Could you tell us why psychedelics can be useful ? And here I give the caveats that maybe you'll feel obligated to give as well .
The que what I think it's what everyone really wants , whether they know it or not and their right to want is a type of freedom that is compatible with even ordinary states of consciousness , which , which can ride along with them into extraordinary states of consciousness . I mean , so what I , I hadn't done psychedelics for 25 years because I mean , again , they were super useful for me in the beginning . Then I discovered meditation on the basis of , of those experiences got really into meditation and realized , OK , this is a much more , this really is the , you know , conceptually , this makes much more sense to me , this is delivering the goods , you know , in terms of my experience , um there's no need to keep having these , you know , seeking these peak experiences with , with , with drugs .
But it had been , you know , 25 years since I had done that . And , and there was this resurgence in research on psychedelics and I was being asked about psychedelics and I was talking about their utility for me . But again , these were distant memories .
Um and we can talk about the , the uh pharmacology if you wanted to . But um the uh I would just say that for many of us , I mean , certainly for me , psychedelics were indispensable in the beginning in proving to me that this was uh that , that , that a first person interrogation of the mind was worth doing . You know , because , you know , I was somebody who , you know , age 17 or 18 before I had any real experience with um with MD MA or LSD or Psilocybin .
Obeyed , et cetera . All that stated it was psychedelics to me are an experience of uh altered perception , internal and external perception , altered spacetime relationship , somewhat dreamlike . I think it was Alan Hobson at Harvard for a long time , talked about the relationship between psychedelic like states and dreamlike states um because of this distortion of space time dimensionality .
