The volume is a trip. In particular, it meticulously recounts numerous substances consumed by this US-raised scholar in philosophical history has ingested. They include magic mushrooms, lysergic acid, marijuana; anxiety medications to ease tension; mood stabilizers, SSRIs, escitalopram and older generation drugs; caffeine (“I've ingested caffeine every single day since the early 90s”); and, personally speaking, the consistently lackluster alcohol.
The Truly Trippy Dimension
The most fascinating part, nevertheless, is less about the philosopher’s narratives of his psychedelic episodes, instead that they are penned by a rigorous analytic philosopher, well-versed in empirical philosophical texts just as much as Aldous Huxley’s psychedelic-fueled perceptual explorations. Additionally, they’re presented intending to dissolving the minds of his philosophical peers and general readers by suggesting that entheogens transcend individual identity merging us with universal awareness, which leads to liberation as defined by Baruch Spinoza’s thinker Baruch Spinoza explained it (expressed by the author through “a willing acquiescence in the way the physical form operates in the necessary order of things”).
Dissolving the Western Tradition
The melting metaphor is apt, as the foundational moment of Enlightenment-era rationalist tradition came when René Descartes French thinker the rationalist melted a solid lump. The lump may change its form, scent, length, width, and yet, the philosopher argued, we still claim that we know that it remains the very entity. The thinking mind can be wrong about all experiences related to the wax but not, he insisted, the fact that they are thinking: this is the foundation of his well-known “I think, I exist” – through which the French thinker shaped humanity into reason-driven, empiricism-loving beings we became from then on.
The philosopher, discombobulatingly, flips the script regarding the thought experiment: imagine if, in place of heating the substance, he had “melted his mind” with acid, or with psychedelics newly introduced in Europe from overseas together with potatoes and nicotine, including sacred cactus or DMT brews? Suppose that rather than emphasized rationality but rather celebrated the creative abilities , the author proposes, are released via entheogens? Western civilization may have evolved understanding existence in a wholly new way, and people not as rational agents but as “limitless wells of illumination and understanding”.
Beyond Conventional Thought
Further dimensions exist in Smith-Ruiu’s psychedelic experience, it could be argued, than considered in conventional philosophers’ philosophies. His perspective appears related to current voguish, mind-blowing movements as contemporary realist new realism, and Timothy Morton’s frameworks and ecological thought. Kant claimed the divine is inherently inaccessible, theorizable yet never experienced. It was impossible through sensory experience, perceive the divine. For Smith-Ruiu, psychedelics can potentially lift that veil. Due to this proposition by itself it is astonishing – and inspired – that academia embraces this.
Lucidity Perspectives
It’s worth mentioning here that this is not like those gonzo books written when the writer is under the influence. The philosopher differs from the chaotic writer. Named On Drugs however it is not composed while high (except, probably, from some of the prescription meds he mentions earlier and occasional espresso hit). “I am as I write, clear-headed, lucid, and completely engaged in the work.”
A Remarkable Plot Twist
The book finishes with a remarkable plot twist (key revelation). Not long ago, the author went to church service for the first time since early adulthood at the church adjacent to his Paris apartment. His proposition here proposes that substance-induced states resembles that of spiritual practices: ordinary time is regarded as a distortion, and during mass it is possible to experience, similar to his with psilocybin, something like timelessness. A further similarity lies in how a person relinquishes personal agency during ceremony as on a psychedelic trip. The author states: “Psychedelics, similar to faith, like poetry constitute a letting go of control to go it alone.” He shows awareness to acknowledge how strange this may seem: that entheogens serve as his gateway drug to religious experience.
Common Consciousness Expansion
It isn’t necessary to consume magic mushrooms from any source in Amsterdam (like the author) to expand consciousness. He points to the initial section of literary works À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, as the young character dreamily imagines that he has become {some of the things
