Psychedelics

"Hamilton Morris: I had a very traumatic and formative experience myself. My best friend had a psychotic break while I was with him tripping, so I have seen this firsthand. I know exactly what it looks like. Joe Rogan: Yeah, Ive had friends have really bad experiences too with screaming and yelling and disassociation, and afterwards, become very strange and have a really hard time with reality for a bit. Ive never seen someone have a complete psychotic break. Hamilton Morris: This was that. He never recovered. Joe Rogan: Never? Hamilton Morris: He never recovered. He was my best friend at the time, and he never recovered. Joe Rogan: So he was fine before the psychedelics? Hamilton Morris: Yes. Joe Rogan: Jesus Christ. So now, hes still fucked? Hamilton Morris: Yes. Joe Rogan: Damn."

"If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with his eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen."

"Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you might jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structure and culturally laid down models of behavior and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong."

"Psychotropics have never been enjoyable to me, ever. … Every single one of them was a challenge in its own way. Some would make you sleepy, some would make you nervous, some would make you lethargic, some would absolutely impair your ability to walk and talk. Everything has its own little quirks, and none of them made me feel good. I like being clear, sober-minded, and aware and conscious. That is my favorite state. And the only reason I ever did any of those substances was to get a glimpse of those spaces that are not normally available in sober, normal consciousness."

"I came of age at a magical time. … Our consciousness was raised by Zen, and also by LSD. … Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that theres another side to the coin, and you cant remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important—creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could."

"Psychedelics are not suppressed because they are dangerous to users; theyre suppressed because they provoke unconventional thought, which threatens any number of elites and institutions that would rather do our thinking for us. Historically, those in power have always sought to suppress free thought, whether bluntly or subtly, because it poses an inherent challenge to their rule. Thats no less true today, in an age when corporate, political, and religious interests form a global bloc whose interests threaten all earthly life, including human life."

"… psychedelic drug investigators may imagine superintelligence as a Great Arch-Chemist opening up unknown state-space of consciousness."

"The hope that LSD-inspired mental states might ever be domesticated for science presupposes that there are certain epistemically privileged sorts of awareness. … Empirical research suggests this optimism is at best naïve. … Shuffling around syntactic tokens in our everyday mental ghetto may amount to futile shadow-chasing. So ones sense of understanding the LSD story may be illusory. The raw feels and the semantic primitives are lacking."

"The "war on drugs" has been lost and should never have been waged. I can think of no right more fundamental than the right to peacefully steward the contents of ones own consciousness. The fact that we pointlessly ruin the lives of nonviolent drug users by incarcerating them, at enormous expense, constitutes one of the great moral failures of our time."

"It has been many years since I took psychedelics myself, and my abstinence is born of a healthy respect for the risks involved. … My "bad trips" were, without question, the most harrowing hours I have ever endured, and they make the notion of hell—as a metaphor if not an actual destination—seem perfectly apt. … Have you ever traveled, beyond all mere metaphors, to the Mountain of Shame and stayed for a thousand years? I do not recommend it."

"The last item—the occasional trip into realms labeled madness—can mean, especially if you are a writer, that you are given to telling the unvarnished, brutal, searing truth, whether society likes it or not. And not the Sylvia Plath look-at-me kinds of truth, but the spiritual-seer and mad-shaman types of truth, the truths that really hurt, the truths that get into societys craw and stick there, causing festering metaphysical sores indicative of social cancers or worse—but also the types of truth that speak to you deeply, authentically, radiantly, if you have the courage to listen."

"Terences pivotal, existential crisis came abruptly, some time in 88 or 89. Everything that happened after that event was fallout. I dont know exactly when it happened, and I dont know exactly what happened; I am piecing it together from what Kat has told me, and she has volunteered few details, and I am reluctant to probe.It happened when they were living for a time on the big island, and it was a mushroom trip they shared that was absolutely terrifying for Terence. It was terrifying because, for some reason, the mushroom turned on him. The gentle, wise, humorous mushroom spirit that he had come to know and trust as an ally and teacher ripped back the facade to reveal an abyss of utter existential despair. Terence kept saying, so Kat told me, that it was "a lack of all meaning, a lack of all meaning." And this induced panic in Terence, and probably, I speculate, a feeling he was going mad. He couldnt deal with it. Kats efforts to reassure him were fruitless. After that experience, he never again took mushrooms, and he took other psychedelics, such as DMT and ayahuasca, only on rare occasions and with great reluctance.Whatever the specific content of the psychedelic experience might have been that triggered the cognitive collapse of Terences worldview and precipitated his existential crisis, what was most remarkable was that he did not see it coming."