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Anodyne

I'm high on life...

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...and crystal meth!

 

When I mention to someone that I take psychoactive drugs and hear “I’m high on life”, my brain usually translates it as one of these:

 

I’m high on life (psychoactive drugs scare me)

I’m high on life (I watch porn &/or play video games 6 hours a day - I don’t have time in my busy schedule for another potentially-addictive hobby)

I’m high on life (I train 6 hours a day - I don’t have time in my busy schedule for another potentially-addictive hobby)

I’m high on life (that OD really scared me)

I’m high on life (workaholic)

I’m high on life (Ritalin doesn’t count)

I’m high on life (still breastfeeding, ask me again next year)

 

So I find that people often just use it as a euphemism for explaining why they don’t take drugs, as opposed to actually expressing an interest in “natural highs” (excepting perhaps the exercise junkies). But I’m curious whether many of you out there are interested in altered states in general as I am, i.e. not exclusively the drug-induced kind. I’ve been interested ever since I was a little kid and first grokked that other people experience the world differently: some people don’t like this taste! My parents can’t hear that high-pitched noise! That blew my tiny mind. When I learned a decade or so later that you could evoke perceptual changes using drugs, that was a great thing to discover as well, but I never lost interest in the other kinds. They all represent manifestations of different parts of our body/brain/consciousness. And since that is how we experience the world, anything that gives us a deeper understanding of that apparatus & how it works - even if only by showing what happens it all goes wrong - is fascinating to me.

So what are these natural altered states, and how to find them? Here are just some of the ones I have noticed:


Migraines (with mild aura) are one that I get occasionally - it used to be I was too busy whimpering with my eyes closed to notice much else, but ever since my doc gave me some of those nice triptan meds I can experience some of the non-headache parts of migraines, and they are quite interesting. I don’t get strong visuals, but all of my senses are turned WAY up. I remember walking home as one was hitting - it was a warm day & I could feel every individual drop of sweat on my skin like hundreds of tiny cold pinpricks. There was a forgotten pack of peppermint gum in my backpack & at one point I had to stop and dig it out & throw it away because the smell was so overwhelming it was getting difficult to focus on things like crossing the road. The similarity to the sensory effects of psychedelics was striking - the feeling that I wasn’t really hallucinating, just experiencing reality in a less filtered way than usual.

 

Another example is the AIWS and other kinds of sensory-processing weirdness that I sometimes experience. It’s been a long-standing theory of mine that the idea of HPPD(“flashbacks”) can be traced to stuff like this. People experience sensory weirdness all the time - for some of us that’s rare, for others not so much - and sometimes we don’t even notice, because our brains are so good at integrating sensory input. And if we do notice something weird happening, how do you even describe it? But people who have taken psychedelics have a point of reference - a similar experience that they can point to and say: “this sensory disturbance that I’m experiencing now reminds me of that time I took LSD”, and worry that they have broken their brains with drugs. Whereas people who haven’t taken psychedelics just say “well, this is a bit weird”, and then forget about it. But there are no stray drug molecules lurking in our brains, and no permanent drug-induced neurological damage. These things happen whether you have taken psychoactive drugs before or not. Interestingly, people doing deep meditation practice sometimes report similar sensory/proprioceptive distortions. I’ve never gone deep enough with meditation to the point of getting any drastic changes in sensory perception, but even the little CBT work I’ve done has been life-changing - just learning that you can *decide* how to react to things.
 
More recently I was changing my diet and observing the changes from that. I’ve never been good with fasting but I’ve discovered that a ketogenic diet gives me most of the benefits of fasting, without the low-blood-sugar, feeling-like-rubbish part. Of special interest for the altered states discussion was reintroducing non-keto foods and observing the effects they have, which can be pretty drastic. I used to think the phrase “sugar addiction” was stupid & sensationalist, but altering my carb intake and paying close attention to my body’s responses has forced me to re-evaluate that, and decide that it’s actually a pretty apt description. I’ve also learned that much of my daily aches & fatigue are caused by my diet (which, by the way, is one that would be considered quite healthy by normal standards), and that some simple changes give me more energy & better mood. So if the CBT work helped me to see how much mind influences body, the diet experiments showed me that the reverse is true as well, and our physical state influences our mindset more than we usually realise. It’s a two-way street and there is no clear divide between mind & body - you can’t take care of one without the other.

 

Drugs generally work by mimicking/boosting/blocking our natural neurotransmitters. But there can be other ways to achieve the same end. After all, we’ve evolved each of those intertwining systems for a reason - to stay alert when we’re in danger, to remember useful information & forget useless stuff, to reward survival/reproductive behaviours like eating & fucking, and so on. And because so many of these processes are geared to respond to basic stimuli (food/water/sleep, emotional/immune reactions), we can manipulate them to a degree, simply by consciously controlling those inputs. The whole “set & setting” idea applies just as much to everyday life as it does to tripping.

 

203392192-crystal_meth.jpg

 

 

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203392192-crystal_meth.thumb.jpg.a437147f12b44910e517b53fa805d40d.jpg

Edited by Anodyne
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Nice post!  My youthful meditations (on a handful of occasions) were by far the strangest and most jarring experiences i can recall, and sleep paralysis is strange too, whereas drugs have produced some of the most pleasant and sensory experiences.

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1 hour ago, Anodyne said:

I’ve also learned that much of my daily aches & fatigue are caused by my diet (which, by the way, is one that would be considered quite healthy by normal standards), and that some simple changes give me more energy & better mood.

 

Have you read any ayurvedic literature regarding cumulative effects of various food intake and the immediate effect on the body and mind ?:)

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those migraines with no pain are pleasurable but feel like they shouldnt be / like youre taking pleasure from something that might be getting damaged kinda thing..

 

sun stroke was trippy as fk, just being in sunshine is

as is ninja fog - in streets or countryside

as is twilight

and many 60s/70s cartoons

 

certain movies and music triggers trippiness and balance perception distortion together or separately

particular weakness for ancient dragon or wizardy myth and magic type fantasy / sci fi alternate dimension type stuffs

 

some flu is like rushing on powerful rocket fuel and you can hear the rumbling in your ears much like some phets when administered in a certain way

 

throwing up has never been fun though

 

theres loads more i cant think of right now I'll bet

 

some video games esp vice city

 

-edit- first kiss was electrifying for days after

mountain biking through forests and woods with high speed in mind as a teen

or on foot swinging katanas and ninja swords with pals cutting pathways through brambles on to "unlocking" previously unreachable levels :3 and places that had been left alone long enough to meditate there or have a reefer there and take in the natural bliss and maybe find a good bonsai project growing from the olde tiles of a disused building/roof/wall

 

 

I guess love was like one of those deceptive trips like tropanes ... youre tripping and you dont know but... everyone else can see you're out of your mind on love ,but you.

 

that like tricked ya into thinking it was great but when awake from it felt like you had been writhing in shit without knowing it and then looking around at those you thought had your back and so you had theirs.. but really they were the perpetuators of your own demise

 

buses trams and trains are really trippy but they were all much better back in the day when you get away with having a reefer on them

- i dnno why tho but not so much airplanes, they seem to be less trippy although that carpet of white cloud beneath has value toward the intended feels..

.. nor boats ... well not ferries, but small row boats can be pretty trippy in a nice lake in a nice park or something .. but mooring an island i think could enhance that better.

 

being a passenger in a car laying down on the backseat on a motorway is trippy as fk

especially when the lamps are yellow

 

after a few re-reads of the op .. yeah fucking can be really trippy especially with goth/heathen girls or uni students and mexican chix can be pretty trippy too

 

talking with practicing witches is pretty trippy and very very addictive

 

Edited by ☽Ţ ҉ĥϋηϠ₡яღ☯ॐ€ðяئॐ♡Pϟiℓℴϟℴ
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I've had a few non drug induced altered states.

 

When I was kid I suffered from Alice in wonderland syndrome and I would trip my tits off as I fell asleep. It's hard to explain properly but I would feel like the walls of my room were miles away but paradoxically my head seemed much bigger than the room. It scared the fuck out me the first few times but I came to enjoy it after a while.It happened mostly when I was an adolescent but it still occurs from time time.

 

I've had a few experiences where my heart has stopped in ambulances after motorbike accidents and I've left my body and watched the ambos working on me from above. I never saw any light or tunnel ect but one time it seemed like I moved past the just outside my body stage and started to move on, I just felt like I was in a void, trapped in no-mans land. Every time after I'd had an OOBE, I felt out of sync for a few days or even weeks almost like I was still hovering just above where I'd normally perceive things from and any small jolt or bump would again send me back to an OOBE state.

 

Then when I had my first DMT experience I didn't completely break through and I just went to the same void I experienced during an OOBE after a motorbike accident. It don't know if seeing/feeling that void is a purely chemical process as the brain starts to power down and turn off but it sure felt like a real place (and it still does feel like a real place in the seconds before a DMT breakthrough), but that "space" is very familiar and real to me now. I actually prefer it to a full breakthrough sometimes as it's the perfect meditative environment where you still have enough consciousness to comprehend it.

 

The worst one for me though is the fucking supermarket. By the time I've gone through and returned to the checkout, I'm in a state of sensory overload and the noises, lights, buzzers and bells etc send me into an altered state. It can be almost a full blown trip for me, there's no visual hallucinations though, which makes it even less enjoyable. It's like I get all the funky weird bits of a trip and none of the eye candy. I've never been diagnosed as being on the spectrum but I reckon I could be on the fringe somewhere.

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Surfing is the closest I can come to a non drug peak experience.

There's a pure focus that comes from harnessing nature and just being in the moment, where there is no thought other than how to ride.

When it all comes together...it's so short lived, but the afterglow is good too.

The other one is downhill mountain biking. Again, it blocks out the world except for a narrow focus. It's more a focus on staying alive though. Every change in balance and line feels like life and death sped up when you're hurtling down a rock garden at 60+ kmh.

Adrenaline

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21 hours ago, ThunderIdeal said:

My youthful meditations (on a handful of occasions) were by far the strangest and most jarring experiences i can recall,... whereas drugs have produced some of the most pleasant and sensory experiences.

I wonder if this is one of the reasons people gravitate towards drugs & exercise more than meditation? I mean, obviously the mental discipline required puts a lot of folks off as well. But I wonder if people prefer drugs not just because it's easier to reach those altered states, but also because you often get a nice whack of euphoria in the bargain, which helps to soften the blow of having the foundations of reality dissolve before your eyes...

 

And exercise too, as Glaukus mentions - where you get a nice endorphin/adrenaline rush accompanying your meditation. This must help to put a positive spin on any altered state, right? one that you might not get just by sitting still & thinking?

 

20 hours ago, mysubtleascention said:

Have you read any ayurvedic literature regarding cumulative effects of various food intake and the immediate effect on the body and mind ?:)

No, never. I've been coming at it more from the angle of elimination-diets, food-intolerance/ immune-responses, and recent research into links between gut health & mental health. I do like my theories to have some scientific basis. But I am open to learning about traditional systems of medicine/healthcare, since so many of them have been supported by science when people finally got around to looking. Can you recommend a good read?

 

 

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13 hours ago, Anodyne said:

Can you recommend a good read?

 

I only have a cursory scope of vision at the Ayurvedic approach to life and from the bits and snippets I've read, the practitioners are describing a combination of energies conducing to ballance in any individual's body as a dynamic system.

Any food or plant or other substance carries cumulative effect to the human state of balance.

Coming from the idea that every particle is a wave at the same time, and every material body is a summation of relationships between particles-waves/vibrations/, it makes sense to me that every meal as a combination of the ingredients and their energies can contribute to a state of conscious design, of one's educated choosing.

 

For example if your personal combination of body energies at this particular age and season of the year brings a particular effect from a particular food, say cabbage brings your digestion a lot of gases, this effect can be neutralized by cooking the cabbage in sunflower oil with curcumin and mustard seeds.

Adding these particular energies to the cabbage tips your system in the direction of balance. 

 

Basically a health care practice based on the concept of adding the natural vibrations any substance carry, towards the desired vibrational outcome or towards a particular balance in a human system .. in other words designer meals that make you healthy or keep you healthy by mixing the right tastes and dosages. 

 

The foods have immediate effect and postponed effect .

 

Various minerals/crystals and different massage types are also a part of the methods used to alter the vibrational state of the body.

 

I had the sense you might like those ideas, although I can not recomend a good read in particular because I'm not a keen reader myself .

 

:):)

 

 

 

Edited by mysubtleascention
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On 11/26/2017 at 10:50 AM, Sallubrious said:

When I was kid I suffered from Alice in wonderland syndrome...It's hard to explain properly but I would feel like the walls of my room were miles away but paradoxically my head seemed much bigger than the room. It scared the fuck out me the first few times but I came to enjoy it after a while.It happened mostly when I was an adolescent but it still occurs from time time.

I never even tried to explain this one to my parents - it was only a few years ago that I learned that it happened to other people and actually had a name. Aside from the weird depth-perception shifts (if you've never experienced AIWS, look at dolly zooms in film - they capture a little of the experience), the most bizarre effect I get is that my proprioception gets all fucked up and my body feels like one of those sensory homunculus guys:

5a1bdd7b70769_Sensoryhomunculus.thumb.jpg.54a94e1fd2c995c2b99e7f31fa28e7f2.jpg

 

I feel like both of these effects stem from a similar process. With the depth perception thing - it might be an inverse of a common effect: the way the moon looks much smaller in photos than it does when we look at the sky, because we mentally magnify it when we pay attention to it. Or when we're looking at someone we're speaking to across the room, we are focusing so much on facial minutiae that their face stands out from the background to us. With AIWS, the opposite happens to me - not only does their face not stand out, but if I try to focus on it, it starts drawing away (like the push-pull focus), eventually seeming further away than the walls of the room, as Sally said.

 

So I wonder if both these effects are instances of our sensory "scaling" systems malfunctioning. Normally we downplay the fact that we're getting more sensory data from our fingers than we are from the entire rest of our arms, and our proprioceptive apparatus tells us that they are smaller. But if that system didn't work, and you had to deal with the reality of those signals in their actual proportions, you might feel like the little homunculus.

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Similarly with our attention-focus telling us that faces & moons are bigger than they really are, or telling us how far away familiar things are even though we don't have enough visual information to make that call - our sensory processing system fills in the blanks from our memories. Normally, that is. But so much of what we experience from our own senses is filtered or illusory or in some cases completely made up - that when you take away some of those filters, or disrupt those processes, things can become really weird.

 

It's even more weird to think about how my sensory homunculus body image is probably just as valid a mental model as the visually-proportioned one, at least from my point of view. That's what really does my head in sometimes - not the idea that I'm freaking out & hallucinating when AIWS & other strangeness happen - but the idea that we are all hallucinating all the time, and that these weird moments are just tiny glimpses of what it might all look like without our brains in the way & misinterpreting everything.

 

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ha-ha-not-to-scale.thumb.jpg.1822126280d7462322de7bc02568e93c.jpg

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something you said anodyne reminded me of this:

 

 

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Sunsets. Not all of them, of course, but occasionally they are spectacular. 

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But I don't quite trip balls just looking at them.....hmmm.

 

End of high school exams. Almost like western society's version of a trial by ordeal to signify passing from adolescence into adulthood. Sooo much Cortisol! Such a build up to it. People sayin' shit like "ooh, it's soo important that you do well; it will determine your life path" etc. the sleep deprivation, the mass hysteria amongst everyone associated with it. The weeks of the actual exams, I was in la la land. I was trying to read textbooks, my old notes and it had turned into gibberish and then panic cos I'd lost my ability to read...Walking out of the exams with no idea whether I had done well or poorly. ( it was poorly ) the thousand yard stare. Mild nervous breakdown stuff. What a trip! A bad one.

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My "high on life" was throwing myself deep and long on ropes into caves. Loved that shit...we've got some deep ones. Buzz going down, near meditative trance ascending the rope if 30m+

 

Cold...like hypothermic....been there a few too many times on purpose. Defo broke through. Not to be messed with.

 

Cluster migraines as a pup teenager, they overwhelmed me, and when I first knew perceptions could be tweaked . They could immerse me into another place. I had them for a year then they stopped.

 

My fuckedness gives me a few of what they I think they call "minor hallucinations" at times... Lol.. The bastard.

 

 The one that gets me is a "sense of presence"... Lol..nothing ominous, just a presence. Can keep a fella with an ingrained high situational awareness busy. I can deal with the other quirks  and now just" normal"with them, but the presence thing is a fckn pest:lol:

 

I'm sure there's other snippets, but I've been busy today, and didn't give life a chance to get me high... :wink:

 

Edit - pain. Defo hallucinate with intense pain after a few mishaps(and I mean FUBARed), and similar I've hallucinated on chillies being an idiot.. Lol

 

Edited by waterboy 2.0
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oh yeah excercise , how did I forget!

running a 1.5 mile in 7.5 minutes when training for the forces ... well , not the running it , but the feeling just after running ... bit tearful tho .. one of the highest I've ever been , almost the very highest.

 

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I never got the "exercise makes me high" hype & I've done some fairly extreme exercise schemes over the years. I was a pro cyclist for several years and I did the type of training the really pushed the envelope many times, it was mostly hours on hours of steady state cardio with a few extended periods at a high heart rate with a few all out max heart rate efforts, all I ever felt was exhaustion.

 

At the other end of the scale I did a lot of intense cardio when I was training for my RKC and again no high or feeling of euphoria from the endorphins.

 

One time when I was into distance cycling I did a 280km ride on an empty stomach and I hit the wall about 10km's from home. I'd burned all my available glycogen and not being keto adapted it really hammered me. I wasn't hallucinating but I was definitely in an altered state and it was the one of the worst feelings I've ever had - nausea and an altered sense of spatial perception combined with an overwhelming distortion of my hearing like I was in a tunnel or tube. Not something I'd ever want to do again.

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For some years I pro fished on deck. Not sorting prawns, topside real fishing in the big blue. It was life on the edge. It was torture. It was insanity. Still I miss it.

 

I'm not sure if it's as much of an endorphine rush as jumping out of aeroplanes, but it's comparable. It builds up day after day, by the time you get back on land you are loony with it.

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Capt'n fuk'n Ahab.....

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This is a great thread. I have spent much of my life obsessed with these natural highs. I have tried many of them meditation, isolation, sleep deprivation. I started very young with the usual thrill seeking, motorbikes and cliff jumping, moving to skydiving in my teens. Skydiving is something everyone should try. After the first few jumps, the high lasts for days. Like coke, you feel blissfully energised, bullet proof and extremely confidant. The best is when there is lots of clouds, so you can't see the ground. Once you pass through the clouds, its there, very close.

For me the best high of all, is sailing offshore, at night, on a full moon. When you have been at sea for weeks, you get very tuned to it. The boat is always moving beneath you. The sound of the wind in the sails and the water on the hull, puts you into a deep trance. As far as you can see in every direction is the surging, writhing, living desert. The power of the ocean is absolute. Its strange how something can be so overwhelming, can make you feel so small, yet give you peace at the same time.

 

Edited by Crop
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Petty theft, surfing waves of consequence, regular and extended public speaking in high pressure situations, navigating the white belt in BJJ, witnessing natural birth, and realising things that you thought you knew. All good ways to get a buzz going.

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 becoming one - 

 with something
 .. bigger than me

 

 beforehand !

 

 

 

 

Edited by mysubtleascention
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1 hour ago, mysubtleascention said:

 

 

 

 

 becoming one - 

 with something

 .. bigger than me

 

 beforehand !

 

 

 

 

yay i think I got one of your crypticals this time ! *feels a little cleverer than before* :3 !

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Chuckling so much at petty theft being an adrenaline sport after witnessing so many in town yesterday from an old guy swiping a hot baguette from a cafe to some teenies running away laffn they asses off with some jeans I was just about to look at , to  x]

 

Sleep deprivation is a serious king of highs .. that part between 3-7 days is super cray cray

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