You seem to be claiming that without somebody giving you suggestions, people would not think of psychedelic trips as something special.
Well, as the discoverer of the substance, Hoffman surely did not have any preconceptions, since the first time he was exposed to LSD it was an accident, and had no idea of it’s psychedelic properties.
A quote where he describes the second exposure, which was intentional experiment: “This self-experiment showed that LSD-25 behaved as a psychoactive substance with extraordinary properties and potency. There was to my knowledge no other known substance that evoked such profound psychic effects in such extremely low doses, that caused such dramatic changes in human consciousness and our experience of the inner and outer world.”
That is exactly what I said in another comment about changing your state of mind and nothing else. Suggestions are outside of that change of state of mind. You seemed to be confused about mixing the effects of psychedelics and voodoo/woo/spiritual stuff. I know psychedelics being viewed as something related to spirituality is rather a popular rhetoric among both users and nonusers. The spirituality is what I mean by suggestion. You are suggesting something that has nothing to do with the mechanism of action of the drug.
Set, setting and suggestions can affect the experience for sure. Personal values, culture, religion etc. can make a difference in how the experience progresses, how it is interpreted and integrated and so on.
But my understanding from both the scientific literature and the anecdotal reports is that the nature of the mechanism of action of these drugs indeed is such that they can result in mystical experiences in people who take it.
See for example:
>Psychedelic drugs have long been known to be capable of inducing mystical or transcendental experiences. However, given the common “recreational” nature of much present-day psychedelic use, with typical doses tending to be lower than those commonly taken in the 1960s, the extent to which illicit use of psychedelics today is associated with mystical experiences is not known. Furthermore the mild psychedelic MDMA (“Ecstasy”) is more popular today than “full” psychedelics such as LSD or psilocybin, and the contribution of illicit MDMA use to mystical experiences is not known. The present study recruited 337 adults from the website and newsletter of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), most of whom reported use of a variety of drugs both licit and illicit including psychedelics. Although only a quarter of the sample reported “spiritual” motives for using psychedelics, use of LSD and psilocybin was significantly positively related to scores on two well-known indices of mystical experiences in a dose-related manner, whereas use of MDMA, cannabis, cocaine, opiates and alcohol was not. Results suggest that even in today’s context of “recreational” drug use, psychedelics such as LSD and psilocybin, when taken at higher doses, continue to induce mystical experiences in many users. ”Illicit Use of LSD or Psilocybin, but not MDMA or Nonpsychedelic Drugs, is Associated with Mystical Experiences in a Dose-Dependent Manner” https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02791072.2012.736842
The study’s approach to mysticism seems to be rather qualitative than quantitative, based on self reporting and questionnaires, mostly from members of MAPS, whom probably have certain variables that aren’t really controlled for compared to the general population.
Mysticism Scale. This 32-item questionnaire (Hood 1975) contains items that ask participants about past mys- tical experiences (if any). The Mysticism Scale has been used in research on the psychology of religion (Spilka et al. 2003) but has only previously been applied to drug experiences by Griffiths and colleagues (2006), who used it to assess psychedelic drug (psilocybin) experiences. The Mysticism Scale yields a total score based on three dimen- sions of mystical experience: noetic quality (e.g., “I have never experienced anything to be divine,” reverse-scored); introvertive mysticism (e.g., “I have never had an experi- ence which I was unable to express adequately through lan- guage,” reverse-scored); and extrovertive mysticism (e.g, “I have had an experience in which I felt everything in the world to be part of the same whole”). The items are rated on a nine-point scale ranging from −4 = “this description is extremely not true of my own experience or experiences” through 0 = “I cannot decide” to +4 = “this description is extremely true of my own experience or experiences.” The psychometric properties of this scale have been reported to be sound (Reinert & Steifler 1993).
You seem to be claiming that without somebody giving you suggestions, people would not think of psychedelic trips as something special.
Well, as the discoverer of the substance, Hoffman surely did not have any preconceptions, since the first time he was exposed to LSD it was an accident, and had no idea of it’s psychedelic properties.
His account is freely available online here: https://www.hallucinogens.org/hofmann/child1.htm
A quote where he describes the second exposure, which was intentional experiment: “This self-experiment showed that LSD-25 behaved as a psychoactive substance with extraordinary properties and potency. There was to my knowledge no other known substance that evoked such profound psychic effects in such extremely low doses, that caused such dramatic changes in human consciousness and our experience of the inner and outer world.”
That is exactly what I said in another comment about changing your state of mind and nothing else. Suggestions are outside of that change of state of mind. You seemed to be confused about mixing the effects of psychedelics and voodoo/woo/spiritual stuff. I know psychedelics being viewed as something related to spirituality is rather a popular rhetoric among both users and nonusers. The spirituality is what I mean by suggestion. You are suggesting something that has nothing to do with the mechanism of action of the drug.
Set, setting and suggestions can affect the experience for sure. Personal values, culture, religion etc. can make a difference in how the experience progresses, how it is interpreted and integrated and so on.
But my understanding from both the scientific literature and the anecdotal reports is that the nature of the mechanism of action of these drugs indeed is such that they can result in mystical experiences in people who take it.
See for example:
>Psychedelic drugs have long been known to be capable of inducing mystical or transcendental experiences. However, given the common “recreational” nature of much present-day psychedelic use, with typical doses tending to be lower than those commonly taken in the 1960s, the extent to which illicit use of psychedelics today is associated with mystical experiences is not known. Furthermore the mild psychedelic MDMA (“Ecstasy”) is more popular today than “full” psychedelics such as LSD or psilocybin, and the contribution of illicit MDMA use to mystical experiences is not known. The present study recruited 337 adults from the website and newsletter of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), most of whom reported use of a variety of drugs both licit and illicit including psychedelics. Although only a quarter of the sample reported “spiritual” motives for using psychedelics, use of LSD and psilocybin was significantly positively related to scores on two well-known indices of mystical experiences in a dose-related manner, whereas use of MDMA, cannabis, cocaine, opiates and alcohol was not. Results suggest that even in today’s context of “recreational” drug use, psychedelics such as LSD and psilocybin, when taken at higher doses, continue to induce mystical experiences in many users.
”Illicit Use of LSD or Psilocybin, but not MDMA or Nonpsychedelic Drugs, is Associated with Mystical Experiences in a Dose-Dependent Manner”
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02791072.2012.736842
The study’s approach to mysticism seems to be rather qualitative than quantitative, based on self reporting and questionnaires, mostly from members of MAPS, whom probably have certain variables that aren’t really controlled for compared to the general population.