Posted by Dimmiwoah 1 day ago
I’ve never tripped but it sounds similar to fever dreams I had a few times when I was sick as a child, running high temperatures. Why anyone would choose to experience that is another question.
Reading that McKenna was just another for-profit bullshit artist at the end of the day is the sad part. Exploring ideas and possibilities is a noble pursuit, but only if you can admit to mistakes and failures. Deciding to carry on to make money is weak and undermines everything. His legacy could have been as someone who dedicated his life to understanding psychedelics and gave an honest, well-researched evaluation at the end of it all. Money and celebrity status ruined all of that.
But psychedelic drugs can trigger an openness to new ideas that is incredibly difficult to achieve while sober.
They’re also dangerous though, like the article notes. It’s like working (or playing) with fire. Even people who have decades of experience with it can suddenly get viciously burned. So I don’t really recommend it at all — intensive meditation can still be dangerous for people who are unprepared for what can come up but it’s a much more sustainable practice than drugs and can achieve similar (but better, if done correctly) states.
The article did make me pretty sad for the same reasons you called out. I used to look up to him a LOT in college. I moved past it when I discovered meditation but reading this piece really shut down the goodwill I still had for him. It also makes it hard not to view him as a weak person who never did any real personal development and just got lucky with his first few decades of tripping. I had nightmarish nihilistic mushroom trips that made me want to off myself even as a college student lol.
And tripping to a fever dream... You know, sometimes it's best to just not respond if you know nothing about a subject at all.
Just my general observation having never read anything from him: many people with generally good qualities but also with a bit of narcissism and self-importance have, when exposed to psychedelics, gone off the rails and became truth-owning preachers or outright abusers. This is to me interesting in so far as this is not the case generally for others groups of psychedelic users.
In that aspect I can understand the analogy, although I have no idea if it's correct.
This sounds a bit like someone who’s never played a video game being disappointed in John Carmack.
When you’re that far removed from a certain subculture it shouldn’t be surprising when you’re unable to understand it.
Guy goes through traumatic experiences because he abused the hell out of psychedelics (5g weekly, wtf?) but continues to encourage people to do the same because he doesn't want to be seen as weak
I have so many problems with McKenna. Guy was a drug addict but because he was one of the first to write about drugs during an era of taboo, he gets a pioneers deference. That would be fine if people still didn't glorify his absurd doses and bull shit about "knowledge downloads" or whatever it is.
Anyways, pardon my rant
What you shouldn't do is just willy nilly tell people to take things. If the article is right about that, it's disappointing. I always saw him as being very academic and quite in tune with the dangers of outright recommendation (perhaps in contrast to Leary but I don't want to misinterpret Leary)
On the contrary we've seen a surge of novelty since.
Smartphone took off before 2012, a few years after iphone's release around 2010 when social media converged on it
He picked the date because of the Mayan calendar. Bullshit all the way down.
He later refined it to align specifically with the Mayan Calendar because that was getting trendy, and he had a public speaking business to support. He pretty much says so in some of his later recordings.
Note he always claimed the end of his “Timewave” was the end of history, not the end of the planet or the end of the universe, or the end of humanity. He speculated that one potential event that could thus end history would be the invention of a time machine.
Now I can't go anywhere without hearing about Roko's Basilisk.
good thing, too!