Wasn’t sure where to put this thread, its a semi-serious question.
We often hear about people having stunning insights while under the influence of drugs, in fact its a common trope that ‘X’ piece of art or philosophy was the direct result of its creator being in an altered state of mind when it was produced.
Its also a cliche of a person having a sudden drug-induced insight into reality and so on.
My question is has such a supposedly drug-induced revelation actually stood up to cold and sober analysis?
For the recoed I’ve never done drugs myself, have no desire to do so, and think they’re generally A Bad Thing.
Not for me. I’ve done lots of “soft” drugs - pot, LSD, ecstasy, etc.
But I have a very intelligent, talented, self-aware friend, whom I trust implicitly, who had a life-changing (for the positive) acid trip about 30 years ago. It apparently involved a sort-of “mental cubism”, in which he saw things from all perspectives at once.
Timothy Leary is the first person I thought of, but I’m not sure he came up with anything after his trips on acid.
That said, a few ‘urban legendesque’ names come to mind. What I mean by that is there are a few people who ‘it’s common knowledge’ that they were on drugs when they came up with their theories. Common knowledge is often a code word for ‘complete rubbish’, so keep that in mind.
It’s said that Freud came up with his theories while on cocaine.
There are also several prominent opium authors of the 1800’s (IIRC).
Socrates was known to drink a lot, but whether or not any of his insights came to him in a drunk stupor, I don’t know.
I wasn’t quite clear in the OP (as per usual), I meant revelations that stood up to outside analysis, that can be explained to another person and its content and import understood.
I’ll check that out, thanks.
edit: Thanks Meatros, your post appeared while I was composing mine.
I once saw the vastness of eternity on psilocybin.
I also had a friend report the same thing, and there is a famous film of a British MP in the 1950s who dropped Mescaline for a documentary, and he reported exactly the same thing (starts around 3:00).
Namely, the perception of one’s life being lived in a linear fashion is illusory, and the hallucinogens allow one to step off that line and see time as the non-linear wholeness that it is. Of course one has to return to standard linearity, but as Lord Mayhew says “it lasted for months”. Thirty years later he says: “I had these experiences, they were real, and they took place outside time.”
Whether this is an insight into what people like Hawking are now proposing, or just a coincidental hallucination, I don’t know. I tend towards the latter but I do find it interesting that that particular temporal perception/distortion matches up with current theoretical physics.
From my experiences, hallucinogen use was useful for providing insight, but not in the sense of obtaining some sort of revelation that can be directly shared with others - one is tempted to repeat many anecdotes of people comming up with allegedly momentous secrets while intoxicated, only to have them revealed in the cold light of sobriety as absurd or meaningless.
My favourite along these lines is attributed to the eminent Victorian William James, who is supposed, after experimenting with Nitrious Oxide (or in some versions Opium) to have arrived at the “secret”:
However, while drug use will not convey any sort of clear-cut “revelation” that can easily be described to others (though I gotta admit the doggrel above is snappy & memorable ), it is I think very useful to some people in two other senses:
(1) It can provide an alternative way of perceiving things. All our lives, we see things in a certain manner, and are consequently (know it or not) likely to assume that what we perceive is, essentially, objective reality. We are unaware of the ways in which our brains filter the information we receive, because our brains filter that information all the time. Our brains are optomized for letting us know what information is important to us for our survival.
Hallucinogens can remove, or at least change, those mental filters temporarily. This can, for some, provide a profound insight into the inherent subjectivity of our experiences, and the possibility that, by gaining multiple points of view, some glimmer of an objective reality can be descerned. Though what an individual does with this insight is of course up to them.
(2) An aspect of removing mental filters is removing temporarily a sense of self, of an egocentric POV. For some this can be frightening, but in many cases it is revelationary - an intuitive sense that the self is transitory, part of something much greater than self. In many cases this is felt as a profound religious experience, as people interpret it through the lens of whatever religious tradition they are familiar with (the “one with the godhead” mystical experience). For those who aren’t religious, it is more likely to be experienced as a panthiestic at-one-with-all-of-nature thing.
That does seem to be the problem, there’s never anyone around that’s sober to record the occasion, I strongly suggest a camera if someone tries experimenting ;).
I’ve had some ‘revelations’ after tokes of the ghanja, I do actually remember it all no matter how stoned I was, and it wasn’t like there was anything particular, it’s not like you get some knowledge that you didn’t already have, it’s more like the dots get connected, you can see things you didn’t before. You also start getting ‘mile-high’ veiws on life and the world and everything around you, it’s like now you can look at everything objectively, there’s nothing that seems more important than anything else.
It’s interesting that this question was asked, generally with MJ what happened to me was I started looking around at everyone that was hustling and scurrying about and I asked myself what they were doing. I understood that they were taking care of business and their families and their lives, but I didn’t understand why they were going about it so frantically. All too often I witness people making mistakes, and sometimes repeating them, merely because they didn’t take a half second to breathe and calm down. So instead of just a second to think about what they should do next and assess the situation, they’d just plow forward and end up spending a lot more time fixing their mistakes, in some cases I’ve seen people ruin their entire lives simply because they wouldn’t take a moment to think (maybe they were incapable of thinking, and obviously incapable of asking for advice too :)).
So that’s my revelation on MJ, I also would like to add that MJ is not in any way addictive, maybe the person has an addictive personality, but MJ itself is not, in any way shape or form, addictive, I was able to quit cold turkey (what does that mean anyway :dubious:) and haven’t looked back since (okay, so I’ve looked back at it, but that’s because a large portion of my life was spent stoned and I can remember every second of it…obviously it doesn’t damage your memory either :D.
Well at the risk of derailing the thread I’ve dealt too often with people who were drug users and I haven’t liked the apparent effects.
I do find the subject interesting though and don’t object to the concept in itself. Iain Banks has the characters in his Culture novels imbued with an integral ‘drug gland’ able to naturally produce a wide variety of drugs, with no unwanted consequences or side effects, which sounds like fun.
I’ve never felt the need to take up smoking or beer either, although I have tried those two…just didn’t like them and/or feel the need to take them any further.
I would say though that I believe alcohol use has a much more common everyday negative impact on society than drug use, and I deal with the former a lot as well. As a result I’ve pretty much given up drinking.
Drugs vary greatly in their real or purported usefulness for making positive mental changes. In this respect, the drugs you should be reading up on are the so-called hallucinogens, such as LSD (though the term “hallucinogen” is a bit of a misnomer, as they do not, by and large, actually induce hallucinations).
Moreover, just as not all drugs are similar in this respect, not all drug users get the same effect - particularly with hallucinogens. Many factors influence this, including the user’s mental state and their setting.
It was an LSD trip that made me realize that rather than hating her as a self-absorbed, bitter bitch, she was just a person, as flawed as anyone, and that she’d been saddled with single motherhood at age 20 and done the job the only way she could. Once I saw her as human, I realized I loved her. I was about 18 at the time and it totally changed the way I viewed my mother, to this day.
I’ve had other profound and meaningful insights into myself and my own behavior that resulted from LSD. Like Jobs, I think that taking LSD is one of the more important and beneficial things that I’ve done with regard to my own mental and emotional health.
What the hell kind of acid were you taking? They absolutely cause hallucinations (i.e. perceiving things in a way that differs from reality), although if you want to adopt a purist’s definition of a “true hallucination”, as in producing visual images completely whole-cloth out of nothing, then I guess I could go with that. My experience, as well as what I understand to be a common experience, is seeing a lot of “warpage” in things - walls and ceilings look like they’re “breathing”, and then as you start to fixate on things they will bend and stretch and sometimes change form. But you probably won’t see a pink elephant walking through the room or anything, unless there just so happens to be a large pink amorphous blob of material already in the room, which could definitely start to look like an elephant if you wanted it to.
The best hallucinations though come when your eyes are closed. That’s when your mind can start to produce some exceptionally vivid and surreal images (imagine the most vivid dream you’ve experienced 10x more real and potent). I don’t know whether a purist would count these closed-eye visions as “true hallucinations” either, though.
Of course this is all neat and fun but the real “benefit” from hallucinogens is more in how it puts your mind into this kind of rapid-fire, extremely lucid and detached state that is hard to describe unless you’ve actually experienced it.
I’m using the term “hallucinations” in the sense someone who has never taken LSD would use the term - actual hallucinations, like talking to someone who isn’t there like your dead aunt Cindy, or thinking you have grown wings and can fly.
I have experienced real hallucinations - while extremely ill, not through drugs. Thus, I say that calling LSD a “hallucinogen” is a bit of a misnomer.
That said, I’ve seen plenty of visual effects - like the “breathing” thing, or the startling increase in intensity of colours, or even mild senthesia - stuff moving to the beat of music. But as you note this is really little more than pretty side-effects, and in no way compares to the sort of thing I’d call a “hallucination”. The primary effects of LSD or mushrooms are mental, not 'hallucinatory".
BTW I have heard that some drugs, such as Jimson Weed, cause actual hallucinations. I have never taken any and don’t want to - the effects sound rather horrible.
[The Wiki site on hallucinogens divides the class into " psychedelics, dissociatives, and deliriants". Of the three “deliriants” cause what persons who have never used hallucinogens tend to think as a “hallucination”:
My take has always been this: John Lennon’s God-given talent produced “Ticket to Ride” and “Hard Day’s Night.” Drugs produced “Revolution #9.”
An exaggeration, I know. Drug-induced imagery certainly worked its way into some Beatle lyrics… but the good songs that featured those lyrics were written when the boys WEREN’T high. “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” may be filled with things John Lennon saw while taking acid, but he couldn’t have written any kind of song DURING and acid trip.
Edgar Allan Poe and Samuel Taylor Colerige may have seen some amazing things while in opium-induced dreams, but they wasn’t capable of writing anything while in those dreams. At best, they’d remember a few interesting things the’yd seen when sober, and write about them then. ANy poem either man tried to write WHILE high would probably have been gibberish.
I can honestly say that my psychedelic experiences were useful to me in a very subjective way.
That doesn’t mean that I came up with any insights that hadn’t been imagined by others before, and I didn’t discover a doorway into another physical reality, but it was a positive life-changing decision that I am very glad I made. However, that having been said, I have no desire to ever trip again. Given a relaxing mode of meditation and some quiet, I can recreate much of the same sensations that I experienced and have done so fairly recently.
Also, some of my best insights into database modeling have come while I was somewhat high on MJ. Certainly some of my best poetry has been crafted under the influence, and that isn’t just my opinion.
), it is I think very useful to some people in two other senses: