Also there's no such thing as a negative emotion. Everything we feel is a necessary (or at least programmed) reaction to our experience.
Also emotions aren't things with sentience that can manipulate you. Either you are at peace with them and rational in how you live them out, or you are not.
I hope I don't come accross as pedantic or condescending, I truly do think we dramatize certain aspects of our psyches that would otherwise be healthier.
(I don't know anything about LSD but I still feel that you're romanticizing it a bit.)
We as a society have changed so much since then. We either need to undo some changes or work out new ways to get along with death. On the other hand, band-aids may be good as temporary solution. But it's definitely not "the right prescription"...
The other change expectations of continuity. All religions have some sort of explanation for death. Whatever the explanation was, one of the reasons was to comfort people. Meanwhile today's popular explanation is void.
Of course people are scared of unknown emptiness. Both the process and what comes after that are totally unknown today, while they were rather clear not so long ago.
Have you ever met someone with emotional issues, i.e. anger management issues? There are indeed many people with habitual "programmed" emotional responses which are detrimental to their well being and are extremely difficult to manage.
You might like to read the works of the evolutionary pyschologist and athropologist Dr. Paul Eckman. He posits that emotions are valuable life saving forces that help us act quickly in critical situations without having to think. However, our emotional habits have also evolved over many thousands of years, and so many of the emotional responses which may have saved our life as a paleolithic hunter gatherers may no longer be relevant and can have the opposite effect in a civilized society.
As far as I know, the problem with anger management is not the anger itself, it's how you deal with it so it doesn't overwhelm you, and so you can have less of it. What I mean is that it's a symptom, not the issue itself. It's normal to be angry when someone is a jerk to you, it's healthy even, and so it's not* inherently "bad" (as we so often portray anger and sadness). The problem is when you let it get away from you.
I hope I understand correctly that your last paragraph is agreeing with my comment. If not, then I should have extended the notion of "necessary" to "useful", in the sense that you are describing. However the problem with evo psych is that it's largely non-falsifiable. The part you are describing is somewhat an obligatory aspect of evolution, but evo psychologists and anthropologists tend to draw conclusions that aren't rigorous (in my opinion). This is coming from someone who has 30 credits in Anthropology from a few years back :)
Generally there is no harm in theorizing, but I consider psychology and psychotherapy to be too important to allow ourselves to consider untested information. I do agree that other people may find Dr Eckman interesting... I don't but others might ;)
Psychology and psychotherapy are almost wholly theoretical, subjective, soft sciences, rather than objectively testable hard sciences like physics and biology.
>psychiatric diagnosis still relies exclusively on fallible subjective judgments rather than objective biological tests".[1][2]
-Allen Frances
I've been trying to get a straight answer to this for years.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm very pro legalisation of the less harmful drugs, and decriminalisation and management of the addictive nasties. And I'm not short on psychedelic experience either. But I don't get it. Personal growth I can see, short and long term changes in ones relationship with oneself, absolutely but... what does society look like?
It's not like we don't already know the people in charge are crooks and bullies, how does LSD, DMT or psilocybin change this? I know a lot of folks who have indulged at points in their lives and all are fairly successful capitalists these days.
(Oh and the whole "spiritual dimension" must have passed me by. I'm pretty sure that these substances can induce a sense of the profound, but I'm a lot less sure there's anything beyond that sense)
Sure, it may make no sense that alcohol and tobacco are legal but weed and mushrooms aren't. They're all natural substances, they are all mood altering, they are all capable of being enjoyed in moderation and also can cause harm if used in excess.
But though alcohol and tobacco are legal, for whatever good or not good reasons, that isn't a logical argument for making more intoxicants legal.
"Alcohol is legal, therefore anything less harmful than that should also be legal" isn't a logical argument?
To be clear I don’t buy this argument since I disagree with the premise, but if you agree with the premise then it does make sense.
The point, of course, is that comparable harm from alcohol is not dispositive in the discussion of a ban on hallucinogens.
Obviously, the notion that LSD is no more harmful than whiskey is also not broadly accepted in our public policy, or really the public policy of most western countries. So there's (at least) two hurdles for your argument to clear. But I'm stipulating the latter argument, because it's the logic you're employing that bugs me, not the equivalence you're trying to draw.
These are positive arguments, not normative ones.
When you are saying you will take someone's freedom, their employment prospects, their whole life away because of possession of a substance, you need to be able to justify what you're doing, and to show how the action you are taking to suppress the substance is not causing much more harm.
Look at the war on drugs - that argument has been resoundingly lost. States and countries are starting to realise it.
More likely most of us don't understand the connection between the material world and these dimensions, and whether they truly are separate or not.