I also believe psychedelics can transform lives in a hugely positive way; since my first (and not last) experience with them last year my quality of life has been constantly improving and remains at an all time high.
That said I found this article extremely difficult to read because of constant references to religion and mysticism. There's a fine line between spirituality and religion and this article consistently falls on what I perceive to be the wrong side.
To anybody whose interest is piqued I give to you the same analogy that was given to me:
Life is like running through the underbrush of a forest, using psychedelics is like climbing a nearby tree and seeing where you would like to go.
I have had some interesting experiences, the most challenging being DMT.
It worked in the following way. During our daily lives, all inputs from out senses are filtered. I imagine that the brain filters the "raw steam" because it is way to much data to consistently process effectively. I think this is why you tend to notice things that have been moved in a room, even if you might not immediately know what it was that had moved. I believe that game programmers use these kind of visual screen drawing tricks all the time.
DMT gives you the ability to see the world without filters for a short period of time. At some point during that unfiltered view the brain can't take it anymore, and it reboots.
Both parts of this experience are both fascinating and terrifying. When you reboot, there is no you. No ego. It takes a while for the brain to work out what you are, before who you are, and then finally what the fuck just happened!
It's nickname is "the businessman's trip". There is no come down.
I'm amazed they manage to write this article without mentioning Nixon's "most dangerous man in America", Timothy Leary... who apparently pre-dates William Richards in the therapeutic study of psychedelics.
Garcia-Romeu described the model in simple terms:
“Basically you give someone a really high dose and
they have a really transformative experience. And
you’ve prepared them for that and then after the
fact, you help them integrate it and they get on
with their lives.”
This sounds pretty much like a re-run of the 1961 Concord Prison Experiment (but with hopefully fewer methodology issues).
There's a big question mark over Leary's science in my mind, but he's a fascinating character and would add a ton of colour to this kind of story.
The most likely risk are not the majority of psychedelics themselves, but the quality of the substance you are getting as well as potency and "therapeutic" window. As they are controlled substances, what you are getting is often synthesised from reagents that are known carcinogenics and poorly purified. In many cases, it is not the real substance but a replacement or a mixture of various other chemicals that is supposed to mimic superficial effects. In addition, some psychoactive substances are active in the ug range and therefore have a high likelihood of leading to severe side effects because of overdosing. Also, the dosage window and thus the difference between hypnotic and anxiogenic/severe side effects can be in the range of mgs as well. Therefore one should be cautious if you cannot get access to them in a controlled/legal environment and certainly should not try every research chemical or analogue that appears on the internet.
After having done seriously heaping amounts of psychedelics, I am still not sure If I can recommend them.
I don't even really know how psychedelics affected me, but I suspect they caused me to become more empathetic. I consider that to be an extremely positive aspect of their use.
Despite what many will tell you, tryptamines / phenylethylamines can be addictive for a certain personality type though.
"I was scared too my first time, a bit reluctant to eat them. However I was visiting my friend on vacation, and his girlfriend offered to babysit us. She even took us to the beach and to get ice-cream (note dont eat, i threw up, part of the purge) I ended up consuming around a gram of caps and stems, which is considered to be a small dose. It took around 45-1hr to start to feel the effects of them, while the full trip lasted around 4-6 hours. The feelings toward the peak of the trip, was very familiar, but everything was new. Almost no visual distortion, sometimes waves of the feeling when you stand up too fast, but not in a nauseating way. C wanted to go to the beach, so she drove us to the gas station, where i was able to find a peach soda. Then we went to this place that was above town that had this overlook. Everything was dark, and we were standing on the edge of the cliff side on this outpost like structure. I recall the sets of waves that were constantly coming in. As well as the deep blue color of the ocean. With the clouds rolling in, we headed back to the apartment. Some people came over, but i dont recall who it was, or why they were there. We were listening to old records, debating what movie to watch. There were more events that happened, looking back on it, it was too much to recall. Over all a good experience, I slept very little that night, and woke up and started cleaning. "
Also Ray Liotta in Goodfellas has no soul, you can see it in his eyes.
Just do it if you're curious. You will need a safe, familiar environment and the company of at least one cool and responsible person who isn't on the trip. A known dose of acid would be the best choice (from a sheet that someone has tried). Stay indoors. Don't go to a movie, or rock concert, don't answer the phone. Give yourself 12 hours for the trip, and a day of recovery afterwards (you may not be able to sleep).
That was the protocol in the 80's-- don't know what the kids are doing today (but probably a good idea to stay off the internet).
The best advice I got before trying shrooms was: Whatever happens, whatever you see or feel, remember that it's just the drugs. No matter what you feel like, it will end. It's just the drugs.
Works for other drugs too. If you get scared or emotionally uncomfortable, remind yourself that it's just the drugs.
Was especially handy when coming down from a combination of MDMA and coke. Not a good hangover to go through on your own.
There seems to be a lot of interest in microdosing psychedelics, which might be a good non-scary approach. I found the Tim Ferriss podcast episode about the subject quite interesting: http://fourhourworkweek.com/2015/03/21/james-fadiman/
if nobody in your family (and you!) don't have predispositions to mental disorders, if you don't become aggressive when drunk etc. then what you can try is following:
in a very comfortable setup (meaning no chance of being disturbed by non-tripping people), ideally with trusty friend who either has a lot of experience or won't use it, you can try half-dose and see how it goes.
btw if you ever smoked weed, how did it work out for you? not in same ballpark, but I would call it similar style, just much more shallow.
Question here, even though I don't intend to do it: I recall having heard that, if you do LSD, you can have a small trip again unexpectedly even years later. That would scare the shit out of me, suppose it happens while you're driving.
HPPD is definitely real, but I would describe that as a more or less constant experience of after-effects for weeks/months/etc.
I took enough LSD and other substances to experience HPPD that steadily faded over the course of about 3 months. Once it was over though, I never randomly experienced a small trip or anything.
From what I've read that idea comes from a myth that psychedelics build up in parts of the body (e.g. the spine) and can spontaneously be released. So, I wouldn't worry about it (and for what it's worth -- I'll get downvoted to hell for this -- but in the past I drove hundreds of times on psychedelics, without incident)
Have you ever smelled something that evoked a really vivid memory? Where every detail of a past experience was suddenly brought to the foreground in your memory? Maybe a certain kind of perfume reminds you of a past girlfriend or something like that.
In my experience, that's what people are talking about when they talk about "acid flashbacks". It's just that you tend to form very strong memories while tripping. It's not dangerous and it's not something unique to psychedelics.
They call them flashbacks and I suspect there's probably a large amount of urban legend going on. Anecdotally, I know many people who have taken psychedelics and have never heard a report of a flashback. That's not to say they're not a thing.
The idea is not to try it, but to get it prescribed to you as part of a supervised course of medication by a professional. The professional could be one of the researchers mentioned in the article. Psychedelics work best when they are not recreational.
Timothy Leary never advocated for people to try it for fun. He wanted proper scientific studies and wanted it used in a controlled way by people who knew what they were doing.
If you consider it in terms of medicine. I would be afraid of performing any kind of surgery on myself, but I would be less afraid and ultimately trusting if a doctor did the same thing. If surgery is the wrong metaphor, how about theraphy or other forms of psychotherapy, mind change, anxiety reduction etc.
In other words, don't try it. The fear of insanity is probably a good fear if people think of doing it just for fun. But if the day comes when a doctor takes you in a trip, your fear will be less, and the doctor will know how to supervise you.
The key idea of this article is that research into psychedelics should be allowed and encouraged. Timothy Leary never advocated for people to try them for fun. Don't think of psychedelics as recreational things to try but as powerful medicine which needs trained professionals to administer.
That's pretty much the same for me. Actually, I wished I did it before having all the responsibilities I have now - I really couldn't afford the consequences of a "bad trip" at the moment. Who knows, maybe in a few years...
Psychedelics are a research area with significant untapped therapeutic potential, especially in difficult to treat diseases such as PTSD. The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) is a leader in this field, with breakthrough studies on MDMA for PTSD in war veterans. For those interested in psychedelic research, check out maps.org or bibliography.maps.org.
Religious studies is a secular, academic discipline. Your concern over words like 'sacred' is a function of living in a cuture where apologists and evangelists dominate such language. It isn't a necessary indicator that there's a problem when such language is used.
Entheogen might mean 'generating god within' from a rather naive and reductionist translation of the greek, but in the field it has a more specific meaning relating to the use of a substance in a ritual context.
Entheogens, and using them in not-ritual contexts to try to replicate experiences reported by ritual participants, is interesting and broadly scientific. Religions are and have been wildly popular structures for guiding and interpreting subjective experiences, and in many cases the framework for pre-scientific medicine and mental health care. It is interesting to ask what kind of mental states they are better at generating and what effects those have.
To study that is not to admit that the religion has the right story of why those experiences arise and what they mean.
We can ask what the religious experience of 'transcendence' is and how it is induced and what is happening in the brain without buying into the idea that it is an experience of oneness with the infinity of the divine consciousness (or whatever story any particular user wants to tell). Such an explanation might be significant, without being true. In the same way one can study the stories and language and behavior of a pyramid scheme without giving credit to its claims.
If you've been bashed over the head with apologetics or evangelism, it can be hard to tune into the use of the language in a more rigorous context, but it has meaning and is not unscientific. Though there is, of course, room for an argument over how much any social science or field of psychology is 'real' science.
"Sacred knowledge" is neither meaningless, oxymoronic, nor mystical. Any more than a discussion of "Erotic knowledge" in the context of sex-research would be.
I'm reading this book at the moment, and so far it seems very good. Even the bit quoted about Jung is handled with more reasonableness than the article suggests (though I'm not sure I agree, yet).
> That's different from ... talking about "sacred medicine"
You seem to be doubling down on interpreting 'sacred' in that context as the scholar saying 'something I believe is supernatural'.
Social scientists studying religion should use religious language, and scientists studying experience are fine to use mystical and visionary language, if they are describing something emically: i.e. the subject reports mystic or visionary experience. Terms like that even have an etic use, to refer to the pattern of experiences that are described that way, where they often become specific terms of art.
You didn't seem to engage with my point that you are misunderstanding the term: it is triggering your 'woo' detector, which is giving a false positive in this case.
"Sacred medicine" is not a problematic term, if you are studying medicine practiced in a sacred context. I have a book on "Shamanic medicine" - that doesn't indicate the author is a true believing shaman, just that they are the subject of his study. "Sacred knowledge" is a very good title for this book, because it is an attempt to look at what knowledge of psychoactive drugs is embedded into sacred frameworks cross-culturally, that can be reframed in a modern scientific context.
I think the misunderstanding is very understandable, because religious vested interests do a good job of preventing religious studies being widely known. Partly their concern is to keep sensible folks like you saying this kind of thing: words like 'sacred', 'mystic' and 'visionary' should not be used unless you are a believer.
Firstly I apologize for making semi-snide remarks without having read the book. It does seem interesting and I appreciate your comments.
But I think you misunderstand my concerns. I'm not really concerned with woo detectors. It's not that I think the word "sacred" implies some delusion or some new age nonsense. The concept of the sacred is indeed well established in theology and anthropology etc (I don't claim expertise in these subjects but I am somewhat familiar with what the word means).
There's no way to sincerely apply the word "sacred" while remaining in the sphere of secular discourse, as far as I can see. Scientists can study the function of sacrality, but I don't think science can make claims of sacrality.
Psychology is not religious studies... Maybe there is something about the framing I am missing here.
I think science is divorced from claims grounded in mystical insights. I think it cannot involve itself with normative/aesthetic/spiritual stuff like saying something is sacred.
And in any case, I do see problems with psychedelics and entheogebs related to all this. Namely how can we take the insights and thoughts and feelings that they tend to generate, and understand those things in a robustly secular way?
I don't have an answer. I've looked around. Lots of the people decades ago who got into the stuff, as far as I can tell, went kinda nuts. Like professor Tim Leary. Huge amounts of people end up in the meditation scene and go onto Buddhism or Advaita monism. That's fine for them—and I'm personally very interested in Buddhism, and to some extent a practitioner of the religion (taken refuge vows; meditate; love the culture; etc), and but still I'm not satisfied, from a scientific and psychological standpoint, with saying we need to bring in concepts of sacredness or mysticism.
That has to do with claims, arguments, reason, the public sphere, and the function of secular science.
> Scientists can study the function of sacrality, but I don't think science can make claims of sacrality.
What's a claim of sacrality? A claim that a particular set of behavior is concerned with the sacred is, as your second paragraph implied, an unremarkable claim. No more impressive that claiming some behavior is religious, or ritualistic.
This is where I'm struggling to understand you. Something is sacred, in the context of religious studies, if it is something set apart by a community and held deliberately in contrast with profane activities (following the Durkheim kind of definition - the older definition of folks like Otto is well out of favour now). To identify that certain activities, knowledge, experience, or behavior is commonly sacred, is just an observation about how communities organise their worldviews.
In a certain sense, no discussion of religion can be secular, by definition (religious and secular are as slippery to define precisely as sacred and profane). But in the sense that you can do secular religious studies, I don't know why 'sacred' for you is a special kind of topic that can't be admitted to the rest of the field.
On the 'people studying this go weird' tack. Yup! Very true. I think this is an issue with religious studies generally, and lots of related fields (biblical criticism, say). The people who are attracted to a field are probably more likely to have some affinity for what they are studying, and sometimes language can get a little to 'emic' for my taste. One does have to be careful to distinguish between the views someone will advocate and the positions they want to put forward as a scientist, or a secular scholar. Though sometimes people will blur those boundaries. Mind you, I get the same feeling from scientists and scholars with strong ideological opinions generally, not just religious folks. But all that said, the term 'sacred' is not unscientific that I can see, or at least, no more than any other term used to describe human religious activity.
For some reason I read Durkheim's book on the origins of religion. Back then I was also reading stuff like William James on the variety of religious experience. Very interesting stuff, and they're both great scholars.
Durkheim of course discusses the sacred at great length, tracing it in the case of Polynesian tribes to the social concept of mana. (Just showing that I've read the book!)
The reason he was able to present this theory in a convincing way that advanced the state of the art in anthropology and sociology and religious studies, it seems to me, is that he was well-trained in the scientific method and scientific writing, so he was able to discuss it all on a scientific basis—that is, I suppose, separating the etic from the emic.
Again I'm simply curious about how the scientist in the article manages that... and I've seen a lot of people get into psychedelics and then kind of lose their ability to talk clearly from a scientific, secular, non-mystic perspective.
Maybe you'll see my point of view more clearly if I say that I have absolutely nothing against the mystic perspective—I just think the value of science lies in its refusal to really "go native." And I think religious studies and religious psychology etc is more fascinating the more it sticks to the scientific/philosophical project of secular explanation.
My initial knee-jerk reaction was about a psychologist publishing a book with the title "Sacred Knowledge." I am probably mistaken about this reaction... it was bolstered by the article's quotes about "sacred molecules" and empirical proof of Jung and excitement about some guy who saw dancing gods on a drug trip, fractal patterns, and so on.
I'm super interested in how we could, with philosophical and scientific rigor, discuss whatever is the actual content of "mystical consciousness." James's work was an empirical and mostly anecdotal study of life-changing mystical experiences, and I thought it was very interesting. I think there are some interesting aspects in Heideggerian phenomenology that would be relevant. Mildly interesting: the reason why those deep learning pictures look like LSD visuals.
If I were to start studying this stuff myself in any serious way, I would also probably be likely to "go native" or "go weird" or blur the emic/etic, etc.
Still, the whole project is very interesting, and kind of seems to represent the whole "Enlightenment project" in a way. Using secular science to treat and collaborate on things that previously was the realm of shamans and priests. Just, how does the scientist not become the priest, even after 100 doses of entheogens?
Hm, could be. So you are acknowledging the feeling of sacredness, but you think there is no point in trying to evoke some sort of artificial 'sacredness' as that would defeat the very nature of it? That the moment you are trying to dissect it, it vanishes?
Hm, maybe, but that's what we humans tend to do, sharing and categorizing experiences and when we do it systematically, it's science.
To put it kind of humorously, I think science itself is sacred in its own way, and by introducing priest-like behavior among scientists, that's violating the sacredness of science as a distinct secular project.
(Also, no need to apologise, at all - I'm interested in the conversation, and you're not coming across negative in any way. I hope I'm not either: I certainly am not intending to be.)
I don't have an open mind about sacredness or God being scientific concepts. That doesn't mean I'm closed-minded, as psychonauts like to imply. I'm just wary about scientists veering into this mystical, religious, shamanistic stance.
I think the misunderstanding is based on the use of words that are already 'loaded' with meaning, as sago pointed out quite well in another comment.
The point is that those experiences are real and have always been a part of the human condition. There is nothing supernatural about this, nothing bending the realms of physics.
It's all about psychology and how things 'feel', how consciousness works and how it goes beyond the single individual in a group setting.
All that mystical language imho is due to a lack of better words.
What I wonder about most is why people seem to have become more depressed than, say, 20 or 30 years ago.
Anyway, it will take a long time before the long-term effects of these psychedelics can be determined. And that is, if a consistent result can even be shown.
That said I found this article extremely difficult to read because of constant references to religion and mysticism. There's a fine line between spirituality and religion and this article consistently falls on what I perceive to be the wrong side.
To anybody whose interest is piqued I give to you the same analogy that was given to me: Life is like running through the underbrush of a forest, using psychedelics is like climbing a nearby tree and seeing where you would like to go.