Psychedelics and Ego Death - PTSD Therapy

For simplicity purposes ill focus on LSD. Psychedelics are gaining awareness as treatment for PTSD. I am putting my work and journal notes out there to raise awareness of other practical uses for these wonder drugs. I don't recommend it for getting work done ie caffeine on steroids for a novice, it takes expert level focus and control. For the novice LSD is sensory overload as you're taking in and processing far too much information to hone in on just any one thing... REAL life ADHD not the crap they're prescribing little kids that don't like sitting in 1 spot for 8 hours... What makes psychedelic so magical is a little thing called ego death. Its when the body and mind are so overwhelmed by the 4+ hits of LSD or 5+ grams of shrooms that your ego is completely suspended. And a suspension of your ego for 4-12 hours is something magical. Our ego holds us back in ways we can't even imagine with ingrained beliefs from cognitive dissonance and societal programming. Anything that challenges a core belief is rejected by the ego and not even processed as information, all of this without even realizing it. Were walking around with baggage that we don't even know we have.... Ever see that alcoholic father who has alcoholic kids who have alcoholic kids? Nobody says "I want to grow up to be an alcoholic like my father." or even worse "I want my kids to grow up with my drinking problem." they simply aren't aware of how baggage can transfer between generations. Yet to the outsider this may be plain as day and even predictive... Or may be not as obvious until the kids get older which ones will take on more baggage. But it goes even deeper than that, all sorts of damage that you didn't even know you could pass down from generation to generation... Stubbornness, tempers, selfishness, abuse, neglect, laziness. See that fat parents with the obese kids? You think obesity is gonna skip a generation when the kids have kids?  I'm going on a tangent but I've illustrated the larger point. We've all got baggage were carrying around (I say damage) and a LOT of it you aren't even aware of because the programming runs deep. Does the Asshole know he's an Asshole? How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie makes the argument that almost everybody thinks they're a decent person, even criminals and thieves. To some people this is black and white, what about some grey areas? What about people in the self help industry or people that sell substandard products and services, trying to make a quick buck? Sometimes they're blatantly ripping people off, other times they're selling a crappy product and the customer could really do with a better product or service and the seller is well aware if this fact. These people ripping others off, preying on others, they don't believe they are bad people or deserve to go to jail despite the obvious harm they cause to others. Many of them have good and healthy relationships with family and friends and wouldn't be considered criminals by the general public. Just look at how Bernie Madeoff stunned The World... And there were dozens of people involved not just Bernie Madoff but we aren't in a hurry to start throwing the whole company into prison. The programming runs deep, your ego protects you from processing any information that goes against the belief of you being a good person. I mean, we are all Asshole some of the time...

Psychopaths make up approximately 2% of the population and most psychopaths aren't actually killers like the TV show Dexter would have you believe. Their lack of emotion makes them too smart for that and so most psychopaths just climb the ranks in corporate hierarchies due to their superior office politics. The rest of the 98% of the population would fit into some variation of sociopath tendency. Not "pure evil" (not that psychopaths are actually evil they're just hardwired differently and its very scary to think about), but different degrees of assholery. Sorry, another tangent.

So imagine what 12 hours of suspending your ego and with it, biases and programming can do for you? You maintain the same level of intelligence and information processing power in the trillions, but see information in an entirely new light... You see possibilities that weren't there before and experience life in the present moment. People with PTSD or those with high levels of anxiety, victims of trauma such as rape and other violence - can look at how feelings, emotions, anxiety affect them almost in 3rd person and analyze them in real time. A rape victim might look at themselves in real-time and say "I'm scared of black men but don't want it to get to me and make me racist so I overcompensate and am overly friendly to black people." Could you get there without drugs? I'm sure you could, but it could take years of therapy and you might never fully get to the root of the problem. In therapy you've got the psychiatrists' ego to deal with in addition to your own. Much like spirituality, I believe the personal discovery journey by is very much your own. It might help to have "guidance" but it also runs the risk of attaining other baggage without you realizing it. A Hindu Father might believe in traditionalism and that his children should find spirituality through the teachings of the Hindu Shruti or Vedas. And at the expense of a generalistic self discovery - excluding other lessons that could be gained from Christianity, Islam or Taoism religious texts. This might create a culture of ignorance and closed mindedness that transcends generations. Kids attaining baggage from their parents... The sins of the father passed onto the son. An atheist rejecting religion might educate himself in his spiritual journey and include all the major religious practices and doctrines and therefore attaining a much more efficient awareness of self and what it means to be "Christ like.".. Or the same person could reject any and all religious dogma and avoid any spiritual self discovery. What causes one and not the other? The ability to process raw unfiltered information, and your ego shuts down that ability more times than you would realize.