psychedelics and neuroplasticity

to any neurodivergent lainons (i imagine that includes most of you) what have your experiences been with psychedelics in terms of how they affected your overall mental health? i ask because i am autistic and shizotypal and have severe depression and anxiety, i've been seeing therapists and psychiatrists since like 2010 or so and i've tried basically every kind of medication there is and been misdiagnosed with bipolar and a bunch of other things over the years by various specialists. therapy and meds have helped me to a certain extent but lately i feel like i've gotten all the help i'm going to get from conventional medicine and i've sort of reached a point of diminishing returns. i wasn't diagnosed with autism until last year and it's kind of explained a lot about my symptoms and why conventional treatments have been so ineffective in my case, i'm thinking whatever is going on with me isn't just psychological but more neurological in nature. i have had a lot of experience with drugs over the years and have taken mushrooms, lsd, dmt, and other things in the past and it always seemed like my mental health would noticeably improve for quite a long time after tripping. i was also a longtime weed smoker and that also seemed to help a lot with the symptoms i have but i had to give up cannabis because it was causing stomach issues and since then i feel like my cognition and creativity and interest in life have just sort of plummeted. the last time i had a psychedelic experience was taking 1p-lsd a few years ago and my mental health seemed to improve for a long time after that trip but now i'm kind of back in the slump again. anyway i've been reading a lot of research about psychedelics and their effect on neuroplasticity and anedotal stuff by people with various neurological issues and their experiences with psychedelics and it's kind of gotten me wanting to try tripping again and seeing if that helps my situation at all. i don't know if i'd want to do something as intense and long-lasting as acid these days, i was thinking maybe just eating some mushrooms and having a mild trip and seeing how i feel after that.

I have PTSD, MDD, GAD, and ADHD(idk if I'm autistic or I'm just "weird" from trauma and other conditions). I have spent months in the psychward in in the past 5 years. I've taken damn near everything that could be prescribed to me including doing ECT with ketamine infusion. That really fuarrrked with my brain and I wanted break off from what my doctors where giving me and try to "fix it" myself. I went cold turkey on my meds and didn't tell anyone(for the millionth time) and started playing with acid in hopes of it helping me. After the 2 months of getting the SSRIs out of my system I started to take acid regularly in hopes of it helping. It almost always started off fine, but about 2 hours in I would just hate myself. It wasn't a suicidal intrusive thought it was more like me "realizing" that I am the worst person on Earth and it is entirely my fault. Even if I was tripping at a concert with one of my favorite bands playing it the enjoyment would come to an immediate stop. I notice everyone around me and there is an overwhelming feeling of not belonging. It would become almost impossible to enjoy myself to any degree and the next couple of days I would be bedridden and do absolutely nothing. I haven't played with shrooms in a long time, but I fear that I would get a similar result. I hate myself, but I also hate that I hate myself so there is some hope. It will probably be a struggle for the rest of my life as it has been for the majority of it, but I hope you have a better experience than me and hopefully find a solution/treatment that works!

>>20278 as a neurodivergent, i can confirm my neurons diverged further, coming full circle and carving just to the right of neurotypical. deviant still, but if you squint i might look normal.

>>20282 op here, i've never had any negative experiences with psychedelics, but i've also never tried taking them out of desperation or with any expectation of them helping or changing anything, i just did it out of curiosity and for soykafs and giggles basically. i would either trip by myself or with my very close friends whom i trust very well, i've never tripped in an unfamiliar overwhelming setting like a concert or something like that. i also never had any urge to take them routinely, it was always a once in a blue moon type of thing - after tripping i would have no interest in taking psychedelics again for quite a long time. the last time i took acid, the 1p-lsd i talked about, i remember feeling kind of bored with the trip after about 8 hours or so, not a bad feeling, but just like "okay, i'm kind of ready for this to be over now" and that's kind of what puts me off wanting to take acid again because it lasts so god damn long. for me personally the effects of psychedelics (and weed to a lesser extent) was sort of like being in a therapy session with myself, i would just sit quietly in a sort of meditative like state and be able to think about everything from a different perspective and frame of mind than i normally do, re-examine everything through a different lens and realize that the various anxieties that i ruminate about are not the terrible end-of-the-world catastrophes that i am making them out to be, or that the people in my life i hyperfixate on are just regular people and not the huge domineering figures i imagine them to be, or that life isn't the pointless miserable monotonous struggle that i tend to think of it as, etc. the effects of psychedelics on me are almost akin to like a seinfeld-esque observational standup comedian who says "what's the deal with x?" like deconstructing every single thought that pops into my head no matter how trivial it might be and i think that whole process kind of forces me to re-examine a lot of the things i think and believe and i think that's been helpful to me in a lot of ways. before i ever smoked weed or took psychedelics i was an anxiety-ridden mess and i couldn't look at people in the eyes or talk at an audible volume or do something as simple as go into a store to buy something at a checkout line or make a phone call to someone i don't know personally, and after discovering drugs in my teenage years all that kind of changed afterwards. people respond differently to chemicals and it seems like psychedelics don't really gel well with you so it might be better to just avoid them in your case, if they just made you feel worse before all the times you've tried them then i don't see why it would be any different if you did it again. a lot of chemicals that other people seem to tolerate well i don't deal with well at all, like alcohol for example turns me into a miserable suicidal wreck and i have to avoid it at all costs, but for some reason psychedelics have always been tolerable for me. i've known people who have done ketamine therapy and say it helped them but i'm personally kind of wary of it just because i know ketamine can be quite dangerous and addictive compared to psychedelics, and i'm kind of at a loss as to why ketamine is fda approved for treating mental illness but psychedelics are not.

>>20278 On a seemingly unrelated note: switched from going vegan for weeks to going "Mediterranean diet" style. Drinking 4 times less coffee per month, too. Helped me to get rid a half of my anxiety and half of my problems.

>>20278 Been using psychedelics periodically for nearly 20 years now, always does me good when done in a spiritual and religious light. Recreational use is a no go. >>20285 Ketamine is legal for prescription because its not the same kind of thing as psychedelics and its very short acting. In lower doses ketamine isnt hallucinogenic. >>20287 Definitely drinking less caffeine helps a lot.

go ahead and delete this post if needed, as it's tangentially related. i think this ticks the "neuroplasticity" subject box, and i do get hallucinations on non-decaf coffee so..it could be a psychedelic in a way. >>20287 i felt better switching to decaf, yet i felt worse cutting coffee entirely. turns out caffeine at a medicinal dose treats my anxiety, ADHD and the symptoms of my form of epilepsy rather than aggravating it. this was an amazing discovery as the next option would have been amphetamines and seizure medication, and ive seen people treated with amphetamines. coffee is a lot cheaper, more accessible, and apparently not as hard on the body. very funny, my brother's girlfriend's dad had no idea he had ADHD until he was 47. it was assumed his dysfunctional state without 2 pots of battery acid black coffee was just a funny quirk. im glad i'm so sensitive to coffee. because i buy it by weight at the natural foods store in the tiny amounts i do, i pay at most $5 a month on the really nice fair-trade organic stuff.

I haven't had a depressive episode (with one somewhat exception that I'll clarify later in the post) since the first time I did MDMA, over 5 years ago. I think this is because I had no external factors that contributed to my depression (in other words, my life was and still is pretty good) and I had reflected enough on my depression to know there was no good reason for me to feel so depressed and suicidal so I knew my feelings were real but, in a sense, invalid. Then when I took MDMA, the euphoria, empathy, and sense of connection it filled me with felt like it reset my brain to being open to feeling good again. A lot of people say MDMA gives them a "new perspective" but for me, it felt like it let my emotions align with the positive perspectives I held intellectually but couldn't feel emotionally. I already believed that my life was good even though I didn't feel good, and MDMA allowed me to connect that belief with positive feelings. Those feelings are, of course, much stronger while on MDMA, but this emotional improvement has lasted long since the drug wore off. After that first dose, I think it was around 8 months before I did any more. The positive effects had not faded at all in that time (I just wanted to do MDMA again because it's incredibly fun). And since then I typically wait 3-6 months between experiences, though I've waited over a year once. So I am convinced the change is either permanent or at least very long-lasting. It's tempting to say MDMA cured my depression but I think it was more like the final piece of the puzzle. If my life was soykaf or if I hadn't done the introspective work to understand my depression, it may not have helped as much as it did. As for neurodivergence, I have never been diagnosed with anything, but people around me suggest I may be autistic or have adhd fairly frequently. It's possible, but I see no reason to care or get a formal opinion. Also, all of my MDMA experiences were done with the sole intention of being recreational, and I did zero therapeutic work when I was rolling. I was just having fun with friends and strangers. The mental health benefits were an unintended bonus. And for the one somewhat depressive episode I mentioned at the beginning: I once took an irresponsibly large dose of MDMA, after which I experienced a hangover that included brain fog, brain zaps, and some depression-like symptoms for a few weeks. This is a known side effect of taking too much MDMA. Since then, I dose responsibly and only experience afterglows, not hangovers, and have not felt depression or depression-like symptoms since. This incident was also over 5 years ago.

>>20292 humans are creatures of habit and tend to think the same thoughts and do the same things over and over again, taking the path of least resistance. the brain and nervous system are, after all, an electrical circuit and electricity always takes the path of least resistance through a circuit. psychoactives have the ability to bridge or reorder wires in the circuit in some unknown fashion so that the electrical signals take a new path that they have never taken before, with very unpredictable results that might be good or might be bad or might be benign. in your case the MDMA altered the circuitry of your brain so that you would feel things like euphoria and empathy and connection to other human beings that you would not normally feel and your brain recorded that experience forming yet even more new neural pathways, remembering the feeling of connectedness you felt and becoming conscious of the fact that it is possible for you to feel that way and what it is like to feel that way, which had a lasting impact on your entire worldview.

hey this is tangentially related. i took acid for the first (probably will be my last) time like 8 hours ago. i thought it was done 2 hours ago but now i feel weird again. is that normal or did i just get a really bad genetics roll and.now have schizophrenia?

>>20307 ohh boy here go. no you aren't schizo honey you are just autistic, like me. don't fall for that psychocondria trap buddy, ive been there cause i'm a guilluble spergy dumbass. protip: you can't induce schizophreinia or fuarrrk up your life after one trip bruh, very very unlikely. at worst you may have triggered a short term 3rd person view like depersonlization but i doubt it.

>>20310 yeah im fine now just woke up, i feel silly in hindsight but at the time i was quite panicked lmao

>>20307 acid usually lasts 10+ hours and the strength of the effects comes in waves. it's normal to think it's over then realize it's not. it is also normal to have the "am i going to be like this forever?" anxiety during your first trip. i hope you had a good trip overall, lain.

>>20313 the last time i dropped acid my trip lasted a good 15 hours at least. it was 1p-lsd which is a prodrug that metabolizes into regular lsd so the effects and duration are identical, but i was used to taking illegal street acid where you generally had to eat like 3 or 4 tabs to get the full effect - these were 100μg blotters i got from chems dot ca and i knew they were lab-grade quality not street grade so i played it safe and only ate one and still it was quite a ride. i'm glad i didn't eat 4 of them like i did with the street acid back in the day.

>>20315 I used to exclusively trip in the mornings so I could sleep the following night.

I used a lot of psychedelics, all the classics. I think it permanently changed me for the better, but my last trip was a great day out in the woods with a friend, and I haven't felt any desire to take psychedelics since. I also stopped smoking weed because while I'm high it makes me stupid and dull in a way alcohol doesn't, plus I'm so sensitive I can't take it in social situations without risking severe anxiety.

I haven't taken anything since mid Feb, but right now I am having the exact same detachment/depersonalization that I have when I am on acid. I hate myself, but at the same time I know I'm not really going to do anything crazy like self harm or attempt suicide. It's fuarrrking weird to watching myself typing this is a shakey trance while trying to calm myself down with a coca cola. I know I'm going to be pretty off for about a week, but snapping out of it is always a strange process. >>20282 is me btw

>>20319 if the psychs are bringing the self-hatred to the surface but not helping you to love yourself or motivating you to change, I think it's fair to say they are doing more harm than good and you should probably stop. I sincerely hope you can one day love life, lain.

Anyone here try lion's mane? It's another mushroom

>>20321 Lions mane is pretty great. Zero brain fog after a few weeks of use.

>>20322>>20321 only tried the extract only and it did have promote a wakefullness, sharp effect on my mind but i had to really focus on any shift to percieve it .. i hear it goes great with psy mushrooms

yeah i just taken sum shrrooms and its fuarrrking me up, literally started crying ( havent done it since last year) when i saw my hallway, been panicking for an hour about a fuarrrking exit to get out of my monotone pathetic life , anyway dont take them if ur in a bad place mentaly, i should have learned from last time i took lsd, now im kind of losing my mind, at least i still have some to take when ill feel better

Trauma (molested), repressed identity -> f'ed up at a young age. girl pic addiction, then alcoholism (blackout drunk). Psychedelics dabbling... Heavy dosages (entertainment consumption is gay). Then I got worse. Way worse.. still drinking at this point. God pilled. Closer to baseline than ever before. Baseline is basically the same as doing drugs but in a smooth way. You don't need the drugs to experience the world strangely. No need for any labels. Being "strange" == being alive. Standardized experiences are nonexistent. Learn to live with yourself. Drugs (for me) just brought trouble. More refined, harder to conceptualize trouble. My take on LSD: you are neuroplastic, you have built a certain way you experience the world. You go to a coffee place, you start experiencing via the senses the environment: noise higher in terms of decibels to what you are used to, some sound peaks from the coffee maker that are aggressive and distracting, you smell coffee, etc... what I don't see discussed as much is how your continuous reaction to these phenomena is learned and also not random. You start building stories in the forms of ideas about other people, a personal insecurity or trauma surges forward, you day dream a mental image about a possible love affair. We understand we each have certain predilections towards certain senses, but we also have predilections toward certain ideas, and certain ways of formalizing those ideas and expanding/reinforcing them. What acid does is it gives you a higher degree of control (an unanchored/unsupervised control) on not only your sensorial codification of the environment, but also on the way we formalize ideas, among other things. You hear the wall scream, and the scream you visualize it in the forms of written language (whereas normally you rarely prioritize sounds, and form mental images from the sounds... not written language). Trouble comes when you, given the unsupervised access to your experience, jumble things up in such a way that the trip ends but you've "rewired your brain" in such a way your normal experiencing of the world is not natural and is not something you are used to. (The ones who stay on the trip/never come back). Of course you can rewire again, but going back to baseline takes years in an organic anchored manner. Exercise, reading, playing an instrument... As to emotional highs and lows, lots of times we are ignorant of the fact that certain behaviors or environmental cues are more detrimental to our well-being than we give them credit for. Your social media addiction is the reason you don't sleep, you not sleeping is the reason you are emotionally unstable (for me sleep deprivation is crazy stuff... seeing monsters kinda stuff). Your not exercising and girl pic addiction is the reason you feel exhausted throughout the day, extra ADHDed (incapable of doing anything), and extremely insecure. Not sensitive, insecure. You've normalized sensitivity with feeling insecure or feeding your trauma, but they don't need to go hand in hand. They don't go hand in hand. Mental clarity is the big one for me. I might still be sad, angry, scared, distracted, but I am not overwhelmed by those feelings in an incapacitating manner. I can feel them (no need to numb it) and it doesn't destroy me. Of course there are eureka transformative moments, we can hope for the "today was the day I chose to be happy and I was never sad again" moment... but if I could say something is baseline is better. As to the born/made rarely discussed issue when it comes to neurodivergent individuals I think most have it in themselves to understand their experiencing of the world, understand what a given group/place social contract requires, and find a middle ground to fulfill the contract and retain pieces of yourself. While a small subset of individuals might be unable to meet the social contract (hypersensitivity to noise is so high my ears bleed and I am at a metal concert). I think most individuals suffer from an interiorized belief that they are unable to meet the social contract when it is not that they are incapable, they simply haven't mastered it yet. (Mastering == socially acceptable behavior) There is a reason I think this happens. Under the auspice of individuation from an early age neurodivergent individuals are encouraged to cultivate their own approximation of the world (with reduced involvment of group engagement as a regulatory role for social behavior). This is not necessarily a positive encouragement, but can also materialize from negative interactions (you are the weird kid, nobody pays much attention to you + you are expected to behave asocially). Behavior compounds into lifelong habits. I am not saying you should bend to the needs of people always. I am saying you have the capacity to interact successfully with others. But you've built lifelong antisocial frameworks of experience that dropping them (even if temporarily) causes great discomfort. But it doesn't mean you are unable to do it. If you understand a social contract (expected to speak like this, behave like this, this is the rhythm, the speed, the body language) you can find ways to match your strange experiencing of the world to the given social contract (they speak slowly, so I either slow down or distract myself with the cup of coffee until it is my turn to participate) Empathy is something else but I don't think this is a place for virtue discussion, more intellectual approximation of a given subject. Also wanted to share the molested thing (new to me). Trauma just surfaced and I was like (wtf?! Is this legit). Time will tell.

>>20358 i don't believe in any social contract and never really did. i learned how to pretend to abide by the supposed social contract to some minimal extent so that i can earn money and eat and pay my bills, but i never actually signed it and i resent the idea that i am obligated to contribute anything to society beyond refraining from hurting other people. my rejection of the social contract and most of the other stupid ideas people come up with, my extreme disdain for authority and outside pressure and dishonesty, my inability to accept anything at face value without examining it more closely, all of that was already there from the very beginning before i ever took any drugs. all the psychedelics really did was temporarily allow me to understand and control my own thought process, become me much more aware of my true nature and realize that i am the person i am and that i don't need to internalize all the outside pressures to conform as a personal failing on my part. my baseline is severely lacking in mental clarity, without drugs my inner thoughts are mostly drowned out by outside noise, and i'm not talking about a heavy metal concert, i mean even being in a seemingly quiet room by myself is overwhelming to my senses - the temperature of the air on my skin, the feeling of my clothing and the bedsheets i'm laying on, the ambient pressure and noise of a ceiling fan or an air duct or creaking of studs in the walls or cars driving by outside, the textures and patterns of the walls and ceiling and carpet, the presence of random objects on shelves or on a desk or a pair of shoes on the floor, all of it is very present and loud and imposing to me at all times. so when i first tried things like acid and shrooms, the sensory part of the experience was like nothing new to me at all, i didn't really pay much attention to any visual or auditory or sensory effects because those effects are already there for me when i'm sober. what was significant to me was just my own thought process which was suddenly very clear and very self-aware and organized, able to focus on one thing and not be constantly drowned out or derailed by the everpresent onslaught of outside information.

>>20358 LSD has never really felt that way for me. Just some cool visuals, euphoria, and lots of energy. Sometimes it makes me extra giggly. Maybe I'm an outlier, though. Even DMT feels clear headed to me. >(for me sleep deprivation is crazy stuff... seeing monsters kinda stuff) Wishing you luck with this, lain. I also experience insomnia that lasts for days at a time and results in sleep deprivation hallucinations. It is, thankfully, mostly under control now. >repressed identity >Also wanted to share the molested thing (new to me). Trauma just surfaced and I was like (wtf?! Is this legit). Time will tell. If by "surfaced" you mean it was a forgotten or recovered memory, it very likely is not legit. I encourage you to look into the evidence against recovered memories (if that is in line with what you're talking about)

>>20278 My partner has a bunch of mental health conditions (trauma, depression, autism etc) and finds psychedelics to be more effective than any antidepressant they've ever tried. Sometimes they'll just cry for hours but its very healing in a way antidepressants explicitly prevent. Personally I find psychs to just be a good general-purpose medicine for tolerating modern life - our time is so conditioned and tripping takes you out of all that. As far as neuroplasticity and using that with the aim of actually curing mental health problems goes, its just like any medication (or therapy) where you have to put the work in. Psychs *can* help you recover from trauma or break out of a depressive episode but only if you're using them properly as a tool for that. Otherwise they're just a break from reality, which is fine too but different.

People with autism supposedly have more neural connections so I do not think increasing BDNF will help and may even potentially worsen autism due to having even more excessive connections. You also being schizotypal it sounds risky to be taking something mind altering. I may come.back with a proposed solution later.

>>20378 this is pseudo-speak, psychs can not make autism worse and in reality autism is much less often a neurological condition and more social. consider how germany is thought of a nation full of autistic people, which makes no sense

>>20378 >You also being schizotypal it sounds risky to be taking something mind altering. i've been engaging in risky behaviors and taking all kinds of different mind altering substances throughout my entire life and if i were to write them all down in order from most risky to least risky, psychedelics would be pretty far down on the list for me. >>20379 you're right about autism not being something that can be "worsened" or "improved", but it's definitely a neurological/biological thing, neonatal brain scans and post-mortem examinations of brain tissue have confirmed this. the variance in reported autism rates around the world are pretty much entirely explained by differences in how different countries identify and report autism; all the latest evidence from cross-cultural studies using consistent instruments seem to point toward autism being a universal condition with a rather uniform distribution across the human population.

>>20380 I know you can detect correlations with brain scans, but it has to be understood that they're exactly that - correlations. Autism is fundamentally understood as a set of symptoms, and you do not need to have these neurological patterns to be diagnosed with it. The inverse is also true, you can have the patterns and not be autistic. I would argue autism is better understood as a loose pattern of human behaviours which, like any behaviour, manifest differently under different social contexts. I think the set of behaviours we understand as autism are carved out to be more distinct because of how badly they mesh with modern society. To boil it down, our understanding of many behavioural disorders and mental conditions are historically/socially relative. Read Foucault. Incidentally, I've actually found some autistic symptoms *can* be improved with psychedelics. I used to be far more particular about what sensory inputs I was comfortable with but have since learned to let any feeling I know to be safe pass through and within me, which is a very common insight people gain from tripping.

>>20381 >The inverse is also true, you can have the patterns and not be autistic. Many autistic people figure out how to act "normal", which makes them extremely unlikely to identify as autistic for a study. So although they may have symptoms of autism, they don't outwardly present as that, nor do they seek treatment for it.

>>20381 data gathered by recent neurological research shows a strong correlation between things like autism, adhd, schizophrenia, etc. with structural abnormalities identified in utero, i.e. before the person is even born, so i think these are not just merely sets of behaviors or some kind of social construct, more and more evidence emerges every day that there are identifiable biological differences in the brain that are associated with these conditions that we once described as behavioral disorders. in recent years, researchers have begun to bridge the gap between psychology and neurology to the point where the distinction between the two has now become largely outdated, the mind and the brain are not being treated as two entirely separate things, and what were considered psychological disorders in the past are now being recognized as neurodevelopmental variance. foucault saw psychology as little more than a tool of social control because during his era that's really all it was for the most part, nobody knew anything about the brain then and mainstream psychology operated on a purely behaviorist level, it was all about "normal behavior" versus "abnormal behavior" and how to "correct" the "abnormal behavior" with social conditioning. i think he was right to reject all the behaviorist bullshit, but he also kind of threw the baby out with the bath water by rejecting the entire science of psychology along with it.

>>20383 I feel like anyone on this board should have enough mental disorders to understand the goal of modern psychology is still very much classification of normality and control of abnormality. I'm not denying that there's real science behind it, just pointing out that they way we interpret that science (any science really) is coloured, and never purely just an observation.

>>20384 this will probably sound very stupid to most people, but when it comes to my usage of psychedelic drugs i like to think that i am engaging in a very amateur and unorthodox and primitive form of neuroscience by taking note of the differences in my thought process and mental state while tripping versus what they are like when i am not tripping. i know that i've learned a lot of things about myself and the way my own brain works by doing this, i know it's not empirical data that anyone could peer review or publish, but when it comes to the brain i think the standard scientific methodology is not really that useful because we don't yet have the ability to really look inside of another person's brain and see what is going on better than they can. one might compare it with newton's optics experiments - newton didn't have the ability to look through another person's eyes nor get another person to clearly describe to him exactly what they were seeing through their eyes, he had to wedge a blunt needle into his own eye socket and pry and squeeze his eyeball and write down what he saw. self-experimentation is a valid form of science in my opinion. and yes, i seriously just compared myself to isaac newton.

All you have to do is realize that we are here, that this is happening (you ARE) , and the implications of your existence. If you don't come to the conclusion that God exists, you are a fool. You only need GOD to fulfill that void that will never be filled. This is why you are doing lots of drugs to cope with reality. Escapism is never the answer, only use drugs to enhance your experience, anon.

acid was very good for me im like autistic etc the mkultra chemical weapon were very bad

>>20442 i believe that god exists, but i also believe that humans can never know god or understand what god is, the word "god" is just one of many placeholder terms for the unknowable absolute center of all things, humans cannot communicate with god or have any kind of additional relationship with god on top of the one they and all other things already have by default (which we are not capable of understanding), god is not a person or a living being or an actor of any kind, god is not a ruler or a creator, god is not a discrete entity separate from other things in the universe (nor is anything else), god is equally attentive and equally indifferent to everything that happens in the universe, god is completely untouchable and unfathomable yet exists in all things, everywhere, at all times, expanding our knowledge about ourselves and our world may cognitively bring us very slightly nearer to god, but as finite human beings with finite human brains we can never actually reach god nor even come anywhere close, and if we could become one with god then we would lose our humanity and our finite discretionary existence in the process, thus the goal of human communion with god is self-defeating in principle.

>>20456 If God is actually the ground of all being he must necessarily be personal, because he must exercise agency to create anything other than himself. If he must create and uphold all things by his intent, he necessarily knows all things exhaustively and cannot be ignorant of anything in any way whatsoever, because he could not create or uphold something without knowing perfectly that which he consciously wills to create and uphold. It is true that no creature could ever reach out and understand the creator as an outside observer, but it is literally retarded to claim God cannot reveal himself or has any interest in the creation he quite literally actively chooses to uphold in every aspect of its existence at all times and willed to do so from eternity outside of time. Peak hubris

should I give my aunt with early onset vascular dementia shrooms to see if it would help

>>20491 Yeah. Make tea with 20 grams of dry fungi, and she'll be good as new.

>>20384 There's a lot less of "you're being weird stop it" and a lot more of "you're developing dysfunctional behavior under the shell", otherwhise trannies or even neurodivergents wouldn't be accepted for who they are and allowed to seek the best way to cope with their conditions. Narrowing it down to social control is very diminutive to the actual harm from the actual symptoms someone experiences, the average therapist might be a NPC moron, but diagnostic criteria is pretty straight forward and is supposed to be used only when your life is being fuarrrked by your mind.

>>20383 every kind of science ultimately comes down to a fundamental debate between understanding and control. humans have yet to come to a consensus on what the purpose of science is, whether it is to understand nature or to control nature. oftentimes they operate on the assumption that understanding and control are the same thing and they can coast pretty far on that assumption, until they can't. even the so-called hard sciences have this problem, classical physics was all based on the principle of mankind mastering the natural world in accordance with the principles of western religion, and we coasted very far operating on that framework, breaking everything in the universe down into discrete little tiny billiard balls and treating reality as a mechanical construction and applying that model to invent all kinds of useful technologies for controlling nature and then citing these applications as proof that the model works and is therefore correct. but eventually reality dragged us kicking and screaming towards acknowledging the serious flaws of this model and now we are right back to the same old dilemma, having to make the difficult choice between understanding and control, whether humanity should play the role of the humble sage or the divine ruler.

>>20549 can you prove understanding without being able to effect some changes ? maybe even then its not proof but its certainly a lot better than just saying 'i get it'

>>20550 >can you prove understanding without being able to effect some changes sure - the speed of light was understood and proven in 1676. it would be hundreds of years before anyone could find any practical use for that knowledge.

>>20549 I'm pretty sure they separated understanding from control when they invented engineering. I'm honestly confused by this post because the scientific method is pretty well defined as far as I know and it's the base in which modern science stands on, a method of proving things based on hard evidence gathered through research.

>>20549 It's a compelling narrative, especially for the current zeitgeist, but I don't think it's really accurate. Classical physics in many ways overturned western religious ideas that the world was made for humans, and as it was proved true over and over again, those ideas were forced to change to a belief that the world was made rationally and can be described by mathematical equations. This is very different from believing that we can control anything; for example, no model of gravitation has ever been proposed that implies humans could meaningfully change the Earth's orbit. Importantly, no modern scientific discovery actually challenges this religious belief. We have philosophical models of quantum experiments which appear to lack determinism, but that doesn't really challenge the idea that the world is rational and can be described by mathematical equations. >>20551 practical use does not imply control.

>>20554 >It's a compelling narrative, especially for the current zeitgeist, but I don't think it's really accurate. Classical physics in many ways overturned western religious ideas that the world was made for humans, and as it was proved true over and over again, those ideas were forced to change to a belief that the world was made rationally and can be described by mathematical equations. This is very different from believing that we can control anything; for example, no model of gravitation has ever been proposed that implies humans could meaningfully change the Earth's orbit. >Importantly, no modern scientific discovery actually challenges this religious belief. We have philosophical models of quantum experiments which appear to lack determinism, but that doesn't really challenge the idea that the world is rational and can be described by mathematical equations. tthe god hypothesis is just one particularly obvious manifestation of a general pattern of anthropocentrism and teleology that is deeply ingrained into human thought, particularly western thought, and is very difficult to break free of, because it is ultimately rooted in our biology, the way our brains and bodies work. and let's not forget that the person who is generally considered to be the founding father of classical physics, isaac newton, was a deeply religious man and genuinely believed in the god hypothesis exactly as described in christian scripture and vehemently rejected all alternative theories and found the more atheistic/deistic views of many of his peers in the academic world to be utterly abhorrent. even the most brilliant thinkers in all of history are often unable to let go of their deepest-held feelings that shape their entire outlook on the world, whatever they may be. just now at the end of your rebuttal you make the assumption that the world is rational and can be described by mathematical equations, as if that is a given fact, but one could argue that science has not proven that at all, if anything it has continually proven the opposite - that every time we think that the world is "rational", i.e. aligns with human reason, and can be described by our mathematical equations, i.e. our human models, eventually some new discovery comes along that completely shatters this assumption and we are forced to come up with new models to account for it. a human being is a macroscopic lifeform that sees the world from a macroscopic perspective, i.e. macroscopic objects like solid rocks and liquid water and gaseous air that are all bumping into each other and interacting in various ways at the macroscopic level. a human being is a mammal with a complex mammalian brain that engages in predictive thinking and purposeful action, noticing and memorizing recurring patterns in past events, speculating about future events, constructing simplified models by which to understand an incomprehensibly vast and complex world, and altering things in the natural world in conscious and often purposeful ways. and like every species, a human being has an innate bias towards its own species and operates on the assumption that humans are the most important and intelligent and sophisticated beings in the world, and also has an innate bias towards familiarity and consistency because things that are unfamiliar or unusual are a threat to our models and therefore a threat to our knowledge and our agency. so naturally when the nature of reality is called into question, the human's first conclusion is that the world is made out of lots of tiny fundamental atoms bumping into each other and interacting in various ways, that the world has a purpose and everything in it has a purpose and that events of the past and the present and the future are all part of a linear timeline that is progressing towards some kind of end goal, that the universe is more or less the same throughout with the same kinds of things that we are familiar with here on earth, and that it was all created by some kind of human-like entity that thinks and behaves like a human does, only on a much greater scale. eventually people began to let go of the god hypothesis when all of our newfound countermanding knowledge made it increasingly obvious how absurd the idea was, but they still could not let go of the anthropocentrism and the teleology, even the most hardnosed atheists and scientific skeptics will talk about things like the "progress" of humanity and "higher intelligences" that may exist somewhere in outer space or may be digitally simulated with computers, they will dream out loud about humans colonizing and terraforming other planets and exploring the universe in spaceships that travel faster than the speed of light and searching for other "intelligent" i.e. psychologically-human lifeforms to establish contact with, they will still cling to outmoded and discredited theories about indivisible atoms of categorical elements or electrons bumping into each other like pachinko balls through a conductor or gravity and time being uniform absolute constants, because these theories are "good enough" for solving most of everyday problems that we want to solve and the actual truth of the matter is too complicated and inconvenient to deal with. the more modern and provably more correct interpretations of reality are simply too alien to our human intuition so we just kind of forget they exist and continue operating in the older more incorrect framework. and to bring it back to the original topic of discussion, the idea of neurodiversity is a particularly unpleasant and scary idea for scientific-minded people because it would mean that there is no such thing as a normal human brain, that not only can we not find consistency and familiarity when we observe the behaviors of things outside of ourselves in the natural world, we also can't even find it in ourselves, that our most fundamental primary instrument for understanding reality i.e. our brain is not a standardized instrument like a ruler where the vast majority of them are more-or-less exactly the same and can therefore be generally trusted to measure things accurately, that all of our human brains are potentially weird and different in some way or another and that consensus reality is a very tenuous and fragile illusion and that we all really live in our own private little worlds to some extent or another. most people tend to operate under the assumption that they and others like them are the smart people and the rest of the world are the retards and that so long as the smart people are allowed to be in charge of things and the retards stay out of the way then consensus reality will be maintained and the human race will not become lost in the chaos and everything will be alright. but what if we are all retards?

I become neurotypical for the day after dosing 500mcg of selank subcutaneous

what are lainanon's experiences wrt microdosing mushrooms? i've only ever taken mushrooms in huge ball tripping doses in the past and have never actually tried microdosing and the idea never really occurred to me, microdosing being a somewhat recent phenomenon afaik. it's hard to find much trustworthy information about microdosing because it became sort of a fad in the square world, lots of redditors and joe rogan enthusiasts who know nothing about drugs and never really did drugs until very recently talking out of their asses very authoritatively about tolerance and health risks and regurgitating dogmatic hearsay with zero empirical evidence to support their claims. i get the sense that it's one of those things like meditation where whitebread western people dip their toe in the water and have only the most cursory understanding of it and then they suddenly think they are gurus and start evangelizing and telling everyone how to do it, appropriate this ancient exotic idea and repackage it into a convenient mass-marketable product. what do people who are actually cool and grounded in reality and are experienced psychedelic drug users say about microdosing? is it really any better to take a tiny dose of shrooms every few days than it is to just have a full blown trip every once in a while? because all the times i've ever done mushrooms or lsd i felt pretty good for quite a long while after the trip, and it seems like it would be more sensible to just use these kinds of drugs the same way people have used them for thousands of years than this new modern method that our braindead digital society has come up with.

>>20742 I microdosed LSD for several years, and I've taken enough to trip ~30 times. Some practical thoughts: -dosing is harder than you think, especially for shrooms. You'll have to dial it in to your specific chemistry and your specific supply over time. -LSD is a strong stimulant, and I think that shines through much more when you microdose. It's my favorite stimulant because it interacts very positively with caffeine, lasts the whole day, and doesn't really have a "crash" except when you get physically tired at the end of the day. -nonetheless, you feel sort of "trippy" the whole day. Imagine that feeling the day after a large dose of acid. I really like it, but I have friends that don't. -shrooms are not as strong of a stimulant, so you might get more of the "trippy" effects and less noticeable energizing effects. But I expect it to still interact positively with caffeine. Some more philosophical thoughts: -don't microdose at work. Unless you've got some mythical job where you're doing something good and important, it's a waste of drugs. Microdose on your off days and spend them outside, hanging with friends, and/or working on your projects. >it seems like it would be more sensible to just use these kinds of drugs the same way people have used them for thousands of years than this new modern method that our braindead digital society has come up with. That only works if you live in that traditional context. Medicine men have a wealth of tradition with which to understand their experiences and a culture that provides them with a positive way to apply it. Our culture, even the psychedelic culture, treats drugs differently, so if we try to take those traditions we are not really using them in a context they make sense in. We have to use drugs in a way that makes sense in the society we have and the society we want to make. I think microdosing is probably better than macrodosing *after* you've already taken a large dose of psychedelics. Unless you're a professional shaman, there isn't much of a point to tripping once you've had that eye-opening one, except to have fun or remind yourself of what's what. Microdosing can do this without lowering your everyday-life faculties, which makes it easier to apply rather than just experience.

>>20743 >We have to use drugs in a way that makes sense in the society we have and the society we want to make. idk about that, i've been drunk or high at work lots of times.

>>20744 yeah, that makes sense because our work is usually crap and you can use drugs to numb yourself. Microdosing psychedelics at work will not do that.

>>20754 consider killing yourself

>>20755 >>20755 >>20755 i don't kill myself only asians and trannies do that

>>20756 this entire board is proof that drugs won't ever get anything out of you that's not already in you. also kys immediately

>>20757 >>20757 >>20757 the collector's edition is the nigger edition

>>20278 The thing about psychedelics and neuroplasticity, is that neuroplasticity is a very broad word, and exactly how psychedelics impact neuroplasticity can be disappointing. e.g. shrooms and LSD's interactions with TrkB having neurotrophic effects, but is that actually good or bad thing? by what metric? the few improvements that are suggested (of cognitive abilities) are in people suffering from depression or other such disorders, but to my knowledge, there's nothing suggesting positive overall effects in healthy individuals. If anything, excessive casual neurite growth/density is associated with disorganized thinking and low IQ. what would be interesting would be to try to pair LSD with some type of pruning stimulant, such that you take out as much as you grow, and some type of conditioning in the mix, though again the results would be closer to brainwashing into psychotic delusions detached from logical reality, rather than some type of improvement.