Nevertheless, it was ground breaking for 1962 and had a huge impact.
Not so significant in the twenty first century.
Wild. Maybe what the world needs.
Example: "A priest, a rabbi, and an atheist walk into a bar..."
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?
If humanity has proven one thing over and over and over again to itself it's that we're terrible at witch hunts.
>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.
History ABSOLUTELY unfolds the way it does because they were tired of being 'taking the reasonable/way that makes sense path'.
You can argue that every invention from the wheel forward has had this approach.
That's a pretty good explainer for psychology. We have a Coke addled Freud who is the father of it all and another drug abuser shepherding the USA.
I wonder how many people have tried to replicate their experiments and succeeded?
Kinda fills in some unspoken gaps about the 'discipline' of psychology...
Psychology is very dependent on statistics and experiments. That can be complicated and after going through those classes I simply don't trust the majority of students (or their professors) to get any of that right. It's why I roll my eyes every time the radio guy talks about the results of another pop psych study. I knew some psych majors big into new age crystal stuff and legitimately believed it all as well as a bunch of additional pseudoscience garbage. That kind of thing is a lot more rare in say physics where it's really hard to get through the program without a rational brain.
Again, there are probably some brilliant folks drawn to that field who knows how to do solid research, but my experiences suggest that the signal to noise ratio may be suspect.
PhDs, though - some more rigor is involved. Definitely not C-grade level folks (or if they were, they've rectified that problem). But still, we do have a replication crisis...
From what I've seen as an outsider, a lot of studies are taken as fact without any confirmation with attempts to reproduce the results. And many results suffer from questionable methodology.
A big part of the problem is that doing psychology well is really, really hard. You are dealing with human subjects, which means there are a lot of ethical and regulatory constraints. A lot of experiments that might give you important insights are unethical and/or illegal. Getting people to participate in studies is difficult and expensive, which means sample sizes are often much smaller than they should be. And there are often significant biases in the population sampled (I believe most psychology studies are done on college students... often psychology students). And then there is the inherent complexity of the subject. Every person's brain is different, and finding general rules that apply to the incredible diversity of human minds is very, very difficult. And finally, I suspect that a lot of psychologists are not trained in statistics and experimental methodology to the same degree as scientists in "harder" sciences.
For a current-times look into nitrous, observe Kanye West. The rumor mill (plus believable evidence) suggests he is out of his MIND on large amounts of N2O frequently, and his erratic and grandiose behavior reinforces the idea. That's probably not ideal for American psychology if "the father" of it is similarly whacked lol.
For a historical look into cocaine, observe Sigmund Freud. There was a great book called Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography [0] by Dominic Streatfeild, the second-third of which covers Freud's discovery and promotion of cocaine as a cure-all.
TL;DR Freud was searching for a drug, any drug, that hadn't been claimed yet by a scientific promoter to then market as his own for fame and fortune, stumbled upon cocaine (hydrochloride, not freebase), started doing a lot of it, proselytizing it (it could cure your heroin addiction!) etc, before the whole thing kind of collapsed around him.
While arguably fun, it's a substance that is the polar opposite of "introspection" and drives a lot of behavior that honestly a person might seek a therapist or psychologist to resolve LOL, so for a psychologist to promote it early in his career who eventually progresses into more or less defining psychology as a field, well ... I just find it curious and would wonder what theories Freud would have put forth had he come to be in a time with psychedelics available instead. That's all!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocaine:_An_Unauthorized_Biogr...
Now do tech CEOs
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.
Things like lemon-tek to make the psilocybin more bioavailable were also not impactful to them, while being apparently extremely impactful for others.
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
He accidentally took a very high dose in his 20s and also read a bunch of books on the subject for a while, by Leary and so on. He equated it to a trip to the mirror maze, but nothing more. He doesn’t find it worth it and warns against it since for some people it lingers for too long. He is puzzled about people calling the experience „spiritual“ too.
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]
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.
Would it make a difference if it was a 70 year old who is still open minded and curious about life, the universe, and everything? (given that I'd guess that any 70+ year old willing to do LSD is likely to be as per this description).
Legitimately interested in your answer / reasoning (mainly because my plan was to experience a number of different drugs once the rest of my life, that could have been put at risk by drugs, is kinda setup and done well enough).
Some drugs increase heart rate dramatically - the older you are the more susceptible to atherosclerosis or other circulatory diseases. There’s more medical risk the older you are for sure. However, you may find you only need a little bit. Some drugs are funny. Some work on first try, other takes a couple tries before your brain understands the chemical.
I know some folks in the HN audience will not like this example, but Elon Musk is one.
An older cannonical example is Timothy Leary.
No names are coming to mind, but I feel like there have been plenty of psychedelic informed cults, with cult leader narcissists who continue to abuse people despite experiencing psychedelics.
It may open some doors and cause you to consider more angles, and for many people it helps them with empathy and connectedness, but in another sense it's amplifying what you've already got. A "bad" input can get amplified too.
But then he noticed that the results really depend on who is taking it and what their world view is. If you do not have any inclination towards that mystic space, you will not get the ego death. It is as Eckhart Tolle said "just your senses turned up to 11", that is if there is nothing else you can get out of it.
As Douglas Rushkoff said "If you give tech bros a hit of psychedelics, all you get is tech bros on psychedelics." There is no higher sense achieved.
In any case, this is why I think philosophy is the required work to be done so that we can invite spiritualism and mysticism into our lives and potentially experience them with these reality altering drugs.
This is only true at the physical level. At another level, the only thing that “exists” is a mind. If all you have is a bunch of rocks floating through space with nothing to perceive it, the universe is indistinguishable from emptiness. Experience lives at the intersection of instantiated reality and thought / perception. You need both.
You can also imagine travelling along the axis of an idea or an archetype through time and space. For example, the idea of lovers or warriors or something. Each instantiation of that idea in someone exists along that axis. The idea can only come into being inside a physical reality or simulation. But the idea itself is eternal. The idea of the number 1 doesn’t “need” the universe.
Ideas aren’t made out of atoms.
This is an amazing line. I must admit: the first time I tried LSD I had some code open on my laptop. Before the trip I was curious what programming on LSD would be like, so at some point dutifully I sat down in front of my editor. I was immediately utterly transfixed by the colours of the text cursor as it pulsed. Then I lost myself watching hover states as I moved the mouse around. Needless to say, I didn’t get any programming done.
I remember thinking how strange and hilarious it was that, while sober, I care at all about programming. It all seemed so hollow.
A lot more happened on the trip - the whole thing was incredibly profound and insightful. But all these years later, I still have a crystal clear image of that pulsing cursor etched in my memory.
I am as agnostic-atheist as they come and would go as far as to say I find mysticism offensive to good sense. But I've experienced the ego death parts of LSD, and consider I have come to know myself more through it.
Frankly I think this idea that you have to be studied in philosophy and open to woo-y nonsense to fully appreciate psychedelics is hilarious and self-aggrandising.
Just to offer a counterpoint:
“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.” ― Kurt Vonnegut
The more I experience, the more I think maybe that's a pretty good point, too.
If you choose to fart around, whatever that means, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Since there's no salvation, farts are also meaningless, and at the same time totally meaningful given the circumstances.
A nihilist would say fart or don't fart it's all pointless.
It very much IS set and setting and the powers that be really want to fuck up the set. Try it. You won't regret it.
My advice has to be very careful in order not to incentivise unprepared people who would otherwise have a great trip. We have to be responsible, even if it'll only gonna negatively affect a very small percentage of them. Applied philosophy of care 100%
Other than that, I totally agree.
When I was in college, I tracked down some mushrooms, bought em, and ran away on my own to trip out. I found myself on a bench, next to a river surrounded by trash in a mixed industrial area. I saw cig butts and empty beer cans on the ground. Looked at my ripped jeans and thought "Am I trash? Why am I here?" It was a shitty feeling and I got really down. I realized that getting fucked up for its own sake was stupid, and it's about sharing time with others that's actually important, no matter what drug you're on. I started crying and felt horrible, but the next day, I had a new sense of worth and a new frame of reference for the world that has persisted for 20+ years. I'll always remember that shitty trip on that shitty bench.
My advice to people who haven't tried it tends to be that if you're scared, you should abstain. Your presuppositions of what the experience will be, will in themselves shape the experience. If you expect a bad time, you're likely to get one.
There's also a group of people who are curious about using psychedelics to treat mental disorder. My advice to those people is to find a way to do it in a clinical setting. Psychedelics have enormous potential for effectively curing anxiety disorders, but it's not just a matter of taking the drugs. The experience must be guided by a psychologist who knows what the goal is. And then integrated and processed afterwards, also with expert help. Psychedelucs are not a treatment in and of themselves, more like an accelerant of psychotherapy. The therapy is still necessary, it's just that psychedelics allow you to do in a handful of sessions what could take years in a sober patient. As a case in point, I have a severe anxiety disorder myself, and my many self-initiated experiments with psychedelics haven't magically cured it. If combined with therapy, it might have. I'm still waiting for clinical practice to catch up, so I can have psychedelic therapy.
I’m well aware through my own testing
EDIT: I’m not saying it is useless information for your life but it is particular to your life, not truths of the universe like the person I replied to claimed
There is no special 'truth' in LSD, certainly no truths outside the self - while you can learn some things about your internal experience from it, it also repeatedly provokes in its users a false sense of the profound. People experience 'realisations' which are pure nonsense when recalled or examined later.
It makes your brain go haywire in all sorts of fun and interesting ways. But if you're looking for the meaning of life in there you're doing it wrong, and I dread to think what you might find.
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.
This is literally a thread about psychedelics, not allegory.
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.
George Gurdjieff wrote about this many, many years ago (1890 – 1912). He called it "The Fourth Way". This is the relevant passage from the book "In Search of the Miraculous":
“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.
In other words, even if you assume that the vision of God/feeling of divine presence/etc. is valid, there are two methods of implementation: either it’s done in a supernatural way that defies physics and logic; or it’s done in a way that accords with the structure of reality (as in, chemically.)
The latter seems a lot more elegant to me, IMO.
https://www.altaonline.com/culture/cartoons/a42179654/weekly...
so hard to track these things down with google nowadays. Treats every word you add as an "or" like yahoo used to when google took their search market. The move from search engine to suggestion engine has been a disaster from my point of view. Hard to see how it would be more profitable.
edit: better link
quantified•7h ago
jbm•6h ago
The New Yorker version looks more interesting.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/05/26/this-is-your-p...
Kilenaitor•6h ago
swyx•4h ago
electroglyph•4h ago
Finding willing rabbis, however, was easy—the challenge was finding ones who were “psychedelically naïve.”
cluckindan•3h ago
nikcub•4h ago
elevaet•6h ago
bookofjoe•5h ago
RobRivera•4h ago
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.
quantified•2h ago
anigbrowl•3h ago