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I know I'm not alone thinking that psychedelics might just be the solution (or key to finding solutions) to a lot of humanity's issues, including climate change, fundamentalism, war.. And it's easy to understand why - because most of humanity's issues are consequences of the spiritual health of every individual living on the planet. If the group, as a whole, is spiritually and morally lost or deceived, things like wars, dictatorships or disregard for nature can and do take place. If psychedelics can heal individuals, then we can eventually heal the whole of society, which is the proverbial moving on to the next level of global consciousness. Without any kind of real data, instinctively I feel like the world is going through an explosion of psychedelic use, partly due to music festivals, partly due to dark markets and partly due to the good press and incredible amounts of information available online. Another interesting aspect is that the users who experienced a powerful personal transformation often feel the need to spread the word and rightfully come to treat them as sacraments. So I think more and more people will use them, which will hopefully lead us to a peaceful, healthy future. AI, VR, Robots, Space exploration and Psychedelics .. Interesting times indeed. |
The main problems I see is that 1) the use of psychedelics is a bit of a shortcut, and as such perhaps deceptively ineffective for long-term change (in contrast to, say, daily meditation), and 2) humans seem to be really good at always returning to some base-line of behavior, and I suspect that this applies equally to 'enlightenment'. This might explain the first point as well.
I only need to look at my friends and extended social circle(s) to see how relatively little their frequent use of psychedelics had on them. The ones where it seemed to have most effect were people who treated it as a more meaningful (and/or spiritual) experience, and especially those who changed aspects of their daily life through this.
Whenever someone brings up Steve Jobs, for example, and his mention of LSD as life-changing, my immediate thought is: 'yeah, but he also lived in an stark, empty house, was spiritually 'active' (don't remember what exactly, some buddhist movement), and went as far as changing his diet and not going to a doctor when he should have. Clearly it wasn't just the LSD, but an entire way of living to go along with that.
I'm afraid that if the use of psychedelics becomes a cultural norm, we'll just give it a small place in our lives where it can do little harm and is defanged of it's power. Like a nice rite of passage to go through before you get back to 'real life'.