can be pretty intense. 

I did it when I was in my early 20s. Having complete honesty and moving forward in that way was important to me, so I don't regret the vulnerability and breakdown of social constraints, which I understand is pretty common. 

I'm not sure I'd do it now, nevermind that my current partner isn't interested. Similarly for mushrooms.

I sometimes wonder what % of our art, tech, culture in general is the product of LSD or other trips. Much more than most people realize, I suspect. 

Maybe your universe is a place of warmth and trust, dominated by your relationships with friends and family and dropping acid will unleash your inner party on a cosmic scale. Maybe yours is an exciting, intellectual universe full of endless new discoveries and the amazing achievements in knowledge and the arts attained by you and by other human beings. Or maybe you contain deep wells of spiritual, religious belief untapped by your local priest, preacher, rabbi yogi or imam, and a psychedelic experience is likely to open you to a vast, cosmic ecstasy of togetherness with other beings like you, beings of light and love experiencing the infinite joy of a reunion that transcends death.

On the other hand, you might be haunted by personal terrors, sadistic, disturbing visions & paranoid projections. And maybe if you manage to see through the veil you'll find that the truth of "one love, one mind" turns out to be a cosmic nightmare, an infinite schizoid solipsism in which death is a horror and the possibility of life after death an even greater one. A cold, terrifying infinity of loneliness masked by occasional delusion: this is what it means to be "god."

Dr. Leary used the term "set and setting" to prescribe the rules for a good trip, but I think it goes far beyond that. You should be prepared to confront your own personal cosmology, including your mortality -- for better or for worse. It may not happen, of course...for some people tripping seems like just another kind of intoxication. It's fun, funny, confusing, pleasant, a bit like dreaming while awake, but by no means does it involve any kind of unhinging spiritual journey. Or you might come unstuck in time and space, collapsing your proprioception and your sense of "you right now" into an infinite, simultaneous aggregation of all possible nows across all possible worlds. It can be exhausting to live through an infinity of time.

The film Donnie Darko pulls off a pretty good approximation.

I strongly recommend against trying it. There are truths about life that are better left unexplored unless you have some great and pressing need for cosmic visions.

I'm not sure if the word "intense" is powerful or descriptive enough. But it's also truly consciousness expanding in a way that's difficult or impossible to do otherwise. Aside from the visual and auditory effects, the best way for me to describe it is that it breaks down certain internal barriers in your thought processes to make you far more intuitive than is ordinarily possible. It also allows (or in extreme cases forces) one to more fully integrate various aspects of one's personality. If you're reasonably well adjusted and have an optimistic view on life, it's a very affirmative experience. But if you have fears or personal demons, they can come to the fore. I think the more spiritual self examination you've done prior to the experience the more likely you are to view it positively. But then again, there are people who just see it as an incredible light and sound show and leave it at that. But I have to say that the usual categories of "happy" or "sad" people doesn't really predict how the drug will affect someone.

It's a very powerful drug that demands respect. It's nothing like having a few beers or smoking a joint. I'm generally in favor of drug legalization, but for some drugs (like LSD and heroin), I wouldn't feel comfortable having it available at the local 7-11. I've known people who had to be (briefly) institutionalized because they were careless and didn't respect the power of the experience. I've also known people who were very unhappy with the revelations they experienced, although in most cases they used their knowledge to work on the things they weren't happy about.

I'm not sure I buy the whole idea of a guided trip, but it is a good idea to have someone around who's been through it before. I've had to talk a few friends through difficult trips and the fact that I knew what they were experiencing helped a lot. It's also imperative that it be experienced in a relatively safe place that you're familiar with, you don't want any major surprises since your perceptions are so altered.

I do think it can be a life altering experience, several times it has been for me. It let me know who I was in a way that I hadn't before. It also provides insights into friends and lovers that you experience it with. That's obviously a double edged sword, and can be the source of problems. I saw the episode of Mad Men that you linked to in the video, and I thought that the conversation between Roger and his wife afterwards was the most accurate part of the scene. Roger could intuit her feelings and realized his own.

The quote I've heard used to describe the experience is from William Blake's Auguries of Innocense -

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

but it's actually a quote from further in the poem that I think is more apt -

It is right it should be so;
Man was made for joy and woe;
And when this we rightly know,
Thro' the world we safely go.

 

Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine.
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.

at it's best, it can help one to become a more integrated and balanced human being.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/4131

Umm, there aren't any keys.

So we've established that Doocy & the rest of the idiots at Fox don't do LSD, but what are they on?

Generally, one can never be certain how much if any LSD is on the blotter paper. Or what else. In any case, I've tried it a few times, 'a trip to visit Uncle Sid' was pretty much de rigueur among computer folk during the 80's, but I was never terribly impressed by its effects, which were fun and fascinating but not world shattering.

My few experiences with mushrooms and peyote were more significant, and I was also sure of what I was ingesting. One should experience the oneness of the universe at least once and a little psychedelics or a lot of meditation can do the trick.

You could have put more emphasis on the healing capabilities of LSD. Not for nothing do they call it a drug. I know there was effective LSD therapy for alcoholics before the squares put an end to it. But it's the healing power of opium I will now praise. I was once blessed by a hat trick of healing thanks to a dozen pipes of the stuff. I think I'd eaten a lunch consisting mostly of rancid lard on a very bumpy road trip in the area of Asia known as the golden triangle. The lunch had given me a bout of diarrhea and the bumps on the road had re-inflamed a not quite fully mended broken rib. After arriving at my destination and consulting with the medicine man, the diarrhea and the pain in my side was no more and I liken the the resulting euphoria to dallying on the suspension bridge connecting the land of waking to the land of dreams. Nothing world shattering but it remains the best bit of medicating, self prescribed or otherwise, I've had the pleasure to experience.

Traveller

And it was like eating a Twinkie for breakfast.

I do not want to think about acid and opium in the morning. I'm warming to the topic, but this is a night-time diary.  

The writer Terence McKenna said the following:

"Somehow, the changing of consciousness is deemed to be threatening to the State. Now why is that? Is the State somehow playing a shell game that would be exposed if the people were to actually open their eyes? In what ways does the expansion of consciousness threaten industrial democracies? I think we need real answers to this."

That was almost 20 years ago and the drugs discussed here are still every bit illegal now as they were back then.

How about state-sanctioned, legal research into mind-bending drugs? Well, following on from McKenna, it's not consciousness expanding drugs which would expect to be researched, but consciousness diminishing drugs. I realized this recently on hearing an interview with Molly Crockett by the hosts of the "Philosophy Bites" radio show.  http://www.mollycrockett.com/

http://philosophybites.com/2012/07/molly-crockett-on-brain-chemistry-and...

It was the most chilling thing I've heard in a long time.

There is a game in experimental economics where a 'proposer' offers a 'responder' a sum of money which he can accept or reject. Both know that there is, say, $100 at stake and the proposer can offer any part of it to the responder. If the responder accepts, they divide the money accordingly and if the responder rejects the offer, neither of them get any money. Classical economics predicts that the responder will accept any offer. He will take even $1, leaving $99 to the proposer because that would still leave him a dollar ahead and that's better than nothing. This game has been played many times in practice and offers of $1 are overwhelmingly rejected. Offers straying a little too far from $50 into the territory of 'unfairness' are rejected, regardless of the irrationality of the move. So much for the classical economist's views of human motives and behaviour.

Here is where Molly Crockett comes in. She talks of playing the same game, only this time with the slight change of dosing the respondents with serotonin. And those dosed respondents will say 'yes' to any offer put before them. How she gushes over the results! In other words, the research is about altering human consciousness in order to make it conform to the heretofore simplistic and erroneous models of classical economics. Rather than rejecting these models, they are embraced with renewed vigour, strengthened by the power of pharmaceuticals. Consciousness diminishment is reducing the rich complexity of our motives and behaviour to something grotesquely simple, state-serviceable and alien. Only a brain chemist working in an economics department could come up with something like this.

I don't deny that the results are interesting. I wonder if the serotonin was also given to the proposer and whether it had any effect on his behaviour... (no mention in the interview)

In surveys administered shortly after their LSD-enhanced creativity sessions, the study volunteers, some of the best and brightest in their fields, sounded like tripped-out neopagans at a backwoods gathering. Their minds, they said, had blossomed and contracted with the universe. They’d beheld irregular but clean geometrical patterns glistening into infinity, felt a rightness before solutions manifested, and even shapeshifted into relevant formulas, concepts, and raw materials.

 

But here’s the clincher. After their 5HT2A neural receptors simmered down, they remained firm: LSD absolutely had helped them solve their complex, seemingly intractable problems. And the establishment agreed. The 26 men unleashed a slew of widely embraced innovations shortly after their LSD experiences, including a mathematical theorem for NOR gate circuits, a conceptual model of a photon, a linear electron accelerator beam-steering device, a new design for the vibratory microtome, a technical improvement of the magnetic tape recorder, blueprints for a private residency and an arts-and-crafts shopping plaza, and a space probe experiment designed to measure solar properties. Fadiman and his colleagues published these jaw-dropping results and closed shop.

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