ContraPoints patreon

Tangent: Psychedelic Experiences

🕑 Added 2023-07-17 20:51:27 +0000 UTC

Comments

Armany Habed

I know the words alone from your trip seem unhinged on their own, but like any passage from a book, the words only make sense when reintroduced to their context. I think they'll make more sense in time

Paul Chattaway

Just found this entry, and the bit about needing cannabis roughly half-way through the experience... heh, yeah, that seems to be nearly universal. It just soothes so much, softens the rough edges. However... it's not strictly necessary, one of the many symptoms of long-COVID for me (I caught COVID for the first time October 5th, 2024) is my nervous system seems to have become extremely sensitive to certain things, alcohol is one of them (I can't even have a single drink now without it triggering a days-long nasty headache), and THC unfortunately is another one of them, started to feel like I was being sliced up with cold steel whenever I had some. I say unfortunately because I was essentially married to the stuff for the past 25 years. Quitting it on February 1st of 2025 was... a challenge... hypothalamic dysregulation for like 3-4 weeks, the first two weeks were utter hell, the worst withdrawal I've ever experienced and I have more experience here than a person should (this apparently is a risk for 1 in 7 regular users of cannabis I have since found out). Anyway, I found out I can still use psychedelics, in fact they seem to reduce the symptoms of long-COVID for some days afterward. But yeah, that craving for THC after acid was a hard thing to deal with the first few times, although I've mostly gotten over it now, like 4 trips later. I have discovered that going through the entire acid experience and aftermath without cannabis can actually be a valuable experience, more "work" seems to get done on one's self this way, and recovery / reintegration is a lot faster (like I previously used to need at least a week off from regular life to recover, now it's like 2 days). But yeah, it's rougher, with more sharp edges.

Francisco Rosso

DOes someone has a list of each book she mentions in each video in Patreon? I am looking for a book that she mentions but I dont remember the name. I think it was mentioned in Psychedelic Experiences, she was explaining that is common to have trips relatable with your cosmogony, your metaphisical explanation of reality. thats explains the capacity that a someone who believes in devil could really see him.

Maddy Shows

some thots, because your notes DO make sense to me: just wanna say first off that psychedelic experiences both are and are not “insightful” in the sense that i believe you can, based on your intent and personal history, come away from a trip with worsened paranoia or truly useless information, or you can gain access to what feels (to me) (TO ME) like a little glimpse into universal truth - true in the way that math is conceptually perfect and accessible to anyone who can think about it, tripping is like learning that 2+2=4 in an emotional, symbolic, metaphysical sense. i think you gained access to that kind of symbolic, emotional universal math, similar to the collective unconscious. you could explain this in a materialistic way, but due to my own beliefs i think it goes beyond that. the preoccupation with metaphysics is just a natural effect of this kind of mental state. tripping also heightens the kind of pattern recognition software we have in our brains, so we become extremely aware not just of physical patterns (like the expressions of fractals in nature, the heightened textures on surfaces) but deeper macro-patterns within our psychological landscape. it’s embarrassing to talk about with other people, and really, nothing you say can capture your experience as you experienced it, which is the most important part! psychedelics, at their best, provide a greater intimacy with subjective experience.

Sunjay

Wait the "Take it easy dude, but take it!" guy is a famous spokesperson for psychedelic drug use? That's simultaneously shocking and completely unsurprising

Jennifer Lightweis-Goff

Can we get a tangent on Brett Weinstein's DMs?!

Lucien Danel

The video isn’t working for me, am I alone?

Fifi Dosch

FUN FACT: Terence McKenna once verbatim said in a lecture, "I'm actually a lesbian trapped in a man's body, but I've made the peace I can with that."

yorrith de bakker

@contrapoints Have you tried to read some Carlos Castaneda? This dude started out as an anthropologist studying the Yaqui way of using medicinal plants. And ended up in this controversial story about exploitation and weird cult like behavior. But his first fieldwork, the teachings of Don join. Are a great insight in these different stages of seeing, that he received from this sjamaan called Don Juan . The white light at the end of the tunnel they aptly named; THE MOLD OF MEN. and it is the actual shape your soul is pushed trough, to mold your consciousness to look like the astral body of a human. If that’s not spiritual patriarchy in a nutshell. There are some interesting concepts that could deepen your research and broaden your cultural diversity in understanding altered states and its common archetypes in seeing the beyond. 😘

Norika Dolmy

You have to sign in to YouTube to watch it since it's age restricted

deebs

I wish I could watch this tangent - is it still working for anyone or is it broken?

Luis

Omg why do all her notes make sense?? Like I can’t explain it, but I felt an intense feeling of “same, girl, same” to how I’ve experienced psychedelics. Also, most of my psychedelic experiences wrapped themselves around philosophy and religion until last year I finally watched One Piece and now there is a lot of One Piece motifs in my trips and they have taken on an overall more positive and hopeful tone than before. I think that’s interesting bc it’s not like I haven’t gotten hyperfixated on other shows and media before, but for some reason this one decided to show up in my psychedelic trips. Anyway, THE ONE PIECE IS REAL!!!

Anni Tendo

I paid for the membership to watch this video and it isn’t playing 😞

abi eats content

I don't think the video is working anymore :(

Andrew May

On dualistic monism: that’s a feature at the heart of Rudolf Steiner’s epistemology (which he called “anthroposophy” or spiritual science—a superfuckingcoconuts worldview but a fun thinking-playground).

Had a tab of what I was told was 500 mus, everything you’re saying is making so much sense

this was beautiful miss natalie. <3

I don't have anything constructive to add, but I watched this video while lying on the couch, zooted out of my mind from post-migraine derealisation and associated brain fuckery. Which I think really added to the experience. Probably a lot less fun than actually taking drugs, but you take what you can get.

Sappho's Friend

she has referenced a "deleuzian rhizome, a non-arborescent multiplicity with as many sinuous interconnections as the truffles on the pizza itself" in a joke included in her video on capitalism. Part 2 i think it was. So the answer is yes

Natalie i’m really late to this party, but have you ever heard of Deleuze & Guattari’s concept of the rhizome? it’s most commonly used in Education, but it might be useful to you. Reference: Deleuze, Gilles, & Guattari, Félix. (1988). A thousand plateaus : capitalism and schizophrenia / Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari ; translation and foreword by Brian Massumi. Continuum. Definition from Oxford Reference: https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110919111808348

Sappho's Friend

I found a way to watch it hehe. I've never done psychedelics, but I have temporal lobe epilepsy (focal impaired awareness seizures, often with with automatisms), and what you descrribed here kinda reminds me of seizures. A lot of these sensations i'd feel during a seizure don't exist otherwise, in a seizure free state; these weird forms of anxiety, very strong deja vu, odd sensations in the abdomen/heart, weird smells of burning leather (idk) that dont exist in real life. When my seizures werent medicated (docs didnt listen to me) and i often had several a day, i was just so drawn to spirituality and conspiracism, even though in a seizure free state I'm anti-mysticism, the rigid autistic atheist type. The frequency of seizures had fried my brain. When it comes to mandalas, i personally suspect they appear because our eye is radially symmetrical, it's circular, including the nerve, or really thats it's just a consequence of our anatomy, and we then assign secondary meanings to them in this state of loosened associations (sort of an induced psychosis) that a psychedelic trip is. *Gotta say not mentioning the QAnon shaman as a reactionary psychedelics-loving hippie was a missed opportunity xD

Oronoro

Couldn't agree more! So much great content. I've already inhaled like three tangents. Stoked af to dive into the rest

I just wanna say that this Patreon is fucking CRAAAAZY. I’m sooo glad I subscribed. Longtime fan of Natalie and I’ve been sad recently about the lack of youtube content… little did I know there’s this absolute goldmine of content she’s been putting out here? Amazing. Love this. Take my money I beg you

Timothy Morrise

I watched Suspiria 2018 recently and this idea of the Reclaiming / Yang / Death / Dark Mother is really intruiging to me. I wonder if there's something so offensive about that in Masculinity our art is designed to supress the Dark Mother as an archetype; which is one reason why I think Suspiria 2018's revelation of Becoming/Embodying the dark mother is really interesting. Also some interesting potential Freud stuff going on there.

Loving the baby goat hops!!

Jeffrey Haught

I can’t play this video for some reason…

in the bern version of swiss german, the word for curious is "gwundrig", which could be translated as "open to wonder", "wondrous". in german, the term for curious is "neugierig", which could be translated as "greedy for the new", "craving the new". i think the two terms describe interesting ways of looking at (metaphysical or esoteric or religious or even scientific/rational and economic) stances towards the unknown and the limits of what can be known and the way those are defined and experienced.

Sadie

Favorite tangent

This video won’t play. The psychedelics video has a bug or something blocking playing?

Jon Stewart

From a right-now perspective, psychedelics are a bloody brilliant way to get the most out of art. Just the right drug and dose, set the time aside, line up the videos and connect with humanity in a bath of overwhelming love (500mg mescaline and moonage daydream here). Should be normal/ritualised, say a couple of times a year IMO. But what do I know...

i don't even know where i can get weed...

I have no idea why, but this is the only video that I can’t watch. Patreon will sit there loading for 20 minutes and nothing.