Comment by stared | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stared | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I think that the effective ban on psychedelic research is a crime against science and mental healthcare - given its immense potential. Sure, there are risks, but we routinely use drugs (as in: medications) of far worse side effects! For some reason, reading Grof felt like reading "Solaris" by Lem - on forsaken, unreal research. I am happy to we are slowly starting research into that.

I recommend "Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research" by Stanislav Grof (https://www.amazon.com/Realms-Human-Unconscious-Observations...) - he was one of the pioneers into psychedelic research, while it was easy and possible. For many aspects, it is... humbling. It seems that visions/senses/experiences of cosmic unity, or unspoken dread, or going beyond the physical world is more of a common theme of LSD.

However, I am torn, when it comes to its lack of skepticism. On one hand side, he hints that some aspects of extrasensory perception (e.g. clear visions of spermatozoid entering an ovum, visions of one's ancestors, etc) can be real, without noting some typical biases (e.g. people reporting coincidences only when they happen). Same, he seems to accept a lot of Freudian stuff uncritically. On the other, I am really happy he didn't censor the stories (or himself!) and share both processed and raw experiences. The overall narration is in the tone of a curious researcher knowing that he may get answers he is not looking for.

Overall, I recommend it a lot, keeping in mind that you don't take too religiously his mentions of Freud, Jung, birth matrices and extrasensory perception too literally. But... as a lens/perspective, that (though flawed/simplified) can yet be fertile.

> Personally, I think that the effective ban on psychedelic research is a crime against science and mental healthcare - given its immense potential...I am happy to we are slowly starting research into that.

Have you thought about supporting the people who have been laying the groundwork for the current wave of research (e.g. https://www.heffter.org/)? This new crop of research owes a lot to this group's decades long mission to bring psychedelic research back to acceptability.

[no affiliation other than knowing some of the founding board members]

also MAPS,

> On the other, I am really happy he didn't censor the stories (or himself!) and share both processed and raw experiences

This should be the default reaction when it comes to metaphysical phenomena like ESP, consciousness, and the like. If he had self-censored, that's less of another human's experience shared.

Sure, enough off-beat ideas label you as a kook, but I think if we entitled every human to one or two write-off beliefs, without labelling them as a kook, we'd discover more interesting things about the world. It's so easy to go, "that person believes in X, clearly they lack skepticism" and write off every other stance by them. Instead if we the listener accept these data points as "interesting but potentially erroneous" we can build better mental models than if we reject outright ideas contrary to our worldview.

> However, I am torn, when it comes to its lack of skepticism.

That's a common theme among psychedelic researchers.

Slate Star Codex wrote an article about it: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/28/why-were-early-psyched...

Every time I read a book or listen to a podcast from a prominent psychedelic researcher, I'm caught off guard by at least one or two bizarre, anti-scientific statements.

With Stanislav Grof, it's his insistence that "synchronicity" is the mind directly manifesting experiences in the physical world. This is an actual quote from Grof:

> What's characteristic for synchronicity is that it seems that the psyche is entering into a kind of a playful interaction with the material world, where something happens in your dream or in your visions, and then the material world kind of plays it out. Let's say you have a powerful shamanic experience involving an owl, and you walk out after the session and there is an owl or a wounded owl and so on.

I suspect that psychedelics might be useful adjuncts for professionally-guided therapy because they open the mind to suggestibility. I suspect that same suggestibility might be dangerous when repeated frequently without external direction, as is the case with many prominent psychedelic proponents. These people begin to believe their own hallucinated thoughts and realities.

It's important to note that the vast majority of psychedelic research doesn't involve dosing people with psychedelics and walking away. Instead, the research revolves around intense therapy sessions where specific sessions also involve psychedelics. Internet articles tend to disregard the therapy portion and write headlines that lead people to believe that psychedelics are inherently anti-depressant, which is a dangerous mischaracterization of the current research.

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