As far as being incredibly smart and taking
psychoactives goes, I thoroughly recommend it.
Hmmmm, not quite what I meant to say. True, but what I meant to say was that a lot of the things really smart people say tend to sound like drug experiences. Start talking about cognitive dissonance or the reproduction of consciousness in machines or subatomic physics or the philosophy of language or the deeper meaning of the Matrix to your high-school buddies and see what conclusions they draw about your current state of mind. Throughout secondary school, people would think, just for a moment, that I was high, before their stereotype-checksums kicked in and pegged me as 'geek'.
Now, of course, they would be correct in many cases, though I still stand by my claim that, when you get down really small, the problem with thinking about what's there is that we are inclined to think of everything as solid, because of our experiences in day-to-day life, but at the level of the subatomic, nothing is 'solid'. It's not there in the sense of being solid, it's there in a way we aren't equipped to deal with. Even though I avoided describing it as 'eternally mutable energergetic vibration' and didn't even mention the uncertainty principle it still borders on stonertalk.
In fact, any observations about social conditioning or the nature of individuality carry the associated risk of you being considered to be a psychonaut of some description, because of the associations many people have between abstraction, especially concerning societal controls on the individual, and drugged rebellion.
But I digress. Maybe I should request a node title edit for my homenode to Digressor.
But, I digress. Fruan and I were sitting in my room the other morning, admittedly high, and I mentioned that some of the discussions we have normally wouldn't be entirely out of place in a circle of hippies. Each hippie tells a story, hippie #1 about Buddhism, hippie #2 about synaesthesia (though he doesn't use that word), hippie #Pseudomancer about qualia with a digression (of course) to the quantum nature of the universe, hippie #Fruan presents the converse, the 4-dimensional spacetime matrix and our limited perception. No incongruity in the tripped-outness of the stories may be observed.
Another point to be made about being really smart and taking lots and lots of drugs is the social one.
naked ape makes this point in (b) and (e), above. I have never known what I want to do when I grow up. I have never wanted a
9 to 5 (see
Geniuses for manual labour). I have never cared for the house, the car, the dog and the kids. I have never seen the point in adhering to an arbitrary obsession with tomorrow, with the pay packet, with promotion and obedience. As a geek, rebellion is not a conscious pose, it's just a necessary condition for my existence. Because I have looked at this thing they call society and want no part of it (thanks for that one
Fruan), I genuinely don't care about the prevailing attitude towards drugs. It is founded on hysteria, misinformation, and an excessive stress on traditional values. I am judged by many people for my use of psychoactives, and I judge the people who do this for judging me. Tomorrow is only a minor worry, life happens
now (he says, tapping away at the keyboard =) and as I can get by just fine intellectually (see (a), above) while continuing to use these substances, I don't need to worry too much about becoming a fuckup.
Which leads on to another point. Drugs fuck some people up. The overly-analytical, introspective nature of my personality acts as a safeguard here - I look so hard at my life that I can see if my usage starts to become a problem (not wishful thinking, I have just recently had to impose some control over my smoking of pot in order to continue to live the life I want. But I did it because I saw what was happening).
I have a semi-clear idea of how I want to be, if drugs get in the way of that they will suffer the same fate as any other aspect of my life would. The problem will be fixed.
Yet another point: having lots in your mind = lots to play with when high. I'm not completely sure what stupid ignorant people think about when they take the drugs I do, I just really don't know.