Psychedelics researcher approached his death with calm and curiosity
npr.org
npr.org
From the podcast summary:
Meditation, Psychedelics, Mortality: A conversation with Tara and Roland Griffiths - Roland is a long-term meditator, a psychopharmacologist and professor at Johns Hopkins, and a leader in researching the clinical effects of psychedelics, including their impact on those struggling with cancer, depression or addiction. At the end of 2021, he discovered he had incurable stage 4 Colon Cancer. This conversation explores the relationship between meditation and psychedelics, and how they both can serve profound spiritual awakening and deep inner freedom in the face of mortality.
Information about the endowment fund: The Roland R. Griffiths, Ph.D. Professorship Fund in Psychedelic Research on Secular Spirituality and Well-Being.
You can mostly avoid upsetting people with the God language by talking about love of truth instead.
How could we understand the state of things once the heat death of the universe is a distant cosmic memory, and entropy no longer provides an "arrow of time"?
stretch your legs :)
I recommend watching Griffith's video message [0] where he talks about the research and reflects on his condition. I also recommend the conversation with Sam Harris that someone else shared in a comment.
But delusions can occur too. Ymmv.
If so, why?
This seems to be like if someone comes to a doctor with an arrow stuck through him, someone saying "don't give him any pain killers, that's bad. Just take the arrow out so the problem is solved."
You should obviously remove the arrow to correct the root cause, but you don't need to deny the patient pain killers in order to do so. Judging him morally or legally for wanting them doesn't make sense to me, short of claiming that an unprovable all powerful being who talks to man only through extremely unreliable and non reproducable channels has revealed to us that it's actually a sin.
If you have chronic pain of some sort and you use substances to mask that pain the root problem hasn't been addressed and still exists, you just won't be aware of it. If loosing awareness (which at its simplest is what painkillers do) of the ongoing problem is okey with you by all means take a substance to mask it, just don't be surprised when the original problem grows worse latter.
Im okey with people masking or not masking. It should be a personal choice free of judgement.
There are two guys and both are extremely depressed. One guy decides to seek out a therapist and has a meeting set for two weeks from now, the other guy decides to take MDMA/LSD/shrooms (or whatever) every day. He feels amazing and is living his best life every day. The first guy is super depressed day to day but maybe the therapy will help...
The next week they are on a plane together that crashes. Who made the better decision?
Alternatively they don't die and instead live decades more. The first guy got to the root of his issues and lived a very happy life while the second eventually burned out and fell into even deeper depression for his remaining years. Who made the better decision?
It is not fair for us to judge others on how they would like to treat their own bodies and minds. We don't know the totality of their path through life.
Therapy can be a deep healing process or a superficial fix, just as psychedelics like shrooms, LSD, or MDMA can be used daily by some (suggesting a shamanic lifestyle, in my opinion) or lead to profound insights in a single ayahuasca trip for others.
It's true we shouldn't judge what works for someone without knowing them well, and even then, we can only offer suggestions. But when comparing, we should ensure we're not misrepresenting the situation, whether intentionally or not.
>"It's true we shouldn't judge what works for someone without knowing them well, and even then, we can only offer suggestions."
Very well said. I have had great success with psychedelics and other mind-altering substances but doesn't mean the next person will. I have yet to reap a great benefit from therapy but perhaps I just haven't found the right therapist either. To each their own.
Gonna go out on a limb here and guess that you've never taken LSD or shrooms... personally, taking them every day sounds nightmarishly exhausing (can't speak to MDMA).
In my experience, these drugs don't mask your problems, they surface/amplify them.
>"In my experience, these drugs don't mask your problems, they surface/amplify them."
MDMA will defiantly mask your problems. As will heroin, GBH, and a number of others. But yeah LSD/shrooms not so much.
I don't know you're situation, dose, knowledge, safety, etc. But in the off chance you're one of the many people destroying their future minds with this stuff, i have to say something. Google MDMA Supplementation Guide Reddit to find the best ways to reduce toxicity if you intend on continuing.
I agree, and therein lies the promise of these drugs in therapy. PTSD survivors engaging in MDMA-assisted therapy can finally surface and talk about their problems without the pain they usually feel just remembering.
Psychedelics bring peace to the dying. What harm is that? That's what you're arguing against
And more importantly, how do you propose people who struggle to do this reach that acceptance?
> It wasn't that he was filled with spiritual language like, "God's gonna save me." No, it was an acceptance for his condition and a reassurance to the people he loved most, that everything was OK, everything was as it should be, and they felt uplifted by that.
I think what you're not understanding is that taking the drug is the death acceptance technique. It is the thing that allows these people to quickly transition into peace. Do you have a better way? Could you please share that so all of our dying family members could finally have the simple solution you seem to be aware of?
1. Cultivating the spirit. This is slow and has a high abandonment rate, but it is second-to-none in terms of living a fulfilling life. It is worth pursuing, but is unfortunately ill-suited for rescuing people who are in the midst of a mental-health emergency. It should be thought of as "prevention".
2. Cultivating psychoactive substances. This is riskier than the first option, but it has two main advantages: (1) with some precautions, it is immensely helpful in connecting people with their spiritual lives and (2) in an emergency, it is reliably effective. This is on par with the discovery of antibiotics, in terms of medical significance. It should be thought of as "intervention".
Why anyone would willingly renounce the use of either? On what principle? This is obscurantism.
(Disclaimer, working at ayahuasca retreat centers for the last 3 years so maybe biased as to what that context actually is :))
Why are we being so credulous?
Daily use of lots of substances, e.g. alcohol, isn't necessarily a bad thing in itself (though it really can be), but if it's to escape a problem then there's a serious risk there. As the above suggested, the problem also remains unresolved.
So yeah, I don't think a person self-medicating on a daily basis is always problematic, but it's never worked out well for me, and it's not something I'd advise.
My original point was really that getting out of one's head once in a while can give a fresh perspective on a problem.
Caffeine? Probably the most used and least worst, could still cause sleep disruptions.
Weed? Could be a problem. It's very easy to get mentally addicted to it and turn you into a bowl of mush, but if you're using it in medical doses I imagine it's less so.
Microdosing LSD? Depends from person to person. I think using it too often isn't good for the heart.
Alcohol? Absolutely a problem, even if the worst side effects take years to manifest.
These rhetorical attacks on Alcohol in an attempt to normalize the use of other chemicals without a similar biological history is asinine.
I'd be more concerned with psychological damage.
People who drink alcohol typically don't go around telling people they communed with entities from another dimension and they realized that all of existence is one harmonious unity.
Or whatever.
Intention makes a difference.
Joe Rogan's old content postulates that religion as we know it today was formed from psychedelic experiences. For example, the bush that burned in front of Moses was acacia and widely known in the levant to have psychedelic properties
Reading in psychedelics into the text is eisegesis rather than exegesis (reading in the interpreters bias into the text rather than discerning the original author’s intent).
Approaching a horrible situation with calm acceptance and resignation is pathological insanity.
Don't let anyone tell you different.
It's self defeating to judge a situation as "I can't do anything about it I should calmly accept it."
You can rarely if ever know with 100% certainty that you "can't do anything". And even then there are usually things you can do (or could have done).
Your emotional state with respect to a external situation is irrelevant, be stoic by all means.
But thats not what we're talking about here. We're talking about people using mind altering substances to alter their mind rather than face the situation and do what they can.
Approaching a horrible situation with calm acceptance and resignation is pathological insanity.
Don't let anyone tell you different. Especially not someone whose mind has been impaired by drugs.
Drugs alter your subjective experience, how can you then understand whether your experience is true, and you are not simply operating with a defective brain.
In these cases it is the latter. If it was natural to feel a certain way, and that feeling was advantageous to the survival of our species, then your brain would already be that way. Tamper with it at your own peril.
For my part, I will wish to maintain my knowledge of reality and make my last minutes count without any false sense of acceptance of the utter evil that is death.
Mind-altering drugs are bad. If you have used them, you may have damaged your mind permanently.
You wouldn't even know. And you'd even go far as to tell me that it made you smarter/better/more enlightened in some way.
Objectively though, it didn't.
https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/306...
Edit: i highly recommend watching Michael Pollan's "How to change your mind" (Netflix documentary). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8LRb4jfZ9g
Assuming equal efficacy is possible in the first place, and assuming every human is even capable of reaching those levels, there are people who can't spend the sometimes years it takes to practice meditation to a point where they can achieve psychidelic efficacy.
Why not have both available and you can do you?
> Donny: Panaeolus cyanescens, psychadellic.
> Lez: What do they do to ya?
> Sassy: Take you on a journey of self-discovery, you find out who you really are, this and that.
> Donny: Either that or you trip out for four or six hours. But in our current situation this will be really good for us, gunna heighten our senses so we'll be way more in tune with our surroundings.
> Lez: These heighten senses?
> Donny: They heighten senses you didn't even know you had.
> Lez: Have we got more than five?
> Donny: So many.
> Lez: How do I turn them on?
> Sassy: Meditate.
> Donny: Yeah meditation's probably the best way. Or, trip out on some psychedelic mushrooms.
If one or two guided trips can transform someone's relationship to death, that's hugely valuable.
I actually don't think it's worth comparing the two. They achieve a similar end goal depending on your intentionality but I don't think it's fruitful to say one is better than the other.
> They seem like a pointless shortcut, and potentially a problematic one.
Psychedelics certainly have a higher ability to be abused. People need to be educated on looking at their family mental health history, they need an informed trip sitter, and they need to be well informed on what the experience will entail.
On the other hand, how many guru cults that incorporate meditation as a form of psychological warfare and isolation have we witnessed in our lifetimes? The people who are casually allowed to walk around and profess themselves as prophets or gurus is highly adjacent to the consequences of ill-informed ego death and return in the psychedelic space.
> If the hallucinatory dynamic is specifically what you care about, that's also typical of perfectly ordinary experiences such as dreaming, or even just drifting in and out of sleep
Psilocybin, LSD, and DMT are nothing like dreaming. They're very vivid experiences. They can rip you out of your rooting in this reality which is why, imo, they're not good to do unless you have an informed trip sitter who can ensure your mental, emotional, and physical safety. That's what also makes them powerful teachers in the way of perspective; imo, it's not that you're "unlocking secrets to the universe" during a trip, moreso you've been granted a perspective outside of your sense of self that is difficult to achieve otherwise. Depending on the dose it could also be total dissolution of the ego. These things wear off, of course, but someone who can help you do a "soft landing" in the case where you run into some trauma makes a huge difference. The things you process afterward are where "the work" is done.
> What "treasure" are we gaining by dosing the brain with chemicals, that we couldn't otherwise?
You could meditate until your ego dies and likely achieve many of the same machinations from what I've read from peoples testimonies. Again, the work isn't done during meditation, it's how you decompose your experience and incorporate it into your life later. Psychedelics are the same, just a different mechanism that you cannot choose to say "I'm done" halfway through.
147 psychedelic deaths over three years - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1523208/
I'll have to find a youtube video but there's a good one with one of the psychdelic guru's describing a trip where had mis-dosed (he didn't realize the mushrooms he was consuming were significantly stronger than anticipated) and he ended up stuck in a "loop" of not being able to start his car.. for three or four hours. His exprience was distressing but not much of an injury, but he then delves into a story about how a similar loop resulted in one of his friends dying from repeatedly falling into cement.
Having just one go slightly sideways would make me really cautious. I was because freshman year I found some random pre-frosh who had hidden in a closet cause they thought they'd be in trouble (they were not, wet campus) who needed help.
Instead, it appears to investigate psychoactive drug deaths not to do with overdose.
There appear to be no "traditional" psychedelics (serotonergic hallucinogens like LSD, psilocybin, etc) covered here _at all_ except perhaps one death categorized as a "hallucinogen", which is definitely a lot less than 100% of the 147 deaths investigated.