Back when I used to use amphetamines and drink a lot of beer I used to rant about all the stuff I heard and read on TV and radio. After I quit drugs and alcohol what people say in the media rarely bothers me. Occasionally, I get a laugh just thinking about how something in the media will affect some of the psychotic people out there. Rush Limbaugh is one of my favorite paranoia generators.
One of the greatest leasons I learned from the pseudo-psychedelic drug amphetamine is how paranoia works. During use of the drug and for at least two weeks after using it, I was not aware that my thoughts were paranoid. Only after returning to normal later, I realized that my anxieties and plans were really paranoid. Luckily I never killed anyone. Not yet anyway. Another thing I realized is that the sane and insane have many of the same fears, its just that the sane can handle them better.
Over years of occasional use of amphetamines I observed my thoughts and the way my mind would seem to fragment (schizo = fragmentation). At times I felt I could sense the underlying more primative parts of my mind and brain, the parts that evolved in the lower forms of life we evolved from. The drug seemed to allow me to access parts of my brain which are normally closed off from my consciousness. I remembered things that Timothy Leary said about various levels of consciousness which can be accessed with psychedelics. The fragments of my mind/brain or cognitive modules seemed to function at various levels themselves, a kind of heirarchy of neurons and neural circuits. Only my consciousness was alive. The rest was an automaton that evolved from lower forms of life.
Edit: Posts merged. Please do not triple post.
[ March 14, 2004: Message edited by: Laukev7 ]