Fuck all that spiritual mumbo jumbo, we’re all a bunch of electrical signals from the brain and that is real.
I enjoy psychedelics. Popping a tab in the woods, surrounded by friends and fairies, and staring straight into the sun-portal; one of life’s greatest pleasures. As the beams of a rapidly setting sun paint rouge against my untanned skin, I take a moment to identify and absorb all the qualia (so I can later categorize them all into one of two categories: Kantian sublimity or nymphomanic immanence), to really reflect on the malevolency of my own self-reflexiveness. The 30-minute mark is approaching, I can slowly feel my left brain power down… no longer am I formulating a universal theory of everything with my gargantuan gigabrain, nor am I subconsciously solving string theory by crunching quarks between the clapping of my cerebral cheeks… hyper-rational propositional proofs on the nonexistence of God and epistemological a prioris are replaced by outpourings of lyrical ballads and clever quips and spontaneous jazz improv in 11/8 and heightened intuition for wanting his big dingaling badonkaschlonk in my tiny little p-hole and.. holy crap, did you know that I am God, and this world is a simulation? You can really feel things, I mean really feel them on acid, ya dig? My depression adhd bipolar anxiety are cured; my fibromyalgia, naught but a distant delusion of the mind. Most definitely musculoskeletal.
Psyche!
I very much support recreational use of and research into psychedelics, and specifically psilocibin. It’s fun (when it decides it wants to be!) and can be a great tool, but that’s just about it on a practical level. It is, however, also a consciousness, and something about synthesizing a conscious spirit so it can be turned into a mass-produced pill you can just pop before your morning commute and solve all your ailments seems promethean. What really jingles my bells is the thought of a bunch of scientists spending years doing controlled research trying to prove something that is self-evident. Did you know that if you spend a considerable amount of time with people, you start to adopt their traits to a certain extent? No wayyy. And if you give a bunch of people psilocybin, their brain starts to change and they perceive reality differently during a trip than someone sober? You’re jerkin my chain.
As to whether or not it's self evident that taking psilocybin has any lasting effects on the brain, this is something I will disagree somewhat with my friend on. When someone says that “X is psychoactive,” they’re usually talking about psychadelic drugs. Psychoactive : “affecting the mind or behavior.” Everything is psychoactive. Everything has lasting effects on the brain, it’s all a matter of degree and permanence. When it comes to high degree and high permanence, I have to disagree.
What psychadelics do is temporarily loosen your frameworks up to rewire your thought processes; it indeed does allow you to “take your house of cards belief system down & then rebuild it with a little more intentionality that we could only find in adult vs the childhood we started with,” as Alex Gopoian put it, but it doesn’t last unless you make a concerted effort to turn it into habit.
When Siegel et al. mentions persistent decrease in hippocampal FC, ‘persistent’ is taken to mean ~3wks. Ultimately, the long-lasting, “life-changing” effects are more so due to concerted effort & time spent re-evaluating ones own thought patterns & frameworks. Psilocybin provides a key to an alternate perception, but it's not the mechanism of change itself. A cheat, & not guaranteed.
Anyways, how do we know subjective consciousness experiences are the correlate to psilocybin, and not to some other mechanism generated by its administration?
Hippocampus and prefrontal cortex disturbances peak during the trip itself, then stabilize after 3 weeks on the higher end (save yourself some time: find this on erowid, or your kooky philosophy professor who lived it up in the 60s). Difference in images 1 and 3 aren't that much different; what would be interesting but also self-evident is a follow-up experiment comparing the last brainscan to that of same patient 6 mo. after the experiment and compare levels of "echo." I bet it would show similar, but even greater levels of change, or almost zero. That's because 6 months of time sober meditating and changing your own tenets will change your brain way more than 1 trip lasting at most 3 weeks. And spending 6 months getting back to your old routine and mindlessly going through the motions isn’t exactly what I’d call life-changing.
I knew a handful of people who’d use it to make them “more creative,” but without it, they couldn’t produce anything themselves. The same goes for divine experience; it’s all temporary unless you change something in your sober life to have more regular synchronistic experiences. This is “integration.”
It allows us to tear down and build anew if we choose so. As for world view, there’s this fascination with one aspect of a psilocybin trip, that which makes a person do a complete 180 in terms of personality and worldview that permanently alters the course of their lives, but this isn’t a result of taking the psychadelics themselves; just an extended time spent re-evaluating one’s own perspectives.
Plenty of people are shown the key but don't or can't follow. From anecdotal experience, one of my old roommates would be completely unaffected by acid. This was most definitely because he lacked the mental facilities to metacognate to a degree necessary to completely overhaul his preexisting belief systems and a very low level of awareness. Another old roommate would take excessive amounts of acid for years and realize no significant changes to his life and still remains a nihilist (same explanation applies). Maybe their pathways are just more resistant, or maybe that doesn't matter as much as we think and consciousness itself chooses not to do much with it in these instances.
Yes, consciousness and self-destructive pathways are emergent, and these pathways can become self-propagating. The switch that breaks this cycle does not necessarily have to take the form of psychedelics. One just has to create a self-prapogating pathway that functions as this switch. Peter J. Carroll figured this out, maybe. I’d argue that a year spent reading radically different material and applying it, or randomly dropping, picking up, and immersing oneself in new systems of belief would accomplish the same thing; all adept Chaos Magicians know this to be the case. Lucidity.
