There was a time in the 70's when I assisted people who were on bad hallucinagenic drug trips to "flip" into beautiful ones. I discovered how to do this by experiencing and observing a number of "bad" trips.
Here is what worked. I discovered that when a person was having a bad trip, it was not because of the trip itself but because of the person's resistance to it.
For example, on LSD someone might look at a painting on the wall and it might turn into a giant spider. The giant spider was not the problem, though. The fact that the person was resisting it—didn't want that giant spider climbing up that wall—was the problem.
What I eventually realized, in going through this enough times, was that the spider was going to be climbing up the wall in any case, and that my choice was to be there with it, or to resist it. In either case the giant spider would still be there, but in the first case I would enjoy it and in the second case I'd be panicked and suffering.
The trick was to convince the person—sometimes myself—to come back into this present moment. Usually this was done by getting them—or me—to focus on the breath, and to stop offering resistance to "what-is"—to whatever was there.
And the giant spider? When the person—or me—could detach from thoughts enough to just be with whatever was there—"A giant spider? Far-out!"—then the trip would turn into something altogether different.
Because of the lack of resistance to whatever was, the trip would turn incredibly beautiful at that point.
Much later I began to glimpse that this way of seeing things applied extremely well to life itself. I noticed that whenever I could let go of my resistance to "whatever-it-was" being the way it was, then it was as if I was living in a different world. Then I did whatever I did, but without the tension caused by resistance, and sometimes with the bliss of actually being in harmony with the flow of the river of life.
—jim sloman, 11/13/00 for Nov 13
|
