As Terence McKenna said, "When you get the message, hang up the phone."
It's useful advice, for those who don't want to get burnt out on acid. So many suffer the 'grim meathook reality' as Hunter Thompson wrote. I mean psychedelics do induce spiritual experiences when the set & setting is right, but too many over-indulge and think they're the Messiah / Second Coming after it all, which is dangerous.
Also: the west has no shamanic centers where we can do psychedelics safely, apart from the Native American churches where you can do peyote rituals without getting arrested. Sadly the men in white coats are the closest thing to a shaman you can get in the West, and we sometimes need a sitter/guide especially with high doses, preferably someone who has done it before multiple times, and can calm you down incase you start having very pronounced anxiety.
"As Terence McKenna said, "When you get the message, hang up the phone.""
That quote originally came from Alan Watts, not Terence McKenna (who, incidentally, didn't hang up the phone until near the end of his life, when he supposedly was too scared to do more mushrooms).
Alan Watts said:
"[P]sychedelic experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight, but a glimpse which can be matured and deepened by the various ways of meditation in which drugs are no longer necessary or useful. When you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope; he goes away and works on what he has seen."[1]
To which I think it was Ram Dass or Dennis McKenna who answered: "I don't hang up on my teachers."
Also, what if you forget the message (as often the states in question are ineffable and the insights one gets are not able to be carried in to ordinary waking consciousness, or not for long)... or what if there is no message, just as seeing a sunset is devoid of messages but still worth seeing? What if you consider the experience sacred or a way to connect to your god(s), the spirit world, transcendent reality, or nature? What if you use psychedelics to enhance your creativity, have fun, or treat your depression?
None of these uses fit neatly in to the narrow "message" paradigm that Watts was talking about.
I don't know anything about this topic, or who any of these people are.
But I do know that often those seeking 'inspiration' will become so enamored with their own insights that they often fail to execute on what they have found. Instead they do everything they can to maintain that feeling of enlightenment at the expense of truly realizing the meaning of their insight.
This isn't specific to drug use, it's not specific to software development or any set of tasks, it is simply a common theme in human behavior I have anecdotally noticed in myself and others over the years.
So based on that...
What I think what Alan Watts intends to say is that if you don't *do* anything concrete with your inspiration then you're simply sitting around on the phone waiting for the next dopamine hit from your 'next great insight' about [literally anything].
In my opinion I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, just that Alan Watts was likely a more objective driven person than his peers, whom sought to live in the experience rather than use it to further some abstract objectives.
"if you don't *do* anything concrete with your inspiration then you're simply sitting around on the phone waiting for the next dopamine hit from your 'next great insight' about [literally anything]."
What do you do as a consequence of looking at a sunset or a great painting, listening to some amazing music, or having mind-blowing sex?
Are such experiences to be devalued unless they lead to something productive?
Maybe some great works of art do have influences on people, but they're not exactly as easy to trace as, say, being taught some useful skill. That doesn't mean that great works of art are valueless nor that we should only value what is useful.
Also, what if your mood improves after taking psychedelics? Or if you enjoy life more, or you're less stressed out? You haven't necessarily done anything based on the experience, but it's easy to see that your life has improved.
It's not all about useful messages or insights.
I don't see what's wrong with simply getting more pleasure out of life.
It is an individual thing is what I was trying to get at. One artist who paints sunsets will see many of them and paint a few in great detail while another may paint each one he sees, selecting the best for his galleries.
If you want to talk on the phone with your pharmacist for 20 minutes after confirming your prescription will be ready at 2PM, thats great. For someone who values efficacy and the reduction of "unnecessary" expenditure of time this would however be unacceptable.
I find myself struggling to let more of the former in my own life than the latter, but in this case I wanted to try and illustrate the *internal* dynamic I saw being expressed by the two viewpoints.
My writing was colored by my own belief of what is best in life, so it leaned towards minimizing the value of leisure, but to be clear, that wasn't the message I was trying to convey.
You don't entirely 'hang up'. You -- as Alan Watts said -- mature and deepen that communication with a different form of communication: meditation. It's like hanging up the phone and meeting with your teacher in person, not hanging up and never talking to them again.
You don't need psychoactive drugs to have deep, earth-shattering mystical experiences, and I don't understand why one would want to rely on drugs to get them.
'Reliable and quick', in the sense that they will almost certainly have a psychoactive effect, sure, but reliable in the sense of 'I can tap into those mystical feelings any time, any where, and turn it off if I need to'? Not even a little. You are not the 'captain of the ship' during a psychedelic trip. Meditation is more reliable in those senses, but you have to learn how to do it and engage with it.
Edit: to respond to your 'easiest' edit in -- it's only easy in the sense that the barrier for entry is lower, but 'lower barrier for entry' is optimising for quantity, not quality.
I'm not convinced that meditation can get one even remotely close to the spaces that powerful doses of psychedelics can get you to... and I'm not willing to invest 20 years of heavy meditation practice to find out.
As for "quality", who's to say? Many meditators have never been heavy psychedelic users, so if they claim that meditation can get them to the same place they don't know what they're talking about.
That's not to mention that psychedelic experiences vary widely from person to person, and often even from trip to trip taken by the same person, so it's really hard to make generalizations that apply to all people, all substances, and all circumstances.
Also, some people dismiss psychedelic experiences as illusory, which to me just signals that they have nothing interesting to contribute to the conversation. I'm interested in exploring these substances and spaces, not in trying to sweep them under the rug or wishing they would go away.
For me, a good mushroom trip plus a good dose of ket (about 3 hours in) will, in a reliable manner, give me a powerful and mind blowing spiritual experience.
Good luck trying to extract any words to describe it. Not that it can’t be done, but when you have a glimpse of more profound realities, who would expect it to be easy to articulate or execute upon?
There is also a great essay written by Andrew Weil ( found in Hallucinogens: A Reader by Charles Grob)who said something similar (if I remember correctly) And that he found it so hard to take knowledge from one realm into the other.
Another little known thing about Andrew Weil is that he seems to have been instrumental in getting Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) fired from Harvard by reporting on their experiments to the press.
That's not to cast blame on him for the firing itself, which lands entirely on the shoulders of Harvard.
I'll admit to being an investor in the field before I say anything about it:
There is a growing field of therapeutics and medicine with a focus on using similar techniques. There's one that's growing pretty quickly in the Vancouver/Montreal/Toronto regions with centres where you can apply for ketamine or MDMA guided therapy. They also psychedelic integration counsellors and therapists. One company in particular recently gained a federal license to supply psilocybin for medical research.
It's encouraging. To me it seems there is undeniably something good there. How it is managed is crucial.
I don't think we've even scratched the surface, yet.
Very sound advise. I know a number of people who regularly took psychedelics/smoked a ton of weed in the 90's and who could now be regarded as casualties. Maybe some form of psychosis would have happened to these people anyway, but IMO psychedelics is not a "one size fits all" type thing. Many people do clearly get something out of taking psychedelics, but other people with genetics tending on the psychotic end of the spectrum clearly should not, in my opinion. Also I think we have survivor bias in many of these conversations on HN - in that people who are in a bad place are not positing on hacker news. Those people are surviving and trying to get their shit together.
In a study of 100k people, 20k of whom reported lifetime psychedelic use:
"There were no significant associations between lifetime use of any psychedelics, lifetime use of specific psychedelics (LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, peyote), or past year use of LSD and increased rate of any of the mental health outcomes. Rather, in several cases psychedelic use was associated with lower rate of mental health problems."[1]
Also: "We did not find use of psychedelics to be an independent risk factor for mental health problems."[1]
Seems like a good time to link to the Fireside Project, who do psychedelic peer counseling over the phone. Non-profit, free.
https://firesideproject.org/
It's useful advice, for those who don't want to get burnt out on acid. So many suffer the 'grim meathook reality' as Hunter Thompson wrote. I mean psychedelics do induce spiritual experiences when the set & setting is right, but too many over-indulge and think they're the Messiah / Second Coming after it all, which is dangerous.
Also: the west has no shamanic centers where we can do psychedelics safely, apart from the Native American churches where you can do peyote rituals without getting arrested. Sadly the men in white coats are the closest thing to a shaman you can get in the West, and we sometimes need a sitter/guide especially with high doses, preferably someone who has done it before multiple times, and can calm you down incase you start having very pronounced anxiety.