Mindfuck

Shrooms vs. ecstasy.
  May 9, 2003

The main difference between shrooms and ecstasy:

Shrooms (and probably acid, which I’ve never tried) make you question the nature of reality. They completely obliterate your sense of what is normal and thereby remove the frame of reference based on which you know if the universe is the way it ought to be. I think shrooms destroy your ability to follow cause and effect. Or, as my friend put it, they make you totally fucking stupid. You observe the world with a truly unprejudiced pair of eyes: you only see what is not colored by where it came from. Perhaps this is the proverbial wisdom of fools. It’s scary as all hell; I remember a trip where I sat rocking back and forth, watching the universe melt before my eyes and whimpering in horror: “I don’t know what’s normal anymore!” All this makes shrooms a good “philosopher” drug (not while you’re on them, but afterwards, when you regain your ability to philosophize): if you want a crash course on the illusory nature of the world the insight is given to you on a silver platter. The problem is that you don’t know what to do with it. It’s ersatz enlightenment, seeing without understanding. Meditation, I hear, will take you to the same heights but as you master it to the point where the gates of heaven finally swing open, you acquire the knowledge to guide you through the disconcerting exposure to the raw universe, unmediated by excess interpretation. It figures that this more rewarding and meaningful way is more difficult: enlightenment, much like energy, does not come from, or go into, nothing.

E, if anyhing, entrenches you even further in unquestioning happy acceptance of reality. Nice for parties and surviving bombing raids.

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