Yesterday I wrote about my fascination with learning about spiritual ideas from different religions and trying to learn if there’s any common origin between them. Today I think I’ll write about another fascination of mine, which might not be as intense anymore, but is still a part of my life, and was definitely a huge deal for me when I was a bit younger. It might not be the healthiest thing to be obsessed with, but I gotta tell the truth. If you’ve read some of my earlier posts in this series of a thousand daily words then you might be aware of how I’m just recently starting to cut down on weed after about 15 years of daily use. These days that’s a big deal for me because weed has always been something which I thought I’d never really need to cut down on, but what you might not know is that weed is far from the only drug I’ve used throughout my life. In fact, my unhealthy fascination I mentioned at the beginning of this post is drugs. Yes, drugs in general have always been extremely interesting to me, and I feel like that is very intimately tied with my love for spirituality, philosophy and all things weird. I’ve always loved learning and researching (about things that actually interest me), and I knew that drugs were dangerous, so even though I was in the eight grade and still very young, I knew that I had a lot of research to do if I was going to embark on this path of experimenting with psychoactive substances, but I was determined to do it so I learned as much as I could. Weed was my first high, and at first I hadn’t decided to make it an everyday habit, but I was completely interested and started learning about it’s effects and even history. Since I had no tolerance at all, weed was super psychedelic for me, something that has never been the same after years of heavy use. I liked how it made me more aware of my thoughts, how everything i thought seemed interesting and meaningful, and as I started learning online about other drugs I naturally gravitated towards substances that offered the same kind of trippy, introspective effects, more specifically psychedelics. I became fascinated with mushrooms and LSD, and I don’t remember whether my interest in psychedelics or my interest in hippie culture came first, or if they both sort of grew together and eventually inspired me to try to live a spiritual or philosophical life. I’ve always thought of the world as extremely unjust as well, and I guess it was the whole anti-establishment thing which made me really like hippies, as well as their use of psychedelic drugs as some sort of sacrament to look within themselves and see what they could find. That life seemed a lot more meaningful to me than working for money my entire life, chasing more power and status. So I started reading countless trip reports on Erwoid, from first trips to heroic doses, to all sorts of combinations, so I was learning about more substances as I learned about mushrooms and acid. The trips were so insane, the visions people spoke of and the feelings they described were so interesting to me, and so I started asking people if they knew anyone with shrooms or acid I could buy. I didn’t have much luck at school at first, but I eventually met this kid, I don’t really remember how, who sold me some acid. I mean, he was a nerdy looking kid from my school, but I don’t remember how I knew to ask him or how our meeting came about. Anyway, I had some crazy acid trips, and from then on I decided to try all psychedelics. Although a lot of it was curiosity, I know that deep down I was never using these substances for the sake of “having fun.” I’ve always had a huge desire to search for truth, to find some truth that will help me live life in the most meaningful way possible, and I was always looking to have mystical experiences that I could learn from, maybe learn something that could change my life, and I can’t say that I didn’t find exactly that. I really think that tripping so many times since a very young age has a lot to do with who I am today and who I grew to be. When I started getting into drugs and drinking, outwardly I was trying to fit in. I was rapping about nothing, about being cool or whatever else I thought would impress people, trying to rock fake designer clothes and smoking cigarettes just to look cool, looking for fights. I don’t want to blame hip-hop because ultimately I was the one who was trying to copy a culture, and a pretty toxic one at that, but it’s obvious that the way I dressed and the way I acted in those days was was inspired by hip-hop. Who didn’t want to have nice cars and clothes and to have any girl you wanted? Tripping made me see the deeper meaning of life though, and eventually I stopped writing those types of raps because I started to see it as an art form, as poetry, in the way that even 2Pac saw it. I also stopped trying to rock designer clothes because I started to loathe materialism and completely rejected being someone who is constantly trying to impress others with meaningless things such as the amount of money or luxury items I have. Tripping hard really let me see that life is way to deep not to take responsibility for my life, to waste it on meaningless things. I started reading a lot of philosophical and spiritual books, such as Aldous Huxley’s “The Doors of Perception” where he talks about the similarities between reported visions of psychedelic experienced and the art and mythology of ancient religions like Hinduism and Buddhism, and this inspired me to learn even more. I’m at the end of this post and I really only got to touch on my relationship with psychedelics, which is one of my more positive experiences with drugs. Other drugs, like alcohol, I haven’t had the easiest relationship with, but that’s a topic for another day.
much love
~ rebel eye
rebel eye 