[HN Gopher] How LSD Almost Became the 13th Step (2019) ___________________________________________________________________ How LSD Almost Became the 13th Step (2019) Author : pmoriarty Score : 33 points Date : 2020-07-25 21:01 UTC (1 hours ago) (HTM) web link (prohbtd.com) (TXT) w3m dump (prohbtd.com) | loceng wrote: | Anecdotally during a period of 3 or 4 months when I had gone to | numerous Ayahuasca ceremonies here in Canada, I saw the | progression of a self-proclaimed alcoholic who felt like she was | going to die soon from the illness - and physically she was very | pale and unwell looking; so much so that she was seeking and | willing to try anything including Ayahuasca, which is an | entheogen similar to but different than LSD - and arguably being | done in a ceremony setting provides a different container as | well. | | There's an opportunity after a ceremony to share during a talking | circle. I can't remember if the woman shared during then or to me | afterward, however she told me in the morning that she could feel | like alcohol no longer had a hold over her. I saw her 3 or 4 more | times over a 3 to 4 month period at ceremonies - and by the end | she looked very healthy, her skin had a healthy pink tone to it - | and she was beaming with energy compared to before. | | Another experience to share related to alcohol and Ayahuasca: an | ex-girlfriend of mine had gone to a few ceremonies with me. After | her first ceremony she shared two notable things. The first was | an insight from her family dynamics that she could see from a | holistic level looking down at the structure, which seemed to | give her great comfort, reducing her baseline stress. The second | was she was presented or saw simultaneously two separate | "objects": she saw alcohol and she saw social situations. She's | Russian so perhaps the deep cultural aspect of alcohol that seems | to go with her background, along with her family always | immediately offering a drink to her as their greeting when she'd | visit are examples of how deeply engrained alcohol and | socializing were for her. After her experiencing that division | separating alcohol consumption and social situations, she roughly | said she no longer felt the need to drink when socializing - | though she never had a problem with alcohol - she felt like | whatever association and connection to alcohol simply diminished, | arguably due to the clear division of the contexts; unlinking the | healthy engagement of socializing from alcohol consumption. | mikelyons wrote: | Entheogens increase your consciousness. High consciousness gets | us closer to the truth of what reality is, which allows us to | break our self-deceptions. | loceng wrote: | Indeed, they temporarily eliminate the ego and its bias from | the equation of the mind, allowing the rest of the mind an | unfiltered view and clear understanding based on whatever | intellectual capabilities one inherently has; ego death, ego | dissolution. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2020-07-25 23:00 UTC)