Despite having had the relevant experience, I've always found it hard to understand why this happens.
You know you're taking a drug that reliably induces feelings of "oceanic connectedness". Why should you change your worldview as a result? All kinds of things can change the way you feel temporarily, but most of them don't leave you thinking that you got insight into the way things really are.
Maybe it's that psychedelics also induce feelings of having discovered something important, and a lot of people don't try to double-check whether they actually did.
Despite having had the relevant experience, I've always found it hard to understand why this happens. You know you're taking a drug that reliably induces feelings of "oceanic connectedness". Why should you change your worldview as a result? All kinds of things can change the way you feel temporarily, but most of them don't leave you thinking that you got insight into the way things really are. Maybe it's that psyched…
If astronauts can have their worldview changed by going to space why can't a psychedelic experience do the same. Both are just a new perspective.
Despite having had the relevant experience, I've always found it hard to understand why this happens. You know you're taking a drug that reliably induces feelings of "oceanic connectedness". Why should you change your worldview as a result? All kinds of things can change the way you feel temporarily, but most of them don't leave you thinking that you got insight into the way things really are. Maybe it's that psyched…
There is some interesting research[1] accounting for this via analogy to annealing: essentially that while using psychedelics (or a variety of other situations), a kind of disordering occurs that opens up an alternate phase of neural behavior where it's more possible to change course; then, after the trip (or whatever caused you to enter this more disordered state where free energy is higher), there is a "cooling" phase and some new order is arrived at.
Despite having had the relevant experience, I've always found it hard to understand why this happens. You know you're taking a drug that reliably induces feelings of "oceanic connectedness". Why should you change your worldview as a result? All kinds of things can change the way you feel temporarily, but most of them don't leave you thinking that you got insight into the way things really are. Maybe it's that psyched…
We don't qualify experiences by consistency with convention so much as intensity. Call it unreasonable but there you go.
So if you have a strange and intense experience then your ideas about stuff are appropriately modified. Even if the experience and ideas don't align with convention/consensus/etc.
The overall result does not surprise me, but two things in particular did: 1. That materialism is much less popular than I expected. I wonder how much is due to selection bias. 2. That idealism didn't enjoy a bigger bump than it did. I predict that dose size would correlate with increase in idealist views, as larger doses are more frequently nondual, and nondual experiences tend to inspire idealist beliefs. I myself…
> That materialism is much less popular than I expected. I wonder how much is due to selection bias
The overwhelming majority of human beings both now and historically are dualists, so this isn't surprising to me at all.
Materialists always lose me when they start trying to explain things like how exactly inanimate matter started thinking. I've never seen any recourse other than handwaving of the highest order. Usually it's something along the lines of emergent behavior, but no mechanism is ever given for how or why said emergence occurs.
My experience has been that just as fast as the walls come down, the mind builds them back up.
sometimes, you can build different walls
and sometimes, when the walls came down, so did the roof, which ripped out the electrical supply, destroyed the plumbing and ruined all the floors. you don't have a house anymore, just a pile of disorganized raw material and you realize you don't know anything about house construction.
My experience has been that just as fast as the walls come down, the mind builds them back up.
That’s an interesting take about the walls. I’ve always thought of it more like pathways. There are certain pathways of thought and action that I tend to take on a daily basis. Those pathways get pretty well worn in which makes it all the more easier to continue taking those pathways even if they aren’t serving me well. Experimenting with psychedelics has been a great way of showing me that there are other pathways or even that I can pave my own, but in order to actually not go back to my old habits entirely afterwards and ways of thinking after the trip, I have to make a conscious effort into choosing to take the new pathways that I discovered on the trip. It’s not usually some big profound change, but I think that following some of those new paths and wearing them in has had a positive influence in my life in ways that can continue.
With some of my more profound psychedelic experiences, I’ve found that there’s a little bit of an afterglow effect where for a couple days, I feel like the trip I had, that has since worn off, is still totally valid and profound and meaningful. That, I’d say, is the best time to start incorporating some new habits or practices (or maybe getting rid of some old baggage), before the walls start to go back up.
Despite having had the relevant experience, I've always found it hard to understand why this happens. You know you're taking a drug that reliably induces feelings of "oceanic connectedness". Why should you change your worldview as a result? All kinds of things can change the way you feel temporarily, but most of them don't leave you thinking that you got insight into the way things really are. Maybe it's that psyched…
Not only that, but the fact that consuming a chemical can make your consciousness feel so different always felt to me like pretty good evidence that consciousness is material.
I do think there are rational realizations that rational people can come to under the influence of psychedelics, that they might not otherwise, though.