From a pretty good essay written by someone who lived through the original "psychedelics will expand your mind" era of the 60s and 70s:
"“Enlightenment in a pill,” many have pointed out, is a quintessentially American concept. Who’s got time for all that prayer and study and meditation and practice when there’s an easier, faster way?
But there isn’t. Therein lies the great danger of LSD and its dopey cousin, marijuana. By offering a simulacrum of spiritual and intellectual growth – a very convincing simulacrum at times – it takes you everywhere except where you need to be, which is doing the long, hard work of learning to live."
I resonate with what he says because, like the author mentions later on, I also have many friends who went deep into the psychedelics journey while claiming it was 'freeing their minds', 'enlightening' them, or whatever other concept they liked to use, only to end up, a decade or two later, in either a regular struggling life like so many others, or a downright bad place. I'm probably wrong to generalize, as I'm sure it can help many, but the drugs still can't substitute the individual's effort and struggle to grow, and overcome, and the learning of how to live a meaningful life.
> only to end up, a decade or two later, in either a regular struggling life like so many others, or a downright bad place
It isn’t like they transform into the ubermensch and transcend the bodily functions of eating and shitting. At the end of the day we all have insecurities
You can be struggling, you can be in a bad place, but that’s orthogonal to feeling connected and spiritually awake
And I’m not saying drugs are how you can (or should) get there, just that the material conditions that someone is living in have nothing to do with being “there”
And by “there”, I mean a sense of abandonment of self to the fabric that you arose out of. Which is not the same thing as conformity, more like a sense of understanding and acceptance of where you belong in the grand scheme of things
"“Enlightenment in a pill,” many have pointed out, is a quintessentially American concept. Who’s got time for all that prayer and study and meditation and practice when there’s an easier, faster way?
But there isn’t. Therein lies the great danger of LSD and its dopey cousin, marijuana. By offering a simulacrum of spiritual and intellectual growth – a very convincing simulacrum at times – it takes you everywhere except where you need to be, which is doing the long, hard work of learning to live."
I resonate with what he says because, like the author mentions later on, I also have many friends who went deep into the psychedelics journey while claiming it was 'freeing their minds', 'enlightening' them, or whatever other concept they liked to use, only to end up, a decade or two later, in either a regular struggling life like so many others, or a downright bad place. I'm probably wrong to generalize, as I'm sure it can help many, but the drugs still can't substitute the individual's effort and struggle to grow, and overcome, and the learning of how to live a meaningful life.