I am sure that it was only one real trip that he had during all life. From different facts it seems that he were just re-telling the stories of other people trips.
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.
I can. An OBE feels utterly real, minus the "oh shit... this is happening!" aspect of it all. It is not like a dream, even a lucid dream. And like a cliched cinematic experience you lift out of your body intact, as if there were two of you, one there and one here. It is legit and strange and the 'reality' of it is a lot to handle, after the fact.
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.
Sounds very much like my breakdown 20 years ago. When I finally emerged 10 years later I was both the same and utterly changed. I liken it to having had my personality deconstructed and then reconstructed from the ground up. I wouldn't wish it on anyone though I'm now in a much better place.
> A further factor was cannabis. Attempts to quit left him feeling stranded in a “horribly profane” world, with a “tremendous narrowing of consciousness.” Substances that once served exploration soon functioned as psychological maintenance. “He just needed to be high on cannabis,” Harrison said. “That was his medicine… what drove everything,” keeping him from “bouncing off the ceiling.”
Clearly there were a number of factors contributing to his difficulties, but this sounds like it may be an underestimated one, maybe more than the mushrooms even. Cannabis dependency really can sneak up on people, and for some it’s quite difficult to get off it, with real physical and emotional symptoms.
> Cannabis dependency really can sneak up on people, and for some it’s quite difficult to get off it, with real physical and emotional symptoms.
Throughout my university years, many of my peers smoked cannabis on a daily basis, often several times a day. Most of them seemed oblivious to the fact that they might have developed a dependence; whenever anyone tried to talk to them about it, they dismissed it, claiming cannabis is completely benign and nothing to worry about. Today, I personally know that at least a couple of them developed serious mental and physical problems, and to this day, they are unable to cope with life without being high.
There should be more awareness about safe cannabis use and its risks rather than framing it as a "healthier" alternative to other drugs, with people usually saying "at least I am not doing X, I am just smoking weed".
Mixing mushrooms and cannabis can lead to some seriously weird places, just read some reports on erowid.org. And Terrance did that repeatedly.
I did this once and ended up completely languageless for a moment, like unable to write and speak at all. Then I would have very intense visions so I would try to close my eyes but alas! my eyes have been closed this whole time. Then there were black holes eating up my field on vision, like clusters of dead pixels on a computer screen, spreading.
Also, I think Terrance suffered from a brain tumour which eventually killed him - I wonder if his migraines and experiences were influenced by that too.
And then there’s this quote from Leary, I think: “Hang up the phone once you got the message”. Psychedelics are no joke. I do advocate for them as sporadic psychological aide because they truly do loosen up the rigid structures in your mind and allow for a lasting change and improvement. But each session should be treated with utmost respect. There should be an understanding that each has the potential to be the best or the worst experience of your life.
Yeah... this made me reflect on my own bad trips decades past. I havent done4 many psychedelics only a handful, but I did have what one could call a bad trip or 2... maybe. It didn't look like it on the outside but internally it was profound. One in particular stood out that had me inhabit this universe but all semblance of emotional ties were cut from that reality, I am sure I would have felt pure terror if i was able to feel anything at the time. odd thing for sure as I am describing a horrible experience from memory but at the time i was unable to feel anything at all. An emotional echo of sorts i guess.... well anyways I do think that experience had a profound affect as the "nothing matters" sentiment stuck around since then. For a long time now I thought I peered in to "the void of reality" but thinking on it objectively now, maybe that was a assumption wrongfully borrowed from a bad trip. After all why should the natural state of things be so bereft of anything. If anything the universe is capable of being witnessed only through the eyes of a subjective observer... Bah anyways ive rambled for long enough. Good read.
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 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.
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.
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 also impressed, but not in a good way. I consider certainty to be the biggest tell of falsehood, and I wish to deny the vote to people with certainty.
Certainty of opinion on a complex topic reveals a belief that organic brains can, in practice, judge the correctness of their own reasoning - a conceit that borders on the psychotic, and at minimum a complete failure of self-awareness. These people don't need agency, they need thorazine.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
spirituality doesn’t have to mean you believe in spirits in the sense of ghosts etc. I believe that if that’s where the definition of exploring one’s own inner world ends, then that person has missed the point.
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?
It doesn't have to be. Searching out the unknown is seeking out new knowledge, seeking to diminish ignorance. You don't need to believe in higher powers or anything like that to search for new knowledge. Spirituality is a shortcut to a unverifiable, unfalsifiable knowledge that some explanation for phenomena exists, but not at all the kind of thing anyone actually interested in truth or expanding their own knowledge would use to explain anything.
I agree that "metaphysical" and "unverifiable" are traits of spirituality, as i understand the word. I consider theorem and animism to be categories of spirituality, but not the totality of it.
I describe myself as a humanist, and to me that approximately means a spiritual existentialist with no belief in spirits. From existentialism you can, of course, reach nihilism, a philosophy that is not so much wrong as unhelpful. But existentialism doesn't teach that there is no meaning; it teaches us that meaning is whatever we want, and it's important because we say it is important. From there you can end up back in any school of philosophy you want, but with a grounding that's compatible with living on a ball of rock hurtling through space.
we are monkeys following logic that was determined by other monkeys. our experience of reality is equivalent to that of a brain in a jar. blind belief is blind belief whether placed in science or religion. breaching the gap of blindness necessarily involves a leap to test ideas with personal faith. such a notion is not necessarily compatible with an atheistic perspective insisting reality is solely that which may be verbally quantified by monkeys. a dog knows to sit on command but has no idea about the concept of sitting, does that make the concept of sitting unreal?
I don't believe in any "God". I believe that only the universe is any "supreme being". Is that woo? Maybe. But it helps me be kinder than any religion seems to teach others.
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.
It's quite the opposite. When a drug trip conflicts with one's "spiritual practice" is exactly when you have a problem. That seems to be McKenna's problem in this case: he tried to assigning meaning to an experience he had while compromising his brain function with chemicals.
All you really need is to understand that there's no magic involved here. If you deliberately compromise your brain function, you're going to have strange experiences. It doesn't "mean" anything except that you compromised your brain function.
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.
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.
Ketamine treats symptoms and is more like a bandaid from what I see, and comes with its own problems (addiction). Psilocybin and ayahuasca when used properly can help you to process and resolve many types of problems (traumas, past drug/alcohol use, sins). But you have to be willing to work (if you can't bear it alone, this is where the curandero or therapist comes in. If that idea doesn't work for you then probably stick to ketamine)
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.
I've been pretty blessed with my path- I've spent the greater part of the last 6 years steeped in traditional ayahuasca (Shipibo) work and it has convinced me that there is very likely something at the root that is not biological/genetic/structural in nearly all cases (the exceptions being schizophrenia/bipolar). The issue is that nearly no one is so blessed to be able to take off for the months/years it requires to actually get there. It's a huge commitment, and to support the lifestyle needed to live free of deep depression can require more changes than most are willing to make. In any case I did not mean to denigrate your own journey with my comment and apologize for it- I am glad you've found something to get your head above water and live.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Maybe the first such experimentation actually teaches you something? By destroying a part you get to understand the true shape of the self. But by repeated use I imagine you get diminishing effects on the knowledge, and exponential damage, as you are left unable to self heal or develop adaptations to the missing corrupted sectors
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.
I remember feeling that once with cannabis, I was feeling some sensations and emotions and initially I tried to explain them rationally, but eventually I came to the theory that some brain areas were just being activated by the drug.
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.
I don't think it's a spiritual experience, in any way. It's just your neurons going crazy. Any spiritual result that you have had fits with how your brain is wired. The majority of the population is spiritual because in the past atheists were killed. I'm atheist and this experience was not spiritual in any way. It just enforced my atheism.
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).
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.
> someone as philosophically astute and well-rounded as he was
Just my general observation having never read anything from him: many people with generally good qualities but also with a bit of narcissism and self-importance have, when exposed to psychedelics, gone off the rails and became truth-owning preachers or outright abusers. This is to me interesting in so far as this is not the case generally for others groups of psychedelic users.
In that aspect I can understand the analogy, although I have no idea if it's correct.
as someone who has a good amount of experience with psychedelics - there is actually a surprising amount of overlap between the two experiences, but mostly in a generalized "how they can feel" way, and not in the sense that they are the same type of experience.
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)
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
I am sure that it was only one real trip that he had during all life. From different facts it seems that he were just re-telling the stories of other people trips.
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.
Thank you. I was curious about what the experience is like.
Now, can you share what an OBE feels like?
I can. An OBE feels utterly real, minus the "oh shit... this is happening!" aspect of it all. It is not like a dream, even a lucid dream. And like a cliched cinematic experience you lift out of your body intact, as if there were two of you, one there and one here. It is legit and strange and the 'reality' of it is a lot to handle, after the fact.
Can you see your other body? Or is it just that you feel yourself in 2 bodies?
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.
It brought me down to tears, thanks.
Do you have ko-fi link?
Happy to hear.
I added a ko-fi link to my about page, thanks!
Sounds very much like my breakdown 20 years ago. When I finally emerged 10 years later I was both the same and utterly changed. I liken it to having had my personality deconstructed and then reconstructed from the ground up. I wouldn't wish it on anyone though I'm now in a much better place.
> A further factor was cannabis. Attempts to quit left him feeling stranded in a “horribly profane” world, with a “tremendous narrowing of consciousness.” Substances that once served exploration soon functioned as psychological maintenance. “He just needed to be high on cannabis,” Harrison said. “That was his medicine… what drove everything,” keeping him from “bouncing off the ceiling.”
Clearly there were a number of factors contributing to his difficulties, but this sounds like it may be an underestimated one, maybe more than the mushrooms even. Cannabis dependency really can sneak up on people, and for some it’s quite difficult to get off it, with real physical and emotional symptoms.
> Cannabis dependency really can sneak up on people, and for some it’s quite difficult to get off it, with real physical and emotional symptoms.
Throughout my university years, many of my peers smoked cannabis on a daily basis, often several times a day. Most of them seemed oblivious to the fact that they might have developed a dependence; whenever anyone tried to talk to them about it, they dismissed it, claiming cannabis is completely benign and nothing to worry about. Today, I personally know that at least a couple of them developed serious mental and physical problems, and to this day, they are unable to cope with life without being high.
There should be more awareness about safe cannabis use and its risks rather than framing it as a "healthier" alternative to other drugs, with people usually saying "at least I am not doing X, I am just smoking weed".
Mixing mushrooms and cannabis can lead to some seriously weird places, just read some reports on erowid.org. And Terrance did that repeatedly.
I did this once and ended up completely languageless for a moment, like unable to write and speak at all. Then I would have very intense visions so I would try to close my eyes but alas! my eyes have been closed this whole time. Then there were black holes eating up my field on vision, like clusters of dead pixels on a computer screen, spreading.
Also, I think Terrance suffered from a brain tumour which eventually killed him - I wonder if his migraines and experiences were influenced by that too.
And then there’s this quote from Leary, I think: “Hang up the phone once you got the message”. Psychedelics are no joke. I do advocate for them as sporadic psychological aide because they truly do loosen up the rigid structures in your mind and allow for a lasting change and improvement. But each session should be treated with utmost respect. There should be an understanding that each has the potential to be the best or the worst experience of your life.
Yeah... this made me reflect on my own bad trips decades past. I havent done4 many psychedelics only a handful, but I did have what one could call a bad trip or 2... maybe. It didn't look like it on the outside but internally it was profound. One in particular stood out that had me inhabit this universe but all semblance of emotional ties were cut from that reality, I am sure I would have felt pure terror if i was able to feel anything at the time. odd thing for sure as I am describing a horrible experience from memory but at the time i was unable to feel anything at all. An emotional echo of sorts i guess.... well anyways I do think that experience had a profound affect as the "nothing matters" sentiment stuck around since then. For a long time now I thought I peered in to "the void of reality" but thinking on it objectively now, maybe that was a assumption wrongfully borrowed from a bad trip. After all why should the natural state of things be so bereft of anything. If anything the universe is capable of being witnessed only through the eyes of a subjective observer... Bah anyways ive rambled for long enough. Good read.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260719160409/https://psychedel...
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.
A single deep DMT experience "cured" my ADHD for several months before it faded, and I had zero guidance
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 also impressed, but not in a good way. I consider certainty to be the biggest tell of falsehood, and I wish to deny the vote to people with certainty.
Certainty of opinion on a complex topic reveals a belief that organic brains can, in practice, judge the correctness of their own reasoning - a conceit that borders on the psychotic, and at minimum a complete failure of self-awareness. These people don't need agency, they need thorazine.
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.
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
"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.
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.
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.
spirituality doesn’t have to mean you believe in spirits in the sense of ghosts etc. I believe that if that’s where the definition of exploring one’s own inner world ends, then that person has missed the point.
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 can see how they mean "the search for the unknown" in itself is already some sort of spirituality.
It doesn't have to be. Searching out the unknown is seeking out new knowledge, seeking to diminish ignorance. You don't need to believe in higher powers or anything like that to search for new knowledge. Spirituality is a shortcut to a unverifiable, unfalsifiable knowledge that some explanation for phenomena exists, but not at all the kind of thing anyone actually interested in truth or expanding their own knowledge would use to explain anything.
I agree that "metaphysical" and "unverifiable" are traits of spirituality, as i understand the word. I consider theorem and animism to be categories of spirituality, but not the totality of it.
I describe myself as a humanist, and to me that approximately means a spiritual existentialist with no belief in spirits. From existentialism you can, of course, reach nihilism, a philosophy that is not so much wrong as unhelpful. But existentialism doesn't teach that there is no meaning; it teaches us that meaning is whatever we want, and it's important because we say it is important. From there you can end up back in any school of philosophy you want, but with a grounding that's compatible with living on a ball of rock hurtling through space.
we are monkeys following logic that was determined by other monkeys. our experience of reality is equivalent to that of a brain in a jar. blind belief is blind belief whether placed in science or religion. breaching the gap of blindness necessarily involves a leap to test ideas with personal faith. such a notion is not necessarily compatible with an atheistic perspective insisting reality is solely that which may be verbally quantified by monkeys. a dog knows to sit on command but has no idea about the concept of sitting, does that make the concept of sitting unreal?
Militant atheists like you are almost as insufferable as militant theists
Or you could you know, answer the question…
I don't believe in any "God". I believe that only the universe is any "supreme being". Is that woo? Maybe. But it helps me be kinder than any religion seems to teach others.
You think asking for explanations and evidence makes someone a "militant atheist"?
What do you call yourself? A militant woo-merchant?
There's an XKCD for that! https://xkcd.com/774/
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.
It's quite the opposite. When a drug trip conflicts with one's "spiritual practice" is exactly when you have a problem. That seems to be McKenna's problem in this case: he tried to assigning meaning to an experience he had while compromising his brain function with chemicals.
All you really need is to understand that there's no magic involved here. If you deliberately compromise your brain function, you're going to have strange experiences. It doesn't "mean" anything except that you compromised your brain function.
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.
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.
I’m glad that you’ve got it all figured out!
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.
Ketamine treats symptoms and is more like a bandaid from what I see, and comes with its own problems (addiction). Psilocybin and ayahuasca when used properly can help you to process and resolve many types of problems (traumas, past drug/alcohol use, sins). But you have to be willing to work (if you can't bear it alone, this is where the curandero or therapist comes in. If that idea doesn't work for you then probably stick to ketamine)
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.
I've been pretty blessed with my path- I've spent the greater part of the last 6 years steeped in traditional ayahuasca (Shipibo) work and it has convinced me that there is very likely something at the root that is not biological/genetic/structural in nearly all cases (the exceptions being schizophrenia/bipolar). The issue is that nearly no one is so blessed to be able to take off for the months/years it requires to actually get there. It's a huge commitment, and to support the lifestyle needed to live free of deep depression can require more changes than most are willing to make. In any case I did not mean to denigrate your own journey with my comment and apologize for it- I am glad you've found something to get your head above water and live.
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.
I'm surprised someone as enlightened as yourself can't imagine a person coming to spirituality themselves.
You define "spiritually" differently (more narrow, for one) than the person you're replying to.
What does "spirituality" mean exactly and why is it so offensive to you?
> 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.
Maybe the first such experimentation actually teaches you something? By destroying a part you get to understand the true shape of the self. But by repeated use I imagine you get diminishing effects on the knowledge, and exponential damage, as you are left unable to self heal or develop adaptations to the missing corrupted sectors
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.
I remember feeling that once with cannabis, I was feeling some sensations and emotions and initially I tried to explain them rationally, but eventually I came to the theory that some brain areas were just being activated by the drug.
Don't do drugs kids.
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.
I don't think it's a spiritual experience, in any way. It's just your neurons going crazy. Any spiritual result that you have had fits with how your brain is wired. The majority of the population is spiritual because in the past atheists were killed. I'm atheist and this experience was not spiritual in any way. It just enforced my atheism.
Wonderfully captivating article about a loquacious man that like the rest of us, wrestled with his demons and even sometimes machine elves.
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).
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.
McKenna to Alex Jones? That is an offensively bad comparison for someone as philosophically astute and well-rounded as he was.
And tripping to a fever dream... You know, sometimes it's best to just not respond if you know nothing about a subject at all.
> someone as philosophically astute and well-rounded as he was
Just my general observation having never read anything from him: many people with generally good qualities but also with a bit of narcissism and self-importance have, when exposed to psychedelics, gone off the rails and became truth-owning preachers or outright abusers. This is to me interesting in so far as this is not the case generally for others groups of psychedelic users.
In that aspect I can understand the analogy, although I have no idea if it's correct.
Pretty terrible take if you compare tripping to a bad fever dream.
as someone who has a good amount of experience with psychedelics - there is actually a surprising amount of overlap between the two experiences, but mostly in a generalized "how they can feel" way, and not in the sense that they are the same type of experience.
I didn't know chemically deep-frying your brain could be a bad thing
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 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.
> which he pegged to 2012
He picked the date because of the Mayan calendar. Bullshit all the way down.
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
In my opinion he nailed the timeline. It just needed to take off, and it is.
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.
> They failed to stop capitalism
good thing, too!