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Critical listening and altered states

Ok, this is not a question about relaxing, but about listening to evaluate how the system (or a piece of gear is sounding).

What, in your experience, are the pluses and minuses of altering your state of mind for listening? This can include anything you've used to affect your everyday state of mind, from coffee, beer, scotch, tobacco, to much stronger — and psychoactive, dissociative — additives.

What do you gain by altering your consciousness in terms of what you notice, attend to, linger on, etc?
What causes more details to emerge?
What allows you to stick with a thread or, alternately, make new connections?

Or perhaps you like to keep all those things *out* of your listening; if that's you, please say a bit about why.

hilde45
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ozzy62's avatar
ozzy62
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ebm <get high ASAP!!!> ebm



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hilde45 OP
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@mikelavigne Thanks for taking the question seriously and answering it in such detail. 

To others denigrating the idea of changing one's state of mind is not about getting "wasted." That is an interpretation that says more about fear than anything else.

The idea is not about altering one's state because their system is already good enough. To see why not, simply read the OP again, perhaps more slowly this time.

The idea is about challenging ruts. As anyone who attends to their own experience knows, we often listen with preconceptions and biases which confine how and what we hear. One needs to sometimes loosen up or shake things up a bit so see things differently.

What I see in the accounts of systems that have improved over time, their owners did something to push their own limits. That could be listening to a friend's system, or new music, or even altering their mental state somehow. It's not "poisoning" their mental state, whatever the eff that means. (Puritan alert!)

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ebm
9,311 posts
 
I don't get high I'm high on life.
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