By this do you mean that psychedelics help you "think critically" about things? They don't really, in my experience (by which I mean my personal experience as well as years of observation of the culture.) Psychedelics touch a part of the brain that is the "I am having a profound mystical experience" center. What a person does with that is up to them. Often, this leads to a very un-critical approach to the psychedelic experience itself. You see this all over the language people use to talk about tripping. Even the phrase "get the message and then hang up the phone," a pretty laudable sentiment, is Ba problem in that there is assumed to be a "message" coming from drugs, which is silly. There is no message. At best, there is a sort of "lens" through which things are perceived that is different from the ordinary one. Integrating the experience requires a comparison between the two "images," not preferring the psychedelic one to the quotidian one. Down the latter path lies madness.
I also agree with the sentiment, as well as your comments on psychedelic culture, but would like to gently push back on a few aspects, in the interest of playing devil's advocate and also, probably, a desire to defend my own rationalisations for continuing to use a wide array of drugs even having been addicted to a few, and with full awareness that in many cases my use has been dysfunctional and in some cases, surely has caused more problems than it's solved. In the vernacular of the 12 step system I would surely be called an addict in denial.
I also admit to cringing slightly whenever I read people talking about plans to undertake a heavy psychedelic experience in order to "reset" or to "fix" themselves. By my observations, this is almost never going to be the outcome, and the problems whatever that person is wanting to solve are, likely, not ones that can be solved easily, even with the gentle prompts that psychedelics can give - such as, for example, although not exclusively, a different way of looking at the world, and at one's life.
The problem here I think - or one of them - is that the altered modes of consciousness that allows one to see reality in a different way - where your problems are no longer insurmountable, your depression, clearly irrational, whatever - are generally quite heavily reliant on one existing temporarily within this altered state. And, while sometimes lasting insights with real benefits can be gained, the psychedelic experience does nothing to actually teach you how to get there, really, or to teach you why this way of looking at the world, or your life, makes sense. It just thrusts you into it, blindfolded and unable to see the cognitive path taken to get there. Sometimes, the mere knowledge that this version of reality exists, and that the way you see things, the way you choose to act or whatever it is that perpetuates your problems does not have to be permanent, is enough. In many cases, it isn't, and thus requires constantly revisiting the psychedelic otherworld for a reminder. This, typically, is not sustainable, because the version of reality you are thrust into is different every time, and even more than that, the brain is not consistent in it's ability to interpret highly abnormal input, resulting in the very real possibility that the net outcome will be negative. The more often one returns to this place, the higher the likelihood that the experience will not be good, and any lasting insights will be negative ones. When this happens obviously it can be a real problem, because if one is reliant purely on psychedelic experiences to remain psychologically well, and that method is exposed as an unreliable one, the rug of security and wellness is pulled out from beneath them and the path forward can be very unclear.
All that said - I actually disagree that there is no message. The psychedelic experience itself is the message, and the message is, at it's most fundamental level,
there is far more in the space of conscious experience than you have previously known, or can know, from within the confines of your human mind.
This is a fairly neutral message, and does not, in and of itself, contain any measure of the value of any of these non-ordinary, arguably quite unnatural types of experiences - it only shows you that they exist, they are there.
I agree with your "lens" analogy regardless but I think if anything that actually supports the point I made above, because we already have a lens which we use to perceive reality. The default lens which most of us refer to as "sobriety" is the fairly diffuse and abstractly defined set of cognitive processes which operate continuously and subconsciously as the software that runs on the hardware of the brain, to interpret the cacophony of sense data we receive at every moment from the universe outside ourselves, and shape it into our experience of reality. The lens itself is not reality, of course, but our
perception and lived experience which is our inner world, facilitated by our brain's natural lensing of the somewhat organised chaos we live within, is our reality. A telescope, for example, viewing the night sky, is a lens. The stars are distant objects, outside of ourselves. What we see through the telescope is a lensed interpretation of something that we cannot ever perceive directly without firstly the lens of a powerful enough telescope - and, secondly, the lens of our mind's sense processing algorithms. Perhaps a better example is a camera that takes a picture. The camera is the lense, the picture is the representation of the reality, which is the object the camera is focused on. If we cannot ever see the object directly - which in the case of conscious experience, without methods of perception - senses, neuronal processes - we never can - the picture is a representation of reality, and as good as reality itself. Reality is a representation.
Actually as I've been typing this post I realise I need to make another distinction here as my initial thoughts may not be entirely accurate. Psychedelic drugs themselves can well be said to be lenses, they manipulate and distort the complex neurochemical processes going on within our physical brains, adding another refractor to the default reality lens we are born with, or otherwise stretching it, contorting it, injecting various modification algorithms, depending on how you want to view it. But the psychedelic experience itself - the
lived experience induced by a psychedelic drug - is not a lens, it is a version of reality, which is itself always an incomplete representation of the unknowable existence outside ourselves.
Of course, that lesson - that it's possible to experience reality in a different way - is not necessarily a useful one, and needs to be interpreted smartly, critically, and usually post-experiemce, back in the more familiar realm that we generally consider to be "consensus reality", when our higher reasoning functions are properly operational again, and not simply overwhelmed, nonfunctioning, unable to make rational judgements about anything because of the sheer alien nature of the psychedelic experience. I will note here though that the reason, in my view, for the severe impairment of higher reasoning that usually serves us very well when sober is at least partly down to the fact that most of us spend the vast majority of our lives existing solely within consensus reality, and thus our brains adapt to operate most effectively in the environment they usually exist within, for obvious evolutionary reasons. I think it's not inconceivable - and I implied this somewhat, I think, in an earlier post - that effective and rational ways to reason, in ways that are beneficial both to humanity and to the individual in the long term -
could occur
within altered modes of consciousness akin to those of the psychedelic experience. Just, quite possibly, not yet, and not with any psychedelic drug we currently have at our disposal.
I would like to express a few things about the 12 step method also as I have thought about it a lot in the last 6 months or so and have spoken at length to a few people currently within that world - and I'm sure I would be very interested to hear your opinion. But, this post is probably long enough for now so that can wait for another time.
I swear my productivity has increased two fold, so fast, so slick, so organized, got everything customized to my liking. I will never go back, and I'm only rocking a very standard Ubuntu.
