Psychedelic Doorways to the Demonic

I'd like to talk a little bit about psychedelics and drugs in general this week.

There's a lot of interest, I think, in the use of psychedelics as kind of a shortcut for spiritual experiences or even spiritual progress in life.

Sometimes for, more recently, for healing, PTSD, things like sometimes depression, anxiety, social problems, There's some research going on with the application of drugs that way.

But the main one I'm talking about here is like people using DMT or 5-MeO-DMT, which is a very, very strong psychedelic, or the ayahuasca drug, which is essentially a plant that's made into a drink, psychedelic mushrooms, LSD, other things like that.

Of course, this has been around for as long as human beings have been around, and as long as people have been able to find substances that get them high.

That's just human nature to experiment with things, and then some people are attracted to the effect of this type of drug.

Now, what does psychedelics really do? Some people have not experimented with any of these, which is great, but they alter sensations, they alter perception, and they alter thinking.

So sensation is like the literal data coming into your sensory system.

So it might be pressure on your skin.

So you close your eyes, you feel somebody take your hand, and you feel the pressure on your skin of them squeezing your hand.

that is sensation.

That is the nerves being stimulated, the nerve signals coming to your spinal cord and making it to your brain.

It is the interpretation of that signal that is perception.

So I close my eyes, I feel pressure on my hand.

That could either be A person squeezing my hand, if it feels like a warm and soft something squeezing my hand, I perceive it as being a hand.

My perception is somebody's taking my hand.

If it was simulated with something else, like a set of tongs, you know, and something warm and soft, I could be tricked and open my eyes and look and see my perception that somebody took my hand is wrong.

It's actually this warm mechanical thing gripping my hand.

But for a moment, I thought it was a person.

So perception is not the same as sensation.

And then there's thinking, which of course is a very complicated topic, but we can think of it as ruminating about and finding meaning in our perceptions and our sensations.

That's one way to think about it.

We can have internal experiences.

that also have, in a sense, sensation and perception, because the nervous system, we can close our eyes and imagine a sunset, and in our mind's eye, we can see it.

So there is no sensation of light hitting the retina, but there's a perception of a sunset, and in the imagination, it's almost as if we were looking at a sunset if we visualize particularly well.