3 experts reveal how psychedelics can expand the walls of perception

It is the natural evolution of consciousness to expand

What psychedelic means from its linguistic roots is mind manifesting. You could have a euphoric experience

You could have a hellish experience. People in the past historically have assigned this to the gods, to the muses, to fate, to possession

This is just too much. This is too cool. It's too inspired. It's too informed to possibly be me

One of the fundamentals that we all have is a sense of identity, kind of who lives in this box

With psychedelics, what you realize is that in some sense, you also are outside this box

And to transcend those limits shifts forever the way in which you see the world

Psychedelic can be used to refer to what are called the classic psychedelic compounds

psilocybin, which is in magic mushrooms, LSD, DMT, which is in ayahuasca, mescaline, which

is in peyote They affect a particular type of serotonin receptor called the serotonin 2a receptor and that their primary mechanism of action But then you have other drugs

So for example MDMA will work by releasing serotonin so that's a different mechanism

And ketamine and PCP they affect the glutamate system in the brain primarily rather than the

serotonin system. So what does psychedelic mean then if it refers to multiple pharmacological

classes of drugs that work in different ways? And the answer for me is that these are all drugs that

can have a profound effect on one's sense of reality, including one's sense of self

because of the neurobiology there are four qualities that tend to arise

pretty consistently in those non-ordinary or altered states selflessness tends to happen

because the areas of our brain specifically the prefrontal cortex but including additional

networks that connect often turn off or completely light up. Either way, they knock out our everyday

waking sense of self-consciousness and self-awareness. Timelessness happens for a similar reason As basically different parts of our brain light up and turn off our ability to calculate time gets knocked out and we get absolutely sucked into the immediate present moment So a feeling of timelessness comes with it The effortlessness and it literally in the

sort of almost in the biblical sense, not my will, but thy will. When I knock out my self-consciousness

when I'm not in the past or the future, I'm just in the present moment. When I am effortlessly

being propelled, the next thing that consistently seems to happen is the richness. We have access to

far more information than we do in our regular waking state. It can be I feel myself swept along

when it feels awesome or it's terrifying but I don't have a choice. Psychedelics not used carefully

are dangerous. Most things not used carefully can be dangerous. The problem for psychedelics

is because the expansion is so strong, if you have no support or no background or no understanding

it's terrifying. Transpersonal psychology is a framework which allows you to get a larger view

It includes all of awareness, all of consciousness, all human experience. And it looks around for what are the tools

Meditation is a tool. psychedelics are a different kind of tool for opening up the closed box of awareness

After a psychedelic experience you are not only more open but you are questioning very fundamental beliefs that you have had without any particular knowledge

Integration is a method of dealing with the overflow of information that happens during and after a psychedelic experience

That time is a very fluid time where the brain is still communicating more than usual

and it's a good time where someone can help you move from confusion to clarity

The central experience that we all strive for is to be unified and connected to a larger reality than ourselves

to feel that you are part of, for instance, humanity, or you're part of the living fabric of the earth

It's not just about hitting a certain type of serotonin receptor in the brain

And there's something about the psychology of the experience that unfolds during that session that tends to be important

We've assigned it supernatural origins, but in reality, it's just us in an optimist state

That's perhaps the goal of transpersonal psychology, and it is the experience of psychedelics

That things will never be the same afterwards because my universe has actually opened wider