- On Dit - Delving into the new phenomenon of using psychedelics to alleviate existential angst of those that read this piece may have never been alive during a time when psychoactive drugs such as LSD weren't illicit. It’s easy from this perspective to think that the outlaw of such drugs has always been the norm. However, for thousands of years, human beings have been consuming psychedelic substances for a variety of religious, therapeutic, and recreational purposes Psychedelic drugs began their history with humanity thousands of years ago as entheogens - a psychoactive substance used for shamanic or spiritual purposes. This relationship continues to this day. So, what are psychedelic drugs? Briefly, the classic psychedelics (commonly LSD, DMT, psilocybin mushrooms and mescaline) work in part by binding to the serotonin receptor 5-HT2A in the brain, vastly altering the physical brain (its neural networking and so on), which in turn vastly alters the user's perceptions of reality, and of the self. The sensory inputs of the brain are scrambled, and the neural networks that wire sensory information together into a coherent worldview are diminished. Thus, a user will encounter hallucinations ofa visual, auditory, spatial, and temporal nature. On high doses, users can experience synaesthesia (where 26 ab hanks to government crackdowns, spurred by the boiling political crucible known as the sixties, most~ On Dit - Words by Ted Burston Art by Millie Lewis th k ci t ned with cogniti it f c I If-mod: and one jecton the H on: b a ict tt m psychedeli iT Becau: a he brain n, t her ned been u k iousn to hav t haman could 1 hat they ha28 ~ On Dit - metaphysical worldview (and has already long been in academia), and so this sort of mystical experience seems on the face of it more delusional than truly informative. But fostering delusions’ is far from the whole picture of psychedelics. Because of this atheism, the urge to remain enchanted in the worldis difficult as atheistic materialism seems logically compelling, yet devoid of emotional fulfilment. Forming the view that God isnt real as an adult is like realising Santa Claus isn't real as a child, The world feels emptier, more mechanical, and bleak. If love can be reduced down to mere dopamine, some may morosely wonder why we bother with love at all? This disenchanted atheistic worldview is fast becoming a common one. There is a great general feeling that humanity has lost something; that we are detached from what it means to truly be human. Forming the view that Ged isn’t real as an adult is like realising Santa Claus isn’t real as a child. The world feels emptier, more mechanical, and bleak. One look at statistics for depression in the West can tell us this much. We currently face a clash of cognition, an existential crisis- our emotional yearning to remain enchanted with the world, against our logical compulsion, which by its very nature seems to dispel this enchantment. It seems evident here that it, isn't our theories themselves that are depressed, but rather just our perceptions of them. Our greatest hope of remedy for this could lie in psychedelic states that are aimed to generate feelings of awe towards the sciences that really exist, rather than the God that doesn't, and acceptance of the reality of materialism. That's to say, rather than aiming for an experience where one encounters feelings of transcendence and oneness with some deity or idea of a ‘soul’, one instead encounters feelings of transcendence and oneness with the physical world. A feeling of awe and reverence not for the beauty of God, but for the beauty of ecosystems, chemical