Psychedelics and the modern world

The sacred, the modern and the realm of meaning

There are certain categories of experience a scientific model just doesn’t have a clue what to do with. When ingested, the realm of substances we call psychedelics produces, to our modern mentality, realms of experience beyond what every day existence seems able to begin comprehend. So much so that during their rediscovery in the twentieth century most governments quickly made them illegal. You can spend your life an alcoholic without going further than your corner shop, but the vast experience of psychedelics are only for most people to read about.

The atheist philosopher Sam Harris said after an experience taking psilocybin “the fact that there are landscapes of mind this vast lurking on the other side of a mushroom is simply preposterous. I mean how could that make any sense? The scale of the thing is all wrong. It violates every intuition you have about what it is to have a mind and a body in a world. It’s as though we’ve lived in a universe where if you just reached into your right pocket with your left hand, rather than pull out your wallet you’d pull out the Andromeda galaxy. So the experience is altogether too much, it’s like a reductio ad absurdum of one’s desire for experience itself.”