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Conversation

I've spent a lot of time way deep in the psychedelic sauce and came out very permanently altered, but I seem to have somehow missed all the altered beliefs that seem to happen to many others who do a lot of eXtreme, experimental introspection. Why is this? 1/14

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I don't think this is because I have any mystical virtue; maybe I just have genetics that mixed just right with a practice that accidentally avoided lots of the pitfalls that result in woo beliefs. But these are all guesses - I'd like to know why! 2/

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I'm not against woo beliefs in principle, but I do think the rigor required for me to adopt a woo belief would sort of make it no longer woo. As in, I've had a powerful, direct experience of an Entity on psychedelics, but this is insufficient to make me believe in entities. 3/

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I'm legit actually open to there being some cosmic force that channels predictive power into e.g. astrology, but I'm also annoyingly familiar with every single way scientific studies can go wrong, and my standards for accepting proof of predictive astrology are real high. 4/

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I'm uncertain about the internal experience of people that causes them to do self-mind experiments and then land on strong, predictive beliefs about the way external reality functions. Maybe I got immunized from having spiritual experiences as a Christian, then losing my faith?

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And to be clear, I think it's super likely that there's a lot of stuff going on that we currently process as woo or magic that probably has some reasonable backing to it. As I've said before, brains are powerful and complex and I 100% believe we can get way freakier. 6/

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I myself hold some pretty insane-sounding perspectives I got out of my deep dives, that I don't usually say to anyone cause it's real hard to explain without sounding unhinged. But my frames are *not predictive*, which feels like a real important distinction. 7/

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It almost feels like woo-believers are failing to grasp their own power. In holding predictive beliefs about the world, they're placing the power *into the world.* They rely on the cycle of the planets to grant them authority, or an impressed recipient to verify the telepathy. 8/

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This is an inherently vulnerable position - it's possible that woo beliefs can be disproven, because they are *about the external world*, which makes testable the hypothesis that you are delusional. All the insights here are *conditional* upon a thing outside of your control. 9/

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And yet the function is also to reassure the believer that they do in fact have power. They have access to information no one else does by divining the stars, or having experienced the aliens/entities/spirits, or being able to read your energy. 10/

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Woo beliefs make you feel safe and special - great incentives to hold them! But *lots* of beliefs make you feel safe and special - why woo beliefs, post-spiritual experiences? I'm not sure. 11/

1:36 AM · Mar 10, 2022

Replying to

From my perspective, "proper" insane spiritual insights are unconditional, self-contained, and invulnerable. They are untestable, not about the world, they are owned entirely, wholly, inside your own experience. Nothing can possibly happen to make them untrue. 12/

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If you have a deep experience that convinces you that somethin woo is real, I am open to woo being real, I just likely won't take your experience as strong evidence, much as I don't take my own as evidence. There's lots of better evidence we could find, so let's go looking! 13/

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P.S. another caveat: I think the brain is very powerful and would not be very surprised if things like rituals or placebo or tiny, magic-like elements we don't fully understand did in fact have strong, purposeful impacts on the brain, and suspect some woo practices are effective

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Replying to

Most woo beliefs are about the greater interconnectedness of everything. This springs from the mystical experience that everything is one - a realisation that the woo believer then tries to hold on to by shoehorning oneness into a causal model of the world.