It's important to have a spiritual practice to go alongside psychedelics to weather the ontological shock.
"Atheists are mentally incapable of handing psychedelics" is certainly a take.
Terence McKenna's Mega Bad Trip (2025)
31–40 of 114 posts
Re: Terence McKenna's Mega Bad Trip (2025)
#32It's important to have a spiritual practice to go alongside psychedelics to weather the ontological shock.
Spiritual doesn't mean religious, is my opinion. It means being grounded in something firm, whether that's inner strength or a reliance on an external deity. Religion is not required for psychedelics, but a strong grounding in something is, in my opinion. People have bad trips because there's something inside them that they haven't identified or dealt with properly. Anxiety and/or depression will ALWAYS flare up duri…
Re: Terence McKenna's Mega Bad Trip (2025)
#33It's important to have a spiritual practice to go alongside psychedelics to weather the ontological shock.
Spiritual doesn't mean religious, is my opinion. It means being grounded in something firm, whether that's inner strength or a reliance on an external deity. Religion is not required for psychedelics, but a strong grounding in something is, in my opinion. People have bad trips because there's something inside them that they haven't identified or dealt with properly. Anxiety and/or depression will ALWAYS flare up duri…
Re: Terence McKenna's Mega Bad Trip (2025)
#34It's important to have a spiritual practice to go alongside psychedelics to weather the ontological shock.
Good crutch for the weak. I've tripped plenty of times; I'm an atheist; it was great. Next time you trip, you should reflect on your need for "spirituality" and what it says about whatever is going on or not going on between your ears. One of the most amazing things about humans is their imagination and ability to convince themselves of almost anything. In my opinion, one of the points of doing psychedelics is to rec…
Re: Terence McKenna's Mega Bad Trip (2025)
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Atheists are mentally incapable of handing psychedelics" is certainly a take.
Equating a belief in gods with spiritual discovery is also a take.
Re: Terence McKenna's Mega Bad Trip (2025)
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Equating a belief in gods with spiritual discovery is also a take.
Belief in spirits is just as absurd as belief in deities, which are just a specialized category of spirit as far as these things are usually classified anyway.
Re: Terence McKenna's Mega Bad Trip (2025)
#37It's important to have a spiritual practice to go alongside psychedelics to weather the ontological shock.
"Atheists are mentally incapable of handing psychedelics" is certainly a take.
Re: Terence McKenna's Mega Bad Trip (2025)
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good crutch for the weak. I've tripped plenty of times; I'm an atheist; it was great. Next time you trip, you should reflect on your need for "spirituality" and what it says about whatever is going on or not going on between your ears. One of the most amazing things about humans is their imagination and ability to convince themselves of almost anything. In my opinion, one of the points of doing psychedelics is to rec…
I’m also an atheist, but just looking at the huge amount of anthropological information we have, from hunter gatherer bands to large scale civilizations, I am quite sure that a perception of god-like and spirit-like entities is built into the hardware layer in humans. That doesn’t make them “real”, of course, but it doesn’t seem to matter much whether or not they are real, and deleting them from life because they are…
Re: Terence McKenna's Mega Bad Trip (2025)
#39Re: Terence McKenna's Mega Bad Trip (2025)
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good crutch for the weak. I've tripped plenty of times; I'm an atheist; it was great. Next time you trip, you should reflect on your need for "spirituality" and what it says about whatever is going on or not going on between your ears. One of the most amazing things about humans is their imagination and ability to convince themselves of almost anything. In my opinion, one of the points of doing psychedelics is to rec…
I’m also an atheist, but just looking at the huge amount of anthropological information we have, from hunter gatherer bands to large scale civilizations, I am quite sure that a perception of god-like and spirit-like entities is built into the hardware layer in humans. That doesn’t make them “real”, of course, but it doesn’t seem to matter much whether or not they are real, and deleting them from life because they are…
Recently returned to psychedelic use to treat depression and the best takeaway I have for the experience is "swimming with God". By God I mean "the Universe as an entity" for lack of better words. Pro tip: ketamine wins out over psilocybin for treating depression.
I did try DMT once a long time ago and saw the machine elves (prior to ever hearing about them) but it felt more like "ROM artifacts" rather than alien consciousness trying to connect.