I go to raves, I take very modest amounts of LSD (100 maybe 150 micrograms), and the whole experience turns into very spiritual session where I dance with my entire being and let myself disolve into the Great Void.
It has lasting effects that go way beyond the effects of the drug.
However I think it's complicated to derive generalisms like saying it's a drug for everyone and everybody should take it. It's definitely not for everybody.
I'm also not going to be a hypocrite and say that you shouldn't do it. What I'll go and say is that it's your journey to figure out what you are going to invite into your life. In any case, depending on what you believe, you aren't actually here to figure things out. You already did. You are here to remember.
In more secular terms, you are here to do the required work to understand yourself, your circumstances, stand on the shoulder of giants and study the great minds that came before you. That will give you the necessary foundational philosophy to withstand and understand these experiences, should you choose to go through them. This is the only way to acquire a foundational respect for these substances and these experiences.
Have I done this work? Have I achieved the required level of understanding to make heads and tails of these experiences? Not for a while at least. It was rough the first couple of times. Very violent and crude, like rushing naked through a sea of people while being completely sure that that night is the last night of your life (I wasn't actually naked, it just felt like that and that everyone was eventually going to merge with me and that I should feel ashamed of it).
But with time and with the necessary exposure to understand the basics of existencialism I think I managed to pin down a more gentle form of this experience that can help me remember how to lay myself bare to the goddess and just be there when I dance.
So I think I can extend this invitation to anyone that feels brave enough to lift the reins of existence and reality and expose yourself to the truth. That everything is a story about the end of the world. About the beginning. And about everything at once.
It's scary, it's blissful and it's totally worth it.
thinkingtoilet · 24m ago
I would go as far as to say most people should have a psychedelic experience at least once in their life. There's nothing like it. It's one of the great pleasures of being alive.
gchamonlive · 8m ago
Totally. It's just that that realisation must come from within, because the experience change the very perception of reality and the relationship between yourself and everything else. With the wrong circumstances what would otherwise be a blissful experience can turn into a nightmare and this gate is likely forever closed for this person. I'd never forgive myself if I had this happen to someone else because of ill advice given by me.
bravesoul2 · 4h ago
> Almost a decade ago, a Baptist Biblical scholar, a Catholic priest, several rabbis, an Islamic leader, a Zen Buddhist roshi, and more than a dozen other religious leaders walked into a lab—and took high doses of magic mushrooms.
Wild. Maybe what the world needs.
jjulius · 3h ago
>Maybe what the world needs.
One line that's been recurring between my wife and I for the past half-decade or so is that the whole planet needs a good hotboxing.
robocat · 2h ago
That's the scattergun controlled approach of seeing like a state - give everyone medication even though it's only some that need it.
There's a small percentage ruining it for most: a few defectors when most are cooperators.
How do we identify the defectors?
What do you do if you identify defectors?
pasquinelli · 19m ago
you're being too fixated on individuals. everyone's doing the same thing: avoiding pain, uncertainty, and the limitation of their future choices; seeking pleasure, security, and to increase their future choices. the very few people who aren't doing that don't matter: history unfolds because people do what makes sense for them, not because some don't.
shiroiuma · 2h ago
>There's a small percentage ruining it for most: a few defectors when most are cooperators.
>What do you do if you identify defectors?
Simple: you put them in charge of the government. That's what we do now, after all.
gsf_emergency · 1h ago
So we just need to hotbox the people running gov :)
Spivak · 2h ago
It's maybe inefficient to hotbox everyone but I think I would rather that than give my government the green light to define and identify defectors.
If humanity has proven one thing over and over and over again to itself it's that we're terrible at witch hunts.
ElijahLynn · 2h ago
Exactly.
BitwiseFool · 3h ago
Quite frankly, that quote sounds like the premise of some new Netflix original series.
neilv · 3h ago
Also, an old joke format, presumably done intentionally by the writer.
Example: "A priest, a rabbi, and an atheist walk into a bar..."
867-5309 · 2h ago
"...and say ouch! it was an iron bar"
quantified · 4h ago
Pretty much nothing of substance in the writeup. All about studying and flaws.
jbm · 3h ago
Yeah I was honestly taken aback with how devoid of content this was. No personal stories or research.
Finding willing rabbis, however, was easy—the challenge was finding ones who were “psychedelically naïve.”
cluckindan · 44m ago
There are videos of such religious devotees riding around cities in a van, blasting psychedelic trance, and stopping at lights to dance around the intersection, offering acid to onlookers.
nikcub · 1h ago
this should probably be OP - much better original story, not a reblog, and it's written by Michael Pollan.
Kilenaitor · 3h ago
Also has a way better headline heh
swyx · 2h ago
michael pollan, one of the best in the biz
elevaet · 3h ago
I had to scroll up and down for a while, looking for the rest of the article. There wasn't any.
Yea I was wondering if there was some UI issue on mobile bc I kept scrolling down expecting more.
I stopped and read the whole thing to be disappointed.
A blurb about [thing i am interested in].
I now feel like yelling at some clouds.
testemailfordg2 · 10m ago
Better to stay sane...Have seen a lot of these kinds of articles, surely funding comes from somewhere...
guicen · 36m ago
What I find interesting is that the line between a religious experience and a brain chemistry event seems a lot thinner than we usually think. The clergy didn’t lose their faith after taking psilocybin. Instead, they seem to hold their beliefs a bit more loosely and focus more on what they feel in the moment.
In some ways, this feels like something humans have always done. Whether it's prayer, meditation, fasting, or psychedelics, people keep looking for ways to quiet the noise in their heads and feel connected to something bigger. The methods change, but the need stays the same.
leptons · 57s ago
>the line between a religious experience and a brain chemistry event seems a lot thinner than we usually think.
George Gurdjieff wrote about this many, many years ago (1890 – 1912). He called it "The Fourth Way".
“So that when a man attains will on the fourth way he can make use of it because he has acquired control of all his bodily, emotional, and intellectual functions. And besides, he has saved a great deal of time by working on the three sides of his being in parallel and simultaneously.
“The fourth way is sometimes called the way of the sly man. The ‘sly man’ knows some secret winch the fakir, monk, and yogi do not know. How the ‘sly man’ learned this secret — it is not known. Perhaps he found it in some old books, perhaps he inherited it, perhaps he bought it, perhaps he stole it from someone. It makes no difference. ‘The ‘sly man’ knows the secret and with its help outstrips the fakir, the monk, and the yogi.
“Of the four, the fakir acts in the crudest manner; he knows very little and understands very little. Let us suppose that by a whole month of intense torture he develops in himself a certain energy, a certain substance which produces certain changes in him. He does it absolutely blindly, with his eyes shut, knowing neither aim, methods, nor results, simply in imitation of others.
“The monk knows what he wants a little better; he is guided by religious feeling, by religious tradition, by a desire for achievement, for salvation; he trusts his teacher who tells him what to do, and he believes that his efforts and sacrifices are ‘pleasing to God.’ Let us suppose that a week of fasting, continual prayer, privations, and so on, enables him to attain what the fakir develops in himself by a month of self-torture.
“The yogi knows considerably more. He knows what he wants, he knows why he wants it, he knows how it can be acquired. He knows, for instance, that it is necessary for his purpose to produce a certain substance in himself. He knows that this substance can be produced in one day by a certain kind of mental exercises or concentration of consciousness. So he keeps his attention on these exercises for a whole day without allowing himself a single outside thought, and he obtains what he needs. In this way a yogi spends on the same thing only one day compared with a month spent by the fakir and a week spent by the monk.
“But on the fourth way knowledge is still more exact and perfect. A man who follows the fourth way knows quite definitely what substances he needs for his aims and he knows that these substances can be produced within the body by a month of physical suffering, by a week of emotional strain, or by a day of mental exercises—and also, that they can be introduced into the organism from without if it is known how to do it. And so, instead of spending a whole day in exercises like the yogi, a week in prayer like the monk, or a month in self-torture like the fakir, he simply prepares and swallows a little pill which contains all the substances he wants and, in this way, without loss of time, he obtains the required results.
I don't know if my brain is just wired up differently, but I've taken both LSD and Psilocybin many times and I did not find the experiences spiritual at all. I don't even know what people are talking about when they talk about spiritual experiences.
t-3 · 2h ago
Agreed. I really enjoy both acid and shrooms, but beyond appreciating the fractal beauty of trees and the patterns in carpets a bit more I wouldn't describe them as anything life-changing, let alone some kind of spiritual awakening. MDMA is similarly hyped up, but no, I never felt "connected to the mass of humanity" or whatever people talk about, I just got high and danced while gritting my teeth and rubbing on my head.
crtified · 1h ago
Decades ago I had the same type of what are people talking about?!, it's certainly not happening to me! surprise, regarding MDMA and the supposed wonders of dancing the night away. I felt the effects of the substance, but to me, nightclub dancing on MDMA still felt about as awkwardly-conscious, performative and unnecessary as it did without!
I suspect it's similar with the spiritual stuff, in principle. That is, if you're typically not a personality who tends towards that stuff - spiritual connections and revelations and such - then perhaps no substance will necessary make you so.
comrade1234 · 2h ago
Same. The hallucinations are fun and the laughter and joy but at the same time I can tell, even though I'm tripping, that it's just my brain mixing up its wiring and nothing to do with god.
DontchaKnowit · 28m ago
Lsd did it for me. Psilocybin was not spiritual at all.
For me the "spiritual exlerience" was just a profound sense of gratefulness. And then the idea that god and objective truth are one and the same. Whatever that means
sev · 2h ago
Dosage might play a factor, I presume.
esseph · 2h ago
I know people personally that psilocybin, LSD, and other substances do nothing for. All of them also have existing mental health disorders (extreme generalized anxiety, depression, bipolar, etc.).
kbenson · 2h ago
Nothing as in there is no outside noticeable change in behavior and they report no change in speaking, or nothing as it relates to the topic of this thread, in that they have no profound or spiritual experiences?
esseph · 1h ago
They might get a slight body high even on what would otherwise be considered heroic doses for their weight.
Things like lemon-tek to make the psilocybin more bioavailable were also not impactful to them, while being apparently extremely impactful for others.
vermilingua · 1h ago
It may be worth noting that antidepressant medication has a strong suppressing effect on psychedelics.
ghxst · 26m ago
Depends on the type! Generally might be true for SSRIs but not always for TCAs or lithium which can have the opposite effect. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8788508/ (just one example)
jdenning · 1h ago
Many psych meds diminish/block psychedelic effects.
konfusinomicon · 1h ago
it is there. in a former life ive only felt it under the spell of either of those substances mixed with others popular with today's party goers, but it is. very fleeting and hard to describe but I have the sparse memories of the feelings during the experiences and once you get there you will know and definitely remember
denkmoon · 2h ago
are you otherwise spiritual? I think that might be a prerequisite. Outside of spirituality did you have any experiences that were "profound" or "thought provoking"?
The Marsh Chapel Experiment, also called the "Good Friday Experiment", was an experiment conducted on Good Friday, April 20, 1962 at Boston University's Marsh Chapel. Walter N. Pahnke, a graduate student in theology at Harvard Divinity School, designed the experiment under the supervision of Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and the Harvard Psilocybin Project.[1] Pahnke's experiment investigated whether psilocybin would act as a reliable entheogen in religiously predisposed subjects.[2]
What are the odds that peddlers of religion would turn to promoting chemical drugs on the side ...
cluckindan · 41m ago
There’s that word again: ”drugs” - you just know anyone using that word in earnest is suffering from a narrow and naïve world view imposed upon them by generations of propaganda.
There is a huge experiential chasm between opiates and psychedelics. These two groups of substances have nothing to do with each other.
50208 · 8m ago
Why do people insist on complicating all this so much ... just take a hit of whatever and experience it for yourself.
xwowsersx · 3h ago
Promising title, but the article felt hollow... all surface, no depth. Skimmed anecdotes without probing them, offered no real insight or new perspective, and left me with absolutely nothing I couldn't have guessed from the headline alone :(
I vaguely remember some televised British experiment in which a clergyman replaced his usual bread with poppy seed bread -- toast for breakfast, sandwich for lunch, etc. -- then at the end of a month or so tested positive for some opioid threshhold
when you eat too many shrooms .. the shrooms eat back at you
caycep · 4h ago
a corollary is - can a clergy still practice if implanted with a neuromodulator device, i.e. deep brain stimulation, for epilepsy, or Parkinson's, or depression?
aspenmayer · 3h ago
There’s also this guy who you might have heard of, who created a little thing called Alcoholics Anonymous:
Apparently he was so serious about the potential for LSD to help alcoholics, that he almost got thrown out of Alcoholics Anonymous, the recovery group he helped create. He had written to a Catholic friend about this.
> LSD, by mimicking insanity, could help alcoholics achieve a central tenet of the Twelve Step programme proposed by AA, he believed. It was a matter of finding "a power greater than ourselves" that "could restore us to sanity". He warned: "I don't believe [LSD] has any miraculous property of transforming spiritually and emotionally sick people into healthy ones overnight. It can set up a shining goal on the positive side, after all it is only a temporary ego-reducer."
> But Wilson added: "The vision and insights given by LSD could create a large incentive – at least in a considerable number of people."
> His words were found in a late 50s letter to Father Ed Dowling, a Catholic priest and member of an experimental group he had formed in New York to explore the spiritual potential of LSD.
motohagiography · 39m ago
if you are interested in a rabbit hole, look up the appearance of the acacia shrub in the bible, a source of DMT, and how some people associate it with the burning bush. quite a trip.
I've said before that I think the geometric patterns in hallucinations resemble analog signal feedback, inside an analog signalling system (your brain) that has been impaired by a chemical. other dimensions and beings aren't necessary to the explanation. there are theraputic uses for breaking cycles of thought, but I'd argue a non-spiritual view of drugs based on signalling feedback and channel impairment is sufficient to describe their effects.
It has lasting effects that go way beyond the effects of the drug.
However I think it's complicated to derive generalisms like saying it's a drug for everyone and everybody should take it. It's definitely not for everybody.
I'm also not going to be a hypocrite and say that you shouldn't do it. What I'll go and say is that it's your journey to figure out what you are going to invite into your life. In any case, depending on what you believe, you aren't actually here to figure things out. You already did. You are here to remember.
In more secular terms, you are here to do the required work to understand yourself, your circumstances, stand on the shoulder of giants and study the great minds that came before you. That will give you the necessary foundational philosophy to withstand and understand these experiences, should you choose to go through them. This is the only way to acquire a foundational respect for these substances and these experiences.
Have I done this work? Have I achieved the required level of understanding to make heads and tails of these experiences? Not for a while at least. It was rough the first couple of times. Very violent and crude, like rushing naked through a sea of people while being completely sure that that night is the last night of your life (I wasn't actually naked, it just felt like that and that everyone was eventually going to merge with me and that I should feel ashamed of it).
But with time and with the necessary exposure to understand the basics of existencialism I think I managed to pin down a more gentle form of this experience that can help me remember how to lay myself bare to the goddess and just be there when I dance.
So I think I can extend this invitation to anyone that feels brave enough to lift the reins of existence and reality and expose yourself to the truth. That everything is a story about the end of the world. About the beginning. And about everything at once.
It's scary, it's blissful and it's totally worth it.
Wild. Maybe what the world needs.
One line that's been recurring between my wife and I for the past half-decade or so is that the whole planet needs a good hotboxing.
There's a small percentage ruining it for most: a few defectors when most are cooperators.
How do we identify the defectors?
What do you do if you identify defectors?
>What do you do if you identify defectors?
Simple: you put them in charge of the government. That's what we do now, after all.
If humanity has proven one thing over and over and over again to itself it's that we're terrible at witch hunts.
Example: "A priest, a rabbi, and an atheist walk into a bar..."
The New Yorker version looks more interesting.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/05/26/this-is-your-p...
Finding willing rabbis, however, was easy—the challenge was finding ones who were “psychedelically naïve.”
I stopped and read the whole thing to be disappointed.
A blurb about [thing i am interested in].
I now feel like yelling at some clouds.
George Gurdjieff wrote about this many, many years ago (1890 – 1912). He called it "The Fourth Way".
“So that when a man attains will on the fourth way he can make use of it because he has acquired control of all his bodily, emotional, and intellectual functions. And besides, he has saved a great deal of time by working on the three sides of his being in parallel and simultaneously.
“The fourth way is sometimes called the way of the sly man. The ‘sly man’ knows some secret winch the fakir, monk, and yogi do not know. How the ‘sly man’ learned this secret — it is not known. Perhaps he found it in some old books, perhaps he inherited it, perhaps he bought it, perhaps he stole it from someone. It makes no difference. ‘The ‘sly man’ knows the secret and with its help outstrips the fakir, the monk, and the yogi.
“Of the four, the fakir acts in the crudest manner; he knows very little and understands very little. Let us suppose that by a whole month of intense torture he develops in himself a certain energy, a certain substance which produces certain changes in him. He does it absolutely blindly, with his eyes shut, knowing neither aim, methods, nor results, simply in imitation of others.
“The monk knows what he wants a little better; he is guided by religious feeling, by religious tradition, by a desire for achievement, for salvation; he trusts his teacher who tells him what to do, and he believes that his efforts and sacrifices are ‘pleasing to God.’ Let us suppose that a week of fasting, continual prayer, privations, and so on, enables him to attain what the fakir develops in himself by a month of self-torture.
“The yogi knows considerably more. He knows what he wants, he knows why he wants it, he knows how it can be acquired. He knows, for instance, that it is necessary for his purpose to produce a certain substance in himself. He knows that this substance can be produced in one day by a certain kind of mental exercises or concentration of consciousness. So he keeps his attention on these exercises for a whole day without allowing himself a single outside thought, and he obtains what he needs. In this way a yogi spends on the same thing only one day compared with a month spent by the fakir and a week spent by the monk.
“But on the fourth way knowledge is still more exact and perfect. A man who follows the fourth way knows quite definitely what substances he needs for his aims and he knows that these substances can be produced within the body by a month of physical suffering, by a week of emotional strain, or by a day of mental exercises—and also, that they can be introduced into the organism from without if it is known how to do it. And so, instead of spending a whole day in exercises like the yogi, a week in prayer like the monk, or a month in self-torture like the fakir, he simply prepares and swallows a little pill which contains all the substances he wants and, in this way, without loss of time, he obtains the required results.
https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.5892/page/49/mode/2up
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Way
I suspect it's similar with the spiritual stuff, in principle. That is, if you're typically not a personality who tends towards that stuff - spiritual connections and revelations and such - then perhaps no substance will necessary make you so.
For me the "spiritual exlerience" was just a profound sense of gratefulness. And then the idea that god and objective truth are one and the same. Whatever that means
Things like lemon-tek to make the psilocybin more bioavailable were also not impactful to them, while being apparently extremely impactful for others.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_Chapel_Experiment
The Marsh Chapel Experiment, also called the "Good Friday Experiment", was an experiment conducted on Good Friday, April 20, 1962 at Boston University's Marsh Chapel. Walter N. Pahnke, a graduate student in theology at Harvard Divinity School, designed the experiment under the supervision of Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and the Harvard Psilocybin Project.[1] Pahnke's experiment investigated whether psilocybin would act as a reliable entheogen in religiously predisposed subjects.[2]
What are the odds that peddlers of religion would turn to promoting chemical drugs on the side ...
There is a huge experiential chasm between opiates and psychedelics. These two groups of substances have nothing to do with each other.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_W.#Psychedelic_therapy
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-5922.13027
Apparently he was so serious about the potential for LSD to help alcoholics, that he almost got thrown out of Alcoholics Anonymous, the recovery group he helped create. He had written to a Catholic friend about this.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/aug/23/lsd-help-alc...
> LSD, by mimicking insanity, could help alcoholics achieve a central tenet of the Twelve Step programme proposed by AA, he believed. It was a matter of finding "a power greater than ourselves" that "could restore us to sanity". He warned: "I don't believe [LSD] has any miraculous property of transforming spiritually and emotionally sick people into healthy ones overnight. It can set up a shining goal on the positive side, after all it is only a temporary ego-reducer."
> But Wilson added: "The vision and insights given by LSD could create a large incentive – at least in a considerable number of people."
> His words were found in a late 50s letter to Father Ed Dowling, a Catholic priest and member of an experimental group he had formed in New York to explore the spiritual potential of LSD.
I've said before that I think the geometric patterns in hallucinations resemble analog signal feedback, inside an analog signalling system (your brain) that has been impaired by a chemical. other dimensions and beings aren't necessary to the explanation. there are theraputic uses for breaking cycles of thought, but I'd argue a non-spiritual view of drugs based on signalling feedback and channel impairment is sufficient to describe their effects.
Nevertheless, it was ground breaking for 1962 and had a huge impact.
Not so significant in the twenty first century.