Abstract Background and aims Emerging research indicates that psychedelics may have therapeutic potential by fostering meaningful experiences that act as “inflection points” in people's narratives of personal development. However, psychedelic research has largely failed to address pertinent developmental considerations. We investigated whether attachment-related variables were associated with...
Psychedelic drugs are currently being investigated for their potential to facilitate a variety of long-lasting psychological changes. One area that has yet to be systematically investigated in psychedelic research, however, regards changes in aesthetic experience (i.e., one’s attitudes, perceptions, and expression of art). This is surprising given the wealth of anecdotes directly noting...
Like a contented stone [#808] Every thing comes, every thing goes.I or rather It rests.There is nothing I have to do.It is easy.[#2511] Imagine that you discovered that what really creates satisfaction in life has nothing to do with achieving goals, or even with acting in any specific way.Imagine that you discovered this not in some intellectual or philosophical way, but as an unexpected and...
An engaging and insightful journey into human consciousness. What if our goal had not been to land on Mars, but in pure consciousness? The experience of pure consciousness—what does it look like? What is the essence of human consciousness? In The Elephant and the Blind, influential philosopher Thomas Metzinger, one of the world's leading researchers on consciousness, brings together more than...
The typical near-death experience (NDE) is generally understood as an altered state of consciousness that occurs during real or presumed life- threatening and/or near-death circumstances, often including the experiencer’s (NDEr’s) perception of existing as an extrapersonal self out of and/or away from their physical body. The ego, while in this presumed disembodied state, some- times has the...
Abnormal self-experiences are a common feature of major depression despite their absence from current diagnostic manuals. Current diagnostic criteria leave us with an impoverished conception of depressive disorders, and they fail to exploit the diverse experiential alterations that might be useful for understanding and diagnosing patients, and last but not least for explaining the aetiology of...
Self-transcendence (ST) is a state of consciousness associated with feelings of ego-dissolution, connectedness, and moral elevation, which mediates well-being, meaning-making, and prosociality. Conventional paths to ST, like religious practice, meditation, and psychedelics, pose nontrivial barriers to entry, limiting ST's study and application. Aesthetic chills (henceforth "chills") are a...
Psychedelics are a class of drugs that can occasion similar changes in conscious ex- periences mediated via the G-protein coupled Serotonin 2A receptor. These changes vary from slight distortions in perceptions to pseudohallucinations and the experienced cessation of a personal self distinct from and necessary for conscious experience, known as ego-dissolution. Psychedelics produce positive...
This study investigated the sense of familiarity attributed to N, N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) experiences. 227 naturalistic inhaled-DMT experiences reporting a sense of familiarity were included. No experiences referenced a previous DMT or psychedelic experience as the source of the familiarity. A high prevalence of concomitant features discordant from ordinary consciousness were identified:...
Classic psychedelics are able to profoundly alter the state of consciousness and lead to acute experiences of ego dissolution – the blurring of the distinction between representations of self and the external world. However, whether repeated use of psychedelics is associated with more prolonged and permanent modifications to the concept of self remains to be investigated. Therefore, we...