| Escapism and experience chasing. The experiences become a lot less profound for the frequent users, and they themselves also become a lot more messed up. The truth is that if you have a psychedelic experience every Friday night, it's not nearly as interesting. With spiritual practice, you gain a sort of humility and perspective along the way. It's not only about experiences, but also community and morality. For people who use the drugs to get the experiences, but don't grow in the other dimensions, it just leads to nihilism once the novelty wears off. Acidheads' lives become empty and there's little benefit in exploring an empty mind. Some people use LSD as a party drug, and I think this results in a lot of the bad trips. It's dangerous as well as idiotic, and indicates that a person is missing the point if you ask me, but the behavior exists. My memory of LSD was that the first 8 hours were mind-blowing and amazing (and not particularly scary) but the last 4 were a bit unpleasant, like I had an itch in my mind I couldn't scratch (but not as bad as a bad trip or a panic attack). I dropped at 3:40 pm, peaked at 6, and started getting tired of the whole endeavor by midnight. At 1:30 am I was trying desperately to get to sleep (impossible on LSD) and annoyed that my mind kept playing tricks on itself. Thankfully, my girlfriend (at the time) was there to reassure me that this was normal and would end. I've often thought, though, that the intensity of LSD and mushrooms is related to the duration of time one is in a psychedelic/meditative state (when psychedelics are not used in a meditative state, they're wasted). I bet that if I had the focus to meditate for 6 hours, it'd be as powerful of an experience (or moreso) than a shrooms trip; same with 12 hours viz. LSD. |
Given how personal and intense my experiences were for both how I relate to myself and the world, but also with my relationship with my best friends, I can't imagine really doing LSD or Mushrooms in a rave/party like environment.