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.
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.
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.
Just be careful with metaphors. It's useful for conveying ideas, but it's easy to mistake the original idea by the substitution. Psychedelics are not programming languages. It doesn't matter if you or I write the same piece of code in gleam, they will work the same if the environment is the same. The same cannot be said by psychedelics.
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.
> 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.
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…
>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.
> ...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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> "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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
In the extremes of the human experience everything is meaningless. I remember I last time I sat down on my sofa after a rave and I just cried thinking about the kids in Gaza and how much life is unfair.
I don't deserve so much, not more than these people that are starving, and yet I'm here. And I know that if I renounce everything I'll just be another starving person, albeit white.
So I enjoy my life and you won't be able to make me feel any worse than I already feel about it. But I dedicate myself to charity and to serving people whenever I can. It's important to use your privileges to care and serve. There is always someone that your abilities can help and renouncing them, renouncing your condition is a disservice to society.
Now answer me. How many people did your comment feed now? Which revolution did it fuel that will feed the masses?
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.
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%
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.
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.
At first I read graves instead of raves. Now that would also be an interesting session with some deep dissolutions & insights, although maybe disrespectful.
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.
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).
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.
I don't know and honsetly I really don't care. What matters is what I do with it. It's really fun, I get a ton of physical exercise, I meet and talk to a lot of people, I help the organization with taking care of the garbage (I can't enjoy a rave fully if the land looks like a garbage dump).
I then get all my insights, because my mind never stops thinking about philosophy, and I write them down. Rinse and repeat.
It has profound effects in my life. Full disclaimer, I also exercise a lot, I have a fulfilling job in tech, I go to therapy, I dedicate myself to arts, I dedicate myself to my partner and my pets (which are almost like familiars for me).
Is it placebo? Is it my lifestyle? Is it the drugs?
I just apply non-interpretation to all these things that happen in my life and I go with it.
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.
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.
> “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.
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.
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
he also reported giving a guru heroic doses of LSD (1200+ μg) 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
100%, tried my best not to recommend it universally. Hope I haven't failed at that.
Having said that, I used to have lots of panic attacks and dissociation episodes but with cannabis. These effects went away over time and now it just gives me the sense of relaxation. Full disclaimer I have a medical prescription for cannabis use and I do regular damage reduction routines. I also don't use opioids, cocaine, tobacco or alcohol (not anymore). I used to enjoy MDMA, but I grew disinterested in it because it makes it very difficult to rest after the sessions.
So hypothesis: maybe cannabis can be used to help mitigate and treat these psychotic effects by safely exposing the user to them.
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.
It was probably K2/Spice. The same thing happened to me as well as a panic attack and borderline disassociation. I never touched weed, real or otherwise after that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Will do, but I can't help but being sceptical of the scepticism of those that study the world from a safe distance. Maybe I'm just too sceptically trusting in my experiences and the world as I see it.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.).
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.
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?
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
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.
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
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"?
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.
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.
> 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.
"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?
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...
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?
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.
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.
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 ;)
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]
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 :(
> 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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
I think they would say (reasonably accurately, tends to be exaggerated though) that traditional cultures all around the world did have psychedelic practices of one kind or another. a lot of places on earth have some kind of psychedelic plant.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I think you are making a very important point here, but unfortunately getting downvoted for stating it so cynically. A more productive way to phrase it would be that people's self-report on a drug's effect (beyond the pure subjective experience of the trip) can be very misleading about alleged positive effects, and can be very incomplete about any negative effects.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
If this topic lights you up, you have to watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn0itlgBZAA.
It dives deep into the geometry of hallucinations, the mechanics of feedback loops in the brain, and how altered states might just be us tuning into the signal of ourselves. It bridges neuroscience, pattern recognition, and philosophy in a way that makes the whole psychedelic experience feel less like “woo” and more like elegant system dynamics.
Whether you’re team “signal feedback” or leaning toward the mystical—this video gives both sides something to chew on. I promise, it’s not just trippy visuals—it’s insightfully grounded.
it was an internet rabbit hole and indeed it could be defused with some regional botany. there's some discussion about DMT content in other acacia species(?) and how it shows up in symbology.
i have the sense that one could construct a whole "ancient aliens" style ideology and paranormal theory of history around hallucinogens, but it would just be entertaining junk.
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
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?
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.
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...
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.
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.”
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.
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?
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?’
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.
“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.
Music does indeed move us emotionally. Some music can move us toward healthy emotions conducive to our flourishing, some can move us toward degradation. So, music can be good or bad with respect to the effect it has on us, and our intentions can be good or bad depending on what we want out of music. Circumstances are also important: you don't play waltzes at funerals, and you don't play requiems at wedding banquets. This accord is a matter of rationality. Appropriate music complements or accentuates the content of the occasion, creating an integrity between reason and emotion, while inappropriate music misdirects emotion and sets it in opposition to reason.
(Since you mention Catholics, yes. For example, chant can be used as part of the liturgy to help move us toward a higher, more contemplative state. This is why some of the bad, schmaltzy music that's been employed at many masses since the 1970s has drawn so much ire and disgust. It is not only objectively bad, but trades the contemplative for the mawkish and sentimental. This is tragic, given the magnificence and wealth of the liturgical music tradition.)
Where drugs are concerned, I never said that all psychoactive effects are bad. In fact, I explicitly said that not all are. We can drink coffee in moderation to make us more alert. We can drink alcohol in moderation to calm our nerves. We can take opiates in moderation to relieve pain. Etc, etc. None of these uses involve the dimming of reason — certainly not the intentional dimming of reason — or the twisting of the senses, or the abuse of the emotions at odds with reality. In the first two examples, we are using drugs in a restorative way; we are enabling the proper function of reason and so on. In the third example, we may be using opiates in a restorative way (ever try functioning when you're in pain?), or, if the dose is high enough to impede reason, we do so not with the intention of impeding reason, but with the intention of relieving extreme pain while tolerating a secondary, undesired side effect of temporary diminution of reason. By impeding reason and clear perception, recreational drug abuse intentionally deprives us of the ability to know and perceive reality, and deprives us of the ability to discern what is good for us and to act rightly in accord with it.
So, where an analogy between music and drugs can be made hinges at least partly on the ill or good effects it produces, which is greater, and whether the ill effects are intended. Recreational drug use intends the bad effects by intending the delusions, the hallucinations, and the irrational. Music that habituates bad mental habits, habituates bad emotional responses and moods, or contains harmful content should likewise be avoided.
There’s that word again: ”drugs” - you just know anyone using that word in earnest is suffering from a narrow and naïve 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.
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".
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.
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.
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 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'.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
These are not normal reactions to being under the influence of psychedelics but latent mental illness being activated.
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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.
Just be careful with metaphors. It's useful for conveying ideas, but it's easy to mistake the original idea by the substitution. Psychedelics are not programming languages. It doesn't matter if you or I write the same piece of code in gleam, they will work the same if the environment is the same. The same cannot be said by psychedelics.
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.
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’.
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> I read in a forum about...
...something that likely never happened (and if it did, it wasn't the LSD)
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Sounds like AI should guide us. (maybe an uncensored version)
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!
> 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.
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…
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>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.
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counterpoint: you only get your first time, one time.
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> ...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.
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.
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I love Vonnegut. I don't agree with him on everything; semicolons are fine.
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."
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One is not counter to the other.
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.
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.
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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.
> 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.
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.
And if that’s the case, do it in your early 20s in college or shortly after. Don’t do it in your 70s.
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It is a fine cure for arrogance too.
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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.
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.
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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.
> 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.
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> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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> "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.
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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.
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> 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.
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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
> 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.
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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.
> 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.
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> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Just be careful when applying reductionism, it's always a tradeoff and you are leaving qualia behind to make these simplifications
> 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
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. ;)
Opinions may vary of course, but I think LSD is best enjoyed without a phone at all.
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 ?
In the extremes of the human experience everything is meaningless. I remember I last time I sat down on my sofa after a rave and I just cried thinking about the kids in Gaza and how much life is unfair.
I don't deserve so much, not more than these people that are starving, and yet I'm here. And I know that if I renounce everything I'll just be another starving person, albeit white.
So I enjoy my life and you won't be able to make me feel any worse than I already feel about it. But I dedicate myself to charity and to serving people whenever I can. It's important to use your privileges to care and serve. There is always someone that your abilities can help and renouncing them, renouncing your condition is a disservice to society.
Now answer me. How many people did your comment feed now? Which revolution did it fuel that will feed the masses?
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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.
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.
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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.
While most people are fine after taking psychedelics, some people experience lasting visuals after a trip: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen_persisting_percep...
There are some interesting videos on YouTube from people experiencing this.
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.
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.
At first I read graves instead of raves. Now that would also be an interesting session with some deep dissolutions & insights, although maybe disrespectful.
Muscimol and Mescaline likewise; unless you're on big pharama med, I'd say most hallucinogenics are worth trying.
"We are the ones we have been waiting for" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-qw0Ud8Yx8
The truth is fully accessible through reason, you don’t need to take drugs to know things
This makes sense because experience doesn’t affect how a person reasons. This is why all truth is agreed upon
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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.
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).
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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.
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Reason is overrated. Knowing that smoking is unhealthy is not sufficient to stop oneself from smoking.
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Qualia. Black and white room.
How do you know your experience is not a placebo effect?
I don't know and honsetly I really don't care. What matters is what I do with it. It's really fun, I get a ton of physical exercise, I meet and talk to a lot of people, I help the organization with taking care of the garbage (I can't enjoy a rave fully if the land looks like a garbage dump).
I then get all my insights, because my mind never stops thinking about philosophy, and I write them down. Rinse and repeat.
It has profound effects in my life. Full disclaimer, I also exercise a lot, I have a fulfilling job in tech, I go to therapy, I dedicate myself to arts, I dedicate myself to my partner and my pets (which are almost like familiars for me).
Is it placebo? Is it my lifestyle? Is it the drugs?
I just apply non-interpretation to all these things that happen in my life and I go with it.
All you touch
And all you see
Is all your life
Will ever be
[flagged]
Why?
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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.
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
>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?
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The cartoon is a 10 out of 10!
> “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.
> What happened in those three weeks in that house, no one would ever believe, including us.
I've often wondered what happened here
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.
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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
he also reported giving a guru heroic doses of LSD (1200+ μg) 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...
That's about the time Catholics stopped having their Mass in Latin . . .
> 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.
>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.
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?
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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.
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Nicholas Sand wanted to turn on the entire planet but was unsuccessful.
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.
Quite frankly, that quote sounds like the premise of some new Netflix original series.
Also, an old joke format, presumably done intentionally by the writer.
Example: "A priest, a rabbi, and an atheist walk into a bar..."
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Exactly.
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.
100%, tried my best not to recommend it universally. Hope I haven't failed at that.
Having said that, I used to have lots of panic attacks and dissociation episodes but with cannabis. These effects went away over time and now it just gives me the sense of relaxation. Full disclaimer I have a medical prescription for cannabis use and I do regular damage reduction routines. I also don't use opioids, cocaine, tobacco or alcohol (not anymore). I used to enjoy MDMA, but I grew disinterested in it because it makes it very difficult to rest after the sessions.
So hypothesis: maybe cannabis can be used to help mitigate and treat these psychotic effects by safely exposing the user to them.
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.
It was probably K2/Spice. The same thing happened to me as well as a panic attack and borderline disassociation. I never touched weed, real or otherwise after that.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
Meaning and spirituality are personal experiences, seems close minded to deny what others avowedly profess as their true first person experience.
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First, your experience is your experience.
Second, how do you define `meaning’ or `spirituality’?
Will do, but I can't help but being sceptical of the scepticism of those that study the world from a safe distance. Maybe I'm just too sceptically trusting in my experiences and the world as I see it.
Pretty much nothing of substance in the writeup. All about studying and flaws.
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...
heh, didn't expect this line:
Finding willing rabbis, however, was easy—the challenge was finding ones who were “psychedelically naïve.”
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this should probably be OP - much better original story, not a reblog, and it's written by Michael Pollan.
Also has a way better headline heh
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Much better, thank you!
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.
Yeah, total clickbait
I had to scroll up and down for a while, looking for the rest of the article. There wasn't any.
Here you go: https://archive.ph/2Za2J
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.
I feel badly that I didn't warn you sufficiently.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.).
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.
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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?
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Fwiw I find that, due to my antidepressants, i need 3x the dose to have the equivalent experience as my friends.
I find mushrooms in particular delightful, just not deep.
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Many psych meds diminish/block psychedelic effects.
Dosage might play a factor, I presume.
I've taken enough to melt into the furniture.
Impurities as well.
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
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.
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
Take twice the dose in a safe environment with only your best friend
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"?
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.
Try it alone, without a phone or a tv or anything particularly distracting.
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.
"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?
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...
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?
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> 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
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.
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.
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 ;)
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]
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 :(
Better to stay sane...Have seen a lot of these kinds of articles, surely funding comes from somewhere...
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.
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)
I've noticed a pattern in which "type" of outlets push this content the most
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.
> 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?
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.
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https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/psymed.2023.0044
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
I think they would say (reasonably accurately, tends to be exaggerated though) that traditional cultures all around the world did have psychedelic practices of one kind or another. a lot of places on earth have some kind of psychedelic plant.
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.
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.
There's not much information in this article.
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.
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?
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.
I think you are making a very important point here, but unfortunately getting downvoted for stating it so cynically. A more productive way to phrase it would be that people's self-report on a drug's effect (beyond the pure subjective experience of the trip) can be very misleading about alleged positive effects, and can be very incomplete about any negative effects.
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?
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
@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...
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
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
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.
Lot of words and blind beliefs.
0 experiential knowledge.
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.
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.
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Mushrooms are not intoxicating.
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I’m pretty sure a heroic dose of mushrooms made me lose 20 IQ points, so…”it’s definitely not for everyone” lol.
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?
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?
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.
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Honestly, kind of.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
If this topic lights you up, you have to watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mn0itlgBZAA. It dives deep into the geometry of hallucinations, the mechanics of feedback loops in the brain, and how altered states might just be us tuning into the signal of ourselves. It bridges neuroscience, pattern recognition, and philosophy in a way that makes the whole psychedelic experience feel less like “woo” and more like elegant system dynamics. Whether you’re team “signal feedback” or leaning toward the mystical—this video gives both sides something to chew on. I promise, it’s not just trippy visuals—it’s insightfully grounded.
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.
it was an internet rabbit hole and indeed it could be defused with some regional botany. there's some discussion about DMT content in other acacia species(?) and how it shows up in symbology.
i have the sense that one could construct a whole "ancient aliens" style ideology and paranormal theory of history around hallucinogens, but it would just be entertaining junk.
Maybe that’s a good start. But sometimes I am able to control my hallucinations, it doesnt seem to be simply analog modification
It's because your awareness and agency is part of the circuit.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_Chapel_Experiment
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/...
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.
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
Opium is made from same plant poppy seeds come from.
that's the premise, yes
From Brainiac: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9At-dgp0rQ
hmmn, possibly
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?
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.
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...
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.
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.”
Lord have mercy, I reject satan and all his pomps.
When clergy take psilocybin . . . God sees them?
when you eat too many shrooms .. the shrooms eat back at you
Pretty sure giving them to non-clergy eventually created clergy
Well, it created monks
any evidence?
it's no surprise to me that people who believe goats talks like to trip lol
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.
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?
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?’
Thank you for commenting. The believer's perspective on life's questions is much too sparse on HN, and it often gets downvoted.
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.
> More religion and preaching got us medieval dark ages and tons of endless wars and genocide
This is false.
“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.
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.
I conclude that you've attacked a straw man.
Music does indeed move us emotionally. Some music can move us toward healthy emotions conducive to our flourishing, some can move us toward degradation. So, music can be good or bad with respect to the effect it has on us, and our intentions can be good or bad depending on what we want out of music. Circumstances are also important: you don't play waltzes at funerals, and you don't play requiems at wedding banquets. This accord is a matter of rationality. Appropriate music complements or accentuates the content of the occasion, creating an integrity between reason and emotion, while inappropriate music misdirects emotion and sets it in opposition to reason.
(Since you mention Catholics, yes. For example, chant can be used as part of the liturgy to help move us toward a higher, more contemplative state. This is why some of the bad, schmaltzy music that's been employed at many masses since the 1970s has drawn so much ire and disgust. It is not only objectively bad, but trades the contemplative for the mawkish and sentimental. This is tragic, given the magnificence and wealth of the liturgical music tradition.)
Where drugs are concerned, I never said that all psychoactive effects are bad. In fact, I explicitly said that not all are. We can drink coffee in moderation to make us more alert. We can drink alcohol in moderation to calm our nerves. We can take opiates in moderation to relieve pain. Etc, etc. None of these uses involve the dimming of reason — certainly not the intentional dimming of reason — or the twisting of the senses, or the abuse of the emotions at odds with reality. In the first two examples, we are using drugs in a restorative way; we are enabling the proper function of reason and so on. In the third example, we may be using opiates in a restorative way (ever try functioning when you're in pain?), or, if the dose is high enough to impede reason, we do so not with the intention of impeding reason, but with the intention of relieving extreme pain while tolerating a secondary, undesired side effect of temporary diminution of reason. By impeding reason and clear perception, recreational drug abuse intentionally deprives us of the ability to know and perceive reality, and deprives us of the ability to discern what is good for us and to act rightly in accord with it.
So, where an analogy between music and drugs can be made hinges at least partly on the ill or good effects it produces, which is greater, and whether the ill effects are intended. Recreational drug use intends the bad effects by intending the delusions, the hallucinations, and the irrational. Music that habituates bad mental habits, habituates bad emotional responses and moods, or contains harmful content should likewise be avoided.
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Thanks. Sanest comment on this thread. The fact that something "feels" very real and insightful doesn't make it so.
their "spiritual experience" came from Demons, change my mind.
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By taking drugs they immediately invalidate their legitimacy and licenses as clergy, so not sure this means anything.
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 ...
There’s that word again: ”drugs” - you just know anyone using that word in earnest is suffering from a narrow and naïve 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.
>There’s that word again: ”drugs” - you just know anyone using that word in earnest is suffering from a narrow and naïve world view
Do you know what a drug is?
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Religion is not literally opium; Marx was speaking/writing figuratively. He just referred to a popular recreational of his time.
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Why do people insist on complicating all this so much ... just take a hit of whatever and experience it for yourself.
I believe people complicate it because brain chemistry modification is mostly a one way change.
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.
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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".
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.
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.
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.
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'.
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> 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.
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.
>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