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drvg thoughts

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really though the main reason why I've tried to shy away from encouraging or posting about drug use too much is because there's a severe lack of education around the topic. not even just with like basic safety shit, but also like pharmacologically it's important to understand what's going on when you do a substance, and worst of all there's also essentially zero knowledge in the west on how to navigate altered states in like a shamanic sort of sense of having a symbolic language for what the experience is going to be like, and really we can blame the boomers for this because when the drug scene exploded with the counterculture it happened in this really idiotic null context of people thinking that taking acid will expand your consciousness in a linearly causal way or that weed is merely a recreational substance. there's this whole westoid mentality of disrespecting the substances that has lead to all sorts of insane cultural neuroses forming around drugs as a result that we have still not recovered from, when really psychedelics in a lot of cases have had the exact opposite effect of consciousness expansion and arguably are in part responsible for the hell world we live in today (there was a huge amount of overlap between the counterculture and Silicon Valley), and weed has been used for thousands of years as an entheogenic substance to induce mystical visions.

these things are rarely as simple and straightforward as the expectations everyone has of them. at a certain point the more I've thought about this the more I've realized it's yet another thing I could write a whole long ass essay or book about. in fact substance abuse and addiction is becoming increasingly normalized as a backlash to the war on drugs but much like the counterculture it's all happening in this idiotic disorganized way that will result in yet another backlash a few years from now. shit sucks

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re: drvg thoughts

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@nyx My first foray into substance use was kinda the backwards version of yours, in that I had no symbolic language to work with but I had a very innate distaste for being high for high's sake and would intentionally put myself in situations that required me to like stress test, and it was after that did I find a way to navigate a lot of altered states, which inevitably become useful when I started exploring more occult stuff.

That said i think the west's biggest problem with entheogens is that we culturally view them as things that *do* stuff *for* us, rather than *allow* us to do stuff for *ourselves*, because it innately relinquishes agency from the experience. And while the sense of losing control is part of healthier experience we as a whole don't see them as anything but tools, when we should be seeing them as collaborators, and even more so see the experience as the beginning and the end of that change rather than a course correction.

There's this idea that we've cured whatever psychic or spiritual ailment we sought to rid ourselves of after the drug has worn off when really all that's happened is you've been shown what to do. Typical map is not the territory shit.

I could ramble on this for days because I hate substance discourse in our current social climate because it's run by fucking morons, but my main point is that that the west sees drugs as things to consume, not medicine, or teachers, or guides, and because we're so hellbent on framing everything as an exercise in extraction rather than mutation.