In this part of the essay I examine the possible methods in order to reach these mystical experiences and the risks that come with them.
Can we open this doorway?
After reading these first-person accounts in
Let’s for the moment follow my intuitions and assume that these experiences are easier to arise in more suggestible people who lack what I call an inherent healthy cynicism and also lack the toolbox of critical thinking which often comes with this cynicism among the well educated.
The important question that follows from this is – as a people who to some extent have and happen to deeply value this healthy cynicism can we somehow reach these experiences without at the same time become suggestible and start accepting strange supernatural beliefs? Or in everyday language – can we reach these experiences without losing our mind?
If the answer is no, then it seems that for most of the secular folk today this doorway is closed and locked. You can’t just try to hold a nonsensical supernatural belief that flies in the face of your commonsense just in order to experience a mystical experience. It does not work that way. Just as you cannot deliberately fall asleep and you cannot deliberately stop understanding what someone speaks to you in a language that you can understand. And as I said above, even if you succeed there is not a guarantee that a mystical experience will necessarily follow.
Supernatural beliefs might not be the key. Some cultures reach these experiences by practicing for long hours, everyday kinds of breathing and focusing technics such as meditation and prayer. They do this for years in order to reach these mystical states and often in their supernatural worldview this state is their final goal. (Digression: Although many of them will involve their worldview into paradoxes by contradicting their previous claims – by saying that the, goal-striving state of mind is a dead end, working in order to reach this “final” state of mind is part of the western dual thinking and has to be eliminated). If this is true, it means that even if we do not buy any of the supernatural beliefs, we can reach these states by practicing these methods for a long time. This seems somewhat impractical. Although the scientific literature of mindfulness meditation shows that the people who practice it have all kinds of benefits such as, improvement of attention, the regulation of cortisol levels, an increase of the number of influenza antibodies and many other things. (for more see Kabat-Zinn 1995; Davidson and Kabat-Zinn et al. 2003; Rosenkrantz et al.
2003). And some of the experienced practitioners claim even greater benefits such as the ability to recognize and hold a distance between your self and your thoughts emotions and sensations and have greater control over them. I am not sure whether this last claim is supported by any strong empirical evidence, but anyway let’s get back to the main discussion.
Luckily, for most of the people who are in the business of instant gratification and are certainly not ready to follow the obscure sketchy way of some spiritual and religious practitioners there seems to be a simple key to instantly open this doorway.
In the 1962 Walter Pahnke – a student at the Harvard Divinity School designed a double-blind experiment for his Ph.D. thesis in which he gave the experimental subjects a high dose of the psychedelic psilocybin – commonly known as magic mushrooms. He wanted to empirically examine the difference between the experiences reported by mystics and those seemingly mystical experiences induced by the psychodelic drug psilocybin. He and his team recruited 20 Christians – students in theology. The experimental conditions in which the study was done were specifically chosen in order to optimize for spiritual, religious, mystical experience. In fact, the study was conducted inside the Marsh chapel on the day of Good Friday. Hence this classic study is known in the literature as the “Good Friday experiment” (Pahnke, 1963)
According to the results of the surveys specifically designed to measure mystical experiences, the responses of the subjects were indistinguishable from the responses given by the mystics on the same surveys. These experiences were strong and really meaningful for the subjects.
Another researcher, (Doblin, 1991) has done a follow-up study 25 years after this study. He found 19 of the 20 participants who participated in the Good Friday experiment and asked them regarding this experience. The experimental subjects showed gratitude for the chance to participate in this study and have said that this mystical experience had noticeably affected their lives in a good way.
After a few decades of the dark ages in psychedelic research due to the negative campaign, in 2006 a carefully designed double-blind study by prestigious researchers from John Hopkins University again confirmed that a high dose of the psychedelic called psilocybin can safely and reliably induce a mystical experience typically described by the subjects as the dissolution of the ego and sense of becoming one with nature or the universe. This description seems to share the common core characteristics outlined in the second part of this essay.
According to the surveys designed to measure mystical experiences, 22 of the 36 subjects in the experimental group had reported a complete mystical experience. On the other hand, those in the control group who received a placebo pill of Ritalin, only 4 had reported a complete mystical experience.
According to the measures of personal meaningfulness and spiritual experience, 67% of the subjects evaluated the experience as “the single most meaningful experience” or as “one of the top five most meaningful experiences in their lives”. They compared it to meaningful important events such as the birth of a first child or compared it to a tragic but important event such as the death of a parent. Furthermore, researchers have administered surveys to measure the third-person accounts of those who are close to the subjects. These results have shown that those around the subjects have noticed that there was a significant positive change in the behavior of the subject after this experience. Griffiths et al. (2008) have done a follow-up study with the same experimental subjects. As they report:
At the 14-month follow-up, 58% and 67%, respectively, of volunteers rated the psilocybin-occasioned experience as being among the five most personally meaningful and among the five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives; 64% indicated that the experience increased well-being or life satisfaction; 58% met criteria for having had a ‘complete’ mystical experience.
This study remarkably shows that the profound experience has not just momentary but persistent long-term positive psychological effects on the subjects.
How does this happen? It is a complex biochemical reaction in the brain that current neuroscience is not able to fully explain. Even if we know what fully happens in the brain, that will not help us much. What is of our interest here are the psychological effects – that we can subjectively experience which are caused by this biochemical reaction in the brain.
What follows is the full account of psychological effects of LSD – a psychedelic compound which has similar but not identical effects as the psychedelic psilocybin which was mentioned in the previous paragraph. This brilliant account is given by the renowned psychiatrists James B. Bakalar and Lester Grinspoon in their classic reference book “Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered”:
This topic has supplied volumes of eloquence. The enormously variable effects have been described as an unspecific intensification of mental processes. They can be classified, roughly, as changes in perception, changes in feelings, and changes in thought—although carving up any experience in this way is somewhat arbitrary, and although this particular experience often has the special property of making such distinctions seem meaningless. Perceptually, LSD produces an especially brilliant and intense impact of sensory stimuli on consciousness. Normally unnoticed aspects of the environment capture the attention; ordinary objects are seen as if for the first time and with a sense of fascination or entrancement, as though they had unimagined depths of significance. Aesthetic responses are greatly heightened: colors seem more intense, textures richer, contours sharpened, music more emotionally profound, the spatial arrangements of objects more meaningful. Other effects include heightened body awareness and changes in the appearance and feeling of body parts, vibrations and undulations in the field of vision, heightened depth perception and distortions of perspective, prolongation of afterimages, the appearance of physiognomies and expressions in inanimate objects, and synesthesia (hearing colors, seeing sounds, etc.). Time may seem to slow down enormously as more and more passing events claim the attention, or it may stop entirely, giving place to an eternal present. When the eyes are closed, fantastically vivid images appear: first geometrical forms and then landscapes, buildings, animate beings, and symbolic objects. The emotional effects are even more profound than the perceptual ones. The drug taker becomes extraordinarily suggestible, reacting with heightened sensitivity to faces, gestures, and small changes in the environment. As everything in the field of consciousness assumes unusual importance, feelings become magnified to a degree of intensity and purity almost never experienced in daily life; love, gratitude, joy, sympathy, lust, anger, pain, terror, despair, or loneliness may become overwhelming. Hidden ambivalent emotion becomes fully conscious, so that two seemingly incompatible feelings may be experienced at the same time. It is possible to achieve either unusual openness and emotional closeness to others or an exaggerated detachment that makes others seem like grotesque puppets or robots. The extraordinary sensations and feelings may bring on fear of losing control, paranoia, and panic, or they may cause euphoria and even bliss. Short-term memory is usually impaired, but forgotten incidents from the remote past may be released from the unconscious and relived. Introspective reflection with a sense of deep, sometimes painful insight into oneself or the nature of man and the universe is common; often the experience is considered somehow more real or more essential than everyday life, and the drug user feels himself to have transcended the trivial and absurd preoccupations of his fellows—the “game world” of ordinary consciousness. There are also profound changes in the sense of self: the ego may separate from the body so that one’s feelings and perceptions seem to belong to someone else or to no one; or the boundary between self and environment may dissolve so completely that the drug user feels at one with other people, animals, inanimate objects, or the universe as a whole. Advanced states of intoxication produce transformations in consciousness that affect thought, perception, and feeling at once. The drug user becomes a child again as he relives his memories, or he projects himself into the series of dreamlike images before his closed eyelids and becomes the protagonist of symbolic dramas enacted for the mind’s eye. Actions, persons, and images in this dreamworld or even in the external world may become so intensely significant and metaphorically representative that they take on the character of symbols, myths, and allegories. The drug user may feel that he is participating in ancient rites or historical events that occurred before his birth; some-times he interprets these as memories of a past incarnation. Users may also believe that they are perceiving normally unconscious physiological processes or experiencing themselves as nerve cells and body organs. They may identify themselves with animals, or feel themselves to be reliving the process of biological evolution or embryonic development. They may experience loss of self as an actual death and rebirth, which they undergo with anguish and joy of overwhelming intensity. They may believe that they are encountering gods or demons, or that they have left the body and can look down on it from above or abandon it to travel instantly to a faraway place. The many degrees of mystical ecstasy culminate in what Hindu theology has described as sat-chit-ananda, being-awareness-bliss; here for an eternal moment all contradictions are reconciled, all questions answered, all wants irrelevant or satisfied, all existence encompassed by an experience that is felt to define ultimate reality: boundless, timeless, and ineffable.
Before I continue with the assessment of risks, it is important to really have in mind that some of these subjective experiences can be extremely bad. And this is part of why psychedelics are not that widespread among the public. They are an extremely sharp double-edged sword which might give you extreme blissful nirvana or might give you the opposite – unimaginable suffering. You have been warned. But before you get scared and give up your interest in psychedelics it seems as the dosage is really important when it comes to controlling the experience and avoiding distress. According to a recent review in Nature about the research in LSD:
In a controlled setting, the subjective effects of LSD were predominantly positive (Dolder et al, 2016; Schmid et al, 2015). Mean group ratings of ‘good drug effect’ and ‘drug liking’ on visual analog scales (VASs) reached 90% of maximal possible VAS scores after administration of 200 μg LSD (Schmid et al, 2015). In contrast, LSD produced only small (<25%) mean group increases in ‘negative drug effect’ and ‘fear’ (Dolder et al, 2017; Schmid et al, 2015). However, transiently greater ratings of negative drug effects (>50%) are seen in approximately half of the subjects at a 200 μg dose of LSD (Dolder et al, 2017). Thus, within a
Matthias E Liechtisession all subjects experience positive drug effects but some also negative drug effects. Profound anxiety or panic was not experienced, and pharmacological sedation was not needed (Dolder et al, 2016; Schmid et al, 2015).
James B. Bakalar and Lester Grinspoon also emphasize the unpredictable nature of the experiences induced by psychedelics:
Some of these effects are more common than others, but few of them occur with any reliability. One person may feel only nervousness and vague physical discomfort from a dose that plunges another into paranoid delusions and a third into ecstasy; and the one who feels ecstatic joy now may experience infinite horror or grief the next time, or even the next moment. For this
reason people who advocate the use of LSD always rightly emphasize appropriate set (mood, personality, expectation) and setting (physical, social, and cultural environment). But the drug—or rather the character and emotional state of the drug user whose perceptions, feelings, and memories it intensifies—is so unpredictable that even the best environment and the highest conscious expectations are no guarantees against a painful experience.
The safety of using psychodelics
At this point of this
Indirect risks
Although the classic psychedelics have not been directly responsible for causing death, the judgment of users is certainly impaired while under the influence of these drugs. This is a particular concern when hallucinogens are used in unsupervised settings. Users may believe that they are invincible or possess superpowers and may do things they would not normally consider, such as believing they can fly (Reynolds and Jindrich, 1985), jumping from buildings (Keeler and Reifler, 1967), or incurring severe ocular damage by prolonged staring at the sun (Schatz and Mendelblatt, 1973; Fuller, 1976).
Also, since psychedelics are illegal, there is a risk of ending up in jail and to add to that you can never be sure that what you get on the black market will be what the shady guy told you it is. So for example in the case of LSD as the guys from Erowid point out:
Since 2013, some blotter and liquid “acid” being sold in the Americas and Europe contains NBOMe compounds instead of LSD. The NBOMe chemicals can cause strong effects even on a single standard hit of blotter (1/4″ (6mm) square). Unlike LSD, NBOMes can cause death. NBOMe compounds are usually bitter while LSD-containing liquid or blotter has only a mild metallic flavor or no flavor at all.
That is why psychonauts have advised the public to respect these drugs and to take all the precautionary steps such as testing your drug, taking an appropriate dose, having someone to stay with you and keep your body safe.
Furthermore, there have been guidelines written by clinical researchers to maximize the safety of doing clinical research with psychedelics. These practices can also be used to minimize the risk of recreational use of psychedelics. David E. Nichols summarizes their work:
Psychedelic administration in humans results in a unique profile of effects and potential adverse reactions that need to be appropriately addressed to maximize safety. The primary safety concerns with psychedelics are largely psychologic rather than physiologic in nature. Somatic effects vary but are relatively insignificant, even at doses that elicit powerful psychologic effects. The proposed guidelines extend and complement the recommendations of Fischman and Johanson (1998) for high-dose hallucinogen research. The guidelines include 1) the presence of two “monitors” with some medical knowledge, knowledge of ASCs, and a degree of clinical sensitivity; 2) a physical environment that is safe, aesthetically pleasing, and comfortable; 3) careful subject preparation, including several meetings to establish rapport and trust with the monitors; 4) a detailed consent form and explanations of the study procedures, detailed discussions about the range of potential experiences, and time of onset and duration of the effects; and 5) an available physician in the event of an untoward medical reaction. Anyone contemplating carrying out a clinical research program with a psychedelic is strongly encouraged to read the detailed guidelines presented by Johnson et al. (2008).
Physical health
The recent pharmacological review mentioned above states the following:
Although there is a general public perception that psychedelic drugs are dangerous, from a physiologic standpoint they are in fact one of the safest known classes of CNS drugs. They do not cause addiction, and no overdose deaths have occurred after ingestion of typical doses of LSD, psilocybin, or mescaline. Cohen (1967) and Jaffe (1985) have both stated that death due to direct LSD toxicity is unknown. Indeed, recreational users who have consumed massive doses of LSD have survived. For example, eight individuals who believed they had cocaine accidentally insufflated an extremely high dose of LSD. Their plasma LSD levels were reported as between 1000 and 7000 μg/100 ml (recall that a typical total oral dose of LSD might be 100–200 μg). These individuals all became comatose, with hyperthermia, vomiting, light gastric bleeding, and respiratory problems. With hospital treatment, however, all eight survived and without apparent residual effects (Klock et al., 1974).
David E. Nichols
There is nothing in the scientific literature on psychedelics that shows any physical health risks. The same team of scientists who have done the famous 2006 study and have written the guidelines for safe administration of high doses of psychedelics in clinical settings assert that psychedelics are not addictive and they do not damage any organs in the body, furthermore they are not neurotoxic, as in the case of some other drugs such as alcohol and ecstasy. They also mention that psychedelics can raise the heart rate and the blood pressure. But none of their patients ever experienced a dangerous rise in blood pressure or had to be treated with medications in order to control this rise. Also, it is good to have in mind that in their study their subjects were old terminally ill patients which is a risk group when it comes to coronary issues.
In a recent study Schmid et al. (2015), gave
Administration of LSD to healthy subjects produced pronounced alterations in waking consciousness that lasted 12 hours. The predominant effects induced by LSD included visual hallucinations, audiovisual synesthesia, and positively experienced derealization and depersonalization phenomena. Subjective well-being, happiness, closeness to others, openness, and trust were increased by LSD. Compared with placebo, LSD decreased PPI. LSD significantly increased blood pressure, heart rate, body temperature, pupil size, plasma cortisol, prolactin, oxytocin, and epinephrine.
The important thing for us here is that they report that:
Adverse effects produced by LSD completely subsided within 72 hours. No severe acute adverse effects were observed.
Mental health
In the case of mental health, our knowledge of the long term effects of psychedelics is not that clear. For long there has been a concern that psychedelics can trigger psychosis in those who
This Popular Science article summarizes it well:
Two neuroscientists from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology looked at associations between lifetime psychedelic use and mental health with data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health in the United States. More than 13 percent of the 130,152 randomly selected survey respondents reported they had used psychedelics like LSD, psilocybin, mescaline and peyote at least once in their life. The study found that psychedelic use wasn’t significantly associated with serious psychological distress, receiving or needing mental health treatment or psychiatric symptoms.
The study didn’t find any evidence for LSD flashbacks or hallucinations. Psychedelic users were likely to be younger, unmarried, and male, when compared to non-users. They were likely to have used a whole range of illicit drugs, and to have said they enjoy risk-taking. But they were not more likely to have lasting depression, anxiety or psychosis as a result of their drug use. Nor did the study find any evidence for LSD flashbacks or hallucinations.
But, why for all these years psychedelics were considered dangerous for mental health? The most frequent answer is that since many of the users of psychedelics during the first wave (
Strict prohibitions were passed and for decades there was a negative political campaign by the American government against psychedelics and other drugs. In the mainstream media, they were depicted as a dangerous mind-killer drug which will make you crazy. This was further supported by anecdotal evidence of few cases of drug abuse, where someone induced an extremely high dose jumped out of window thinking that he can fly or about someone who took a mega dose killed his dog and cut off his penis for no apparent reason. Add to this negative campaign the risk-averse nature of people, the fear of the unknown and you can see why psychedelics are still a taboo topic. (for a good account see Pollan, 2018)
A deeper explanation of this confusion comes from the psychology of judgment. Humans are bad at determining causal links and even worse at dealing with assessing risks and uncertain events. We largely rely upon fast and frugal heuristics, which are most of the time good enough strategy when it comes to determining relationships between variables and estimating frequencies. These heuristics rely upon cues from the environment which do not always correlate with the real causal link or the accurate frequency of events.
In order to avoid this confusion, we must approach the topic of risk statistically as was done in the mental health risk
Several issues are important to keep in mind when considering case reports.
1) Adverse effects of psychedelics are usually short-lived; serious psychiatric symptoms following psychedelic are typically resolved within 24 hours or at least within a few days.
2) Both mental illness and psychedelic use are prevalent in the population, likely leading to many chance associations; for instance, about 3% of the general public will have a psychotic disorder sometime in their lives.
3) The typical onset period of both mental illness and psychedelic use occurs in late adolescence and early adulthood, again possibly leading to mistaken causal inferences.
4) Most case reports do not rule-out preexisting psychiatric difficulties, life stresses, or use of other drugs. Many psychiatric disorders are believed to be heavily influenced by genetics and earlier experiences, even if symptoms are often first triggered by a stressful event. Note, however, that people with first-episode psychosis often have no apparent family or personal history of mental illness, whether or not if they have previously used psychedelics.
5) Because of the striking subjective effects of psychedelics, some people attribute psychiatric symptoms to the use of psychedelics even if the symptoms started months or years later.
6) Some health professionals may have a biased view since they meet people with mental health problems and have little or no contact with the majority of psychedelic users.
7) Caution should be used when generalizing from LSD to other psychedelics because of emerging evidence of unique effects of LSD.
8) Case reports of mental health problems following psychedelics are often comparable to case reports of mental health problems linked to intensive meditation, visiting holy sites or viewing beautiful artwork and sublime natural scenes.
Other risks that come with the use of psychedelics
Other than the physical and mental health concerns, what else could possibly go wrong? The odds are high that most of the people who decided to read this essay care a lot about their epistemic rationality. And there seems to be enough powerful anecdotal evidence that after artificially inducing these powerful experiences this extremely instrumentally valuable feature – the epistemic rationality – the ability to form accurate beliefs about the world might be negatively affected.
In one of his blog posts the polymath Scott Alexander after doing a small case study of the scientists who synthesized, studied and consumed psychedelics says the following:
“My point is that the field of early psychedelic research seemed to pretty consistently absorb brilliant scientists, then spit out people who, while still brilliant scientists, also had styles of thought that could be described as extremely original at best and downright crazy at worst.”
He gives three possibilities for this.
“you had to be kind of weirdto begin with in order to be interested in researching psychedelics. On the one hand, this is a strong possibility that makes a lot of sense; on the other, the earlypsychedelicists ended up really weird.”
“I know that almost all of these researchers used psychedelics themselves. Psychedelic use is a sufficiently interesting experience that I can see why it might expand one’s interest in the study of consciousness and the universe. Perhaps this is especially true if you’re one of the first people to use it, and you don’t have the social setting of “Oh, yeah, this is that drug that makes you have really weird experiences about consciousness for a while”. If you’re not aware that psychedelic hallucinations are a thing that happens, you might have to interpret your experience in more traditional terms like divine revelation. Under this theory, these pioneers had to become kind of weird to learn enough for the rest of us to use these substances safely. But why would that make John Lilly obsessed with aliens? Why would it turn Timothy Leary into a space colonization advocate and Ron Paul supporter?”
As third and for us most important possibility is that these drugs permanently change our personality. Scott points to a famous study done in 2011 that shows
“that a single dose of psilocybin could permanently increase the personality dimension of Openness To Experience. I’m emphasizing that because personality is otherwise pretty stable after adulthood; nothing should be able to do this. But magic mushrooms apparently have this effect, and not subtly either; participants who had a mystical experience on psilocybin had Openness increase up to half a standard deviation compared to placebo, and the change was stable sixteen months later. This is really scary. I mean, I like Openness To Experience, but something that can produce large, permanent personality changes is so far beyond anything else we have in psychiatry that it’s kind of terrifying. And that’s one dose. These researchers were taking psychedelics pretty constantly for
years, and probably experimented with the sort of doses you couldn’t get away with giving research subjects. What would you expect to happen to their Openness To Experience? How many standard deviations do you think it went up?”
Following
Confused and concerned by this case study I decided to ask the following question on Quora:
“Why it seems that psychedelics have messed the epistemic rationality (healthy cynicism and critical thinking) of intelligent, reasonable people such as most of the eminent scientists who synthesized, consumed and studied them?”
I was lucky because on Quora the great transhumanist philosopher David Pearce is doing God’s work by bringing light to layman enthusiasts like me. So, here are the relevant excerpts of the answer, although I strongly urge the reader to read the full answer, because it contains many other insights about the relation between the rationalist skeptic scientists and the psychedelics states of mind.
All too often, heavy psychedelic use makes people crazy – and not fitfully brilliant and insightfully crazy, just nuts. […]
Psychedelics reveal the existence of outlandish state-spaces of consciousness that have never been co-opted by natural selection for any functional purpose. Tools of navigation are virtually non-existent. Human language is a pre-eminently social phenomenon (cf. the Private Language Argument). […]
Some users babble unintelligibly. The discovery of such an alien state-space of consciousness transcends their conceptual framework. Psychonauts have no shared language to express their mystical visual experience (“It’s inconceivable!”). […]Darwinian minds are typically overwhelmed by taking psychedelics. Our primitive brains evolved under pressure of natural selection in an unforgiving environment. So we are intellectually and emotionally unequal to challenge of exploration. That said, not every psychonaut succumbs to flakiness, mysticism or psychosis. Recall the late Sasha Shulgin. Sasha devised a systematic discovery-process for the synthesis of new psychedelic agents. He created a rigorous methodology of first-person experimentation. He wrote lucid and illuminating texts documenting their use. Alas, most of us are not so psychologically robust. “
When it comes to the case of epistemic rationality – it seems that both the great polymath Scott Alexander and the great philosopher David Pearce have a reason to be concerned about the negative effects of the intense psychedelic experiences. Hence I would advise the rationalist in you to continue reading this essay until the end in order to weigh all the pros and cons and determine whether it is worth it to take this risk.
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To continue reading part 4 of this essay, follow this link.