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.
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.
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.
It also puts into context the fact that other individuals have _different_ extents.
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 :)
Yes, this is exactly the take away one should take in my opinion.
Going into deep spiritual meaning about nature is a rabbit hole.
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.
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.
$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.
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.
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.
Just my 2c.
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.
And you got yourself a puddle of mud.
But it's worth exploring, I swear.
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.
"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.
Can you demonstrate this in any meaningful way that will affect the world you exist in?
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.
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.
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
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.
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
This assertion is just as unfounded as the opposite.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Michael Pollen’s How to Change Your Mind is a 2018 survey of this voice.
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.
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.
Imagine trying to describe the color blue to a blind person, or the sound of music to a deaf person.
Some things cannot be described or understood without direct experience.
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".
[0] PDF Warning https://maps.org/images/pdf/books/HuxleyA1954TheDoorsOfPerce...
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.
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.
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.
That's why doctors often prescribe medicine with the caveat "do not take drug A if you have conditions XYZ"
Especially for ones as strong as salvia or DMT.
how do you know what they would have taught you?
I'm sorry to hear that you had such a negative experience with these substances.
Note: Done 200+ trips w/ 2 bad ones in the first 10.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
edit: whoever disagrees should explain.
Change my mind?
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.
Mushrooms feel wonderfully natural and therapeutic on the other hand.