Behold, The First-Ever Brain Scans Of LSD's Mind-Altering Effects

Grof lives!

Red parts are the psycho killer urges, purple the crumbling DNA, yellow the heroin addicting cells.
Any clinical benefits were disproved long ago by J Edgar Hoover et al.

Man, that stuff's a lot of fun.

And there is a lot of research going on that it is a very effective treatment for many mental illnesses - without the nasty side effects that many pharmaceuticals have.

Win-win!

It's win-win, except for the injuries incurred, say, chasing a $20 bill down the street that keeps running away from you or marveling at how you can stick a fish hook through your hand without it hurting.

Fair enough. Perhaps like the medical tests, it should only be used in a supervised environment. Like one of those McDonalds' 'playplaces'.

Of course it should. Leary talked about (mind)set and setting. You want to use the drug therapeutically, it needs to be in a therapeutic setting. It's not just pop acid and you're "cured," it's the whole experience. Got dragged to a party with what turned out to be biker wanna bes, who talked about doing acid camped at Alouette Lake and wanting to take their hunting knives, cut out their brains and bash them on the rocks - that's not going to do anybody any good. Acid was way misused in the 60's, I guess even by spiritual seekers like myself, think you've found the elevator to satori. Acid can show you some doors, but you still have to walk thru them, which is the hard part.

I've always wondered about that part. I think I'd like the experience, but I've never tried it because of some bad trips people I know have had. I don't think I could trust myself if things got 'weird'.

You shouldn't be doing it alone, but with people who have experience with it and who have a good mind space. I had a bad trip around breaking up with a girl, and it can get pretty rough.

You basically do want things to get weird, that's kind of the point, but you need to be able to meet that weirdness with equanimity, can't try to force your old thinking patterns on what's happening. That's the whole point of taking acid - to open to different ways of experiencing yourself.

As I said, I think it was misused by many people, and should only be used in a healing setting for a serious purpose. It's not a good party drug, because you can go from wahoo or holy shit in seconds.

Chogyam Trungpa called LSD double samsara. ie illusion about illusion, so for people wanting to grow spiritually it can be a real dead end where you're always expecting to get high, which is not what spiritual practice is about. But I can see it for treating various psychological problems.

Read an article similar to this a couple years back. They're also using concentrated psylocybin from mushrooms theraputically to help veterans who came back from Iraq and Afghanistan with severe PTSD. The initial test results were so promising that they found letting the guys get a controlled "high" was as effective as teaming them up with a service dog in terms of stress relief and helping them control their reactions around certain stimuli like hearing firecrackers or smelling burning meat that would traumatically snap their minds back to a battlefield.

Personally I still think the times I messed with psychedelics were some of the best times I ever had. Never had a freak out, which is good, but the intensity of the experiences was terrific. Especially the one where we did some LSD outside during a lightning storm. Hoo-boy, that was something cool, especially when the street lights reflecting off the low-level rain clouds made the sky turn purple-pink.

I had a friend ask around last year during the worst of my downfall if he could find any acid or shrooms so we could have a get-together like that again. Unfortunately both seem to have disappeared from the scene, in Calgary anyway, and have been replaced by molly and meth in terms of availabilty, and no one who isn't near-suicidal or retarded wants to take the risk with either of those toxic alternatives. Apparently the chemicals that can be used to make really good LSD are so tightly controlled now that very few cooks risk trying to get them anymore. It's just too easy for the governments to track them and come down hard on anyone using them for a brew-up. In the meantime the dangerous stuff like badly brewed ecstasy and meth that have god knows what in them, and now fentanyl, are easier and easier to find and get some poor fools who use them permanently fucked up by it with every passing year.

And then there's that salvia shit that was in the news a lot a couple of years ago.

Not sure if this stuff is still readily available at the local smokeshops or not.

I'm sure you can find it on the net if nowhere else. Supposedly a very quick, very intense high. I doubt it has any therapeutic applications.

Psilocybin supposedly is very good for migraines. Saw a program where a very straight Texan was growing his own - he hated the trip because of the intense colors, but bore thru it because if helped his headaches. Different people, eh?

Yea, that's exactly what I'm talking about. I was at a party, and some guy dropped some, and started seeing blue men with long fangs jumping off neighbouring roofs coming to kill him. He started crying when he was unable to escape them by entering the hidden door in the corner between two walls.



I decided to stick to whisky and cigarettes. A more 'even' buzz.



That's what intrigues me. All my knowledge about math, astronomy, physics; I've heard from others who have tried it, Mushrooms, or Peyote, that the experience in seeing all of those things assembled together in the mind is an amazing experience. Vast understanding of the universe as a epiphany. Possibly on par with a spiritual revelation, but amazing nonetheless.

Or I could try to escape through the secret door in the wall corner.



I've seen a couple documentaries on it, but I can't recall their titles. I'm pretty sure this was one:

http://natgeotv.com/ca/inside-lsd

And there was also some good information here:

http://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the- ... -1.3104349

It seems that the original use for LSD was as an aid for psychological therapy, and it looks like it's being tested as just that once again.

LSD was OK until the CIA got a hold of it.

Grof was treating people with schizophrenia with it, according to him with good success. If they could make breakthrus there, that would be incredible, instead of using those awful anti-psychotics. Basically instead of trying to fight the disease, clamp down on it, you'd be engaging it. Who knows what creativity could be released.

As for the blue man freakout, I think that's just a cover for what's really going on. Hallucinating never freaked me out, since I knew I was on drugs and it was just a hallucination. You can actually see behind the illusion if you try. It's what the blue men represent to the guy you mentioned, ie inner demons, that can be the hard part.

Actually my "freak out" really wasn't one. I got higher than I ever had, in a very positive way, seeing the meaning of suffering. The hard part was coming down and seeing it all slip away, realizing that the experience was so ephemeral. I was still suffering, and in just as unenlightened a way as before. The Buddha isn't selling any shortcuts. So as I say, you can be shown a direction by acid, but you still have to walk that road, and it can be made harder by the lure of the quick high. It might be the same for your scientific realizations. OTOH, you might do a Kekulé, but so far nobody seems to have stepped forward and said that acid is responsible for their Nobel.

Sheldon Cooper on acid.