A lot of people believe they found *the* objective truth while high, and because of that they turn arrogant afterward toward experiences/thoughts of others.
I've had friends who started acting like that, I once did myself, believing that they had found the one truth other people hadn't found, but since my friend group is generally honest and real with each other, we've helped them down from their arrogance.
However, I think it can be hard for people like CEOs, surrounded by sycophantic bootlickers, to realize that. They'll quickly be convinced by their own hubris.
"drugs" are an extension of "food" and "breathing" .. what ? everyone agrees that you have to eat, and people do.. yet the details of eating, and what you eat, are massively varied.. too varied to make meaningful generalizations on a text forum. Similarly, when you ingest "stuff" there are complicated interactions that happen without consciously knowing it.. the edge of those interactions are what you are calling "drugs"
Lastly, some of the old herbal drugs were awful, and we are evolving past those.. but, some of the new synthesized drugs are more awful.. some of them are being used by millions right now.
it seems that many people in the west always try to find the _magic pill_, something you can swallow and forget, but in reality what's need to change is the way of living. You cannot expect working 16 hours a day, being stressed whole day, take acid on the weekend and make it go away.
in addition this article is evil, since psychedelics are not for everyone, it requires a specific state of mind to actually benefit and learn from them in the long run.
I am an avid user (LSD), was an abuser, I had lost 4 friends to crazy...
also, Ketamine is not a psychedelic and is bad for you in non small usages.
LSD, DMT, psylocibyn, salvia, mescaline, and probably more, these are psychedelics.
I have found lower doses of THC <= 5mg allows me to self reflect on my current situation, and gives me a sort of "vacation" from my normal way of thinking, without completely blowing away my sense of reality. For a few hours I can meditate to music, tap into a more creative artistic side with painting, and leave the stress of the day behind me. The next day I wake up recharged with a better way of thinking about my day. Of course, THC is a mild psychedelic, but I don't get the extreme paranoia or anxiety of complete ego dissolution. I have not tried microdosing, but perhaps that could have a more lasting effect. The last thing I want is to need medication just to perform at work. I have generalized anxiety disorder, and the THC seems to help in all aspects of that anxiety, not just work related.
I've probed other people about the anxiety and fear I experienced, and have since learned that it's actually a fairly common feeling that even experienced users get. However, it's just considered part of the trip and requires experience to understand how to manage it. I wish I could reach a tolerance level that would allow me to have a more reliably enjoyable psychedelic experience, because I feel like I'm missing out on something that so many others seem to get positive results from.
Thoughts are nothing but a chemical reaction happening in your brain.
Some thoughts (That are worth having IMO) are impossible to have without a chemical catalyst.
Without certain chemicals, you can't have certain thoughts.
You can't just 'think of anything you want' because you are bound by the laws of chemistry playing out in your brain, and, to go one step further: you can't even control the thoughts you will have next.
Chemistry is what's running the show.
Well put and true -- just like machines let us do certain things we couldn't do without them (either extending or repairing our body/mind), the same for chemicals. But I don't agree that this obviously follows:
> Chemistry is what's running the show.
It all depends on what you define as the show. I would prefer to think of the show as something that takes place outside of my head and, even assuming it is reducible to chemistry/physics, it's part of a system way to complex for us to understand with mechanical models and necessitates some sort of framework where each individual is an end unto themselves.
Drugs can go a long way to recreate the sensations similar to sympathy and possibly even jumpstart it, but they can't actually create the intellectual side of the link that creates real living relationship in the real world. Having the tools to decouple the feelings from the meat of the relationship could be a powerful tool in the right hands, but applied by misguided people it will make things worse.
... to put it another way, it seems like the elite and the most poor are both using more drugs. But instead of solidarity it seems there's even more of a disconnect.
The show is the experience of being.
> I would prefer to think of the show as something that takes place outside of my head
All of your experiences occur in that brain meat-space, your vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch, temperature, etc... all of that (experience of) is occurring in your head. We hope it is coordinated with some objective physical reality. There is no guarantee of that.
to quote C.S.Lewis ``` If minds are wholly dependent on brains and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees. ```
Here we have an interview with "a former sales and marketing consultant" who "doesn’t have a medical degree and said he learned to dose through experience". Oof. I'm still clicking on every new article about psychedelics as I had some very positive experiences and would love to see scientific progress, but these fluff articles are a letdown, every time.
>The most compelling insight of that day was that this awesome recall had been brought about by a fraction of a gram of a white solid, but that in no way whatsoever could it be argued that these memories had been contained within the white solid. Everything I had recognized came from the depths of my memory and my psyche. I understood that our entire universe is contained in the mind and the spirit. We may choose not to find access to it, we may even deny its existence, but it is indeed there inside us, and there are chemicals that can catalyze its availability.
"We're all interconnected," "live life in the moment," etc are boring and cliche we've all heard them a lot. But they are also profound & wise and you could spend hours thinking on their details and consequences and how to apply them to your life.
The wisdom is the experience of doing it, not saying or hearing the words. Psychedelics can give people insight into that experienced value and grow a resolve to apply them to their lives.
This has nothing to do with drug use and was just randomly thrown into the article.
Those who seek novelty, explore reality and enjoy seeing the world through different perspectives use drugs to obtain all that.
This creates a false correlation wherein people believe the drugs cause enlightenment when in fact the person simply used the drugs to ease or induce the process.
