On Psychedelics, "Hard Drugs" and Personal Development.

Hello there, and thank you for taking the time to inquire about Psychedelic Hallucinogens and the possible harms and uses they may have. The question was, in short, ‘I am worried about people who claim that psychedelics and the people that use them are somehow “Priests or Shamans” to be revered and looked up to. I do not understand how people can look up to someone using hard drugs and condone it. Can anybody please explain to me why people feel this way and if I am wrong, please explain.’

So Thank You for addressing this very difficult question.

My answer will be one of many words, as it usually is, to make sure that I cover all the bases and provide all the relevant information for anyone reading it to successfully pursue their own personal development, and to learn a bit about who I am and how I have bettered my own life as well.

Firstly, let us analyze the definition of “Hard Drugs”.

There are many drugs out there, and of course Everything either Is or Is Derived from Natural Resources. But let us begin to define what “Hard Drugs” means to the scientific community. Hard Drugs could be defined in a few ways. First,

1. Substances which are highly addictive.

2. Substances which disrupt successful life functioning.

3. Substances which have an adverse effect on Physical Health.

4. Substances which have an adverse effect on Mental Health.

5. Substances which cause prolonged loss of bodily control and/or insanity.

I am going to further develop the picture here, but let me first draw reference to the very uncomfortable fact that our governments have been selling drugs since the dawn of our civilizations. In fact, the Colonies were expanded via market share, directly attributed to consumable drugs sold directly by the governments and their associated. These include but are not limited to:

1. Alcohol. 2. Tobacco. 3. Opium. 4. Morphine. 5. Heroin (opiates) 6. Cocaine. 7. Crack Cocaine. (Coca derivatives with harmful chemicals added). 8. Methadone. 9. Fentanyl. 10. Sugar (as addictive as heroin and entirely useless to the human genome). 11. Coffee. 12. Cacao (mixed with sugar is chocolate).

So there are a variety of legal drugs to choose from, most of which meet the criteria for “Hard Drugs”.

Opium, though non harmful to the body, is extremely addictive, and was not looked at under the lens of addiction until the 1600’s! Morphine, a synthetic derivative of Opium, was hailed as the “Cure to Opium”. Heroin, a more addictive, more harmful version of Opium and Morphine, was of course, hailed by the government marketing team as a “Cure to Morphine”.

The Stimulant class of drugs -Tobacco, Cocaine, Coffee, Tea, Sugar, Cacao- are all highly addictive, though with some tangible benefits – they help us work harder, under more draining circumstances, and produce quality work through Focus and Persistence, albeit much Trepidation. This has been useful not only to advance the agenda of Colonialism, the control of other countries for profit, but also for Industrialism as well.

So I won’t go into the specifics of how each of these drugs, sold by our governments, meet the criteria of Hard Drugs, but you can compare them easily above. But on to the topic of Indole Hallucinogens.

Indole Hallucinogens include Psilosybin Mushrooms, or Stropheria Cubensis, LSD, or a derivative of Morning Glory seeds or Ergot fungus, which grows on grass, and DMT, or Ayahuasca alternatively, which is generated by our own brains and is present in almost every living substance, including healthy, normal grass, which is the most present plant life on earth.

So what makes these Indole Hallucinogens different from the other aforementioned substances?

First off, the indole hallucinogens are not only non-addictive, they are in fact Anti-Addictive, being used successfully in various studies to accomplish an 80% success rate in curing addiction on their own, an absolutely unheard of number, as told by Jordan Peterson, a respected and conservative professor of Psychology residing in U of T in Toronto. (cite)

Secondly, the Indole Hallucinogens (henceforth referred to as IH’s) have been studied to have profound effects on the successful exposure to and reformation of, dysfunctional ways of living. They not only counteract drug addiction but also destabilize one of the most powerful non-substance drugs – Television and Media. In fact, they combat other areas of dysfunction as well, and before someone says “HEY! I really enjoy TV!”, let me tell you that I do as well, but from a certain perspective. The IH’s will not necessarily give you a binary truth on any of these matters. It is not as simple as “This is Bad”, “This is Good”. In fact, nothing in life is really like this, however, Dualism is the lens through which we view all of society, the Illusion referred to as the Dream, the Simulation and the “Truth”. The real truth is, reality is made up of seemingly conflicting truths. It is not a matter of Red vs Blue, Liberal vs Conservative or Yankees vs Blue Jays (for some reason my favorite reference), in fact, if we dig into it a little, we can realize that both Red And Blue are necessary for perceiving the world. Otherwise, how would we see Purple? Both Liberal And Conservative are needed in our current governmental structure. Both Yankees AND Jays are needed to hold a real baseball game. And so it is with life. The IH’s have a pretty stable effect across the board of dissolving This Or That perspectives and integrating a more Polar approach to understanding the world than traditional Dualism. In fact, many famous and successful people have claimed proudly their use of the IH’s and their integral role in shaping these people’s careers. These include Bill Gates, Albert Hoffman, Joe Rogan and I want to say Nicola Tesla (?) among many others.

We could look at the IH’s as disrupting successful life functioning on account of Disillusionment with ourselves, our families and society, however, this would be no different than looking at AA as disrupting our lives, since we have to go to weekly meetings and no longer get to sate ourselves with our alcoholic vices. In reality, IH’s separate us from previous patterns of behavior and cause us to look at them in a true light, Disenchanting us and causing quite a lot of stress upon the scenarios we have involved ourselves in for so many years. It can be very difficult to accept that we have spent 5, 10, 20 or our whole lives of years down the wrong paths, and this presents its self as stress and mania during the first psychedelic experiences. This is usually what turns people off. I remember my first experience, I experienced more stress by a factor of at least 100 than I had ever conceivably experienced in my life. 3-6 hours in of crying, screaming, moaning and otherwise realizing how much I had messed my life up in times previous, I remember thinking “Dear God, what have I gotten myself in to? Am I going to be like this for the rest of my life? Is this ever going to end?”.

After hours and hours of traumatic release, I grabbed a marker, crushed it in my fist like a caveman and did my best to bring it down to the paper (my fine motor control was not so good at the time) and I wrote, almost unintelligibly, “I Felt”. This was one of the first experiences I had ever had with mushrooms, and beyond that, one of the first times I had ever felt like I had truly seen the harsh reality.

The next day I was voraciously committed to healing my mental health. I had been suffering from Dysthymia, or chronic mild depression, for as long as I could remember. I used to stare out the window of my apartment building as a child and wonder how there could be Good or God in the world when so much was wrong; tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, rape, murder, theft, neglect, ect. I was not happy about what I saw. My subsequent solution was to “Escape” into books, dreams, video games and Avoidance, of everything. I was disillusioned by school, by my doctor, by my parents… it was as if, as a child, I had already gotten a bitter taste of what Indole Hallucinogens held for me in the future.

But that is a whole other story, so let me move through into the other definitions of Hard Drugs.

Not only do IH’s not have any significantly negative effect on physical health (besides if you so cliché’ly jump off a building or into a puddle), they can actually have quite a positive effect on physical health. Let me explain it by telling you what happened next.

As I have told you, I had been depressed all my life, convinced that I had Depression, maybe I was Bipolar, Autistic, I didn’t know. All I knew was There Was Something WRONG with me. That was what society had taught me, what school and my doctor had taught me, what my friends and family had taught me. The problem was within me. I had a chemical imbalance. So, not only was this Not True, in fact, there is no chemical test to affirm this “Chemical Imbalance”. Instead, I was presented with hundreds of psychiatric questions and provided with explanations that did not fit. ADD, ADHD, GAD, ect. I had trouble focusing in school and forgot half of what my parents said to me, but at the same time, I could focus for hours and hours on a creative project, reading a book, ect. I had times when I was happy, and times when I was sad. But most of the time I felt numb and vaguely depressed. So how then, did psychedelics benefit my physical health? Well, the day after my manic psychedelic experience, I found myself stoically committed to finding solutions to my mental health. I read books, I watched videos, I read articles, I scanned databases, I tried everything for myself. I realized early on that, despite what Health Canada (cite) said, the cures for depression were more than Pharmaceuticals, Psychotherapy and Electroshock (are you kidding me?). What I learned almost immediately was that Nutrition, Exercise and Sleep played huge roles in the cause and relief of depression… who knew? So here is where the physical health benefits start coming in, which far outweigh any harmful effects the drugs may have caused, though they have been studied to have little to no negative lasting physical side effects.

I started eating better. “What does that even mean?” I thought, and so I found out. I spent over 8 hours profiling the different macronutrients required (yeah, I guess that’s a thing) and the highest sources of those nutrients. Now I have pages of information that help me to make healthy eating choices, whenever I need to look. I also started exercising. In fact, I was totally disinterested with my usual 8 hours of video games a day. I started taking daily jogs up the road from my house, and soon found myself jogging further, with more energy, and feeling less debilitated by my depression. I also started getting more rest. I had always felt like I never got enough done in the day. How was it that I could be awake and busy for over 16 hours but I always felt like I got nothing accomplished? I didn’t get anything accomplished. All I managed to do was feed myself, smoke weed and play video games. But that changed, because I was not willing to go back to my old lifestyle. I somehow felt like it wasn’t Me, even though it had been for as long as I could remember. So when that time came around 11PM that I normally felt like I hadn’t done enough, I remembered how much I actually HAD done, and that I would be able to do even more tomorrow, if only I got enough rest.

Over time, I did fall back into old routines and became lost again in depression, but I had made real progress, and despite how my family was looking at thing, I HAD accomplished something, and I wasn’t just a quitter. I hadn’t failed. When times were right again in the future, I had the work I had done to fall back to and was able to keep adding to it. I have spent the last 4 years since that day, working on and off to learn and integrate mental health solutions.

I also learned that Perspective and Environment played a huge role as well. Similar (really the same) as “Set and Setting”, described as guidelines for proper hallucinogenic use, Perspective and Environment were really important. I realized my perspective –this is good, this is bad, this is me, this is not, my life sucks, ect- was not doing me any good. I also realized my environment –my computer, my phone, my messy room, my unwashed dishes and clothes, my outside influences, ect- were not doing me any good either. I set about changing them, what I now think of as an Alchemical Process. I stayed away from video games and TV shows. I cleaned all the dishes, and when I used them, I cleaned those too. The same went for the laundry, the mess and everything else. But this didn’t happen in a week, nor did it happen within a month. I was by myself in this, and it took me a year of hard work before I felt I wasn’t totally depressed anymore, and another year before I knew I was no longer depressed. The next year was spent not solving problems, but finding solutions, exploring new avenues of creativity, getting out into the world, making new friends (I was an introvert) and exploring my newfound, or newly created life. This last year has been spent specifically on learning how I can use what I have learned to help others, and these online posts are one of the ways I work (for free, mind you) to help people around the world. I do not want or expect a pat on the back, an award, a fancy desk or a stroke of my ego, I simply want people who are suffering like I was to know they are not alone, and to finally receive some help that may benefit them in changing their lives for the better. This is my life’s purpose now.

The fifth element of Hard Drug definitions is prolonged loss of bodily function and/or sanity (as defined quickly by me). The motor control, though lost temporarily sometimes on psilosybin, is I really think meant as a “Sit Down, Shut Up and Learn” prerogative. You’re not supposed to take Indone Hallucinogens and party or go to a social event. You can do it, and you may have a really good time, but the Purpose and the Room for Error is great, and it is usually not a good idea to use these tools in public, just like you wouldn’t bring a scalpel to a music concert or a family event.

As for insanity, they say this is the major risk of psychedelics. Can you get in, get out and keep your sanity? In reality, this is said because IH’s are Boundary Dissolving, meaning, you’ll probably become more like me; impressionable to music, movies, books and media, as well as other people and even animals. When the line between you and someone else becomes not only blurred but Dissolved, totally, you have people walking around believing they ARE Jesus Christ. I can see how this would be weird. In summary, these people have possibly been religious and felt a connection to the spirit (what he preached) of Jesus, or biblical passages, stories, or even subtle wavelengths of Christ Consciousness himself. This is where it all gets very subjective, so I do not believe I could really continue the conversation about the experiences themselves with someone who has not experienced them, as this article has (in my mind) been very clinical in scope as so far, and though the experiences themselves are even more valuable than the results in curing addiction and transforming lives, they are extremely strange and I do not believe someone without experience could ever hope to understand what I am saying without first being properly exposed to the indole hallucinogen experience in the proper context. That is to say, one would have to do their research (I have done over 80 hours) and conduct the experience with the proper goal of personal development, and, upon experiencing the huge amounts of stress -which I imagine would be codependent of how many years we have lived against the grain of what is needed from us, via our bodies physical needs, our brains cognitive needs, our hearts emotional needs and our Sole or Soul needs of living out our life’s purpose on a daily basis- in order to go any further with this. After the initially “Bad Trips”, I can tell you, one will be exposed to the beauty of nature, the intrigue of life and a profound change in perspective and life direction, that is so common yet so underexplored in psychedelic usage.

The problem I see is that these useful and dangerous tools –these psychedelic scalpels- are being abused by us in our current society, as we are used to abusing all other drugs, from Coffee to Cocaine. I believe articles such as this one provide a positive entry point to the research and experience of Indole Hallucinogens, however, I also highly recommend reading the works of more highly acclaimed individuals than me –historians, scientists, psychologists, ect- who have not only more years of professional training than me, but who have also made it their life’s work, along with their respective fields, to study, experiment with and catalogue the beneficial and complicated results of psychedelics.

I highly recommend the very jam-packed book, “Food of the Gods”. And outside of directly psychedelic methods, I encourage you to look past just the “Drugs” to Reality, after all, that IS what it’s all about. The books “Leadership and Self Deception”, “Hooked”, “Predictably Irrational”, “The Science of Influnece”, “Tools”, “The Organized Mind”, “The Four Agreements”, “Flow” and “Shambhala, the Sacred Way of the Warrior” have all been integral parts of my learning – as integral as the psychedelics themselves.

The thing is, Mushrooms and LSD have a really quick tolerance, which means they won’t work well if you try to do them too frequently. In my experience –and through the accounts of others, both professionally and by survey- have been that one must wait 2-4 weeks in order for the IH’s to properly become fully active again. This is a really great, built in counter-abuse strategy. My suggestion, is that after learning about Set and Setting and going about at least 30 hours of study (or reading Food of the Gods) that a person, if they have the courage and the intention to use these compounds to look into the deep, painful recesses of the psyche and the world –to find problems and invoke solutions- , one should start with 2 grams of dried Stropharia Cubensis (psilosybin mushrooms) and follow Terrance McKenna’s suggestion of meditating in a dark room with no music and eyes closed, and be prepared to experience something strange, at first traumatic, and very life altering. The COURAGE needed to pursue this is vast, and perhaps it would be best if one could open their eyes soberly to the world around them First, and make as many positive changes as they can in their lives, before experimenting with Indole Hallucinogens.

The “Quest” or “Journey”, is such that, since these experiences can only be had once a month, and may not be desired for months to years afterwards, one must “Integrate” the experiences in their “sober” time. This is to say, we must take what we have seen -the Good, the Bad and the Ugly- and make changes that address to the discontinued harm of ourselves and the recurring development of our Psyche’s, our Lifestyles, our Environments and our Perspectives.

Since my journey began, I have made progress and experienced regressions, relapses and setbacks, both from within my own mental health and from the trials of life, in all its complexities. This is neither an “indulgence”, a “quick fix” or an “easy way out”. It is a valuable shortcut into understanding that there are no short cuts. If that doesn’t make sense, but the rest of what I have mentioned intrigues you, I commend you to do your research, make positive changes in your life, and, if you believe it may help you, take the right precautions and preparation to eventually begin your own psychedelic research. I assure you that, even if you do not think in a scientific or psychological way at the moment, these Natural Software Upgrades will do wonders on the way you perceive the world around you, and be very useful in helping you understand how psychedelics work, how life works, and how you can work successfully in each and every day to create a life so great you could have never dreamed of it from within the depths of your previous experience.

I am happy to restate that I no longer suffer from depression, which plagued me for over 20 years in my short (so far) life. The debilitating anxiety I experienced, which I used cannabis to deal with, has gradually become a sign to me that I am doing something important. A general rule of thumb is that if you’re afraid of it, it’s important to you. Whether that is studying for the test, putting yourself out there on a new creative project, trying to meet some new people or defending yourself from a mugger in a back alley, the value is the same. We need to face our fears, and I believe starting from what you can manage to face in the Here and Now is what you should face, and as you do, what you are able to face will grow. At first, it may be best to act in One Moment to not succumb to the temptation of sugar, to clean up your room, or even just make your bed. Even just lift One dirty sock from the floor, even just open One page and read One word, is a good place to start. This is how I went about gradually curing my depression and Anxiety, how I cured my addiction (with the help of LSD) and how I have come to become extremely happy with a life where almost every minute of my free time now goes to cleaning, reading and living in a way which does me wonders.

If you would like to access some more helpful articles, more specifically about Wellness and Development for people with Depression, Anxiety or Addiction, you may read those at my free website (free for me as well) @ www.clmovingmountains.wixsite.com/explore in the Blog section. I have this divided into Blogs and Articles, and the Articles are what you will be looking for. Most of these I wrote last year or the year before, but the content is still very relevant. I have been focused primarily on learning this last year, and so have not contributed further articles; however, I will post articles like this on there when time permits. I am starting a new program in college next week in Outdoor Adventure Education, as I believe it to be a perfect medium to break the cycle of Depression, Anxiety and Addiction, without the use of psychedelics. This is part of a plan to develop a program that teaches various skills to minors and people experiencing mental health dysfunction, and will be released –with government subsidies if possible- as soon as I feel the program is developed enough and market research thorough enough to start the experiential organization with resounding success.

This article was researched for and written by Conor Lynch of Peterborough Ontario for the benefit of those suffering with what is referred to as Mental Illness, as a medium of self-help, as well as for those studying in the field to provide assistance to such people, and those simply wishing to learn more about Psychology, Wellness and Development, and Psychedelics.