Do You Need a Guide on Your Psychodelic Experience?

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One of our audience is concerned about the fact that when you undergo a psychodelic experience, it can be incredibly profound and transformative. People do have very difficult experiences on psychodelics. Even trips you remember as being positive have very scaring moments where youre feeling anxious or threatened in some ways. But same experience when you're with an experienced guide, can be incredibly productive. And so i don't think people should use large doses of psychodelICS in a casual way, or without proper preparation.

When you start your day with a cup of tea or coffee you are ingesting a consciousness-altering drug, which you are quite likely to be addicted to. That drug of course is caffeine, the stimulant used by 90 per cent of people on earth, and it is one of three mind-altering molecules that bestselling author Michael Pollan has been investigating for his new book This Is Your Mind on Plants, alongside morphine, produced by the opium poppy, and mescaline, found in certain cacti. In conversation with the medical doctor and broadcaster Guddi Singh, Pollan explores humanity’s longstanding and powerful attraction to psychoactive plants. Why do we go to such lengths to seek these shifts in consciousness, and why do we then hedge this desire with laws, customs and fraught feelings? And why do we categorise these compounds so reductively – calling them either a licit or an illicit drug? For, as Pollan will argue, when we take these psychoactive plants into our bodies and let them change our minds, we are engaging with nature in one of the most profound ways possible. Click here to get the Intelligence Squared discount on the book: https://www.primrosehillbooks.com/product/this-is-your-mind-on-plants-michael-pollan/

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