HumbleTraveler777 said:
What do you mean by healthier spiritually? Why on earth would you need to take a drug for self improvement? Why not just cut out the middle man and do the self improving?
Traditional cultures don't consider them "teachers" for nothing. Cutting out the middle man is great if you know how to do it yourself. In western psychedelic culture we say "once you get the message hang up the phone".
Anyways the answer to your question is "without a doubt". I'll use my first Ayahuasca trip as probably my best example of a psychedelic experience that has impacted my life. I had entered ceremony as a born and bred reductionist. I identified with my logic and only saw healing as a manner of pointing at problem sources and "fixing" them. This led to a lot of external blame and powerlessness to do more than shout at the world about how shitty of a job everyones doing. How could I a lone human, "fix" this broken world? Anyways, Ayahuasca kicked my ass. I was given a full breakthrough-strength dose. The first thing that happened was I came face to face with the Creator. That vision is permanently burned into my psyche. It is my guiding light. The pinnacle of my being. My divine right to eternal union with the infinite Creator and it's endless gifts. After that I was chucked out of the clouds into the pits of hell. I was literally begging people i didn't know to kill me and disrupted the entire ceremony. I put it up there as one of if not the most terrifying experiences of my life. Anyways the point is that nothing changed. Between heaven and hell. The ceremony stayed the same, the setting did not change... Yet I must have changed something. And i was certainly too intoxicated to have done so from coherent logical thoughts. To be able to manifest heaven and hell only from a change in being... that's true power. Living life with that sort of power... Well I'm infinitely grateful to it. A year later i contracted Lyme disease unknowingly and was let to progress to late stage where I remain today. It's like being on Ayahuasca continuously. A continuous test of attitude and perseverance to rectify it. Learning to lead from the heart and let understanding follow. Waking up everyday and seeking the Creator in everything to ease the pain. Continuously letting go of preconceptions that inhibit your healing. And most of all learning to effect change through action and presence as opposed to logic and condemnation.
I live in a magical and functional world thanks to Ayahuasca. Other psychedelics only serve to support this change. I will say too that more than just inner personal change I also brought back some great music from my ceremony
![Beaming face with smiling eyes :grin: 😁](/styles/default/xenforo/smilies/nexus/unicode/64/1f601.png)
Music that, four years later, can still induce instant flashback and make tears flow. Music that, despite me giving up my own musical career, keeps me playing the guitar and offering up my gratitude from a mode of self expression that i would otherwise not have.
I can empathize though, that psychedelics can be seductive. I just tripped this morning for the first time in almost a year. Just DMT. But I remember now the infinite mind game it plays with you. I keep coming back to it thinking I'm going to be swimming in sacred geometry and yet all I get is a bunch of tests of will :d In a few hours that will all be gone and I will be fantasizing about geometric shapes again. I spent years obsessed with altered states. Lyme disease really pulled me out of that by forcing me to focus on health and shift my scientific interests from psychotropics to microbiology. And I'm glad, but I think psychedelics still have their relevance in my life in a more ritualized context. Only when i have a deep commitment to the work. The ceremony also helps give context that I can bring back day to day without feeling as if i must continue to drink on a regular basis. Because essentially I meet other people on the same healing path, I hear songs written by people on that path, and so I get a lot of materials to work with in my freetime besides my own vague memory of the experience. So there's a lot of significance in the communion as well as the individual work. In fact I did not even participate last time, but merely stepped into the space to pick up my wife at the end of the night and that alone gave me afterglow for a month as if i had actually taken the brew
Well that's my kratom ramble for the day.