The 2nd Psychedelic Renaissance and related content

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techstepgenr8tion
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22 May 2021, 3:03 pm

I thought about just titling this after the video below but IMHO it's a broad topic and likely needs a thread that can be further expanded on because, as far as I can see, it's going to be a bit of a bombshell and it's going to risk both doing a lot of damage to the pharmaceutical industry on one hand (particularly for antidepressants and antianxiety) and there's also a risk that if the pharmaceutical industry subsumes it that the value would be leached out of until we have yet more pharmaceutical drugs that only work a little better than the ones we have now which people can be kept on for the rest of their lives to turn a profit for shareholders.

Yes, this first video is Jordan Peterson interviewing Roland Griffiths, putting up anything by JP risks about a third of responders going to 'Ahhhhhhh!! ! I'm the Great Cornolio! I need Teepee! Teepee for my bumhole!'. What he's doing a good job of here is unpacking really the complexity of Roland being able to even start this research, as early as 2001, with the drug war's view of psychedelics being what it was at the time, being schedule I, and of all things - being able to give heroic doses (something like the equivalent of 5 grams of psilocybin) to psychedelic novices, for the sake of not having a sample group self-selected for positive psychedelic experiences. Both Peterson and Griffiths also have experience in researching and working with addiction (with Peterson it was researching alcoholism, it sounds like Griffiths had a broader spectrum of substances and addictive patterns he was researching).

I've been following the whole '2nd psychedelic revolution' closely because on one level I really do think this is something that needs to go through successfully but it really requires very careful management from two sides 1) not having another Timothy Leary blowing it up and sending it back underground for another 25 years - ie. it needs real discipline, and 2) not having the pharmaceutical industries watering it down into what Jamie Wheal calls 'Prozac Nation 2.0'.

It's also going to force us to really rethink the category of 'drugs'. We've been looking at anything psychoactive for a long time as 'narcotics', 'getting high', for bad, lazy, weak, 'other' people, part of that is the zero-sum predatory game, some of it is just how many people who've lost family members to things like heroin or methamphetamine, part of the problem - something Sam Harris has noted that I agree with him strongly, that it's a massive slush fund of things that don't belong in the same category. The overall idea with psychedelics is that they do have medical value, in a certain sense they also have plenty of capacity to make 'good people better' or 'healthy people healthier', we typically haven't had a good model for that in the past in terms of anything pharmaceutical let alone 'recreational' but the potentials of these states for clearing out trauma patterns, environmental debris, etc. seems overwhelming.

My own take - some people have brought up a 'license' model where people need to have licensing to either use these substances themselves, similar to the training and vetting one might need to have a concealed carry permit, that makes a lot of sense. The trick is scoping these kinds of things responsibly because they can be profoundly helpful if handled responsibly, profoundly damaging if handled irresponsibly.


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techstepgenr8tion
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22 May 2021, 3:05 pm

Jamie Wheal discussing the collisions of more traditional psychedelic researchers with the world of corporate interests and fiduciary obligations to shareholders:



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22 May 2021, 3:58 pm

This 2nd revolution is however markedly different in intent from the first one - in the first one, psychedelics were meant to liberate one's mind from the shackles of (this) reality. In the 2nd one, it's about making the shackles bearable.


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techstepgenr8tion
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22 May 2021, 4:13 pm

shlaifu wrote:
In the 2nd one, it's about making the shackles bearable.

The funny thing - if that weren't the case it would be getting stomped out all over again.

The trick might be that as the psychedelic experience proliferates through our culture and stops falling on the other side of a double-bind where the experiencer, by virtue of being the kind of person to have tried it (thank you drug war), is morally and ethically unqualified to speak on behalf of reality for what it actually seems to do. As that double-bind melts we'll be in more of a place where more people have seen tigers in India rather than only a few people having seen them and everyone else debating whether they're a fiction.

The result of that - it's going to permeate the 'dark matter' or unspoken buildup of experience, and eventually after enough people have run into it and after certain generations march off into the fog of history (ie. people whose identities are permanently built around being superior to people who've tried substance 'x') certain people will look around and start asking each other 'now that the cloud of BS and hysteria has blown over, is it possible that we can say y or z about the nature of meaning?'. I think this is a large part of how John Vervaeke's meaning crisis resolves itself - people having more of their constraints blown off.

The other bit, that Jordan and Rowland get into, is what psychedelics do to trait openness in the OCEAN model. It seems to up creativity and openness by one standard deviation - permanently. That's not a small thing and obviously that kind of shift would scare the hell out of anyone whose trying to keep power. My alternate take on why this is being allowed to happen - the system has run out of gas, the powers that be are really out of solutions (as Daniel Schmachtenberger would often say - the Bretton Woods 'everyone trades to prevent war' has run into a near fatal environmental constraint, and if that's not enough we have things like synthetic biology coming down the pike where there will be more and more democratized ways for smaller and smaller groups of people, for less money, to render humanity either extinct or down to remnant hunter/gatherer populations).


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23 May 2021, 1:25 pm

techstep, I don't watch videos because they drive me crazy. I have read some articles about using psychedelics for/as mental health therapy, and the successes thereof. I am not surprised by this. As you point out, the issue is that the US government went ballistic in making them schedule 1 drugs. You blame this on Leary, but I am not sure he takes full blame. There were at least two others at Harvard who were "experimenting" with psychedelics.

Have you read any of the books or papers by or about Richard Schultes? A generation earlier than Leary, he was researching botanical hallucinogens and would try almost anything in the Amazon River valley while looking for tropical plants. He also reported on what some of the shamans told him about their "trips" which they believed to be real, although in a different dimension. As I recall, some of these "trips" were taken in order to find answers to questions that were unsettling to their people or a person. Also from Harvard. He spent nearly 12 years in the Amazon.

I do not see the point in requiring a prescription or a therapist guide for taking psychedelics. We let anyone with with license drive cars and God knows that results in injury and death. We, at least in America, had out guns to anyone old enough. These weapons also result in injury and death. A few people jumping out of windows or having "flashbacks" (SARCASM) is hardly a good reason for limiting access, when viewed from that perspective.

I remember, from the 70s?, a cover story for Psychology Today entitled, "What this country needs is a good five cent intoxicant." (A play on words from a quote: "What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar.")


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techstepgenr8tion
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23 May 2021, 2:02 pm

blazingstar wrote:
Have you read any of the books or papers by or about Richard Schultes? A generation earlier than Leary, he was researching botanical hallucinogens and would try almost anything in the Amazon River valley while looking for tropical plants. He also reported on what some of the shamans told him about their "trips" which they believed to be real, although in a different dimension. As I recall, some of these "trips" were taken in order to find answers to questions that were unsettling to their people or a person. Also from Harvard. He spent nearly 12 years in the Amazon.

I have heard the name but no, I haven't dove into any of his articles.

I think the real importance of these substances isn't that they're a panacea for everything, it's much more humble. You get a much lower-level view of your own nuts and bolts in terms of how your own brain operates. Instead of seeing it like a polished, engineered user interface like we see Wrongplanet or something like Google Chrome or Firefox Mozilla what you end up seeing is the object oriented code on one level, then the system or even assembly code on a deeper level, and you can pursue it downward. This can be great for troubleshooting sticking points or things that you never would have realized really had you in a bind but, because they're problems without known solutions, they lurk in the background and end up causing a boiler plate of unease. Similarly you can come to see ways in which you can adjust your own views to a set of situation that might not only be more functional but even more accurate, particularly if there were complexes of life events that are and were effecting you far more than you realized.

The primary drawback and I think the thing people need to be on guard for (part of why I think we need a lot of trained professionals in this field) - you can end up in situations where... what I'll just call your own internal assembly daemons... can start trying to seduce you, have their way with your beliefs in one manner or another (even giving you something like highly gratifying or false mystical experience content), the issue here that needs to be understood is that Darwinian evolution doesn't just take place outside us but also inside of us as well, and the whole concept of Christian spiritual warfare or books like John Bunyun's The Battle For Mansoul seem to detail some of the struggles that one has when trying to hold progressive human ethics or virtues against the exigencies of Darwinian evolution.

This is where yes, they can have a lot of upside, sometimes even grappling with your own daemons is critical because having that point of contact is part of actually humanizing your deeper gear boxes. For me there's also the whole issue of the train of activity from the base of the spine upward, ie. the experiences of kundalini syndrome, which I don't know what they are but they seem to have something to do with a biological optimization function. I think the more people who actually go through these things and come out the other side of them in one piece the better our culture will be at grappling with the strangeness of the contents in these spaces and more... this really my bottom-line hope... that we can actually optimize culture by understanding our substrate and dealing with it effectively rather than causing all kinds of really cruel but legal externalities to pour down on our weakest members and have school to prison pipelines and things like that. It perverts the heck out of our culture and weakens the coherence and capacity for proper decision making at the top (particularly when power means that you're in a void of meaning and can do anything you can get away with - or even should to stay ahead of your competition).

blazingstar wrote:
I do not see the point in requiring a prescription or a therapist guide for taking psychedelics. We let anyone with with license drive cars and God knows that results in injury and death. We, at least in America, had out guns to anyone old enough. These weapons also result in injury and death. A few people jumping out of windows or having "flashbacks" (SARCASM) is hardly a good reason for limiting access, when viewed from that perspective.

Where I'd have to disagree. Think about how fast - hook, line, and sinker - that our culture bought up the notion that the laws against said substances were to protect us or our kids from plucking an eyeball out and throwing it or jumping off tall buildings thinking we can fly. We don't live in an honest world, that dishonest world is further loaded with all sorts of propaganda - still - about psychedelics and similar chemicals, and anything that makes people uncomfortable in this matter they're just itching, dying really, to slam the door shut on it again and send it back to being the providence of freaks, losers, and people who have no place in society because socially conforming just isn't enough for them.

To that end you almost need viable counterarguments - such a being able to say that adults should under most circumstances be able to get licenses for use but that if they create public disturbances or prove that they can't handle them responsible run the risk of losing that license. The people who that measure is meant to restrain would have to have left this world by and large before we could have true open access and even there, it may very well turn out that it's not a great idea (for example marijuana edibles can cause some people to go crazy, lose their identities, etc., and any cases like this that end up badly get megaphoned in the media).

blazingstar wrote:
I remember, from the 70s?, a cover story for Psychology Today entitled, "What this country needs is a good five cent intoxicant." (A play on words from a quote: "What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar.")
That seems to run in the direction that sliafu mentioned above - ie. if you're going to have to work 60+ hours per week to pay rent on an apartment or have some small mortgage, have almost no possibility for advancement, and live in a state where your seen as subhuman by the growing number of social climbers if you aren't doing better than they are, you need to get people f'd up, regularly, for them to even participate in a system like that. In this case - no kidding they'd want a cheap intoxicant.

What doesn't work out as well with psychedelics, and part of why they never got legalized, is that they do provide actual coherent knowledge. Knowledge is power and, unfortunately, power is best kept in certain families and patronage networks, it's too upsetting to the social order for everyone to have it.


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23 May 2021, 2:11 pm

Nothing super-deep here but it's Sam Harris talking to Lex Fridman on his take (lead by a question from Lex) that the whole Terrence McKenna 'self-transforming machine elves' of DMT are just an extension of one's own brain to make plausible 'others' in dreams:




I'm going to both agree and disagree with Sam's argument. I think he's right that we need to be on guard for things that seem to break our intuitions, such as sensing an 'other'. If our assembly daemons can whip that together as a form of communication or simply due so by the excitation of certain pathways anyway with or without agenda then it's not necessarily proof that we're dealing with anything transcendent and quite often IMHO these beings and the information they carry are clothed in the contexts of our own minds.

Where I'd slightly disagree - these experiences can also be accompanied by finding information that we had no way or knowing, or by having experiences that then somehow informationally strike their way outward, later in sober states, in forms as strange as strong synchronicity.

My admonishment with these sorts of entities or ideas - there's transpersonal content potentially there but we're almost tuned to look in the wrong places for how its carried (especially if we're taking any of it on face value).


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24 May 2021, 7:25 am

A bit more entertaining than educational (Russell Brand) but, he's not wrong.


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24 May 2021, 10:36 am

Paul Stamets chiming in on the current state of research and acceptance (includes a list of something like 40 different major hospitals and foundations in the US, 30 in Europe conducting research), discussion of ballets in various states and provinces of the US:


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24 May 2021, 10:56 am

not the man!

licence to trip? dude wtf!



Last edited by The_Znof on 24 May 2021, 12:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.

aghogday
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24 May 2021, 12:32 pm



Let's Face It (or not), Life is Out of Balance For Most NoW in Our So-Called 'Progress';

Humans Aren't 'Classically Naturally Evolved' to Live As the Tools They Make/Co-Create...

So Much More To Find Within When We Aren't Mostly Relegated to Words... Becoming Again

Even More Tools We Co-Create; So What's The Condition of the Human Condition 'These days';

Five to Eight-Fold Higher Rates of Depression Now Than in the Depression Years of the Depression in the 30's;

Yes Now 2021, Where We Have

Highest Stock

Market

Rates

Ever

In the Same

Damned Country Now;

So What's Missing; Well

Considering A Metaphor of 'Left Hemisphere Think'

Uses Tools And Apprehends Solutions to Problems

That Are Mostly MaNuFaCTuRED And Materially Reduced

To Word Think; Just Different Pictorial Shapes Floating around

Attempting to Approximate The Essence of What's Before Our Eyes;

True, in Our Mind's Eye too; Yes What's Missing is Social Empathic, Artistic

Real Emotional Sensory Spiritual Intelligences That Get Lost On the Highway

To Hell For Real That Ironically So Many People Continue to Co-Create in FEAR THiNK...

ALL ASSOCIATED
with so many

Damned

Feelings and

Sensings of Anxiety

And Depression Now That

'The Dude' off 'The Big Lebowski'

Movie Would Probably Be Getting BacK in

Balance Even Better than 'Half and Half' Now

As Art Comprises Literally 60 Percent of SmART And HeART;

This isn't 'Rocket Science' And In Fact It's Not Classically Naturally Evolved to Be the

Pandemic Out of Balance Human Is Now; Once the Quickest Fix, Dancing Naked Giving No F's;

Getting Back to What We Are Nature Breathing Free; This Doesn't Have to Be A Science Project At all...

Yet for

Some

It is and

Will be until their last breath;

i find that Very Sad (Cold) And Truly Worth FiXin', If Possible...

i For One Surely Don't Need Any Additive Substances; Yet Given

my Experience With Cold and Empty Within (RealHell); It's Definitely

Worth Pursuing for A "Zombie Fix''; Yes Under Controlled Safest And

Legal Conditions only...

ANYWAY for now

'That Apocalypse'

Continues For Real Now

As Science Fiction/Fiction Is

Typically A Forbearer of Human Reality And or 'In-Synch' Now..;)

(The Proof Is In 'The Pudding(S)

Image



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techstepgenr8tion
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24 May 2021, 1:44 pm

The_Znof wrote:
not the man!

licence to trip? dude wtf!

Guess I'm a bit of a pessimist when it comes to power. I don't think anyone gives it up unless it's directly in their interest.

The only place where it maybe makes some sense that we wouldn't have a repeat of the early 1970's - we're not in a cold war with the USSR, we're in a trade war with China, and the question is does liberal democracy and free market have a chance at catching up in efficiency and giving fascism a run for it's money? China's got high speed rail all around the world so it's probably time to stop knee-capping our potential and if some people think better, faster, and innovate more microdosing or even full-dosing, it's probably not the best time to judge let alone stand in their way.


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27 May 2021, 3:16 pm

I'd like to see it happen again. I think it would be groovy to see.


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31 May 2021, 8:18 pm

85 min debate between Alexander Beiner (Rebel Wisdom) and Lars Wilde (Compass Pathways) on the involvement of the corporate incentives in the legalization path for psilocybin therapy:


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