/lit/ - Literature

>>11511775
>All psychedelics do, in my estimation, at active doses, is enhance a persons personality characteristics.
This is a common and misleading misconception. The outcome of a psychedelic experience is completely dependent on the psychic framework a person has placed around the experience in their mind. If a person approaches psychedelics with, using your example, the expectation that this experience will enhance their previous personality traits, then that occurrence is much more likely to happen.

This is the nature of the experience. You get in return what you are able to put in. Naive college kids experimenting with hallucinogens obviously will get much less benefit out of such an experience when compared to e.g. a young amazonian tribesman drinking a psychedelic brew as an initiation into adulthood as his father and forefathers did before him. The cultural framework to help the user assimilate the experience into their everyday life and derive benefit from it simply is not there for the westerner (as Mckenna constantly preached), so it is obvious why (most) westerners fail to assimilate the knowledge gained in a psychedelic state. They do not fail because it is the nature of the drug to "enhance a persons personality characteristics", that is a wrong and limited analysis. They fail because the mental framework set up to consciously and unconsciously assimilate the experience is not conducive to actual, effective assimilation.

Also most of these users I've seen use these chemicals and plants pretty irresponsibly; effectively throwing set and setting out the window--but that is another issue.