[HN Gopher] What happens when clergy take psilocybin
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What happens when clergy take psilocybin
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 330 points
Date : 2025-06-16 21:34 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (nautil.us)
(TXT) w3m dump (nautil.us)
| quantified wrote:
| Pretty much nothing of substance in the writeup. All about
| studying and flaws.
| jbm wrote:
| Yeah I was honestly taken aback with how devoid of content this
| was. No personal stories or research.
|
| The New Yorker version looks more interesting.
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/05/26/this-is-your-p...
| Kilenaitor wrote:
| Also has a way better headline heh
| swyx wrote:
| michael pollan, one of the best in the biz
| electroglyph wrote:
| heh, didn't expect this line:
|
| Finding willing rabbis, however, was easy--the challenge was
| finding ones who were "psychedelically naive."
| cluckindan wrote:
| There are videos of such religious devotees riding around
| cities in a van, blasting psychedelic trance, and stopping
| at lights to dance around the intersection, offering acid
| to onlookers.
| nikcub wrote:
| this should probably be OP - much better original story, not
| a reblog, and it's written by Michael Pollan.
| kevinwang wrote:
| Much better, thank you!
| elevaet wrote:
| I had to scroll up and down for a while, looking for the rest
| of the article. There wasn't any.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Here you go: https://archive.ph/2Za2J
| RobRivera wrote:
| Yea I was wondering if there was some UI issue on mobile bc I
| kept scrolling down expecting more.
|
| I stopped and read the whole thing to be disappointed.
|
| A blurb about [thing i am interested in].
|
| I now feel like yelling at some clouds.
| quantified wrote:
| I feel badly that I didn't warn you sufficiently.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Yeah, total clickbait
| calibas wrote:
| It also makes some mistakes:
|
| > Many of those who chose to participate were also considering
| leaving the profession at the outset and so could have been
| seeking a way to reconnect with the divine
|
| From the study:
|
| > 8% endorsing that they were currently considering leaving
| their vocation
|
| https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/psymed.2023.0044#sec-...
|
| 24 completed the study, so that's 2 people.
| worik wrote:
| See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_Chapel_Experiment
| worik wrote:
| I am no fan of Timothy Leary, I think he put the cause of
| Psychedelics back decades. He was also a very flawed
| researcher, which effected this study.
|
| Nevertheless, it was ground breaking for 1962 and had a huge
| impact.
|
| Not so significant in the twenty first century.
| chiefgeek wrote:
| Yes. Came here to to say this has been done before. It was too
| much for the Establishment to stomach. Ram Dass, Tim Leary's
| associate (Richard Alpert at the time) talks about it here -
| https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ram-dass-here-and-now/...
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| > Almost a decade ago, a Baptist Biblical scholar, a Catholic
| priest, several rabbis, an Islamic leader, a Zen Buddhist roshi,
| and more than a dozen other religious leaders walked into a lab--
| and took high doses of magic mushrooms.
|
| Wild. Maybe what the world needs.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Quite frankly, that quote sounds like the premise of some new
| Netflix original series.
| neilv wrote:
| Also, an old joke format, presumably done intentionally by
| the writer.
|
| Example: "A priest, a rabbi, and an atheist walk into a
| bar..."
| 867-5309 wrote:
| "...and say ouch! it was an iron bar"
| jjulius wrote:
| >Maybe what the world needs.
|
| One line that's been recurring between my wife and I for the
| past half-decade or so is that the whole planet needs a good
| hotboxing.
| robocat wrote:
| That's the scattergun controlled approach of seeing like a
| state - give everyone medication even though it's only some
| that need it.
|
| There's a small percentage ruining it for most: a few
| defectors when most are cooperators.
|
| How do we identify the defectors?
|
| What do you do if you identify defectors?
| Spivak wrote:
| It's maybe inefficient to hotbox everyone but I think I
| would rather that than give my government the green light
| to define and identify defectors.
|
| If humanity has proven one thing over and over and over
| again to itself it's that we're terrible at witch hunts.
| shiroiuma wrote:
| >There's a small percentage ruining it for most: a few
| defectors when most are cooperators.
|
| >What do you do if you identify defectors?
|
| Simple: you put them in charge of the government. That's
| what we do now, after all.
| gsf_emergency wrote:
| So we just need to hotbox the people running gov :)
| pasquinelli wrote:
| you're being too fixated on individuals. everyone's doing
| the same thing: avoiding pain, uncertainty, and the
| limitation of their future choices; seeking pleasure,
| security, and to increase their future choices. the very
| few people who aren't doing that don't matter: history
| unfolds because people do what makes sense for them, not
| because some don't.
| worthless-trash wrote:
| I think you're being too fixated on your own perspective.
| History is nothing but the individual having a large
| blast radius.
|
| History ABSOLUTELY unfolds the way it does because they
| were tired of being 'taking the reasonable/way that makes
| sense path'.
|
| You can argue that every invention from the wheel forward
| has had this approach.
| pasquinelli wrote:
| > History ABSOLUTELY unfolds the way it does because they
| were tired of being 'taking the reasonable/way that makes
| sense path'.
|
| i think we're talking at cross purposes. quoting myself:
|
| >> ...everyone's doing the same thing: avoiding pain,
| uncertainty, and the limitation of their future choices;
| seeking pleasure, security, and to increase their future
| choices.
|
| do you think that doesn't characterize the motivating
| factors that lead to invention?
| timewizard wrote:
| My friend Andy smoked weed with us once.
|
| He disappeared about an hour after.
|
| We found him a day later at his house.
|
| He let us know he was okay, and everything was "cool and
| stuff", because the ice dogs didn't manage to catch him. He
| was able to run away into the woods to hide all night and
| eventually found his way back home in the morning. He was
| then curious why the ice dogs didn't chase us at all.
|
| We didn't smoke Andy up anymore.
| raducu wrote:
| > We didn't smoke Andy up anymore.
|
| I got open eye visuals from smoking some dubious hashish, 2
| other people smoking the same stuff had no issues. I really
| enjoyed the experience, except for a small incident where I
| woke up in the middle of the night and started slapping my
| snoring friend -- I hallucinated he was in fact chocking on
| his own vomit and was going to die and in my mind I was
| saving his life.
|
| I also got mild HPPD that got better in a few years --
| mainly I could not look at certain grid patterns because
| bright flashes of light would come from the intersection --
| this mostly happened from vent iron grids and some shirts
| of mine.
| echelon_musk wrote:
| Nicholas Sand wanted to turn on the entire planet but was
| unsuccessful.
| ElijahLynn wrote:
| Exactly.
| boxed wrote:
| Maybe. I'd be scare of what happens to conservative members of
| religions that can go off the deep end pretty badly, primarily
| islam, but various cults like scientology also comes to mind.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| "William James, considered the father of American psychology
| ...., is said to have to come to many of his own most central
| ideas at least in part through hallucinatory experiences with
| nitrous oxide"
|
| That's a pretty good explainer for psychology. We have a Coke
| addled Freud who is the father of it all and another drug abuser
| shepherding the USA.
|
| I wonder how many people have tried to replicate their
| experiments and succeeded?
| kevinsync wrote:
| Yeah, keep in mind that significant abuse of the drugs
| mentioned are, uh, let's say, prone to inflating the ego rather
| than killing it and showing a different path.
|
| Kinda fills in some unspoken gaps about the 'discipline' of
| psychology...
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| Can you explain this for those of us with minimal background
| in psychology? Is there a substantial amount of pseudoscience
| in modern psychology, or just historically?
| 7thaccount wrote:
| This is a little blunt, but I knew a lot of people who went
| into psychology and got degrees. They were not very gifted
| academically (C students in highschool) and went into psych
| as it was an easy major that let them coast and party for
| four years. I'm sure this isn't the case for all psychology
| majors of course, but it was very different on average than
| what I was used to in engineering or the hard sciences
| where you generally had 4 years of excruciating math
| classes including calculus and differential equations that
| weeded out most.
|
| Psychology is very dependent on statistics and experiments.
| That can be complicated and after going through those
| classes I simply don't trust the majority of students (or
| their professors) to get any of that right. It's why I roll
| my eyes every time the radio guy talks about the results of
| another pop psych study. I knew some psych majors big into
| new age crystal stuff and legitimately believed it all as
| well as a bunch of additional pseudoscience garbage. That
| kind of thing is a lot more rare in say physics where it's
| really hard to get through the program without a rational
| brain.
|
| Again, there are probably some brilliant folks drawn to
| that field who knows how to do solid research, but my
| experiences suggest that the signal to noise ratio may be
| suspect.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| I appreciate your honesty, blunt or not that's an
| interesting perspective.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Psych majors with just a BS degree - totally agree with
| you.
|
| PhDs, though - some more rigor is involved. Definitely
| not C-grade level folks (or if they were, they've
| rectified that problem). But still, we do have a
| replication crisis...
| thayne wrote:
| Psychology has a pretty significant reproducibility crisis.
|
| From what I've seen as an outsider, a lot of studies are
| taken as fact without any confirmation with attempts to
| reproduce the results. And many results suffer from
| questionable methodology.
|
| A big part of the problem is that doing psychology well is
| really, really hard. You are dealing with human subjects,
| which means there are a lot of ethical and regulatory
| constraints. A lot of experiments that might give you
| important insights are unethical and/or illegal. Getting
| people to participate in studies is difficult and
| expensive, which means sample sizes are often much smaller
| than they should be. And there are often significant biases
| in the population sampled (I believe most psychology
| studies are done on college students... often psychology
| students). And then there is the inherent complexity of the
| subject. Every person's brain is different, and finding
| general rules that apply to the incredible diversity of
| human minds is very, very difficult. And finally, I suspect
| that a lot of psychologists are not trained in statistics
| and experimental methodology to the same degree as
| scientists in "harder" sciences.
| kevinsync wrote:
| I can't really speak for psychology as a field other than a
| spectator, but I find it to be quite subjective. What I
| really meant was related to cocaine and nitrous oxide --
| two very different substances that both result in wild
| egos, wild ideas, hard-to-sustain invincibility and a host
| of other effects, unlike psychedelics (LSD, psilocybin,
| DMT, etc) which are arguably closer to (and provide)
| positive psychological responses / breakthroughs /
| perspectives.
|
| For a current-times look into nitrous, observe Kanye West.
| The rumor mill (plus believable evidence) suggests he is
| out of his MIND on large amounts of N2O frequently, and his
| erratic and grandiose behavior reinforces the idea. That's
| probably not ideal for American psychology if "the father"
| of it is similarly whacked lol.
|
| For a historical look into cocaine, observe Sigmund Freud.
| There was a great book called _Cocaine: An Unauthorized
| Biography_ [0] by Dominic Streatfeild, the second-third of
| which covers Freud 's discovery and promotion of cocaine as
| a cure-all.
|
| TL;DR Freud was searching for a drug, any drug, that hadn't
| been claimed yet by a scientific promoter to then market as
| his own for fame and fortune, stumbled upon cocaine
| (hydrochloride, not freebase), started doing a lot of it,
| proselytizing it (it could cure your heroin addiction!)
| etc, before the whole thing kind of collapsed around him.
|
| While arguably fun, it's a substance that is the polar
| opposite of "introspection" and drives a lot of behavior
| that honestly a person might seek a therapist or
| psychologist to resolve LOL, so for a psychologist to
| promote it early in his career who eventually progresses
| into more or less defining psychology as a _field_ , well
| ... I just find it curious and would wonder what theories
| Freud would have put forth had he come to be in a time with
| psychedelics available instead. That's all!
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocaine:_An_Unauthorized_
| Biogr...
| adastra22 wrote:
| Psychology isn't a science and never has been. It fails to
| meet the basic criteria. Reproducibility in particular has
| been a very big deal in recent years (google search term:
| "replication crisis").
| clipsy wrote:
| > That's a pretty good explainer for psychology. We have a Coke
| addled Freud who is the father of it all and another drug
| abuser shepherding the USA.
|
| Now do tech CEOs
| quantified wrote:
| The Hebrew writings include some instances of God appearing
| from fire or smoke. Exactly what was burning? I've read what I
| consider rumors that there are DMT-containing shrubs in that
| part of the world.
| caycep wrote:
| a corollary is - can a clergy still practice if implanted with a
| neuromodulator device, i.e. deep brain stimulation, for epilepsy,
| or Parkinson's, or depression?
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| I don't see why not? If it alters the function of the brain
| _towards_ the default, natural state, instead of away from it,
| then that doesn 't distort clear perception of reality.
|
| It's much like with glasses - the lenses alter the light in a
| way that _helps_ the retinas receive the light more like the
| default, natural human perception does.
| caycep wrote:
| This is true assuming it is just a matter of abnormal vs
| default state. Sometimes I wonder, especially as people are
| doing more studies using these implants for conditions like
| major depressive disorder...there are also concerns re even
| for motor symptoms like Parkinson's, there may be subtle
| cognitive/psychiatric changes - we have accidentally induced
| noticeable mania in some patients at least temporarily, until
| we were able to correct the settings on the device...
| xwowsersx wrote:
| Promising title, but the article felt hollow... all surface, no
| depth. Skimmed anecdotes without probing them, offered no real
| insight or new perspective, and left me with absolutely nothing I
| couldn't have guessed from the headline alone :(
| aspenmayer wrote:
| There's also this guy who you might have heard of, who created a
| little thing called Alcoholics Anonymous:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_W.#Psychedelic_therapy
|
| https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-5922.13027
|
| Apparently he was so serious about the potential for LSD to help
| alcoholics, that he almost got thrown out of Alcoholics
| Anonymous, the recovery group he helped create. He had written to
| a Catholic friend about this.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/aug/23/lsd-help-alc...
|
| > LSD, by mimicking insanity, could help alcoholics achieve a
| central tenet of the Twelve Step programme proposed by AA, he
| believed. It was a matter of finding "a power greater than
| ourselves" that "could restore us to sanity". He warned: "I don't
| believe [LSD] has any miraculous property of transforming
| spiritually and emotionally sick people into healthy ones
| overnight. It can set up a shining goal on the positive side,
| after all it is only a temporary ego-reducer."
|
| > But Wilson added: "The vision and insights given by LSD could
| create a large incentive - at least in a considerable number of
| people."
|
| > His words were found in a late 50s letter to Father Ed Dowling,
| a Catholic priest and member of an experimental group he had
| formed in New York to explore the spiritual potential of LSD.
| ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 wrote:
| https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/psymed.2023.0044
| patrickmay wrote:
| When clergy take psilocybin . . . God sees them?
| 867-5309 wrote:
| when you eat too many shrooms .. the shrooms eat back at you
| 867-5309 wrote:
| I vaguely remember some televised British experiment in which a
| clergyman replaced his usual bread with poppy seed bread -- toast
| for breakfast, sandwich for lunch, etc. -- then at the end of a
| month or so tested positive for some opioid threshhold
| cnasc wrote:
| From Brainiac: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9At-dgp0rQ
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Opium is made from same plant poppy seeds come from.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| I don't know if my brain is just wired up differently, but I've
| taken both LSD and Psilocybin many times and I did not find the
| experiences spiritual at all. I don't even know what people are
| talking about when they talk about spiritual experiences.
| esseph wrote:
| I know people personally that psilocybin, LSD, and other
| substances do nothing for. All of them also have existing
| mental health disorders (extreme generalized anxiety,
| depression, bipolar, etc.).
| kbenson wrote:
| Nothing as in there is no outside noticeable change in
| behavior and they report no change in speaking, or nothing as
| it relates to the topic of this thread, in that they have no
| profound or spiritual experiences?
| esseph wrote:
| They might get a slight body high even on what would
| otherwise be considered heroic doses for their weight.
|
| Things like lemon-tek to make the psilocybin more
| bioavailable were also not impactful to them, while being
| apparently extremely impactful for others.
| vermilingua wrote:
| It may be worth noting that antidepressant medication has
| a strong suppressing effect on psychedelics.
| ghxst wrote:
| Depends on the type! Generally might be true for SSRIs
| but not always for TCAs or lithium which can have the
| opposite effect. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8788508/
| (just one example)
| esseph wrote:
| Well aware and accounted for.
| dymk wrote:
| If they're doing high doses of psychedelics and only
| experiencing a body high, then they're either on a drug
| blocking its effects, or they're not taking a 5HT2-A
| agonist. They simply do not just produce a body high at
| high doses, you will know when you're tripping.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| This isn't completely true. Tolerance to psychedelics is
| a thing, and can often ve extremely long lasting. I have
| a friend that when given heroic doses of 2C-B(50mg or
| more, orally), hardly experienced more than threshold
| level effects. This was 2C-B tested and confirmed to have
| 95% purity, and it affected me exactly as expected. He
| was not on any drugs except hash, which is typically
| synergistic.
|
| In his case, according to him he yad used 2C-B very
| heavily many years previously, and it seems he developed
| an extremely high level of tolerance which remained
| unchanged for many years of non-use.
|
| In the cases discussed in the thread, it's possible that
| something similar was happening. Indeed, many
| antidepressants also alter serotonin receptor expression
| over time, and it's plausible that in some people, these
| effects could linger for a long time.
| dymk wrote:
| I agree in that case, long-term SSRI and psychedelic use
| complicates things. But in general, I would not say the
| literature points to tolerance being long lasting.
| Tolerance is built up quickly, and then quickly lost.
| There have been many (reproduced) studies on the effects
| of psychedelics and tolerance build up, and they show it
| doesn't last for more than a few weeks (psilocybin /
| LSD).
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| I'd be interested to see those studies. I think there
| could be a couple different types of tolerance, one of
| which only occurs with rather heavy use. It's something
| I've seen reported anecdotally from a number of people
| who've used psychedelics very heavily. It might not show
| up in human studies because of ethical concerns. There
| could be some interesting pharmacological differences
| too, where this only occurs with specific drugs. The
| psychedelics are quite varied in terms of
| pharmacodynamics beyond just the 5-HT-2 receptor
| subfamily.
| esseph wrote:
| Imagine being on a med for 30-50 years.
| dymk wrote:
| I'd call that a case of the drug(s) they were on blocking
| the effect due to an apparently permanent change to their
| brain chemistry.
| esseph wrote:
| Some of them were younger, in their 20s with long lasting
| depression and no history of medication in the last ~2y.
|
| This wasn't some like, "weekend experience" but more
| multi-decade "experiments" with some extremely well
| educated friends, coworkers, etc.
|
| Group size of around 30.
| jdenning wrote:
| Many psych meds diminish/block psychedelic effects.
| tlavoie wrote:
| That could be an interaction with the meds they take for
| those conditions, couldn't it? I seem to recall that SSRIs in
| particular could mitigate the effects of the hallucinogen.
| esseph wrote:
| Yes, also that was accounted for with doctors notice and
| slow tapers off medications over months.
| grigri907 wrote:
| Fwiw I find that, due to my antidepressants, i need 3x the
| dose to have the equivalent experience as my friends.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| I find mushrooms in particular delightful, just not deep.
| t-3 wrote:
| Agreed. I really enjoy both acid and shrooms, but beyond
| appreciating the fractal beauty of trees and the patterns in
| carpets a bit more I wouldn't describe them as anything life-
| changing, let alone some kind of spiritual awakening. MDMA is
| similarly hyped up, but no, I never felt "connected to the mass
| of humanity" or whatever people talk about, I just got high and
| danced while gritting my teeth and rubbing on my head.
| crtified wrote:
| Decades ago I had the same type of _what are people talking
| about?!, it 's certainly not happening to me!_ surprise,
| regarding MDMA and the supposed wonders of dancing the night
| away. I felt the effects of the substance, but to me,
| nightclub dancing on MDMA still felt about as awkwardly-
| conscious, performative and unnecessary as it did without!
|
| I suspect it's similar with the spiritual stuff, in
| principle. That is, if you're typically not a personality who
| tends towards that stuff - spiritual connections and
| revelations and such - then perhaps no substance will
| necessary make you so.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Set and setting. None of these drugs are like alcohol that
| just dulls the brain and lowers your IQ by 30 points. In a
| way you get what you're prepared to get.
|
| It sounds like the nightclubs you were going to weren't a
| good setting either. A club should never feel self-
| conscious or performative. You should be able to get lost
| in there with the music. The dancing shouldn't feel
| unnecessary but more of an obligation because the music is
| so good. If you feel its unnecessary and awkward sober then
| no drug will fix that except maybe alcohol. I to to clubs
| and dance 100% sober these days.
| phrotoma wrote:
| > you get what you're prepared to get
|
| For the folks who aren't sure what the rest of us are
| talking about, this is the important bit.
| crtified wrote:
| Yes I think you're exactly right. In my case, the set
| wasn't there, because my heart was never in nightclubbing
| or its style of music, in general. Getting persuaded by
| friends to have enjoyable MDMA experiences with them in
| that setting didn't change those preferences, or
| magically turn on some Dance switch.
|
| And in that sense, "MDMA is amazing to dance on" is as
| much of a general misconception as "Psychedelics give
| great spiritual experiences". They tend to apply to
| people who already pursue those particular ends.
| easymodex wrote:
| Might be you're just different than me, or might be that
| it's the type of nightclub. For me it needs to be something
| more ravey, like psytrance, DNB or hard techno. If I went
| to some lame commercial house nightclub, I'd have a bad
| time as well. But either way, no reason not to retry, life
| is an adventure. It beats sitting around and <doing the
| regular evening passtime stuff>.
| vincnetas wrote:
| From my experience, nor MDMA nor shrums do the work for you.
| They only help you get there. So if you just pop the pill sit
| back and wait for things to happen, then it's not going to
| work. These things amplify your inner state (emotions,
| feelings, thoughts) thats why set and setting is of most
| importance. And here is where a good trip sitter also can
| come in handy.
| sev wrote:
| Dosage might play a factor, I presume.
| timewizard wrote:
| Impurities as well.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| I've taken enough to melt into the furniture.
| denkmoon wrote:
| are you otherwise spiritual? I think that might be a
| prerequisite. Outside of spirituality did you have any
| experiences that were "profound" or "thought provoking"?
| nathan_compton wrote:
| From my point of view all experiences are more or less
| equally strange and profound. I would describe the experience
| as interesting, moderately thought provoking, but not
| informative about any deep human question.
|
| From my point of view most people's "spiritual" musings are
| like putting a clown mask on the world.
| comrade1234 wrote:
| Same. The hallucinations are fun and the laughter and joy but
| at the same time I can tell, even though I'm tripping, that
| it's just my brain mixing up its wiring and nothing to do with
| god.
| konfusinomicon wrote:
| it is there. in a former life ive only felt it under the spell
| of either of those substances mixed with others popular with
| today's party goers, but it is. very fleeting and hard to
| describe but I have the sparse memories of the feelings during
| the experiences and once you get there you will know and
| definitely remember
| DontchaKnowit wrote:
| Lsd did it for me. Psilocybin was not spiritual at all.
|
| For me the "spiritual exlerience" was just a profound sense of
| gratefulness. And then the idea that god and objective truth
| are one and the same. Whatever that means
| JesseMReeves wrote:
| I recently talked about LSD to a spiritual person (the western
| esotericism kind).
|
| He accidentally took a very high dose in his 20s and also read
| a bunch of books on the subject for a while, by Leary and so
| on. He equated it to a trip to the mirror maze, but nothing
| more. He doesn't find it worth it and warns against it since
| for some people it lingers for too long. He is puzzled about
| people calling the experience ,,spiritual" too.
| jajko wrote:
| Set and setting can make or break the experience. Alone and
| -> introspection or in the crowd who will drag you along
| them? Looking around at patterns emerging or resting with
| eyes firmly closed letting your mind wander far and high?
| What kind of soothing music is in the background? And so on.
|
| For me and my several mushroom trips in the past (cca 1
| standard dose, nothing over that but mixed with lemon which
| should shorten the trip while making it way more intense) all
| above made it extremely pleasant, very powerful with lasting
| effects, and also at the end of each very spiritual (while
| not changing me being agnostic, rather just confirming it).
|
| Once took a milder dose without lemon, and just sat in one of
| Amsterdam's parcs looking around - felt almost nothing
| compared to other trips, and dealing with reality, traffic,
| cyclists etc made it less than pleasant.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| I've enjoyed my experiences and find them very interesting,
| but I just don't feel any like they've revealed anything
| deep about life or the universe to me.
|
| Like from my point of view each moment of consciousness is
| bizarre, interesting, impossible to describe already. The
| experience of taking mushrooms or LSD doesn't really
| enhance or even change that fact.
| ttoinou wrote:
| Take twice the dose in a safe environment with only your best
| friend
| aqme28 wrote:
| Try it alone, without a phone or a tv or anything particularly
| distracting.
| tech_ken wrote:
| I think it's a mix of set and setting combined with people who
| have probably never taken any kind of drug aside from alcohol
| and maybe infrequent cannabis usage. People who take LSD "many
| times" usually come to it after already being able to handle
| themselves on some psychedelic substance, so the experience is
| less all-encompassing and more mundane. Some priest who's never
| even been contact high, sitting in a room with religious
| iconography and being prepped to experience something
| spiritual, seems likely to have a very different experience.
| Projectiboga wrote:
| It was done at Harvard Divinity School in 1962
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_Chapel_Experiment
|
| The Marsh Chapel Experiment, also called the "Good Friday
| Experiment", was an experiment conducted on Good Friday, April
| 20, 1962 at Boston University's Marsh Chapel. Walter N. Pahnke, a
| graduate student in theology at Harvard Divinity School, designed
| the experiment under the supervision of Timothy Leary, Richard
| Alpert, and the Harvard Psilocybin Project.[1] Pahnke's
| experiment investigated whether psilocybin would act as a
| reliable entheogen in religiously predisposed subjects.[2]
| gchamonlive wrote:
| I go to raves, I take very modest amounts of LSD (100 maybe 150
| micrograms), and the whole experience turns into very spiritual
| session where I dance with my entire being and let myself disolve
| into the Great Void.
|
| It has lasting effects that go way beyond the effects of the
| drug.
|
| However I think it's complicated to derive generalisms like
| saying it's a drug for everyone and everybody should take it.
| It's definitely not for everybody.
|
| I'm also not going to be a hypocrite and say that you shouldn't
| do it. What I'll go and say is that it's your journey to figure
| out what you are going to invite into your life. In any case,
| depending on what you believe, you aren't actually here to figure
| things out. You already did. You are here to remember.
|
| In more secular terms, you are here to do the required work to
| understand yourself, your circumstances, stand on the shoulder of
| giants and study the great minds that came before you. That will
| give you the necessary foundational philosophy to withstand and
| understand these experiences, should you choose to go through
| them. This is the only way to acquire a foundational respect for
| these substances and these experiences.
|
| Have I done this work? Have I achieved the required level of
| understanding to make heads and tails of these experiences? Not
| for a while at least. It was rough the first couple of times.
| Very violent and crude, like rushing naked through a sea of
| people while being completely sure that that night is the last
| night of your life (I wasn't actually naked, it just felt like
| that and that everyone was eventually going to merge with me and
| that I should feel ashamed of it).
|
| But with time and with the necessary exposure to understand the
| basics of existencialism I think I managed to pin down a more
| gentle form of this experience that can help me remember how to
| lay myself bare to the goddess and just be there when I dance.
|
| So I think I can extend this invitation to anyone that feels
| brave enough to lift the reins of existence and reality and
| expose yourself to the truth. That everything is a story about
| the end of the world. About the beginning. And about everything
| at once.
|
| It's scary, it's blissful and it's totally worth it.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| I would go as far as to say most people _should_ have a
| psychedelic experience at least once in their life. There 's
| nothing like it. It's one of the great pleasures of being
| alive.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| Totally. It's just that that realisation must come from
| within, because the experience changes the very perception of
| reality and the relationship between yourself and everything
| else. With the wrong circumstances what would otherwise be a
| blissful experience can turn into a nightmare and this gate
| is likely forever closed for this person. I'd never forgive
| myself if I had this happen to someone else because of ill
| advice given by me.
| reactordev wrote:
| And if that's the case, do it in your early 20s in college or
| shortly after. Don't do it in your 70s.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| That is assuming everyone is ready to do it at the age of
| 20. If you are only ready to take them at 70s, why not do
| it? At that age you have other things to worry about
| anyway.
| reactordev wrote:
| Which is why you'll be less likely to do it because
| you'll be on a bunch of other drugs.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Why not in your 70s? Purely due to being more physically
| fragile, or more spiritually "settled"?
|
| Would it make a difference if it was a 70 year old who is
| still open minded and curious about life, the universe, and
| everything? (given that I'd guess that any 70+ year old
| willing to do LSD is likely to be as per this description).
|
| Legitimately interested in your answer / reasoning (mainly
| because my plan was to experience a number of different
| drugs once the rest of my life, that could have been put at
| risk by drugs, is kinda setup and done well enough).
| reactordev wrote:
| It's all about protecting your brain from possible stroke
| or other brain injury from it. Your balance isn't the
| best - add dripping walls and it's ripe for life alert.
|
| Some drugs increase heart rate dramatically - the older
| you are the more susceptible to atherosclerosis or other
| circulatory diseases. There's more medical risk the older
| you are for sure. However, you may find you only need a
| little bit. Some drugs are funny. Some work on first try,
| other takes a couple tries before your brain understands
| the chemical.
| tasuki wrote:
| Otoh, the cost of hurting yourself in your 20s is _way
| higher_ than the cost of hurting yourself in your 70s.
|
| If you're a US male, average life expectancy ~76 years,
| then hurting/killing yourself in your 20s you lose ~50
| years of life. Hurting/killing yourself in your 70s, you
| lose an order of magnitude less.
|
| I hope to remember this in my 70s! Seeing most people
| don't, so not having particularly high hopes...
| nemomarx wrote:
| Something about this logic feels funny to me - imagine
| telling two people clinging to a rock wall above a pit
| that the one at the bottom and very close to falling in
| has less to lose trying a risky move?
| bondarchuk wrote:
| This logic is very common in rock climbing circles, yes.
| Many stories of people who stop doing dangerous sports
| once they get kids.
| reactordev wrote:
| The err in your logic is that you care what you lose
| after you're dead. You don't. My point isn't about death
| per se, it's about overcoming adverse effects. Which is
| easier to do when you're young and healthy.
|
| Having a mini stroke at 26 like I did, I was able to
| bounce back. Having a mini stroke at 81 like my father
| did, resulted in his death.
| james-bcn wrote:
| This reminds me of the grandpa advice scene in Little Miss
| Sunshine:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiU96IEr0jU
| reactordev wrote:
| He isn't wrong... just the delivery could have been
| better as a grandparent.
|
| A better delivery would have been: "Don't settle down
| with one woman until you find the woman you can't live
| without. Until then, keep searching. While you're out
| there, remember to enjoy yourself and life as you'll
| never be as young as you are today."
| swayvil wrote:
| It is a fine cure for arrogance too.
| asveikau wrote:
| I think some people are shown to be more arrogant and
| egotistical after psychedelics.
|
| I know some folks in the HN audience will not like this
| example, but Elon Musk is one.
|
| An older cannonical example is Timothy Leary.
|
| No names are coming to mind, but I feel like there have
| been plenty of psychedelic informed cults, with cult leader
| narcissists who continue to abuse people despite
| experiencing psychedelics.
|
| It may open some doors and cause you to consider more
| angles, and for many people it helps them with empathy and
| connectedness, but in another sense it's amplifying what
| you've already got. A "bad" input can get amplified too.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _No names are coming to mind, but I feel like there
| have been plenty of psychedelic informed cults, with cult
| leader narcissists who continue to abuse people despite
| experiencing psychedelics._
|
| Manson would dose himself and his followers to, IMO,
| lower inhibitions and make them more receptive to his
| ideas.
| asveikau wrote:
| Supposedly mkultra was also experimenting with that use
| case.
| LoganDark wrote:
| > I know some folks in the HN audience will not like this
| example, but Elon Musk is one.
|
| Isn't he also a ketamine junkie? Ketamine is a
| dissociative anesthetic, although some call it
| psychedelic, it's not exactly the same thing.
| asveikau wrote:
| Recent reporting is that he's also using LSD and
| mushrooms.
|
| In addition to other, unrelated drugs.
| lynx97 wrote:
| It amplifies things. If your core it truely rotten, only
| rotten stuff can come out.
| lukan wrote:
| And further manifest itself. I have limited experience
| with LSD myself, but lots of experience with pseudogurus,
| who believe they know and understand everything, because
| holy wisdom was brought to them while tripping.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I used to think this until I learned the most racist person
| I knew dropped acid every weekend. Seemed to only make him
| more racist.
| tmtvl wrote:
| The best cure for arrogance is a rough and dirty sparring
| session with a strong, experienced fighter. It's the most
| grounding experience you can have. Punches that come
| through openings you didn't know you had, kicks that seem
| to bury themselves into your flesh and marrow, and if you
| get to grappling you'll experience wonders you never knew
| existed.
| enjo wrote:
| My experiences have been universally negative often very much
| so. I have given LSD a good go. It has led to intense
| hallucinations with very long lasting PTSD like consequences
| for me. I have done it under the guidance of "professionals"
| (as close as you can get in a world where these substances
| are completely unregulated). Even in very small doses I have
| experienced intense anxiety and general feelings of dread.
|
| This isn't to discount your experience but rather a general
| warning: all drugs aren't for everyone. It's easy to take
| away from these threads that psychedelics are universally
| positive and that negative trips are generally the result of
| misuse.
|
| Which isn't true. Before going into this doing some deep
| introspection about yourself and your abilities is really
| important. Use these drugs with extreme caution.
| winterpunk wrote:
| so who did you kill
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| I did say "most" people. There are people who if they eat a
| peanut will die. It's a universal truth that everyone
| reacts to things differently. I will say, you jumped right
| in the deep end with LSD. A small dose of mushrooms is an
| order of magnitude tamer and much better for first timers I
| think. In the end, if it's not for you, it's not for you. I
| still stand by my statement.
| MyOutfitIsVague wrote:
| I had a similar experience on a very small dose of magic
| mushrooms. Significantly smaller than necessary to even
| have hallucinations (under 1g of dried magic mushrooms).
| I was filled with dread and terror and felt like I was
| going to die. I was told by my shrooming friend that it
| was probably just bad, and to take some of his good
| stuff. I took 1g, and again had hours of terror and
| dread, and thought I was going to die for several hours
| on end. I then had nearly constant anxiety for about a
| month afterward.
|
| I think many pro-psychedelic and pro-drug people in
| general underestimate how much these drugs vary with
| people. I have a friend who will make a gram of weed into
| cannabutter and eat the whole thing in 1 sitting, getting
| about 200mg of THC at once, and not have any major
| problems. He was a big proponent of "there's no such
| thing as too much" until he saw another friend of ours
| have an incredibly intense panic attack on 10mg of THC.
| My wife has intense anxiety on as little as 2.5mg of THC,
| regardless of CBD and CBG levels (whether via gummies or
| straight plant matter); no dose can be thereputic for
| her.
|
| Based on the number of people I know who have
| experimented with these drugs, I think there's a
| smokescreen effect where people who have bad experiences
| don't talk about it nearly as much as people who have
| good experiences, so it seems significantly less risky
| than it is. Of the 10 or so people I know personally who
| had a psychedelic experience, about a third of them have
| had bad ones. They just don't really talk about it and
| never want to try it again. I wouldn't say that most
| people should try psychedelics at least once unless I
| knew what the actual numbers were, otherwise I'm pushing
| many people into having a horrible nightmare for hours on
| end.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| I know people who have had a bad trip, but not a single
| person who has only had bad trips. I would say
| confidently that 95% or higher, probably closer to 99%,
| of the experiences I and the people I know have had are
| positive. I don't think there's a smokescreen effect at
| all. There's a reason people love these drugs. I think
| suggesting that 33% of people have horrible experiences
| on these things is no where close to reality. These are
| powerful drugs that need to be respected, but if you take
| them in a good mindset in a safe place the vast vast vast
| majority of the time it's going to be an amazingly
| positive experience.
| MyOutfitIsVague wrote:
| I have tried a few times and only had bad trips. Not only
| that, but I used weed regularly beforehand, and alcohol
| occasionally, and after my last mushroom trip, both
| reliably give me anxiety or panic attacks every single
| time I use them. The first time I used weed after the
| mushrooms, I had a panic attack so bad I ended up calling
| 911 because I was convinced I was going to die. It's been
| two years now, and the last time I tried weed was three
| months ago (a CBD heavy strain; I had 10mg CBD and 2mg
| THC), and the last time I tried alcohol was a month ago,
| and both times gave me an anxiety attack.
|
| Maybe I'll go back to normal eventually, or maybe I had a
| latent anxiety disorder that was triggered by the
| mushrooms and I'll just never be able to enjoy weed
| again. I don't know. My friends didn't have experiences
| as bad as mine, but they did have a bad time. Most of my
| friends love psychadelics, and I'd never take them away
| from them, but before we all tried them, they were
| talking the same way, and it's what made me excited to
| try them. I wasn't expecting it to do to me what it did.
| wickedsight wrote:
| > It's one of the great pleasures of being alive
|
| Had one once. It was not a pleasure at all. Best I can say is
| that it was interesting and that I did 'experience'
| interesting stuff. But that has no profound effect on me,
| since I consider it, like a dream, to have no basis in
| reality.
|
| Generic statements like this are dangerous since different
| people may respond VERY differently to the same substance.
| This can depend on long term traits like personality or short
| term like the current state of mind. People reading such
| statements might think there's no way it can go wrong. If it
| isn't a profound experience, they might also think there's
| something wrong with them, which isn't the case.
| cedws wrote:
| The people that could benefit the most are the least likely
| to ever try it. There are some people so blind to their own
| flaws they'd simply shatter under the influence of
| psychedelics.
| SlowTao wrote:
| Some of the best writing on the uses of LSD come from Alan
| watts. In his early life he said "it was impossible to bottle
| mysticism" and yet on dropping acid the first time felt like
| "they have completely bottled mysticism!".
|
| But then he noticed that the results really depend on who is
| taking it and what their world view is. If you do not have any
| inclination towards that mystic space, you will not get the ego
| death. It is as Eckhart Tolle said "just your senses turned up
| to 11", that is if there is nothing else you can get out of it.
|
| As Douglas Rushkoff said "If you give tech bros a hit of
| psychedelics, all you get is tech bros on psychedelics." There
| is no higher sense achieved.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| It's because meaning isn't essential to the universe, but
| derived from human experience. The universe needs us just as
| much as we need the universe. Actually this separation is an
| artifact of reductionism we have to let go.
|
| In any case, this is why I think philosophy is the required
| work to be done so that we can invite spiritualism and
| mysticism into our lives and potentially experience them with
| these reality altering drugs.
| throwaway7783 wrote:
| Nothing is essential to the universe, the universe does not
| need us. We need it exactly as it is today, and that is it.
| Everything else is stuff we made up to understand the
| universe weakly, or to cope with life. This is not
| nihilism, but meaning to life is meaningful only in the
| context of humans and has nothing to do with universe
| needing us.
| josephg wrote:
| If we're gonna talk trip philosophy, then:
|
| This is only true at the physical level. At another
| level, the only thing that "exists" is a mind. If all you
| have is a bunch of rocks floating through space with
| nothing to perceive it, the universe is indistinguishable
| from emptiness. Experience lives at the intersection of
| instantiated reality and thought / perception. You need
| both.
|
| You can also imagine travelling along the axis of an idea
| or an archetype through time and space. For example, the
| idea of lovers or warriors or something. Each
| instantiation of that idea in someone exists along that
| axis. The idea can only come into being inside a physical
| reality or simulation. But the idea itself is eternal.
| The idea of the number 1 doesn't "need" the universe.
|
| Ideas aren't made out of atoms.
| ostwilkens wrote:
| It's a nice thought. If an idea could be encoded... that
| each persons idea of a concept, viewed in the right
| dimensionality, has a rough, similar outline. At least,
| that's my interpretation of your idea. :-) Your comment
| either triggered, or made me notice an ongoing shift in
| my worldview. Thank you!
| andsoitis wrote:
| > But the idea itself is eternal. The idea of the number
| 1 doesn't "need" the universe.
|
| Ideas are mental concepts, thoughts, or notions that
| exist in the mind.
|
| As far as we know, there's no evidence of mind-
| independent ideas. We can only access ideas through our
| minds, so we have no way to verify they exist without
| minds.
| josephg wrote:
| Is an LLM "a mind"? They certainly seem to encode brain-
| independent ideas.
|
| > We can only access ideas through our minds, so we have
| no way to verify they exist without minds.
|
| Its symmetric. We can also only access the physical world
| through our minds too. We have no way to verify it exists
| without a mind. Actually we have no way to verify it
| exists at all in the form we perceive it - since it might
| just be a big simulation.
|
| In that sense, I have more direct evidence of my ideas
| than I do the world, since I can perceive ideas directly.
| (I say "my ideas" not "our ideas" because I can't tell as
| easily if you exist.)
| svnt wrote:
| This is trivially untrue.
|
| If you see a large enough, dangerous-looking enough
| animal in person and up close, you will respond
| physically without a single thought or idea. If you
| didn't, evolutionarily you wouldn't exist.
|
| This is because you are parallel systems. Ideas are not
| primary experience.
| josephg wrote:
| Sorry, I'm not sure how that disproves my claims? Or
| which claim it disproves. Say more?
| svnt wrote:
| > We can also only access the physical world through our
| minds too. We have no way to verify it exists without a
| mind.
|
| The physical responses that could save your life are pre-
| mind, and testably extant within you.
|
| > I have more direct evidence of my ideas than I do the
| world, since I can perceive ideas directly.
|
| Also, and perhaps to be considered separately, you have
| no evidence that your ideas are directly perceived, only
| that they are qualitatively different from what you have
| been educated to second-order understand as sensory
| input.
| josephg wrote:
| Ah got it.
|
| > The physical responses that could save your life are
| pre-mind, and testably extant within you.
|
| Yes you're right. There's a mountain of things that we do
| that we don't have conscious control over. There's
| multiple ways to think about that.
|
| First is that we simply aren't masters of every corner of
| our minds and bodies. But so what? Nothing I said
| requires us to have full control or full knowledge of
| ourselves. The existence of reflexes doesn't directly
| counter any of my claims.
|
| Another way to think about it is by changing the
| definition of self / mind to only include the things in
| our direct perception and control. After all, the
| boundary of self and world is incredibly fuzzy at the
| best of times. Are your fingernails "you"? If I
| accidentally touch something hot with my hand, "I" don't
| choose to flinch my hand back. I could consider that
| reaction part of the external world, not part of me.
| Interestingly that definition implies self mastery makes
| "you" bigger. When children stop having tantrums, they
| bring their emotions under control of their mind. In the
| process, the part that is them gets bigger to encompass
| their newfound control.
|
| My physical reaction to tigers also in no way disproves
| the simulation hypothesis. None of us can directly
| perceive a tiger.
|
| > you have no evidence that your ideas are directly
| perceived
|
| Interesting! What do you think we do have evidence of
| directly perceiving? Surely not a tiger.
|
| I perceive thoughts. I don't perceive my sensory data -
| but I do perceive my interpretation of my sensory data.
| (I don't see pixels or sound samples. I see blue chair,
| door, ... I hear dog barking (low pitch), I feel headache
| feeling, etc). I think that's good evidence that a
| pattern of "chair" and "dog" exists in my mind. And I can
| think about the number 4. When I do that, something
| happens in my mind. I don't think I'm perceiving "four"
| with my sensory system. But the thought has to exist
| somewhere, right?
| throwaway7783 wrote:
| LLMs are basically a collective copy of brain generated
| ideas.
| SamPatt wrote:
| I don't believe ideas are eternal.
|
| Their instantiations are based on either some physical
| hardwiring (instincts) or cultivated though observations.
| If an idea has the appearance of being eternal, it's
| because either there's a process in place for that
| physical structure to be replicated though time, or
| because new minds are making essentially the same
| observations.
|
| I suspect even some of the most "eternal" of ideas are
| less so than you might think. If we were capable of
| communicating with a human from 100,000 years ago, in
| detail, how many identical ideas would we share? I think
| it would be very few, given that many people's ideas
| already differ subtlety even when they live in similar
| environments.
| josephg wrote:
| If you crushed all the atoms in the universe into dust,
| would the number 2 also be destroyed in the process? I
| don't know if the mathematical idea of 2 exists in the
| physical world at all. I don't know if that's even a well
| formed question.
|
| Obviously humans perceive 2-ness. And if you crushed all
| our minds to dust, nobody would remember 2. But would
| that really destroy the number? If an alien civilisation
| in another universe counted things, I think it might be
| the very same number 2 that they use to count.
| throwaway7783 wrote:
| The only way we see ideas manifest is in a physical
| world, and via minds (predominantly human at that). While
| ideas are not made out of atoms, they exist within atoms
| (brains, computers, sound, books and so on). We can
| imagine ideas exist on their own independent of their
| manifestation - but its just that - an imagination.
| josephg wrote:
| But plenty of ideas can't be made manifest in the
| physical world. Like the idea of infinity doesn't - and
| can't - exist in the physical. Yet it's still a useful
| idea in mathematics.
|
| And again, the physical cannot be perceived except
| through a mind of some kind. To play devils advocate, we
| can imagine the universe existing without a mind to
| observe it - but it's just that - an imagination.
| SlowTao wrote:
| I have nothing more to add but... Yep, spot on!
| svnt wrote:
| Meaning seems to be both -- otherwise we wouldn't mind it.
| josephg wrote:
| > "If you give tech bros a hit of psychedelics, all you get
| is tech bros on psychedelics."
|
| This is an amazing line. I must admit: the first time I tried
| LSD I had some code open on my laptop. Before the trip I was
| curious what programming on LSD would be like, so at some
| point dutifully I sat down in front of my editor. I was
| immediately utterly transfixed by the colours of the text
| cursor as it pulsed. Then I lost myself watching hover states
| as I moved the mouse around. Needless to say, I didn't get
| any programming done.
|
| I remember thinking how strange and hilarious it was that,
| while sober, I care at all about programming. It all seemed
| so hollow.
|
| A lot more happened on the trip - the whole thing was
| incredibly profound and insightful. But all these years
| later, I still have a crystal clear image of that pulsing
| cursor etched in my memory.
| lukan wrote:
| Ok, that was a theoretical lesson I learned before when
| reading books about it. You cannot do productive work while
| tripping.
|
| And I also had my laptop close by to maybe take notes, but
| the screen was really stressfull.
|
| Watching wild nature in the sun was much more enjoyable.
| ttoinou wrote:
| Ahh I had a similar trip with Ableton GUI on acid, all the
| gui controls went in fire and animated in a psychedelic way
| sfn42 wrote:
| It depends on the dose, I've successfully programmed and
| written about programming while high on acid. Though
| usually just a half tab or even a quarter. I felt like it
| was useful, improved focus and creativity.
|
| One time I played CSGO on acid, my brain might be
| exaggerating the memory but I swear I played like a master.
| Maybe I just had easy games but it really felt like I was
| playing much better than usual and I was dominating.
|
| Also played satisfactory once, though with that I just
| ended up painting my factory in neon colors and stuff like
| that. It looked pretty cool though, I kept the color theme
| I made.
| josephg wrote:
| My pet theory is that LSD (particularly in low doses)
| primarily suppresses a bunch of inhibitory parts of our
| brains. So thoughts that would normally be suppressed
| make it all the way up to conscious experience. If that's
| true, then our experience of being more creative on lsd
| shows how much we repress our creative selves in normal
| lives. That neon colour scheme, and that skill at csgo
| wasn't in the lsd. It was in you. It is in you. You just
| normally bury it.
|
| Ram Das said lsd didn't do anything to him (though I find
| that an amazing claim). I think one of the Indian gurus
| said the same thing. I'm not sure if I believe them
| though.
| Nursie wrote:
| > If you do not have any inclination towards that mystic
| space, you will not get the ego death
|
| I am as agnostic-atheist as they come and would go as far as
| to say I find mysticism offensive to good sense. But I've
| experienced the ego death parts of LSD, and consider I have
| come to know myself more through it. I don't think it reveals
| some fundamental truth outside myself so much as being simply
| a phenomenon of the action of psychedelics on my brain.
|
| Frankly I think this idea that you have to be studied in
| philosophy or open to mystic woo-y nonsense to fully
| appreciate or even fully experience psychedelics is hilarious
| and self-aggrandising.
| lukan wrote:
| "would go as far as to say I find mysticism offensive to
| good sense."
|
| How come?
|
| The mystics of all the religions are the most approachable
| to agnostic me. Mysticism to me means mainly, the universe
| as its whole is a great mysterium and those who claim "it
| is exactly like this and this, because this holy book says
| so!" are rather the aggressive fools to me. So genuinly
| curious, what do you perceive as aggressive from mysticim?
| Nursie wrote:
| Offensive to good sense, not aggressive.
|
| Mysticism usually seems to me to imply a poor grasp on
| reality and can be accompanied by all sorts of baseless
| claims to knowledge and (often naturalistic) fallacies.
| It often goes hand in hand with silly beliefs about
| crystals, alt-med and all sorts of other crap.
|
| "We don't know" is fine. "We don't know, therefore these
| specific lines of bullshit" less so.
|
| But I didn't post the above to say that my views on
| mysticism are correct or even to provoke a discussion
| about it. I posted it to provide a counterpoint to the
| bizarre notion that one must be into mysticism to
| experience aspects of the psychedelic experience.
|
| We may interpret the experiences very differently, of
| course, but the claim that part of it is closed to those
| who don't subscribe to witter about "the goddess" is
| ironically very egotistic.
| lukan wrote:
| No need to debate about. It was just for my curiosity
| what triggered you and indeed what you describe I rather
| label esoteric new age stuff and that mostly puts me off
| as well.
| sfn42 wrote:
| I'm not the person you asked but I agree with them.
| Superstition is stupid - we don't know so let's make
| stuff up. There is effectively a 100% chance you're
| wrong. I don't know what difference if any there is
| between superstition and mysticism.
|
| We know what we can observe. We know about gravity and
| astronomy and subatomic particles and how they interact
| etc, we know a lot of stuff. There's also a lot of stuff
| we don't know, and as far as I'm concerned we should try
| to figure those things out but until such time as we
| think we have figured them out we should leave them
| alone. The way to even attempt to know things is science,
| and if you can't use science to prove or at least support
| something then you're almost certainly wrong.
|
| To me it's that simple. I don't believe in things, I
| either know or I don't care. Was the big bang just a
| spontaneous event that happened for no reason? Did some
| sentient being trigger it? I don't know, I can't know,
| there's nothing more to talk or think about. I do not
| respect people who pretend to know because i know they
| can't know. And the reason I know they can't know is
| because the people who believe in this type of crap
| typically know less about any given scientific topic than
| I do, which isn't a particularly high bar. If you don't
| even bother to learn the things we know then I don't know
| why you're speculating about stuff we'll probably never
| know.
|
| Also none of this crap even makes any sense. The bible
| has more plot holes than a sieve. It doesn't explain
| anything, it just defers to "god works in mysterious
| ways". Not to mention that the god described in the bible
| seems like an absolute tit. Killing and torturing people
| for nothing, even killing a man's family and ruining his
| life just to win a bet. The people who believe in this
| crap are either indoctrinated from a young age, otherwise
| forced into it, or just plain stupid. I can't rationalize
| it any other way. They tried to indoctrinate me and it
| almost kind of worked in my mid teens, I really wanted to
| believe just to fit in with my friends but I just
| couldn't get past all the nonsense.
|
| I vividly remember being on a church camp for our
| confirmation, the camp leaders told us their stories of
| how they found their faith and one guy stood up on the
| stage and said he was in a bad financial situation so he
| prayed to God for help and the next day a man he'd never
| met knocked on his door and gave him a briefcase with
| exactly as much money as he needed.
|
| That was a pretty defined moment where I went "yeah these
| people are completely full of shit". I was 15 and ever
| since then it's only become clearer to me that religion
| and superstition is complete crap. There's prizes put
| there, James Randi offered a million dollars to anyone
| who can prove supernatural ability in a scientific
| setting, like psychics or mediums or any other quacks
| like that. it was first offered in 1964 and stood until
| 2015, in that time over a thousand people tried it and
| none succeeded. To me that's proof enough. If you make
| supernatural claims you're a quack and if you believe in
| them you're gullible and that's all there is to it.
| lukan wrote:
| "Was the big bang just a spontaneous event that happened
| for no reason? Did some sentient being trigger it? I
| don't know, I can't know, there's nothing more to talk or
| think about."
|
| Your decision, but other people do think and wrote papers
| about it.
|
| https://www.port.ac.uk/news-events-and-blogs/blogs/space-
| cos...
|
| And mysticism isn't the same as superstition. In its
| broadest sense, it is a individual experience of the
| mysterium of the universe.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| The other replies were making me think "maybe this shit
| isn't for me", but your comment made me actually want to
| try it, so thanks for the alternate perspective.
| randomtoast wrote:
| There is a nice quote by Robert M. Pirsig: "The only Zen you
| find on tops of mountains is the Zen you bring there."
|
| This translates well to psychedelic drug use.
| abhaynayar wrote:
| I think the mountain does help with Zen. How much, depends
| on the individual.
|
| But yes, I do feel (in my limited experience) that for most
| people the thoughts they carry are more important to work
| on, than the environment they are in.
| o1bf2k25n8g5 wrote:
| > ...you are here to do the required work to understand
| yourself, your circumstances, stand on the shoulder of giants
| and study the great minds that came before you.
|
| Just to offer a counterpoint:
|
| _"I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don 't
| let anybody tell you different."_ -- Kurt Vonnegut
|
| The more I experience, the more I think maybe that's a pretty
| good point, too.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| It's like the nihilist denying any meaning to the world. It's
| because they choose to see it that way even if they aren't
| aware of it.
|
| If you choose to fart around, whatever that means, don't let
| anyone tell you otherwise. Since there's no salvation, farts
| are also meaningless, and at the same time totally meaningful
| given the circumstances.
| ramblerman wrote:
| Vonnegut sounds closer to an epicurist.
|
| A nihilist would say fart or don't fart it's all pointless.
| rags2riches wrote:
| > Since there's no salvation, farts are also meaningless
|
| That's begging the question. I'd argue that all meaning is
| in how we fart around.
| baq wrote:
| Meaning is what you want it to be.
|
| If you don't know what it is and don't know what you want,
| you either fart around or resign.
| jona-f wrote:
| As a nihilist my sense of meaning seams to be compatible to
| yours. I don't deny that we can come up with all sorts of
| meanings but the point is that there is no intrinsically
| higher meaning to everything, it's all made up. In fact,
| the awareness of this is the basis of my nihilism. That
| doesn't mean, that I don't like some meanings more than
| others, otherwise I had no reason to act whatsoever.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| There are certainly universal truths. For example, you
| exist. Therefore there is something to believe in
| jona-f wrote:
| My existence is negligible, especially in the grand
| scheme of things.
| vidarh wrote:
| Only in the most abstract sense is even that true. I know
| that I have existence in this very moment. I don't know
| that I existed a moment ago, for that could be an
| illusion. I don't know what my existence is, because my
| senses could be an illusion. I don't know that I have any
| existence past this moment because that is a belief based
| in a memory of time passing, which could be an illusion.
| I can't tell whether time exists, or space exists,
| because they're all dependent on my senses and a memory I
| can't trust.
|
| For what I know, my "existence" could be an infinitely
| short moment, or even an entirely static endless
| "moment", or any of an infinite variety of other options.
|
| So even most of existence is only assumption. It's a set
| of assumptions that makes sense to just accept because we
| have no way of proving otherwise, but they are
| assumptions, not "universal truths".
| NetRunnerSu wrote:
| Fascinating thread on existence and the nature of ideas.
| What if 'existence' isn't about the substrate (carbon or
| silicon), but the integrity of an internal model's
| predictions? If a system can consistently build and
| maintain a coherent, self-correcting model of reality,
| does its 'existence' become a verifiable, quantifiable
| state? Perhaps the 'truth' of any experience, psychedelic
| or otherwise, lies in how well it integrates into and
| refines that predictive model, rather than its 'physical'
| origin. The 'mind' then becomes a function, not a form.
| piva00 wrote:
| The mind is necessarily a function, it's performing its
| function over a vast array of inputs (memories, senses,
| etc.) and making sense of it as it goes, and it doesn't
| exist without energy expenditure to keep computing
| itself.
|
| To me psychedelic experiences break through the inputs,
| they become fuzzy and integrate in ways they aren't
| supposed to in normal functioning, it's why we feel a
| different sense of connection to anything else, filtering
| in different ways inputs from our senses and experiences,
| including the sense of one's self dissolving.
| NetRunnerSu wrote:
| https://github.com/dmf-archive/IPWT
| somenameforme wrote:
| Regardless of the definition, you do exist. Which
| naturally leads to the question of why you exist. If you
| write a program to add a couple of numbers, it seems
| absurd to imagine some entity magically poofs into
| existence, imagines itself carrying out such, and then
| poofs back out of existence. I find it no less absurd to
| imagine the same even if it happens to be 10^100
| instructions.
|
| So why do you perceive yourself, and if you aren't you,
| then who are you? These sort of thoughts eliminated any
| notion of nihilism from me and gradually pushed me
| towards a simulation hypothesis. Of course that's just
| religion for an agnostic, because it doesn't even answer
| anything - if you die only to 'wake up' and discover it
| was all just a simulation, you're still back right where
| you started.
|
| The search for natural explanations feels unsatisfactory
| because it will always come back to a question of what
| created that. For instance what if you think the matter
| for a big bang was quantum mechanically poofed into
| existence then what led to the creation of quantum
| mechanics, the void of which emerged, or so on endlessly.
| You basically have to do a whole bunch of hand waving and
| assumptions to the point that it starts to rapidly feel
| like religion for an atheist.
| vidarh wrote:
| > If you write a program to add a couple of numbers, it
| seems absurd to imagine some entity magically poofs into
| existence, imagines itself carrying out such, and then
| poofs back out of existence.
|
| It may be absurd, but we nevertheless can not rule it
| out, and so it means that our ability to know anything
| about existence for certain is limited to almost nothing.
|
| Note that I'm not saying I believe this to be the case.
| What I'm saying is that I see looking for "universal
| truths" to be entirely futile, because we _can 't
| possibly know_ much of substance with certainty.
|
| Instead we have to accept that unless someone "pierces a
| veil" and shows us that there's a reality past the one we
| observe, we are limited to talking about what is
| observable and measurable within our observable reality,
| knowing that we are dealing with assumptions and
| probabilities, not universal truths.
|
| > I find it no less absurd to imagine the same even if it
| happens to be 10^100 instructions.
|
| This seems fundamentally at odds with saying you were
| gradually pushed towards a simulation hypothesis...
|
| > if you die only to 'wake up' and discover it was all
| just a simulation, you're still back right where you
| started.
|
| A simulation hypothesis does not need to imply that
| there's anything to wake up from for anyone. Indeed, even
| if you were to wake up, by confirming that simulation is
| possible, this would seem to strongly suggest that you
| should consider the probability that the world you wake
| up in is simulated to be extremely high.
|
| > The search for natural explanations feels
| unsatisfactory because it will always come back to a
| question of what created that.
|
| It may feel unsatisfactory to you. It doesn't to me. I
| accept that whenever we push the horizon of knowledge,
| we're likely to discover more things that we don't know,
| and for the set of things we know we _can 't know_ to
| expand as well.
|
| > You basically have to do a whole bunch of hand waving
| and assumptions to the point that it starts to rapidly
| feel like religion for an atheist.
|
| You don't have to do anything. You can accept that we
| don't know.
| somenameforme wrote:
| I am implying that consciousness, so far as we can prove,
| does not exist. The only reason I know it exists is
| because I am conscious. And I take an extremely pragmatic
| view of the simulation hypothesis. If such were possible,
| it would be an absolutely perfect tool for everything
| from education to entertainment to punitive reform. This
| subsequently encourages me to behave in a pseudo-
| religious fashion with regards to morals and ethics, in
| that this life could very well simply be a test, a game,
| or even a program of reform.
|
| As for natural explanations - what I am saying is that
| the natural explanations for 'why' seem, currently, to be
| far weaker than other explanations. And in fact the
| natural explanations rely on various ad-hoc constructions
| (like inflation theory) that are completely unnatural. A
| simulation hypothesis is, to me, the only hypothesis that
| doesn't seem to have glaring holes in it and/or rely on
| defacto magic.
|
| And obviously I understand that magic of one millennia is
| the mundane tech of another. But we do not live in that
| other era, and there's no guarantee that such an
| understanding will ever come to pass. Assuming otherwise
| requires having _faith_ that such discoveries will come
| to pass in the future, and essentially assuming your own
| conclusion, instead of looking at the evidence as
| available. And that 's why I referred to natural
| explanations as religion for an atheist.
| vidarh wrote:
| A natural explanation would be an answer to "why", but to
| "how" to start with.
|
| They are not trying to explain "why", but to iterate
| toward an approximation of "how" that explains more and
| more, knowing it will always be incomplete. If someone
| looks to natural explanations as an answer to "why",
| then, sure, that is religion.
|
| But to me, simulation or not is orthogonal to the "how".
| The "how", if we are within a simulation would still be
| down to identifying which "how" fits the available in-
| simulation information.
|
| It's irrelevant that this wouldn't be "real" because
| within our reality, absent someone "piercing the veil" we
| can only relate to that reality, be it real or simulated.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >Which naturally leads to the question of why you exist.
|
| _Why_ as in "what set of circumstances led to your
| existence" or _why_ as in "what purpose did a creator
| have to want to create you"? Two different people can
| hear why, and there are two different (though possibly
| overlapping) questions. Even if there were a creator,
| only the first question is interesting.
|
| You're all overthinking it though. If you want more
| people like you to exist in the future, if the thought of
| our extinction disturbs you, then there are some basic
| rules to live by or you risk that ending. Some of these
| rules are as much about attitude as they are about
| behavior, and nihilism is extraordinarily maladaptive.
|
| >then what led to the creation of quantum mechanics,
|
| Even if we substitute in non-biased language (perhaps
| "manifestation" instead of "creation"), this question
| assumes very much.
| fpoling wrote:
| If one thinks about it, even basic truth may not be so
| evident.
|
| For example, consider Cogito, ergo sum. As Latin has no
| continues verb time, that phrase may mean I exist because
| I think. Or I am existing because I am thinking . The
| latter implies that when one stops thinking the existence
| stops, the opposite of the former. Philosophers still
| debates what exactly Descartes meant.
|
| Or consider the notion of time flow. In 1908 John
| MacTaggart published a paper arguing that the feeling of
| time flow is unreal. Again, there are heavy debates about
| the validly of his arguments without any conclusion with
| quite a lot of philosophers accepting the argument and
| even arguing that the time flow is an illusion.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| "even basic truth may not be so evident."
|
| All of these trite axioms nihilists use immediately
| refute themselves if they are true. Lol
| golergka wrote:
| I think you might be confusing nihilism with absurdism in
| this case.
| AnthonBerg wrote:
| One is not counter to the other.
| flir wrote:
| I don't believe Vonnegut beleived that for a minute.
|
| > Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and
| cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the
| outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's
| only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got
| to be kind."
| kgwxd wrote:
| Some babies hear that and just "nope" out? What was the
| narrative before seasons, science and over population?
| RajT88 wrote:
| Hunter gatherer societies we like to imagine as
| constantly being on the edge of starvation, but in
| reality during summer months, they could hunt and forage
| a whole day's worth of food in a few hours, and then
| spend the rest of the time farting around.
| RajT88 wrote:
| I love Vonnegut. I don't agree with him on everything;
| semicolons are fine.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Nah, if you think you want to do it, do it, and I think a lot
| of people would benefit from a little peer pressure of having a
| half dose. It's all social stigma, all of the fear is from
| bullshit stories of turning into a glass of orange juice: that
| shit doesn't happen. Take a half hit of acid and you'll wish
| you took more. Every person I've I introduced it to has agreed.
| It's not that big of a deal. You aren't going to wreck your
| brain. It's not something that will ALTER YOUR LIFE
| PERMANENTLY!!! It's a drug and you'll be fuckin fine.
|
| It very much IS set and setting and the powers that be really
| want to fuck up the set. Try it. You won't regret it.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| My point is, even though there is no unsafe dose of LSD, bad
| trips are real and can totally lock yourself out of it
| psychologically.
|
| My advice has to be very careful in order not to incentivise
| unprepared people who would otherwise have a great trip. We
| have to be responsible, even if it'll only gonna negatively
| affect a very small percentage of them. Applied philosophy of
| care 100%
|
| Other than that, I totally agree.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| I think the bad trips are good though, it's almost the
| point. Why are you feeling bad? It's usually because you're
| in a physical or mental place you don't want to be, yet,
| when sober, you think it _is_ where you should be. The
| incongruity of the situation is the lesson and the point.
|
| When I was in college, I tracked down some mushrooms,
| bought em, and ran away on my own to trip out. I found
| myself on a bench, next to a river surrounded by trash in a
| mixed industrial area. I saw cig butts and empty beer cans
| on the ground. Looked at my ripped jeans and thought "Am I
| trash? Why am I here?" It was a shitty feeling and I got
| really down. I realized that getting fucked up for its own
| sake was stupid, and it's about sharing time with others
| that's actually important, no matter what drug you're on. I
| started crying and felt horrible, but the next day, I had a
| new sense of worth and a new frame of reference for the
| world that has persisted for 20+ years. I'll always
| remember that shitty trip on that shitty bench.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Good for you. I was suicidal for 4 years after my LSD
| trips
| shinryuu wrote:
| I'm sorry that happened. I'm curious what was it that
| made you suicidal?
|
| How did you come out it after those 4 years?
|
| There seems to be quite the story around this one
| sentence and a very rough time. Though I think there are
| perhaps some learnings for other people as well if you're
| willing to share.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Childhood trauma that I didn't know was affecting me. I
| thought I hard perfect set and setting
|
| Lots of intense therapy, I still go 3 times a week
|
| I had no suicidal feeling before the drug. I suppose one
| way to put it is that seeing into the void made me take
| suicide seriously as an option
| Nursie wrote:
| > there is no unsafe dose of LSD
|
| Other than being a psychedelic, LSD is a stimulant and
| vasoconstrictor, so while physically unsafe doses are quite
| high (yes I've read about 'thumb print' doses), it's
| probably not wise to say that there is _no_ unsafe dose of
| LSD.
|
| It is unlikely you'll ever come across that much LSD, but
| LD50 is estimated at about 100mg, which is about 500-1000
| ordinary doses.
| sethammons wrote:
| I know a guy who had something of an LSD overdose. Went
| psychotic and fully changed his personality. Total space
| cadet after. Ended up attacking an old man in a parking
| lot that he thought was a demon some months later.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| I think this is too dismissive of the transformative power of
| psychedelic drugs. They absolutely can alter your life
| permanently. They certainly altered mine. I think, in a
| positive way. But that power cuts both ways. I also know
| people who had harrowing, traumatic experiences and developed
| PTSD.
|
| My advice to people who haven't tried it tends to be that if
| you're scared, you should abstain. Your presuppositions of
| what the experience will be, will in themselves shape the
| experience. If you expect a bad time, you're likely to get
| one.
|
| There's also a group of people who are curious about using
| psychedelics to treat mental disorder. My advice to those
| people is to find a way to do it in a clinical setting.
| Psychedelics have enormous potential for effectively curing
| anxiety disorders, but it's not just a matter of taking the
| drugs. The experience must be guided by a psychologist who
| knows what the goal is. And then integrated and processed
| afterwards, also with expert help. Psychedelucs are not a
| treatment in and of themselves, more like an accelerant of
| psychotherapy. The therapy is still necessary, it's just that
| psychedelics allow you to do in a handful of sessions what
| could take years in a sober patient. As a case in point, I
| have a severe anxiety disorder myself, and my many self-
| initiated experiments with psychedelics haven't magically
| cured it. If combined with therapy, it might have. I'm still
| waiting for clinical practice to catch up, so I can have
| psychedelic therapy.
| ath92 wrote:
| While most people are fine after taking psychedelics, some
| people experience lasting visuals after a trip: https://en.wi
| kipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen_persisting_percep...
|
| There are some interesting videos on YouTube from people
| experiencing this.
| arkey wrote:
| Are you referring specifically and exclusively to LSD? Or to
| hallucinogens in general?
|
| A friend of my brother was doing shrooms with a couple other
| guys, had a bad trip and actually offed himself as part of
| the trip.
|
| Please don't try to convince people that all of this is
| completely safe.
| echelon_musk wrote:
| This is demonstrably false and dangerous to repeat.
|
| Just because everyone in your sample size has been fine
| doesn't mean everyone will be or even that your group will
| continue to be. Contrary to simplistic thinking, the law does
| exist for a reason and these substances are also scheduled
| for reasons other than conspiracies around free thinking.
|
| Please spend some time reading about drug induced psychosis
| and educate yourself of the risks.
| bowsamic wrote:
| The truth is fully accessible through reason, you don't need to
| take drugs to know things
| LoganDark wrote:
| No, but LSD helped me see things that couldn't be learned
| from outside. For some reason, it helps me recall childhood
| memories better. Sure maybe there's some guided therapy
| session that could have done that, but LSD gives it to me for
| free, along with a whole lot of other stuff.
| bowsamic wrote:
| All knowledge that can be gained through LSD is contingent
| and experiential, not universal and certain
|
| I'm well aware through my own testing
|
| EDIT: I'm not saying it is useless information for your
| life but it is particular to your life, not truths of the
| universe like the person I replied to claimed
| LoganDark wrote:
| Oh, of course, nothing about LSD can give me access to
| things that my brain just doesn't have access to. It can
| help with the things that already are in my brain though.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Your brain does have access to all rational truth
| LoganDark wrote:
| My brain has the ability to claim anything it wants as
| truth. I prefer for my truth to either be consistent with
| an objective or empirical truth, or be measurably opposed
| to truths I disagree with (and to a known degree). I
| don't always achieve this and I'm not always the best at
| being open-minded but it is the goal, I would think.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Empirical truth is a lesser form of truth, look for
| necessary truth, purely rational
| adastra22 wrote:
| Wha? Empirical truth is a lesser form of truth? What are
| you getting at there?
| bowsamic wrote:
| Empirical observation is contingent, so cannot be the
| basis of certain knowledge.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Did it let you recall childhood memories, or invent new
| ones? How would you know the difference?
| sethammons wrote:
| Historic events can be corroborated.
| LoganDark wrote:
| This. There are certain events that we already know
| happened. We have approximate dates, and we have talked
| about the events with others, who have given us their
| impressions of how we acted at the time. But sometimes we
| don't remember what our internal thought processes were
| at the time, or we simply held some certain belief about
| what had occurred (e.g. "I just decided I didn't want to
| go to school some day", or "I wanted to go to school but
| ADHD wouldn't let me!"). Sure LSD can give us some
| creative visualizations, but sometimes it also gives us
| ideas that just make more sense than what we had before.
| Instead of some spooky brain disorder just randomly
| Stopping me from going to school that day, randomly,
| maybe it was actually a fight between alters (yay for
| dissociative identity disorder!). And the more I thought
| about it (especially being - apparently !! but clearly -
| able to see what was me and what was the other during
| those fights), the more true it seemed, especially given
| all the more instances of this I've discovered over time,
| and that it's part of a longstanding pattern, but I
| digress. More and more has come out over the months and
| years that builds a progressively clearer picture of why
| we act the way we do and why we've done certain things
| we've done; why I feel certain things I do, why I
| remember certain things I do and why I don't remember
| certain things I don't. I'm not seeing any universal
| truth; I am discovering our own truth, and we are
| discovering our own truths, and this has done a lot of
| good for us, especially where we gain a better
| understanding of our past behavior in friendships (and
| elsewhere), and where we can still improve, etc.
|
| Even _if_ everything we 've learned through LSD were
| false, I wouldn't even really care because we've still
| uncovered and figured out so much through this (much of
| it we've discussed with various others who were there
| during past events) that we are incredibly grateful to
| now know. So overall I think the experience for us has
| been positive, that we have gained much from it, and that
| we may stand to gain more over time since we are a
| regular user.
| adastra22 wrote:
| None of that new information you provided is something
| that can be corroborated against the historical record.
| The claim is that LSD gave you access to long-locked up
| memories that happened to corroborate with what you are
| going through now.
|
| The vastly simpler explanation is that your brain did
| what brains do best and filled in the gaps in your memory
| be inventing a story constrained to corroborate with the
| bare facts you remember, but because LSD it feels so real
| and vividly detailed that it "must be correct."
| LoganDark wrote:
| > None of that new information you provided is something
| that can be corroborated against the historical record.
|
| > The claim is that LSD gave you access to long-locked up
| memories that happened to corroborate with what you are
| going through now.
|
| I think it's more like it gave us different perspectives
| on the same memories. We've had those memories but we
| couldn't see them that way before.
|
| Also, uncovering this stuff randomly is what _starts_
| these paths of discovery for us. It 's not that we're
| working through something and conveniently happen to find
| apparently useful things in past memories, it's that
| something (anything) triggers a flashback to a past
| memory that upon closer inspection reveals something that
| turns out to have had real apparent effects _because_ it
| resulted in obvious behavioral patterns that _multiple_
| other friends have confirmed to us and are only now being
| placed in proper context with what feels like a proper
| explanation. This isn 't somewhere the proper explanation
| could be just anything and this isn't schizophrenia where
| completely unconnected ideas are considered together. The
| stuff we find in flashbacks can completely surprise us
| and often has nothing to do with what we think we're
| looking for or think we're going to get out of it. It
| sometimes just somehow alludes to something far bigger
| that we really can corroborate with multiple external
| sources. Our brain and the others in it play so many
| tricks on us and on me, I know not to trust any single
| experience as a source of truth, but it can show me where
| to look.
|
| > The vastly simpler explanation is that your brain did
| what brains do best and filled in the gaps in your memory
| be inventing a story constrained to corroborate with the
| bare facts you remember, but because LSD it feels so real
| and vividly detailed that it "must be correct."
|
| I don't really know how to properly articulate that I've
| verified anything because it's hard for me to even verify
| to _myself_ that I know any of the things I 've
| discovered for quite sure, and not just trusting
| something that very well could have been made up. I know
| the specific experience of recall is very fabricated, I
| know that what I see and what I think I identify as
| different parts while recalling those memories could be
| completely made up, but I'm not deriving everything from
| that experience. I use it as a suggestion to guide actual
| research that is not grounded in flashbacks and feelings
| and we have discovered actual patterns that are
| consistent with our theories and that couldn't possibly
| just be convenient explanations. Past a certain point all
| of Dissociative Identity Disorder is technically made up
| in some way (neuroplasticity!) and it's damn near
| _impossible_ to know with certainty how things work or
| have worked, but I am taking the same approach that I
| have always taken and that is using the best explanations
| and the best theories that I currently have at my
| disposal and constantly testing and looking for
| improvements I can make to our understanding of
| ourselves.
|
| But like I said, I wouldn't even care if it was merely a
| convenient filling of the gaps, because it has resulted
| in material good for us, it has resulted in material
| advancement of our understanding of our own past actions
| and in discussing them with those who we have hurt in the
| past, and it has also given us direction on how to better
| ourselves for the future. It really doesn't seem like
| that'd be the case unless the gap filling was so good
| that it correctly accounted for everything we hadn't even
| figured out yet, everything that we hadn't even heard of
| from others yet, and basically all of the ways we've been
| testing and testing the theories and the explanations
| that we have now.
|
| Even if whatever it gave us access to was not something
| already stored in our brain, whatever it did was
| sufficient to allow us to figure things out that could
| otherwise have taken us months to years or even longer,
| and we know that they are material things that impact
| others because they have helped us work through emotions
| with others who formed those emotions independently of
| any LSD, based on those past actions of ours which we now
| better understand.
|
| So I choose to believe we have gained valuable insight as
| a result of these experiences, not based on the
| experiences themselves which I know take great creative
| liberties, but based on everything we've done informed by
| the experiences to figure things out the old-fashioned
| way, too.
| krzat wrote:
| Reason is overrated. Knowing that smoking is unhealthy is not
| sufficient to stop oneself from smoking.
| bowsamic wrote:
| It's not overrated if you want to know the universal truths
| of reality, which is what the person I replied to spoke of.
| The truth is fully reasonable
| haswell wrote:
| > _The truth is fully reasonable_
|
| Doesn't this effectively hand wave away the hard problem
| of consciousness?
|
| i.e. even a purely reason-based understanding of truth
| must acknowledge that the only thing we can be certain
| actually exists is the mind. With no true understanding
| of how the mind functions, and giant gaps in our
| understanding of existence, the idea that universal truth
| can even be comprehended -- much less mapped wholly onto
| humans capacity for reason - is just a belief. An article
| of faith.
|
| It seems to me that a purely reason-based worldview must
| by definition acknowledge that a statement like "the
| truth is fully reasonable" is untenable at worst and at
| best just a prediction.
| bowsamic wrote:
| We don't need to understand how the mind works to derive
| the necessary metaphysical categories. That's something
| Kant got wrong
| haswell wrote:
| I'm not sure upon what basis you think such a claim can
| be definitively made. Nor does declaring "Kant got this
| wrong" help the argument.
|
| For sake of argument, let's say the simulation hypothesis
| is true. Would you acknowledge that the implications of
| such a thing being true would have vastly different
| metaphysical properties than other hypotheses, e.g.
| "consciousness is a fundamental property of existence and
| all matter is conscious"?
|
| The mind is literally the only thing we can be certain
| exists. We've made so much progress scientifically
| mapping the territory available for us to explore, that I
| think many people have lost sight of the vastness of the
| gap between what we actually know and what we have yet to
| understand.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Forget about all that. Start with no presuppositions:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_of_Logic
|
| Then you'll find out the truth
| grep_name wrote:
| This doesn't pass the smell test for me.
|
| It seems like you've taken a system of reasoning that was
| built through careful consideration (Kantianism), called
| the conclusions it meticulously built 'presuppositions'
| and hand-waved it without making substantive
| counterpoints.
|
| The problem then, of course, is that burning down
| previous philosophy and starting 'without
| presuppositions' will lead inevitably to conclusions
| again, which you can once again call presuppositions and
| hand-wave.
| bowsamic wrote:
| If you have no external assumptions you can't be wrong
| bevan wrote:
| You don't need to take drugs to know things, but reason only
| covers a portion of what can be known. Reason doesn't really
| help one understand the nature of experience itself. That's a
| whole different kind of meta-factual knowing, an infinite
| subject that some people approach through meditation (and
| psychedelics too).
| bowsamic wrote:
| Reason can know the entirety of all necessary truth. There
| are experiential contingent things such as what I ate for
| breakfast that it of course cannot know. But it can know
| all universal truth, such as all metaphysical and
| philosophical truth
|
| I'm a Hegelian though so I'm biased
| jrflowers wrote:
| I like this because it immediately accounts for truth not
| arrived at though reason and then just slaps on the word
| "universal" as the descriptor for the subset of truth
| reachable through reason. It is convincing because
| universal is a big word
| bowsamic wrote:
| Well the reasonable truth is not universal as in
| exhaustive but as in it always holds. I mean universal as
| in necessary, not contingent. Psychedelic and personal
| experience is merely contingent
| bevan wrote:
| I think we're talking past each other (or maybe mysticism
| and Hegel don't mix!). These mystical experiences touch
| at something on a different level than reason, a little
| closer to base metal. I mean that no reason or
| representation can capture that most fundamental reality
| of being, the fundamental experiential truth. Reason can
| try to explain it, and reason can help guide some people
| to the experience of it (jnana yoga, getting a satori
| from reading Eckhart), but it cannot itself know it.
| Meditation, psychedelics, dance, or whatever else are the
| typical pathways to it. All reason, all facts, are
| subordinate to it and less true than it. Or can being be
| contained by reason?
| golergka wrote:
| Qualia. Black and white room.
| jrflowers wrote:
| This makes sense because experience doesn't affect how a
| person reasons. This is why all truth is agreed upon
| bowsamic wrote:
| I know you're being sarcastic but indeed if we reasoned
| properly we would all agree
| sethammons wrote:
| A common fallacy is that if you and I are smart then we
| will agree. Conflicts of interest and personal value
| systems and world views provide easy inlets for various
| counter points.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Well it isn't a fallacy because if you reason without
| presuppositions you do uncover the absolute truth
| haswell wrote:
| > _if you reason without presuppositions_
|
| This cannot be accomplished, and the conclusion that such
| a feat leads to absolute truth is philosophically
| untenable.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Yes it can. Hegel did it in the Science of Logic
| haswell wrote:
| Many people have made philosophical claims. That does not
| make them categorically true, and Hegel certainly has his
| critics.
| jrflowers wrote:
| I used to know a guy that read some Hegel and then
| claimed dominion over Knowing the Truth and I used to
| piss him off by saying shit like "dogmatic people are
| slaves to their fears" and "discourse is a form of
| oppression"
| quesera wrote:
| And what elevates Hegel over any other philosopher,
| prophet, god, or performance artist?
| krelian wrote:
| > know you're being sarcastic but indeed if we reasoned
| properly we would all agree
|
| We would also lose everything that makes us human and
| will find no satisfaction in knowing.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Satisfaction in knowing comes from disagreement? I don't
| think so
| gchamonlive wrote:
| I've seen your post below about your bad trip. I fully
| respect your position, but that is not my experience. I
| realised I can't access things I find important through my
| reason. I'm just too dependent on my body for my mind to
| function, so I just followed what my body was telling me.
|
| But I agree that you don't need to take drugs. That's why my
| advice wasn't a definitive one. It's an invitation for people
| to consider what they want in their lives.
|
| Wish you all the best truthfully.
| illiac786 wrote:
| Would you say the following are (individually taken) red flags
| for trying it: * being terrified of letting loose (even with
| something common in the local culture, for example alcohol) *
| having zero belief in the mysticism
| AgentMatt wrote:
| > being terrified of letting loose (even with something
| common in the local culture, for example alcohol)
|
| In that case, I would suggest working a bit on that first.
| Meditation can help, but "terrified" sounds strong enough
| that trying out therapy if available may be worthwhile.
|
| Regarding substances, I found mushrooms to be easier than
| LSD, with a kind of warmth that softens the psychedelic
| experience (without taking anything away from it). The
| effects also don't last as long. A non-psychedelic which can
| allow one to face difficult emotions is MDMA. In some
| countries you can find MDMA based therapy. This could prepare
| someone to become more open to what psychedelics have to
| offer. (Edit: Also, all of these substances have effects that
| are not comparable to alcohol at all. Trying to understand
| the effects of psychedelics/empathogens based on experiences
| with alcohol is a category error.)
|
| Based on my limited experience, I would roughly categorize
| the relation of these substances to the idea of control like
| this:
|
| LSD: you might feel like there's some control, but you're
| actually the playball of the substance
|
| Mushrooms: the substance draws you in some direction, and
| it's best to just lean into it, but it'll support you in
| doing so
|
| MDMA: there's no need for control, things are okay the way
| they are
|
| > having zero belief in the mysticism
|
| That depends on what exactly this means.
|
| Have some knowledge of "mysticism" or some eastern worldviews
| / philosophy, without taking it too seriously, would be a
| good basis IMO.
|
| Actively rejecting any ideas related to mysticism while
| clinging tightly to a specific world view / metaphysics (and
| related beliefs like "I can only allow something if I
| understand / can explain it") may lead someone to have a
| really bad time on psychedelics.
|
| ---
|
| Note that this isn't advice about whether to consume anything
| or what to consume, and experiences can vary widely between
| individuals, settings, dosages etc. (For both assumptions
| above, is possible to construct higly positive outcomes,
| where the substance helped overcome problems, opens one up,
| etc. and negative ones, horror trip, lasting trauma from the
| trip, ...) Having someone experienced present when doing
| something like this for the first time is highly recommended.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| 1. yes, that can be an issue, up to the point that you
| willingly or unwillingly "go on the trip" so to speak. i
| kinda prefer take more than less (not a brag - never done
| more than 2 tabs of acid at once before) because of that -
| it's a lot easier to ride it out when your conscious brain
| isn't making you self-conscious and anxious.
|
| 2. i never have and probably never will be a spiritual
| person. doesn't lessen the enjoyment or impact. i literally
| just think of it as a "reset button" - it makes you forget
| some previous anxieties, reframe others, let go of stuff
| that's dragging you down. it's not therapy but sometimes just
| shaking things up a bit gives you enough of a new perspective
| to really benefit you. or... you know, sometimes you just
| watch tv with your roommates for 3 hours. whatever.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _being terrified of letting loose (even with something
| common in the local culture, for example alcohol)_
|
| Do you have good reason for this fear, like fantasies of
| hurting yourself or others? If so, yeah, you probably
| shouldn't ingest substances that can lower your inhibitions.
| illiac786 wrote:
| I am not terrified, rather scared of loosing control,
| hurting people I like, feeling ashamed forever afterward,
| the usual. I use to not give shit but I'm old now and I
| have a much bigger social net I care about.
|
| But I do know people which I would categorise as really
| terrified of loosing control.
|
| Maybe "letting loose" was the wrong expression here, I
| meant "loosing control" rather.
| quchen wrote:
| Losing control is something that happens at higher doses.
| It's hard to quantify this without prior experience, but
| most substances can be taken on a level of >>three beer
| drunk<< where you're very clearly not sober, but you can
| still talk, and take care of the essentials of life like
| going to the toilet and walking home in public without
| attracting attention.
|
| For example, the average person will feel altered mood
| states and mild visual hallucinations (patterns on
| surfaces, think very detailed mandalas or fractals), in
| the 50-75mg range of LSD. They will not see pink
| elephants, they will not try to call their dog on the
| phone, they will not strip naked, they will not make
| growling sounds at trees.
|
| Now, I do voluntary work in drug education, and there's
| one important thing to say, it's that everyone's
| different, and it's fine not to do psychedelics, or any
| other substance.
| illiac786 wrote:
| Thanks, that's useful feedback.
| kgwxd wrote:
| You weren't always in control. You still mostly aren't.
| illiac786 wrote:
| Yeah, it's not binary, let me rephrase: "relinquish more
| control than when having 2-3 beers".
|
| There are things I can't control even when sober, that's
| clear, but I'm used to it. Giving up the control over
| things I usually control is a different thing (for me).
| lioeters wrote:
| > having zero belief in the mysticism
|
| Good, belief has nothing to do with mysticism. It's about
| experiencing the ineffable, something beyond yourself, which
| is often terrifying.
| sfn42 wrote:
| I'm terrified of letting loose with alcohol because alcohol
| is a terrible drug. I've tried lots of different drugs and
| alcohol is in my opinion one of the worst. Culture pushes me
| to drink more (people buying drinks for me etc), and the more
| I drink the less concerned I am about moderation.
|
| When I wake up the next day after taking it too far I'm
| riddled with anxiety and usually feeling sick, the whole day
| and maybe even the next day is ruined. And yes of course it's
| my responsibility to moderate my intake, it's just hard for
| me. The solution I've come up with is I try to never have
| more than 4-6 drinks in an evening.
|
| I have experienced both myself and others saying and doing
| things while drunk that we never would have done or said
| sober. I have experienced myself and others being seriously
| injured solely due to alcohol.
|
| There are other drugs that scare me the same way,
| particularly pills like benzos and such but I have never had
| a bad time with MDMA or LSD. It's much more of a "I love you
| man", "Everything is awesome" vibe. At least at the doses I
| use I'm completely lucid and in control, I'm just also having
| an amazing time.
|
| Alcohol just makes me forget stuff, LSD and MDMA have given
| me some of the best memories of my life. I can't remember the
| last time I drank alcohol and woke up the next day thinking
| "last night was awesome". I've definitely had some good times
| with alcohol but the amount of bad times completely dwarfs
| them.
|
| And again maybe this is all on me, maybe I just can't handle
| alcohol. But I'm definitely not alone.
|
| If it wasn't for the social stigma and the fact that I
| generally don't want to associate with the people who supply
| drugs, I'd never drink alcohol again. I'd smoke weed and for
| special nights like festivals etc I'd use MDMA and maybe LSD.
|
| The main thing to keep in mind if you want to try LSD is it
| lasts a long time. 8-12 hours, there is no off switch. Start
| with low doses, do half a tab or even a quarter tab. You
| don't need much, it's really powerful. A small dose will
| completely change your state of mind. If you like it, do more
| next time. Personally I don't really experience
| hallucinations, I'm completely aware, present and in control.
| Maybe patterns like wallpaper and leaves will seem to move
| and stuff like that, but aside from the dilated pupils you
| can't really tell I'm high. To me it's like seeing the world
| with new eyes, mundane things you pass by every day are
| suddenly interesting. Look at that beautiful tree. Look at
| your friends and loved ones, they're amazing. It makes me
| think differently, see things from a different perspective
| and be thankful for the things I take for granted in my daily
| life. It's awesome, I've done it maybe 20 times and I hope I
| get to experience it many more times. Just wish I could get
| it without buying from criminals.
| Nursie wrote:
| I think this notion that one must engage in philosophical study
| or appreciate "the goddess" to survive, enjoy and appreciate
| psychedelics is ridiculous.
|
| There is no special 'truth' in LSD, certainly no truths outside
| the self - while you can learn some things about your internal
| experience from it, it also repeatedly provokes in its users a
| false sense of the profound. People experience 'realisations'
| which are pure nonsense when recalled or examined later.
|
| It makes your brain go haywire in all sorts of fun and
| interesting ways. But if you're looking for the meaning of life
| in there you're doing it wrong, and I dread to think what you
| might find.
| lynx97 wrote:
| Joscha Bach summed this up in a very succint way in an
| interview once. Paraphrasing him, psychedelics tend to result
| in overfitting. Suddenly, everything is about them. Leary and
| McKenna are actually good publicly known examples. And the
| phenomenon of "I have found the soltuion" without being able
| to actually name it, is also pretty common.
| cjaackie wrote:
| Found what I think is probably the video if anyone else is
| interested:
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Pif-1bTmQZc
| lynx97 wrote:
| Yup, thanks for digging that up, that is the soundbite I
| was refering to.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| > I think this notion that one must engage in philosophical
| study or appreciate "the goddess" to survive, enjoy and
| appreciate psychedelics is ridiculous.
|
| Cool. I think it's very important. I'll think really hard
| about philosophy when on drugs, you go do your thing ;)
|
| > There is no special 'truth' in LSD, certainly no truths
| outside the self
|
| What is the "outside of the self"? Isn't that smuggling in
| the assumption that there is an essential separation of the
| self and the rest of the world? What if everything is world?
| And what if everything is self? Does it make any difference?
|
| > while you can learn some things about your internal
| experience from it, it also repeatedly provokes in its users
| a false sense of the profound
|
| What is the correct sense of the profound and who is going to
| be the gatekeepers of the profound?
|
| > People experience 'realisations' which are pure nonsense
| when recalled or examined later.
|
| I have all my notes and they still make a lot of sense to me
| so I don't think this argument hold by experience.
|
| > But if you're looking for the meaning of life in there
| you're doing it wrong, and I dread to think what you might
| find.
|
| Is there a meaning to life to be found? I always thought the
| meaning of life is something you never stop pursuing, every
| day all the time. So please, tell me the right ways so I
| don't dread you. I'm being sarcastic in the same proportion
| you are being arrogant.
|
| Ah and thanks for proving my point about the necessity of
| philosophy.
| Nursie wrote:
| > I'll think really hard about philosophy when on drugs,
| you go do your thing ;)
|
| Yeah sounds great. It's the imputation that it's the _only_
| way that got my back up. I don 't imagine 5% of people
| who've taken and enjoyed LSD have taken the time to
| understand the basics of existentialism or done "the
| required work to understand yourself, your circumstances,
| stand on the shoulder of giants..." and all that guff.
|
| And we still had an absolute blast.
|
| > Isn't that smuggling in the assumption that there is an
| essential separation of the self and the rest of the world?
|
| There is, it's called your body and other humans generally
| recognise yours as distinct from themselves and from other
| objects.
|
| > And what if everything is self? Does it make any
| difference?
|
| Acid-like thinking detected.
|
| > What is the correct sense of the profound and who is
| going to be the gatekeepers of the profound?
|
| Well, given the nature of the 'profound' realisations
| people on acid tend to have, I think "a modicum of common
| sense" would suffice.
|
| That fascinating plastic lemonade bottle you're
| contemplating so hard probably isn't going to have much
| impact on space travel, no. Or on a larger scale, many of
| the proclamations that LSD will fundamentally change
| society when people 'realise' one thing or another that
| they 'learned' while under the influence turn out to be
| hopelessly naive - see the various late-60s to early 70s
| hippie communes in the US that generally fell into disarray
| and outright collapse when it turns out optimism and LSD
| weren't going to solve everything and _someone_ still has
| to do the dishes eventually.
|
| > I have all my notes and they still make a lot of sense to
| me so I don't think this argument hold by experience.
|
| Your experience is certainly a data point, I would be
| surprised if this is as widespread as "I wrote it down and
| now realise it's all nonsense, it felt so meaningful at the
| time", but I don't imagine anyone's done a study.
|
| > Is there a meaning to life to be found?
|
| That's an interesting question, but looking for it in
| psychedelic experience seems to me a path that could lead
| to all sorts of odd places, mostly concerned with weird
| echoes of your own mind.
|
| > Ah and thanks for proving my point about the necessity of
| philosophy.
|
| The necessity of philosophy to an internet argument is one
| thing. Its necessity to a fulfilling life is arguable,
| given so much of it is navel-gazing bollocks, and the
| necessity of deeply studying philiosophical principles
| before dropping acid even less clear.
|
| You do you, but your original post was full of pretty
| arrogant assertions about how everyone else should do them.
| I agree, I shot back with some of the same.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| Thanks for the thought out response, I think I can let my
| guard down. We were both arrogant and there's nothing
| wrong with it.
|
| I'm coming from a personal point. I don't care about
| space travel or these enormous projects. I'm a simple guy
| with simple needs, and I like people and serving people.
| I am grateful there are people out there like you that
| spend time on this so I can focus on alienating myself
| with things I find interesting, like drawing and
| philosophy of consciousness.
|
| It's just that not everything has to be a data point or a
| general abstraction on a larger scale. You can meet
| people in their own grounds so you can find common ground
| without imposing yourself.
|
| And about drugs, I reflected on what you said and I think
| I could have expressed myself better, because I don't
| actually think there's a universal imposition of having
| to learn philosophy to take drugs, even though I agree
| with Simone Weil when she says philosophy is the required
| work so we can become vessels of God (hope this doesn't
| trigger your acid-like thinking detector). I only think
| drugs are tools we have the option to use and have the
| control over how we are going to direct them.
| Nursie wrote:
| For my part I probably could benefit from studying
| philosophy and contemplating inner life a little more.
| It's also fair to say I'm disillusioned with psychedelics
| - not that I don't think they're pretty amazing, but that
| time in my life has passed and I've come to view them as
| maybe overhyped.
|
| I find my contentment and meaning in digging and planting
| these days, managing trees and general manual labour
| surrounded by birdsong and small animals. And in my
| relationships with my partner and my friends.
|
| In many ways this is as irrational as any other path :)
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| It will strip the user of it's self obsessed focus on me, my
| wants & needs, and allow you to see life from a very far
| distance.
|
| Therefore for some people it will show them their "truth",
| its not that lsd or mushrooms contain the truth.
|
| This goes from very practical truths in where you see
| patterns of yourself that are not very useful but even more
| important you will see & feel the impermanence of your being
| & experience the world in it's totality making your
| impermanence a joyful feeling of being part of the world
| instead of being seperated from it. This is why in some
| studies people fear death less.
| jampekka wrote:
| > I take very modest amounts of LSD (100 maybe 150 micrograms)
|
| PSA: 100-150 micrograms of LSD is a medium to strong trip. For
| beginners its good to start low, perhaps 75 micrograms or
| lower.
|
| Edit: Also testing your reaction psychedelics in more
| controlled and calmer settings is highly recommended before
| doing in it raves or other public places. But also note that
| the effects may vary significantly even in the same person at
| different times and settings.
| dbbljack wrote:
| counterpoint: you only get your first time, one time.
| lukan wrote:
| Yes. And I wish I would have started with 75 microgram.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Less is more
| jampekka wrote:
| First time is rarely especially good. This applies to more
| or less all substances.
| berkes wrote:
| Wat? Maybe my bubble is different, but in my surroundings
| and experience, the exact opposite is true.
|
| Now, an important factor here is that a first time often
| comes with anxiety, insecurity, and even fear. With many
| substances these feelings get amplified so that makes the
| entire experience be mediocre or even bad. Especially for
| that, I think it's very important to experience this in a
| safe, loving, caring and depending on the type taken,
| controllable, silent, busy, energetic, dark, light etc
| environment.
| junon wrote:
| That's... not true, lol. That _can_ be true, especially
| for psychedelics, but that 's absolutely not true of
| other drugs.
|
| MDMA comes to mind. I've also heard (though not tried,
| nor will I) the harder narcotics such as heroine and meth
| are almost never as good as the first time.
|
| The first time being the best time is often _exactly why_
| people become addicts.
| chronogamous wrote:
| Know then that what you've heard is incorrect. Heroin
| especially tends to cause nausea and vomitting on first
| time use, as the body reacts to something as unexpected.
| Meth may be great the first time round, and still be
| nowhere near as good as it can be - the drug has a steep
| learning curve and requires rigorous discipline for it's
| effect to be exploited fully - a mindset rarely present
| in first time users. With practically any drug, initial
| effects are very much subject to the intention of the
| person taking it, just as much as physical attributes
| (fitness, body-type, metabolism, etc).
|
| Not to downplay all obvious and less obvious hazards of
| these 'harder' narcotics, just saying the whole 'first
| time being the best time' as an explanation of why
| exactly people become addicts relies very much on
| hearsay. It's the sort of language that came with the
| whole war-on-drugs-thing, and does not reflect reality.
| jampekka wrote:
| That's more like the first time having sex can be
| special. The novelty gives it a lot of extra. But like in
| sex, you'll learn to be better at using drugs and the
| experiences become richer and more pleasurable.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Agree! Go into it with great preparation -- be sure to read
| the manual closely.
| const_cast wrote:
| Counter counter point: if you mess up your first time, it's
| likely you'll never be able to enjoy the experience.
| netcan wrote:
| Continuation the counter points: most traditional uses,
| guided by shamans or priests use heavy doses.
|
| I had expiremented with moderate/recomended doses of lsd
| and psilocybin before participating in an auahuasca
| retreat... and the doses were shocking.
|
| This was a relatively tame centre in western Europe that
| had trained psych nurses in attendance. Still, the Shaman
| handed out monster doses... and offered a second one a
| couple of hours in... and again the following day.
|
| Many traditional practices conceive of "levels"
| corresponding to doses, and the lower levels are not the
| ones associated with transformative spiritual experience.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I know there are higher levels out there, but I've found
| even moderate doses of psychedelics to be more than
| enough to be transformative. You just need to focus the
| energy right.
| netcan wrote:
| valid point, just adding context.
|
| I have no recomendations of my own.
| hoseja wrote:
| Counter counter counter point: That's a good outcome.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > Counter counter point: if you mess up your first time,
| it's likely you'll never be able to enjoy the experience.
|
| That's what drug prohibitionists would love to happen, so
| they should encourage such a "wrong" experiment instead
| of prosecuting it. :-)
| dmos62 wrote:
| Might be true for some, but I had a long series of bad
| experiences when I was a teenager (tension and paranoia),
| was convinced that it wasn't for me, and only in my 30s I
| started having very profound and positive experiences.
| Now I only experiment alone, in a non-distracted, aware,
| self-reflective manner, as if it were a meditation aide.
| monista wrote:
| And it's a very bad practice. No experiment ever should
| be taken without an assistant (sitter in this case).
| lioeters wrote:
| Bad advice. Yes there should be at least one other person
| who knows what you're doing, but if you're experienced in
| the matter, solitude is the best practice. The emergency
| contact person could be a phone call away, just in case.
| esseph wrote:
| "I know what I'm doing" said the victim before they died.
| peebeebee wrote:
| problem is that when you are really in deep, you are not
| able to make that phone call. It is good advice to always
| take someone with you. It is like saying: more
| experienced bikers don't need to wear helmet. Yes, 99.99%
| of the time things will be fine, but it's still good
| advice to always wear one. Because that 0.01% can lead to
| severe consequences.
| esseph wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| Unexpected things happen, mental states swing, and now
| you're in a mentally compromised state in-between
| reality.
| golergka wrote:
| In my experience, first times with drugs like MDMA are very
| important just because the tolerance builds up basically
| forever. First time with LSD however... Better safe than
| sorry. My first time wasn't that impressive, but it was
| safe and didn't involve any negative emotions. I've had
| many other times since, much more impressive and important.
| berkes wrote:
| Drugs' build up and tolerance varies wildly between the
| drugs, the person and the experience one seeks.
|
| Chemically and physically, LSD for example is gone in a
| few days and certainly weeks. But taking two days in a
| row needs "insane" amounts to get you the same (physical,
| chemical) effect. MDMA is almost entirely gone in months,
| after which a normal dose will get the same (physical,
| chemical) effect. Good documentation with even
| calculators for this can be found online (be aware that
| it may not be allowed to even visit such sites in some
| countries!)
|
| I deliberately emphasis the "physical and chemical"
| because the experience itself may be something you get
| used to. First time MDMA is wildly different from any
| time thereafter for many people. For many this is even
| stronger with LSD or Psilocybin. Many people report that
| the (first) experience opened up their mind and being
| profoundly and lasting. The more one gets used to the
| feeling the more this feeling itself becomes routine.
|
| The intense love and euphoria from e.g. MDMA may be the
| same on an objective level, after letting the chemicals
| disappear over months, so technically one can achieve
| this level a few times a year. But the feeling itself is
| something one could get "used to" and "become bored by".
| Similar to how experiencing a rave sober for decades, or
| even how after decades of traveling it could get boring
| and a routine.
|
| My point is: indeed first times are important. Even if
| the textbooks say that tolerance is gone after X time.
| herbst wrote:
| Imo not true for psychodelics
|
| You just open the door for many more first times to come
| shric wrote:
| It's also worth noting that there isn't exactly strong
| quality control on the product. There is a good chance what
| is labelled 150 micrograms is actually closer to 50
| micrograms. Or it could really be 150...
| berkes wrote:
| But that's true for any criminalized substance. It's not
| like the FDA or EFSA or so is going to do lab tests on,
| say, XTC and fine producers that lie on their ads or
| ingredient-list.
|
| Though biological products like psilocybin (or weed etc)
| are harder to measure and control by producers, in strength
| than purely chemical products like LSD or MDMA. It's hard
| to trace what mother nature did exactly when producing this
| particular mushroom cap, but it could be possible to trace
| what the chemist did when producing this particular blot.
| If only it were legalized and we could have actual control,
| tracability, and prosecution of malpractice...
| gbrits wrote:
| Fwiw at least xtc and coke can be legally tested in the
| Netherlands. https://www.drugs-test.nl/en/testlocations/
| mettamage wrote:
| Ah funny! You were 3 hours before me. It's not just xtc
| and coke. It's much more than that. Most things are
| simply going to be sent to the lab.
|
| The only thing they don't test are things you can somehow
| get legally, if I recall correctly (so whatever you can
| get for any psychological condition).
| berkes wrote:
| They can be in more countries than just the Netherlands
| IIRC. And simple test-kits are available too - these
| aren't as good obviously, but can e.g. prove the absence
| or presence of certain (by)products.
|
| Also, these tests are set up in a way that they are
| anonymous in a way that e.g. even if prosecutors could
| subpoena a test-location or lab to hand over
| administration, this administration won't contain any PII
| or even pseudonymous information.
| daseiner1 wrote:
| I was under the impression that it's impossible to
| reliably test, e.g., cocaine for fentanyl, without
| destroying the drug and it doesn't take much of the
| latter narcotic to kill you.
| jampekka wrote:
| The amount that has to be destroyed is miniscule.
| daseiner1 wrote:
| my point is that powders don't mix evenly. part of a
| baggie testing negative for fentanyl doesn't mean the
| remainder is clean.
| arnok wrote:
| Lsd can be tested as well in the Netherlands. You can get
| a quantative analysis, but you lose the sample.
| heavenlyblue wrote:
| With MDMA if you have 150 mg of powder, you have 150mg of
| powder, i.e. this is the upper bound on how much
| substance you will take (be it MDMA or not), i.e. there
| can't be MORE than 150 mg.
|
| With LSD it's always a solution (either in paper or in
| liquid), so you can only trust the producer.
| bethekidyouwant wrote:
| Well, also it degrades over a couple of years (unlike M)
| so the producer usually makes the dose strong to start
| dymk wrote:
| Depends on how it's stored. There's still LSD from the
| 70s in circulation in solution. It degrades in light,
| otherwise it's very stable.
| dymk wrote:
| Sure it can't be more than 150mg of MDMA, but that
| doesn't tell you how much meth / fentanyl / whatever is
| in there, so it's not like you're somehow in a safer boat
| with it. At least it's easier to test LSD for
| adulteration due to it being such a different chemical
| than what it could be adulterated with.
| HocusLocus wrote:
| That's why I don't vape nicotine. Small molecule, sold in
| concentrate, mixed by who knows who. A high school
| chemistry experiment. If a butcher offers you a 4-ton
| pork chop by mistake at least it's obvious you shouldn't
| stand underneath it. Cigs are cigs but nicotine in
| solution is an assassination weapon. Ask the CIA.
|
| People who long for the old days must realize there were
| serious mental issues in society. It wasn't a simple case
| of the dids and the didn'ts. People were batsh*it insane,
| and I don't mean hallucinogens, especially not LSD that
| is not directly toxic at all. People were literally
| driven to hysteria by the ~thought~ of LSD.
|
| The juggernaut opposing LSD and set the stage for the
| endless war on drugs. It was the boogeyman that could
| justify any legal atrocity. Lives could be destroyed,
| tripping teenagers were treated as if it was a life
| threatening medical emergency, which is trauma and
| sadism. The monkey brain slides that implied chromosome
| damage was deliberately not replicated after the mistake
| in handling was found, and the study was cited for a
| decade after author retracted it. Just too convenient to
| repeat the lie.
|
| It is not surprising that G. Gordon Liddy a toady in
| Nixon's cabinet, spoke up at a meeting briefly to suggest
| putting LSD on opposition journalist Jack Anderson's
| steering wheel. As if it's presence would cause an
| instant accident that flipped the car 5 stories into the
| air. He was showing off his ignorance and trying to boost
| his reputation as a 'fixer'.
|
| But far more dangerous than LSD, a few impaired people
| here and there was the mass hysteria to the 'plot' and
| 'scandal' that wouldn't work anyway and 3/4 of the
| country was consumed by it. That was in 1972.
|
| Then along comes fentanyl that is really scary and not
| much serious pushback, until 'recently'.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| > If a butcher offers you a 4-ton pork chop by mistake at
| least it's obvious you shouldn't stand underneath it
|
| brilliantly put
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| You're not wrong, but the biggest confounding factor for
| LSD is that a 100ug dose comes embedded in 10000ug of
| blotter paper. Scales are useless for determining how
| much you're taking.
| aqme28 wrote:
| This is true of every illegal drug to some extent. You do
| not know how it is mixed. Though sure, your 100mg of
| "MDMA" is unlikely to contain more than 100mg of MDMA
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| My point is that the potency at small doses creates novel
| hazards which, when avoided (and rightly so) interfere
| with the ability to know what you have.
|
| One dose would be tricky, but you could process twenty
| doses of "MDMA" via column chromatography and end up with
| a sample of MDMA which your scale can actually measure.
| There's nothing scary about twenty doses of MDMA except
| that maybe you'll get caught with it. If you dropped it,
| nobody would get hurt.
|
| If you tried the same with LSD you'd have to process tens
| of thousands of doses before your scale would be of any
| use. That much LSD in solution is an accident waiting to
| happen. I wouldn't go anywhere near it.
| aqme28 wrote:
| That is not true and dangerous. 20 doses is deadly. It's
| less than the LD50 for most people, but since MDMA
| disregulates your body temperature you can easily
| overheat
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Well yeah, if you consume it. I'm worried about it
| splashing out and touching your hand. That's how LSD was
| discovered, Hoffman accidentally touched it and got a
| massive dose. I'm just saying that its much more
| dangerous to be near several grams of LSD than it is to
| be near several grams of MDMA, which means that the only
| person who can tell you the potency is likely the person
| who was crazy enough to make it in the first place.
| dmos62 wrote:
| Some countries (Germany, Holland) have (or had ~5 years ago
| when I was interested in this) legal analogues of LSD that
| are produced and sold in a fully regulated, safe, precise
| manner.
| eru wrote:
| Well, cocaine and heroin are still used for certain
| medical applications, too, ain't they?
| devilbunny wrote:
| Cocaine is still legal for medical use, but in twenty
| years of anesthesia I've never seen it used (though we
| are not an ENT-heavy practice). Too much concern about
| diversion. It's a great drug for ENT use but the way
| little bits of excess disappear means that most hospital
| pharmacies don't want to touch it (and surgery centers
| that don't have 24/7-staffed pharmacies want it even less
| due to risk of break-ins and theft).
|
| Heroin is not legal in the US, although it is in the UK
| at least as a hospice med (under the generic name
| diamorphine).
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Being significantly older than you (I retired from the
| practice of anesthesiology at age 67 in 2015) I am able
| to recount my experience with cocaine use to prepare
| patients for nasal intubation.
|
| When I began my residency at the UCLA Department of
| Anesthesiology in the fall of 1977, I was instructed on
| how to use cocaine.
|
| First, one requested a 2cc glass vial of cocaine
| hydrochloride solution (4-10% strength, prepared from
| cocaine powder).
|
| The patient in the O.R. was then sedated heavily to both
| eliminate fear and anxiety and decrease the stinging and
| discomfort resulting from the imminent application of the
| cocaine solution against the nasal mucosa.
|
| Cotton pledgets on thin wooden sticks about 6 inches long
| were submerged in the cocaine solution until saturated,
| then very slowly and delicately introduced into both
| nostrils simultaneously and rotated while being advanced
| deep into the nasal cavity: usually they went in about
| half their length.
|
| A nice aid to successful intubation: As a rule, we chose
| to intubate via the nostril which most easily and deeply
| accommodated the pledget.
|
| We then waited for 15-20 minutes for maximum local
| anesthesia and vasoconstriction, then removed the
| pledgets and proceeded with nasal intubation.
|
| I continued to use cocaine for nasal intubation until I
| moved to the University of Virginia in 1983; for whatever
| reasons, the drug wasn't part of our therapeutic
| armamentarium there, rather lidocaine with epinephrine
| was employed in the same manner as cocaine solution and
| produced equivalent results.
| devilbunny wrote:
| I suspected you might have useful insight :)
| ascorbic wrote:
| It's not just used in palliative care (though it is
| certainly used widely for that). As I understand it, in
| the UK diamorphine is prescribed for lots of types of
| acute, severe pain, including pain from surgery, heart
| attack and childbirth.
| devilbunny wrote:
| Good to know. I read that many, many years ago (it was
| printed on paper!), but obviously things change. Still
| Schedule I (no accepted medical use, i.e., totally
| illegal) in the US.
| ctippett wrote:
| My wife, a PhD student at the time, was tasked with
| delivering cocaine to another university's research lab.
| I believe they were administering it to mice, I don't
| know much else. Anyway, my wife agrees and proceeds to
| take a public bus with an illicit substance and no
| accompanying permit or documentation. Wild.
| mettamage wrote:
| Like what? What was a legal analogue 5 years ago?
| JimmyBiscuit wrote:
| There were multiple, I think they were called 1p-LSD,
| 1cp-LSD, 1d-LSD, 1v-LSD and currently you can still
| legally buy 1S-LSD. Its a bit of whack-a-mole with the
| lawmakers because there isnt a blanket ban, only ever the
| specific chemical gets banned. Although stuff got quite a
| lot more expensive with every iteration.
| s3krit wrote:
| Not quite the specific chemicals anymore. As I understood
| it, when they outlawed 1v, the legislation was changed to
| also consider the weight of the molecule. Ok fine, still
| whack-a-mole, it just took the clandestine chemists
| slightly longer to figure out what mostly inert
| structures they could add to the LSD (though not actually
| add, since that would mean they were at some point making
| LSD, which is illegal) that would be cleaved off
| metabolically so you end up with LSD in your system
| mettamage wrote:
| There is in the Netherlands. You can test it there [1].
|
| Ah, I see someone else already mentioned it. I'll still
| keep this here for increased visibility. Drugs testing in
| NL is solid.
|
| Source: trust me bro ;-)
|
| Second source: go see for yourself! It's anonymous.
|
| [1] https://www.drugs-test.nl/ (use google translate)
| Dilettante_ wrote:
| >100-150 micrograms of LSD is a medium to strong trip
|
| Did you get that from a government "risk prevention" website?
| 100 micrograms is a base, standard dose; There's a reason
| that that is the most common amount to a piece of blotter
| paper.
|
| A medium trip would be something like 220(also a common
| dose), and "strong" can go anywhere from what, 500 to
| 1000?(1000 and above being commonly referred to as "heroic
| dose" and fairly rarely taken)
|
| I do agree that a beginner might want to try sub-100
| micrograms, but you rub up against the lower border of real
| perceptible effects around 50.
| lynx97 wrote:
| "We are the ones we have been waiting for"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-qw0Ud8Yx8
| wickedsight wrote:
| > I go to raves, I take very modest amounts of LSD (100 maybe
| 150 micrograms), and the whole experience turns into very
| spiritual session where I dance with my entire being and let
| myself disolve into the Great Void.
|
| Cool. And good for you, but this has honestly ruined 'raves'
| for me.
|
| I'm a huge fan of different types of electronic music and
| really, really enjoy it. The music itself is a spiritual
| experience and allows me to 'disolve into the Great Void'. But
| these days when I go to a festival or something, I'm surrounded
| by people I can't share this feeling/experience with, since
| everyone seems to be on some type of drug and either in their
| own world (X, LSD, etc) or think the world is in them (coke).
|
| I recently prematurely left an artist I was really looking
| forward to because of exactly this. It was incredibly
| disappointing, though not surprising.
| gchamonlive wrote:
| Totally get your point. And I feel the same way.
|
| It's really hard to maintain a healthy state of mind when
| there is a dude overdosing with several paramedics trying to
| stabilise him. I still remember that time and it hurts me
| every time I think about it.
|
| But there are smaller raves, with 50-500 people, where I
| think this feeling is maintained.
|
| I'd maybe recommend avoiding what we call here "commercial
| raves" and go to "pvt's", private raves, which are not
| private, just with more modest economic goals.
| latexr wrote:
| > I wasn't actually naked, it just felt like that and that
| everyone was eventually going to merge with me and that I
| should feel ashamed of it
|
| This reminded of Deep Space Nine's Great Link. The drop becomes
| the ocean, and the ocean becomes a drop.
|
| https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Great_Link
| bjourne wrote:
| I read in a forum about psychedelics about a guy who had been
| carving up his whole arm while tripping on LSD. The response
| befuddled me and wasn't what I expected: "Classic newbie
| mistake", "Your own fault for tripping alone", and "You should
| put knifes and weapons away when you trip." It made me realize
| these people are like adopters of niche programming languages.
| To outsiders they tell everyone how great their language is and
| how you'll become 10x more productive switching to it. Only on
| bug trackers will you find out about lack of tooling support,
| stochastic compiler bugs, and bad api designs.
| Nursie wrote:
| I would have said that was both horrific and unusual, rather
| than 'classic'.
|
| Let's not pretend it's perfectly safe (what is?) but this is
| hardly 'normal'.
| bluGill wrote:
| While it might not be normal, that type of thing is not
| unknown and alone is enough to mean everyone should avoid
| those drugs.
| Nursie wrote:
| I disagree, I think it is effectively unknown,
| vanishingly rare considering how many millions of doses
| have been consumed over decades.
|
| Let's not pretend it's 100% safe and foolproof, but
| that's _very_ far out of the ordinary.
| e40 wrote:
| By your own logic you are fine with all alcohol being
| avoided, right? Psychedelics kill infinitely fewer people
| than alcohol, after all.
| bregma wrote:
| That kind of thing occurs far more often when someone has
| not used drugs.
|
| Logically, drug use should be mandatory to reduce the
| prevalence of such self-harm.
| tasuki wrote:
| This should've been horrifying I guess, but I found it rather
| amusing. And as a niche-programming-language-enthusiast: well
| done with the analogy!
| Mo3 wrote:
| These are not normal reactions to being under the influence
| of psychedelics but latent mental illness being activated.
| fvdessen wrote:
| That they can activate latent mental illnesses that
| wouldn't be activated otherwise is the main risk of
| psychedelics, and is absolutely a real problem
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| It happened with someone I know. He tried psychedelics in
| a weekend at the beach house scenario for the first time
| as a middle aged man. He liked the experience and then
| started reading about LSD microdosing, so he decided to
| try that.
|
| Over the course of a few weeks he began to slide into
| what was clearly schizophrenic delusions. He became
| obsessed with what he presumed was a vast conspiracy to
| murder him and take his money, interpreting ordinary
| events like someone cutting him off on the highway as
| being part of this.
|
| Thankfully he's got a good partner and support network,
| got into therapy, and now is doing fine.
|
| I have a pretty live and let live attitude over
| psychedelics, but I do hate when aficionados pretend
| there aren't risks or downsides.
|
| On a less dramatic scale I know people who've tried it
| and hated it, and that's very much a possible outcome as
| well. It's crappy when aficionados flip that around into
| somehow being a square or whatever.
| cess11 wrote:
| It is quite irresponsible to take a psychedelic drug and
| then drive a car.
|
| So called microdosing of psychedelics is generally
| rubbish, the way they're distributed means you have no
| idea whatsoever what dose you're actually taking and if
| you want to live with a 5-HT2a tolerance, just go on a
| trip dose and you're good for a few months.
|
| Edit: And with some of these substances one should expect
| cardiac toxicity if dosing every day, due to serotonin
| receptors in the heart.
| dymk wrote:
| Activating latent mental illness is a risk of
| psychedelics, and yet they are still safer in that regard
| than alcohol and cannabis. There is a lower rate of
| psychosis being triggered with LSD and psilocybin. This
| is an education problem: we are (at least sort of) taught
| in school the risks of drinking too much, and in younger
| generations, smoking too much weed, but we are taught
| nothing about when it's appropriate to take psychedelics.
|
| Some recent studies suggest that there is no increase in
| risk of psychosis from psychedelic use, and at worst, it
| causes symptoms which would have surfaced anyways to
| surface sooner. This isn't a reason to take psychedelics
| of course, it's better that one goes as long as they can
| without experiencing some sort of schizo-affective
| disorder.
|
| My point is that people are misunderstanding the risks
| when they look at psychedelics and go "No way I'm taking
| that, I don't want to make myself schizophrenic", and
| then don't bat an eye when they drink a glass (or two) of
| wine or smoke a joint.
| ty6853 wrote:
| The longer I live, the more I find most things in life
| are just delaying something, and ultimately just death.
| My teeth are shit, I fix them a little at a time and just
| pray they don't break down too much before I'm dead. Some
| of my muscles/tendons bones are getting weaker, I just
| baby them enough that hopefully I can keep their use to
| old age.
|
| We hope to push most the bad stuff beyond or as far
| towards death as possible, and death as far away as
| possible so long as not too much bad stuff is already
| happening. The question then becomes at what rate we slow
| the delay of schizo-affective disorder or some other
| mental illness. It's coming for all of us, given enough
| time.
| nevertoolate wrote:
| I see this differently. Your worldview is "normal" but
| not "healthy"
| MyOutfitIsVague wrote:
| > they are still safer in that regard than alcohol and
| cannabis. There is a lower rate of psychosis being
| triggered with LSD and psilocybin.
|
| Is this adjusted by amount of use? As in, is it possible
| that it's more likely to trigger latent mental illness
| with alcohol and cannabis not because they trigger it
| more effectively, but because they are significantly more
| widely available, significantly more widely used, and
| people who consume them consume them in significantly
| greater amounts?
|
| If you get drunk once, I get high once, and our friend
| trips on psilocybin once, what is the comparative risk of
| activating latent mental illness for these events alone?
| tripped6789 wrote:
| The thing is, the use patterns are not really the same.
|
| I had to quit drinking, because I couldn't moderate my
| intake. I struggle with cannabis craving and use.
|
| I have taken a number of psychedelic drugs, but never due
| to craving, and not more than a handful of times. I have
| had profound and life changing experiences (for the
| better), it's not always fun.
|
| For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure regular use of
| psychedelics is not a great idea. These substances can be
| hard on the body and brain. Respectful and intentional
| use can have benefits far beyond the risk. Indeed, I may
| be alive today as a result of my use.
| cess11 wrote:
| With 5-HT2a psychedelic substances you get an immediate,
| extreme tolerance so unlike ethanol or other common
| GABA:ergics you won't get that kind of every day abuse
| and related self harm.
|
| Single dose use is more likely to be harmful with ethanol
| at a comparable degree of intoxication, it is strongly
| disinhibitory in comparison, but a particular person
| might be more sensitive one way or the other.
| kbos87 wrote:
| My one experience with psilocybin was the only time in my
| life I've ever confronted the fragility of my mental and
| emotional wellbeing in such a sudden way. Drastically
| different from other psychedelics I've experienced. MDMA
| is pure bliss - psilocybin is something I won't go near
| without professional guidance.
| colecut wrote:
| MDMA is extremely mild on the psychedelic side compared
| to psilocybin, lsd, dmt, etc.. not to mention it floods
| you with "happy/safe" feelings which makes for a
| generally easy experience.
|
| The others can really get you..
|
| I've experienced what I thought was being at the gates of
| hell on all of them at least once.. The gratitude I felt
| at the conclusion of those trips lasted for months =p
| tcdent wrote:
| Consuming any substance really comes down to one thing:
|
| Do you want to "feel" yourself more, or do you want to feel
| yourself less?
|
| Many people are not interested (or ready) to feel
| themselves more. And when they do, they might not like what
| they find.
| MyOutfitIsVague wrote:
| That's pretty simplistic, and doesn't come close to
| explaining the complex interactions of drugs. Caffeine,
| Zoloft, LSD, Meth, Heroin, and PCP all have wildly
| different effects that can't be boiled down to "feeling
| yourself".
| pie_flavor wrote:
| They are 'classic newbie mistakes', but they are not
| normal? The drug messing with your neural pathways, messing
| with those particular neural pathways, is not normal, but
| rather just activates 'latent' messed-with-ness? This
| sounds like words without meaning.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| Or just someone who is mentally ill taking psychedelics.
| britzkopf wrote:
| "latent mental illness" sounds like a tagline for the human
| condition.
| fnordlord wrote:
| It also sounds like blaming its risks on "user error"
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > I read in a forum about...
|
| ...something that likely never happened (and if it did, it
| wasn't the LSD)
| mycodendral wrote:
| People jump out of windows/off roofs all the time on
| psychedelics.
| stickfigure wrote:
| The AI overlords call bullshit on that.
|
| The nutshell quote: "Jumping from heights under
| psychedelics is possible but statistically extraordinary
| --orders of magnitude rarer than popular mythology
| suggests."
| settsu wrote:
| The chances of being struck by lightning are exceedingly
| slim. But if you're venturing out on a mountain top in
| early summer your odds skyrocket. So shouldn't we widely
| inform people who are doing so of the dangers and what to
| be aware of?
|
| https://www.cdc.gov/lightning/data-research/index.html
| mycodendral wrote:
| Maybe heights specifically, but hang out at the medical
| tent at any decent size music festival and tell me
| psychedelics are as harm-free as people suggest.
| dymk wrote:
| No they do not, the instances of this are incredibly
| small, and every one of them involved the use of alcohol
| or other drugs.
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21256914/
| mycodendral wrote:
| I don't buy it, personally. I used to be a big psych guy
| until I had multiple friends get in dangerous police
| situations because of them. And I've heard a lot more
| individual stories. Pretty much every psychedelic
| festival has people ending up in the security/medical
| tent. It's not as risk free as people will have you
| believe.
| dymk wrote:
| Don't buy it however you like, actual data does not
| support your claim. How do you know those people ending
| up in the med tent only took LSD or psilocybin?
| flkenosad wrote:
| Med tent is mostly people overheating because it's a
| summer dance festival and water is often scarce.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| How many of them get there from intentionally jumping of
| a roof or carving up their arm? I suspect most are simple
| dumb accidents, like people have with alcohol, but of a
| different variety.
| HocusLocus wrote:
| Bath Salts. If rabies was a medicine. LSD lets you keep your
| marbles, they just become more colorful and roll around for
| awhile. It is disassociative though in a way that pain can be
| experienced differently. Solitary is okay, but don't go into
| it alone with self-harm in your history.
|
| Ask your doctor if placebo is right for you.
| m463 wrote:
| Sounds like AI should guide us. (maybe an uncensored version)
| RankingMember wrote:
| I see it as an unfortunate byproduct of the war on drugs
| forcing advocates to become boosters beyond what they
| otherwise would as a means to counteract the many years of
| bad-faith negative press. It was especially prevalent (still
| is to a certain extent) for weed, though I think that's dying
| down a bit now that it's been decriminalized in a lot of
| places.
| justinclift wrote:
| If you're up for it, the next time you're trying out LSD at a
| venue see if you can watch the GUNSHIP video "Ghost" on your
| phone:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUJuwNxNUWQ
|
| Kind of suspect it'll make for a extra trippy trip. ;)
| aqme28 wrote:
| Opinions may vary of course, but I think LSD is best enjoyed
| without a phone at all.
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| At first I read graves instead of raves. Now that would also be
| an interesting session with some deep dissolutions & insights,
| although maybe disrespectful.
| codr7 wrote:
| Muscimol and Mescaline likewise; unless you're on big pharama
| med, I'd say most hallucinogenics are worth trying.
| bamboozled wrote:
| _In more secular terms, you are here to do the required work to
| understand yourself, your circumstances, stand on the shoulder
| of giants and study the great minds that came before you_
|
| Is that what kids who are born into starvation and poverty
| think ? Or just white guys with money ?
| aantix wrote:
| How do you know your experience is not a placebo effect?
| caycep wrote:
| I sometimes wonder - if the sensation of a "spiritual state"
| can be defined as a quantitative amount of some
| neurotransmitter in some circuit. That might be a sad day,
| though, for something that sounds so profound, to be reduced to
| numbers and probability....
|
| The "out of body experience" ppl describe in near death always
| seemed to me to be a glitch of the brain's 3D perceptual space,
| i.e. a forced linear transform of 3D coordinates or something.
| kazinator wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_of_the_people
|
| What are the odds that peddlers of religion would turn to
| promoting chemical drugs on the side ...
| cluckindan wrote:
| There's that word again: "drugs" - you just know anyone using
| that word in earnest is suffering from a narrow and naive world
| view imposed upon them by generations of propaganda.
|
| There is a huge experiential chasm between opiates and
| psychedelics. These two groups of substances have nothing to do
| with each other.
| kazinator wrote:
| Religion is not literally opium; Marx was speaking/writing
| figuratively. He just referred to a popular recreational of
| his time.
| cluckindan wrote:
| No, he was referring to making the people unwilling and
| unable to revolt.
|
| This is literally a thread about psychedelics, not
| allegory.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _There's that word again: "drugs" - you just know anyone
| using that word in earnest is suffering from a narrow and
| naive world view_
|
| Do you know what a drug is?
| dymk wrote:
| Caffeine, Tylenol, beer, heroin, LSD, Sudafed, Five Hour
| Energy, ...
| motohagiography wrote:
| if you are interested in a rabbit hole, look up the appearance of
| the acacia shrub in the bible, a source of DMT, and how some
| people associate it with the burning bush. quite a trip.
|
| I've said before that I think the geometric patterns in
| hallucinations resemble analog signal feedback, inside an analog
| signalling system (your brain) that has been impaired by a
| chemical. other dimensions and beings aren't necessary to the
| explanation. there are theraputic uses for breaking cycles of
| thought, but I'd argue a non-spiritual view of drugs based on
| signalling feedback and channel impairment is sufficient to
| describe their effects.
| elevaet wrote:
| I 100% agree with you on the "signal feedback inside an analog
| signalling system".
|
| I've done a lot of tripping, and I've come to this same
| hypothesis independently. I believe this explains a great deal
| about the visual geometric and fractal patterns you can see on
| psychedelics and also that analogous things happen within the
| auditory processing system, memory, emotions, and so on when
| you trip.
|
| So much of tripping comes down to turning up the gain on
| signalling in your brain, which causes feedback pathways to
| start resonating. This results in colour saturation, tracers,
| geometry, exaggerated patterns and edge detection, echoing,
| reverbs, increased impact of thoughts, and following thoughts
| down deep rabbit holes etc.
|
| None of this is to reduce the experience, I love psychedelics
| and think they are super important. But that's whole other
| discussion.
| shinryuu wrote:
| It seems like you're thinking of acacia confusa but that bush
| is growing in south east Asia and not close to where the bible
| played out.
| ttoinou wrote:
| Maybe that's a good start. But sometimes I am able to control
| my hallucinations, it doesnt seem to be simply analog
| modification
| elevaet wrote:
| It's because your awareness and agency is part of the
| circuit.
| guicen wrote:
| What I find interesting is that the line between a religious
| experience and a brain chemistry event seems a lot thinner than
| we usually think. The clergy didn't lose their faith after taking
| psilocybin. Instead, they seem to hold their beliefs a bit more
| loosely and focus more on what they feel in the moment. In some
| ways, this feels like something humans have always done. Whether
| it's prayer, meditation, fasting, or psychedelics, people keep
| looking for ways to quiet the noise in their heads and feel
| connected to something bigger. The methods change, but the need
| stays the same.
| leptons wrote:
| >the line between a religious experience and a brain chemistry
| event seems a lot thinner than we usually think.
|
| George Gurdjieff wrote about this many, many years ago (1890 -
| 1912). He called it "The Fourth Way". This is the relevant
| passage from the book "In Search of the Miraculous":
|
| _"So that when a man attains will on the fourth way he can
| make use of it because he has acquired control of all his
| bodily, emotional, and intellectual functions. And besides, he
| has saved a great deal of time by working on the three sides of
| his being in parallel and simultaneously._
|
| _"The fourth way is sometimes called the way of the sly man.
| The 'sly man' knows some secret winch the fakir, monk, and yogi
| do not know. How the 'sly man' learned this secret -- it is not
| known. Perhaps he found it in some old books, perhaps he
| inherited it, perhaps he bought it, perhaps he stole it from
| someone. It makes no difference. 'The 'sly man' knows the
| secret and with its help outstrips the fakir, the monk, and the
| yogi._
|
| _"Of the four, the fakir acts in the crudest manner; he knows
| very little and understands very little. Let us suppose that by
| a whole month of intense torture he develops in himself a
| certain energy, a certain substance which produces certain
| changes in him. He does it absolutely blindly, with his eyes
| shut, knowing neither aim, methods, nor results, simply in
| imitation of others._
|
| _"The monk knows what he wants a little better; he is guided
| by religious feeling, by religious tradition, by a desire for
| achievement, for salvation; he trusts his teacher who tells him
| what to do, and he believes that his efforts and sacrifices are
| 'pleasing to God.' Let us suppose that a week of fasting,
| continual prayer, privations, and so on, enables him to attain
| what the fakir develops in himself by a month of self-torture._
|
| _"The yogi knows considerably more. He knows what he wants, he
| knows why he wants it, he knows how it can be acquired. He
| knows, for instance, that it is necessary for his purpose to
| produce a certain substance in himself. He knows that this
| substance can be produced in one day by a certain kind of
| mental exercises or concentration of consciousness. So he keeps
| his attention on these exercises for a whole day without
| allowing himself a single outside thought, and he obtains what
| he needs. In this way a yogi spends on the same thing only one
| day compared with a month spent by the fakir and a week spent
| by the monk._
|
| _"But on the fourth way knowledge is still more exact and
| perfect. A man who follows the fourth way knows quite
| definitely what substances he needs for his aims and he knows
| that these substances can be produced within the body by a
| month of physical suffering, by a week of emotional strain, or
| by a day of mental exercises--and also, that they can be
| introduced into the organism from without if it is known how to
| do it. And so, instead of spending a whole day in exercises
| like the yogi, a week in prayer like the monk, or a month in
| self-torture like the fakir, he simply prepares and swallows a
| little pill which contains all the substances he wants and, in
| this way, without loss of time, he obtains the required
| results._
|
| https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.5892/page/49/mode/2up
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Way
| keiferski wrote:
| People often assume that a spiritual experience is by-
| definition somehow supernatural, but it makes sense to me that
| it would need to functionally have a wiring system in order to
| actually work.
|
| In other words, even _if_ you assume that the vision of God
| /feeling of divine presence/etc. is valid, there are two
| methods of implementation: either it's done in a supernatural
| way that defies physics and logic; or it's done in a way that
| accords with the structure of reality (as in, chemically.)
|
| The latter seems a lot more elegant to me, IMO.
| Winsaucerer wrote:
| My own view is an idealist style one, where I think God
| impresses experiences upon us, and the experiences we have
| are determined by physical states. On this view, it's
| impossible to have a religious experience without there being
| appropriate physical states in place. In other words,
| agreeing with your conclusion.
| anon291 wrote:
| The entire premise of supernatural is wrong. Anything that
| occurs in this world is, by definition, natural.
|
| Other definitions of supernatural really fail to be complete
| or useful. One definition is 'not predictable' , but by that
| metric, every moment of a newborns first few moments of life
| is supernatural.
|
| Of course, there's another definition, which is experiences
| that do not take place in this world and unobservable to us.
| In which case, sure but then we cannot experience them here
| on earth. The moment such a thing is experienced by a human,
| it becomes natural
|
| I honestly challenge people to explain what they mean when
| they say 'supernatural'.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| I'm a Christian and here's my perspective.
|
| There's a physical realm we exist in defined by space and
| time. Everything outside of that is the supernatural.
|
| God is not bound by time and His true nature is not
| something we can fully understand. He is in our world, but
| not from it.
|
| The Bible makes references to angels and demons, entities
| that cannot be seen or measured unless they choose to make
| themselves known. They can affect still affect the natural
| world. These effects can be observed, but it would be
| difficult to reproduce any experiments because they are an
| unknown variable.
|
| Science has trouble differentiating between an effect
| without a cause (a miracle basically) and an effect with a
| mechanism we haven't accounted for.
| anon291 wrote:
| I'm a Christian too and while I agree with everything you
| said, any time anything outside our 'world' interacts
| with our world, the phenomenon we see is... Natural.
| geye1234 wrote:
| > there are two methods of implementation: either it's done
| in a supernatural way that defies physics and logic; or it's
| done in a way that accords with the structure of reality (as
| in, chemically.)
|
| Why not both?
|
| Everyone agrees that brain chemistry-stuff happens when you
| have a supernatural experience, just as brain chemistry-stuff
| happens when you eat a steak. The disagreement is whether
| that's _all_ that 's happening. Pointing to the existence of
| brain chemistry-stuff as an argument against the existence of
| the supernatural is like pointing to it as an argument
| against the existence of the steak.
|
| Also, the 'supernatural' does not defy physics or logic; it
| is perfectly logical, and outside the scope of physics.
| testemailfordg2 wrote:
| Better to stay sane...Have seen a lot of these kinds of articles,
| surely funding comes from somewhere...
| easymodex wrote:
| Are you saying you are sane but you also believe secret orgs
| are funding to push psychedelics to people to make them insane?
| I have bad news then.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| This magazine (nautil.us) is funded by the John Templeton
| Foundation, which seeks to promote "the intersection of
| religion and science".
|
| (Noone talked about "secret" orgs, the GP poster which you
| imply is not sane actually made a correct guess based on
| common sense)
| t0lo wrote:
| I've noticed a pattern in which "type" of outlets push this
| content the most
| 50208 wrote:
| Why do people insist on complicating all this so much ... just
| take a hit of whatever and experience it for yourself.
| worthless-trash wrote:
| I believe people complicate it because brain chemistry
| modification is mostly a one way change.
| dymk wrote:
| There's plenty of reasons but that's not a great reason for
| or against - there is no process you can do to your brain
| that isn't a one way change.
| summer_glue wrote:
| There's not much information in this article.
| SlowTao wrote:
| Ram Dass said that back in the 1960's when they were doing study
| of LSD they would try to randomize/double blind these tests but
| it was very funny to see. There were one where they had clergy
| involved and it basically went, one person would be like "I think
| it is doing something" and another would be wandering around
| going "I SEE GOD! I SEE GOD!". It was obvious who had what.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| That's about the time Catholics stopped having their Mass in
| Latin . . .
| harry8 wrote:
| Cartoon about that which made me laugh.
|
| https://www.altaonline.com/culture/cartoons/a42179654/weekly...
|
| so hard to track these things down with google nowadays. Treats
| every word you add as an "or" like yahoo used to when google
| took their search market. The move from search engine to
| suggestion engine has been a disaster from my point of view.
| Hard to see how it would be more profitable.
|
| edit: better link
| SlowTao wrote:
| The cartoon is a 10 out of 10!
| sznio wrote:
| >Hard to see how it would be more profitable
|
| Queries use less compute time to complete, saving money. Why
| provide quality if there's no competitor for users to escape
| to?
| hellotheretoday wrote:
| This was part of this difficulty in clinical trials for mdma
| iirc. Both researchers and participants were fairly reliably
| able to discern placebo, among some other issues
| echelon_musk wrote:
| > "I took five people and we locked ourselves in a building for
| three weeks and we took 400 micrograms of LSD every four hours.
| That is 2400 micrograms of LSD a day.... We finally were just
| drinking out of the bottle.... We were very high. What happened
| in those three weeks in that house, no one would ever believe,
| including us. And at the end of the three weeks, we walked out
| of the house and within a few days, we came down! It was a very
| frustrating experience, as if you came into the kingdom of
| heaven and you saw how it all was...and then you got cast out
| again."
|
| Ram Dass and his retelling of this experience contributed to my
| shift from psychedelics to established spiritual traditions.
| They had the territory mapped out thousands of years ago. Ram
| Dass ultimately settled as a Hindu where as I find myself drawn
| to Buddhism. Anatta maps nicely to experiences of ego death and
| I find that I can see all drugs as part of the conditioned
| world. If you rely on a physical substance of the conditioned
| world for access to the divine then you're not free yet.
| kgwxd wrote:
| If the goal is death, what's the point of living? shouldn't
| we be doing something completely different here than trying
| to find a way back? if we're going to end up back there no
| matter what, it seems a waste of life to spend it on that.
| echelon_musk wrote:
| > the goal is death
|
| ?
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| I presume they are referring to "ego death".
| kgwxd wrote:
| What's the difference between ego death and physical
| death? Doesn't physical death include ego death? If so,
| why bother trying to kill it before then. Is it something
| we must kill before physical death? If so, why? If we
| don't kill it before physical death, then what? If we
| already have "connected to everything" at home, shouldn't
| we take advantage of the situation while we're out?
| Because home sounds kind of boring.
| haswell wrote:
| > _What 's the difference between ego death and physical
| death?_
|
| When the body dies, the lights go out (as far as we
| know). When the ego "dies" (I agree with your sibling
| comment that maybe the word "death" is not the right
| word), you can go on living your life with a
| fundamentally shifted perspective.
|
| > _Doesn 't physical death include ego death? If so, why
| bother trying to kill it before then._
|
| This line of questioning doesn't make much sense to me.
| Why learn language, study philosophy, form relationships,
| have kids, and otherwise gain life experience if we're
| just going to die eventually?
|
| For the same reasons "death" is potentially a misnomer,
| so too is framing this as "killing" it. The ego does not
| "die" because it was killed. It "dies" because we realize
| it was never what we thought it was to begin with. Ego is
| an idea. A concept. A formulation of thoughts and
| feelings that is so pervasive in our psyche that we form
| beliefs about its nature despite those beliefs not
| withstanding rational scrutiny.
|
| The "death" of ego is the felt sense of this truth.
|
| Clearly there is a difference between physical death and
| adjusting one's beliefs based on new evidence/experience.
|
| > _If we already have "connected to everything" at home,
| shouldn't we take advantage of the situation while we're
| out?_
|
| This is a misconception about the experience of no-self.
| Many people hear about this concept, and draw conclusions
| about what such an experience means about the rest of
| life that are unfounded (I was one of them).
|
| It reminds me a bit of the arguments some of my religious
| friends make. "Well if we all just evolved, and are the
| result of random chance, what's the point of living
| life?" as if gaining a deeper understanding of existence
| will somehow suddenly change what it means to be human
| and to have a human experience. To me, this is a
| nonsensical line of reasoning. Learning more about the
| fundamental aspects of the universe doesn't de-value life
| for most people. If anything, it makes it all the more
| fantastical.
|
| > _Because home sounds kind of boring._
|
| I'm right there with you. Experiencing ego "death" didn't
| make me suddenly decide to just rot at home because I
| have everything I need. It didn't remove the things I'm
| passionate about in life or make me less likely to engage
| with the world and do interesting things. It didn't even
| remove that internal collections of thoughts and feelings
| that I had previously identified with as synonymous with
| "me".
|
| It just changed how I understand myself, relate to those
| feelings, and how I relate to the world around me. In a
| practical sense, it helped me reframe the more
| distressing aspects of life and deal with my anxiety and
| depression in new ways.
|
| Your questions seem to reveal a belief that experiencing
| no-self somehow devalues or reduces the richness of
| experience. In my experience, the opposite is true. It
| makes life richer, fuller, and more amazing. It's
| anything but boring.
| haswell wrote:
| The goal is not death. The comment mentioned ego death
| which is something else entirely.
|
| At the risk of trivializing something that must be
| experienced not explained, the realization of no-self (ego
| death) is one of the most liberating things one can
| experience.
|
| It's the realization that the feeling of "I" is just
| another feeling that arises in the same space as all other
| feelings, and that this feeling is ultimately greatly
| constraining/limiting. It's the realization that what we
| are is far more expansive than most people realize without
| such exploration of self and no-self. It's liberation from
| the illusion that is our default state.
|
| > _what 's the point of living?_
|
| For me, experiencing it is what makes life worth living.
|
| The best way I can describe this is that it was the gradual
| dissolution of certain ideas I had about what it means to
| be me. This dissolution wasn't just experiential - it was
| also the result of rational interrogation of various
| beliefs I had about myself.
|
| To put this another way, it was the sum total of a series
| of realizations about what it _can't_ mean to be me.
|
| - It feels like "I" is at the "center" of me, but
| biologically and neurologically, there is no discernible
| center
|
| - It feels like "I" am my thoughts and feelings, but who
| then is aware of these thoughts and feelings?
|
| - It feels like "I" am looking out at the world through the
| windows of my eyes, "I" am in the inside, and the world is
| on the outside. Except this relies on the unexamined belief
| that there's some kind of homunculus inside my head doing
| the seeing. Instead, there's just seeing.
|
| And a list of related realizations too long to enumerate
| without making this comment longer than it already is.
|
| The end result that people often refer to as ego death is
| the opposite of a waste in my experience. A life without
| breaking down these illusions is a life of servitude to our
| evolutionary defaults. A life lost in thought is a life
| that hasn't experienced some of the most awe inspiring
| states of consciousness on offer.
|
| As a skeptic, I spent the first 35 years of my life lost in
| my thoughts and feelings, and unaware that I could
| experience life any other way, and frankly uninterested in
| such ideas.
|
| Life circumstances gave me a taste of what ego death
| entails, at which point I realized how completely oblivious
| I'd been and how deep my misconceptions about people who
| talked about such things were.
|
| This comment is a stream of thought and not sufficient to
| communicate what ego death entails, but it is certainly not
| the scary/bad thing I had once believed, and is one of the
| most meaningful/helpful experiences of my life and has made
| life much richer.
|
| Anything but a waste.
| echelon_musk wrote:
| Well put. Thanks for clarifying a bit more for those
| unfamiliar with these concepts.
| kgwxd wrote:
| Death means dead. If it comes back, it didn't die. So
| either everyone saying they've experienced it, has no ego
| (what are "they" then?), or they're using the wrong word.
|
| I've experienced all those realizations myself, but "I"
| am back for now. So what's a better word for it? Maybe if
| we didn't call it "death", it wouldn't sound so scary, or
| mysterious, or interesting, or even useful. Guess it'd be
| kind of hard to build religions around that though.
| haswell wrote:
| "Ego death" is really not the death of ego, but the death
| of the _belief_ that ego is is at the center of all
| things, and is somehow a thing that actually exists in
| the way we tend to believe it exists before examining it
| more closely.
|
| > _Maybe if we didn 't call it "death", it wouldn't sound
| so scary, or mysterious, or interesting, or even useful._
|
| I tend to agree. I think there's a strong stigma and
| association people hold when they hear these words, that
| are unrelated to the actual phenomena itself.
|
| > _Guess it 'd be kind of hard to build religions around
| that though._
|
| This reveals some of the associations you seem to have
| with the concept. I'm not religious, have taken on no
| metaphysical beliefs, and consider myself somewhere
| between agnostic and atheist.
|
| There is nothing at all religious about ego death, even
| if many religions and people who talk about such things
| are doing so from a clearly religious context. It's this
| religious association that kept me away from exploring
| the ideas for many years.
|
| It wasn't until I had directly experienced a taste of
| what that phrase means that I took it seriously. My
| worldview remains as irreligious as ever.
|
| In retrospect, avoiding it because of this association
| seems as ill-advised as avoiding science because of its
| origins and associations with the Catholic Church.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| The goal is ego death, to let your day-to-day machine mind
| die and be reborn as yourself without having to physically
| die. Keeping your soul, subconsciousness and your
| experience, while shedding the crust and rust that we
| accumulate over the years.
|
| Now you know what born again Christians are all about.
| jobs_throwaway wrote:
| > What happened in those three weeks in that house, no one
| would ever believe, including us.
|
| I've often wondered what happened here
| Liquix wrote:
| he also reported giving a guru heroic doses of LSD (1200+ mg)
| on two occasions and observing practically no effect.
| presumably because the state produced by the drug is a fleeting
| taste of the state the guru had achieved through more
| traditional means.
|
| https://www.ramdass.org/ram-dass-gives-maharaji-the-yogi-med...
| Animats wrote:
| So where's the follow up in which others evaluate the
| participants? The results all seem self-reported. But did the
| participants improve in some measurable way as seen from the
| outside? Without outside evaluation, it's just people who took
| drugs reporting they mostly liked the results.
| agold97 wrote:
| it's no surprise to me that people who believe goats talks like
| to trip lol
| deepsun wrote:
| I swear psilocybin affects the sense of importance, sacredness,
| meaningfulness. One can be staring at the most boring thing and
| see the Universe in it. Doesn't mean there's really anything
| important nor useful in it. Just like a shot of dopamine affects
| feeling of pleasure, psilocybin affects the brain's feeling of
| "importance".
| quchen wrote:
| You make it sound very negative. It's a strong experience, and
| after a strong experience most people have it on their mind,
| and talking about it is one way to integrate the experience.
| Previously insufferable people have a new channel to be
| insufferable, scientific people will analyze what their brain
| chemistry did, dull people will brag about how extreme it was,
| and so on.
| Unearned5161 wrote:
| I wonder if a similar thing to the dwarfing high of heroin
| applies to these psychedelics. Would the amazing awakening
| experience I'd have with an LSD trip make all other mentally
| exciting moments and smaller awakenings I come across in day to
| day life more boring in comparison?
| hyperadvanced wrote:
| I don't think so. I've done it probably 20 times and I feel
| like it bleeds out into the rest of your life. It forever
| altered my appreciation of clouds and postmodern
| fiction/philosophy
| Unearned5161 wrote:
| Right, that sounds reasonable enough. Maybe that's because
| it's more of a semi-permanent neuron rewiring and less of
| hitting a dopamine receptors rev limiter?
| quchen wrote:
| Have you been to a really long opera? It's quite impressive.
| After hours of pretty intense performance and singing, can you
| not appreciate the street musician the day after? Do you have a
| strong desire to go to the opera again the following days?
| flkenosad wrote:
| Honestly, kind of.
| Unearned5161 wrote:
| I get the direction you're trying to go in, but I think this
| metaphor is flawed. If all I've seen in life are mediocre
| street musicians, and then one day I go to some concert and
| it's the best thing ever, sure that's going to change how I
| see the street musicians from before.
|
| Replace with food and its even clearer. Going to some top of
| the line Micheline star restaurant _will_ alter how you look
| at food for the rest of your life.
|
| Watching a movie in blue-ray full quality no compression
| _will_ alter how you appreciate streamed movies for the rest
| of your life.
|
| You can still appreciate it for what it is, but it will
| forever have that relative smallness.
| pjerem wrote:
| > Going to some top of the line Micheline star restaurant
| _will_ alter how you look at food for the rest of your
| life.
|
| Interestingly I don't agree with you and that's what I
| would call elitism.
|
| Food is a great example as I know I'm personally able to
| appreciate a great and complex meal at a high end
| restaurant and still enjoy some fast food.
|
| It's the same for art : does having a favorite
| book/movie/music/videogame/... makes you unable to enjoy
| other books/movies/music/videogames ?
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| That's like asking if getting a new pair of glasses makes
| looking at things more boring. Psychedelics are most
| interesting because of the medium and long term effects they
| have on the brain.
| Unearned5161 wrote:
| The second part of your comment seems reasonable, but your
| glasses analogy makes no sense. Glasses don't make things
| look exciting, they make things sharper and help you see
| better.
|
| Furthermore, if you're trying to say that taking off my new
| glasses makes things less clear then yes, that's precisely
| the symptom that made me acquire them in the first place.
| socceroos wrote:
| The article opening sounds like a bar joke.
|
| Also, I think this point is salient:
|
| > He pointed to the risk of selection bias: those who volunteer
| are likely to be "spiritually hungering for a mystical
| experience,"...
|
| I would go further and suppose that any Christian elder or leader
| who volunteered to do this had already demonstrated their
| unsuitability to speak on the matter of psychedelics and God.
| rendall wrote:
| > _I would go further and suppose that any Christian elder or
| leader who volunteered to do this had already demonstrated
| their unsuitability to speak on the matter of psychedelics and
| God._
|
| I have honest questions. Would you mind expanding? Is there a
| theological basis for your stance? What would a suitable
| Christian elder or leader say on the matter of psychedelics and
| God?
| nooneinpart wrote:
| For example, it has been written in the letter to the
| Ephesians 5.15-21:
|
| Therefore watch carefully how you walk, not as unwise, but as
| wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil. Because
| of this don't become foolish but understand what the will of
| the Lord is and don't be drunken with wine, in which is
| dissipation, but be filled with the spirit, speaking to one
| another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs; singing and
| making melody in your heart to the lord; giving thanks always
| concerning all things to God, even the father, in the name of
| our lord Jesus Christ; subjecting yourselves to one another
| in the fear of Christ.
| rendall wrote:
| Would you say the issue is intoxication in general, or is
| there something categorically different about psychedelics
| compared to alcohol?
| nooneinpart2 wrote:
| The letter to the Galatians (5.19-23) may distinguish
| between drunkenness and drug use depending on if you
| consider pharmakeia (pharmaceia) to include the use of
| psychedelics:
|
| Now the deeds of the flesh are obvious, which are:
| adultery, ... sorcery (pharmakeia), ... drunkenness
| (methai), ... and things like these; of which I forewarn
| you, even as I also forewarned you, that those who
| practice such things will not inherit God's kingdom. But
| the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience,
| kindness, goodness, faith, gentleness, and self-control.
| Against such things there is no law.
| hiimkeks wrote:
| At the same time, monasteries have a long history of
| producing beer, wine, liqeur (think Chartreuse) and
| liqour (think Klosterfrau Melissengeist).
|
| At the same time - having a glass of wine for stimulation
| while contemplating the divine might not be the same as
| drunkenness? And is the different the dose ("a glass of
| wine") or the purpose ("stimulation while contemplating
| the divine")?
| pjio wrote:
| Those studies should also include if the individuals taking
| substances become better or worse for the lives of the people
| around them in a sustainable way.
| billynomates wrote:
| They did, if you read the study linked in the article. The
| individuals who took psilocybin mostly became more open,
| compassionate, and grounded in their spiritual roles. They
| reported feeling more deeply connected to their faith
| communities, more empathetic in their pastoral care, and more
| authentic in how they engaged with others. And the changes were
| still evident over a year later, long after the acute effects
| of the substance had passed. What shifted wasn't just mood or
| perspective but the felt sense of purpose and interconnection.
| Many described themselves as more present, more patient, and
| more attuned to the emotional and spiritual needs of those they
| served. Their beliefs became less rigid, their egos softened,
| and their sense of service deepened. For the people around them
| the net result was almost universally positive. Not in a
| grandiose or abstract way, but in the quiet, daily patterns of
| being more available, less judgmental, and more aligned with
| what they had always claimed to teach.
|
| "Participants often described becoming more open and
| understanding toward others' beliefs, feeling greater love for
| those they serve, and experiencing renewed clarity in their
| spiritual leadership."
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| I have taken boatloads of psychedelics in my life. If I could do
| my life over again I would have traded every single trip for
| having read Orthodoxy and the Everlasting Man by Chesterton
| before I was 25. Tripping gives you zero insights into the
| divine, it is not revelation, you don't get closer to God. There
| are real answers, but we as civilization have been deliberately
| moving away from under false premises, and the world has gotten
| worse and worse. Drugs can't fix this. If you want a better
| world, you should not dull your perception of it.
|
| Something that would be much more beneficial for all humanity is
| if more of the clergy actually preached the bible, instead of
| trying to explain it away, which is almost exclusively what the
| clergy I have engaged with tries to do.
| jwrallie wrote:
| I take this book was life changing to you, would you mind
| explaining a bit more on why? If you read it before 25, do you
| think it would have the same effect, given your different
| experience at that age?
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| Psychedelics caused me to isolate from society and those
| around me. It makes you feel more connected while actually
| becoming less connected, it makes you feel that you
| understand while actually understanding less.
|
| I see now that the real pleasure in life is in being
| connected with your local community, with those around you --
| not because you agree with them, not because they think or
| look the same as you, but because they are yours, and you are
| theirs in a very deep sense.
|
| I also see now that the Church of Christ makes this possible,
| it's a vehicle for fulfilling our purpose in life. No other
| thing exists which provides the same avenue, nothing else
| even comes close.
|
| The specific changes the books made in my life is that it
| helped me get over my superficial objections to Christ (I was
| an atheist from the age of about 14), it helped me see the
| whole, and thus helped me adopt Christ as my saviour, and the
| Church as my Church, and it brought me to a point where I
| have faith without doubt.
|
| > We know better than the scholars, even those of us who are
| no scholars, what was in that hollow cry that went forth over
| the dead Adonis and why the Great Mother had a daughter
| wedded to death. We have entered more deeply than they into
| the Eleusinian Mysteries and have passed a higher grade,
| where gate within gate guarded the wisdom of Orpheus. We know
| the meaning of all the myths. We know the last secret
| revealed to the perfect initiate. And it is not the voice of
| a priest or a prophet saying, 'These things are.' It is the
| voice of a dreamer and an idealist crying, 'Why cannot these
| things be?'
| jajko wrote:
| Given current major religions are visibly inventions of men to
| cover basic existential fears we all face and were done during
| roughly iron age era with corresponding illogical parts and
| conflicting statements, no amount of drugs are going to move
| any normal person to whatever god or God represents in this
| universe.
|
| The introspection part is where true gold is - and to be honest
| that tells _a lot_ about where we feel above topic is in our
| cores (and as you yourself confirmed from your experiences,
| like it or not).
|
| More religion and preaching got us medieval dark ages and tons
| of endless wars and genocide, I think mankind deserve a bit
| more these days.
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| > More religion and preaching got us medieval dark ages and
| tons of endless wars and genocide
|
| This is false.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Thank you for commenting. The believer's perspective on life's
| questions is much too sparse on HN, and it often gets
| downvoted.
| myflash13 wrote:
| By taking drugs they immediately invalidate their legitimacy and
| licenses as clergy, so not sure this means anything.
| stared wrote:
| I highly recommend the whole book "Sacred Knowledge" by William
| Richards (one of the author of the studies).
|
| "To most people who are even moderately experienced with
| entheogens, concepts such as awe, sacredness, eternity, grace,
| agape, transcendence, transfiguration, dark night of the soul,
| born-again, heaven and hell are more than theological ideas; they
| are experiences." - Thomas Roberts
|
| This phrase is quoted in "Sacred Knowledge" by Richards, yet I
| find it the most suitable summary of this overview of scientific
| research on psychedelics and religion.
|
| We hear about mystical visions from LSD ("acid"), psilocybin
| ("shrooms"), and DMT from many "spiritual but not religious"
| people and self-proclaimed shamans. But how does it relate to
| vision by ordinary people (ones who never tired, and wouldn't try
| if it weren't for legal, scientific research)?
|
| And how does it relate to prayer, mediation, and mystical visions
| by Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and Hindus? How do monks and
| priests compare their psychedelic experience with their regular
| practice? Do they all turn to Zen Buddhism, or entrench in their
| religious background?
|
| Regardless if you are deeply religious, or a non-spiritual
| atheist, I believe you will reconsider a few things after reading
| this book.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| I have taken LSD and mushrooms about a dozen times each.
| They're just drugs. Drugs that mess with the way you perceive
| things, there's nothing spiritual or profound about any of it.
| I very much enjoy hallucinogens but any 'meaning' or
| 'spirituality' about the experience is nonsense. I still think
| the experience itself has positive effects overall.
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| Meaning and spirituality are personal experiences, seems
| close minded to deny what others avowedly profess as their
| true first person experience.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| It might be close minded, but it doesn't mean I am
| incorrect. I've done enough varieties of drugs (multiple
| types of every class of recreational drugs) to know it's
| just altering your brain chemistry to make you perceive
| things differently. There's no higher meaning or purpose to
| tripping. Other people may believe there is, but I think
| they're wrong and misinterpreting their experience due to
| what they've read and heard about hallucinogens.
|
| Staying grounded when you're doing powerful psychedelics is
| a good idea.
|
| As an experiment, next time you trip, write down your
| 'profound' thoughts and then examine them after the trip is
| over.
| Dumblydorr wrote:
| My thoughts were that relationships and love are the true
| key to happiness and fulfillment in life. Those thoughts
| were integrated for sure.
|
| Seems like you're lost in the thought that scientific
| rationalism and spiritualism can't co-exist. Look at
| definitions of the words meaning and spirituality and
| ponder why they're universal across all "wrong" religions
| in your view.
|
| I think It's because those are true human experiences,
| regardless of their detachment from established religion
| or tropes. I don't believe any religion but I do believe
| people have genuine awe and wonder and label it
| spirituality.
|
| And to just go deny other people, sounds like a bummer to
| be around while tripping.
| stared wrote:
| First, your experience is your experience.
|
| Second, how do you define `meaning' or `spirituality'?
| cozyman wrote:
| AS Christians we don't expect to receive mystical and
| transcendent visions, although they can happen it's exceedingly
| rare and not something the majority of people will see in their
| life.
|
| Satan is far more likely to give you a mystical vision that
| leads you away from the faith than for you to receive a Divine
| vision.
| stared wrote:
| I recommend reading "Sacred knowledge" even more (the author
| is Christian, if it makes a difference). When it comes to
| mystic experiences, while technically it can me "less than
| 50%", it is still a lot
| (https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2023/12/07/spiritual-
| ex...). Not everyone is happy to talk about it, both is it
| might be very personal and as many are afraid to be
| considered crazy.
|
| I cannot say much about relative Bayesian probability of
| getting a vision from God or Satan, though.
| A_Duck wrote:
| @dang can we change the article link to the much more detailed
| New Yorker article? Several comments noting the current link is a
| pretty thin summary
|
| https://www.newyorker.com/newsletter/the-daily/michael-polla...
| stared wrote:
| Or the actual paper (open access):
|
| Effects of Psilocybin on Religious and Spiritual Attitudes and
| Behaviors in Clergy from Various Major World Religions (2025)
| https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/psymed.2023.0044
| yboris wrote:
| Maybe related, a book _Varieties of Spiritual Experience_ by
| David B. Yaden and Andrew Newberg - the title pays homage to
| William James, considered the father of American psychology and
| author of _The Varieties of Religious Experience_.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/019066567X
| alex-vlasis wrote:
| I come from a Muslim family but aren't deeply religious myself.
| My first LSD trip felt deeply spiritual and echoed themes from
| the paper on psychedelics and religion. Here's what I took away,
| which might interest anyone curious about this topic:
|
| - Prophetic Sensation: It was so profound that, 5,000 years ago,
| I could've thought it was a prophetic vision. I didn't feel like
| I was speaking to God, but I got how prophets might've felt
| something divine.
|
| - Inner Peace & Clarity: LSD brought pure joy, warmth, and peace.
| It stripped away mental filters, showing me the world as it is,
| not just how I see it.
|
| - Accepting Death: I felt at peace with death, seeing it as a
| natural part of life. I'd never really thought about it before,
| but there was no fear--just acceptance.
|
| - Divine Music: Music felt heavenly, amplifying the moment's
| emotional and spiritual depth. It was like it carried the
| experience.
|
| - Spiritual Connection: I didn't think about whether religions
| are "true," but it felt spiritual, like touching something bigger
| --hard to explain, but so meaningful.
|
| - Right & Wrong Philosophy: I realized "right" and "wrong" are
| labels we create. Right feels like harmony, wrong like harm, but
| they're fluid, shaped by context. Things just are, and we use
| these ideas to navigate life.
| aljgz wrote:
| Dude, I needed to double check to make sure this is not my
| comment, all the way to being born in a Muslim family. The
| prophetic part is spot on, I stop right here ;)
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| Pretty sure giving them to non-clergy eventually created clergy
| dymk wrote:
| Well, it created monks
| cozyman wrote:
| any evidence?
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| "Almost a decade ago, a Baptist Biblical scholar, a Catholic
| priest, several rabbis, an Islamic leader, a Zen Buddhist roshi,
| and more than a dozen other religious leaders walked into a lab--
| and took high doses of magic mushrooms."
|
| I seriously wonder what this Catholic priest was thinking.
|
| According to a natural law view, the reason for taking a
| psychoactive substance is a major component in determining
| whether taking it is licit. A bad intent corrupts the act. So, if
| I have a martini _in order to calm my nerves_ , or choose to
| _savor the goodness of a glass of beer_ , then knowing what we
| know about the effect of alcohol in moderation and our own
| personal response to the quantify in question, there is nothing
| wrong happening. (Catholics are not teetotalers. We like our
| wine.) Indeed, if you are in a state of high anxiety that impedes
| the use of reason, taking something to calm your nerves would be
| therapeutic and restorative. But if we consume alcohol _in order
| to get drunk or buzzed_ , then this is morally illicit, as the
| intended effect -- the distortion of perception and the impeding
| of the operation of our rational faculties -- is immoral. This is
| because, on a natural law view, our nature is to be rational
| animals -- to know reality as it is, which is what the senses and
| reason are for -- and to intentionally thwart our nature, and
| especially that which is most essential to our humanity, our
| rationality, is bad for us as human beings. (It also produces
| emotional distortions, which are, again, something bad for us.)
| That is why it is an affront to human dignity to trip, and we
| intuitively perceive this when we see a drunk or someone who is
| high. They disgust us, they arouse pity in us, or, in less
| serious cases, we laugh at them, because the comedy is the result
| of them failing to be rational and thus human.
|
| The principle of double effect also tells us how and when taking
| a substance with harmful side effects is licit. The intent is,
| again, an essential component, and recreational drug use is
| simply never licit for that reason as explained above.
|
| The idea of using drugs to produce a "spiritual experience" is
| also nonsensical. That is because it isn't a bona fide spiritual
| experience. It is a hallucination, a corruption and suppression
| of the perceptive and rational faculties which is how we come to
| know reality. It does not clarify our perception of reality per
| se, but darkens it by producing mental and emotional distortions.
| A true spiritual "experience", if you want to call it that, would
| involved the heightened or elevated operation of perception and
| rationality, not their diminution. So the real McCoy is exactly
| opposite. That people subjectively report having gained insight
| is either a side effect of the hallucinogen disrupting some
| pattern of denial or whatever, or merely an error of perception
| (which is expected, as people high on drugs aren't thinking
| clearly and have a poor ability to appraise the validity and
| value of their thoughts).
|
| True spiritual maturity is sober. Hallucination is the exact
| opposite of sober. It is a fraudulent ersatz, not some royal road
| to the divine or whatever.
| geye1234 wrote:
| Thanks. Sanest comment on this thread. The fact that something
| "feels" very real and insightful doesn't make it so.
| cozyman wrote:
| their "spiritual experience" came from Demons, change my mind.
| quesera wrote:
| Sometimes I listen to music explicitly for the way it makes me
| feel, emotionally and physically.
|
| That the "drug" is auditory (physical) instead of chemical
| (physical) does not change anything meaningful.
|
| Catholics do this too. In fact they are encouraged to do so.
|
| I conclude that your argument is flawed.
| nashashmi wrote:
| No Islamic leader in their right mind would try taking magic
| mushrooms or any forms of intoxication. That is a red line. So I
| seriously doubt the experience of the person who went in and took
| it. Which means the question remains unanswered: how would a
| person of the Islamic faith describe the experience obtained from
| magic mushrooms?
|
| By the words of the Quran, the response is They
| ask you about wine and gambling. Say, "In both there is great
| sin, and some benefits for people. And their sin is
| greater than their benefit." And they ask you as to what
| they should spend. Say, "The surplus". This is how Allah
| makes His verses clear to you, so that you may ponder.
|
| Benefits are acknowledged, but it emphasizes the sin (likely
| meaning a curse aka perennial harm) is greater.
|
| My protest to the context of HN, this study furthers the idea
| that God/religion/belief is a mystical hallucinated idea (and
| does not belong any greater in rational belief than does the
| experience of magic mushrooms). But such equivalencies being
| drawn here would be hasty and ignorant and a logical fallacy.
| First, if Person A believes in X and Person B believes in Y and
| goes through an experience causing Person B to also believe in X
| and calls Y a similarly relevant belief, does not make Person A
| and Person B similar, nor does it make X and Y similar. It just
| means the experience is mind altering. Second, these studies
| observe the outcomes, describes the outcomes, and hypothesizes
| the empirical causes, but in the case of this study it is
| observing hallucinations in believers of faith and finding
| similarities in reasoning to their preconcieved beliefs, causing
| it to claim that hallucination is equal to belief.
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| Lot of words and blind beliefs.
|
| 0 experiential knowledge.
| thendrill wrote:
| It's worth clarifying a few points about Islamic teachings and
| history regarding intoxicants.
|
| First, the Quran does not categorically declare all intoxicants
| haram (forbidden) in the legalistic sense often assumed. The
| verse commonly cited (2:219) does not prohibit wine or similar
| substances outright -- it acknowledges both the harm and
| potential benefit:
|
| > "They ask you about wine and gambling. Say, 'In them is great
| sin and [yet] some benefit for people. But their sin is greater
| than their benefit...'"
|
| This is moral guidance urging caution and reflection -- not a
| blanket prohibition. The prohibition as we know it today comes
| from later jurisprudence built atop evolving interpretations,
| often informed by societal conditions, not an explicit Quranic
| ruling alone.
|
| Second, many prominent Islamic thinkers in classical times
| engaged deeply with altered states and substances -- sometimes
| even celebratory of them. Avicenna (Ibn Sina), arguably the
| greatest polymath of the Islamic Golden Age, wrote on the
| medical and philosophical effects of opium and other
| psychoactives. Other thinkers -- like al-Ghazali, Suhrawardi,
| and Sufi poets such as Rumi and Hafiz -- explored the
| boundaries between mystical experience, reason, and sensory
| perception. In some cases, this included symbolic or actual
| engagement with intoxicants to describe the ecstasy of divine
| union.
|
| The idea that "no Islamic leader in their right mind" would
| ever touch such substances overlooks both historical nuance and
| the breadth of Islamic thought -- from orthodox jurists to
| radical mystics. The same diversity of perspective exists
| today.
|
| If you are interested in learning more about the topic there is
| a great book about it : "Tripping with Allah: Islam, Drugs, and
| Writing Book by Michael Muhammad Knight"
|
| Finally, equating religious belief with hallucination because
| both may involve altered cognitive states is philosophically
| flimsy. That a mushroom trip can lead someone to perceive "God"
| doesn't invalidate faith any more than a dream invalidates
| memory. Experiences can reinforce prior belief without reducing
| them to mere neurochemistry. Correlation is not causation --
| and even if it were, that would not necessarily diminish the
| meaning of the experience.
| nashashmi wrote:
| Yes, agreed on all fronts. I am familiar with Knight as well.
| The literal word is intoxicants, not wine. And different
| substances were interpreted as intoxicants later. But after
| being declared intoxicants, Islamic leaders would not go near
| it. Avicenna was a Muslim researcher and philosopher, and not
| religiously minded. Sufis experimented with various elements
| of mysticism and some experimented with substances even to
| this day. But there explorations were attempts to find God
| and perhaps understand intoxicants' effects on the brain. I
| put them under the researchers' category.
| flkenosad wrote:
| Mushrooms are not intoxicating.
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| All spiritual experiences are nevertheless an appearance in
| consciousness.
|
| So consciousness can generate an infinity of experiences.
|
| So no reason to think one experience is somehow more special than
| any other experience since all experiences passes and go no
| matter how profound you feel.
|
| Even profound feelings are just appearance in consciousness.
|
| Even if you die and go to heaven that's still appearance in
| consciousness.
|
| Even time is an appearance in consciousness.
|
| So given all that, is there anything to chase?
|
| Are we stuck here forever?
|
| Nothing to gain or loose.
| notarobot123 wrote:
| Nihilism, not even once. It's a hell of a drug that'll wipe out
| all meaning and purpose from life leaving you cold, detached
| and suicidal.
|
| Meaning is emergent and constructed from our experience of
| being physical beings in the real world. Just because that's
| mediated through our thoughts and senses doesn't suddenly strip
| it of existence or relevance.
|
| Even reflecting on the nature of consciousness is contingent on
| so many other more fundamental lived experiences and mental
| abstractions. It's turtles all the way down and meaning is
| found/constructed in every layer.
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| No. I don't feel suicidal. Actually completely opposite. I
| have never been more freer. To try new things and
| experiences.
|
| I was not talking about meaning. I think it's a false
| assumption that you need meaning to have a fulfilling life.
| Meaning just creates a feeling. So you are really focused on
| the feeling and not the act itself or implications.
|
| Like you don't want to do an act which is logically
| meaningful and feel depressed after doing it. You want to
| feel good after doing meaningful act. So it's all about
| feeling. And not meaning.
| ecshafer wrote:
| These studies are all deeply flawed. They find willing
| participants, give them some drugs, then ask how they feel about
| it. Of course they say they feel spiritual and connected with the
| world and all of that, that's what the drugs do. But I know
| plenty of people who claim that mushrooms or lsd were spiritually
| awakening and connected them with the world, who wouldn't think
| twice about stealing from an old woman's purse, robbing people,
| or worse. I know alcoholics who claim they don't have a problem
| and think drinking is just good fun, but are also violent
| assholes when they drink.
| Whitespace wrote:
| I did not read the study so I don't know if you're referencing
| a specific claim in it, but I do not understand your comment.
| What does being immoral have to do with TFA?
| ecshafer wrote:
| This is making the claim that psychedelics are making people
| more spiritual, that these are spiritual awakenings. Morality
| and spiritually are intrinsically linked. There is also a
| flaw in the research when they only ask the participants how
| they feel and do no outside measurements.
| abeppu wrote:
| From the results paragraph in the top of the linked journal site:
|
| > Furthermore, 42% rated one of their experiences to be the
| single most profound of their lifetime.
|
| > Although no serious adverse events were reported, 46% rated a
| psilocybin experience as among the top five most psychologically
| challenging of their lives.
|
| From skimming the paper, it looks like they don't do a
| correlation analysis between the various questionnaire responses,
| only between the groups and responses (perhaps correctly due to
| insufficient data), but I wonder: are you more likely to find the
| experience profound if it was challenging?
| sachin_rcz wrote:
| They are called mind altering drugs for a reason. Because you are
| actually somewhat aware of your mind being altered and loosening
| of the restrictions and rules that are created in mind for
| physical world.
|
| This conscious or unconscious realisation during and after the
| trip leaves a profound impression on you that everything is about
| perception.
| cozyman wrote:
| Lord have mercy, I reject satan and all his pomps.
| throw18376 wrote:
| some people should _never_ take psychedelics.
|
| in the last few years' surge of popularity, I found that your
| typical psychedelic advocate* would never admit this category of
| people exists. they were committed to the idea that everyone can,
| should, and must take these drugs.
|
| this attitude is currently on a downturn, which is a good thing.
| people now admit that these drugs are not for everyone.
|
| however, there's little solid understanding of exactly who should
| avoid psychedelics. it would be good to have a more solid
| scientific understanding of this. i imagine psychedelic advocates
| (which includes many scientists working on the topic) would be
| wary of such research, because it seems to similar to the history
| of government-sponsored propaganda "science" finding exaggerated
| harms of various illegal drugs.
|
| however, scientific knowledge about who most likely will have
| adverse effects would be useful. that way people at low risk
| could use psychedelic drugs with the confidence that they are
| very likely safe. people at high risk can avoid them. this would
| be a great outcome.
|
| The only problem here would be that if someone chooses not to use
| psychedelics, this might mark them as having certain traits that
| most people judge negatively. For example, history of severe
| trauma, family or personal history of psychotic disorders, and so
| on.
|
| Given this, I think anyone who wants to normalize psychedelic
| drug use in their local community, ought to really fight to
| destigmatize such traits (and most communities won't accept
| this), or else more practically, promote an extreme commitment to
| privacy and personal choice.
|
| *: I don't just mean people who do drugs, I mean people who think
| that doing drugs is mandatory to fix various spiritual/mental
| problems that prevent you from being a fully ethical being.
| Centigonal wrote:
| > people who think that doing drugs is mandatory to fix various
| spiritual/mental problems that prevent you from being a fully
| ethical being.
|
| I don't doubt that these people exist, but this premise boggles
| the mind. Does that mean fully ethical beings didn't exist
| outside small geographic pockets where specific cacti and fungi
| grow before ~1960?
| WastedCucumber wrote:
| Just a little PSA for anybody getting curious about psychedellics
| from this post. If you have a family history of
| psychosis/scizophrenia etc., don't fuck around with it.
|
| Especially if you've tried before and you've felt paranoid (or
| same with weed) then really, it's just not for you.
|
| On the other hand, if you have some psychosis in the family tree,
| or felt paranoid from LSD/MDMA/THC, then try out meditation,
| cause you might find the divine is already close to your sober
| mind.
| srameshc wrote:
| I don't know if I should share it here, but once travelling, I
| shared a smoke with a fellow traveller and I thought I could
| handle anything because I thought it was weed. It was something
| more than I know. I felt paranoid and felt everyone was
| watching me. I don't know how I was sane, but I decided to go
| and sleep and never will I dare touch anything so called weed.
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