jim n says:

I don’t know about stories as they would take way too long to describe. My experience has been that they are not new realities but expansion of one’s reality. As such though, like dreams, different aspects get confused–am I high or not–is this base reality or not–am I asleep or not–for the most part one comes down. The positive effect of this is finally being admitted by research showing that psychoactives help with impulse control and emotive ego stability, even after the drug has been taken. I have also never felt godly connectedness–certainly connectedness to people, places, things, and thoughts but not to a specific god(s)–only, because I just don’t have them in my world anyway. There is a feeling of puniness sometimes but that is caused by many things–including tuning in that in spite of our arrogance we really are puny and not to what we think we need to fear.

He is also correct that fasting, sleep deprivation, extreme emotional intensity, and mental calmness can also induce states of alternate realities. Control junkies tend not to use drugs to have these intense feelings but may use church music (or other art, secular or not), hyper physicality, pain response, or a host of other more controllable means to get the same effect.

HST well writes about the twistedness of drug logic and one has to be ready to suspend personal criticism of personal perfection to have a good time. Also, the consequences of being too loosely tethered to aspects that support normal (not high) bodily function can be rather harsh.

My hippie friends in high school seemed to insist that I believe they were true alternate realties like universes but this kind of perspective egoism is no different, than us as we are, than the story of many people looking at the same elephant and thinking their view unique or autonomous to their reality. At some point you come down. At some point your perception of reality becomes richer if you see it as expansion rather than as replacement or alternation–just as realizing that these seemingly disparate and separate views of the elephant, as entities, are actually an elephant to be considered as one big animal you can’t see all at once without moving around and then it’s still one perspective and inference allows you to complete the picture. The focus of the drug may actually exacerbate the narrowness of the perspective–it can work both ways.

Much like learning a new language isn’t a translation or expansion of your native language but rather expanding your native language. The human mind mind doesn’t treat languages as autonomous whole’s but rather as just another part of your big language–just more rules, vocabulary, and usages in the big language of consciousness.