I’ve noticed a troubling trend among psychonauts: any reports of terrible experiences or long lasting negative effects of psychedelics are waved away in two different ways:
1 - blaming of the person who had the experience, for not having the proper “set and setting”, or not respecting the drug.
2 - claiming that there’s no such thing as a “bad trip”, and only a challenging one that takes time to integrate.
There might be some truth to both of those things, but I think it vastly undersells how incredibly destabilizing a “bad trip” can be.
The primary thing I learned from spending an eternity in hell on two of my trips? That it’s absurd how much suffering the human mind is capable of experiencing. A few years later and I can no longer feel much of the trauma of the experience, but there were months were I would just lay there feeling the aftershocks of the seemingly unending emotional pain I had experienced.
Currently I feel that there’s nothing about life or myself that I can learn on drugs that I can’t learn in other (safer) ways.
I’m glad people have massively positive experiences on drugs, but I worry that we’re underselling the risks when we just say “just check your set and setting, and remember that there’s no such thing as a ‘bad trip’, just a challenging one”.
1 - blaming of the person who had the experience, for not having the proper “set and setting”, or not respecting the drug.
2 - claiming that there’s no such thing as a “bad trip”, and only a challenging one that takes time to integrate.
There might be some truth to both of those things, but I think it vastly undersells how incredibly destabilizing a “bad trip” can be.
The primary thing I learned from spending an eternity in hell on two of my trips? That it’s absurd how much suffering the human mind is capable of experiencing. A few years later and I can no longer feel much of the trauma of the experience, but there were months were I would just lay there feeling the aftershocks of the seemingly unending emotional pain I had experienced.
Currently I feel that there’s nothing about life or myself that I can learn on drugs that I can’t learn in other (safer) ways.
I’m glad people have massively positive experiences on drugs, but I worry that we’re underselling the risks when we just say “just check your set and setting, and remember that there’s no such thing as a ‘bad trip’, just a challenging one”.