Comment by Nursie
8 months ago
> If you do not have any inclination towards that mystic space, you will not get the ego death
I am as agnostic-atheist as they come and would go as far as to say I find mysticism offensive to good sense. But I've experienced the ego death parts of LSD, and consider I have come to know myself more through it. I don't think it reveals some fundamental truth outside myself so much as being simply a phenomenon of the action of psychedelics on my brain.
Frankly I think this idea that you have to be studied in philosophy or open to mystic woo-y nonsense to fully appreciate or even fully experience psychedelics is hilarious and self-aggrandising.
"would go as far as to say I find mysticism offensive to good sense."
How come?
The mystics of all the religions are the most approachable to agnostic me. Mysticism to me means mainly, the universe as its whole is a great mysterium and those who claim "it is exactly like this and this, because this holy book says so!" are rather the aggressive fools to me. So genuinly curious, what do you perceive as aggressive from mysticim?
Offensive to good sense, not aggressive.
Mysticism usually seems to me to imply a poor grasp on reality and can be accompanied by all sorts of baseless claims to knowledge and (often naturalistic) fallacies. It often goes hand in hand with silly beliefs about crystals, alt-med and all sorts of other crap.
"We don't know" is fine. "We don't know, therefore these specific lines of bullshit" less so.
But I didn't post the above to say that my views on mysticism are correct or even to provoke a discussion about it. I posted it to provide a counterpoint to the bizarre notion that one must be into mysticism to experience aspects of the psychedelic experience.
We may interpret the experiences very differently, of course, but the claim that part of it is closed to those who don't subscribe to witter about "the goddess" is ironically very egotistic.
No need to debate about. It was just for my curiosity what triggered you and indeed what you describe I rather label esoteric new age stuff and that mostly puts me off as well.
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I'm not the person you asked but I agree with them. Superstition is stupid - we don't know so let's make stuff up. There is effectively a 100% chance you're wrong. I don't know what difference if any there is between superstition and mysticism.
We know what we can observe. We know about gravity and astronomy and subatomic particles and how they interact etc, we know a lot of stuff. There's also a lot of stuff we don't know, and as far as I'm concerned we should try to figure those things out but until such time as we think we have figured them out we should leave them alone. The way to even attempt to know things is science, and if you can't use science to prove or at least support something then you're almost certainly wrong.
To me it's that simple. I don't believe in things, I either know or I don't care. Was the big bang just a spontaneous event that happened for no reason? Did some sentient being trigger it? I don't know, I can't know, there's nothing more to talk or think about. I do not respect people who pretend to know because i know they can't know. And the reason I know they can't know is because the people who believe in this type of crap typically know less about any given scientific topic than I do, which isn't a particularly high bar. If you don't even bother to learn the things we know then I don't know why you're speculating about stuff we'll probably never know.
Also none of this crap even makes any sense. The bible has more plot holes than a sieve. It doesn't explain anything, it just defers to "god works in mysterious ways". Not to mention that the god described in the bible seems like an absolute tit. Killing and torturing people for nothing, even killing a man's family and ruining his life just to win a bet. The people who believe in this crap are either indoctrinated from a young age, otherwise forced into it, or just plain stupid. I can't rationalize it any other way. They tried to indoctrinate me and it almost kind of worked in my mid teens, I really wanted to believe just to fit in with my friends but I just couldn't get past all the nonsense.
I vividly remember being on a church camp for our confirmation, the camp leaders told us their stories of how they found their faith and one guy stood up on the stage and said he was in a bad financial situation so he prayed to God for help and the next day a man he'd never met knocked on his door and gave him a briefcase with exactly as much money as he needed.
That was a pretty defined moment where I went "yeah these people are completely full of shit". I was 15 and ever since then it's only become clearer to me that religion and superstition is complete crap. There's prizes put there, James Randi offered a million dollars to anyone who can prove supernatural ability in a scientific setting, like psychics or mediums or any other quacks like that. it was first offered in 1964 and stood until 2015, in that time over a thousand people tried it and none succeeded. To me that's proof enough. If you make supernatural claims you're a quack and if you believe in them you're gullible and that's all there is to it.
"Was the big bang just a spontaneous event that happened for no reason? Did some sentient being trigger it? I don't know, I can't know, there's nothing more to talk or think about."
Your decision, but other people do think and wrote papers about it.
https://www.port.ac.uk/news-events-and-blogs/blogs/space-cos...
And mysticism isn't the same as superstition. In its broadest sense, it is a individual experience of the mysterium of the universe.
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Experiencing ego death is a mystical experience. Perhaps it is the mystical experience.
You describe it in terms that make sense to your culture. Perhaps the term mystic has been contaminated for you by all the nonsense and bullshit.
The experience is very difficult to communicate, generally relying heavily on metaphor. Those who are uninitiated often wildly misunderstand. We see this in other areas of life too, cargo culting for example, but the deep and very personal nature of the mystical experience pretty much ensures confusion.
A perpetual motion crackpot probably describes themselves as a "physicist", but that's nonsense and bullshit too.
You are a mystic in the real sense, having an esoteric experience and then integrating it into your worldview.
Psychedelic drugs are just one way of doing this, but one of the more accessible.
I think your attitude is completely appropriate, by the way.
The other replies were making me think "maybe this shit isn't for me", but your comment made me actually want to try it, so thanks for the alternate perspective.
There is a lot of waffle written about psychedelics and various forms of spirituality.
If you're not that way inclined but are interested in experiencing psychedelics, then yeah - don't let them put you off. My subjective experiences of it, when it was good, were that it filled me with a childlike sense of wonder as I watched things melt and flow in enhanced colours, as I had weird and wonderful thoughts about all sorts of things. Everything was new again.
It did make me feel connected to the world, to the universe and to other people in a different way to something like MDMA, with some of the love but also through a blurring of sense of self. It can change your perspective on some things, and as others have said it often feels afterwards like you've had a bit of a reset on your stresses and worries. And I did get to watch my stereo do a little dance...
When it was not good, by the last time I tried it which was probably at least 20 years ago now, I just got bored and slept it off, though YMMV on ability to sleep because it is a stimulant.
I guess maybe I'm lucky never to have had anxiety or a 'bad trip', though there were a few occasions where the group of us would sit down and ask "so ... uh... anyone else find this is dragging? How much longer?". Usually it's when you're towards the tail end anyway, but it's just not tailing quite as much as you might want.
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