Get out the Vote: Terence McKenna 2016

[guruilla]

If you can draw a direct line between how his overall ideas were somehow in the service of his IA/corporate sponsors in a simple manner, again, I'd be very obliged. Again, how one or two sentences can be made into his main thrust baffles me...

It's a good question/request. I'll get back to this soon, if someone doesn't beat me to it. Or you could ask Jan Irvin.

[SonicG]

If you can draw a direct line between how his overall ideas were somehow in the service of his IA/corporate sponsors in a simple manner, again, I'd be very obliged. Again, how one or two sentences can be made into his main thrust baffles me...

It's a good question/request. I'll get back to this soon, if someone doesn't beat me to it. Or you could ask Jan Irvin.

Yeah, I meant to say that I tried to understand it when Irvin first started going off but remember finding his explanation rather lacking...I have to that I have been similarly unimpressed with the same accusations about Wasson.

[guruilla]

Here's some stuff about Wasson from Occult Yorkshire; I'll get to a larger context shortly as it overlaps with other subjects being discussed here currently in ways that are pretty striking (besides TM's mushroom-inspired male-eradication plan!).

So what’s the connection between a poet-mythologist [Robert Graves] and the world of social engineering and mind control? The answer I found was surprising because also so familiar: the world of hallucinogens. In 1952, Robert Gordon Wasson (the man who brought the magic mushroom to the west) wrote to Graves asking him about the kind of mushroom which had allegedly been responsible for Claudius’ death. Graves sent Wasson an account of ancient Mexican religious ceremonies that included the ingestion of mushrooms—mushrooms that had “eluded botanists and explorers for nearly five hundred years and, as a result, were generally considered to be mythical.” Graves claimed there was new evidence for their actual existence, but that currently the only thing known about them was that they were referred to as “the flesh of God.” It was allegedly (my source is Streathfield’s Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control) Graves’ tip that sent the Wassons down to Mexico in 1955, where they made the discovery that would help kick start the counterculture by sparking off the “psychedelic revolution.”

Among the first people to hear of Wasson’s discovery were Graves and his “friend,” William Sargant. “In a bizarre turn,” Streathfield writes, “the war poet and the psychiatrist had struck up a friendship and agreed to collaborate on a book about brainwashing; two years later Battle for the Mind was a bestseller and had cemented Sargant’s fame. Sargant provided the opinions, Graves the structure and layout to ‘make the saliva flow,’ as he put it.”

A few months after Wasson’s discovery, the CIA were reporting on the work of “an amateur mycologist” and the potential to incorporate his findings into what was then Project Artichoke, soon to be MKULTRA. Small world. (Wasson’s team was then allegedly infiltrated by CIA agent James Moore, before the next trip to Mexico.) As for Wasson being “an amateur mycologist”: maybe so, but he was also vice president of J. P. Morgan at the time, one of the biggest banks in the world, so not exactly an “independent researcher.” To cement Wasson’s finding, Life magazine ran a piece in 1957 called “Seeking the Magic Mushroom.” Life magazine was published by Henry Luce, close friend of CIA-director (and MKULTRA initiator) Allen Dulles. According to Carl Bernstein, in “CIA and the Media,” Luce “readily allowed certain members of his staff to work for the Agency and agreed to provide jobs and credentials for other CIA operatives who lacked journalistic experience.”

In his memoir, author Tom Robbins talks about the impact this article had in “turning on” countless young Americans—himself and Timothy Leary included—all thanks to an English war poet who became famous writing historical novels about ancient Rome! Was it also the CIA who coined the phrase “truth is stranger than fiction”? Following Graves own mushroom eating ceremony (with Wasson in New York in 1957, soon after the Life article came out), he decided that “the sacred mushroom should be distributed across Europe and America.” The CIA may have agreed. Four months after that, Graves took LSD and reported his experience, negatively, to his brainwashing buddy William Sargant. (Graves felt LSD was a deceptive imitation of the mushroom that led “to Coney island and not to Eden.”)

In 1961, Graves waxed paradisiacally to members of the Oxford Humanist Society about his mushroom experiences, and during that same period, the British Military took a keen interest in the substance. All of this was occurring congruent with the CIA’s use of LSD and countless other drugs in their MKULTRA program. It was like two parallel histories running side by side—one selling Eden, the other storming Hell.

[SonicG]

Great. Life was CIA-connected, the CIA looked into using entheogens for brainwashing and truth serum. This is all well documented. Maybe you will elucidate this later, but I still fail to understand how the use of entheogens in the 60s had a negative impact. It seems that heroin, and later crack cocaine, were the obvious drug weapons of choice to use against the lumpen but entheogens generally aided and encouraged anti-authoritarian thinking. And again, in the epicenter of the most radical actions of the 60s, Paris 1968, entheogens cannot be said to have any influence one way or the other.
I have the same problems with all the Laurel Canyon stuff. How did the music of Zappa or the Doors or whoever really affect the political sphere??

(besides TM's mushroom-inspired male-eradication plan!).

Can you give me the correct time-stamp in the video or quote McKenna on this? If it was a plan of his, he must have laid it out in great detail!

[guruilla]

OK, proposal.

This is from something I posted today elsewhere, coincidentally. I hope to go into it with more care later on at another thread:

In “The Childhood Origins of the Holocaust,” the psycho-historian Lloyd de Mause talks about Weimar culture, the flourishing of the arts and sciences in Germany during the Weimar Republic, in the period between Germany’s defeat in World War I and Hitler’s rise to power. De Mause writes how it “may have produced ‘exuberant creativity and experimentation’ but also created “anxiety, fear and a rising sense of doom.” By the end of the 1920s, so many reactionary anti-democratic backlash parties had spontaneously sprung up that Weimar was called ‘a Republic without republicans.’ People began to call for ‘emancipation from emancipation’ and ‘a restoration of authoritarian rule.’”

What de Mause is describing, in bald terms, is how a period of social and sexual freedom allows for a release of collective unconscious or “id” material in a people, and how this then leads to a corresponding reaction from the controlling ego, i.e., to even more severe social restrictions. It’s possible to extrapolate from this—an observable trend in history, both individual and collective—how such a principal could be consciously applied at the level of social engineering. If the aim, say, is totalitarianism, first promote the opposite ideas pertaining to individual freedom, sexual liberation, artistic expression, human rights, and drug experimentation. Such a hypothetical form of deep psychosocial engineering could, hypothetically, proceed over generations, propagating a set of values to one generation so as to create an opposing reaction from the next. It could also proceed at a more localized, short-term level, over periods of months, days, and hours, even down to a micro-level, such as when a TV show promotes “radical” or anti-capitalist values, while at the same time serving as product placement for corporations.

A very broad example of this might be how the promotion of individualistic, capitalist, consumer values over the second half of the 20th century led to a supposed dead-end and “environmental crisis” in which individualism is frowned upon and seen as something to be curbed (often via draconian laws) in order to save “the planet” (collective). It also goes the other way, as when the collective “countercultural” values of the 60s, promoting peace and harmony, led to the capitalist feeding frenzy of the 80s—many of the feeders being former hippies who “wised up.”

https://auticulture.wordpress.com/2015/ ... rkshire-9/

[SonicG]

Very interesting although I think there is a lot open for discussion there. Actually it seems fairly easy to pick apart on the surface....

[tapitsbo]

I believe many have testified to the propensity for entheogens to enable initiation into authoritarian as well as anti-authoritarian mysteries

[guruilla]

It's a no-brainer.

[Bryter]

All of Jan Irvin's evidence for his claim is a FOI request to the CIA about affiliation to Mckenna, the results of which are here:

http://www.gnosticmedia.com/urgent-rele ... filiation/

Now, I might be daft, but they came back with a "can neither confirm nor deny". I don't think that means what he claims.

[guruilla]

All of Jan Irvin's evidence for his claim is a FOI request to the CIA about affiliation to Mckenna, the results of which are here:

http://www.gnosticmedia.com/urgent-rele ... filiation/

Now, I might be daft, but they came back with a "can neither confirm nor deny". I don't think that means what he claims.

JI's case against McKenna is inconclusive and made even more so by his insistence that it's not. On the other hand, the overall mapping he's doing seems pretty strong, and is confirmed by the research I've ended up doing simply trying to untangle the knot of my personal family history. I certainly didn't intend, expect, or desire to look into Wasson or the mushroom when I began to follow the Robert Graves connection.

I didn't know about the letters between Wasson & Dulles until now, either.

I think it's helpful for those who take a strongly skeptical position about McKenna or about McGowan's work, for example (or Irvin's), to consider if they would be equally skeptical when faced with a similar amount of evidence around something or someone that did not form a part of their personal belief system and value set. If you see what I mean. (I.e, there may be some personal investment in being "rigorous.")

[SonicG]

I think it's helpful for those who take a strongly skeptical position about McKenna or about McGowan's work, for example (or Irvin's), to consider if they would be equally skeptical when faced with a similar amount of evidence around something or someone that did not form a part of their personal belief system and value set. If you see what I mean. (I.e, there may be some personal investment in being "rigorous.")

I hear where you are coming from...So I must give full disclosure. I consider myself to have been highly influenced by McKenna and Wasson and the rest of gang, except Leary, although RAW is the man. I was living in Mexico City when I started reading McKenna and, of course, was in a prime location to experiment with entheogens. It really only took one single heavy trip at home on a quiet Sunday afternoon to influence me for a lifetime. I have a tattoo of the mushroom icon from the base of the statue of Xochipilli, the Prince of Flowers...etc. So yeah, I suppose McKenna is " a part of (my) personal belief system," so I am sure I am very reticent to really question all the great benefit that I have had personally, and that I have witnessed through the great work of MAPS and related persons recently...But show me some real smoking guns, and I'll bite...I have recently let myself be convinced that Chomsky is no anarchist...
But McGowan? The stuff about the rock musicians that I could really care less about? I recognize the genius of Zappa but he really leaves me cold artistically, and the Doors, fuck them, their legacy is naught...

Or, as I said, in lieu of a smoking gun, convince me of the end game plan, because as I said that psychohistory stuff seems to miss a whole lot, especially on the global scale....

It could also proceed at a more localized, short-term level, over periods of months, days, and hours, even down to a micro-level, such as when a TV show promotes “radical” or anti-capitalist values, while at the same time serving as product placement for corporations.

A very broad example of this might be how the promotion of individualistic, capitalist, consumer values over the second half of the 20th century led to a supposed dead-end and “environmental crisis” in which individualism is frowned upon and seen as something to be curbed (often via draconian laws) in order to save “the planet” (collective). It also goes the other way, as when the collective “countercultural” values of the 60s, promoting peace and harmony, led to the capitalist feeding frenzy of the 80s—many of the feeders being former hippies who “wised up.”

https://auticulture.wordpress.com/2015/ ... rkshire-9/

I really think it is tenuous to draw some yin-yang between the 60s and the 80s. It was certainly the repression of such countercultural values and FBI infiltration of radical groups that killed the hippy dream, along with Manson, Altamont, the carpet bombing of Laos and Cambodia...The unrest and search for alternatives might have had a great soundtrack to it in rock music, but the upheaval was strictly political, as it was all across the world. I guess you could blame the Frankfurt School as a recent thread here discussed. Political repression along with capitalism really picking up the learning curve about how to subsume culture into the machine. Paris...1968. Again.

A new human being is created: the consumer. Previously repressed and sublimated desires are now unleashed and "desublimated" (Herbert Marcuse) ideologically so that they can be reshaped and channeled into the circuits of consumption and leisure (It might be noted that this structural shift performs a double function: it resolves a crisis in the accumulation of capital, which imperialism alone could not do, and more generally, it legitimizes the capitalist system.) Alienation, once a consciously experienced and unwanted misery, has now become unconscious, "made comfortable," and multiplied in consumption. Domination, once essentially coercive and economic in nature, is now primarily ideological and cultural: ideological, as the tangible world and machinery of the spectacle sets up above itself an inverted unreality of reified thought and images, which are taken as real; and cultural as the power of this ideological control is disseminated through the cultural apparati of society, especially the media.
http://library.nothingness.org/articles ... isplay/238

NP:

[guruilla]

.But show me some real smoking guns, and I'll bite...I have recently let myself be convinced that Chomsky is no anarchist...

I don't think there ever are smoking guns when it comes to social and cultural engineering

Understanding how it works is an accumulative process, and maybe it can't be separated from one's own journey of individuation, self-knowledge ~ determining the nature of the influences in our lives, and deciding how beneficent they have been.

Or, as I said, in lieu of a smoking gun, convince me of the end game plan, because as I said that psychohistory stuff seems to miss a whole lot, especially on the global scale....

Naming the end game seems even more tenuous and improbable than finding a smoking gun. Regarding psycho-history, it's a massive undertaking just to read Lloyd de Mause's work. IMO, one chapter contains enough to change a person's worldview if really assimilated.

I really think it is tenuous to draw some yin-yang between the 60s and the 80s. It was certainly the repression of such countercultural values and FBI infiltration of radical groups that killed the hippy dream, along with Manson, Altamont, the carpet bombing of Laos and Cambodia...

Doesn't that depend how far back you pull with your lens? I think it's reasonable to suppose that the hippie movement was an effective way to neutralize an actual social-political threat which a budding counterculture might represent, if it didn't get swept up in sex, drugs and rock and roll.

This would also play into the deeper, more long-term psycho-social engineering of activating the collective guardian/superego by releasing all that id energy.

Trying to figure out history without looking at the psychological mechanisms that are installed in a populace via child abuse, IMO, is like, I dunno, trying to grow vegetables without any dirt.

A new human being is created: the consumer. Previously repressed and sublimated desires are now unleashed and "desublimated" (Herbert Marcuse) ideologically so that they can be reshaped and channeled into the circuits of consumption and leisure (It might be noted that this structural shift performs a double function: it resolves a crisis in the accumulation of capital, which imperialism alone could not do, and more generally, it legitimizes the capitalist system.) Alienation, once a consciously experienced and unwanted misery, has now become unconscious, "made comfortable," and multiplied in consumption. Domination, once essentially coercive and economic in nature, is now primarily ideological and cultural: ideological, as the tangible world and machinery of the spectacle sets up above itself an inverted unreality of reified thought and images, which are taken as real; and cultural as the power of this ideological control is disseminated through the cultural apparati of society, especially the media.
http://library.nothingness.org/articles ... isplay/238

Interesting quote. It seems to agree with the one you disagreed with?

[guruilla]

MSM source, so offered with a pinch of salt:

LSD, Suggestibility, and Personality Change
Could LSD make users more suggestible in the long-term?
Posted Aug 25, 2015

Research into the beneficial effects of psychedelic drugs, such as LSD and psilocybin, is making something of a comeback in recent years. A number of recent studies have re-examined the therapeutic potential of these drugs in treating psychological problems, including depression, anxiety, and addiction, subjects that were originally explored from the 1950’s to the early 1970’s until research on the topic was effectively halted. Some of this old research suggested that LSD could increase a person’s suggestibility, and a more recent study has revisited this topic. The authors of this study proposed that increased suggestibility might contribute to the psychotherapeutic effects of LSD that can occur in a proper treatment setting. Other research has indicated that psychedelic drugs such as LSD might perhaps increase receptivity to unconventional spiritual ideas in the longer term, so it would be interesting to consider whether increased suggestibility plays a role in this effect.

The power of suggestion is well known, although how it achieves its effects is not entirely understood. Suggestion can be employed to alter the contents of a person’s consciousness, and can produce changes in perception, thought, emotion and behavior. For example, a person might be given a suggestion that a part of their body will experience different sensations, such as warmth, cold, or numbness, and they may then begin to actually feel these sensations. Although suggestion is commonly associated with hypnosis, suggestions can be given effectively without a prior hypnotic induction. Individuals differ in how responsive they are to suggestion, a trait characteristic known as suggestibility. Psychedelic drugs have potent mind and perception altering properties, and a couple of studies in the 1960’s found that people became more suggestible than usual under the influence of LSD. A more recent study aimed to replicate this finding using more up-to-date measures of suggestibility (Carhart-Harris et al., 2015).

The study involved 10 participants, who had previous experience with psychedelic drugs and who were carefully screened to ensure they had no history of psychiatric illness. They were tested in two sessions, the first one involving an injection of a saline placebo, and the second an injection of LSD. In both sessions, they were given a suggestibility test and a mental imagery test. Prior to the sessions they completed personality tests assessing the Big Five traits, and the trait of absorption (link is external), which is the tendency to become fully immersed in experiences. Most participants experienced an increase in suggestibility under LSD compared to the placebo, which was statistically significant. There was a trend for participants to experience an increase in mental imagery but this was not statistically significant. Participants who were high in absorption tended to have higher suggestibility and more vivid mental imagery in both sessions. This is to be expected as absorption is known to be associated with being imaginative and having a stronger response to hypnosis and to psychedelic drugs. A more unexpected finding was that participants’ conscientiousness was strongly positively correlated with the degree to which they experienced an increase in suggestibility under LSD compared to placebo. That is, the effect of LSD on suggestibility was larger in more conscientious participants compared to less conscientious ones.

The authors of this study argued that increases in suggestibility under LSD might account for some of the psychotherapeutic effects observed by therapists who used LSD with their clients in the 1950’s and 60’s. The kinds of experiences clients had seemed to particularly reflect the expectations of their therapists. For example, clients of Freudian therapists tended to recall more childhood memories, while clients of Jungian therapists had experiences of a more spiritual nature. Hence, Carhart-Harris et al. argue that the way people interpret their psychedelic experiences might be influenced to some extent by suggestion. This could apply for example to whether a person interprets experiences during intensely altered states as being of a mystical or spiritual nature or whether they interpret them through a more secular framework.

Regarding the positive correlation between conscientiousness and increases in suggestibility, the authors speculated that conscientiousness is a form of self-control, and that LSD has the effect of loosening control over one’s inner experience. Therefore, people who are normally the most controlled have more room to change in this respect. This assumes that the ability to respond to suggestion requires a lack of self-control. However, it is possible to argue that suggestibility is a form of control over what are normally automatic processes. If this is the case, then perhaps people high in conscientiousness have a greater potential for control over such processes that is amplified by LSD. This is sheer speculation on my part though, and more in-depth research is needed to fathom this issue.

Due to the small sample size of the study by Carhart-Harris and colleagues, only very tentative conclusions may be drawn. Bearing this in mind, I nonetheless find the possibility that suggestion could play a role in the nature of the psychedelic experience to be intriguing. A number of old and new studies seem to indicate that psychedelic drug experiences may possibly have long-lasting influences on attitudes and beliefs in some people, particularly those who find their experiences profoundly meaningful. For example, consider the results of a study in the 1960's on a psychotherapy program incorporating the use of LSD (Klavetter & Mogar, 1967). There was a strong relationship between the perceived quality of the LSD experience and subsequent psychological growth. Those who had what the authors called peak experiences – that is, intensely positive experiences characterised by perceptions of beauty, understanding, and self-transcendence – experienced greater increases in subsequent psychological well-being compared to those who regarded their LSD experience as less satisfying, e.g. those who found the experience disappointing, frightening, or of no lasting significance. About 69% of participants were considered to be ‘peakers’ while the rest were considered ‘non-peakers.’ Psychological growth was assessed using a measure of self-actualization, a concept developed by Abraham Maslow to refer to the tendency to fully express one’s most healthy psychological potentials for creativity, fulfilment and love. About nine months after taking LSD, peakers scored significantly higher on a measure of self-actualization compared to non-peakers. The authors took this to support Maslow’s notion that peak experiences have a positive effect on psychological growth, although they were reasonably cautious about interpreting the findings. The self-actualization scale used included a broad range of items relating to psychological health, such as better appreciation of relationships, greater happiness, less anxiety, deeper understanding of beauty and art and so on. Additionally, the scale also included quite a few items relating to spiritual beliefs, including unconventional concepts, such as increased interest in and open-mindedness about things like mysticism, telepathy, reincarnation, and spiritualism, and peakers tended to score higher than non-peakers on these as well. I find it interesting that the authors of this paper considered openness to unusual spiritual ideas as being a feature of optimal mental health (something I consider rather questionable) and that participants in this study who had peak experiences also became more open to these kinds of ideas.

Studies on psychedelic drugs from previous decades, including the one I just described, were generally not all that rigorous by today’s standards, but it is still interesting to compare their findings to those of more recent work. For example, A more recent study on psilocybin (Griffiths et al., 2011; MacLean, Johnson, & Griffiths, 2011) found rather comparable results to those of the previous study I cited. I have written about this study previously, but briefly, about 60% of participants who took a high dose of psilocybin had a “complete mystical experience” which they regarded as having sustained personal significance and meaning more than a year later. These participants reported long-lasting positive effects of this experience including increases in the personality trait openness to experience, a more positive attitude towards life, and an increased belief that there is continuity of consciousness after death. One of the features of the trait openness to experience is an interest in novel and unusual ideas of all kinds, including those of a spiritual nature. This might be a factor in increased belief in life after death long after their psychedelic experience.

These studies seem to indicate that some people experience effects that last long after the initial psychedelic drug experience has concluded. As well as increased well-being, these effects include increased openness to unconventional ideas such as those of a spiritual and/or paranormal nature. According to a number of studies, there are many positive correlations between suggestibility, belief in the paranormal, mystical experience and the personality traits absorption and openness to experience (Atkinson, 1994; Braffman & Kirsch, 1999; Smith, Johnson, & Hathaway, 2009; Thalbourne, 2010). These characteristics may share a common foundation in the ease with which psychological material crosses the threshold between the unconscious and the conscious areas of the mind, a characteristic that the late Michael Thalbourne (2010) referred to as transliminality. In some people the barrier between the conscious and unconscious functions of the mind is more permeable than usual, and they are more prone to experience unusual mental states, such as mystical feelings of oneness with the universe, experiences which they consider to be of a psychic nature (e.g. apparent telepathy), and so on. As discussed in a previous article, people high in absorption tend to have the strongest response to psychedelic drugs, and absorption is a feature of transliminality. It might therefore be reasonable to think of the psychedelic drug state as involving a temporary and massive amplification of transliminality.

Carhart-Harris and colleagues (2012) argued that psychedelic drugs temporarily produce an “unconstrained style of cognition” due to alterations in normal brain activity (which I have discussed in this post). This might help explain why LSD can produce a temporary increase in suggestibility, as well as more profound alterations of consciousness such as mystical experiences. Perhaps this temporary state of unconstrained style of cognition leads to more lasting effects in some people. If it is true that psychedelic drug use can lead to long-term increases in openness to experience, as the MacLean et al. study suggests, then perhaps as a consequence people become more willing to entertain unusual ideas about the nature of reality, such as belief in paranormal and spiritual aspects of existence. If this is the case, might this represent a manifestation of a long-term increase in suggestibility? Future studies on LSD and similar drugs could look at whether users experience long-lasting changes in suggestibility and how these might be related to changes in their beliefs. They might also look at whether users experience increased receptivity mainly to “spiritual” ideas, or whether they become more open to unusual ideas in general. E.g. do they become more open to non-mainstream ideas about lifestyle, health, politics, and so on. If so, this might indicate that the mind-opening effects of psychedelic drugs might be very broad-based. It might also be interesting to see whether people who are higher in conscientiousness experience greater change in their beliefs and experiences compared to less conscientious people. Carhart-Harris and colleagues (2015) proposed that how people interpret psychedelic drug experiences might be influenced by the process of suggestion. Therefore, it might be worth considering whether the people who conduct these studies have a suggestive influence on the experiences of their research participants. For example, it is possible that researchers with particular spiritual interests might influence their participants to have experiences of a more spiritual nature, while researchers with a more secular orientation might have a subtly different influence. It would be important to know whether this is true, because subtle influences of this sort might interfere with the scientific objectivity of the research itself. This might be studied by comparing the outcomes of different research teams to see if there are any apparent biases in their findings.

The research studies that I have reviewed here all have their limitations as this field is still in its infancy really, and the ideas that I have tentatively proposed here need to be regarded as speculative in nature. For example, at this time we cannot really be sure that psychedelic drug use actually does cause long-term changes in users' personality and beliefs. It is quite possible that people who are already open to change are drawn to experimenting with these drugs (and this may include those who are willing to participate in research on them) and that they simply act as a catalyst for changes that would have occurred anyway. (Personality psychologist Sanjay Srivastana discusses this possibility in an insightful critique (link is external) of the psilocybin study by MacLean et al.) Hence, more research is needed in order to develop a deeper understanding of any potential long-term effects that these drugs might have.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/un ... ity-change

Similar findings marijuana:

Abstract
Thirty-five subjects of known hypnotizability were tested for primary suggestibility in the waking state with and without marijuana intoxication. The drug caused an increase in suggestibility similar to that produced by the induction of hypnosis. The effect did not persist when subjects were retested one week later in their normal waking state.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF00431853

[slomo]

^^^^ Guruilla, thanks. I was wondering how some of the research showing psychological benefits of psychadelics squares with your Reality Sandwich piece a few years ago re: potential long-term harm of these compounds.

[guruilla]

Between the hard biological and the soft energetic reading is the psychological take, which is always case-specific; but in a nutshell, if psychedelics allow unconscious material to come into consciousness, there's nothing to indicate that they assist with the integration of that material. (The ego that chooses to drop LSD is the same ego that is then faced with the task of integration, and knowledge does not automatically = wisdom.)

Since there's a reason that stuff was made unconscious (usually trauma-related), the danger of using external aids to bring it into consciousness seems self-evident. In my own experience, besides the massive ego inflation that occurred (also known as archetypal possession: I did believe I was an incarnation of Lucifer for several years), and a general lack of discernment about what was real and what was dissociative and compensatory fantasy (such as my being Lucifer), in the long run I experienced a huge amount of "back-taxes" owed to my body/unconscious, for crossing borders with an entheogenic rocket pack, and failing to pay the necessary tolls. Simpy put, just being an ordinary self living an ordinary life was damn hard, after having traversed the galaxies and arm-wrestled the archetypes.

There are those who might say I took the blue pill, by settling back into a human identity-form. But they are generally now on proscribed medication and/or drug addicts.

The danger of stirring up unconscious psychic material without being prepared for it can also be said of sex, and even therapy, which is why trust and intimacy are so essential to sexual and therapeutic relationships.

I don't know about micro-doses. But for me this is the most cogent explanation for how and why there may have been a social agenda (one that made use of genuinely well-meaning individuals) to get people to heavy-dose on sex, drugs, and rock and roll.