On February 26 I mentioned that "I've started three good-sized blog posts". After a prolonged dive out of and back into good health (and a road trip to Montana), I published one of them as High-Powered Tools of Inner Exploration and Neuroscience. It's a science-based article about a particularly stunning and unusual class of mind-altering substances and how they benefit people psychologically and neurologically.
` Though this certainly wasn't taught in the psychology classes I went to, and hasn't been since The War On Drugs came into effect, psychedelics are known therapeutic agents and more. I extensively described much of their effects on sense perception and expansion/alteration of conscious awareness, and you can read it right here.
The other two posts (from Feb 21) are "Things People Say" About Psychedelics, which I didn't dare publish until I had at least one well-referenced article on this blog. It's the first, perhaps in a long-running series because I have even more of these, from many different people.
` Discussing this in skeptic/atheist circles, I find a wide range of reactions to this chemical class of substances, and this mostly has to do with the degree of people's overall familiarity with them.
` For example, some tell me how they have used psychedelics for better self-understanding and self-control. Some others say they would assume that psychedelics hinder these things. It's important to me that we're no longer so divided in our knowledge on this. (It's not the only topic, but it is a good starting point.)
I'm going to focus on some objections and questions, which I have answered, and then cut and pasted them here. I'll start with a common sort of challenge:
"Most of mainstream medicine does not condone psychedelics."
To which I responded: "The only reason for this is the fear-mongering and the War on Drugs. Early research showed that they can work wonders for people dealing with trauma, addiction, and other serious impediments to health. Modern research only confirms this." (For more, see High Powered Tools.)
Another statement: "People Have Had Years Of RELAPSES on them."
They meant 'flashbacks', which are rare, temporary, and not even necessarily problematic. It can happen only after a single use, but they usually occur after lots of heavy use, especially after a really unpleasant or traumatic experience. Psychedelics can amplify what goes on in the mind and the environment, and unpleasant experiences are generally caused by something in these domains getting out of control.
` Through the proper (mind)set and setting, unsettling experiences are all but preventable, and otherwise can be mitigated. The quasi-psychedelic MDMA is fairly anxiolytic (anti-anxiety) and generally makes one's body feel fantastic, so is unlikely to create a bad experience.
` Thus it is fitting that I move on to my too-vague explanation of why it makes no sense to worry about MDMA making you feel anxious. Bad choice of words. With my thumbs, I typed on my phone: "It feels as though nothing bad could ever happen while in that state."
Thus eliciting the response: "That sounds like it could be dangerous. If you do not think anything bad will happen, what is to stop you from jumping off a building? I don't jump off a building because I anticipate that doing so will cause me to die, which is bad."
I get this kind of question all the time. Here's my answer, which I wrote once at a computer keyboard:
"If you are on MDMA, on a couch or some other comfortable setting, you don't feel as though anything bad could happen. Because it really can't. Except for something like an earthquake.
` Generally, after a bit of a rush as it comes on, you start to feel warm and fuzzy. Your ego boundaries begin to dissolve and you begin to absorb the emotional energy of whoever and whatever is around you.
` As long as everything is mellow, you tend to feel fantastic with your mind and emotions opened up. If something unpleasant happens to work its way into your open mind and emotions, that can be distracting, annoying, or upsetting.
` You can still have unpleasant experiences if you feel threatened, such as if you were on top of a building and someone threatened to push you off. That would probably be even scarier than it would be without MDMA.
` So, to answer your question, you would not lose your mind and forget that falling off a building means death. Sam Harris has actually written about his first experience beyond ordinary consciousness, which he did in a house with a friend of his, on MDMA.
` You can read/listen here." For my blog-audience, who may like to just keep reading, here's a relevant quote:
Unlike other drugs with which we were by then familiar (marijuana and alcohol), MDMA produced no feeling of distortion in our senses. Our minds seemed completely clear.So, this neuroscientist/atheist philosopher is saying that he found a new level of sanity and clarity because of the spiritual experience he was having on MDMA. This is a typical sort of effect one gets just by taking the right substance in the right set and setting, it does not necessarily take effort to evoke.
In the midst of this ordinariness, however, I was suddenly struck by the knowledge that I loved my friend. ... I wanted him to be happy.
That conviction came crashing down with such force that something seemed to give way inside me. In fact, the insight appeared to restructure my mind. My capacity for envy, for instance—the sense of being diminished by the happiness or success of another person—seemed like a symptom of mental illness that had vanished without a trace. ... What did I care if my friend was better looking or a better athlete than I was? If I could have bestowed those gifts on him, I would have. Truly wanting him to be happy made his happiness my own.
A certain euphoria was creeping into these reflections, perhaps, but the general feeling remained one of absolute sobriety—and of moral and emotional clarity unlike any I had ever known. It would not be too strong to say that I felt sane for the first time in my life.
` He goes on about what his first time seeing through the ego was like, and his words resonate with many others who develop their consciousness along those lines. As I've shown in High-Powered Tools, psychedelics do offer far superior mental perception, especially when used properly.
To contrast with experiences of knowledgeable psychonauts, tragic cases are sometimes mentioned. One person mentioned a man from Lille, France, who partly severed his own penis while on LSD, and the tragic case of Frank Olson, who worked for the CIA.
` First, it's important to note that most people who take LSD cannot imagine themselves becoming so confused that they would wield knives at themselves, and would speculate (reasonably) that this guy had other issues. It is true that psychedelics tend to increase mental health, but they can worsen some mental problems, such as psychosis, especially in non-therapeutic settings.
` As for Olson, he was given LSD without his knowledge or consent as part of the CIA program Mind Kontrol Ultra. He already had suicidal tendencies, and fatally plummeted from a hotel window nine days after this unethical experiment.
The inability to predict the effects of psychedelics are easy to exaggerate, and here is done well: "The CIA experimented with LSD in the 1950s with disastrous results. The outcome is unpredictable. Some people gain a new perspective on life. Others engage in self mutilation."
I answered: "Disastrous settings lead to disastrous results. Just giving LSD to people without their knowledge, like the CIA did, can be extremely damaging to an unsuspecting individual, who does not understand what is happening to them."
Another quote: "I would not take LSD if you put a gun to my head. I'd consider death preferable. I prefer to see life as it is."
I typed back via laptop: "Your brain does not show you life as it is. The ego, or self-process, habitually filters out cracks in paint and thoughts and perceptions you have been trained to ignore. The only way to get a more objective perspective outside of the ego is to power down the ego to a large extent and become fully conscious.
` There you can see that the world you experience around you is only your perception of the world, as filtered through your limited senses and preconceptions. What you think of as every person you have ever met, is just your perception of those people, and the real people exist out in the real world. THAT is the way it REALLY is.
` In fact, that's what Jennifer Ouellette was talking about when she was on the SGU and some of the other interviews she did because of that book she wrote. She took LSD to see her own self inside her own head." For this blog post, I found an interview where Ouellette said:
It dissolves the boundary between self and others, so you really do feel as if you are integrated with the whole universe. You realize that your molecules and all the other molecules in the world are all kind of one and the same.At one point, I wrote, "You don't know you're blind until the ego goes away, then you finally understand that it was blinding you all this time. It is possible for people to reach this state of consciousness after years or decades of meditation training, but if people don't understand that they can do this, why would they bother?
What was interesting to me was that despite all of that, even if I closed my eyes, if there was a physical disembodiment that happened, or if I just kind of merged with everything, there was still an “I”. That intrigues me. I still knew that “I” was me. That’s consciousness.
` That is one reason psychedelics are treasured -- they can give you an ego-transcending experience, plus much more, within a few hours. Once people understand that this is possible, they may be motivated to continue altering their consciousness towards this end.
` When the boundary comes down, you connect with the rest of your mind and perception. You see, clearly, that your identity is just a bunch of B.S. that you were conditioned to believe. You are just an animal. You are free. Free to think outside of labels and languages. You are just part of the system of nature. The narrative that you have been programmed to believe is "you", is just a story. "You" are merely the consciousness that is watching all of this.
` The ego, which you previously thought of as "you", is now a bunch of stories and images and concepts stretched out before you. You can easily flick from one to the next, examine them, and see what "you" look like from the perspective from another person. You can easily see the constructive versus destructive patterns in your mind, push out the ones you don't like, and enhance the ones that you want to last.
` The difference between a full transcendent experience and normal waking consciousness is as great as the difference between waking consciousness and sleep. In other words, normal waking consciousness is like sleep compared to fully-expanded consciousness. When one's consciousness is expanded, it is literally another level of awareness, a pattern that is not normally there.
` It's like when a deaf person gets a cochlear implant and hears for the first time. It's a totally novel experience. Psychedelics are very often compared to cochlear implants, or the blind seeing, that sort of thing.
` As scientific instruments, psychedelics are compared, in usefulness, to the telescope and the microscope. They could be called 'psychescopes'. The space inside your mind feels every bit as vast as the space outside your mind, and either way, everything you are perceiving is inside your mind. That can be very obvious when you are looking through your own personal psychescope."
Another quote about LSD: "If someone ever forced it on me, I'd track then down and kill them with my bare hands."
But what if you were able to have an amazing time? Would you reconsider killing them?
"I think I'd rather eat plutonium. At least the effects of plutonium are well-understood."
Let's see. No one has died from overdosing on LSD, ever, in history. Plutonium involves a slow, painful death from radiation illness and/or cancer. As for anyone reading this, would you rather have the LSD or the plutonium? Is it hard to choose?
One last cynical quote: "Everything you feel during a trip...the connection with a higher being or a greater awakening....none of it is real. It's all fake. It's an illusion caused by bombarding the world's most powerful chemical computer with a substance that is poorly studied and makes neural connections go haywire."
If psychedelics teach you anything, it is that your perception of normal, waking life is also created by your brain. There is no experience you can have that isn't. So, what's wrong with using your brain in a different way than usual? It is true that your ego can be seen for the construct that it is; the visuals that are typical of psychedelic trips are even more obviously a construct of the brain.
` I asked, "What's one of your favorite movies?" As for those reading my blog, take a few moments to think about why you like a particular movie.
` I got a cogent response:
"Enemy at the Gates is very underrated. I could not believe how well it captured the essence of the desperation and misery of Stalingrad.
There is artistic license, but the scenes when 16 year old soldiers try to duck for cover in terror and their own commanders machine gunned them...that totally happened.
And they did not have enough guns so they sent a gun out with one guy and another behind him, and then the first man shoots. After he is shot, the second man picks up the gun and shoots. After he is shot, if anyone is still alive, try to find a gun and shoot."
A little farther on, I wrote: "Imagine if I thought you needed to be told, 'You know Enemy at the Gates isn't real. It is just a projected image with sound. It's all fake.'
Does that in any way take away the value of that movie, or any movie, BECAUSE it is a movie?"
Of course we know how movies work, that's beside the point. The effects that psychedelics have on brain activity are understood well enough to explain why they create both a sense of ego-loss as well as "inner sensory" information.
` If anything, their value lies on the unique perspective they can give someone on who and what they are, and greatly expand what they are capable of experiencing and thinking. Just as a movie, or a VR headset is part of the world, so is a psychedelic experience, or a dream. Why deny exploration into a part of the actual known universe because you have been taught to fear it?
That's enough for this edition for Actual "Things People Say", and I hope it wasn't too much for your brain to digest at once. I'll try to tone it down a little next time.
Down the line, I even plan to collect quotes from those in the skeptic community which reflect a similar point of view to mine, just to show that I'm far from here by myself. Of course, it is not about pushing my own point of view, it is about going with the evidence.
` The way the evidence is going, it may be only a generation before the scientifically-minded will all recognize that psychedelics are a tool, not a threat, to their rationality and endeavors. Until this cultural shift, I will dutifully document the "Things People Say".
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