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Comment by drzaiusapelord | Hacker News Reader

Counterpoint: No. I feel like you just trade one set of delusions for another with psychedelics. Talking to plants or rocks isn't real, its just another way the ego and the imaginative part of the mind plays with itself.

If you're looking for consciousness expanding activities, I found my meditation practice and buddhist readings were 1000x more powerful than my drug attempts. For an HN'er I'd recommend starting with this:

https://www.amazon.com/Why-Buddhism-True-Philosophy-Enlighte...

as its more sciency/modern than diving into the Pali Canon or popular but dated 1960s attempts to westernize Buddhism.

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A lot of people come to Buddhism through psychedelics, and some use them to enhance their practice.

Check out Erik Davis' article "The Paisley Gate":

https://techgnosis.com/tantra-of-psychedelics/

Ego dissolution is an extremely common occurrence among mushroom users, and leads a lot of people to meditation, and eastern philosophy.

Also to brush off the 'imaginative part of the mind', i.e. your subconscious so readily is absurd. It drives us far more than our intellect would care to admit, and having a chance to interact with it so directly is very 'real', and not a delusion.

The illusion of ego dissolution maybe, I mean this is difficult to quantify, but we do have research that shows the brain changes experienced meditators get dont happen to psychedelic users. Every psychedelic user is back to being an egotist quickly in my experience while the meditators I know seem far less egotist and are always advancing.

I don't think there are shortcuts to enlightenment and drug culture posturing is just fraudulent to me, or at best, a cheap and ugly temporary fix that ultimately distracts people from the proper path. That said, it does push some people to the right path, so it can't be all bad. The larger issue is that a lot of people have latent schizophrenia and its impossible to know if you do and drugs can set it off. Its not worth the risk imo.

This happened to someone close to me and it was difficult and heartbreaking.

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