Subject: Nitrous ramblings
From: [email-masked] (Laura Lemay)
Date: Wed, 12 May 1993 21:08:06 GMT
Newsgroups: alt.drugs

'lo, all.

Two things:

Lots of people have been asking nitrous questions recently. There
isn't a Nitrous FAQ on ftp.u.washington.edu.  I've got some free time.
I'm a writer.  Hence: I'm writing one.

Send me info you have kicking about.  I know lots about whip-its; its
just about everything else I need to know about. :)

- N20 is not N02.  What is it N02 is again?

- Why is it N20 does what it does, i.e. chemically.  Why does oxygen
  deprivation make it more interesting?

- How can you get ahold of it in canisters (the big ones, not whip-its).

- Dangers, rumors of dangers (burns holes in your lungs, kills major brain
  cells, causes menengitis/alzheimers/bad taste in shoes/whatever)

- Medical grade vs. everything else, what are the risks/problems/warnings

Secondly, I'm the one that posted a while ago about finding the secret
to the universe on nitrous, and I should have known that people would
ask me what it was. :) Its taken me a while to figure out how to
actually write about my nitrous expreiences, just cause words are
rather limiting when you talk about the wide expanse of what you can
understand when you're on nitrous.  But here goes.  

Before I start, a disclaimer:  this is long and trippy-sounding.  I'm
embarrassed as hell about posting it, cause its not at all what usually
appears on this newsgroup, and a lot of it is wild speculation that I
find fascinating, even four months after discovering it on nitrous.
Note that I've never read any philosophy, including psychedelic philosophy.
I am not at all religious, in fact I'm anti-religion.  I'm not sure
what relevance that has to all of this, but I felt it was important to
mention.  I thought of this all on my own. :)

----------

First of all, I need to explain how I start thinking when I've had a
lot of nitrous.  A couple people have posted or sent me mail
describing the effect as being like uncovering layers, or of things
being recursive.  Those are both good words.

I read once that most major breakthroughs in thought have taken place
not because of an incremental increase in knowledge, but because of a
paradigm shift.  The thoery, as far as I could remember it, was that
within a paradigm, incremental breakthroughs in understanding could
only take you so far.  But to really progress someone has to hold up
then entire paradigm to the light and come up with a diffierent
paradigm; then the cycle can start over again.  The problem is that
those who end up tossing out the old paradigm are usually thought of
as crackpots and villified by thier peers for doing just that, and it
may take years before eople decide that the paradigm-shifter was actually
right.

The prime example of all this is Galileo and the sun-revolves-around
the earth paradigm; science had gone only so far in explaining things
under that paradigm, and they were unable to explain many other things
(sorry I'm being so vague; I don't remember the details).  When the
paradigm shifted, and it was more commonly believed that the earth
revolves around the sun, the problems made more sense.  But it took
someone to question that fundamental fact (as it was believed to be)
for the change to take place.

My point in mumbling about all this nonsense is that sometimes its hard
to see the forest for the trees; sometimes its hard to back up far enough
into the paradign that you question the paradigm itself.  Nitrous, for
me, makes it easier.  It makes it easy to question things you have never
questioned before, to step back and see the bigger picture.

But it doesn't stop there.  Once you've examined one paradigm and found
its problem, you've got another paradigm to fool with.  And then the
nitrous makes you examine *that* paradigm.  Its like an infinite onion;
you peel away one belief and there's another beneath it.  And another
beneath that.  And on. And on.

I've had many nitrous conversations with myself that dealt with wild
religious conspiracy thoeries, whether animals think, how it is I can
come up with ideas for short stories, and many other things I can't
remember off hand.  But my most mind-expanding nitrous trip of all was
one where I started thinking about perception in general and just what
reality means.

I started out thinking of the phrase "I'll believe it when I see it
with my own eyes."  Or not necessarily that phrase in an of itself,
but the idea that truth only exists if we can see it, or hear it, or
taste it, or whatever, for ourselves.  We rely on our perceptions to
draw conclusions and accumulate knowledge.

But our perceptions can't necessarily tell us the whole truth, cause
there are things outside those perceptions that exist, but we can't
perceive of them with the raw equipment we have.  For example, 300
years ago there were no microscopes, and people could not see viruses
or bacteria.  It wasn't until we found a way to expand our vision into
the very very small via microscopes that we were able to find out that
microorganisms exist.

There are thousands of examples of bits of knoweldge that we didn't
know about because we did not have the ability to bring the data into
the focus of our senses, to perceive it and learn about it.  We had to
keep pushing on the "too small to see" or "too quiet to hear", and so on,
boundaries before these things came into focus.  Therefore it follows
that if there were things that were beyond the extremes of our senses
then, there are STILL things out there that we still haven't been able
to observe.

At this point in my thinking, the onion peeled back.  If there are
things beyond the extremes of our perception that we have only just
discovered, and there are still things out there beyond those
extremes, then perhaps it follows that there are also forms of
perception we have not yet discovered.  Perhaps there are more than five
senses, but we just don't understand what they are because they are
not as observable to us as the original five.  Perhaps there is reality
out there that we'll never be able to understand because we don't have
senses that will be able to find it, and we have no way to build machines
that will open up those doors of perception to us.

Layers, layers of perception and reality.  I know it all sounds really
stupid.  I'm reading this over and thinking "ack, you're not going to
POST this, are you?  How embarrassing."  But this is exactly the way
that nitrous makes you think.  

After musing about all this for a bit, my mind began to fold back in
to the present.  In order to come up with this concept of inifnite
knowledge contained in infinite perceptive forms, I had to be under
the influence of a substance that makes my mind think in different ways --
that *changes my perception.*

Perhaps, unlike according to common knowledge, drugs don't *distort*
reality, or pervert perception.  Perhaps they are gateways into 
different forms of perception that we don't yet understand.  Perhaps
its only drug users who are looking at the future, at the alternate
paradigms, at the different ways of seeing things that "normal" people
may not find for hundred of years or not ever at all.

And if you follow that theory, isn't it sad that drug users are
persecuted, teased, frowned at, and treated as criminals for not being
"normal," for using drugs to "escape from reality."  Maybe we're not
escaping.  Can you really escape from a reality if you don't
understand what that reality is?

Five hundred, a thousand, some number of years from now, maybe people
will say "isn't it funny how the people of the millenium frowned on
drug use" the same way that we say "isn't it funny how people in 1600
thought the earth was flat."

Hmmmm.

Thats as far as I got on this train of through, or as far as I got that
I can remember. Things get pretty strange the further down in the onion
you go while under nitrous.

Perhaps others can take this reasoning and think about it while under
the influence of nitrous or acid or whatever.  Maybe you can come up
with other layers that I can't found yet.  By all means, let me know
when you do.

Or perhaps you can all sit there and laugh and poke holes in my theory.
Thats OK, too. :)

-- 
*********************************************************
Laura Lemay                              [email-masked]
writer of trifles in shadows and blood
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