Can psychedelics decrease insight derived by other means?

[Matt23]

I heard Daniel Ingram discuss how muddy the spiritual and meditative landscape is in terms of having it mapped out, like a science.  In one part, when addressing psychedelics, along with saying that there is a wide range of effects, from permanent enlightenment to nothing at all.  In this part, he talks about people he claim say that using psychedelics too much can decrease one's ability to attain insights through other means, and may disrupt of permanently damage one's "natural" ability at maintaining and sustaining these states without psychedelics.  I've also heard Ram Dass say something similar.

Have any of you psychedelic spiritual people experienced this?

Leo, (or anyone else who's done heavy psychedelic use as well as pursuing spirituality) have you experienced this or noticed any effects of the like that you might think could be associated with psychedelic use?

Cheers.

[Gesundheit]

From what I've noticed about psychedelic users, they all, without exception, seem to be stuck in chasing mind-expansions and favoring it over being. And to me that's antithetical to enlightenment. Because the more mind you have, the less you'll be able to just be.

[Leo Gura]

3 hours ago, Matt23 said:

using psychedelics too much can decrease one's ability to attain insights through other means, and may disrupt of permanently damage one's "natural" ability at maintaining and sustaining these states without psychedelics.

Nonsense and fearmongering.

Psychedelics do exactly the opposite. They increase your capacity for natural insights and they raise your baseline state.

Can they make you lazy? Yes, because compared to practices like meditation, psychedelics are so much stronger that you will be disappointed with meditation. It's hard to convince yourself to invest 20 years into meditation once you've tried something like DMT.

[Talinn]

3 hours ago, Matt23 said:

In this part, he talks about people he claim say that using psychedelics too much can decrease one's ability to attain insights through other mean

This should be a no brainer because any time you spend 1 minute on X you lose the potentional to spend that 1 minute on Y, Z, V, and R. And you have a finite time with your body.

You invested some part of yourself into anything that you tried for that 1 minute, making you ever so slightly less invested in that other thing you could try. 

But other than that I don't think there's really a correlation.

[Thought Art]

@Talinn not unless X Is a catalyst for Y

[Matt23]

@Talinn If you mean that if a person just spends hours on psychedelics with no meditation practice, their meditation practice without pyschedelics would be weak.  Then ya, I could see that being the case.  But, I don't really have much experience so I dunno.  And ya, @Thought Art makes sense as well.  I mean, in an obvious straight-forward way that @Talinn was saying makes sense, but I don't think Daniel was meaning that.  I think he was meaning more along the lines that taking psychedelics can affect one's bio-chemistry, or spiritual abilities on an energetic level or permanent level or something along those lines.  Rather than lack of abilities coming from simply lacking practice (thus they can be retrained/grown, whereas the way I heard him, he was saying psychedelic's effects = permanent).  

...?  Dunno.

Sounds like a good area for research. ... Anyone got $10,000,000 +  they want to put towards a 10 year-long longitudinal study on meditation and psychedelic research?!  

Edited November 10, 2020 by Matt23

[Shin]

On 08/11/2020 at 4:37 AM, Gesundheit said:

From what I've noticed about psychedelic users, they all, without exception, seem to be stuck in chasing mind-expansions and favoring it over being. And to me that's antithetical to enlightenment. Because the more mind you have, the less you'll be able to just be.

Yes but no.

From what I understood when I speak to psychedelics users, is that the trips can be so profound and life shattering that they are naturally anti-addictive.

A chasing mind-expansion can still be there without psychedelics at all, and you are way more stuck in that case, cause your mind is just so closed minded.

So there is really no reason not to use psychedelics, the only thing we don't know are the long term effects since it has been demonized for so long.

Not taking psychedelics in your spiritual journey is like wanting to walk through the amazon forest and expecting surviving on your own really.

Unless you're a spiritual genius, you'd probably never be enlightened, maybe not even at peace in your life, some people are so fucked up in their head that they will never sit for 10 minutes.

Edited November 10, 2020 by Shin

[Corpus]

On ‎08‎/‎11‎/‎2020 at 5:31 AM, Leo Gura said:

Nonsense and fearmongering.

Psychedelics do exactly the opposite. They increase your capacity for natural insights and they raise your baseline state.

Can they make you lazy? Yes, because compared to practices like meditation, psychedelics are so much stronger that you will be disappointed with meditation. It's hard to convince yourself to invest 20 years into meditation once you've tried something like DMT.

I'm not sure its quite so clear-cut. Insights gained on psychedelics, with the clarity and "wow-factor" they impart, inevitably fade and in some people nil remains of consequence whereas others can retain the sense of the insight. Having additional practices such as meditation can also re-impart the same insights but more blandly, thus subtly fostering a sense of disappointment at the realization- because you have a more glamorous version to contrast it with. Thus the magnitude of the insight gained without psychedelics is in some way diminished by psychedelic use.

Leo says DMT doesn't give him visuals and I have no reason to disbelieve this, although he has never made clear his dosage range/ preferred ROA/number of inhalations taken; for the overwhelming majority of NN DMT users, the experience is a riot of visual content and thus, IMO, almost the antithesis of meditation.

Edited November 10, 2020 by Corpus

[Leo Gura]

17 minutes ago, Corpus said:

for the overwhelming majority of NN DMT users, the experience is a riot of visual content and thus, IMO, almost the antithesis of meditation.

Even if you get lots of visuals it does not contradict meditation.

The visuals are not the most significant part, the expanded consciousness is.

Visuals + expanded consciousness will be more profound and insightful than any meditation. Especially on DMT. The insight on DMT is second to none and will knock your socks off no matter how much you've meditated.

DMT is like God ejaculating his seed all over your face from a firehose until you drown.

[Corpus]

7 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Even if you get lots of visuals it does not contradict meditation.

The visuals are not the most significant part, the expanded consciousness is.

Visuals + expanded consciousness will be more profound and insightful than any meditation. Especially on DMT. The insight on DMT is second to none and will knock your socks off no matter how much you've meditated.

DMT is like God ejaculating his seed all over your face from a firehose until you drown.

If you don't get visuals with DMT as you claim, then you are assuming how profound and insightful this kind of DMT trip is ie for the majority. You don't need to persuade me- psychedelics stamp on the face of meditation then grind its nose to a bloody deformed mess with its heel but the expanded consciousness on vaporized DMT is so intertwined with the eye-candy that unless one uses it in very particular ways, the expanded consciousness gets "obscured". Unless one has had the visually-dominated DMT experience any utterances are just imagined/ speculation.

[Leo Gura]

@Corpus First of all, 1000s of people can easily attest to the profoundness of DMT even with crazy high visuals. This is not some untested thing.

Secondly, I've taken other psychedelics which have lots of visuals and the visuals do not obscure the profundity of the trip.

You seem to be stuck on visuals for some reason when there's no reason to be. Visuals don't obscure a trip any more than they obscure meditation.

[KingEnergy]

39 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Visuals + expanded consciousness will be more profound and insightful than any meditation. Especially on DMT. The insight on DMT is second to none and will knock your socks off no matter how much you've meditated.

DMT is like God ejaculating his seed all over your face from a firehose until you drown.

When did you start using DMT? Did you find out it was more potent than 5-MeO only after opening your mind so much after many trips? or would DMT have been more potent for you from the start? My theory is that DMT is deeper because you literally lose your body so you are more capable of insight.

On 11/8/2020 at 6:31 AM, Leo Gura said:

Nonsense and fearmongering.

Psychedelics do exactly the opposite. They increase your capacity for natural insights and they raise your baseline state.

Can they make you lazy? Yes, because compared to practices like meditation, psychedelics are so much stronger that you will be disappointed with meditation. It's hard to convince yourself to invest 20 years into meditation once you've tried something like DMT.

Do you still meditate 1 hour daily and enjoy it? Or have you given it up entirely?

[KingEnergy]

@Corpus The visuals make insight more capable imo because you have lost your entire reality to visuals, so your old reality no longer blocks your insight. its literally like cracking open God's skull. I have seen visuals which would convince you that you are God even if it didn't raise your consciousness.

[Leo Gura]

Just now, KingEnergy said:

Did you find out it was more potent than 5-MeO only after opening your mind so much after many trips?

They are both very potent, just in different ways.

Just now, KingEnergy said:

or would DMT have been more potent for you from the start?

I assume it would still have been very potent from the start.

Just now, KingEnergy said:

My theory is that DMT is deeper because you literally lose your body so you are more capable of insight.

I don't really lose my body. Although that's gonna be dose dependent and the body is imaginary anyways so to me the body is not an obstacle.

Just now, KingEnergy said:

Do you still meditate 1 hour daily and enjoy it? Or have you given it up entirely?

I meditate without a strict schedule, as I feel like.

[KingEnergy]

Thanks for answering.

[Corpus]

17 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

@Corpus First of all, 1000s of people can easily attest to the profoundness of DMT even with crazy high visuals. This is not some untested thing.

Secondly, I've taken other psychedelics which have lots of visuals and the visuals do not obscure the profundity of the trip.

You seem to be stuck on visuals for some reason when there's no reason to be. Visuals don't obscure a trip any more than they obscure meditation.

The profoundness of DMT is not in question- but the clarity and other-worldliness of the visual effects (which would require massive doses of other agents like LSD to achieve, upwards of 1mg) IS intrinsic to the profundity. This is consciousness expansion with/as objects, and this form you have not experienced. "Seem to be stuck on visuals"- a nice Leo-ism, accusatory and unfalsifiable, yet the point remains- you cannot state how DMT with breakthrough visuals affect the trip until you have been there. "Lots of visuals" may or may not be sufficiently akin to DMT visuals for you to know, and the "obscuring" I mentioned (in quotations) could also be referred to as a modulation. In retrospect, this would have been a better turn of phrase. 

 

29 minutes ago, KingEnergy said:

@Corpus The visuals make insight more capable imo because you have lost your entire reality to visuals, so your old reality no longer blocks your insight. its literally like cracking open God's skull. I have seen visuals which would convince you that you are God even if it didn't raise your consciousness.

21 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

 

@KingEnergy But have you really lost your entire reality to visuals? Try vaporizing a breakthrough dose with headphones on/music playing. You may find that your notion of "entire reality" is limited.

I dunno if I am making my points clearly enough- profound visuals provided by DMT are intrinsic to the experience and by their captivating nature allow subtleties to be overlooked. 

[Leo Gura]

@Corpus I don't understand what wisdom you think you are arguing.

Take psychedelics, amazing awakenings will result. Simple. You are over-thinking things. Stop worrying about things which ain't a problem.

If you are so worried about visuals, take 5-MeO-DMT.

[Corpus]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

@Corpus I don't understand what wisdom you think you are arguing.

Of course you don't understand because you don't get visuals with DMT, so how could you? Just be open to the possibility that the experiences you have had cannot inform you of the DMT breakthroughs' visual component and salience because it is inconceivable. Being meditative when confronted with this is a different scenario to being meditative under the more commonly used psychedelics, or 5 MeO DMT.

 

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

 Take psychedelics, amazing awakenings will result. Simple. You are over-thinking things. Stop worrying about things which ain't a problem.

If you are so worried about visuals, take 5-MeO-DMT.

Concluding its due to over-thinking, and worrying about visuals seems a little premature. We appear to be communicating at cross-purposes and will continue to do so because we do not share the experience in common to discuss. No worries.