Sam's Mushroom Trip

okay so as I said about a week after I recorded that conversation with Roland I had my first psychedelic experience in probably 25 years maybe a little longer now most of you know my history here I wrote about it in my book waking up and the relevant chapter can be found on my podcast and in the waking up app under the title drugs and the meaning of life can also be found on my blog under that title now I'll issue all the usual caveats here briefly psychedelics are not for everyone if you do them you should do them with a guide I don't recommend tripping at parties or concerts or out in the world where you can stumble into the lives of others or into traffic and anyone at risk for psychosis probably shouldn't trip at all as I wrote in waking up some people can't afford to give the anchor of sanity even the slightest tug now unfortunately I don't know how one determines whether this admonition applies to oneself but if you're concerned about this you should talk to a psychiatrist or a psychopharmacologist or someone who can give you personal guidance I really don't think people should take these drugs lightly and a scientific research with psychedelics continues and the opportunity to take them in a controlled setting becomes more available I think it will become easier to evaluate these things and to explore these landscapes of mind safely for instance there are protocols for managing bad trips a clinician can bring you down with a xanax or some other drug if things are really running off the rails for you and bad trips aside one wants to have good trips that lead to genuinely transformational insights as Roland pointed out in this conversation many people have good experiences that don't change their lives very much so to get the benefit I think you need to approach the use of these tools seriously and hopefully free people will eventually be free to do that with all the support and guidance that science can offer that is if the government doesn't kick in the door and put a stop to the whole thing in the mean time the potential of these drugs to help people is so great even people who are otherwise well it would be a tragedy if we lost this moment again so where to begin well here's what did I took five grams of dried mushrooms and stayed blindfolded throughout the trip had never done this before all my previous mushroom trips had been in nature at lower doses and I'd never taken any psychedelic blindfolded this was always terence mckenna's recommendation 5 dried grams of mushrooms in the dark and he always talked about this experience as though he were throwing down a gauntlet of sorts he would say things like if you really think you have an interest in the nature of mind if you really have the courage of your convictions well then just take 5 grams of mushrooms in the dark and you'll see how much you didn't know and I was aware that I had never done this right and I hadn't done it because I was scared to do it frankly it really was a kind of failure of nerve I've been hearing Terrans talk about this since the early 90s and I had had several bad trips on LSD and even on mushrooms at lower doses that had given me cause for concern I've had wonderful experiences on both those compounds as well but the possibility of losing one's mind and of not getting it back feels real after a bad trip even if it remains statistically unlikely but after 25 years I recognize that I'm at a different point in my life and I had this nagging feeling that there was something for me to learn here and it must be said that my wife Annika was strongly encouraging me to do this she was really insistent that I do it and so as one does I put it on the calendar now as I discussed with Roland there was one experience with psychedelics I had never had which is often reported by people who take psilocybin at higher doses as well as DMT and that is the encounter with something that seems to have a mind of its own and I was interested to have that experience unlike the LSD experiences I remember from my youth there was a sense of being guided deeper across this landscape of mind by something I thought about this as the mushroom itself now of course I'd been primed to think along these lines by listening to Terence Mckenna rave about these things for many years but there's no denying that there were parts of the experience that felt like an encounter with something other than my own mind now to be clear I'm not drawing any ontological conclusions from that I'm just reporting the character of the experience as I said I was blindfolded throughout the trip so at first it's like being locked in a dark closet but as I was waiting for something to happen I began to feel that there was a Jaguar in the closet with me and I began to suspect that some accommodations would have to be made now unlike the dmt report that Roland and I laughed about in this podcast I wasn't raped by a Jaguar but I can't say we're entirely on platonic terms either now psilocybin is highly visual and the visions come in waves and each time they receded I found myself saying or thinking show me more again there was a sense of being led by something across an inner landscape and the notion of visions doesn't quite capture it the experience isn't confined to one sense domain there's a merging of the senses in a synesthesia so one is really having a vision with one's whole body Renaissance sculpture by Bernini of the ecstasy of Saint Teresa captures the mood pretty well there's just an utter surrender to this thing it's like your mind is being extruded across a landscape and conform to it and squeezed and evaporated there's definitely a motif of sacrifice here and dismemberment it's like you are the lucky human sacrifice and to say that one's mind has simply been shot out among the stars is somehow to trivialize the experience again it's not merely a matter of scene in a vast space it's a matter of feeling to a degree that defies description I mean I can dimly remember feeling such intense gratitude that I wouldn't expect to feel any other emotion for the rest of my life and there's no question that having experience of this kind in the context of believing specific religious doctrines could seem to confirm some of those doctrines the ax for instance I had been a Christian with some notion of the holy spirit rattling around in my brain well then I would count this experience as a full collision with it and proof of its reality but as most of you know my day job is to not be fooled by spurious ideas passed down from our ignorant ancestors so I'm very slow to make claims about what I think is going on here and there's no question that areas of the brain that represent our relationship to other minds can get triggered arbitrarily just as Roland suggested this happens every night when we dream we feel ourselves to be in relationship to people and things that don't exist and frankly the sense of otherness was actually a minor component in the end mainly it was an experience of mental reality but early beyond what I recognized to be my own mind it was not merely impersonal in the sense that was brought beyond any reference to my own life there was no discernibly human aspect to parts of this landscape now the first revelation is with respect to the absolute insufficiency of language to capture the experience I mean you are wading into a roiling ocean of meaning with the proverbial thimble what you bring back in that thimble just can't begin to indicate the immensity of the experience or its beauty or its terror depending even to oneself as an aid to memory language is next to useless and 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 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 end dromeda galaxy so the experience is all together too much it's like a reductio ad absurdum of one's desire for experience itself it's as though the cosmos were saying oh experience is what you want you want to see and feel and think okay how's this and then what follows is a vision so blinding in its beauty and intensity that it shatters your mind it just unmake cyou to admit the poverty of words here we have a word for love for instance what's the word for all the love you can possibly feel and all the love that you recognize that you have failed to feel at every moment in your life up until this moment what do we call the experience of having that ocean of feeling invade you and fill every empty space in your mind there really are no words to describe this experience just as there's no way of snapping your fingers to describe it language is simply the wrong tool for the job does mindfulness relate to phenomena of this kind and psilocybin seemed to have the same effect of decreasing activity in the default mode Network this network has been widely associated with self referential thinking and as Roland mentioned there was a study just published recently on the interaction between mindfulness and psilocybin they took a group of expert meditators and put them on a silent retreat for five days and gave half the group psilocybin and the other half a placebo on day four and then they evaluated them on many measures of meditative and mystical experience and then followed up at four months to assess the lasting effects the important point is that on four months follow up the measures of appreciation for life and self-acceptance and concern for society and planetary values sense of purpose a lack of anxiety around death and dying by all of these measures the psilocybin group looks nothing like the controls and compared to other studies with psilocybin mindfulness appears to increase these effects and minimize the negative experiences but the general picture with psilocybin with or without mindfulness is that as Roland said something like 70 to 80 percent of people who take the drug under controlled therapeutic conditions rated among the top 5 most important experiences of their lives which is extraordinary I think my experience in meditation helped me here and I was conscious at many points of surrendering to the experience by cutting through the sense of self which is to say subject object dualism as I discussed elsewhere in the waking up app but there were also vast stretches of time where there was simply no recollection that mindfulness was an option again it's hard to communicate how far gone one is during the peak of the experience which might last an hour or 90 minutes or so there was no memory at all of having taken a drug there was no reference point to my life and any sense there was no possibility of controlling anything or having a plan another analogy comes to mind here mindfulness seems to me like the discovery of fire right you can Kindle it yourself laborious Li at first but eventually you can produce it on demand and it warms you and you can put it to many useful purposes and it really is fire right it's the real thing as much as any other fire in the universe but five grams of mushrooms is like being hurled into the Sun you can't use this experience at all but it's there consciousness without the feeling of self is the utter erasure of anything recognizably human about your mind scares you it should is a fear of death or madness to overcome here because resistance is just futile and very painful and there's no doubt that many religious ideas in some way relate to this domain of experience for instance one could say that to recoil from the beatific vision is to be cast into hell right or alternately one could say that one gets forced out of the Garden of Eden and thereafter there's an angel with a flaming sword at one's back and then one is left wandering this desiccated world of ego 'ti filled with fear and craving and confusion these opposition's describe a kind of geometry of mind and the way out of hell is simply to surrender all resistance to recognize that consciousness itself at its core is imperturbable being itself trinsic Lee free if it's apparent changes but it's true that realizing this with a category-5 hurricane of eschatology bearing down on you is easier said than done now what kept me sane again was gratitude and [Music] dropping the self and remaining open to experience good intentions really I think love is the ballast you want in your ships hold as you set out over the abyss now this isn't to say the experience might not have gone some other way for me or that it couldn't go some other way in the future because I think there is something about the initial trajectory of the launch that seems to matter and in this case my mind seemed totally permeated with feelings of gratitude and love and awe as the experience was achieving its peak intensity the return to normal waking consciousness was a little shaky to stick with the rocket analogy there definitely was the sense that my vehicle might break up on re-entry the first experience that is analogous to actually slamming down into the atmosphere of Earth it's the surprising recollection that you've taken a drug right you've forgotten that and this entails the realization that you are someone who was so far gone on drugs that you had no memory you had taken a drug in the first place and although I'm not a clinician it seemed easy enough to diagnose myself as psychotic at that point and then of course the door to unpleasant thoughts immediately opens you had such a good life and now you've gone and ruined your mind on drugs how are you going to explain this to your wife that she's now married to a madman but again one is bouncing off the atmosphere here so the recollection that one has taken a drug gets forgotten and must be relearned again and again that's one skids and shudders and then finally comes hammering down through the atmosphere back to earth now as good as my trip was at moments like this one does prey rather fervently to the god of homeostasis just let my brain return to its boring 20 watt glow I'll take an ordinary human mind thank you very much but happily my mind reassembles itself and there were no stray pieces I could see left on the floor anymore feel none the worse for wear in fact I feel saner than I felt in quite some time my priorities are straighter it's like something that needed stretching got a good stretch for about a million years again there are people who should not take these drugs but in the vast majority of cases normalcy returns I will do my best to stay current with the research in this area as it continues to come in I really am looking forward to a time when psychedelic therapy is a legal established clinical science this really must happen we need a modern rational ethically responsible way of Rhian Stan she ating the mysteries of Alice's we need to understand the furthest reaches of human well-being and many of us need to experience these states of mind directly so that we can create an ethics and a politics and a culture generally that has its priorities straight no question that the use of these tools is entirely compatible with the path of meditation for some people and I include myself here initial experience with psychedelics is probably the only thing that could convince us that a path exists and that there's a landscape of mind worth exploring and the combining of a silent retreat with a high-dose psilocybin session as was recently done in the study that Roland referenced seems like a great idea the title of that paper incidentally is characterization and prediction of acute and sustained response to psychedelic psilocybin in a mindfulness group retreat that is a terrible title for a very important study and if human history bends in the direction it should at this point there will be retreat centers set up to do that sort of thing in the near future I'm certainly going to spend some time thinking about how to help make that happen of course I'll do my best to bring whatever relevant resources I can to the waking up app and it's safe to assume that I will be watching this space and speaking with more people doing this research and doing what I can to support it and with that I'll leave you until next time

Channel: Sam Harris

Views: 438,238

Rating: 4.9163356 out of 5

Keywords: sam harris, sam harris podcast, waking up podcast, waking up, waking up with sam harris, sam harris waking up, waking up sam harris, sam harris jordan peterson, sam harris joe rogan, author, neuroscientist, philosopher, philosophy, Making Sense Podcast, Making Sense

Id: yKGddvmU0fA

Length: 19min 45sec (1185 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 22 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/SuitcaseInTow]

This is so good!

[u/PsychedelicBraille]

I'm not so keen on trusting Sam with psychedelic advice.

Nothing wrong with taking a low dose of psychedelics at concerts, also nothing wrong with tripping alone without a sitter (for me, it's better that way).

[u/prgkr7]

He’s known to be a bit of an asshole but I do enjoy his trip reports like this one! I agree with most of his arguments, although I do wonder, for someone who experienced this infinite love that got his “priorities straight”, since he still lacks the ability to be empathetic towards religious people or listen to experts (because he’s too sure of himself he often shuts down experts who know more about certain topics than he does), if more people thought like him, the world might not be such a good place like he anticipates.