About the god thing, my 2 cents. "god" doesn't always mean Christian White Old Guy on a Cloud Looking Angrily Downwards. There's a less narrow interpretation.
If psychedelics strip away your day-to-day preoccupations, and show you life with a vastly different set of mental filters in place, many people experience a transcendent feeling of belonging to something bigger than their sober selves. A connectedness to other humans and nature that goes beyond ordinary experience. The idea that death isn't so bad, only suffering is; and suffering is the price we must pay for the ability to see its opposite, beauty.
Which people then conversationally condense to "yeah you meet god"
Imagine a chronic obsessive cellphone gazer. One day he lifts his nose from the screen. Sun! Clouds! Birds and squirrels!
Except moreso.
So no deities but spiritual like what you said.
I don’t think anyone would earnestly claim that there is zero risk to any hallucinogenic experience. One of my hopes is that through study we can better understand the ingredients that lead to profoundly positive experiences vs. profoundly traumatizing experiences. And anyone who claims we know that today is acting in bad faith.
Terminal cancer patients, those expecting to die and “meet God” soon, are a very, very niche audience compared to a general population with non-specific major depressive disorders.
But at the same time, I love this. The more study, the better!
Griffiths' research is all high quality. He is the pioneer in making this field of scientific research palatable to the mainstream medical establishment.
It's anything but simple if you're depressed. You seem to think that insight drives motivation, but in depressed people these are often decoupled. You can have all the insights you want but the motivation to do anything just does not manifest.
it's a little tongue-in-cheek. of course changing your life is hard. but, if you are dissatisfied with your life, it is also the only solution.
My friend was suicidal, and psilocybin was the only thing that made him go back to wanting to be alive (though the effect only lasted ~2 weeks each time).
As someone with somewhat first hand experience with this, it's not exactly "gives them the energy".
The anti-depresents I started taking worked exactly as advertised. The "problem" was I wasn't just depressed, I was also just not happy with life. Anti-depresents can get you out of a depression but they won't make you happy.
It was a bit enlightening to understand the difference between the sadness I felt and the depression but it can also make you feel more helpless when the depression lifts and you still don't really want to wake up tomorrow.
As a result of this experience, I think it's irresponsible to prescribe anti-depresents without accompanying therapy.
Take "it just showed me that I want to die" and unpack every single word into an absurdly and "pedantically" complex, comprehensively and perfectly correct articulation of the(?) precise meaning in this context. In doing so, use various forms of articulation, not only paragraph/narrative form.
If you are doing it right, ideally you will find yourself having to fight against your own mind at several points during the analysis.
Work on the problem for a month or six, even just two or three minutes at a time now and then. I propose that at the end of this process, you will possess more knowledge than you did before.
There are various techniques to accelerate this process, but I will let you figure those out on your own along the way. As a hint: consider various topics of discussion that arise on the website you are on.
I should probably also note: this is not necessarily a risk-free undertaking, so maybe build some safeguards into your methodology.
"unpack the meaning of a word"...this makes sense?