Hacker News Reader

Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

Do mushrooms make you write incoherent ramblings on Facebook about how you are God and how everyone else is stuck in the matrix? Because I have 3 different friends who all started doing that after dabbling in psychedelics

View on HN

Your friends are doing their best to connect with others and share their newfound perspective using whatever crude tools are available to them. Be kind.

Psychedelics give you a new map into reality. If nobody teaches you how to read the map, it's easy to get lost or misread it. Integrating a bunch of different maps can be very challenging.

Charitably, what they probably mean is that if we model god as the sum total of all experiences and all things, then it can be said that we are all aspects of divinity.

The tree recognizes itself as a tree and as part of the forrest.

Playing into and encouraging other people's delusions isn't helping them.

Denying people's experiences and calling them delusions isn't helping them.

Have you tried it? They're pointing at something here that all of humanity has tried to point at.

I'm a very strident atheist and even I would claim that I have "found god" while high on mushrooms. And you and I both happen to be "it".

I'm not pointing at the institutional god. But I end up using the institutional words, because it's hard to find other words that describe it properly.

Alan Watts is the closest I've found that describes it without using religious phrases.

There is something to be said for waiting until you're 25 to do this stuff. Let the brain form all the way first. I think the last study I saw on marijuana linked most of the worst effects to starting while still a teenager.

The logistical problem of getting access to these experiences if you wait until well after college is not insurmountable (especially with THC, today) but it definitely seems more like a project than just showing up on a Friday night to your extended social group.

Poor Paul Stamets ('the' mushroom guy of this era). From his writing it seems like half the people who want to talk to him want him to hook them up with psychedelics. It's hard to tell if he's playing up that ratio or playing it down. His standing answer is "I don't do that, I can't help you." He also mentions that the DEA has made him aware that they are aware of his existence.

I would certainly hope that the DEA is aware of his existence, as the DEA granted him a license to grow Schedule 1 "narcotics".

“That led to being covered by a DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration] license to study psilocybin active mushroom species. So, I specialized in the taxonomy of those species, and then, because of the cultivation skills that I gained, I branched out into growing edibles and medicinals, and my mother was much happier.”

https://www.herbalgram.org/resources/herbalgram/issues/109/t...

I’ve seen the observation that psychedelics evoke a sense of spirituality in people. I wonder if this is how people cope with that feeling of spirituality if they don’t participate in any organized religion?

it depends, of course. to experience a transpersonal / “spiritualized” angle into reality can be deeply challenging for non-religious, non-spiritual, or atheist folks.

or it can feel quite curious, new, refreshing, even liberating.

or anything else along that spectrum.

The last time I took mushrooms with a friend they tried to talk me into joining them in worshiping Satan. Maybe you're onto something.

It actually really does show you a „different reality“. It has different effects on different people, I assume. For me, it was quite eye-opening, in that it made me stop using cigarettes for example. But for others, it leads to those strange thoughts of living in the matrix or something

The perceived effects of psychedelics can be very strong. That is why it's recommended to take them with a professional, so as not to become delusional, e.g. being a god.

However, the effects of even a single trip can be quite profound and life changing.

That "god" thing is often misunderstood. If we assume that humans are somehow connected, by quantum entanglement in their brains or whatever, then mushrooms make this connectedness apparent by muting the link to the body motor complex. In other words, that "god" is the union of all humans, and currently it's undergoing, for its own reasons, a severe form of schizophrenia when its big consciousness is split into a few billions small consciousnesses.

As far as I know it is a possible side effect of psychedelics indeed

i mean.. maybe they're right?

No. Schizophrenia does. Probably a few other things.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com