In order to tackle the original paradox of thought - to “think that which is unthinkable” - it’s necessary to drastically change the scope and frame of reference within which our consciousness operates.
Every civilisation that encountered psychedelics either made them sacred or tried to ban them. That alone should tell you these substances are doing something more interesting than producing a recreational high.
The Amazonian jungle shamans concocted a brew called ayahuasca, which contains an ingenious mix of DMT-yielding plants and a vine that acts as a MAO inhibitor - essential for DMT to become psychoactive when ingested orally. How could they have known about this? I’m guessing it wasn’t trial and error. Native Americans, all the way back to the Aztecs and Toltec Indians, used mescaline to induce sacred visions, divine the future, and as a powerful medicine.
For nearly two thousand years, the greatest minds in Greece - Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Cicero - participated in a secret annual ceremony at Eleusis involving a psychoactive brew called kykeon, likely derived from ergot, a chemical ancestor of LSD. Cicero wrote that the Mysteries were “the most exceptional thing Athens produced.” Revealing the ceremony’s secrets was punishable by death. The entire intellectual foundation of Western civilisation was built by people who tripped once a year and considered it sacred.
These substances have been instrumental in some of the most significant shifts in human thought, and they’ve been with us far longer than the civilisations that tried to outlaw them.
The Modern Pioneers
Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin discovered, synthesised, and personally bioassayed over 230 psychoactive compounds. He and his wife Ann - a psychedelic therapist in her own right - would try new compounds from Sasha’s lab, and if a compound proved worthy, they’d share it with a close group of friends who would test and rate it for duration, psychedelic qualities, and other effects. The couple published their findings in two groundbreaking volumes: PiHKAL1 and TiHKAL2 - Phenethylamines and Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved. As Sasha put it, everyone has “the license to explore the nature of his own soul.”
Albert Hofmann inadvertently discovered LSD in 1938 while researching lysergic acid compounds for the Swiss drug company Sandoz. He shelved LSD-25 after inconclusive initial tests, but five years later his thoughts returned to it. During a second round of synthesis he must have got some on his finger and touched it to his mouth, because he had to leave work early due to “a feeling of remarkable restlessness, combined with a slight dizziness.” On his bike ride home he “perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colours.” Sandoz ran clinical trials, were excited by their findings - no other substance was so potent at such low quantity with such low toxicity - and by 1947 had patented and marketed it as Delysid for use in psychotherapy.
Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick reportedly used small amounts of LSD to aid his thought process, and is said to have credited it with helping him perceive the double-helix structure of DNA. Steve Jobs called LSD “one of the most important things in my life”:
“Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important - creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.”
Alex Grey attributes his extraordinary artworks depicting the energetics of the human form to the use of LSD. These aren’t people escaping reality. They’re people who refused to accept the boundaries of ordinary perception, and used these tools to see deeper.
Direct Perception
DMT - dimethyltryptamine - exists naturally within each one of us, and in trace amounts in almost every living plant and animal. When taking DMT one often experiences leaving the body completely, traversing space or passing through what could only be described as many alternate dimensions at a very fast rate. After the initial experience of travelling, it’s not uncommon to meet certain entities with which one can converse. The common factor with these entities is their transcendental wisdom - through them one can gain insight into the clarity around past and present choices, the deeper meaning of things, and the purpose of one’s life.
These experiences can be terrifying, especially for those who are brought face to face with the reality of their choices without mercy or remorse. Yet they almost always yield positive results. The trick is not to hold on, but to yield oneself fully to the experience, because control is just an illusion.
Whether these reports are metaphysically true in the strongest possible sense is not the point. The point is that they are strikingly consistent, deeply destabilising, and experientially interpreted as more real than ordinary consciousness.
In the 1990s, Rick Strassman conducted the first FDA-approved psychedelic research in a generation,3 administering DMT to sixty volunteers at the University of New Mexico. Subjects independently reported strikingly similar experiences - contact with intelligent entities, entering constructed spaces, receiving information they couldn’t account for. Strassman couldn’t explain the consistency within any existing scientific framework. Sixty people, no prior contact with each other, describing the same place.
The overlap between DMT reports and near-death reports is provocative enough to deserve more attention than it usually gets, even if the ontology remains unresolved.
Aldous Huxley arrived at a similar place through mescaline. In 1954 he wrote “The Doors of Perception”4 - a vivid visual commentary on life, art and culture as perceived through the eyes of mescaline. It was one of the key literary works responsible for the 60s social revolution. Without it there would be no Timothy Leary, no “turn on, tune in, drop out”, no Merry Pranksters, no Sergeant Pepper, and no Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
The Suppression
Every power structure that has encountered these substances has tried to control or destroy them.
The Spanish Conquistadors arrived in the 16th century and outlawed peyotism, linking it with witchcraft and cannibalism - the first anti-drug laws in the western hemisphere. They drove indigenous psychedelic traditions underground for 200 years. When peyote resurfaced during the American Civil War, peyotists formed the Native American Church in 1918 to protect their right to sacramental use. The legal battles continued for another seventy years. Today, mescaline is illegal in most parts of the world.
When LSD escaped the lab in the 1960s, the response was the same. While one segment of the American population was using LSD to produce peace and spiritual awakening, the CIA was running MK-ULTRA - 149 subprojects in chemical and psychological warfare. They conducted experiments on unsuspecting civilians, slipped LSD into drinks at bars, and ran interrogations with subjects under prolonged influence. Where the hippies saw unity and joy, the CIA saw paranoia and fear.
The Soviets banned psychedelic research in the same decade, for the opposite reason. Where America feared counterculture, the USSR feared individual consciousness itself. A population having mystical experiences is incompatible with state materialism. Two superpowers on opposite sides of every issue, both terrified of the same molecule.
Each chemical structure in nature is unique and serves its own purpose. To classify them all as “bad” because some legal doctrine says so is ignorance of the highest degree. Classic psychedelics do not produce dependence patterns anything like opiates or stimulants. Like anything, they can be abused and overused. They need to be respected for what they are - not a party drug, but a powerful tool for the purpose of knowledge and insight. The modern drug regime flattened every distinction that mattered, then called that flattening science. That was never serious thinking. It was administrative fear.
After fifty years of suppression, the evidence is forcing the door back open. Oregon decriminalised psilocybin in 2020. Australia approved psilocybin and MDMA for therapeutic use in 2023. Johns Hopkins and Imperial College London are running clinical trials with striking results - a head-to-head trial in the New England Journal of Medicine found psilocybin matched or exceeded escitalopram on every measure, with double the remission rate.5 The institutions that outlawed these substances are now publishing papers on why they work.
What Runs Through All of This
These substances have been with us for thousands of years. They’ve been used to heal, to divine, to create, and to control. They’ve inspired Nobel Prize-winning discoveries and CIA torture programs. They’ve been sacred medicines and Schedule I felonies. The same molecule, in the same dosage, producing radically different outcomes depending entirely on the intention of the person holding it.
What connects all of these experiences - from the shamans’ ayahuasca ceremonies to Hofmann’s accidental bike ride to Huxley’s afternoon in his garden - is that they bypass the filters. Psychedelics don’t add anything. They strip away. What remains is direct perception - raw, unmediated, and often terrifying in its clarity. In a culture training itself to accept the statistically probable answer, that matters whether or not you accept the strongest metaphysics around it.
The shamans, the pioneers, the artists who used these tools weren’t seeking the most likely answer. They were seeking the true one, however unlikely, however terrifying, however far from the consensus it turned out to be.
The hardest truths are often hidden by the filters that consensus calls normal.
References
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Shulgin, A. & Shulgin, A. (1991). PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story. Transform Press. ↩
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Shulgin, A. & Shulgin, A. (1997). TiHKAL: The Continuation. Transform Press. ↩
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Strassman, R. (2001). DMT: The Spirit Molecule. Park Street Press. Based on FDA-approved research conducted 1990-1995 at the University of New Mexico. ↩
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Huxley, A. (1954). The Doors of Perception. Chatto & Windus. ↩
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Carhart-Harris, R. et al. (2021). Trial of Psilocybin versus Escitalopram for Depression. New England Journal of Medicine, 384(15), 1402-1411. ↩