#015 - Mindfulness and psychedelics.

#015 - In this episode Gabi speaks about the main differences between the two and why he is in favor of using meditation as a form to free the mind instead.

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Transcript

Welcome to the Learning Languages in Society with Gabi podcast, where it’s all about the fascinating world of languages and culture. Let’s rock.

Hi everybody and welcome to my show, my name is Gabi. I have to excuse myself again for being absent from my podcast, but I have been unusually busy as I have recently moved out from my old flat into a new one and I have been amidst the thunderstorm of packing, wrapping, cleaning, unpacking, unwrapping, cleaning, organizing, etc. 


Anyways, here we are again. Today I would like to talk about psychedelics and meditation. There has been an incredible explosion of research and renewed general interest in the world of psychedelics and the benefits they purport to give to the human mind. There has been a considerable amount of new research addressing the attention of the public eye in that direction.

One thing that is clear about taking psychedelics is perhaps the realization that the human mind is so much more expansive and boundless than we would’ve thought it was. The human mind turns out to be deep and infinite as the cosmos itself. It is the very beginning of everything that ever existed or that will ever exist. It is in other words what we call consciousness. 


Taking psychedelics, provided you had a good experience, can also be the unhappy discovery that everyday life feels like living in a prison. A form of mental illness. I have to give the disclaimer here that I am not promoting in any way the use of any kind of substance. Quite the contrary, I advocate for meditation as the most powerful tool of our spiritual toolkit to unlock the power of our minds. 


To achieve the virtues of wisdom. Meditation and psychedelics both address important questions such as how do we overcome pain in our daily lives. What is out there available for us once our basic needs are met. What is the purpose of it all. Both provide difference answers: psychedelics provide in big doses huge changes in consciousness which last or vanish. It is often a surprise what you get but you do certainly get spectacular changes in dream-like states for a few hours. 


While meditation is quite different in this respect. You might meditate once or twice every week for six months and if you aren’t doing the exercise correctly, you might not even any of the benefits meditation gives.  Why would I pay attention to the breath?

For many people meditation is at the beginning an empty promise. It is supposed to be beneficial but by the very nature of it you can’t verify it until you try it. And you can’t verify anyone else’s experience either. It seems a waste of time. Psychedelics instead do deliver almost immediately a rollercoaster of emotions, no questions asked. 

When you come back from psychedelics to you usual self you do realize that being engaged with the present moment does really mean something. The contents of your consciousness radically change for many moments. Even if that experience could be rated as crazy. Meditation, instead, tries to make you recognize the freedom that is inherent to consciousness itself. Regardless of its contents. 


Psychedelics are hallucinatory in nature. Meditation isn’t. Meditation is not inherently good or bad, it has no good or bad trips, meditation just is. You might begin to meditate for a while and then realize that every time you do it you become more calm, and so you might strive for that calm or blissful state of mind, in the pursuit of pushing meditation to its end goal completely missing the point that meditation has no end goal. It has no beginning and no end. It is just the recognition of the continuous flow and appearances of the contents of consciousness. 


Only that. It is not colored by emotional states. It is peace and wisdom in its purest state. Every state of mind is free of self. The purpose of meditation is to make you recognize the contents of consciousness without the identification with thought. And you don’t need psychedelics to do that. 

Many people however seem to take the path of meditation only after having had a colorful trip with psychedelics. Only after they have verified that indeed there are many doors to the mind that can be opened. But I am here to tell you that psychedelics are ultimately unnecessary. The promise of the unlimited psychological freedom is achieved by mere paying attention to the breath.