Please congratulate that person on my behalf. Even though it may be the result of an epiphany, self-restraint is still hard to achieve and a noble goal in itself :-)
I'd like to prefix this as _anecdotal_ as it is only some speculation I've done on the matter, but here is my take on it:
The brain is in the end a neural network, and like all such devices, can get stuck in various local minima that are difficult to get out of. An old habit that has been reinforced through many years can take a considerable "shock" to dislodge. All the little cognitive and behavioral biases that one accumulates through their life get in the way in very subtle forms that are entirely sub-conscious.
What psychedelics like LSD, psilocybin and others can do, is remove or downregulate these internal filters for some time. To give an example: the visual cortex normally applies a filtering mechanism to what the eyes see and correct problems. It acts as a common-sense filter to remove improbable or impossible information and augment, perhaps even add some extra detail to save the conscious part from being swamped with ridiculous data. Mostly it just lets the sensory input through with little synthetic stuff. This means that the visual cortex has to have some sort of model of reality that it builds over time (with feedback from the consciousness). This filtering mechanism is one way mostly, the visual cortex modulates the input and adds information here and there, and then reinforces the internal model with feedback form the consciousness.
Now, under psychedelics, one gets all the output that the visual cortex can generate together with the actual real data from the eyes. The previously subtle filter applies the full transformation described by the internal model to the sensory data. This results in wacky outlandish shapes and impossible landscapes as reality is modified fully with all the information that the visual cortex has accumulated. Quite like the bizarre images generated by artificial CNNs when ran backwards!
So to arrive at my point, I posit that psychedelics can (not guaranteed of course), remove the long standing subconscious filters and biases that one has built over their life and offer the raw perspective on things. They remove all the useful illusions that the brain pulls over our eyes to get through our days. A thing that one tends to lose during a "trip" is control over the thought process, some call it ego death, a profound sensation of being able to observe one's thoughts from outside - as if unburdened by one's own insecurities and from an objective view. It isn't unpleasant at all, if anything it is liberating. It is always difficult to face one's own shortcomings, because of the importance that we place on the ego. Once that burden is removed, it becomes an experience of resignation and healing.
I want to avoid ascribing religious or transcendental characteristics to the process, far from it. It's a mere result of some very pleasant time spent being free from the tyranny of the ego and the subsequent introspection.
The problem is that we shouldn't feel the need to use drugs to make our lives bearable. Depression, burnout and other mental issues is amplified by our lifestyles and the system that allowed them.
Sure you can take psychedelics, anti depressant, alcohol, and other drugs to make it bearable, it won't fix the underlying issue(s).
I agree with most of what you say on psychedelics, I don't see it as a cure to what we're talking about here though.
I don't know why you are being downvoted (I upvoted you), because you are raising a point that absolutely needs to be discussed.
Perhaps I phrased things incorrectly, but the idea behind using psychedelics is not to suppress the symptoms, as is with classic anti-depressants. They cannot do that. Rather to change the way one thinks in such a profound way that they will voluntarily solve the root cause of the problems without being intimidated by them.
Taking Prozac will make one completely numb to feelings, and the hope is that since they no longer feel crippling depression, they can overcome whatever difficulties are the root cause. I would describe it as depersonalizing the individual completely so they become a robot. Psychedelics absolutely do not do that. You remain a feeling, emotive being - more so if anything, but they allow you to see your own thought process objectively.
I haven't studied the clinical usage of psychedelics, but my impression from cursory research is that the approach is different from traditional anti-depressants, and arguably more constructive path. Rather than numbing all emotions using very biologically-addictive substances, use non-addictive substances with very low abuse potential to make the conscious mind want to fix the problem. Not because it is being forced to, but because they want to heal. Often, part of this healing is a sort of resignation, or letting go, where the emotional baggage is fully acknowledged and the pent up pressure can be released. This is part of the therapeutic process, by removing the internal filters, one cannot help but acknowledge and face these things and interestingly enough, in a positive way.
E.g. a person who has problems with their weight will finally come to terms with their body, which allows them to acknowledge the root cause and start working on fixing it, now liberated from the suffocating feeling of "having problems".
I don't know how to describe it better, and I realize I'm being incredibly un-scientific, but perhaps you see what I mean?
I agree we shouldn't need drugs to make our lives bearable. I do find that psychedelics behave differently than other things called "drugs" though. Here's a quote I love from someone who took ayahuasca:
"The medicine was saying, “You only need to come here when you forget! Remember that the miracle is the dimension you normally live in. The more you can find the Divine in what you think of as the ordinary world, the less often you need to come back here.""
In contrast, drugs generally say "It's more fun over here! Come back any time!"
The cure, of course, is revolutionary societal change, and a replacement of monolithic cultural institutions like the private, authoritarian firm and the similarly hierarchical church with worker-led cooperatives comprising human-in-the-loop planning. Leadership currently _ignores_ the workers' plight–burnout, depression, and other mental issues–to the degree that it can, and as a result we're all encouraged to live in the margin of fiscally tolerable depression.
You misunderstand the post to which you're replying. Psychedelics, for one thing, are in another class from alcohol (a central nervous system depressant). Their use does not make the underlying issues bearable. In fact, they're just as likely to stimulate a rejection of one's participation in stale institutions. Likely, this is a reason they're kept illegal. Philip K. Dick did a marvelous job of ironically portrayed illicit street drugs as "anti-psychotics" in his short story, "Faith of our Fathers."
We co-evolved with psychedelic plants. They're a tool our ancestors used to enable us. To say "they won't fix the underlying issue," is like saying "a hammer won't build a house."
Technically, true. Heck, you don't even need hammers to build houses, anymore.
Psychedelics are not like anti-depressants, alcohol and a lot of other drugs. They don't just make you feel better while the effect lasts. They actually have a chance to fix the underlying issue after a single and only take, for example by triggering a change of lifestyle.
Psychedelics are not addictive. In fact they are known to have cured addictions.
The problem is that you don't know if it will make your life better or worse or cause no change at all.
Have you ever been depressed or burnt out? Cause I have suffered from both. I will agree that alcohol and most drugs are likely going to make your problems worse or at the very least, keep you at whatever level of happiness you're currently at. I would say psychedelics and antidepressants fall outside of these categories. Many people take antidepressants for a short period of time and then go off of them. Similarly, psychedelics could potentially be a single trip and you're cured type scenario. The benefit of psychedelics as I understand them (though I have never done them personally) is that they allow you to gain a completely new perspective. With this new experience, you can begin to see the world in a more positive light after the experience is done, instead of having a dark cloud hanging over you at all times. It has more to do with kicking your mind out of a loop, as opposed to escaping reality.
like i said, someone who isn't me was able finally watch how he ate.
Swim grabbed a big plate, sat in front of a mirror, and ate it all!
It was definitely not a good experience for swim, but as you said, it was a mind opening one, because swim was able to watch himself as a third party, free from all the defense mechanisms that did not let him see what he saw before and for all those years.
After that, swim knew for sure he had a problem and as swim is a perfectionist, he wanted to solve or at least work that problem. But before the experience, swim did not see the issue as a problem, but merely "who he was".
Swim realizes now that no one ever "is" something, they just "are being (something) right now". and if you gain that notion, you realize that everything in yourself that you want to change can be changed with hard work and enough time.
NINJA EDIT: and to close the thought of the last paragraph: No one needed drugs to read that last paragraph, it is a notion simple enough to grasp. But, sometimes your actions and thought patterns are so grooved into your head that you need something to untangle/undo/rewire some stuff up, even temporarily, letting you see past your already defined outputs.
No need for the SWIM. It gives you no plausible legal deniability.
That's all I have to say. Glad you managed to perceive your problem (and therefore fix it). I too have found psychedelics helped me address issues in my life that I wasn't even aware of.
edit:
>Swim realizes now that no one ever "is" something, they just "are being (something) right now". and if you gain that notion, you realize that everything in yourself that you want to change can be changed with hard work and enough time.
I had that exact same realization on shrooms. What a succinct and beautiful way to put it.
SWIY is 100% correct about "is"-ness vs "being"-ness. It may be simple but it is incredibly profound. And yet, some things aren't actually changeable. Case in point, sexual orientation. Even with total personal commitment, it does not seem to be malleable. Not that it has never changed or evolved for anyone, but that hard work and time are not sufficient to create that change intentionally.
If drugs "remove the long standing subconscious filters and biases that one has built over their life," what replaces them? Does one simply continue living into posterity without filters? I argue not, and in fact that, over time, the filters tend to come back without repeated exposure to drugs and drug-thought, and one is given a choice: return slightly-modified to regular life, or commit to taking drugs regularly, whereby one absorbs new filters/biases that change one's relationship with the world and are almost equally limiting. These "drug" filters/biases may generate beliefs such as the following: reality lurks behind what you see; we are all deluded; society is a myth; money is a myth; we are all one; we are being tricked into believing in this reality and, therefore, someone is tricking us (paranoia); etc.
While I agree that psychedelics do offer the important function of removing the filters/biases, I caution against presenting them as a uniformly positive method of doing so. I think they replace those filters with ones of their own making, and while thus leading to a different schema than sober exposure to regular life, they do not necessarily lead to a "better" one.
> If drugs "remove the long standing subconscious filters and biases that one has built over their life," what replaces them?
Perhaps I should've phrased this better. These filters are removed temporarily (for the 8-12 hours that the drug is active), then it is up to the individual to do what they will with the findings while the filters are gone. I don't think one needs repeated exposure either. I have seen many cases among my friends, most have never felt the need to repeat the experience.
There are risks of course, and a change for the worse is a distinct possibility. A dramatic change like delusions and paranoia are fairly rare, but are ostensibly a risk. There is a reason why every sensible source advises to do mental prep-work, and in a clinical setting, the whole treatment is overseen by a professional.
Like any mind altering substance, they can be abused.
>I think they replace those filters with ones of their own making, and while thus leading to a different schema than sober exposure to regular life, they do not necessarily lead to a "better" one.
Yes, partially along this line of thought I have consciously decided to not take any psychedelic drugs at all (or drugs other than coffee really). I am quite happy with my status quo, and taking psychedelic drugs may pull me out of it. I do realize that psychedelics do dissolve the ego, but I find having an ego is quite helpful in life in that most of my main accomplishments thus far have been by me standing up for myself and taking a shot in the dark. And I couldn't have done so without an ego.
I just want to add, these kind of knowledge comes from within. It is not sufficient to communicate the ideas with words. You likely know this, but people reading may not understand. One of the foundational concepts to me is the difference between abstractions like language, and real experience and also the inherent limitations of language and the idea of false knowledge that comes from reading instead of experiencing.
Your brain is like a snowy hill. As you ride a sled down it, you develop ruts/grooves in the snow. Eventually, no matter where you start sledding from, you'll end up at one of only a few locations at the bottom of the hill.
Psychedelics are like a fresh coat of powder, they let the brain reset some of the ruts, so certain starting conditions will end up in new resulting locations.
> the visual cortex normally applies a filtering mechanism to what the eyes see and correct problems. It acts as a common-sense filter to remove improbable or impossible information and augment, perhaps even add some extra detail to save the conscious part from being swamped with ridiculous data.
Your comment reminded me the "SEP field" (Somebody Else's Problem) from Douglas Adams' "Life, the Universe and Everything". It was a sort of invisibility cloak where people perceive something so inconceivable that it can't exist, so they ignore it. (In this book, a space ship landed at a cricket match.)
If you haven't read it already, you should totally read "How to Change Your Mind" by Michael Pollan. The book more or less agrees with your point (though I don't think the science has necessarily come to a solid conclusion on which mental disorders psychedelics are going to help relieve. I think alcoholism had a fairly high response rate, though). I believe the book "Capture" by David Kessler also covers the phenomena of how minds can end up "stuck" in some mode, so to speak, though I have yet to read that one.
The brain is in the end a neural network, and like all such devices, can get stuck in various local minima that are difficult to get out of. An old habit that has been reinforced through many years can take a considerable "shock" to dislodge. All the little cognitive and behavioral biases that one accumulates through their life get in the way in very subtle forms that are entirely sub-conscious.
What psychedelics like LSD, psilocybin and others can do, is remove or downregulate these internal filters for some time. To give an example: the visual cortex normally applies a filtering mechanism to what the eyes see and correct problems. It acts as a common-sense filter to remove improbable or impossible information and augment, perhaps even add some extra detail to save the conscious part from being swamped with ridiculous data. Mostly it just lets the sensory input through with little synthetic stuff. This means that the visual cortex has to have some sort of model of reality that it builds over time (with feedback from the consciousness). This filtering mechanism is one way mostly, the visual cortex modulates the input and adds information here and there, and then reinforces the internal model with feedback form the consciousness.
Now, under psychedelics, one gets all the output that the visual cortex can generate together with the actual real data from the eyes. The previously subtle filter applies the full transformation described by the internal model to the sensory data. This results in wacky outlandish shapes and impossible landscapes as reality is modified fully with all the information that the visual cortex has accumulated. Quite like the bizarre images generated by artificial CNNs when ran backwards!
So to arrive at my point, I posit that psychedelics can (not guaranteed of course), remove the long standing subconscious filters and biases that one has built over their life and offer the raw perspective on things. They remove all the useful illusions that the brain pulls over our eyes to get through our days. A thing that one tends to lose during a "trip" is control over the thought process, some call it ego death, a profound sensation of being able to observe one's thoughts from outside - as if unburdened by one's own insecurities and from an objective view. It isn't unpleasant at all, if anything it is liberating. It is always difficult to face one's own shortcomings, because of the importance that we place on the ego. Once that burden is removed, it becomes an experience of resignation and healing.
I want to avoid ascribing religious or transcendental characteristics to the process, far from it. It's a mere result of some very pleasant time spent being free from the tyranny of the ego and the subsequent introspection.