Every Entrepreneur Should Try Magic Mushrooms

2 - marijuana is a more common first "drug" than hallucinogens, for good reason. Although temporary psychotic breaks CAN happen, they are rare, and it is an otherwise pretty innocuous drug.

3- as for hallucinogens: SET, SETTING, and DOSAGE.

Negative story: taking mushrooms with a friend when neither of us were in a good place, emotionally. [bad set] Got confused at the typical 20 minutes in when you "think nothing is happening maybe they didn't work" (this thought ALWAYS occurs) both ate more mushrooms. [bad dosage] Bad bad negative hallucinations. Head on upside down. Turned in to prehistoric bird. Friend outside on the street screaming racist epithets (not normally a racist dude) Luckily ghetto neighbors did not execute him (people can be much more tolerant than we give them credit for) police came and were astonishingly restrained, brought him to hospital. Very close call.

I still concur that hallucinogens are a great thing. But it bears repeating, respect Leary's SET, SETTING, and DOSAGE.

A couple of years ago I went a few days without sleeping, and I had hallucinations and I felt like my mind was ultra-sharp. Just like the author of this article with his 9 mile walk, certain things had happened that I had no memory of. Later when I'd gotten some sleep, it turned out that the sleep deprived state of mind wasn't so sharp after all, it was just an illusion. This is why I'm always a bit skeptical of these kind of claims.

Is your view that that we have evolved for the ordinary state of consciousness a view that was made and evaluated in an ordinary state of consciousness? Should its worth be evaluated in an ordinary state of consciousness? How should we decide if it's valid? Why should something that is considered "most useful" be more valid than something that is considered "less useful"?

An ant's view of the a human city may be very useful to it in terms of its own survival and that of its colony, but few would argue that it understands a human city on as profound and deep a level as a human would. Now, which of these views are "right" or "valid"?

As for what's "in line with reality", would you consider a Picasso painting to be worthless compared to a photograph because the former is not very realistic compared to the latter? What about a song? Is the "in line with reality" standard applicable to a joke? (Sure, there are some jokes with are "funny because they're true", but that standard does not really apply to puns or jokes that rely on surprise for their effect. Are they worthless?) What about poetry? What about the value of a kiss?

Finally, speaking of evolution, Terrence McKenna conjectured that human intelligence and evolution may have been influenced by an encouter with psychedelic mushrooms, whose spores were hardy enough to survive a long interstellar journey to earth, and whose consumption gave human ancestors an enormous amount of novel information.

But that's like anything else - you watch a classic old movie and it utrns out to have a few (ro even many) scenes that just drag, or a book turns out to have some excellent ideas but also a fair amount of filler, a scientific paper is a theoretical breakthrough but also contains some conjectures that turn out to be wrong. Einstein went to his grave a frustrated man insofar as he was unable to articulate a theory of everything that would have made relatively consistent with quantum mechanics, but we don't think of Einstein as a failure.

Think of it like a prism for your mind. A prism allows you to see light and color in a wholly new way, but you wouldn't want to wear prisms in front of your eyes like spectacles because you would be constantly misjudging things and banging your knees. Doesn't mean that what you can see with a prism is false, it's just not optimal for continual use.