I wouldn't know what to tell someone about what entering a (the?) void is like, but the closest i can imagine is a situation where you're 1000 nautical miles out to sea in a small sailboat on a pitch dark cloudy moonless night, far away from anyone. A storm is brewing and the seas are getting large, though you can't see them, it's too dark for your eyes, though you feel the force as it throws your small boat around. It's more than you bargained for, but there isn't anything you can do about it. You're in it now. You're losing control of the boat. You're afraid of what will happen if you lose control, the seas grow larger... The rains and the lightning and thunder are here and it's just too much too bear, so you go down below and lay ahull, surrendering to the sea and forces beyond your control. The sea will make of you what it will, you're fate rests with something larger than yourself. A part of you dies that night, and what emerges the next day is different from what was swallowed by the storm. Your old self at the helm, somewhat unrecognizable. And a part of you never made it out of the storm, remembering that you're always out to sea, and that you needed to come out here to remember that.
And he had even more regret when he thought that his (terminal) brain tumor was caused by all the psychedelics he had done (though doctors assured him that was unlikely in the extreme).
Don't incapacitate yourself during a major weather event.
Absolutely, Set and setting is critical while using psychs, ensure that no random events can happen, cut off all phones, doorbell and anything that can make abrupt noises to not derail you. Do not do it if you don't feel like it that day, or if the weather is unpredictable.
It's important to have a spiritual practice to go alongside psychedelics to weather the ontological shock.
Spiritual doesn't mean religious, is my opinion.
It means being grounded in something firm, whether that's inner strength or a reliance on an external deity.
Religion is not required for psychedelics, but a strong grounding in something is, in my opinion.
People have bad trips because there's something inside them that they haven't identified or dealt with properly. Anxiety and/or depression will ALWAYS flare up during your trip. It's best to deal with those properly (meaning change things in your life, not just medication) beforehand.
Right, there can be a religion without spirituality and there can also be a spirituality without religion.
But we see people promoting psychedelics specifically to "reset" your brain and get rid of depression and anxiety.
My experience is that psychedelics will not get rid of anything on their own. They provide you with a different perspective on what you may or may not already know is going on.
This perspective can help you process those issues, absolutely. But they will not solve anything. I was always interested in finding a psychiatrist or therapist that would help me process during a shroom trip, but never found one.
And resetting your brain is just a nice way of saying, confront every single demon you have all at once. Some people are strong enough, mentally, to process things like that. Most are not. Most will take the bad trip as a sign that they shouldn't ever do psychedelics.
I'm firmly in the camp of not using them to explore my problems. I know what they are already, and I know how to fix them. I used to love psychedelics when I was younger (and had less stress and obligations). Now they just panic me and aren't fun.
I feel that looking for God is spiritual but saying you've already found Him, know Him, know His kids, etc - that is religious
There are finders and seekers. I’m always impressed with people who ardently believe they know the truth, they can act without doubt, an interesting skill.
I'm with you. It's not for me but it's absolutely fascinating. There's something nice about letting go and just knowing that it's part of someone's plan. Again, not for me but I understand that appeal.
"Atheists are mentally incapable of handing psychedelics" is certainly a take.
I really don’t think the word spiritual precludes atheists, you could even read it as “the human spirit”. The point is just that you need some framework to ground yourself. Plenty of people have “spiritual” beliefs based purely around the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics or even simulation theory.
Equating a belief in gods with spiritual discovery is also a take.
Belief in spirits is just as absurd as belief in deities, which are just a specialized category of spirit as far as these things are usually classified anyway.
If you don't mean to suggest you believe in some strange metaphysics without any grounding in reality, why do you call it spirituality? What "inner world" are you "exploring"? Can that be done in plain language without any mysticism? Why or why not?
I'm an absolute atheist and philosophical nihilist and I have done psychedelics and I've never had a problem with them. Typically find the experiences positive. So we have at least one counter-example.
Good crutch for the weak. I've tripped plenty of times; I'm an atheist; it was great. Next time you trip, you should reflect on your need for "spirituality" and what it says about whatever is going on or not going on between your ears. One of the most amazing things about humans is their imagination and ability to convince themselves of almost anything. In my opinion, one of the points of doing psychedelics is to recapture your own imagination and flush out all the BS that other people have put in there to capture your mind. And here you are telling people to pour more programming back in there in the form of "spirituality."
I’m also an atheist, but just looking at the huge amount of anthropological information we have, from hunter gatherer bands to large scale civilizations, I am quite sure that a perception of god-like and spirit-like entities is built into the hardware layer in humans. That doesn’t make them “real”, of course, but it doesn’t seem to matter much whether or not they are real, and deleting them from life because they aren’t literally real is an ongoing experiment.
Yes, perception of entities during psychedelic experience is unhinged paredolia: psychedelic substances obliterate the squelch for our pattern recognition systems, of which paredolia is one. Deepdream slugdogs are sort of a synthetic analogue to this.
Also an atheist. Used psychedelic recreationally/recklessly in my youth but that was a long time ago.
Recently returned to psychedelic use to treat depression and the best takeaway I have for the experience is "swimming with God". By God I mean "the Universe as an entity" for lack of better words. Pro tip: ketamine wins out over psilocybin for treating depression.
I did try DMT once a long time ago and saw the machine elves (prior to ever hearing about them) but it felt more like "ROM artifacts" rather than alien consciousness trying to connect.
Everybody's different. I am approaching the problem from multiple angles (pharma, non-pharma); CBT is on the table and I'm open to other non-chemical routes.
Your comment conflates depression with "being sad/hurt". There's biological aspects that no amount of trauma processing (whether talk therapy or spiritual (psilocybin)). Sometimes the machine itself is broken, not the programming.
I've experience significant trauma in my life and, while it shapes my being, is not the basis for my "depression".
Bandaids are valuable tools. I know there are plenty of non-chemical remedies, exercise being a foundational one, that a proper treatment plan includes.
So for everyone, YMMV, but clinical ketamine use has been borderline magical in readily perceptible improvements, with the caveat that it does seem to be temporary. This is a pity, because it's easy to grow mushrooms and DIY in that regard but getting K requires going through expensive gatekeeping.
And to address the addictive concerns of K, for me, the treatments have had their own elements of joy but I see no recreational value for me personally. I've delt with addictive issues in the past and I have no problems facing those particular demons.
The bastardization of the term “spiritual”/“spirituality” has done deep damage to the collective psyche. The view that spirituality is following dogma rather than an exploration of the ineffable from your own subjective experience is a widespread failure of communication.
Agreed. I use the term as "a sense of connectedness" rather than "seeing God"
> one of the points of doing psychedelics is to recapture your own imagination
this also is my takeaway as to the primary utility. its so easy to accumulate ideas about how things _must_ be represented over time. every so often (maybe 5-10 years?) its probably good to have a way to shave them off and re-expose the surface.
You define "spiritually" differently (more narrow, for one) than the person you're replying to.
I'm surprised someone as enlightened as yourself can't imagine a person coming to spirituality themselves.
What does "spirituality" mean exactly and why is it so offensive to you?
The article mentions that the "pranksterish" groups who took psychedelics weathered it just fine. They didn't have an expectation to disappoint. Irreverence seems to be just as good
It does sound like the opposite a bit, it sounds like attempting to create a spiritual practice, or assign spiritual significance at all was what did him in
No, it isn't. What's important is "set", and "setting".
Set is your mental mindset. Setting is where you're tripping. If you're mentally in a good place, and you're comfortable in your surroundings, you will probably have a good trip.
If you're dealing with some shit mentally and you're not comfortable where you're tripping you'll probably have a really bad trip.
What? No you don't.
This kind of talk is how you get tech Bros paying 10 grand for some rando to be a "shaman" during a "retreat"
We used to call them trip sitters and it was a friend who helped keep you grounded. Rich people will always find a way to buy their way into a subculture.
For some a tent in a forest is enough, others need luxury hotels next to the forest.
> Terence told friends, “history’s going to end any day now.” Friends worried they’d “gone off the rails,” and Dennis later conceded they had a point.
I always imagine the recklessness of psychonauts like McKenna as something like dragging a high powered electromagnet across the skull to force altered states while doing who knows what to the membrane.
Every time I read about either tDCS or psychedelics, I'm reminded of altering random hex values in games on my Apple II+ as a kid. One tweak got me a score of 100,000,000 in Falcons, and the screen dump made for nice bragging rights on the school bus the next morning. The next one crashed the game and wrote a bad sector to the floppy.
I tried lsd with friends in undergrad. It was to me a very interesting experience. Not spiritual in any way - it was like I could tell that my neurons were firing off all over and incorrectly. It was fun and I enjoyed it very much and I've never had the desire to do it again.
My friends from that night did still continue doing lsd after that. For one of them he stopped when he had what sounds like a horrible trip where a pool table opened up to a portal to hell and dragged him in. Lol.
You might want to consider retrying it in a "spiritual/meditative setting", i.e cozy with headset on, music pre-curated (nothing off-tune and so-on) and closed eyes then get lost to eventually breakthrough, strictly only with people you deeply trust.
Their server was sleep paralyzed by the HN egregore
The famous story of La Chorrera is that Dennis is the one that went seriously off the rails but it's Dennis in some of his public statements and book that cast skepticism on a few of Terence's ideas
What you shouldn't do is just willy nilly tell people to take things. If the article is right about that, it's disappointing. I always saw him as being very academic and quite in tune with the dangers of outright recommendation (perhaps in contrast to Leary but I don't want to misinterpret Leary)
I remember discovering McKenna in the late 90’s when I first got internet access at home. The comparison with Alex Jones is a good one: he was initially very interesting, sparking the imagination that whole worlds existed out there that I didn’t know about. But quickly it fell apart and I understood it was just horseshit, a form of fantasy.
I’ve never tripped but it sounds similar to fever dreams I had a few times when I was sick as a child, running high temperatures. Why anyone would choose to experience that is another question.
Reading that McKenna was just another for-profit bullshit artist at the end of the day is the sad part. Exploring ideas and possibilities is a noble pursuit, but only if you can admit to mistakes and failures. Deciding to carry on to make money is weak and undermines everything. His legacy could have been as someone who dedicated his life to understanding psychedelics and gave an honest, well-researched evaluation at the end of it all. Money and celebrity status ruined all of that.
Tripping is pretty different from even the wildest dreams, mostly because it changes how you think. Usually when I have a bizarre dream the non-euclidean reality is frustrating, because my mind in the dream is still the same as my mind when I’m awake.
But psychedelic drugs can trigger an openness to new ideas that is incredibly difficult to achieve while sober.
They’re also dangerous though, like the article notes. It’s like working (or playing) with fire. Even people who have decades of experience with it can suddenly get viciously burned. So I don’t really recommend it at all — intensive meditation can still be dangerous for people who are unprepared for what can come up but it’s a much more sustainable practice than drugs and can achieve similar (but better, if done correctly) states.
The article did make me pretty sad for the same reasons you called out. I used to look up to him a LOT in college. I moved past it when I discovered meditation but reading this piece really shut down the goodwill I still had for him. It also makes it hard not to view him as a weak person who never did any real personal development and just got lucky with his first few decades of tripping. I had nightmarish nihilistic mushroom trips that made me want to off myself even as a college student lol.
Pretty terrible take if you compare tripping to a bad fever dream.
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i think his theory on novelty diminishing is bunk we are seeing more and more of it
he didn’t say it would diminish, he said it would increase until we reached a singularity, which he pegged to 2012. not that i’m a mckenna devotee but i always thought it was interesting that he speculated the final push would be a “device that a small group of people use to generate infinite novelty” and then the smartphone really took off exactly around 2012. the “small group” is just you and your buddies making endless memes and new inside jokes.
Terence McKenna predicted that the universe's accelerating accumulation of complexity and novelty would hit its absolute maximum, or "zero point," on December 21, 2012
On the contrary we've seen a surge of novelty since.
Smartphone took off before 2012, a few years after iphone's release around 2010 when social media converged on it
This movement had a movement but now it's over. They failed to stop capitalism and effective altruists from taking over the cultural lexicon.
Now I can't go anywhere without hearing about Roko's Basilisk.
Is this a quote from a book? Beautifully written
Thanks afro88. I was inspired by the storm in Terence's story, and my time on my sailboat when it felt like the sea was getting to be too much. Glad to share.
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