The Context: Cognitive Freedom And Psychedelics

We have always been asking questions about who we are and how we think. What defines our identity, our awareness of ourselves and of others? We have tried to explore and experiment the dynamic boundaries of this understanding by altering our states of cognition through means that go from the pretty abstract, like meditation, to the very concrete, assuming substances like alcohol, or psychedelics. In order to see what happens and in order to achieve a deeper understanding of how our mind and our body reacts to the world and reacts to our own internal states, this reverberating set of behaviors and experiments, this fractal attempt to explore what is possible, has been going on for thousands of years.

With the organization of our societies, the set of rules and regulations that influence or define what can or cannot be done, obviously should take into account this ongoing experiment as well. The hypocrisy and the contradiction of governments that regulate and allow dangerous drugs like tobacco and alcohol that cause dependence, deaths in the millions worldwide versus prohibiting other substances like cannabis or 5-MeO-DMT is perverse.

So what are the limits of our pursuit of cognitive freedom? Is our ability to pursue these experiments of introspection and understanding of self awareness and awareness of others going to increase or decrease? I really hope that in the future we will understand that in a responsible and self aware manner these experiments should continue, that our degrees of freedom around them should increase. And that whether with chemical or other technological means, understanding who we are, has been and is going to be a genuinely human pursuit.