#286  The Paradox of Psychedelics

Taking a sufficient dose of psilocybin or LSD, provided you have a generally positive experience, makes it absolutely clear that you have been living in a kind of prison. And once the drug wears off and you're returned to that prison, you can't quite convince yourself that it's good to live there.

If you have a truly liberating experience on psychedelics, it is difficult not to view a conventional sense of self as a form of mental illness.

Each time you do something, pleasant or unpleasant, that is one last time you will do it. And there will come a time when you'll have done something the final time, and you will rarely know when that is.

The great strength of psychedelics is that, at a sufficient dosage, they are guaranteed to produce a profound effect. No one has ever taken 5 grams of mushrooms or 300 micrograms of LSD and been bored. That has literally never happened.

I'd like you to take a moment to think about all the things in this life that you will experience for the last time. Of course, there will come a day when you will die, and then everything will have been done for the last time. But long before you die, you will cease to have certain experiences—experiences that you surely take for granted now.

Your mind is the most rambling, chaotic, needling, insulting, insufferable person you will ever meet. It's like having some maniac walk through the front door of your house and follow you from room to room and refuse to stop talking.

The reasons why people practice meditation and take psychedelics are often the same. They both expose the mechanics of our psychological suffering, and they both suggest that the remedy for it lies in experiencing ourselves in the world beyond our usual concepts.

For many people, learning to meditate without having first taken psychedelics is a little bit like learning to play a musical instrument when you've never heard music.

The point of meditation isn't to collect more transitory spiritual experiences; the point is to recognize that even the most ordinary state of mind is free of self. And it is free of self already; it isn't made free by the practice of meditation.

I really don't think I would have recognized the power of meditation without having taken psychedelics, without first knowing that there was much more to the mind than I was tending to experience.

Meditation is a skill that opens doors that you might not otherwise know exist. And to say that you should do this because it reduces stress or confers any other ancillary benefit is really to miss the point.

You are always meditating on something. Your attention is always bound up in something. We largely become what we pay attention to. We are building our minds in each moment. We're building habits and desire and worries and expectations and prejudices and insights.

Real relief comes when we recognize thoughts for what they are: mere appearances in consciousness, images, bits of language. The fact that a thought has arisen does not give it a necessary claim upon your life. It need not have any implications, psychological or otherwise.

We spend our lives seeking, and the goal of our search is poorly defined. We get inducted into a search by our culture, by the expectations that others place on us and which we learn to place on ourselves. And we learn that there are things we want out of life, largely because others want them.

The freedom that you find in meditation is not a change in experience really; it's the recognition of the context of experience itself. You simply need to drop back and recognize the condition in which everything is already appearing—thoughts and intentions and moods and emotions, sensations, perceptions. Everything is simply appearing. As a matter of experience, there is no you apart from this flow.

Psychedelics work by producing extreme changes in the content of consciousness, whereas the true purpose of meditation is to recognize the freedom that is inherent to consciousness itself—whatever its contents.

Once you know how to meditate, you discover that real mindfulness is free of effort. It, too, simply appears, like anything else. The clouds part all on their own. And you just notice the next thing you notice.

Everything that appears is simply appearing in consciousness as a modification of it. As a matter of experience, awareness is not in your head—and it can't be aimed from your head toward other objects of perception or sensation or emotion or thought. Everything is simply appearing in its own place, all by itself.