Name: 3 experts reveal how psychedelics can expand the walls of perception
Uploaded: 2025-08-13T18:39:27.000Z
Duration: 5 min 54 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

It is the natural evolution of consciousness to expand.

What psychedelic means from its linguistic roots is mind manifesting.

You could have a euphoric experience, you could have a hellish experience.

People in the past historically have assigned this to the gods, to the muses, to fate, to possession.

This is just too much, this is too cool, it's too inspired, it's too informed to possibly be me.

One of the fundamentals that we all have is a sense of identity, kind of who lives in this box.

With psychedelics what you realize is that in some sense you also are outside this box and to transcend those limits shifts forever the way in which you see the world.

Psychedelic can be used to refer to what are called the classic psychedelic compounds.

Psilocybin which is in magic mushrooms, LSD, DMT which is in ayahuasca, mescaline which is in peyote.

They affect a particular type of serotonin receptor called the serotonin 2a receptor and that's their primary mechanism of action.

But then you have other drugs, so for example MDMA will work by releasing serotonin, so that's a different mechanism, and ketamine and PCP, they affect the glutamate system in the brain primarily rather than the serotonin system.

So what does psychedelic mean then if it refers to multiple pharmacological classes of drugs that work in different ways?

And the answer for me is that these are all drugs that can have a profound effect on one's sense of reality, including one's sense of self.

Because of the neurobiology there are four qualities that tend to arise pretty consistently in those non-ordinary or altered states.

Selflessness tends to happen because the areas of our brain, specifically the prefrontal cortex but including additional networks that connect, often turn off or completely light up.

Either way they knock out our everyday waking sense of self-consciousness and self-awareness.

Timelessness happens for a similar reason.

As basically different parts of our brain light up and turn off, our ability to calculate time gets knocked out and we get absolutely sucked into the immediate present moment.

So a feeling of timelessness comes with it.

The effortlessness, and it's literally in the biblical sense, not my will but thy will.

When I knock out my self-consciousness, when I'm not in the past or the future, I'm just in the present moment.

When I am effortlessly being propelled, the next thing that consistently seems to happen is the richness.

We have access to far more information than we do in our regular waking state.

It can be I feel myself swept along when it feels awesome or it's terrifying but I don't have a choice.

Psychedelics not used carefully are dangerous.

Most things not used carefully can be dangerous.

The problem for psychedelics is because the expansion is so strong, if you have no support or no background or no understanding, it's terrifying.

Transpersonal psychology is a framework which allows you to get a larger view.

It includes all of awareness, all of consciousness, all human experience, and it looks around for what are the tools.

Psychedelics are a different kind of tool for opening up the box of awareness.

After a psychedelic experience, you are not only more open but you are questioning very fundamental beliefs that you have had without any particular knowledge.

Integration is a method of dealing with the overflow of information that happens during and after a psychedelic experience.

That time is a very fluid time where the brain is still communicating more than usual and it's a good time where someone can help you move from confusion to clarity.

The central experience that we all strive for is to be unified and connected to a larger reality than ourselves.

To feel that you are part of, for instance, humanity or you're part of the living fabric of the earth.

It's not just about hitting a certain type of serotonin receptor in the brain.

There's something about the psychology of the experience that unfolds during that session that tends to be important.

We've assigned it supernatural origins, but in reality, it's just us in an optimated state.

That's perhaps the goal of transpersonal psychology and it is the experience of psychedelics that things will never be the same afterwards because my universe has actually opened wider.

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3 experts reveal how psychedelics can expand the walls of perception

meditation

present

profound

experience