Messages that can only be understood under the influence of psychedelics

I feel like time goes by “slower” for me ever since I did a heroic dose a few years ago. Used to be stressed the f out all the time. Now I feel like I can enjoy every full second. Crazy how much time we have in life when we just stop paying attention to the negative energies like stress and instead channel them into storage for something positive later.

I’ve always been efficient and quick at learning new things and doing work. So it’s like being given a superpower to “slow” time.

(Obviously time hasn’t slowed down only for me. It’s just how I personally perceive it now.)

The problem is, of course, you have no idea if that dose is what caused the change. That change in personal outlook may have been coming your direction anyway, or you may have experienced it sooner if you hadn't been doing LSD at all.

> The problem is, of course, you have no idea if that dose is what caused the change

What problem exactly? This seems like a dismissive take on someone's positive experience.

Are your referring to the scientific problem of studying cause & effect of the psychedelic experience? Science is figuring that out.

"You don't know if you were gonna have a life changing epiphany next week or not!!!"

The radical changes in mentality from psychedelics is well documented. Not understood but documented.

No I’m talking about this one’s person’s experience. They are putting out their notion of cause and effect on a public forum and I am questioning it. That is OK, right?

People have life changing epiphanies without psychedelics all the time though, and people (me) take psychedelics without having them. So yeah, GP could have been due for one.

What you seem to be after is scientific evidence. The problem is that these substances by nature cannot be double-blind trialed because blinding is impossible. So as individuals we all need to make a decision whether we would like to try them or not for ourselves and the best evidence we can ever hope to get is subjective and anecdotal. If you want to deny yourself the potential of these life changing experiences without scientific evidence then that’s your choice. In my opinion it’s your great loss too.

> all the time

Humans do all the time. A person does very seldomly.

I think the more scary issue - what else changed in their brain. Maybe they've changed in such a way that they perceive something as a power when it is a drain.

"That is OK, right?"

The way you are doing it, could maybe be improved.

"The problem is, of course, you have no idea if that dose is what caused the change"

You clearly judged here based on little information. How do you know, that he cannot know?

(Unless you argue about philosophical limits of "knowing")

When till time X there was behavior Y and at time X there was a strong trip - and afterwards differences,then it seems pretty linked to me.

> these substances by nature cannot be double-blind trialed because blinding is impossible

That's a bold claim. You can try multiple different substances, the test subjects know they ingest a psychedelic, but don't know which, which allows you to have a control group.

Clinical trials would face other issues, but not this one.

Maybe it isn't. What I mean is, it doesn't seem to be a problem for them. A peer reviewed study of their own life experience isn't necessary for them to be a lot happier post-trip than pre-trip. Correlated with many other peoples' experiences, there is at least strong correlation evidence between certain drug use and epiphanies.

Sure, "person ready to take drugs to have epiphany" might mean they were on the cusp of one anyway, but it doesn't really matter.

yes, but mostly without psychedelics.

Hey thanks, I'll work on that. You try and work on staying on topic and not making meta comments.

Well I guess I was not very clear with my words then. I didn't say it was a problem for them, and they seem to be perfectly happy at the idea of their big epiphany coming from LSD. But I wasn't taking issue with that, I believe they believe that. I simply meant the "problem" with ascribing the epiphany to LSD is there is no way to know in an individual case if LSD had anything to do at all with it, because we know very little on that subject at the current time.

You run into another problem here: those other psychedelics may also cause the same changes.

We know very little about a lot. Including things society believes we know a lot or all about. Scientific evidence isn’t infallible or the be all end all.

It still might be worth trying though, if it can be done ethically. It's not a perfect test, but it's halfway decent?

It is little-known but clearly established knowledge that psychedelics are very potent at curbing inflammation, including inflammation in the central nervous system. Inflammation in the CNS and feeling bad are highly correlated.

For more information, see this paper for instance – Psychedelics and Immunomodulation by Dr. Attila Szabo of the University of Norway, published in 2015: https://doi.org/10.3389%2Ffimmu.2015.00358

> The problem is, of course, you have no idea if that dose is what caused the change.

No, there's no problem. It doesn't change the fact that the dose is when it happened.

I mean, if one of ten happened while on psychedelics, and the person spent 0.0001% of their life under the influence of psychedelics, that's a pretty significant contribution.

Hrm.. does time going slower mean you overclocked your cpu? Are you able to accomplish more in a given amount of time? Say typing faster? Or is it just the perception of time passing that changed and maybe your ticks are further apart so that it seems like time has slowed but has actually remained constant?

Sorry, but that is quite similar. You asked a question and I decided to answer it. No meta comments initiated from my side, as far as I am aware.

(I did not take part in the conversation before).

So you are not really in a position to tell me, what to do, yet you did. And I am not in a position to tell you, what to do. I merly answered your open question on what I think you could improve.

But if you would like a meta comment from me: I think you might benefit from not considering every online discussion as something you have to win.

(I have been there as well)

I think this is an overly cynical take. I've had pretty deep rooted anxiety most of my life and it got worse after military service, to the point that I was probably a part time agoraphobe. My mushroom and LSD use coalesces with when that stopped.

It's okay to recognize that people consistently claim an effect, and to affirm that it is indeed a possible effect without knowing why.

i think it would be super interesting to do a study where we compared the effects of moderate/high-dose psychedelics to some other substance that had comparable subjective effects. but (a) i don't think such a control substance actually exists and (b) i strongly suspect that you'd see the same benefits to both groups - and then what conclusion do you draw from that?

I wasn’t making a point I was countering yours.

And I was countering your counter?

Was that not self-evident?

Also, countering a point is itself a point in a conversation.

And if you had wheels, you could be a bus.

It really isn't. They certainly have more insight into their subjective mental state than you, so basically you're just saying 'coincidence?!' about an unmeasurable phenomenon where the observer has qualia and you do not.

It'd be like if you said 'I had an idea yesterday...' and I responded with 'Did you though? Maybe you just overheard it and thought it was yours! Maybe you just thought of it now and incorrectly associated it with something you did yesterday!' It doesn't add any extra information while dismissing your own conscious experience completely.

Sure, but it's your problem, not OP's.

That's one of the signatures of a psychedelic experience. There's plenty of research on the subject, this study came up on a quick Google search.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsptsci.0c00194

> Our position contrasts the idea that subjective effects of psychedelics may be irrelevant to their therapeutic effects.

> The meaning and significance attributed to psychedelic experiences has been well established in laboratory settings. Psilocybin administration studies have repeatedly shown that participants frequently rate their psychedelic experiences as among the most meaningful of their entire lives (5,6,8,16−19) and they are sometimes compared to the birth of a first-born child or death of a parent. Due to their salience, such experiences may serve as narrative “inflection points” in one’s life that could provide an impetus for changing one’s identification with certain patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.