Acid test: on drugs and science fiction (2017)
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> In just a minute or two, you’ll discover a vast increase in your mental abilities—a sureness of thought, a breadth of understanding, and a rapidity and sureness of reasoning you never achieved before…Of course your brilliant realizations and mighty discoveries somehow seem to misfire when you come down off that jag
I believe this covers quite a lot of the amazing 'realisations' people have whilst on psychedelics like LSD, as well. And I'm not speaking from ignorance here, but as one who has tried around 10 different natural and synthetic psychedelics. They are beautiful, I'm not going to dispute that they can change the way we think of ourselves and the world around us. But...
The utopianist ideas of "If everyone just tried this, there would be no war, we could get rid of government and all look after each other, and the world would be as one!" are wishful thinking. As illustrated by the vast majority of the communal living projects started in the late 60s and early 70s.
I agree that people significantly overstate this point, but I think there is some kernel of truth to it. The government experimented with psychedelics, and decided to ban them. I think that's because they perceived them as a threat to the established order in some way (I know I could be wrong). But yeah, dropping acid won't make you into a wonderful human being overnight. Honestly I think MDMA would go further if the goal is making everyone love each other, but the neurotoxicity of it seems sketchy, and it doesn't make your thoughts and perceptions as... interesting. I think the main utility of acid to society will be in microdoses, though real trips have their place as well.
But as for realizations that are had, typically the value isn't in anything thought of while on LSD, but from the lasting change of perspective in months afterward. Realizations can happen on it, but they seem minimal. The closest thing would be that one point while on it I realized I was fully capable of holding two contradictory beliefs and simply consciously ignoring where they contradict. The thing is, a realization like that leads to greater realizations about how your own brain works.
> I know of no work of art, essay, story, discovery, or anything else of value created as a result of LSD. When the acid-droppers start outdistancing the squares in any field, I’ll sit up and take notice.
Heinlein wrote some decent novels but I keep coming across pretty closed-minded, strong opinions in quotations of his. Many great musicians were known to have had LSD inspire their creations. The Beatles, Coltrane, the Beach Boys to name a few. Some of Huxley's work was influenced by it, and the biochemist Kary Mullis credits it with helping him develop the PCR method for DNA sequencing.
For a person of his time, that only puts him in the bottom 99% of open-mindedness.
People used to think sniffing ether, taking absinthe or breathing nitrous was incredibly profound. Until enough people did it that the evidence was underwhelming.
Michael Pollan's _How to Change Your Mind_ has a good overview of the attempted scientific research. Early research was tainted by overzealous experimenters, then research was banned for a long time, and recent studies have only been approved for serious conditions, like treatment-resistant depression.
The real problem is that creativity, the long-term generation of valuable ideas, is basically un-measurable. Scientific studies of "creativity" exist, but they all pull the ol' research switcheroo by measuring something easy to measure, rather than the kind of creativity that matters.
So, don't expect good scientific evidence of improved creativity, from any treatment, ever. That's as true for substances as for, say, whether to write on paper or at a computer. Most novelists swear by one or the other, but there's no feasible scientific study you can do to decide which produces objectively better novels. Same for whether meditation improves creativity.
(If you want to get into this line of research, start with meditation rather than psychedelics. It's much easier to get approved.)
For making your own plans about how to maximize your mental output, all you can really do is ask people whose works impresses you (and who are willing to talk about such things) what works for them, and then try those things to see if they work for you too. Being careful to compare the results side-by-side some time later, to reduce bias.
LSD is ... frankly, in my experience, a lot of bullshit. I've done enough of it in my youth to early adulthood to be annoyed I wasted those brain cells instead of thinking about interesting problems. I've also never seen anyone who it improved; mostly it seemed to increase people's self-regard.
Put it another way, invention and new ideas haven't exactly increased since Albert Hoffman's big idea. You'd expect there to be a lot more cool stuff if this were really true, as there are certainly a whole lot of people who have tripped balls in the last 50-60 years.
> "Several years ago, when I was ill, Heinlein offered his help, anything he could do, and we had never met; he would phone me to cheer me up and see how I was doing. He wanted to buy me an electric typewriter, God bless him—one of the few true gentlemen in this world. I don't agree with any ideas he puts forth in his writing, but that is neither here nor there. One time when I owed the IRS a lot of money and couldn't raise it, Heinlein loaned the money to me. I think a great deal of him and his wife; I dedicated a book to them in appreciation. Robert Heinlein is a fine-looking man, very impressive and very military in stance; you can tell he has a military background, even to the haircut. He knows I'm a flipped-out freak and still he helped me and my wife when we were in trouble. That is the best in humanity, there; that is who and what I love."
There are multiple ways to be an asshole, and so maybe we should say Heinlein sounds like an asshole, but by many accounts was kind to those who knew him well.
“An armed society is a polite society” is one that's floated often today among those pro-gun.
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
I've encountered people that take these as him being a fascist, asshole or prick. Personally, I agree with him on both counts, and consider most people to be lack contributions to the human race for their lack of desire to learn and become competent, or for their inability to learn. If that makes someone an asshole, so be it.
Heinlein has struck me as an asshole over the years. It's like his defining personality trait. I find PKD much more likeable.
Perhaps humans are complicated creatures and everyone has their bad moments.
I'm certainly not defending Dick's actions, but, I do think it is somewhat unfair to his memory and to yourself to hear about two (certainly very bad) instances and then decide unequivocally that he was just an asshole rather than a troubled man with good and bad qualities.
The one thing I'd say in defense of this quote is that it's from 1967. LSD had only been in major counter-culture circulation for a few years and a lot of the public advocates were people like Huxley and Leary who had produced documentary work on acid, but not major art. To a surprising degree, Heinlein was simply unlucky: acid-derived art got going right as he dismissed it.
Pet Sounds and Revolver were 1966, admittedly, but I'm not sure how well-known their association with LSD was at the time. The really famous and overt psychedelic music like Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, and the Woodstock scene in general mostly hit its stride in 1968-1970.
Over in non-academic writing, The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test was 1968, the same year the Whole Earth Catalog got started. Fear and Loathing was 1971. P.K. Dick wrote about LSD in Palmer Eldritch in 1965, but didn't actually try it until much later. Zelazny's work has psychedelic overtones and one in-story LSD scene, but he was just getting started in '67. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is pretty much the only major piece of acid-derived fiction I can think of by 1967.
Obviously, Heinlein was wrong. But I'd be interested whether he ever followed up on this; the acid-droppers started outdistancing the squares almost immediately after he said it.
I agree with this. I’ve known a lot of people who have done a lot of psychedelics and most of them learned absolutely nothing from it if I’m being honest, and the few who had what I’d consider to be profound or interesting insights from it were deep thinkers anyway.
There are multiple difficulties when talking about LSD experiences, especially to others, given the enormous degree of subjectivity and variability in these experiences. Sometimes, the transformative effects take time to manifest or time for one to realize that they did manifest. Most importantly, given that LSD plays tricks with one's notion of what constitutes one's self, one can be rewired in major ways and never himself realize it.
Psychedelics in my view are a supremely useful tool. They can lead to unveiling hidden potential, intelligence amplification, wilds bouts of creativity, confronting and healing traumatic events, breaking free of conditioning, resetting and transforming one's mind. These are baseline effects, there is also the spiritual/shamanic domain which - for some - is by far the more interesting one.
Hard agree. The least anyone can take out of it is a new perspective which does not come often to many.
1: That, to me, has always been the unfortunate aspect of psychedelics - the moment is fleeting. Luckily, meditation and just generally being present has been much more sticky.
If you give fantastic ski gears to most people, then won't ski better than before, but to a good skier, they will change a lot.
It makes sense that you can use a tool to the maximum potential that you are capable of.
I like the metaphor of a battle, where it's easier to apply lots of energy to the front when your flanks are secured.
For many people they are surrounded by financial insecurity, dysfunctional social structures and even unsecure psychic structures.
ie. psychedelics don't make you creative, they inform your creativity
They’ve also been incredibly great experiences for benefiting my poetry and musical compositions.
I believe they are great tools that require education to use. It’s a shame that education is more or less forbidden knowledge.
https://www.amazon.com/Change-Your-Mind-Consciousness-Transc...
There's some merit to this, but by the time they were teaching us about drugs, teachers had already lied to us about countless other topics. I wish they hadn't lied about the severity of marijuana, but that alone would have hardly changed my skepticism regarding everything else.
> Marijuana ... is not an aphrodisiac ...
No, but it does improve sex.
There was also an excellent study i read a while back on the effects of different terpenes on the kind of high you have and how they interact with thc and various other cannibinoids.
This article summarizes the study pretty well:
Maybe the downvotes were for something else - honestly curious!
But I do agree totally with this:
> The subjective effects are really a matter of the ratios/amounts of cannabinoids and terpenoids and the manner of ingestion
There's lots more to marijuana than THC and CBD. Way back in grad school, we had a preparative gas chromatograph (GC). So I created a fat glass U column, and packed it with silica gel plus some retardant specified in a thesis. I extracted some marijuana with acetone, filtered, and then rotovapped to get "hash oil". Then I ran that through the GC.
Referring to the thesis, I identified the main THC, CBD, etc peaks. And so I captured fractions, using small glass U tubes in liquid nitrogen. Then a few of us sat around, vaping the various fractions, and comparing experience. It could have made a nice paper, but for the illegality, and the general unpublishablility of subjective experience.
>> Referring to the thesis, I identified the main THC, CBD, etc peaks. And so I captured fractions, using small glass U tubes in liquid nitrogen.
That's pretty fantastic, but I think I'll stick to rollin' j's :)
Yes i know the difference between I/S.