I'm glad you had a good outcome. It's difficult to relate to your experience from the outside. Most of the time people talk about these experiences, they are vague and difficult to understand.
Sometimes in poor cases it can sound like gym-bro science where I should totally pop a supplement because this guy had a good experience on it and trust me bro.
I would love to know more specifically about the subjective experience is like, so we can pick out pieces that have a greater meaning to collective understanding.
Depression is an umbrella term for one experience caused by many, many different problems. Some chronic medical situations are going to allow your body to be re-depressed after a positive drug experience, so being able to see subjective reports in detail can allow the public to decide if it's worth doing a psychedelic treatment.
Not to mention we should probably map this experience out to slowly cut down on the same speculative questions every time drugs come up; about the divine/psychological/medical nature of a drug trip.
> Most of the time people talk about these experiences, they are vague and difficult to understand.
I’ve taken LSD a few times. When people ask about it I like to say that the experience is exactly like how people describe it, but nothing like what I expected. Trying to “map it out” in complete detail would be like trying to map out sex. I’m not convinced I can fully explain my experience, and even if I did, I bet your experience would be different from mine.
Maybe the best description I can give is that your mind stops suppressing a lot of thoughts. When I hear music on LSD my brain turns the music into a whole planet that looks like that music sounds. When I look in the mirror I see myself as a fey creature full of animus and life. The things that my sober self stresses about seem ridiculous - like the fears of a 5 year old. And I still feel trapped by my fears at the same time.
It’s a very unique experience. As Sam Harris says, if you take enough LSD it’s impossible to be bored.
> Trying to “map it out” in complete detail would be like trying to map out sex. I’m not convinced I can fully explain my experience, and even if I did, I bet your experience would be different from mine.
That's exactly right. I think of it like this: you've spent a lifetime building and entrenching filters around your perceptions and thought patterns to react to them. They persist because in evolutionary terms you being still alive means your behaviour is "adaptive" in a sense, irrespective of how you actually feel.
Psychedelics temporarily tear down most of those filters and
disrupt those thought patterns, allowing you to perceive things in very novel ways and react to hem very differently.
Nobody's thought patterns or filters are going to be the same and so nobody's psychedelic experience will be the same even though many of them will have similarities (we are the same species in the same culture after all).
It can be described. But its like describing sex, dreaming, music, the taste of delicious food or the feeling of grief.
Words are no substitute. The experience itself can't be expressed in language. Language can refer to it, but without a common reference point, language will always fall short.
> A fey creature full of animus and life, may be intense and full of subjective richness for you, we have seen this imagery before in pagan worship.
So? The imagery isn't the interesting part. The subjective richness is, and the imagery denuded of its subjective richness is just some boring pigments. I've seen that imagery before, but that didn't prepare me at all for my trip.
The imagery relates to the experience like a postcard relates to New York City.
If I had never felt pain before, do you think you could explain it to me? Do you think you could teach what the color blue looks like to someone who is colorblind? I don't think you can do it - but by all means, prove me wrong :)
I agree with what you say, but my point has been washed out. A description, no matter how poor gives us insight into the change and some subjective experience can be mapped to others.
Iron deficiency causes your leg to bounce.
CBT causes people to practice second order thinking.
Faith causes people to experience grace.
Your subjective experience has overlap with other phenomena, a description of the journey allows it to be mapped. People with medical grade depression can then decide if taking LSD is likely to resolve their problems.
Playing the subjective-definition game is entry level stuff. There is real suffering that could be allieviated here with a little more insight and mapping.
Sometimes in poor cases it can sound like gym-bro science where I should totally pop a supplement because this guy had a good experience on it and trust me bro.
I would love to know more specifically about the subjective experience is like, so we can pick out pieces that have a greater meaning to collective understanding.
Depression is an umbrella term for one experience caused by many, many different problems. Some chronic medical situations are going to allow your body to be re-depressed after a positive drug experience, so being able to see subjective reports in detail can allow the public to decide if it's worth doing a psychedelic treatment.
Not to mention we should probably map this experience out to slowly cut down on the same speculative questions every time drugs come up; about the divine/psychological/medical nature of a drug trip.