"Spiritual Drugs" Are Bullshit

_{source: livescience.com}

What most people call Spiritual Drugs is nothing more than metaphysical woohoo nonsense experience. In other words, blind belief in the "unlocking" of..."something", supposedly "greater" than us. Nonetheless, like Christopher Hitchen's eloquently put it "What can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence".

Life sucks. For the most part is pain and struggle. This is after all why so many people find themselves desperately chasing delusive concepts such as "happiness". Since the dawn of our evolutionary timeline, human always tried to escape the reality of life by doing physiological "hacks". We turned into hallucinogenic drugs because it was one of the simplest ways to get away from the mundane in a time we knew nothing about how our brains or bodies work.

The way these drugs work is rather simple. In order to function, our brain integrates different signals (such as glutamate and serotonin). What hallucinogens more or less do, is to disrupt these processes so that normal sensory perception is altered by them. This is how the experience turns out to be "different" and "without words".

In other words, the experience is similar to some visual illusions when poisoned, getting hit on the head and feeling dizzy or having a fever and seeing all sorts of....things. People believe in the "supernatural" part of these drugs because they are buying into the cult delusion of trying to find an easy way out from their daily problems.

A good example of these drugs are LSD and Ayahuasca. Thing is, the public seems to be immune to the dangers since almost always there is some kind of conspiracy theory linking them to the "real" reason they are banned. Ayahuasca is a tea, containing the psychedelic drug DMT. It almost always induces profuse vomiting, discomfort and other physical effects before the start of the hallucinogenic experience. It is believed that it brings personal enlightenment by confronting the user with their darkest fears.

I am not going to argue about the dangers of these drugs even if many people have died in the process of taking them. I have tried both DMT and LSD and you just have to be careful. They can be fun but they can also give you a pretty fucked up trip. It is a gamble really.

I this post I am only tackling their "spiritual claims". The fact that these drugs use as a post-hoc narrative after someone is on a "personal quest" should make everyone skeptical. It is much like the fortune teller, making bank on self-fulfilling prophecies. "You will meat a tall blond girl with blue eyes" she says looking through her bullshit cards. The gullible individual hat lacks confidence follows up on her assumption and starts tall blond girls with blue eyes. Eventually he lands one and the fortune teller becomes "the real deal".

Drugs like Ayahuasca work much the same way. People describe their experiences based on what other people have said. After taking the drug they claim that their problems magically disappeared based on the same process that others have described. Similarly, when we watch TV right before we go to bed, we might have parts of the show pop-up in our dream story. The brain is not such an awesome tool. It mostly reshuffles things around.

There no proof, of "spiritual" realms, "astral" or whatever people like to call their experience other than hearsay from the people who make the claims. Truth is not a democracy. Simply, people seem to turn more and more gullible when numbers in support of something increase.

Individuals that gather up around spiritual drug-cults are usually buying into two false narratives. The first one is a classic. It revolves around the idea that if something is "old" or better "ancient" it must be good. The belief comes mostly from westerners that are fed up with the modern world — that rightfully seems to be more and more superficial and fake. But even though the modern world does revolve around fake ideas, so does the ancient one and in a much greater magnitude. We have VR and alcohol, they have plant piss that can mess with some of our brain's receptors.

There is no grand conspiracy about spiritual drugs either. No one is trying to "hide" the keys for unlocking the doors of the 12th Dimension. These things are illegal because at some point some people saw the side effects they had, got scared and so they pushed through democratic means their ban. Governments found out that they could profit and so they reinforced campaigns, pushing other substances as a replacement — such as cigarettes and alcohol. The war on Drugs is a joke but so is the spiritual path towards them.

I am very vigilant when it comes to public education and information that arrives on our laps. I am also equally skeptical of claims that are made from completely uneducated individuals that push "alternative" ideas because they were too lazy to study or even research themselves. I have seen Ayahuasca being pushed by one of the most popular personas here on Steemit, following his own personal path towards "enlightenment". I wrote this so people will think twice before taking these kind of drugs. Bullshit is ok. Dangerous bullshit is not.