Would be a nice world indeed if everyone tried psychedelics. Especially something like Salvia or DMT. As it wakes you up from the often 'mundane' life people are living. From personal experience it inspired me to want to explore this universe more.
There seems to be a large spread between how the person who used psychedelics describes their experience vs how it appears to me. It used to just be the people who were in to crystals and vibrations and other new age things, but I see it with most people who talk about the benefits of psychedelics. Very smart people claim to have learned profound things from their experiences but when they explain them, they sounds like nonsense to me. They common quality is that the experiences sound disconnected from reality. They try to explain the experience and are fully convinced they learned some fundamental truth but can't explain it in any way that makes sense. Like when you have an emotional reaction to a dream but when you explain the dream, you realize the literal description in nonsense. Perhaps disconnecting from reality a bit or internalizing a core belief that everything OK, even when it isn't, is a good thing for making you happy, but there seems to be a lot of downside in breaking critical thinking in a lot of people's heads.
I used to listen to Tim Ferris and Peter Attia, and thought they were both very logical thinkers, but since they started talking up the benefits of psychedelics, I keep getting that same feeling that what they are describing sounds more like trying to levitate the pentagon to end the war.
The best way I can describe it is, before you experience anything like that, you are only aware of the normal/sober extents that your mind uses, and afterwards you realize that most the dials/knobs/gradients/ups/downs you've experienced are only within a small threshold of what your brain is capable of. Experiencing that allows you to have a better understanding of where your thoughts/emotions/experience fall on those spectrums the rest of your life. It puts the range you normally operate into perspective.
Think of it as a kind of messy recalibration, a jostle of the box of your mind. Jostling your box occasionally can help you sometimes break through a local optima to a more global optima, shaking the fuck out of your brain all the time, well, it'll probably make you creative but no guarantees anyone else will understand you.
I think it's a pretty good analogy. I was experiencing a personal paradox of mine for over a year and no amount of writing or thinking about it helped. Then after a single experience with weed, the next day I was able to piece things together and resolve this paradox. It's been about 9 months since and the solution still holds up to my own scrutiny. I believe this would not have been possible without the weed. It's funny how a single day can help you resolve something that bothered you for hundreds of days.
There is _something_ that one can discover when they try psychedelics. It is a non-normal experience and so by definition will have novel data. Is it useful though? So many people couldn't have been flatly wrong (but they said that about religion) - so there could be something to it. One of that is the realization that our sensory inputs, how we process them, and also how we understand ourselves, the world, and the separateness of the self from everything around us - are not preordained. The way we look at all of them is not the only way. We think the way we think because we've evolved to it. What we see is not the objective reality; it is just a filter through which we perceive it. This experience can allow someone who's prepared for it, to break out of their own patterned ways of thinking.
But - there is a reason we've evolved to perceive reality in this way. It allows us to survive. Material concerns - health, wealth, status etc. and extractive consumption which messes up "nature", and having ego/identity distinct from nature -- all of this serve useful, vital purposes. A person who's constantly tripping will find it difficult to survive both in modern and ancient times long enough to propagate their genes.
People search for profundity in these experiences, and sure there are some. But to really understand the world and nature, I think the lens of science - observation, empiricism, and the scientific process is a better bet. There unfortunately really isn't anything _deeper_ about life. And whatever there is, personal introspection aided by psychedelics cannot hold a candle against organized human scientific endeavor.
Also, messing with one's brain is dangerous. It is one of the least understood human organs, irreplaceable, and fundamental to life like few other things.
Meh. I'd say we're likely stuck in a local optimum - the default programming of our brains is clearly not optimal for our state of evolution... our brains evolved for hunting and gathering clearly don't have good default programming for understanding and exploring the universe.
Hope brain-computer-interfaces come soon and we can do more controlled hacks with those, but until then anything that can nudge our minds out of equilibrium / gradient-pit is great. And some side-effects (eg. small minority of people manifesting psychoses etc.) are a sign we're on the right track imo.
Sure, we can try tweaking external factors, sprinkling in some wars, terrorism, pandemics, riots etc. to occasionally wake some people up, our benevolent true leaders, whoever they are, treat us with these at least... but I'd support more direct and less destructive alternatives :)
You have no guarantee that the next drug-induced iteration will push you towards another local optimum though. If it redefines your current experiences, it could misattribute many things true positives you have learned throughout your life.
> One of that is the realization that our sensory inputs, how we process them, and also how we understand ourselves, the world, and the separateness of the self from everything around us - are not preordained. The way we look at all of them is not the only way. We think the way we think because we've evolved to it. What we see is not the objective reality; it is just a filter through which we perceive it.
Yes, this is exactly the take away one should take in my opinion.
Going into deep spiritual meaning about nature is a rabbit hole.
The nature of an internal psychological experience is that it is deeply personal. The best analogy I can provide for you is that of the religious conversion. A strong psychedelic experience is like Saul being called out to by Jesus from the heavens or Moses receiving the commandments from the burning bush. In a moment, an experience once thought impossible shows them they have a humble place in a bigger picture. Psychedelics are similar, for reasons not fully understood.
Common experiences during psychedelic therapy include the sensation of having died or feeling the boundary between yourself and others or yourself and the world dissolve. You are correct to note that there is no evidence of either such things occurring during any psychedelic experience at any time to any person. It's the deeply personal quality of the experience that induces significant changes in behavior for the users.
Another great analogy is that of new parenthood. You may just see a wailing lump of flesh, defecating and crying out for nourishment. The parents themselves often see their own reflection in an endless chain of reproduction, and feel a new responsibility having been forced to really consider their place in this ongoing process.
I think you are right to be skeptical of psychedelic drugs. If you have doubts about the efficacy of the drugs as a treatment, I encourage you to skim a few of the most relevant studies. Under quantifiable circumstances, psychedelic drugs produce reliable and positive benefits to the mental health of certain types of individuals.
I think I am mostly skeptical about peoples description of their own experiences and I am also concerned that we don't have a metric to measure the diminished objective evaluation of reality that I see in so many people.
It seems pretty clear that psychedelics can allow reforming certain thought patterns outside what would be possible otherwise. I just hope not all of the people running the experiments are participating in the experiment as well.
> They common quality is that the experiences sound disconnected from reality. They try to explain the experience and are fully convinced they learned some fundamental truth but can't explain it in any way that makes sense.
$0.02 — psychedelics help you understand the way the world is by allowing you to temporarily experience the way the world isn't. most of these fundamental truths just get verbalized as platitudes because, well, they're widely-understood fundamental truths. the benefit is in examining them with a new parallax.
> there seems to be a lot of downside in breaking critical thinking in a lot of people's heads.
agreed inasmuch as psychedelics sometimes do induce long-lasting, harmful delusions. but...the upside of breaking critical thinking for a little while is that you get to experience its limits as a mode of engaging with the world. and you get to put it back together from its constituent parts, and occasionally find that one of those parts might not belong in there.
My first "trip" I came away with the following insights, which I would not describe as particularly profound.
First, that I could sometimes be too hard on myself, for no benefit.
Second, that I had a tendency to drive my body around like a crappy old station wagon I didn't care about, some kind of hand-me-down; I realized "I am the station wagon, when I wreck this one, that's it."
Each subsequent trip did leave me with a kind of refreshed feeling, like I had the vents blown out and the floor scrubbed. That's about as ineffable as I got. Perhaps I lack imagination.
I don't think it's really that you lack imagination; it's that the human condition is quite universal in a lot of ways so the insights you gleaned were not particularly novel. But the real value is in actually taking the insights to heart, rather than dismissing them as empty platitudes.
Perhaps you lack imagination, perhaps you lack dose, setting, mood, etc. Have you tried different kinds of music to go along with these? Have you tried to isolate from most of your senses like sight? It's a very different experience to trip fully awake and out and about vs headphones in, eyes closed, lying down.
The benefit to me is that you can understand how other people see the world. Psychedelics strip away the "you" of perception. Instead, it allows you to see the world for how it actually is and understand how different everybody perceives the world.
For me, it helped me understand that nobody cares about what I do and that really helped my social anxiety. Everyone sees the world so differently that I shouldn't worry what other people think of me.
If you work a lot on yourself, you always end up learning things you can't explain to others.
When you approach life intellectually, because it has been your best weapon until now, you tend to think that if you understand something clearly, then you can express it as clearly.
But just like it's impossible to explain blue to a blind man, it's impossible to explain realizations about what happens inside yourself, to people outside. Or maybe you'll find a way (E.G: frequency for colors), but it will have no impact on the other party because the experience it what matters.
It's weird, but there are actually a lot that happens to us that we have no vocabulary for. Or no language tools, or even shared concepts, for. It's very frustrating, espacially if you are particularly good at putting things in words.
I like step by step explanations to get a grap on things. It infuriated me when I had to learn practices that weren't taught that way. It felt such BS. But I now know that it's not. It's just our way of communicating is limited, like everything in the human condition. And the more you practice, the more you see things you didn't notice before in yourself. It's no surprise we got no word for something we seldom pay attention to.
Knowing that now, I understand why so many self-help practices seems so full of shenanigans: testimonies look irrational, full of terrible analogies and symbolism, or flat "duh, bro".
Plus, people create complicated believe systems around their experience and mix up everything. We are so desperate for the extraordinary that we will make it up at any occasion. E.G: meditation is a very mondain activity, but the term is loaded with a lot of stereotypes, expectations and mythology.
It's confusing, and doesn't scream credibility.
Also, we reuse the same labels for totally different things. I've seen hundred of people taking about psychedelics or meditating, and they do it in vastly different ways.
If you take LSD at a party, it's not the same than in a guided ceremony. If you medidate 10 minutes singing a mantra, it's not the same than a 10 days silent retreat, etc.
Then, add variety in people, the fact experience can't be measured, that there is no way to be objective about it, the placebo effect, history, culture, politics, moral, religion, other believes, etc.
Personally, doing mushrooms helped me work out some stuff for my PhD thesis research. What he says about making your brain more plastic is the key point. I thought about things from a new angle, which directly informs my current research.
I also saw palpably how much I judge myself in every moment of the day, which I had never realized before. Reducing that judgement has become an important goal. That's just useful. It's not wacky far-out magic thinking.
Now, if I tried to describe to you the beauty of what I saw, I would say it looks like a cathedral, and have to stop there, or it will start to sound like nonsense. But that's only because we don't have useful language to discuss the specifics of the experience, so we have to try to use metaphors, which easily sound like BS, unless you've seen it yourself. But then, the metaphors used to describe any specialist field sounds a bit like BS if you don't have the technical language, or direct experience, to make sense of it.
I'm pretty sure others have better answers than I do on whether objects we appreciate and describe as beautiful have intrinsic quality or if the entirety of the beauty exists only in the observer. I believe that there is an interplay between observer and object but I don't think I could prove it to you. However, if there was a pill that made me believe that something I previously thought was terrible and ugly was the most beautiful thing I had seen, that would not convince me that objects had no inherent beauty, just that the my brain was easily manipulated.
Ha, right, perhaps I hallucinated separately the image and the emotion that it is beautiful. My guess (just a guess) is that the images were themselves generated by the parts of the brain that register beauty, and so were beautiful by definition. If that's not true, I suspect that if you sat a large sample of people to look at these images, most would agree they were beautiful.
Maybe because psychedelics don't teach you any new "objective" information but rather a completely different (and convincing) way to interpret the information you already had.
"Our perception of time flow is just an illusion". Any smart person understands what that sentence means, but the default state of your brain is believing the illusion, so you don't really feel it, you only understand the concept.
When I was on LSD, time flow being an illusion was the default state of my brain. No need to make a mental effort to understand anything. It felt as natural as breathing.
But it's hard to explain these natural things without sounding line a crazy person.
I am not the parent, so I cannot comment on this specific realization.
But if I may, I want to give a point of data of one effect in the actual world beyond the illusion of the drug, which I believe is what you asked:
During an LSD trip one day, I could easily imagine the vision of a third party watching us, the human race, as one would observe ants going on with their lives. This observation would span across all the civilizations though time on earth, like an epic movie/dream if you will.
In this imaginative "history of the human race" playing before me, I could see myself as I was, that is only a faint bleep, that one day was born, and the day after would die.
This made me feel how insignificant we are, and how futile our day-to-day vexations can be.
This is not a new idea, I was aware before the trip that we are not a lot in the grand scheme of things. But feeling it is another thing.
Having at this very moment as little emotional attachment to my own life as anyone would have to Mr Random Smith born in 1865, made me _feel_ how little we all are, and how almost everyone really live in the illusion that their life, their values, is somehow so important and timeless, whereas in reality, it is probably just a result of being born at a time and a place. In short: life is short, and values are very relative.
So I came back from this trip having understood more of the world. Not as if I magically understood the very fabric of reality. Not as if I became a saint, as if every issue in the world has been revealed to me as self-evident. But as if I became a little wiser, by the simple virtue of taking off my ego for a few hours (if not for real, at least in feeling).
This realization, this feeling, I came back with it. I keep it constantly with me, still to this day. It helped me grow as a person.
And it really helps me to put my daily vexations into perspective. I am more serene because of that. This, to me, is not an illusion, but an actual helpful epiphany I had.
I don't think the article is arguing that the specifics of what people see in an LSD or Psilocybin trip are of significance. Rather it's the shift of perspective that often results that can be of benefit. For someone with an incurable illness, the fear of death might make their final years unbearable. An experience that deemphasises the self and puts life in context (which is what some have described) seems like a valuable treatment.
From my own personal experiences, the most profound, impactful realization I had was in simply seeing my mental state change in an irregular way. It makes you suddenly aware of all the things you've taken for granted in your mental life that suddenly seem so fluid and malleable. The observation of lots of mental walls suddenly coming down and being free in your own head, that sticks with you.
Lots of good answers here. And I think there’s reason to be skeptical.
One concrete thing I’ve taken out of it is greater empathy for my kids’ lived experience. Alison Gopnik at Berkeley talks about how fmri studies suggest that the increased connectivity between different regions of the brain on psychedelics shows some similarities to children’s brains at all times.
I can sense in my kids, particularly the one with some sensory processing issues, just how overwhelming certain situations can be by analogizing to my experiences with psychedelics. I look at her and think, yeah, I wouldn’t be able to handle this birthday party either if my brain was in that state.
There are a number of common-phrases I'll hear like "everything is connected" or "everything is alive/sentient."
However, not everything is connected, effective thinking is very much about identifying independent problems. Also I certainly don't believe everything is alive, and I certainly don't think this opinion should be held on the basis of chemicals rather than scientific data.
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Edit: And what's most disconcerting is that they seem to think these phrases "mean" something. If they said "Well, there's really no way I can articulate it, but it's changed my emotional outlook on a lot of things" then I'd be much more receptive.
I guess what gets me is that there is a hidden premise in scientific materialism that _nothing_ is alive and _nothing_ is connected, because it starts with inanimate fundamental parts and tries to build up to reality.
From a psychedelic perspective, that's backwards - if you start, instead, from "what are my perceptions" and try to extrapolate out, you start to find that the default assumptions assume there's a boundary somewhere - "light hits my retina so I see it" "my optic nerve sends a signal so I see it" "certain neurons fire so I see it" but there's no firm place to draw the line "this is where the light stops and where the perception begins", your body and the light are one machine, going from the big bang through the star through space through objects through your eye through your brain - there's no solid boundary between any of those things, it's one long unbroken string of causality.
Or, you're having a conversation with a friend, and you realize that all of the words, all of the concepts, the patterns of your speech, are all things that you got from somewhere else, they flow through you, from person to person, throughout history - you're not having a conversation, the conversation is having _you_
Or, you start thinking about your life and the world and you think about incredible pain you've experienced. And great beauty you've seen. And your greatest fear. And your greatest joy. And you realize - the palette of your experience has _incredible_ dynamic range, like your brain is some kind of magnificent radio and the music it plays is every perception you have - from colors and smells to the most complicated ideas are all things it can receive or transmit or something .... but who is listening?
Or any of thousands of other non-normal schemas. None of these function as scientific knowledge - they're shifts in perspective, but they don't make new predictions (or if they do, those predictions can be re-explaned back into the scientific materialist metaphor!).
And while the goal of science is to see reality as it really is, there's a default perspective to science, which is to isolate components to see how they work in a simplified context, and then to say "the complexity of reality is just like the simplicity of the simplified contexts, only without the simplification" which is a super interesting hallucination but I don't see why it's any more _correct_ than any of the other visions of complexity
One of the best explanations of it I've seen. Touches on the magic feeling of it (how would having a direct feeling of perception of the causal chain of the entire universe possibly not feel magical and profound) without depending on the reader having had a psychedelic experience to understand.
That state of direct sense of universal causal connection is achievable sober. Not meditation either (though I hear thats one reliable way too). I accidentally "clicked" into it one day while thinking about the border between my skin and inanimate objects. I thought about the idea of my skin being part of me, my control of this reality, and the objects being somehow just entirely separate. It started to seem to make no sense that I can understand and feel in a deep way that my hand is mine but what it touches is something else. I then started thinking about how the hand seems like its mine, but really only seems like that because of nerves etc. connecting it to my brain. That became a thought about how I can even maintain a coherent mind across the space the brain exists in, and soon enough it clicked and I knew it. It was simultaneously a bit exciting, and profoundly calming.
I don't think I had any direct major life improvement from that realization alone however. It took psychedelics to understand how to use that perspective to snap out of anger or rise above anxious fears.
This is one of the best articulations I've come across. For me, it sparked the realization that the boundary line between (to cite your example) light and perception is on some level an arbitrary distinction between words, that reality is continuous but language is quantized and the relationship between the two is malleable. There are numerous other paths to this insight, but for me it turned an intellectual understanding into a gut-level one.
Foucault, for instance, penned this anecdote about Borges in his introduction to "The Order of Things" five years before he took acid out in death valley:
“This book first arose out of a passage in [Jorge Luis] Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.”
Here is a six hour mathematically rigorous lecture by John Conway in which he argues either everything has free will or nothing has free will. I’m not trying to convince you everything is sentient, but to introduce some doubt in your black & white thinking. https://youtu.be/tmx2tpcdKZY
That's a very particular definition of "free will": it's either everything follows a deterministic time evolution (so its future behavior is dependent only on what happened in its past light-cone) or not. It's not the "intuitive" idea of "free will" most people are used to, though that isn't a well-defined concept.
Probably a better explanation is everything is whole. The problem is you are trying to envision it from the perspective of analysis, when what they are describing is a visualization of their feelings, emotions, and perceptions sometimes we don't understand our feelings, psychedelics given the right circumstances can change the perceptions of our feelings and emotions, rewire our inputs and cause us to visualize/hear/physically feel them. That is why it sounds like gibberish when someone tried to describe them. It would be akin, to all the sudden you vision and touch where reversed, how would you describe touching blue, or seeing cold, how would anyone who has never experienced it relate.
This is also why, it can be an effective mental health tool, because it rewires inputs and outputs and allows different parts of our brain to experience our feelings or our thoughts. Sometimes profound ideas come from it, sometime it just a bunch of dumb gibberish.
"Everything is connected" is a description of the sensation, not a statement of a scientific fact.
My personal experience was like this: This was nearly 30 years ago, I was 13 and invested some time in 'accidentally' meditating - I just looked at a spot on my roof for a long time. Then suddenly - wham - I literally feel a deep connection between everything I look at. The trees outside my window, the world, everything.
Let me provide an analogue. You can feel pain, yes? You can feel moving your foot? You feel your hands are part of you? Well, it was like that, only, I felt that everything was connected.
Was it just neurons firing in my head, creating a strange mode of sensations for a while? Yes. Was it devoid of deeper scientific significance? Yes. Was it profound? Hell yes.
Deeply spiritual experiences don't need to be mystical or attached to a larger theological context. They can be taken as a non-magical, psychological state of mind just like sleep or orgasm. This does not make them any less profound.
If those are say, you and I, or you and the parent comment, how are they seperate?
We're experiencing identical perception right now, me in the form of reading the words you wrote, and you in the form of reading these words. The words are just information which is now duplicated in both our minds. When the psychedelic "everything is connected" concept is brought up, this is what is meant. Its not some new magic that has been discovered, its realizing that the mundane everyday mechanics that allow our reality to function, are in fact quite magical, not mundane at all. But anyone can still choose to see it as mundane, its just a choice of lens.
That's the most prevalent modern Christian view but many traditions have some version of monopsychism, where the many souls are a manifestation of the one God, or Allah, or Brahman, or Buddha-nature
What you're fetishising is called "Scientism". It was pretty en vogue at the end of the 18th century, and arguably led to the rise of both fascism and communism: Both schools of thought, though widely different in almost everything, wanted to rid themselves of all the "feelings" and "sentimentalities" (and jews) that felt superfluous in the coming age of machines and facts and science and progress.
Root comment stated that taking psychedelics made him want to explore the universe more. This sounds like a concrete, positive, and sane outcome. There is a voice inside the psychedelic community that does claim to preach deep fundamental truths, but there is also a reemerging scientific and clinical voice that are using psychedelics for concrete, positive, sane outcomes.
Michael Pollen’s How to Change Your Mind is a 2018 survey of this voice.
The word commonly used for this sort of thing is "ineffable" - that which cannot be put into words.
If you want to see a less "these are magical" and more "here's some science" perspective, you might like "How to Change Your Mind" by Michael Pollan. Always very down to earth, gets into some mechanics of effects, well written and engaging.
Everything you consider objective reality is filtered through your senses and your subjective perceptions. Psychedelics highlight this by applying novel transformations to our processing of the input stream. It’s a bit like how you perceive the world differently when under the influence of emotions like fear, anger, or love, but more dramatic. They reinforce that reality is first a mental construction: it’s less fixed and more malleable than most of us have ever considered.
So when you say that people’s experiences with psychedelics seem disconnected from reality, it might be because you have an incomplete picture of how fluid, complex, and inherently incomprehensible this thing we call “reality” really is.
I think part of is that it changes your sense of what "disconnected from reality" means. It's not like a dream where you wake up and say _ohh that was a dream_. It's more like, _ohh my whole reality is a dream, all the time_
Do you think it is possible that there are truths that cannot be articulated in words? Is it possible that there are meaningful experiences that cannot be easily conveyed by language?
There are many parallels one can draw between accounts of psychedelic experiences and mystical or spiritual experiences brought about by other methods, such as (but not limited to) meditation, ritual, music, or fasting. I haven't really read an account of such phenomena that really captures the full weight of its direct experience. Indeed, there are many ancient and continuing traditions that use psychedelic substances in a religious capacity. If one doesn't think there's any meaning in such realms of human activity then I think that's their personal answer.
Have you read the Doors of Perception [0]? It's a fairly lucid, but ultimately limited, account of psychedelic experience by Aldous Huxley. Perhaps they did send a poet :^)
> They common quality is that the experiences sound disconnected from reality.
Well here's the thing, and it's something one can realize in a very visceral way in the middle of a trip: There is no disconnecting from reality. Your experience is always some incomplete part of reality, some part of the reality of your body. I think you knew that and were getting at something else.
What I guess you mean by this: In normal operation our cognitive experience seems to "refer" to the outside world in a carefully regulated way. That makes sense because we think in order to understand and interact with our environment in predictable ways. If our cognitive processes wildly differed from the reality relevant to our safety and well-being, we would die. So, our senses are well calibrated by a constant feedback loop between cognitive processes, interaction with our environment, and perception of our environment. We are so well accustomed to this calibration that it is difficult to even perceive it unless we are very carefully attentive to our own thoughts.
Psychedelics can throw all of your cognitive processes out of that control loop that keeps them in tune with external reality. But that doesn't disconnect them from reality, your cognitive processes are part of reality. So, what are you experiencing? What are you when you are not being pushed constantly into alignment with the Other? If you could see your normal experience in the context of a much wider possibility of experience, how would that change you? It's very plausible that this kind of insight would elude even the most precise language.
All that said, I don't think psychedelics are for everyone. Some people are very sensitive to being brought out of their normal cognition and have a hard time finding their way back. I think maybe in a far future when we have reached a very advanced state of medical understanding, psychedelics could be sufficiently understood and nuanced that they could be "for everybody".
> Do you think it is possible that there are truths that cannot be articulated in words? Is it possible that there are meaningful experiences that cannot be easily conveyed by language?
In a vague sense, yes, but I think I'm making is subtly different. I think many people struggle to turn important ideas in their heads into clear words. This synthesis is largely what separates smart people from people who change the world. My observation is that psychedelics seem to place the idea in a persons head that they have synthesized some fundamental truth, but their explanation of it doesn't sound like a difficulty putting a complex idea into words, but instead they discover that that thing they are convinced is a fundamental truth is actually just an empty shell. They have just broken the part of their brain capable of realizing that there is nothing there but an emotional belief.
From personal experience, the depression-alleviating effects of mushrooms are not caused by grand spiritual experiences (although death acceptance and a general feeling of spiritual peace do accompany the experience) so much as mental clarity that causes very powerful, practical gestalt shifts. Here's a deliberately boring but true example:
I used to be very disinterested in cleaning and tidying. I live way up in my head most days, and if I let myself, I can go weeks without really looking at myself or my environment. When I tripped the first time, I looked around myself and really saw my living situation for the first time, in profound relief. It was like cleaning grease off a camera lens. I was a stereotypical 20-something depressed academic living alone, "in filth" so to speak. I realized very clearly and distinctly that I was choosing to create this environment, and that my habit of neglecting tidiness and hygiene was an affectation I was choosing out of irrational pride (I was clinging to the childish notion that being bothered by filth was irrational and a waste of time and energy better spent working). I just... saw all that clearly, in a manner of a few seconds, and made up my mind to change my behavior. That decision has improved my life, and generally made me a happier and more functional human being (as well as a better partner to others). I've expanded on that realization to make my external demeanor and appearance more approachable, and taken the gruff, sometimes nasty edge out of my personality. This has not, to my knowledge, diminished my productivity.
Having tripped a few times, each time I've discovered and confronted some new set of facts about myself and how I think and behave that, upon sober examination, are true.
The last time I tripped on mushrooms I was overwhelmed by the cacophony of toxic thoughts that were bubbling up in my head "unbidden". It was like hearing my voice recorded for the first time - it was definitely the familiar thoughts I had every day, but I realized just how weirdly cruel and unnecessary they were. That led me into daily sitting and paying attention to the shit stew bubbling around in my head, which has really helped short-circuit some of the bizarre self-flagellating depressive thought loops that used to paralyze me.
Again, just from personal experience, mushrooms remove barriers to self-perception, and put you in a frame of mind for having powerful realizations about yourself and your relationship with the world.
They ALSO can produce some absolutely mind-blowing spiritual ecstasy, feelings of oneness with the world, an expanded appreciation of the way the natural world works, awareness and acceptance of death... but for my two cents, the big value proposition is ripping away the mental filters we impose unconsciously on ourselves that cause unnecessary suffering.
Would NOT be a nice if everyone ended up suicidal and manic, like my best friend after one particularly bad trip. He's still on treatment and out of society, by the way, 6 years so far :(
Yep I have personally witnessed a friend lose his mind. Years later he is not back to normal. This was a man that I had once admired greatly. To see him deteriorate into a disillusioned stranger was terrifying and heart-breaking. Be careful folks! Don't play with drugs when your mind isn't in the right place or if you're currently going through something in life. Make sure you have a positive mindset, do it in a very safe environment with people that you are very comfortable with because there will likely be long periods of silence.
It’s almost like mental health is just like our physical health. Not preparing ones self for changes or heavy lifting can cause muscle failure. Why is your brain any different?
I support psychedelics but you need someone who’s borderline a psychotherapist to escort you the first time and guide you long term. Too many people just swallow a pill without thinking of side effects...
Edit: Downvoted... I spent a year researching MDMA and preparing my brain for the toxic effects before taking it recreationally for the first time. Had the best ever experience and never had the ectasy hangover that’s so common with the drug.. you need to mentally prepare before doing psychoactive drugs and if you can’t you need a sitter and be ready for the possibility of a bad time.
I highly disagree, mostly because I've yet to see any real long-term studies that show that taking psychedelics actually benefits people long term to the point where we should make literally everyone take it. I have an illness on the psychotic spectrum that I wasn't able to get treatment or addressment for until my 20's, which is when such disorders can begin manifesting if they are to manifest. Psychotic and dissociative disorders are also a significant portion of the human population and are often neglected or straight up ignored in discussions like this.
We shouldn't make literally everyone take it, that's silly. The John's Hopkins studies do show sustained long term (6-12 months) clinical improvements for about 80% of test subjects -- from a single dose. No other psychopharmaceutical drug comes close to such success, much less with a single dose.
Test subjects that are highly selected for to avoid the exact conditions I was describing. We need larger studies before we make such bold claims that potentially make invisible or completely overlook the variety of mental conditions that this sort of plan would expose people of. Additionally, 6 to 12 months is not nearly long enough to say that an entire population should be dosed with a drug.
Yes, anyone trying to push these drugs on literally everyone is a fool. The reason people with pre-existing psychosis like schizophrenia are being ruled out of such studies is because the risk is plainly obvious.
That's why doctors often prescribe medicine with the caveat "do not take drug A if you have conditions XYZ"
Which is why I'm highly disagreeing with the concept that such drugs should be widely or anywhere near universally taken. You'll likely have a significant subset of people who shouldn't be taking this medication, either due to being related to someone with a psychotic or dissociative disorder, or having one themselves. I also worry about people whose existing schizotypal traits are within normal bounds but may be exaggerated by psychedelics to a negative outcome.
High doses of psychedelics literally induces schizophrenia in its users, albeit for a brief amount of time, so it makes sense why that could be dangerous for people already living in such a state
My experience with psychedelics was unpleasant and gave me anxiety for months. I don't think "everyone trying them" is a good idea. They can be great for certain people in certain situations, but are not without dangers.
Yeah I would be in support of everyone trying them in a supportive setting with some professional oversight. Definitely would not recommend going it alone.
Agreed, more access to psychedelics in a safe and professional setting would be really good. I wish I had had been able to do that for my experiences -- as it stands, I think they're ruined for me forever. (I'm okay with that though, one lesson I learned was that I could learn anything psychedelics could teach me using other methods.)
If you don't mind I'd be interested in hearing more details. I'm personally really curious about stories like this, mostly because I have the opinion the world would be better off if more people tried lsd or something once.
Sorry to hear that. Hopefully we'll learn enough to prevent such mismatches and to freely allow petitioning wanderers to become holy fools for a brief time.
Note: Done 200+ trips w/ 2 bad ones in the first 10.
> Would be a nice world indeed if everyone tried psychedelics
Sometimes I think grandiose statements like these are a consequence of the idea that this kind of insight is only achievable through the use of psychedelics, when in fact they’re not.
They are a shortcut to insights, that without, might take a person years to come upon otherwise. And that is if they are actively trying. For most people who aren't normally driven to spend a lot of time actively self-reflecting and critically observing their world with the intent on finding truth, rather than merely confirming their beliefs, psychedelics might be the only way to kickstart things. An important property of psychedelics is that they peel away the ego, which frees one to confront ideas that might normally be too uncomfortable to think about. Of course, psychedelics are not for everyone. Like, it's probably not a good idea for people with, or at risk of developing serious mental illness. And no one should ever feel pressured to take them if they feel uncomfortable about it. But the effects are long lasting-to-permanent with regard to opening one up to seeing the world in new ways, askings questions, and not taking for granted that things are as they seem. So while I agree with you that the idea that everyone should take psychedelics is grandiose, I also agree with OP's sentiment that the world would be a nicer place if more people took them. There's too many people roaming around thinking they've got it all figured out and that there's not much else to the world than what they are familiar with in their own little bubbles. Psychdelics, essentially immediately, pop your bubble and alert you to a much wider plane of existence. It's humbling, while at the same time reassuring, to truly get a sense that we are all connected. And I think it's rare for people to actually experience this without the aid of psychedelics.
I know plenty of close minded people that took psychedelics. I could even argue that psychedelic users tend to be more close minded than the rest of the population —- their religious devotion to these drugs is to me a great example of fundamentalism and rigidness of thought, and the notion that these drugs can be nothing but good betrays arrogance (since insight inherently positions them above the “square” masses that did not take the red pill). I don’t like when religious leaders tell me how I should experience life, and some of the rhetoric by psychedelic users is worryingly similar.
I could also use philosophy to question the very nature of these insights. On what basis does one affirm psychedelic trips provides greater access to reality than regular conscious states?
No one should be telling you that you have to take them, that's as wrong as forcing your religion on somebody. You do you. And as I said, it isn't for everyone.
There's enough research and annecdotal evidence to show that there are indeed positive effects for a lot of people who take them, however.
Certainly, if you're not open to reflecting, you're not going to not going to come to any realization no matter how stoned or sober you are.
And no, I wouldn't say psychedelics get you access to some hidden realty. We all have access to the same thing, they just make it easier to access more of it quicker than if you, say, spent ten years of your life meditating every day. As I said, it's a shortcut, and for some people it can be the kick in the pants that they need to get the ball rolling.
Oh yeah there are lots of evidence showing psychedelics can be useful for sure. I just don’t have much patience for religious zealots, even when they’re part of my own religion.
This isn't true and it's not ok to assume this. In general, the psychedelic community must stop overlaying their own subjective experiences on to other people.
Psychedelics can help, but they can also harm. Psychedelics, like everything else in this world, are viable for some but not all. What we need is research without stigma and WoOoO to determine what is going on, why, and how we can shape that into a therapeutic regime coupled with counseling and support.
You need to be very careful extrapolating your personal experiences towards the masses.
Humans are a violent, vengeful, petty species. Modern society does a great job of discouraging and masking those qualities, making the youngsters of this generation feel like those qualities hardly exist!
They do, and brain altering drugs might re-activate those qualities and then some, you need to be very careful.
"Modern society does a great job of discouraging and masking those qualities,"
Until you attempt to shake another's position in a social hierarchy (wittingly or not). Violence, vengeance, and pettiness are not only driven by barbaric feelings. They're strategies! Ones that disgust my intrinsic aesthetics, and probably yours, but which nonetheless are wielded. So let the timid have their controlled experience with such things so that when the wolf "of man known as man" attempts to ambush them, they can drive it off.
But since we're talking about psychedelics like LSD, awakening those qualities seems like a rare experience. I think majority experience would be a light in a tunnel that younger generations seem funneled into as everything around them is increasingly predatory ala ads, distraction, substandard diets, and probably a million other parasites. Being able to shed that for a brief bit and to not shoulder the heaviness of all your frustrations and expectations is immense.
I don't deny the benefits of escapism and novel experiences. I'm an escapism expert myself :)
I'm simply against people experimenting with substances that don't undergo any quality control and that may result in your brain being scrambled for extended periods of time afterwards.
We should decriminalize drugs, research them and offer psychedelic holidays, it's a complete no-brainer, but until then, the risk/reward ratio is simply not in favor of taking the chance, not to mention all the problems of dealing with drug dealers - you don't want your source of consciousness exploration being tied to someone willingly being a criminal.
An anecdotal experience shouldn't leap to a nice world indeed if everyone tried something like I did. How did it inspire you to explore this universe more is what I'm interested in.
The experience is so far out of the realm of reality, that when you try to explain to a non-user it sounds like absolute mumbo-jumbo gibberish.
Like Leary said "Turn on, Tune in, Drop out".
Salvia can be one of the strongest "psychedelics" (it's not really a classic psychedelic even), and can completely replace reality with something else. Often a bizarre 2D experience where someone "becomes" the floor, or the siding of a house, or whatever. Or transported to some alternative reality completely unlike our own.
It can also be extremely dysphoric and terrifying. I personally wouldn't recommend it to anyone. I have heard that chewing it produces a less dysphoric experience than smoking it though, and is how it was used in traditional ceremonies.
Not sure how much you took and in what way. For me it was a complete loss of self memory (ego death) and a very bizzare experience which unlike most other psychedelics was also tactile and not that pleasant. And after few min you are back to being fully sober.
The last time I smoked Salvia was the most intense, spiritual out-of-body experience I've ever had. While it was profound, it was also truly terrifying and did not feel good for me at all. I think salvia is very misunderstood and underestimated by most people. You give up all control when you take a serious dose, you're just along for the ride.
Mushrooms feel wonderfully natural and therapeutic on the other hand.
