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> Seeing other humans the same way I feel when I look at a pig or a wolf. A large, possibly dangerous animal, with no real intelligence behind its eyes, only cunning.

I'd say people are pretty much talking animals. Not to discount language and what it entails, of course. If I had thoughts like you describe, I think I'd be more worried about the belief that I should consider animals (and only animals!) as something that's always dangerous and cunning. In my experience animals, especially mammals, have very similar emotional systems to mine, and that makes it pretty easy to have an empathetic relationship. A relationship with a pet won't be super intellectual, but who wants that anyway?

Some do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3njWjIimd4

Agreed. For at least some people, there is something deeply, deeply wicked about acid. I can't put my finger exactly on it but I always felt that it changed your perceptions in such a way that made you feel like you were being enlightened and embracing universal love while at the same time making you capable of justifying enormous evil.

Its like it makes you actually feel nihilist rather than just think nihilistic. Or something like that.

Would it be fair to say it makes you more 'radical'?

Your mileage will almost certainly vary. It changes people in interesting and unpredictable ways. Sometimes for the better sometimes for the worse. I know people who became much more grounded through their use of psychedelics. Others much less so.

Some changes are predictable. For instance most people will stop abusing drugs after strong psilocybin trips. See the work of Rolland Griffiths.

Most but not all. The opposite trend is less common but totally possible from personal observations. saying that a psychiatric procedure will result in specific changes would be stretching the truth from probably to necessarily. The first result I found in Google related to Griffiths is here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31084460/ They are doing an anonymous online self selected reports and they find a strong effect but also 17% do not appear to exhibit the trend.

For some perspective, this is the current state of the art pharmacological treatment for substance abuse disorder, as in no other available treatment has a stronger effect.

It makes the standard 9 to 5, hour long commute, and retire at 65 shtick unpalatable, but we in the West live in a radical society where you can already smoke pot, drive fast cars, play loud music, not start a family, and so on. Part of that is attributable to us living in a post-psychedelic world.

Every time I read somebody describing their experience with something I wonder if the reduced drug usage is one of the lead causes of the lack of warmongering we got since the late 20th century.

lead or lead lead?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead–crime_hypothesis

Lead doesn't explain it, warmongering is something that has been high since ancient times, but airborne lead dates to the 20th century.

Dietary lead in the form of sweeteners for wine plus a little abraded from cups and pitchers has been present since antiquity, so could still stand?

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/07/did-lead-poisoning-c...

Reduced? Alcohol consumption is down (depending on how you view the stats), but drugs are winning the War on Drugs. Everyone else is losing. Legally, oxycontin is more highly regulated today, but the opoid epidemic is, well, an epidemic. Cannabis is legal for recreational use in many states. I willing to buy that something that's widely available in today's society has lead to less war (Internet porn, perhaps?), but I'd be surprised to hear in what ways drug use is down.

> but drugs are winning the War on Drugs

Drugs used to have institutional usage. They used to be distributed by armies, take part on religious practices, have explicitly regulated import quotas to keep the population "calm".

We have nothing like that today.

> lack of warmongering we got since the late 20th century

Srsly? Where have you been hiding? Where is this place where wars are not being fought?

"Including several that I had used to justify the value and importance of human life itself. ... And I saw a capacity for all manner of evil in myself only barely contained."

Honestly, that's terrifying. I mean all the anti-drug stuff parents and schools try to scare us with and this tops it.

That realization is not unique to drugs. If this scares you stay away from reading Solzhenitsyn.

Knowing that one has a capacity to commit violence isn't the concerning part. The "barely contained" part is.

Yeah, Solzhenitsyn has that too. Here's a famous excerpt.

https://mbird.com/literature/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn-on-the-l...

Except the way he came to that reealization was through spending a good while in the gulag instead of tripping balls. Pick your poison.

There's a difference between coming to that point of view by reason, willingly, and being dragged to it by a substance, unreasoningly.

True, some trips can get more deeply philosophiocal than you are comfortable with, but typically no matter what corner of philosophy you think yourself into, greater minds have been there and done that. For me for example it sparked some interest in reading Nietzsche.

Try using reason to explain the taste of an apple to someone who has never tasted it.

Honestly, as someone who took that kind of substances, this is not terrifying.

This is actually going out of denial, and really just seeing ourselves just the way we are. Agreed, we have a pretty fucked up side of us, but also a true potential for love and sharing.

These 2 sides are mixed, in conflict, and ever-evolving, but really, they are us. It may appear terrifying, but really, when you see it, it has a freeing and peaceful quality to it, because you just "know" that this is true.

Barely being able to contain violence should be concerning. It's one thing just to know you are capable of violence, it's entirely different if you are struggling to control it.

LSD alone does not create any violence, it does not bring any evil into your mind from the outside.

It mostly shows things that usually stay in the unconscious part of our mind. It is more like a lens than a seed.

Of course Barely being able to contain violence is concerning, but let's face it, it is a daily struggle for a LOT of humans. Our good intentions dp not always weigh up when for example we are starving to death. Anger, greed or hatred, are some of our common struggles, but most of the time they stay hidden in our subconscious, bc we do not like to see ourselves as persons able to perpetrate violence.

But only when we see it (it requires honesty, not necessarily lsd xD) and we resolve to work on it, can we really grow.

I think you misread op (either that or I did).

I didn't interpret the post as "I was feeling barely containable violence then" but more of a "I became aware of the barely contained violence that me/humans have under the surface". As in, a change of judgement on his current and past condition, rather than a new emotion.

OP said evil, not violence. The boundary between good and evil is so thin, that people cross it without even realizing that, e.g. when they wish or do something for personal gain. It's just most people have zero power over others. Evil is indeed barely contained in a typical human today.

Hmm, but isn't it the beginning of wisdom? Will a person be motivated to cultivate themselves to be good if they really have no inkling about their capacity to do evil and harm?

It's not an issue with the knowing part, but with the barely containing part.

_barely_ here embodies imo the difference between knowing theoretically "yeah I can do some bad sometimes", and really feeling it in your guts, or your heart, rather than your head.

Wisdom comes when feeling who you are, not having some distant idea about who you are

Honestly seeing what you have blocked out of your consciousness about yourself is the essence of shadow work as described by Jung.

We are all capable of terrible things, in the wrong circumstance. We just don’t like to admit it.

Perhaps it might be worth examining your views on animals some more, while your perspective isn't uncommon, it might be worth analyzing it somewhat, as there are also a lot of people who look at a pig or a wolf and have a very different experience. It's always good to understand yourself more, and hallucinogens are a heck of a tool to do that, if you can sort out the root of the issue. I suspect you might have stopped a bit short of the root cause (fear/uncertainty towards non-humans)

Could be wrong, but that's what jumped out at me.

Same here. I see a wolf and see a giant puppy.

Evidence of their giant puppy nature:

https://twitter.com/nywolforg/status/1434488985066299395

https://twitter.com/nywolforg/status/1433949290485985280

Yeah I have a similar experience to GP, a normalization of life value across species. But for me it manifests as a greater respect for life forms I normally take for granted, rather than a loss of respect for human life. I have trouble breaking branches off trees, pulling weeds, killing mosquitos after a trip. I still feel uneasy about it but have justifications to help.

I also see life in superstructures. Stand on a skyscraper rooftop deck and look down at the city. The city is alive. The roads are its arteries, the people its lifeblood.

I think it's quite possible to look at a wolf and see a creature with more powerful social dynamics and civilizedness than that of the human, by nature. Pack animals cooperate in ways that isolated predators don't, and as humans we live in a sort of strange halfway zone, neither fully pack animals nor fully individual predators. We get a little bit of everything.

It makes perfect sense to me if someone took acid, saw the fundamental weaknesses of human consciousness, and then jumped to the conclusion that people had to be ruled by their superiors because there would always be inferiors that had to be kept in their place. That's one possible conclusion to draw, particularly if you seek a hardcore rationalist perspective where everything can be created through self-will and rational thought, and there's nothing else.

I wouldn't draw that conclusion, but that's because I've studied chaos theory and artificial intelligence and the way evolution draws on diversity of population to surface useful traits out of a seething, unpredictable gene pool. As such, I can't look at the concept of 'inferiors' in the same way: to me, rationalist hierarchical systems mean 'local maximum, unable to further progress'. In short, a serious problem rather than a desirable state.

Could you get chaos theory just out of taking acid? Could you interpret evolutionary mechanics? I don't think taking acid will give you fundamentals like that. What it's gonna do is shake up what you already have, and this can lead to very interesting reformulations, but it's not giving you anything that you don't already, in some sense, have.

Wolves cooperate more than humans?

Even when we compete, we cooperate on an enormous scale [0]

[0] https://fee.org/media/33856/i-pencil-final-proof-for-website...

I enjoyed reading the second paragraph, I understand what you are describing. You have a way with words.

My question is how do you define conservative? What you are describing is the raw nature of man, the shadow, the animal behind the smile.

We are all animals but it is mans unique ability to transcend the animal world by having the will, to act, or even suppress mans raw individualistic animal desire often to better fit socially defined rules by the local tribe.

I'm not sure how you drawing the borders between the left and right paradigm. Can you share more

Conservative not so much in the political sense of who I might vote for. I meant in a psychological sense. More reactive to perceived threats, less trusting, more guarded.

I was influenced by some recent research like this when I spoke: https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2020/novemb...

> Specifically, the studies by Jost and his colleagues, including Michael Strupp-Levitsky, who conducted the work as an NYU undergraduate and is now a doctoral candidate at Long Island University-Brooklyn, showed that those moral foundations known to be more appealing to liberals than conservatives—specifically, fairness and harm avoidance—are linked to empathic motivation, whereas the moral foundations that are more appealing to conservatives than to liberals —such as ingroup loyalty and deference to authority—are not.

Loss of empathy, perhaps. Something in that vein. Man, I really am making a great case against acid, aren't I? I did rediscover empathy. I think I learned a thing or two of value in the process. And I don't feel that it actually fundamentally threatened my sanity, for what it's worth. But I guess I got what I was looking for. I won't be repeating it any time soon.