Psychedelic Trips

I have never done drugs. Have no intention whatsoever to do them ever. Illegal, known to cause death in cases of overdosing (given the lethal fact that it is almost always self-administered), what is it that that attracts the users to recreational substance abuse?

My first job assignment was with an advertising agency thus I chanced upon the occasion to informally interview a few who had at sometime experienced the psychedelic world of drug (ab)use?

They told me of Good Trips and Bad Trips..Good trips where they experienced heightened sense of creativity and energy – a state where creative ideas literally came to them..and bad trips in which they almost lived hell.

Over the years have read many articles on Aghoris and other neo Sadhaks using these as a shortcut to touch different ‘planes’, and filmmakers claiming that a few movie scripts were revealed to them during a ‘trip’.

My reading and internet research (besides a few casual interviews) has left me intrigued.

In essence a psychedelic episode is a unique heightened state of being (analogy:  mystical experience, ecstasy?).  Some who undertake psychedelic experiences come to see them as an ordeal – in which case the result is often known as a "bad trip" or psychedelic crisis, closely linked to the psychological turmoil and hysteria.

The ‘Good Trips’ are the ones that The Beatles sang about in “Lucy in the sky with Diamonds”

A Bad Trip can be exacerbated by the inexperience or irresponsibility of the user or the lack of proper preparation and environment for the trip, and are reflective of unresolved psychological tensions triggered during the course of the experience. You can end up in a situation where you’re weakening the resistances, your conscious is becoming more aware, but you’re not really in touch with it properly, you’re not really fully experiencing what’s there, not seeing it for what it is. You get kind of deluded and caught into this

Reportedly there is a common theme of "connectedness" or "unboundedness" which seems unique to many transcendent states of mind, and no less by the state of psychedelia – ranging from a sense of connectedness to everything in the immediate vicinity, to a sense of oneness with everything in the universe. Is this rather near to what individuals meditating in Ashrams sensed when they experienced brief realms of ‘self-realization’? Refer “Eat Pray Love”- Elizabeth Gilbert.

First, sensory perceptions become especially brilliant and intense. Normally unnoticed aspects of the environment capture the attention; ordinary objects are seen as if for the first time and acquire new depths of significance. Visual responses are greatly heightened: colors seem more intense, textures richer, contours sharpened, music more emotionally profound, the spatial arrangements of objects more meaningful. People may feel keener awareness of their bodies or sense changes in the appearance and feeling of body parts. Inanimate objects take on expressions, and synesthesia (hearing colors, seeing sounds, etc.) is common. Time may seem to slow down enormously as more and more passing events claim the attention, or it may stop entirely, giving place to an eternal present. When the eyes are closed, fantastically vivid images appear: first geometrical forms and then landscapes, buildings, animate beings, and symbolic objects.

As a certain someone relates – “Me and a friend pranced through fields of dandelions forever and we spent hours convinced we could walk on water, and that perhaps we were a reincarnation of God.”

Picture yourself in a boat on a river,
With tangerine trees and marmalade skies
Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly,
A girl with kaleidoscope eyes.

Cellophane flowers of yellow and green,
Towering over your head.
Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes,
And she's gone.