What took me by surprise was I felt the company/teaching itself was largely bs, but something about how the whole room of 100 or so people seemed to come together in a giant ball of positivity put me in that state, and it was an immediate shift. It was so overwhelming on the drive home that I had to pull over a few times to get my bearings. I woke up the next morning still fully rolling, and it wasn't until lunchtime that it really abated.

Many attendees were acting fairly happy/goofy but it's just one of those things that would be inappropriate to bring up or ask. I attended a follow-up 3 day advanced seminar to see if I could recapture that feeling and left disappointed.

This stuff falls under what I would consider the 'cult' umbrella and I think one of the reasons why such orgs are so successful is because group empathy sessions are really powerful. Unsure if my experience itself was in essence an MDMA flashback or if MDMA (and psilocybin) is a conduit to what group empathy can achieve.

1.) your immune system isn't bogged down by foreign matter, plus

2.) your mind needs to focus to find food in times of scarcity and avoid predators.

The MO of a cult introduction is to love bomb the victim and/or to build up tension and then release it cathartically. This is often enhanced by deliberately disturbing food and/or sleep cycles.

The superficial content is not the message. The feelings are the message.

These events are designed to make people leave on a high, so they imprint on the source and keep coming back to it. The high is far more effective than anything that's said, whether or not it makes sense.

The thing is, I went in knowing all this. I knew exactly what they were doing, knew the background of the org, and went anyway to support a couple friends. It still got me right at the end, as I was sitting in my chair thinking how ready I was to go home, within the second to last hour of the 3 day retreat.

I didn't come away thinking better of the event, but I was damn curious about the psychological impacts of group empathy, how the room had almost attained some resonant frequency of emotional harmony and I was swept up in it.

/my uneducated theory

The approach should be to use different types of psychoactive drugs to multiple pseudocontrol groups. Have a control group have placebo, then another LSD, another Ketamine, another a synthetic cannabinoid, another mushrooms.

That way even if the effects are genuine of psilocybin it will pop from the rest in the results, if is in psychedelics in general LSD will pop as well, if it's anything "mind exploring" Ketamine will pop too, if it's just getting high what makes things better, the cannabinoid will join into the results.

And obviously this has to be done on people without drug experience, because the effects are rather easy to tell apart by drug users.

Interestingly, the subjective experience of having a "high" seems to be somewhat learned through prior experiences. Testing on people without drug experience may not be the accurate test one might want and assume.

I would love to see a study of this effect.

Or, just human interaction is good. Either way, we belong in communities. This is what is meant by "love each other". Stronger in packs, etc.

There are a lot of ways that "psilocybin therapy" is more similar to behavioural/experiential (rehab, Camino del Santiago pilgrimage, etc.) than pharma therapy.

I'm not sure that those things are an appropriate control. But yes, there's been very little serious research. It was near impossible to do until just recently.

Some more solid old research on iboga and some new, somewhat more mature research happening with mdma.

Interesting point. Given individuals temperamentally and experientially predisposed to depression and who report they know no other cognitive condition then entheogen exposure could supply the experience of alternate (positive) states of mind. Assuming these individuals report they want to entertain these induced positive states then you could imagine a therapeutic regimine which would involve use of psilocybin-like compounds coupled with presentation of social interaction simulations through 3D VR headsets outfitted with strategically placed EEG monitoring probes. If simulations are shaped to elicit negative reactions which subsequently are detected then audio queries can be inserted such as 'is this an appropriate reaction? What would be a better reaction or strategy?' which could aid individuals in shaping their own cognitive behavior. - does sound like a personalized interactive AI date-sim plus often the only winning move is not to play :-)