I was having a conversation with an old guy I was working a dead-end job with. He was just there killing time. Anyway, he said something that was so inane, trivial, stupid and borderline puerile, but in the context, it made me stop and think, and reevaluate many of the things I thought were “Truths”.
This was in the early 90’s. I won’t repeat it, but to give you an idea of how stupid and simple it was, think “There are more than one ways to skin a cat”.
Yeah. There are things you don’t even question, because you’ve be doing/believing them for your whole life. And then when an alternative comes along, you gotta start thinking about all the other stuff you blindly follow. Much of it is sound. Don’t bring a knife to a gun fight, Don’t swing on a cop, but other stuff that is subtly … convoluted. Could be plain wrong.
It was Eye-Opening in the strangest way.
I didn’t care for Fred too much at first, but learned to respect his experience, dry humor and avoid his horrendous smell.
I think a lot of what gives people anxiety or depression is based on what “might happen” as opposed to what is actually happening. And usually what happens isn’t as bad as they were worried about and most times will eventually pass anyway.
I am also reminded of this quote:
“All of humanity’s problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
–Blaise Pascal
As I looked into some of the background behind this quote, I think that it is true now more than ever. We’ve created a society where its almost impossible to just sit quietly without feeling like the moment needs to be filled up with busywork and noise.
Born and raised Roman Catholic, Kindergarten through 11th grade were in Catholic Schools. I was a pious goody two-shoes feeling increasingly guilty about my baser (normal human) aspects as I became a teenager. Around age 15 I began to get less and less involved with things Catholic but still went to Sunday Mass occasionally, and still lived with the constant undercurrent of Catholic Guilt.
I vividly remember my Damascus Moment as if it were yesterday. I was 17, riding my motorcycle to the parish church for Sunday Mass, came to the stoplight. Instead of turning right into the church parking lot, without any thought I impulsively turned left and drive a block up the hill, pulled over and looked across the street at the church and parking lot. My inner voice said “I don’t believe this shit any more” and I felt a great weight fall away from me. It was almost a physical sensation. One boy had gotten off the bike, and a young man got back on.
Never looked back, never gave it another thought, and I’ve been comfortably agnostic for the 57 years.
About a year later, except for tobacco the very first drug I ever ingested was LSD.
That remains my second greatest life-altering burst of insight/clarity.
Thirteen years after that I survived a terrible car crash that should have killed me. T-boned on the freeway at very high speed by a drunk driver. I’ll never forget the moment of realization “I’m about to be killed” (instead everything rolled to a stop). During that moment I felt absolutely calm, a sense of “isn’t that interesting.” No tunnel of light etc, but since then I’ve never felt afraid about my inevitable death.
Interesting, please elaborate more. Most psychedelic trips I’ve read of were either, “It gave me tremendous clarity” or “it destabilized my brain for months.”
I’d wanted to try it myself except that I have a bipolar sibling.
My experience is this: depression is mainly concerned with ruminating about the past (all the mistakes you’ve made, things you shoulda woulda coulda done), while anxiety deals with ruminating about the future (things that haven’t happened yet, but you catastrophize as though they have). For what it’s worth. Are there moments of clarity? Sure, after weeks or months of beating myself up first. A feeling of, maybe I’m not such a bad person after all. One time when I was driving I made a friend walk home because he was being an asshole. Not very nice, maybe, but it helped me feel assertive.
I had a similar moment and it has given me such a gift of calm. A large gangster-style SUV pulled up behind me in a quiet neighborhood, it was bouncing with energy from four tough looking young men apparently hyped up on something. Suddenly it roared around my car and screeched into the intersection just ahead of me, turning sideways to block my path. Two of the occupants rose through the windows on the far side and leveled rifles at me across the roof of the car, then fired.
I’ll never forget the weird way time slowed as I watched those nearly twin dots grew larger and larger aimed right along my line of sight. During that moment I somehow experienced an almost blase sense of “well how about that, this is it for me. Huh.”
Turned out to be paintballs. But it feels wonderful to know that my imminent death may not be filled with terror.
It wasn’t any one thing, and the process took the better part of a decade, but for most of my life until that point I’d based everything I did, thought, bought, sold, ate, consumed, etc., through the lens of a silly superstition that I’d been taught basically since birth. That some Palestinian dude got murdered and then returned from the dead, and then 20 centuries of what his followers taught should be the basis of my life.
It was the planet Saturn, of all things, that probably was the moment around which my deconstruction, as it’s called in this community, coalesced. I was looking at Saturn one night and I was contemplating its rings. The scientific explanation is that they’ve been there for at least 10 million years (or something), well before Galileo noticed them in 1610. The Evangelical Fundamentalist Christian explanation is that the universe began about 6000 years ago, meaning Saturn’s rings have always been there, or God just manifested them into existence at some point.
So here we have two choices: the natural one that makes sense, or the idea that God just yeeted Saturn into space, then drew rings around it, knowing full well it would be centuries before anyone noticed them.
I had an inexpensive 8" reflector telescope that I used to haul out to summer BBQs and camp meetings, and looking at Saturn was always the ball buster. Folks used to wave their hands in front of the tube as if to say “bullshit, I can’t really be seeing that out there.”
I think in the back of my mind that was my intention - to introduce the wonder of reality to the credulous.
It’s difficult to put into words (a cliche but true for me), but I’d say it was the realization that there was so much more to reality/the universe/life than what everyday perception had been showing me. Aldous Huxley’s “Doors of Perception” expresses it pretty well for me.
FWIW I only took LSD or Mescaline three or four more times, the last one having been more than 40 years ago. Insight and clarity notwithstanding I always found the experiences unsettling and frightening.
Regarding your bipolar sibling, I of course am not a psychologist but with years of hindsight I’ve become convinced that psychedelics can be dangerous to some people’s psyche. In my opinion your caution was/is warranted.
Same, but I came of age during the Carl Sagan Cosmos era:
“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”