Michael Pollan: observation

Transcript context

…Are you worried about dogmatism? Some people, after psychedelics, you get the feeling they say, “I’ve seen how things really are.” That makes me suspicious. Maybe we’re measuring openness incorrectly, that some forms of their openness go up, but other forms go down. With respect to their own psychedelic experience, they’re more dogmatic. What’s your view? Yeah, a related paradox is ego dissolution versus ego inflation. People have an experience of ego dissolution on high-dose psychedelic experience, which can be quite profound. It was for me. Many people — I don’t know what percentage — emerge from the experience with a subsequent sense of ego inflation, which is weird. You have these gurus emerging from this ego-destroying experience. Leary is a great example. He was a complete egomaniac. Yet, he’d had repeated experiences of losing his ego. What happens? This is, I guess, the dogmatism point. You’ve had such a profound experience that you think you found a key to reality. You feel very special because you hold this key to reality. I think that’s a very dangerous thing. I don’t know that what you experience is absolute reality in any sense. The experience to come out of it with confidence that you’ve solved some riddle of the universe, that’s always a dangerous thing. And that does lead to dogmatism. It leads to the guru complex. We’ve seen that, too. The people who come out of the experience deciding they’re gurus and they’re dogmatic about it, they tend to hold the cultural microphone longer than the people who just went off to their corner and enjoyed what they learned and shared it with their friends and didn’t get dogmatic. But certainly, it is an occupational hazard of messing around with psychedelics, that kind of dogmatism. LSD and some other psychedelics — they do seem, as you mentioned, correlated with the phenomenon of gurus. Do you think that’s deeply structural? If we had what (in your view) would be a more rational set of policies toward some psychedelics, that the guru would persist? Or is that an artifact of illegality or it being underground?…

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