Consciousness and Mind

However, it’s also true that psychedelics amplify set and setting. If a person has the mindset or intention to ‘find the root traumatic cause of my suffering’, if they are immersed in the cultural narrative of ‘traumadelica’ (i.e. ‘psychedelics can help me uncover early trauma and thereby find healing’), it’s possible that psychedelics will reflect... See more

This is the challenge faced by all research into ecstatic states of consciousness. The mind responds to our expectations, and to the script we bring to it, via what the Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking calls ‘looping effects’. We take the mind’s responses as objective proof of our theory, when they are really just responses to the script.