carlw wrote:
> I have always found your posts sensible, rational, thought inspiring and
> fun.
Thanks, Carl.
> Last night, in a previous post, you said "This is the first time I've
> tried to compose a Virus post at night while
> not high in many months, and my thinking isn't very clear."
Both true. I'm feeling a bit of that again tonight, though not to the same degree, so I won't be attempting any triple somersaults in this post.
> I noticed the
> unclear thinking in the article you posted and said I preferred you as you
> usually are. No insult was intended at all, and if it appeared that there
> was one, I must apologize. Profusely.
Apology accepted, and I'm sure I over-reacted. I've been doing that with disturbing frequency recently. I'm pretty sensitive about the whole pot thing as I was never a daily pot smoker until I started working at Amazon.com, and the longer I worked there and came to dispise the place, the more I morphed into a pothead. I figured I'd cut down after I left Amazon, but about a month before I quit, my father committed suicide. I've basically been stoned ever since, the only exceptions being when I was in Peru and when working on my comic. I can't draw high.
I realize that my comment about writing my first straight post in months sounded like a joke, but it was not. Marijuana may not be physically addictive, but when your brain is expecting its regular dose of THC and you don't deliver, the brain will make its displeasure known.
> I think I should give up trying to be amusing in this forum. I seem to be
> making a mess of it.
> <...>
Make liberal use of emoticons. ;)
> Dr. Groff
> I guessed that maybe you did it (posted the excerpt from "The Holotropic Mind"
> to shake the trees and see what fell out of them. The fact that you
> didn't even complete the book yourself suggests to me that I may have been
> right.
I'm generally not much of a tree shaker, but we haven't had enough interaction for me to expect you to know that. The fact I didn't finish Grof's book isn't necessarily an indication that I didn't like it; I start and don't finish lots of great books, but "The Holotropic Mind" isn't one of them. I'm not a scientist, but I've read enough scientific writing to have developed a set of expectations for clarity and systematicity of presentation that was totally lacking in Groff's book.
I expect that it will pain you to learn that his is a BIG name in psychology. Just do a web search on his name and be amazed at the number of sites there are devoted to his work. I remember reading something about him in a general intro to psychology course in college. I picked up "The Holotropic Mind" before my trip to South America because the experiential workshop I was to attend in the jungles of Peru was supposed to be on Shamanism and Transpersonal Psychology, and Grof is the name most commonly associated with Transpersonal Psychology. His writing may not be anything to write home about, but my Holotropic Breathwork experiences at that workshop were more powerful (at least in terms of immediate impact) than my Ayahuasca experiences.
Anyway...
No quotes tonight.
-KMO