Great essay.

I think that capitalists who try to control psychedelics are doomed to fail. You can guide a psychedelic trip yes. You can create a positive setting and I actually think it's good to have therapists who are able to prevent bad trips or at least keep people who are having bad trips safe from harming themselves or others.

But the psychedelic experience defies control.

Regarding the sacred - I think that the sacred experience (which one can call "spiritual" or not) is the experience of nonduality, which is of the absolute interconnectedness of everything, the dissolution of self and other, the dissolving of concepts, of tribes - and makes us wake to the fact that we are not separate, we are not "part of" the natural world, because there are no parts. We are It. Tat Tvam Asi. I am You. You are Me. We are All. And that is profoundly consciousness-raising.

That kind of experience however isn't guaranteed in a psychedelic trip. And you can forget how it felt if you don't properly integrate the experience and let it change your behaviour. That's how those venture capitalists who took psychedelics were able to forget the essence of their trip. The veil of the world falls back over their eyes.

But I do think that the fact they want to make a business from psychedelics and help legalise it, shows that they had some grain of positive intent. And once psychedelics are decriminalised somewhere, they will be easier and easier accessible to the average person and be easier to access in the underground as well.