I claimed *exactly* that a few posts ago ... well, OK. I suppose you have to read a little between the lines to see it. That your between sober and drunken life is *false*, starts us down the slippery slope to claiming that alcohol *does* bring you to a new reality and raises your consciousness. I can continue that argument if need be.
I don't much care if you believe it or not. But what I do want you to hear is that any insight one thinks they gain while on drug X is *already* reachable, sober, drunk, calcium deficient, high on tryptophan, or whatever. You're right to question the claims to insight the druggies make. But you're wrong to distinguish so harshly between states. Your privileging sober life is almost a perfect analogy to the Cartesian split between mind and body. Just because 1 state *feels* one way and another feels another way doesn't imply they're different in kind, however much they may differ in degree. And if you're unclear on the prejudicial consequences of such a false dichotomy, all you need do is look at our (admitted) *need* for the disease model of addiction ... or if that's not enough data, take a look at the demographics of our prison population (black vs. white, poor vs. wealthy, etc.). As to the destructiveness of an altered state, "the dosage is the poison". A tiny bit of sky diving is just fine. Too much sky diving will kill you. On 2/27/20 9:11 AM, thompnicks...@gmail.com wrote: > Nobody ever claimed for alcohol that it brought me to a new reality or raised > one to a higher state of understanding. I think of it as inducing a > modulated and reversible little death of the mind, a quieting of the voice. > Not so much an altered state, as a slowed regular state. It is evidently > destructive, but sometimes a little destruction is just what one needs. -- ☣ uǝlƃ ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
