The Drug of Choice for the Age of Kale

Well, if real wisdom requires experience then the harm you are talking about is probably slightly less harmful than the pseudo-wisdom one feels when reading another persons experience in a book. After all reading a book doesn't give us an experience, its all "just" chemistry too..

I'm a SV entrepreneur who is pretty well-connected with the community here (only mentioning this for the sake of credibility).

Maybe it's because I missed Burning Man this year, but I haven't heard of anybody doing this outside of articles on Tech Crunch that say people are (let alone normal hallucinogens).

Marijuana or Adderall, sure (Meadow and Eaze are doing well here); maybe even the /r/nootropics stack, but not hallucinogenic substances.

I know people who have experimented with shrooms, but they don't consider them a "drug of choice," let alone a productivity enhancer by any means. In fact, one of my acquaintances ended up going off the deep end when he started taking LSD. It was a really sad story.

For me the experience that has made the most discernible difference in my everyday life has been to recapitulate in a waking [altered] state a recurring dream narrative I've had for decades, recasting [archetypal] its content (which had been a source of anxiety) in a much more positive way. This was followed by a 'coda' of sorts in which the previously unrealized reformation of one of the images was inhabited for some time and found to be a source of joy, as an affirmation of a personal observation/credo about human interaction.

The emotional effect of the easing of an almost entirely unconsidered but omnipresent background note of minor but real and adamantine anxiety is completely personal, but I would by analogy describe the before-and-after as if a decades-old background musical harmonic dissonance were suddenly reframed by the addition of a new bass note, which integrated them into a satisfying (and hitherto unimagined) chord.

I could describe the specifics, but I'm trying to avoid the cliché of sharing dream content with the expectation that its logic and e.g. discernible ties to everyday consciousness can somehow be translated and made of interest...

...I fear those are just deep-sea fish that are better discussed at a remove, or, alluded to rather than named.

If that makes any more sense itself. :)

Maybe a more direct TL;DR would be, _a long-standing semi-conscious fear which had resurfaced repeatedly in disturbing dream, was revisited and unexpectedly resolved in such a way that I came away with greater serenity, which has persisted now for many years after the experience_.

That might be akin to saying that the experience afforded the resolution of a long-standing emotional conundrum, apparently for good. The consequent sense of equanimity has stuck with me and is something I am grateful for.

(I am certain I myself might have come to the same resolution through some other path; my sense from the communities I am in is that one reason people pursue this one is that such experience are very common. Whether through intrinsic pharmacology or some alchemy of set setting and expectation seems almost not to matter, IMHO.)

I am not the OC, but I think he was going on about how you apparently attributed a certain level of "reason" to evolution. His contention is that evolution exists free of reason. I think you two are disagreeing on the term reason.

You mean "reason" in the sense of "why" and he means reason in the sense of "logical conditions". The why is an interesting question, what environmental or other factors provided an advantage in a plant containing this chemical, or was it a non-important side effect of some other change. It is interesting, maybe not easily knowable.

Hope this clears it up. I may be wrong, but I get annoyed when I read comments that are negative without an explanation, so I thought I would attempt to shine some light.

'Negative'? That seems a touch harsh, although possibly just because I find myself on the pointy end.