Tripping

[Chiral]

Tripping...what is the purpose of it..

Do we do it because we somehow deep down inside hope that it might be soooo damn good that we will actually be absorbed into the fractally alien world we see when trippin.

Obviously that never happens..yet! I have heard some people say oh I was so exhausted I just wanted it to stop..nuff is enuff..mmmm why do it then. Isn't the point to escape and learn and understand who or what we are.

Are we in a rush to get back to mundane lives that we desperately try to escape..don't make sense to me. I think some are so attached to the safeness of normality that we like to think that paying a visit every so often to the other side means we be enriched and can hang out and talk about such experiences with others. So what is the point of that..? would any of you here give up your current lives to trip for ever in those beautiful places we see when tripping, or are we to afraid to leave behind all these things we cherish here. A person who takes LSD once when they are in their 20's says oh wow that changed my life..Did it..? what are you doing now that you wouldn't have been doing if you never took acid.. seems to me we still lead relatively the same lives albeit in a more caring of natureand become slightly more aware of our surroundings...what about those that have never tripped are are like that anyways. I can hear you all now saying oh yeah but Gandhi took shrooms and Einstein ate hash blah blah ..no proof of any of that. so with all that in mind..what is the purpose of tripping and why do we do it.

Other questions I had in mind are do blind people trip..and I researched this and yes they do..but..! they have to have seen at some point in their life..a person born blind apparently cannot hallucinate like we do..they have no memory bank of visions and shapes and colours to reference from. If they have lost their sight at some point the brain will use what it has stored as reference material to create the visuals. don't seem so spiritual now does it. I was under the impression we are seeing things from other worlds and other dimensions..wow..seems we maybe wrong..its just the brain malfunctioning and distorting all the imagery that is stored in ROM in our skulls..food for thought me thinks. Brings up the obvious question..we never see anything in our trips we haven't already seen in real life...we only see visuals we have allready seen through our eyes from TV and books and experience. If anyone can disprove this I'd like to hear what their theory is. I think the omly avenue of disproving this is finding out what someone who has never seen anything from the modern world ever..like a native from a deep jungle..give them a halucinogen and find out what they see and have it written out or drawn so as we can see what they say they are seeing..

which brings me to another slightly disturbing question...could..is it possible that young children could trip like an adult does..I mean is the human body when its a child made up chemically different to an adult..I'm talking pre-pubescent here and does it have the same affect..in time these sorts of questions need answers as part of a deeper understanding of these substances and what roles they play in humans lives. Sure it sounds sick and twisted and I would not want my little daughter near a vial of acid..but I would like to know for the pure scientific basis what happens so we can learn more and piece together what these molecules are doing and why.

H.

[Undergrounder]

people born blind have no memory bank of visions and shapes and colours to reference from..

Correct me if i'm wrong but i would have thought the reason they don't see things is because of a defect in the visual centre of the brain, not because of a defect in the eyes. If tripping is just stimulation of the visual centres of the brain directly, then whether you have any pictures to reference shouldn't matter, a blind person should still see colours and things, UNLESS the problem was to do with their brain to begin with. Visual memory shouldn't have anything to do with it.

But on the idea regarding hallucinations just referencing experienced material, i don't think that's the case. I think the brain references certain abstract concepts and memory cues, the links between which might be completely messed up compared to normal, and then sends that off to the visual centre where it appears. That way you should be able to see things you've never seen before... I used to think the same for other phenomena. It amazes me the creativity of the subconscious, i think it can shoot out new material any time it likes

[oface]

That reminds me of an invention I read about once. From memory you strap it to your tongue, and it detects objects that are ahead of you, mapping them out for you by stimulating particular parts of the tongue depending on how far away it is, how large an object it is etc.. Apparently after a bit of practice, people who had been blind from birth were able to use this thing to navigate their way past obstacles in a hallway with quite a deal of accuracy. The really interesting part was that brain scans revealed that the subjects fitted with these devices actually utilised the same areas of the brain as sighted people asked to perform the same task (using their eyes).

Details might be a bit off as it was a while ago, but that was the gyst.

Other questions I had in mind are do blind people trip..and I researched this and yes they do..but..! they have to have seen at some point in their life..a person born blind apparently cannot hallucinate like we do..they have no memory bank of visions and shapes and colours to reference from.

I'm surprised to hear that. I Would have assumed that they would possibly have had the experience of seeing things in their mind's eye, maybe random patterns, swirls of colours.. and just had no idea how to interpret them/relate them to anything else. Does that mean that they also don't see colours etc. in their mind's eye ordinarily/from time to time, or even arbitrarily in conjunction with particular thoughts (as i've also always assumed pretty possible)? Does it mean that a deaf person (who has been so their entire life) isn't capable of having 'aural' hallucinations like those that we have?

Theoretically, if there was a person who from birth had no sight, no hearing, no sense of taste, no kinaesthetic sense etc. etc., whose disabilities were caused not by any kind of neurological damage or dysfunction, but by things like genetic defects in the sensory organs, nerve damage and the like, would they be unable to experience hallucinations of any kind? I would have thought they would experience them in some way, but I guess it's all speculation, as you could probably never get any real idea of what kind of thinking, if any, goes on in their conscious (+ sober) mind. With effectively no external input, would this person even develop a personality of their own? Being unable to learn a human language with which to structure complex thought, would this person be incapable of any form of logical thinking? What would they even have to think about?

Sorry for going off on a massive tangent, I'll go back to blindness for a sec..

Suppose there was a baby who was born sighted, but then lost their sight due to some kind of unfortunate, severe eye injury. Would this person grow up to be a tripper who visually hallucinated in a similar way to how sighted people do? If a person blind from birth is unable to perform any kind of 'abstract' visualisation, surely somebody who was sighted originally, but lost their sight at a very young age, would continue to visualise things? Or would the ability go into atrophy?

Would there be some kind of critical point in a child's development that they have to reach before going blind, in order to be able to experience visual hallucinations at a later age? Maybe the point at which they begin to form memories?

---

On a completely unrelated note, it's probably about time I introduced myself.

Been lurking for a while, my name's Owen. Looking forward to hopefully getting to know some of you; judging by your posts there's a heap of really interesting people around here.

- night

[baphomet]

Other questions I had in mind are do blind people trip..and I researched this and yes they do..but..! they have to have seen at some point in their life..a person born blind apparently cannot hallucinate like we do..they have no memory bank of visions and shapes and colours to reference from. If they have lost their sight at some point the brain will use what it has stored as reference material to create the visuals. don't seem so spiritual now does it. I was under the impression we are seeing things from other worlds and other dimensions..wow..seems we maybe wrong..its just the brain malfunctioning and distorting all the imagery that is stored in ROM in our skulls..food for thought me thinks. Brings up the obvious question..we never see anything in our trips we haven't already seen in real life...we only see visuals we have allready seen through our eyes from TV and books and experience. If anyone can disprove this I'd like to hear what their theory is. I think the omly avenue of disproving this is finding out what someone who has never seen anything from the modern world ever..like a native from a deep jungle..give them a halucinogen and find out what they see and have it written out or drawn so as we can see what they say they are seeing..

I have heard people say that eskimo's who were given ayahuasca saw visions of the jungle which they had never actually seen before. I have also heard of other "telepathic" phenomenon associated with ayahuasca, I am not convinced either way but here is an example.

"Hernando García Barriga, writing in 1958, added to the telepathy narrative. "Savage Indians," he wrote, "who have never left their forests and who, of course, can have no idea of civilized life, describe, in their particular language, and with more or less precision, the details of houses, castles, and cities peopled by multitudes." What — other than ayahuasca-induced telepathy — could possibly be the source of such knowledge? Psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo had similar thoughts in 1967, but in the opposite direction. When he gave city dwellers harmaline — note that this is not the same as harmine, although related to it, and also a constitutent of the ayahuasca vine — they reported that they saw tigers and jungle imagery. Clearly the synthetic chemical had somehow connected Naranjo's subjects mentally to the jungle.

Of course, none of this took into account other possible reasons for these results. As anthropologist Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff has pointed out, even isolated Indians in 1958 knew a lot about cities, having been told about them by missionaries, soldiers, rubber tappers, traders, and travelers, and having seen pictures in calendars and magazines. And we have no idea what expectations Naranjo's volunteers brought to their experience, although I think we can make a pretty good guess. But so embedded had this meme become that, in 1967, a Haight-Ashbury resident told Andrew Weil that Eskimos given ayahuasca saw visions of huge cats.

Meanwhile, Kenneth Kensinger, a missionary and anthropologist who had worked for many years with the Cashinahua, echoed the narrative of Hernando García Barriga. Several Cashinahua, he wrote in 1973, "who have never been to or seen pictures of Pucallpa, the large town at the Ucayali River terminus of the Central Highway, have described their visits under the influence of ayahuasca to the town with sufficient detail for me to recognize specific sights and shops." And he echoes Manuel Córdova-Ríos as well. According to Bruce Lamb, during a particularly intense ayahuasca session, Córdova-Ríos saw his mother dying; when he returned to the home of his youth, he learned that she had died just as he had seen. Kensinger similarly reports that, after one ayahuasca session, six of the nine participants told him that they had seen the death of his mother's father, two days before Kensinger himself was informed of the death by radio."

http://singingtotheplants.blogspot.com/200...pathy-meme.html

Edited November 13, 2008 by baphomet

[ThunderIdeal]

quick answer, i think reality or god is more like a trip than our day to day reality (which is somehow a part of the bigger trip). so we are tripping anyway, if that makes sense.

[Vertmorpheus]

I think it depends on what you call "tripping" as such... I'm really nto one for having my entire reality deconstructed (mainly because its taken me 10 years to get my head back around its finer points as it is ) but give me the same scenes from a slightly elevated POV anyday. Spice cadets and turbina powered pilots are slightly different critters, at peak.

Interesting to me is the common phenomena among infrequent dosers or low level dosers, of basically chugging along fine for ages and one day the thought enters your head "mental degreaser" "emotional metamucil" "cosmic lubricant" but then you decide not to, for one reason or another, for another few weeks yet... i see this correlates (entirely anecdotally of course) with a gathering of bullshit and tensions and misgivings and questions, usually followed by a renewed sense of purpose and function for a few weeks... note, I don't tend to notice ppl just loading up every couple weeks either just to take advantage of stray seratonin, as much as I imagine I would.

Blind ppl... one of the biggest mates of Sid is a mate of a mate that has been blind since birth... he can tell if the lights are on or off, that's about it and even then if its been overcast all day he's likely to end up sitting in the dark all night playing piano. He likes it BECAUSE it's the only time he can "See" in some ways. Images and patterns are reported as being very very complex and intricate, and coming from a classically trained pianist I can trust that kinda assessment eg he's not just seeing splotches.

What I'd like to know is how much better tripping in any form would be for ppl of am uch less technological background... thinking about inherent and unremarked magic like street lighting, fireworks, visualisation software, dolby surround, light shows, lasers, holograms and whatnot... I think there's often much more going on upstairs in that state but we simply don't notice it, or don't credit it with the glory it deserves, as lets face it theres hardly a moritorium on weird visual effect after sunset anymore. Remember the first time you saw the rainbows on a CD? I found myself looking at one the other day thinking "i havent actually LOOKED at one of these things in about 10 years" haha.

I suspect some of us simply have a countdown timer, if it wasn't followed up n fed iwth plants or music or writing or what have you then we'd probably fill it up with lunar festivals, solar observances, meditation, etc. Most balanced "trippers" I know were always prone to those kinda thigns already, I find the tripping usually calls for a reassessment of those aspects, a growing sense of things such as say priesthoods merely getting in the WAY of their direct experience of Divinity, nature, whatever. The most "fucked up" trippers I've seen ar ethose that start off almost spiritually dead, or spiritually gastric... sacraments it seems just disturbs these types... those iwth a headfulla questions but a heart full of trust and wonder seem to be the "best off", before, during and after. Not that there's not the odd wobble. But ya know what I mean.

Also interesting is the natural nature of altered states or wanting to experience htem.... we've all watched kids run around in the sun fulla sugar til they're peaking out hard, or spin around til they nearly yak, rub their eyes on the toilet to look at coloured squirmers, or are fiends for biomorphism eg seeing faces in things and everything else in the clouds.

As Pratchett said, the most underrated part of the mind is the part that STOPS us from noticing just how damned magical the things around us are... without that we'd never get anything done and we'd still be staring at the clouds and tracking black dots around our visual fields ... oh, wait

tripping - the original budget airline.

VM

edity bit.... re native telepathy etc as bapho was saying... theres a fantastic lil book, aussie thing, the only place ive seen it is in Toowoomba council library... collected experiences of colonial cocky types dealing with blackfellas "knowing" eg auntie died, uncles sick, sister had a boy, stocks on the run from station x, etc... I suspect onceuponatime, when the world was less noisy and the air less full, we had an inner system more like mobile phones than we'd like to admit these days... even now, when you can quiet the mind and neither focus, or become unfocussed, but just be, its amazing what floats by for the picking. Harmala alks (if you accept such things that is ) seem to be such warpers of our understanding of "real" that even their physical presence seems to precipitate odd happenings and synchronicities.... may be something in that justfying their bullshit high scheduling etc.

Edited November 14, 2008 by Vertmorpheus

[woof woof woof]

tripping is for enhanced concentration

[mu!]

entertainment & amusement is high up there!

[woof woof woof]

entertainment & amusement is high up there!

you are right MU......... however i think that the amusement fades with time as you mature spiritually..... then again... some almost dont seem to mature

[mutant]

People trip for different reasons... And that's the question.... some for amusement, some for exploration, some for artistic insight, some for spiritual/religius/philosophical reasons , some might do the psychoanalytical thing and some don't trip at all Some people shouldn't trip at all anyways, and some people who trip too often maybe shouldnt.

Not 'worshipping' the 'sacraments' gives you advantage of totally questioning their potential. Cultivation is a short of worship anyway Exploring them and sheding light ... without necessarily praising the use .... See dangers, see wonderful potential... I find it is extremely varied... Extremely dependent on the person... and if it just fucking looks like the same mentality in each community, it is because people really need a sheep mentality to unite under. Or maybe because , despite the differences, psychedelics bring out ancient truths that are universally recognised, then individually interpreted and worked out. But it's totally different now for modern people, than it was and still is for native tribes in the amazon. And sure, trust/faith might offer a more pleasant and smooth , 'familiar' ride, but hey, the scepticists do trip too, sometimes... Hence the differences in approaches and greater degree of importance of set+ setting for some people... Hence the rarer trips ;)

Even, trip sounds like fun, huh?? Psychoanalysis through psychedelics isn't always, fun, and it's not supposed to be either...

Anyway, I totally disagree with OP's tone , especially in the opening part

Are we in a rush to get back to mundane lives that we desperately try to escape..

heck, this sounds like a very bad reason to take psychedelics, but hey, if it suits someone, be my guest. If one trying desperate to escape life through psychedelia, then he might as well think about ways to make reality a better place to live in... Life doesn't feel like something to be skipped through psychedelics, but enhanced, examined, analysed, changed, influenced, explored, loved through their catalytic role.... A single psychedelic experience, could change a man's life from mundane to life lived to its best. It might inspire someone to actually do something about this mundanity.... And guess what? it has already happened

And, heck it might also open up the eyes and see the beauty in stuff that looked mundane in the first place... Not spining colours or wacky effects, the real colours of nature... but sure, it doesn't help to live in an cold cement urban enviroment

would any of you here give up your current lives to trip for ever in those beautiful places we see when tripping, or are we to afraid to leave behind all these things we cherish here.

of course not!!! I'd rather trip on life man , with the ups and downs... it has always been an struggle

We trip because we remember the times we had and feel the influence. And this goes for all, regardless of the dose/frequency. We might expect to live a similar thing in one of our consequent experiences...

I am also interested in what vert said

Interesting to me is the common phenomena among infrequent dosers or low level dosers, of basically chugging along fine for ages and one day the thought enters your head "mental degreaser" "emotional metamucil" "cosmic lubricant" but then you decide not to, for one reason or another, for another few weeks yet... i see this correlates (entirely anecdotally of course) with a gathering of bullshit and tensions and misgivings and questions, usually followed by a renewed sense of purpose and function for a few weeks... note, I don't tend to notice ppl just loading up every couple weeks either just to take advantage of stray seratonin, as much as I imagine I would.

but fail to totally translate it

PS: On a side note, on the telepathy jungle jaguar thing.. IF it is true... is it so strange for a chemical originally carried in a jungle plant to further carry information from the plants bloodline and history of ecosystem [see: the jungle] ? ... hey,

.

I believe these plants carry some data, some information of some short, and it's up to the receiver to comprehend, and react and maybe evolve... I do believe that these chemicals are somewhat linked to the seed that originally sprouted and gave birth to what we have become, planet earth... but I don't think a higher being or higher truth really exists... the ultimate truth is the plant, the ecosystem , ultimately life ... no secret behind... Anyways.. anyways....

Edited December 3, 2008 by mutant

[Re-Grifter]

Is the term "tripping" derived from Peter Tripp's experiences with sleep deprivation?

[Chiral]

Isn't it simply slang for going somewhere different....a trip away..

H.

[Re-Grifter]

That's what i thought before seeing a doco on Tripp, it kinda made me wonder about the origin of the word.

[t st tantra]

there is some stuff defining tripping as a journey across levels of consciousness but i'm not sure historically.

pretty sure it has nothing to do with Tripp.

back in the day,a tab used to be called a ticket..........always made me think of 'she's got a ticket to ride' yeah,yeah,yeah!!!

t s t .

[mauve]

i trip because it is healthy.

[trans_diff]

The first time I ate mushrooms I was changed by it. Things I hadn't understood before were suddenly clear. It was a very gentle but long-lasting "aha" that went for some weeks. I felt like I'd ben given the missing piece of my life's puzzle. And that the cobwebs were blown out of my brain by a fresh breeze. And that I now had a very healthy appreciation for the straight normal workings of my everyday mind.

[ThunderIdeal]

i wouldn't even call my first mushroom experience a trip anymore. is that accurate or fair to say??? i remember thinking my aura was huge, like several houses, and i could feel it and felt light.

I'd rather trip on life man , with the ups and downs...

everything is a trip.

[t st tantra]

i had a vision of a tantric universe,walked across the room ,picked up a book on tantra and read about what i had just seen.i had never heard of tantra until i picked the book up.lay down listening to velvet underground,lol,to experience my body buried and decomposing into the ground,very peaceful,then there were half a dozen pretty young lebanese sisters flitting around everywhere.........worked for me!

t s t .

[kenny]

I honestly don't think I would want to experience any kind of trip all day every day. So far as I am concerned the experience is usually just a deep exploration into the emotions we are simply unable to fully experience in 'waking/sober consciousness'.

It allows us to understand who we really are.

Clearly many people experience similar visuals but the journey's and the resulting change in mentality is not always the same.

(based on my experiences, and "trip blogs")

My experience with hallucinogens is relatively limited to many of you, no doubt. So to back up my thinking on this, could some of you comment on how your experiences have evolved over time? Say, taking DMT.... Is it often the same kind of trip? Or do you find yourself continuing on from where your last trip ended in some way. Or simply random experiences with visuals and beings that never appear to have any kind of connection to anything?

Salvia being something I have experienced many times. I can safely say that my experiences were always connected as a progressive journey. Similar to reading a new chapter of the same book every time. Which takes me to the question about Blind people Hallucinating.

My first 3 or 4 trips on Salvia were not visual at all... aside from some faint dull rings passing me by, as though i were being hurled down a poorly lit tunnel at enormous speed. The majority of the sensations were auditory and olfactory. The most disturbing of which were short random explosions of sound and what felt like hot molten steel cutting through my body. It was not painful, it felt more like my body was being reformed or simply washed away. As though my mind (or something beyond my mind) was slowly preparing me for the experience to come. Which indeed resulted in the physical body as i know it, being totally stripped away. What was left was not something I have ever been able to describe in words.... and the term 'pure energy'(as so many people seem to like using) simply does not cut it....

It's not like I ever saw myself anyway... it was just a feeling that i was something else completely.

Having my precious human body taken away from me was the most terrifying of all experiences. Probably because it is something I/We are so used to thinking of ourselves and seeing ourselves in this form every day. So when you are no longer what you thought you were...... why wouldn't you be terrified?

Anyway, it might seem like there is no point to this... and your right...

;)

No. What I meant to say was that for someone who has never seen themselves or another person. Or anything at all.. An experience like this might not be so terrifying.

Sure, they might not see the wonderful colors and shapes and alien beings that we see. I have no doubt though, that the mind would compensate in a much more heightened Olfactorial and Auditory experience. As far as I'm concerned, these aspects are always far more profound than the visuals anyway. The feelings overshadow the visuals every time.

Which Is why I can not wait for the day I get to experience a deep journey on DMT. The thought of becoming, or simply being in the presence of, 'pure love' gives me goose bumps.

Peace.

[hoot]

I started the biggest trip of my life quite some time ago. I was all nice and warm and cozy and it was dark and peaceful, and then all of a sudden I was being born and getting squished, and then blindingly bright white lights, there were fingers prodding me and cold air on my naked baby butt. My god it was mind blowing, only problem is I have been in this trip for that long that I don't even notice it anymore. Maybe then I'd say the reason we like tripping is because were always there, and its just nice to occasionally be reminded and have that reminicent memory from our childhoods come back to make us feel like we have gone home.

[mutant]

only problem is I have been in this trip for that long that I don't even notice it anymore.

I'm not sure I got this straight. We are NOT in constant trip. And this doesn't sound very nice. Maybe you want to explain further??

[hoot]

In a nutshell, before I'd been born I had never seen colours or anything but darkness, I'd always been quite warm, always steady beat of my Mums heart. Never really tasted anything either I supposed, and the only things I'd ever felt would have been probably quite soft.

At the hospital I would have come out, it would have been cold, some doctor would have been grabbing all my fingers and toes, make sure there all there, no more heart beat, and would have seen things for the first time, albeit a rather obnoxiously bright light but all the same seen something.

Now, the concept that I attach to the word tripping is it's a change of state of consciousness and our normal perception/understanding of whats going on, that or falling over. Or maybe even a holiday around the world. But anyway, birth I believe is a massive change from the state that we had existed in for 9 odd months, for the rest of our lives. I might be clutching at straws here but I've always felt that 25 years ago I underwent something more mind blowing than any tripping experience I have ever had, it's just been going on for that long that I only very rarely appreciate just how awsome the experience of life is, or maybe that I think to much to appreciate whats going on.

When we do something nowadays to change our state of consciousness, I think a big part of the enjoyment is returning back to when everything seemed new and fresh, like when we were kids and still found amazement like a bug in the backyard that we hadn't seen before. Kind of like a reminder that we are still going through something amazing, just get to caught up in things to notice.

Not sure if I have really explained it any better than I did before. Hope that helps.

[oface]

Wow I really enjoyed that last post, thanks dude.

[SunChaser]

I don't think what you see when tripping is all that important or meaningful, I think it's what you feel. If you use Hallucinogens as a drug then you will probably see lots of cool shit and have a fun time, but if you use it as a tool to feel at one with the earth then you can really learn something.

Hallucinating in my mind is more of a side effect and if that was all they had to offer I would have no interest in them. I think it's a tool to help you get a taste of the connection that humans once had with the natural world.

Hey hoot, I think you might be on to something there.

Edited January 13, 2009 by jabez

[mutant]

Yep, you sure explained much better now hoot ;) Very nice thoughts...

Indeed the moment of birth seems like a re-occuring subject for those who are after 'the big truths' about life and experiencing in to its fullest, and seems to be linked in the psychedelic experience too. I also find these things are linked with the hug, be that of a mother's or a girl's. And warmth.

I have been thinking / planing to have my next lsa self psychanalysis session in a warm bath....