Better living through chemistry

General Discussion
1

I can accept that their are the “Purist- only a straight head” people; and then there are “The Tainted”, folks like me- who has no problem with the coloring book, but the colors are just so much more fun and pretty with alittle ‘fuel in the tank’. So, having said that, and inviting debate or experiance from both sides-
Do you have a favorite ‘little helper’ ? If so what is it, what do you like comparing this for that?

One of these days I gotta re-write and upload a piece I wrote called “Hemp and Holiness”- even though the main star of the scripture is not hemp, likely hash oil, some opiate, soma or something- but the results clearly were pretty awesome as it resulted in over 70 books of prophecy and was commanded to be taken by “An angel of god”. The “Anti” crowd, seem to have a pretty strong “Opposition” to what “The Gods”/“Demons” have to say on the matter.

2

I find that being stoned definitely makes a difference. It opens things up mentally in a way that is much more difficult to achieve when sober. Alcohol, OTOH, seems to be a road block.

3

and alcohol tends to get the widest “nono” factor with religion, which I find interesting.

4

But sometimes alcohol makes it easier for me to have sleeping paralyzes, which could progress into astral travel.

5

On the subject of alcohol…

After reading Konstantinos work, I discovered Chartreuse and I like this drink a great deal. Skrying into the murky green fluid with a melting layer of ice produces interesting results. Highly recommend.

A dark red wine can serve two purposes here, one as a traditional offering understood as the fruits and joys of life(?) and the other for the ritual itself to be consumed. Like offering a friend a drink and spending time together.

I tend to think that the “alert body” can be the enemy at times. A barrier not easily pierced. Fasting, sleep deprivation, meditation, music all help. Alcohol too.

BUT… limiting the consumption is important for me. Just a touch does the job. Perhaps that is true of all chemistry complimenting our work.

Never tried traditional Absinthe. Would like to at some point.

6

Absinthe induces a kind of trance and, like hynosis, you go under more quickly and deeply each time. You don’t experience usual alcohol-related effects, and it’s more subtle than in your face. Essentially, once you learn to stay conscious and lucid through it instead of just go under dream away, you’ll ‘drop into’ a state of taking in sensory phenomena in a very novel way, interpreting great significance in what you observe and being led to key thoughts in a way that bypasses mere logical progression.

Holy hell, why have I never read tarot with this stuff?

7

Because you might start to touch your client inapropriately while you do it, or maybe because the Hierophant will wink and pull back his robe to reveal he’s wearing the cutest garterbelt you’ve ever seen on an old man :smiley: .

Kidding, but I say that on the basis of what’s happened to me while under the effect of alcohol, and why it is one of the reasons I am against the use of drugs in esoteric works.

I am against the use of drugs under any circumstances, even outside the occult, because I am afraid that the current lack of acceptance from the general public prevents safe and measured usage, because I am afraid of adiction and, mostly, because I’ve seen some serious shit with the least amount of alcohol that caused such an impression I felt I was having a minor cardiac arrest.

So, trying to be brief:

  1. Too many risks:

  • Addiction: If it becomes a frequent habit the body will increase its tolerance as a natural reaction. I am glad and envious for those who can handle it, but if I cannot handle putting down the god damn fork much less I will try my luck with that.

  • Adverse reactions: AKA “holy fuck I just found out I am allergic to this stuff and I am way too shitfaced to call an ambulance besides the fact that the phone has fangs right now”. That and because one must always consider any ailments running in the family. Wouldn’t it be a nasty surprise to find out your heart cannot handle this strees?

  • Risk of mental breakdown: Without wishing to stirr a debate here and talking from my limited experience but pharmacologically subtstantiated research, some drugs worsen pre-existing mental conditions. I am sure that we, people with a modicum of higher perception than others, suffer a depression far deeply than any other normal person. Imagine that but under the symptoms of withdrawal.

  • Social exclusion: Nothing worse than your explanations falling on deaf ears. Sure, you might experience far greater results than the usual, but try telling that to a spouse / significant other / family member under all those “drug war” scares. Needless to say word gets around and while for you it is a controlled experience, for your short-sighted employer might be not, imagine how worse could things get when you justify the use and he goes “oh great he’s a Satanist now too”.

Never underestimate the power of ignorant people in great numbers or in a position of superiority.

  • Supply and dependability: Whatever the poison of your choice you must keep in mind that you cannot just go to Walgreen’s and restock. It takes a special kind of person to grant you access, and that person can (and statistically WILL) run into legal problems, problems that can be managed with an agreement with the appropriate authorities.

The last thing you want is your dealer ratting you out in hopes for a shorter sentence. I don’t imply that you are doing bad things, I am not here to judge, but you surely have been way too friendly and loosened your lips around such characters considering that the whole business depends on mutual trust. In my time, when I studied Criminology at Uni, we learned that people tend to reveal personal information between criminal associates because, in a way, alleviated the pressure, allowed bonding and established an unspoken rule.

This unspoken rule, my friends, is what allowed Renaissance-era Italian thieves to thrive and establish the idea of criminal guilds that we find today in fiction. Every new member had to confess their own crimes as well listen to the ones of his comrades, thusly guaranteeing loyalty, because had one of them gone to the authorities, the remaining members could team and report the rogue member for all of his misdeeds.

In other words: If you’ve got a dealer and he knows about your stuff? It is a liability. Don’t allow yourself to live with lose ends, and take that however you want.

On the other hand it is only consequencial that drug dealers run into all sorts of risks tied to their profession (and by extension, to violence). Not having to deal with the dealer (pardon the pun) reduces your own chances of running into trouble.

As a personal account, I had a shifty friend in high school, who while he was a nice person to be around was also involved in all sorts of trouble. He was not the most wealthy person I know so when one day he showed up on my door with a racing motorcycle I understood something bad was going on. He asked shelter of me, a few hours to hide himself from pursuers (legal and otherwise) and a few days to actually hide the vehicle.

I obliged but he was gone, with the bike thankfully, in under thirty minutes yet not before telling me his story: Apparently he had stolen the bike from a rival dealer who had assaulted him some time earlier. I heard sometime after he had demanded money from the first dealer and that upon denial he set it on fire.

Yeah, fun times, right? D:

  1. No reliable information regarding dosage and safety:

Most of the things we hear are over-inflated stories about people who destroyed their lives, the risks and a run down of treatments and stuff.
And on the other hand, most drug users are not seeking to enhance their ESP skills but rather have a good time.

The panorama is set upon thrill seeking and altered states of mind that render the user a passive agent. You go through the experience, you do not control it as it would be a drug prescription or a treatment.
What I wish to convey is that no one tells you “take x amount to get into a useful trance and don’t go over it or you’ll be shitfaced”.

And of course, whenever you make the question, you’re taken for a weakling who is trying to white wash his interest under a legitimate purpose (AKA “no guys I swear I am doing it for research”). It takes a select community to reach these answers, and sadly, this is easier said than done.

8
  1. Running into “Them”:

In my experiences I’ve seen some “things” that simply made no sense but where real enough for my physical eyes to see and give me a small cardiac arrest (or at least what I think it was, because I felt like dying). Mind you, the visions I will describe were not horrific or shocking enough to induce a viewer to panic, as a matter of fact some are ridiculous to the point that they seem like Sesame Street rejected puppets that should not scare anyone.

It is the pervasive and recurring effects that happened after the visions that made me label them under the “Them” cathegory, because each one of them seemed to trigger a physical reaction that seems as if my brain wished to deny their existance and the effort caused the painful shocks that followed almost instantly.

One of the visions happened after taking a shot of vodka. The brand was not a cheap one and it was bought from a decent, reliable store, by me and no one had access to it until it was served. That said there is simply no chance that someone could have spiked my drink or that the vodka had been of the worse quality or in a bad state to cause the sight.

The second one was caused by physical exhaustion (had been running behind someone riding a bicycle to train my endurance), to the point that I had begun to lose hearing and having tunnel vision. I stopped to recover and when my perception was restored, I looked up and saw the creature.

The third vision happened after making a ritual offering and had no links with the contacted entity (Marbas), yet I was slightly woozy from the repetition of incantations and had recently exited T/G synch.

The fourth vision occurred just as I woke up after a brief nap, so we could say between the states of sleep and wake.

All visions lasted for maybe two seconds at most, all of them happened just as watching people on the street, nothing was internal nor mental. I saw them with my very eyes. All of them caused a sharp pain in the left side of my chest (an inch or two to the left of my sternum) followed by a burning sensation, brief breath shortage and sudden sensation of impending doom. Please keep in mind that I am a fairly large, imposing and violent individual who (without wishing to brag) has handled more than one tense situation, and that at the moment of the visions I was armed and capable enough to react, yet those visions broke me.

9

The visions of “Them”:

  1. Silverback-shaped gorilla sitting on my roof. Metallic skin and details to the point of seeing how the armored plates connect between each other and small things such as rivets or individually armored fingers comparable to wearing a gauntlet. It’s face was shaped like a coffin would, the horizontal section of what appeared to be the usual Christian cross found on coffins being actually a slit for eyes.

I stayed dumbfounded for almost two hours until I mustered the courage to open the door, mostly because the night guard saw me tittering crouched behind a wall. I had a large knife on me at the time, but I was trapped in a circular patter of logic (“I can hurt it” and “but it’s skin is metal, I cannot penetrate that”).

The vision lasted two or three seconds, but the impression was enough to break my nerve for, as I said before, two hours. The chest pain in this one happened AFTER I entered my home and thought about the ordeal, just in the moment I began to ponder how silly it was.

  1. Four legged dragon-like creature plodding through the parking lot. It was as big as a car, but emaciated to the point that just skin clung to its bones. It had no eyes but empty orbits, but a distinctive sensation that it could see.

I watched it walk with an anatomical precision that it disturbed me deeply. Not because I saw it walk, but because HOW I saw it do that, that begged the question of “if this is fake, how come it walks in such a perfect fashion / in a way I could not have imagined”.

The pain happened, again, just as I thought “this cannot be real, but it’s there and I am seeing it”. It walked past me and it vanished, but in those few seconds it provoked in me the same sensations that anyone would have if such an animal walked by.

  1. The mountains have eyes, literally: After a ritual of offerings to Marbas I stood in my balcony, still a bit dazed after the whole thing, and looked over at a walled community. The view is a nice thing, it has two big mountains in the background, one which is shaped like a triangle (largest peak in Spain), the other is a monstrous plateau.

Well, as I was watching that, at night, I realized there was a disctintive shape next to the plateau, as if all of a sudden were a total of three mountains.

Just as I thought how strange that was, the shape separated itself from the other two by turning around and looking at me with two orbs of burning light the size of a small apartment. It as then when I realized it was a vaguely humanoid-shaped thing the size of a tower, and that it had been resting its back against a building.

As soon as I began processing that, it vanshed, and left me with the already too familiar chest pain. What the fuck.

  1. Binbag looking creature: Picture a serpentine body doted with smallish arms that end in enlogated fingers, all held against the chest as if plagued by atrophy. To that add small wings that seem way too useless to propell the creature anywhere.

Then, the face looks like a heavy garbage bag would look if viewed from the underside, and if that underside was all crumpled up and splattered with golden paint.

The thing appeared next to my bed, we exchanged glances, and it vanished. To say it appeared it would not be totally right, as it was already there when I opened my eyes. It vanished, and the same happened again.

So, what is your take on this, fellows? Ever seen something like that? Even if they were just product of my tired mind, that’s enough reason for me not to do drugs. Just not cut for that I guess.

(reserved for more tomorrow)

10

Sorry for your bad experiences, my own lend to the practice of taking things that are dangerous and require ‘balancing on the razor’s edge’ as a way to propel rapidly forward the one able to ‘ride the wave’ of what threatens to overwhelm him if he does not intend to be at all times the master. If I abhorred danger, I wouldn’t do -anything- magical.

But instead of being safe and lukewarm, here I am encouraging as many as have the heart to go as far as can be gone, and either transform or be destroyed.

[/false dichotomy]

11

Claidheam my man I was joking, dude :smiley: I know that I am not made for that experience just as I am not made for motocross, but I had to point out the pros and the cons from my point of view for anyone that might think to start. You know, just sharing my two cents.

By the way, a friend told me he would see humanoid shapes made out of Tiffany window glass when drinking absinthe. Have you ever seen something similar? Please let me know.

12

No, but it could easily be very different for different people. My friends and I will very often carry on our activities and conversations, only to learn later that those not drinking absinthe watched us just pass into a strange trance. Our memories, however, would reflect identical recollection of in-depth conversation, and moving around to different places with no idea that our physical bodies were doing vegetable impersonations.

There is a spirit associated with absinthe that will occasionally make an appearance, and that is the storied Green Fairy. When she appears, she seems to want to beguile the drinker into greater depths of received impression, and the wisest thing to do is probably to just be polite and let her guide your activities just the way you would with the hostess of a gathering in her own home.

But absinthe is far from consistent when it comes to -quantifiable- phenomena. It’s, to me, more than anything a tool for creating -atmosphere-, for bringing the mind into that very subtle state where everything is a symbol and the mundane mind doesn’t second-guess everything. One should never be dependent upon it or any thing, but it makes an excellent tool in the hands of one determined to be the master.

No offense taken, we’re here to be grown-ass adults and deal with (and maybe learn from!) other perspectives - you and I can disagree with each other about everything under the sun, but as long as we’re mature and respectful we’ve presented others reading with plenty to work through.

13

Claidheam, I’m curious about the amount you imbibe in order to have the effect it has on you. I’m assuming it’s not to the point of intoxication, maybe just that “warm glow” state? I would certainly be willing to try, since I’m a grown-ass adult :slight_smile:

14

My experience of being addicted to alcohol was nothing like Bukowski, Oliver Reed, or even like the guy sleeping on a park bench blissfully fucked on cheap beer - instead, it was exactly like having a whiny toddler locked in my head, almost constantly asking “Are we there yet?” - with “there” being, “Have I pursuaded you the day was good/bad/indifferent enough to justify one more drink?”

So once I tipped that point (it didn’t feel like a razor’s edge, I think if it was that sharply defined there’d be no addicts) I had the unglamourous, nay tedious, choice between tolerating a whiny uncivilised thing that was going to bitch and moan inside my head, 24/7 some days - or taking it to where it always wanted to be, and becoming it. Very little glamour in that! :wink:

There are methods to deal with it, thankfully, and I can even safely use alcohol a few times a year for ritual purposes by now, but the main thing I want to raise since the topic of addiction’s come up, is that every last addict at the start thought they could handle it, and it’s one hell of a risk to take if it can be avoided in any way.

Do what thou wilt but remember no-one gets into this believing they’ll be the one to get stuck, and by the time you realise you are, you have the toddler from hell installed and ready to go.

/ends fussing grandma mode :stuck_out_tongue:

It never held me back, and neither did some minging hangovers, but I think some people metabolise it differently and therefore (like I did) get hooked easier: there may also be the fact that nothing sucks like having a hangover on a hot bright day, which is the normal weather in the countries where it’s most frowned upon.

One theory about the metabolism thing, which I think I posted here already, is that there’s a north European/Celtic (and also native American etc) vulnerability for people whose ancestors originally ate a lot of seafood (possibly also insects and grass-fed large game) and whose brains therefore became accustomed to high levels of omega 3 oils, which when withdrawn from the diet lead to a depressed state.

Once alcohol is introduced it in some ways mimics that, relieving the intense deficiency state that creates psych. pain and rapidly becoming an addiction.

Anyway neurochemical musings aside :slight_smile: I do lean towards the straight side these days, but I’m experimenting right now with a ketogenic diet, I sustained it for 3 whole months then as an experiment came off it last Weds, which means my brain was burning ketone bodies in place of glucose for the most part, and the small amount of glucose I created from proteins was kept fairly stable.

That this dipped, dramatically, after evocations is something I logged elsewhere on here, and right now I’m moving back from glucose metabolism to ketogenic.

Keto feels like burning rocket fuel - moving back to glucose felt like pouring some backwoods hooch made from potato skins into the fuel tank, so I’ve probably found a new (ab)-normal, and of course how sustainable it is to remain at around 40g total carbs a day is another question!

So, equally wacky, just less likely to take up residence in my head as a chemically-mediated whiny brat. :slight_smile:

I HOPE! >_<

15

I guess I should have stated that for me, alcohol is a road block. I get too fuzzy headed and find I can’t focus, my thoughts just kind of “loop”. Rockin’ the Ganja, OTOH, locks me in and takes me deep. Focus is very easy and almost automatic. The absinthe thing, though is worth a shot. Thujone, a psycho active found in absinthe, is the reason it was banned for a long time in many countries. It’s disputed that there’s enough of it in absinthe to have any real effect, and here in the US, it has to be Thujone free, which means no more than 10 ppm.

16

If you do it right, you -won’t- get intoxicated, not like regular alcohol. True, most absinthes seem to be bottled at about 65% alcohol, and when I was younger and more ignorant I didn’t know any better than to just drink it straight (horrendous btw), but properly prepared will see you closer to that “warm glow” of a nice mild buzz.

The standard technique is to mix 1 part absinthe from the bottle with 2 parts cool water. If it’s not cool, it’s not as smooth and you still get a distracting burn from all the alcohol combined with the very strong licorice-like flavour of the anise, fennel, etc. but warm water won’t kill the effects if you don’t mind drinking it.

You’ll want to drip the water in slowly as this is what frees the acting herbs from the bottled solution; you’ll get a really cool spectacle of the ‘louche’, or transformation of the beverage from a clear green liquid to a milky greenish white.

The proper form is to drip the water over a slotted spoon with a sugar cube on it. The reason for that is that the best (for effects, anyway) absinthes contain a certain thujone, which the sugar will combine with to be better taken in by your body for heightened effect. Not many absinthes I’ve come across (I live in the US, which only recently loosened the ban on wormwood, the most important herb, in absinthe, but is still deathly afraid of one more substance like thujone) contain thujone, but it’s worth the search if you’re looking for the most interesting. Pernod has thujone in theirs, you just need to make sure it’s the Absinthe Superieure and not their completely mundane anise liqueur that comes in a nearly identical bottle. But if your absinthe doesn’t have thujone, adding the sugar will be strictly for flavour. Another thing that’s unfortunate in the US is the proliferation of false absinthes that don’t even contain wormwood! So make sure yours does, otherwise it’s just a peculiarly flavoured alcoholic beverage.

Once the drink’s all louched, enjoy. Many people (like myself) seem to be put very easily into a deep sleep full of strange dreams not very far into their first few times drinking absinthe, others are weirdly immune. It definitely seems to bridge between the different states between sleep and wakefulness in a very strange manner, and the more often you drink absinthe, the more “lucid” you’ll become while drinking, and the more you’ll be able to kind of ‘ride the wave’. But yeah, it’s a very ‘somnolent’ type of experience.

Just don’t try to have an agenda at first, stay open minded and just observe your surroundings, including stray thoughts, any music, or anything visually aesthetic because your ability to interpret meaning in things should gain a peculiar kind of insight.

Three to five glasses in is where the interesting bits start to set in, and this can continue for as long as you can remain conscious - just don’t feel bad if you nearly immediately drop into some kind of trancey sleep the first couple of times because it happens to a lot of people and will eventually go away.