Call to adventure: How I reconsidered my aversion to psychedelics

Do you ever get those rare moments when a new piece of information seems both very important and totally incompatible with your framework at the same time? Those are often the gateways through which you can unlock a whole new branch of the information-fractal. As a novelty-seeking introvert, I’m pretty much addicted to those cognitive paradigm shifts.

In early June of 2018, I encountered one such discovery that later proved to be life-changing. I was listening to a discussion between Sam Harris and Michael Pollan on Sam’s podcast. I didn’t even know who Pollan was, and his new book on psychedelic drugs was completely outside my fields of interest so I wasn’t paying much attention. But then something caught my ear.

Pollan was citing a series of small-sample studies that were originally conducted in the 50s, and were being repeated recently. They were experimenting with using psilocybin (the psychedelic compound in magic mushrooms) to treat depression, anxiety and alcoholism. He was mentioning success rates of around 80%.

That just sounded unrealistic. Also, why would tripping balls improve mental health? It just didn’t make any sense whatsoever. This was of course a typical immune-reaction against a cognitive paradigm shift. Our human psyche really hates disruptive ideas. But this time I started to pay attention, because it was directly relevant to me.

A few days later, while devouring Pollan’s book, “How to change your mind”, I started recalling a lot of information I passively had about these substances and related topics. It turns out, this thing was right in front of my face for years and I kept ignoring it whenever it came up. It’s amazing how effective the brain’s filtering mechanisms can be when our framing is wrong. And it turns out most people’s framing on psychedelics is completely wrong. This shit is not what you think it is.

After reading the book, I started doing some research and came across this:

Wow. That was certainly unexpected. Not only could Psilocybin cure anxiety, depression, and multiple forms of addiction, but it has no dependence potential to speak of, and it’s virtually impossible to overdose? What the hell? This sounded like science fiction. But if true, this could actually help me.

It took me a long time before I was ready to face my own issues, but luckily by the time I got my hands on Pollan’s book, I was pretty sure I had some serious issues with anxiety. It sometimes even triggered periods of depression, and the term “self medication” was probably the best explanation for my sub-optimal drinking habits. Without my one year in therapy I probably would have continued masterfully ignoring all this, but thanks to my efforts I was self-aware enough that the promise of solving all these issues at once made me all ears instantly.

I’m 37 and from Eastern Europe, so my parents’ generation completely missed out on “Turning on, tuning in, dropping out”, simply due to the iron curtain. All we got were the rumors from the moral panic period afterwards. So the my original mental model of the “drugs” domain was “it’s all evil and it will kill you”. Of course, I discovered the socially acceptable drugs early on, but I still maintained this simplistic frame about the “real drugs” for many many years. And then Michael Pollan happened.

But what happened next was even more surprising. After concluding that I will obviously have to try shrooms, I immediately shifted my interest to meditation and didn’t even think much of psychedelics for several months. I didn’t want to wait until I could get my hands on some mushrooms, and I was already aware of the connection between meditation and psychedelics from the works of Sam Harris. So I thought, since I now had enough information to be confident about going down this path, why not start exploring consciousness right away, from the very basics, on my own?

So I dived headfirst into the rabbit hole.

Since then I have a few months of meditation practice experience, I had my first magic mushroom trip, and I explored some of the scientific and philosophical background connected to such practices. I’m in the research and planning phase for my first flotation tank session, and for my first Ayahuasca ceremony for next spring.

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