Anyone who's taken psychedelic drugs will recognize the kind of experiences I'm describing here. The details are different for everyone, and different for every trip, but one thing is common: the deconstruction of reality, the erosion of ontological certainty. Immediate perception of an underlying world, of the arbitrariness of the personal and social categories we use to divide up the world. Stanislav Grof, the pioneer of LSD psychotherapy, has written that "LSD and other psychedelics function more or less as nonspecific amplifiers of the psyche." I would agree with this but would clarify further that this amplification tends to have the consequence of freeing up static, ossified thought systems. LSD frees up the mind from its routines, and thus opens up the possibility of supernormal states of ecstasy or despair. It shifts the balance of the dual network, weakening the hierarchical network and letting the heterarchical network run free. It shakes the mind out of the basin of attraction of ordinary consensus reality, giving the possibility of fundamentall different states of awareness.

To someone who has had a deep psychedelic experience, the world can never again appear as solid, rigid, and fragmented as it did before. The memory of the solid world dissolving into sensations and relations is always there, hovering in the background. The memory of self, others, and physical objects deconstructing into a shifting web of peacock-feather interrelations. As one of my uncles, a schoolteacher and playright, said to me recently, "taking acid was one of the bigthings in my life, no question about it. It's like getting married, or going to college -- I can't imagine how different I'd be if I hadn't had that experience."

I'm sure I'm not the only one, but I did some drugs during college... LSD, of course, and others, mostly 2C-E, DMT and mushrooms. I happened to have a group of friends who were interested in psychonautics and had access to a wide variety of drugs. What started as mild curiosity for these altered states, turned into an long journey with so many indescribable memories and experiences that changed the way I think about the world in subtle but pervasive ways. Over time and after so many crazy experiences, our little group broke up; one of us had a long standing drug addition problem, which returned and caused many problems for him. One of us just stopped hanging out and disappeared; I think he might be on Facebook but I haven't seen or talked to him in years. Two others I'm still very close friends with.

Overall, I'd have to say the experiences left me much more open to spirituality. I has always been a skeptic/atheist before and really just disregarded notions of spirituality out of hand, but now, I'm not so sure. I'm still just as distrustful of organized religions, however, I think those experiences changed how my mind works at the fringes. It's hard to really put my finger on it in a concrete way, but this author expressed it better than I could have. I hope I have the opportunity to experience psychedelics again, they aren't exactly the easiest drugs to find, although mushrooms are fairly easy to grow if you've got a little closet space, time and money. Thank you for posting this.