I won’t be able to do it justice in words, but I like to try.
If you value your current makeup as a “rationalist”—LSD will not necessarily help with that. Whatever your current worldview, it is not “the truth”, it is constructed, and it will not be the same after you come down.
You can’t expect a trip to do anything in particular, except maybe blow your mind. A trip is like finding out you were adopted. It’s discovering a secret hidden in plain sight. It’s waking up to realize you’ve never been awake before—you were only dreaming you were awake. It’s finding out that everything familiar, everything you took for granted, was something else all along, and you had no idea.
No matter how much you’ve invested in the identity of “rationalist”, no matter how much science you’ve read… Even if you know how many stars there are in the visible universe, and how many atoms. Even if you’ve cultivated a sense for numbers like that, real reality is so much bigger than whatever your perception of it is. I don’t know how acid works, but it seems to open you in a way that lets more of everything in. More light. More information. Reality is not what you think it is. Reality is reality. Acid may not be able to show you reality, but it can viscerally drive home that difference. It can show you that you’ve been living in your mind all your life, and mistaking it for reality.
It will also change your sense of self. You may find that your self-concept is like a mirage. You may experience ego-loss, which is like becoming nobody and nothing in particular, only immediate sensory awareness and thought, unconnected to what you think of as you, the person.
I don’t know about health dangers. I never experienced any. Tripping does permanently change the way you view the world. It’s a special case of seeing something you can’t un-see. Whether it’s a “benefit” … depends a lot on what you want.
(Created an alternative username for replying to this because I don’t want to associate my LSD use with my real name.)
I’d just like to add a contrary datapoint—I had a one pretty intense trip that you might describe as “fucking weird”, which was certainly mind-blowing in a sense. My sense of time transformed stopped being linear and started feeling like it was a labyrinth that I could walk in, I alternatively perceived the other people in the room as being real separate people or as parts of my own subconsciousness, and at one point it felt like my unity of consciousness shattered into a thousand different strands of thought which I could perceive as complex geometric visualizations...
But afterwards, it didn’t particularly feel like I’d have learned anything. It was a weird and cool experience, but that was it. You say that one’s worldview won’t be the same after coming down, but I don’t feel like the trip changed anything. At most it might’ve given me some mildly interesting hypotheses about the way the brain might work.
I’m guessing that the main reason for this might be that I already thought of my reality as being essentially constructed by my brain. Tripping did confirm that a bit, but then I never had serious doubts about it in the first place.
I don’t think describing the experience itself is very helpful to answering the question.. The comment seems as close to an answer of “yes, it’s likely you would find the results of a trip irreducibly spiritual or some other nonsense” as someone would actually give, but because of the vagueness that seems to be intrinsic to descriptions of the experience of a trip, I’m not even sure if you’re espousing such things or not.
In my experience, it is possible to bring parts of the experience back and subject it to analytical and critical thinking, but it is very challenging. The trip does tend to defy comprehension by the normal mode of consciousness, which is why descriptions have the quality you call “vagueness”. In short, distilling more than “irreducibly spiritual nonsense” from the trip takes work, not unlike the work of organizing thoughts into a term paper. It can be done, and the more analytical your habits of thought to begin with, the more success I think you could expect.
I won’t be able to do it justice in words, but I like to try.
If you value your current makeup as a “rationalist”—LSD will not necessarily help with that. Whatever your current worldview, it is not “the truth”, it is constructed, and it will not be the same after you come down.
You can’t expect a trip to do anything in particular, except maybe blow your mind. A trip is like finding out you were adopted. It’s discovering a secret hidden in plain sight. It’s waking up to realize you’ve never been awake before—you were only dreaming you were awake. It’s finding out that everything familiar, everything you took for granted, was something else all along, and you had no idea.
No matter how much you’ve invested in the identity of “rationalist”, no matter how much science you’ve read… Even if you know how many stars there are in the visible universe, and how many atoms. Even if you’ve cultivated a sense for numbers like that, real reality is so much bigger than whatever your perception of it is. I don’t know how acid works, but it seems to open you in a way that lets more of everything in. More light. More information. Reality is not what you think it is. Reality is reality. Acid may not be able to show you reality, but it can viscerally drive home that difference. It can show you that you’ve been living in your mind all your life, and mistaking it for reality.
It will also change your sense of self. You may find that your self-concept is like a mirage. You may experience ego-loss, which is like becoming nobody and nothing in particular, only immediate sensory awareness and thought, unconnected to what you think of as you, the person.
I don’t know about health dangers. I never experienced any. Tripping does permanently change the way you view the world. It’s a special case of seeing something you can’t un-see. Whether it’s a “benefit” … depends a lot on what you want.
(Created an alternative username for replying to this because I don’t want to associate my LSD use with my real name.)
I’d just like to add a contrary datapoint—I had a one pretty intense trip that you might describe as “fucking weird”, which was certainly mind-blowing in a sense. My sense of time transformed stopped being linear and started feeling like it was a labyrinth that I could walk in, I alternatively perceived the other people in the room as being real separate people or as parts of my own subconsciousness, and at one point it felt like my unity of consciousness shattered into a thousand different strands of thought which I could perceive as complex geometric visualizations...
But afterwards, it didn’t particularly feel like I’d have learned anything. It was a weird and cool experience, but that was it. You say that one’s worldview won’t be the same after coming down, but I don’t feel like the trip changed anything. At most it might’ve given me some mildly interesting hypotheses about the way the brain might work.
I’m guessing that the main reason for this might be that I already thought of my reality as being essentially constructed by my brain. Tripping did confirm that a bit, but then I never had serious doubts about it in the first place.
I don’t think describing the experience itself is very helpful to answering the question.. The comment seems as close to an answer of “yes, it’s likely you would find the results of a trip irreducibly spiritual or some other nonsense” as someone would actually give, but because of the vagueness that seems to be intrinsic to descriptions of the experience of a trip, I’m not even sure if you’re espousing such things or not.
In my experience, it is possible to bring parts of the experience back and subject it to analytical and critical thinking, but it is very challenging. The trip does tend to defy comprehension by the normal mode of consciousness, which is why descriptions have the quality you call “vagueness”. In short, distilling more than “irreducibly spiritual nonsense” from the trip takes work, not unlike the work of organizing thoughts into a term paper. It can be done, and the more analytical your habits of thought to begin with, the more success I think you could expect.