Chemical explanation to superstition? (page 2)

Incense_and_Peppermints

try it now, beck. sorry about that.

(i'll still write to ya, though )

That experiment was all fine and dandy but there was just not enough empirical evidence: they didn't check for the presence and influence of those pesky demons. It's really a very easy thing to do scientifically. You just get an old shirt from a garage sale, and then go over to the volunteer and then you...........

Oh, nevermind.

Farkel

COMF

i do feel that there are spiritual energies and forces around us everywhere. it sounds silly i know.

No, it doesn't sound silly. Millions of folks believe the same thing.

the patterns were the same. don't you think that's cool? and do;t you wonder why that is?

Honestly, I&P, "no" to both questions. The wind sometimes sounds like wolves howling. I can imagine there's a significance in that if I want to, just as I can find the head of Jesus on the side of a tortilla if I want to. I don't. I have no problem with you doing so, though. Don't think that my views are a condemnation of yours. You asked; I responded. We can believe differently and still live in peace. :)

Now, here's a story for you.

I did a lot of LSD--a whole lot--between the ages of 15 and 20. These two stories are true events that happened during LSD trips.

We, my tripping friends and I, had noticed many things that suggested we might be sharing brainwaves during our trips. We hadn't talked a whole lot about it, but we developed this general assumption that when we were tripping, we could more-or-less read each other's minds. Of course, a lot of it had to do with the heightened awareness of facial expression, nuances of body movement and tonal changes. But we believed there was more to it than that.

One Saturday, my friend Jackie and I took some LSD at the same time and stayed together in my room as we began to "come on". We laid back on my bed with our eyes closed, feeling the familiar tension setting in, the odd, mildly unpleasant sensation of the chemical in the muscles of our bodies. About 30 minutes after we took it, I began to hallucinate. It starts small, just little things like dots of color moving around on a field of black. But then as the chemical takes hold it rapidly increases. the dots begin to move forward and backward, taking on a 3-dimensional quality. Then they become very distinct, and you see that they aren't just dots, but are composed of many smaller dots, and your vision closes in on those dots so that you can distinguish how they are separate, but they work together to make up the whole original dot. By now, the original dot has become something more complex; some figure, a square, perhaps, or a word, waving and expanding and contracting in 3-D.

As the drug's effects increase, the hallucinations become more and more intense and complex, until, if you've taken enough LSD, you're watching an animated movie. And so it was in this case. I began to see figures of people, from different views; sideways, behind, overhead, and so forth. One figure came to prominence in the center of my perception (my eyes were still closed). She was a very beautiful young woman, with straight black hair and fair white skin. She was looking down, demurely, and I was seeing her from slightly overhead. Slowly, gradually, as if I were seeing her through a moving film camera, my view floated down until I was no longer higher, but face to face with her. I could see that she had full red lips and a pert, pointed nose and dark eyes, still shyly averted. She slowly raised her head up, and drew her eyes up to meet mine, and as we looked eye to eye...

The moment we looked eye to eye, her facial expression changed; she switched from demure to dangerous, threatening. Her eyebrows arched; her eyes became darker, menacing; she looked at me as though I had greatly offended her, and she opened her mouth... she had vampire teeth, which gleamed wickedly in front of a blood-red tongue as she tilted her head back and moved toward me, never taking her eyes off mine.

At this point, I sat up and opened my eyes. I turned to my friend and said, "Jackie?"

His voice came feebly from the other end of the bed... "Yeah, man?"

"What did you just hallucinate?" I asked him.

Jackie sat up and said, "Well, man, I was seeing all these people, you know. And there was this one chick, man... she had black hair, and she was really pretty... she was looking down, and then she looked up at me and turned into a vampire."

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Like I said... all electro-chemical. Some of the electricity just bled over from one of us to the other and vice versa, I reckon. My buddies and I concluded that LSD sometimes does something to your brain to make it into a transmitter/receiver, or something. Who knows? It wasn't terribly consistent, just an occasional thing, and not very strong when it happened.
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Another time, I came home already about a good hour into the tripping (it lasts about 10 hours, so an hour into it isn't much... you're still coming on). Nobody was home but me and the cat. Now, this cat was an alley cat that had adopted us as its family. He just moved in one day and stayed, except for times when he would leave for three or four days. This was a very intelligent cat, as demonstrated by other neat stories I can tell you of stuff he did (but those are tales for another thread). He was big and fearless without being arrogant, and had a neck as big around as a softball.

The cat had gotten into a fight during one of his leaves of absence, and had come home with a bad cut on his flank, which got infected and began to ooze. so we took him to the vet, and the vet cleaned out the wound and gave him a shot and gave us a tube of antibiotic ointment. He said we should put ointment in the wound daily. There actually was a hole in his muscle where the vet had cleared away the bad part, and we were supposed to stick the pointed end of this tube into the hole and squeeze the medicine into the hole.

Right.

So, I came in and I was tripping my ass off, and I just sat down on the couch and zoned out for a while, until the cat came strolling in from down the hall, and plopped down in the middle of the living room floor. I looked at him and said, "Oh, yeah! I've got to doctor up your leg," and I got the medicine. I sat down beside him, petted him for a second or two, and then stuck the tube up to the wound and started to stick it in the hole. The cat jumped and hissed a couple of times and batted my hand--without claws, but hard nonetheless--and then ran off down the hall again.

I followed him down the hall, and found him in my sister's room, up under her bed. Now, I gaurantee you, I didn't relish the idea of sticking my head up under that bed with that cat, and trying to grab him and pull him out. So here's what I decided to do instead.

I sat down in the middle of the floor, where I could see the cat's face and he could see mine. And I talked to him. "Here's what the deal is," I said. "I know that it hurts there on your leg, and you don't want me messing with it. But I wasn't trying to hurt you... you know that, you know I wouldn't do that. I just want the place to get well, and this stuff..." (showing him the tube) "...this stuff is meant to help you heal. But we have to put it in there if it's going to do you any good.

"Now, I'm going to go back in the living room and wait. You think about it, and when you're ready, you come on back in there, and we'll doctor you up and be done with this, okay?" And I got up and went back into the living room and sat on the couch again.

I picked up the paper and started trying to read it (it's difficult to read on LSD... everything keeps turning into little animated cartoons instead of being just words on paper). About 10 minutes went by with me sitting there reading, and then I became aware of movement in the room. I looked, and the cat had come back in and laid down where he had been before, in the living room floor. He looked at me.

At first I didn't think anything about it, and was going to keep on reading, but then suddenly I remembered what I had told the cat in the bedroom. So I asked him, "Oh... are you ready for the medicine now?" He just laid there.

I got up, moved slowly down beside him, and showed him the tube. I let him smell of the tip. "This is it," I said. "I'm going to put it in now." Then I put the tube up to the hole, and squeezed a little bit. The cat didn't move. I squeezed some more. Then I went on and filled up the hole, moved the tube away, and petted the cat. "That's it, all done," I said.

The cat jumped up and ran back down the hall again.

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Like I said... all electro-chemical. Some of the electricity just bled over from one of us to the other and vice versa, I reckon. My buddies and I concluded that LSD sometimes does something to your brain to make it into a transmitter/receiver, or something. Who knows? It wasn't terribly consistent, just an occasional thing, and not very strong when it happened.
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Satanus

Incense

I downloaded some of those electromagnetic wave sound recordings. I too thought they sounded the same as whale sounds. Here is a funny thought. If whales use those sounds to communicate w other whales, might the earth be communicating w other planets/moons/stars?

If i can find the site again, i'll post it.

SS

Incense_and_Peppermints

My buddies and I concluded that LSD sometimes does something to your brain to make it into a transmitter/receiver, or something

i've never dropped acid. your mind was altered by chemicals, so perhaps that influenced what you saw. as well as your friend. you could have been speaking out loud what you were seeing and not even have been aware of it, hence she visualized the same thing.

The wind sometimes sounds like wolves howling

this was more than human interpretation. this was the frequency of sound measured through an osciloscope - a pure tone. see the difference?

(i don't mind if you disagree with me. and i don't have a problem with you believing what you believe )

satan: i would love to read that. pleaseohplease let me know when you find it. thank Q.

COMF

you could have been speaking out loud what you were seeing and not even have been aware of it, hence she visualized the same thing.

No. This is a typical shot-in-the-dark assumption made due to inexperience. We knew what we were doing.

see the difference?

No. See Jesus in the tortilla?

Incense_and_Peppermints

No. This is a typical shot-in-the-dark assumption made due to inexperience. We knew what we were doing.

"shot in the dark"? i don''t know what that means. i wasn't assuming anything, just conjecturing, as a way to possibly explain what might have happened. if you say it happened the way you say, i believe you, for i am not you and only you know what you saw and experienced, not me.

No. See Jesus in the tortilla?

"jesus in the tortilla"? again, i don't understand what you mean. but if you're suggesting a hysterical mass hallucination as a way to explian my experiences, then you're wrong. i know what i saw and heard and felt. i don't see jesus in tortillas or have stigmata or jump into sacred pools to live forever or firewalk or avoid stepping on cracks or expect 7 years of bad luck if i break a mirror... these things happened to me when i was little and do not happen now. i was simply sharing my experience.in jan's "paranormal" thread. but thank you for sharing your views - it was interesting.

regards,
~incense

COMF

as a way to explian my experiences

Please don't misunderstand. I haven't read your experiences and am not remarking on them. I read the first few posts, until I got to the one that moved me to write my initial answer to you. I read your response to it, and have carried this conversation on since. I haven't read the posts in between.

I think the story about the sounds is just silly. Here's why.

Some guys went up north and set up recorders close to the aurora borealis. They recorded some noises. Then they said, "Hey! I wonder if these sound like whales and dolphins! Let's see if we can find any similarities!"

Sorry, I'm not buying it. Given the credibility of the story to begin with, it sounds like somebody with an agenda. Why whales and dolphins? Why not compare it to the sound of a rusty windmill?

To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Satanus

Geez comf, i didn't know you were such a skeptic. Here is the nasa site where you can download a bunch of these and listen to them for yourself. They exlain how they were recorded and how they are produced.

"Natural Radio" describes naturally-occurring electromagnetic (radio) signals emanating from lightning storms, aurora (The Northern and Southern Lights), and most importantly, the Earth's magnetic-field (the Magnetosphere).

http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/sounds/sounds.html

SS

COMF

Looks like anybody handling a website for NASA would have sense enough to post MP3's instead of WAV's, doesn't it.

Chemical explanation to superstition?

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