I have met people before who were devoted to mystical insights gained through the use of psychedelics. Quasi-religious groups of people who stopped taking psychedelics for fun and started taking them for meaning.
Crazy might be an apt term to describe them, but they weren't dangerous or harmful people. Quiet the opposite actually. However talking to them an listening to them talk to each other, it was clear that they had lost contact with the ground, but they were convinced they were more in touch with it than anyone else. To the point they could feel that they were more in touch than anyone else.
Take a fan and point it at someone's back and they will feel the breeze there. Now cross wires in the brain that replicates the same feeling, even in the absence of the fan. They will be just as convinced that the breeze is there. Now do the same thing but for something that cannot be as simply empirically verified as the presence of a fan. And then short out the wires that would allow one to "step back" and see rethink. Maybe that is crazy, I don't know.
Crazy might be an apt term to describe them, but they weren't dangerous or harmful people. Quiet the opposite actually. However talking to them an listening to them talk to each other, it was clear that they had lost contact with the ground, but they were convinced they were more in touch with it than anyone else. To the point they could feel that they were more in touch than anyone else.
Take a fan and point it at someone's back and they will feel the breeze there. Now cross wires in the brain that replicates the same feeling, even in the absence of the fan. They will be just as convinced that the breeze is there. Now do the same thing but for something that cannot be as simply empirically verified as the presence of a fan. And then short out the wires that would allow one to "step back" and see rethink. Maybe that is crazy, I don't know.