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Comment by cnity | Hacker News Reader

This system of scientific gatekeeping and law enforcement is a direct projection of the barriers put in place between individuals and god by the catholic church. For millennia authorities have attempted to prevent people from having meaningful spiritual experiences directly, of their own accord, via access to substances that grow e.g. in their nearest cow fields.

In this way, your psychiatrist friend is simply the next iteration of a priest, and the portrayal of her patients as greedy fools only furthers this divide and pushes ever more people towards the other side of the law. I'll see you in _my_ cow field with a woven basket!

_edit_: think of it this way. An internal urge drives people to your friend in search of a meaningful experience. Your friend consults her good book and returns to them with information: no, you cannot have your meaningful experience.

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The customer is not always right. Just because the customer wants something or believes something doesn’t make it factually true.

This really isn’t about being a lawful authority trying to buzz-kill society as much as it is about having principles as a doctor. The patient wants a cure to an ailment while their doctor has no evidence of its efficacy.

If I had someone coming into my auto repair shop telling me they didn’t need brakes, they let Jesus take the wheel like they heard in the song, my noncompliance to their request to remove them from their vehicle does not make me a gatekeeper like the Catholic priests you described.

My original post left too much to the imagination and I realise re-reading it that it appears as an attack on professionalism within science, and possibly even an attack specifically on the parent commenter's friend, and I regret that angle.

What I broadly mean is that modern society has done a relatively poor job at helping to produce integrated humans that have the capacity, tools, and know-how to navigate their inner journey. I know this sounds woo to a lot of people here. That the new wave of psychedelic interest is reified as purely medical treatment is a continuation of this trend. That is what I'm trying to articulate.

I have a deep suspicion that you can't simply sterilise the transformation at the heart of these experiences.

Maybe their friend is simply uninterested in having the liability as opposed to some millennia long conspiracy by the Catholic church making her do it.

And anyways, your statements ignore that there's plenty of hippies on Instagram peddling their mushrooms and Ayahuasca in intense spiritual experiences for only 1500$ a pop. Does the Catholic church control them too?

I believe you have misread my post. Powers that be continue to want me to not have mind altering experiences. I continue to have them anyway. So it goes.

But why call them spiritual experiences when hallucinations will do even better?

Potato tomato.

"Do people have ideas or do ideas have people?" might have something to do with the phenomenon of different humans preferring different labels for the same thing.

This is from Jung right? I've always been fascinated by his teachings, especially the collective unconscious. I'm just gonna leave a couple related quotes and ideas down here cause I want to.

Dostoevsky made observations like this, too.

"It was not you who ate the idea, but the idea that ate you"

"Men need to bow down to something; whether another man or an idea.”

I think Ernest Becker explored similar ideas in The Denial of Death, though through a different context.

Yep...the problem with humans has been pretty well understood for ages, hopefully we can get over this all science and only science phase and utilize some of this valuable knowledge before we kill ourselves.

There are different implications though. One implies there's some meaning while the other does not.

They both have meaning, a distinction is the degree to which free will (or, System 2 in Thinking Fast and Slow) is in play. But now we have two problems!

I believe this comment minimized the structure of spiritual experience in a hyperrational way, which is exactly as the GP comment warned against.

If your views in having a spiritual experience are exclusive to consuming psychedelic substances then you are minimizing what is available across the human experience in terms of spiritual explorations.

"If your views on crossing a river are exclusive to the usage of canoes then you are minimizing what is available across the human experience in terms of river crossings."

Somehow you turned someone's subjective spiritual exploration into them limiting themselves...

Correct! My schizoaffective disorder bipolar type is actually a spiritual issue at its core.

When people tell me about their psychedelic trips, I am like, so? I’ve been doing it my whole life without drugs!

However, my tendency to go on these trips are highly affected by environmental variables. So the only thing I would add is, it’s a mix between the spiritual and the material And we cannot negate either.

So all these therapist and psychiatrist trying to cure me are taking the wrong tact. What I learned is I needed to understand it, and understanding it alone is the cure.

Because for every functional self-dosing career professional, there's 10 self-dosing tent dwellers living in squalor in every major US city

Umm... that's much more likely to be opiates and meth, and the criminalization hasn't especially helped with those either.

Not to mention, the language you use is really cruel.

Likewise I think non-enforcement of drug laws tacitly permitting people to self-destruct in the streets is really cruel

The question isn't about whether it's good to just let people self destruct, its whether criminalization helps. Not every problem is a police problem.

You have that ratio backwards, and it's still an exaggeration.

I didn’t realize the ratio was so high but I guess it would explain why the white collar sector doesn’t accomplish anything anymore

I certainly agree that the failure modes of addiction, homelessness and toxicity are worth avoiding.

What drugs are you on?

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