Back when I was running Gator Freethought (AAFSA at the time), I was often pressed for creative material to use at our non-guest-speaker meetings. At one meeting, I decided to talk about the role of drugs in so-called "spiritual" or transcendent experiences, and especially drugs like psilocybin, after reading about it at world-science.net that previous week. The meeting went fairly well, I guess, although I admittedly wasn't as prepared as I should have been.
The long story short is that some drugs (especially psilocybin) seem to induce a state of mind akin to what Buddhist monks enter when they go into transcendental meditation, in that one loses all sense of self and an indelible sense of oneness with the cosmos emerges. That's also the report from a few friends of mine who have experimented with mushrooms.
Anyway, I was reminded of that as I read that in studies on those exposed to psilocybin, the effects on their mood and happiness have lasted a very long time -- over a year. Since my pipe dreams still include the FBI/CIA thing, I will hold off until that ship sails. After that, I think I'd like to see what transcendent experiences I can have with psilocybin.
