The Psychedelic Experience

[she phoenix]

^Is reality, as perceived by our sensory organs real? If so, then so is the psychedelic experience. If the psychedelic exp. is not real, neither then is sensory-reality.

The fire doesn't burn your hand; the heat does. The fire represnts the heat. The drugs don't trip you out; your mind does. The drugs catalyse the mind into new vista's. Ether way, the fire burns if YOU feel it.

Take the blue pill.

I love this. It's brilliant

 

[solistus]

I love this. It's brilliant

Agreed. The more interesting question than, "are psychedelic experiences real?" is, "what do we mean when we label something 'real' or 'not real'?"

If we're talking about physical reality, it's more clear what 'real' and 'not real' mean: if I say object X physically exists and assign some properties to X, saying, "no, X isn't real" is akin to saying there is no physical object with the properties I described. However, this empirical reductionist approach has the same flaw as any empirical reductionist ontology; it completely ignores the element of subjective experience, which is what is being discussed when we ask if the psychedelic _experience_ is real. (Almost) all of us can agree: the physical compounds we call psychedelics are physically real, the images they cause us to see are not produced by real physical objects, and the experience they produce is, well, "real"-ly experienced.

In terms of psychedelics, it's a fairly obvious conclusion for most that hallucinated objects are not real, but are rather manifestations of thoughts and ideas from one's own mind. However, there's a difference between saying "the pink elephant isn't real" and "this experience isn't real;" the latter implies that any meaning to be found in the experience should be discredited. In the Lacanian view, the term reality ultimately stands for our effort to describe and therefore make sense of the world around us through language; denying the reality of the psychedelic experience is indicative of a refusal to integrate that experience into one's symbolic understanding of the world.