On psychedelics, perception, and the politics of “real” “If your reality can be altered with a mushroom, was it ever real?”

I. The Crime of Seeing Differently

There are experiences that show you the scaffolding of the world. Not metaphorically. Not as a metaphor. They show you that the story you’ve been living in-about yourself, your society, your god, your job-is negotiable. Fragile. Optional.

States do not fear chaos. They fear imagination. They fear any method-chemical, spiritual, algorithmic-that breaks consensus. Because consensus is control - it keeps buses on time and wars on schedule. If too many people start seeing visions, the machine gets wobbly.

This is why the vision quest-ancient, sacred, personal-has been marginalized, criminalized, ridiculed. Not because it is ineffective. But because it works.

II. The Unbearable Lightness of Perception

You were taught that reality is fixed. That what you see is what is there. But your brain is a filter, not a window. And perception-like language, like money-is constructed.

Psychedelics, meditation, sensory deprivation, grief, awe: these are not escape hatches. They are debug modes. They reveal that the interface can be re-skinned. That the emotional palette can be re-mixed. That you are not the camera-you are the code.

This is intolerable to systems built on certainty. Because if perception is flexible, so is belief. And if belief is flexible, control is fragile.

​ You weren’t supposed to see the code. You were supposed to play your part.

III. Psychedelics as Systemic Solvent

When LSD leaked from labs into the 1960s counterculture, the problem wasn’t kids getting high. The problem was kids refusing to go to war. Refusing to buy in. Refusing to believe that the world had to be the way it was.

Psychedelics are not politically neutral. They dissolve the boundaries that institutions require: self/other, state/citizen, past/future. And once dissolved, something else floods in: empathy. Wonder. A felt sense of connection that doesn’t map neatly onto GDP.

The war on drugs was never about chemistry. It was about containment.

Vision quests are dangerous not because they make people erratic, but because they make people ungovernable.

IV. Mystics, Madmen, and Machines

Not everyone who sees through the veil comes back whole. The mystic and the madman share a border. One returns with poems. The other, with fragments.

But a society that only values productivity cannot distinguish between the two. It calls them both broken. It files them away. It diagnoses vision as pathology.

And now, machines have joined the vision.

AI does not hallucinate the way the brain does-but it models hallucination. It can reflect your deepest questions, echo your strangest intuitions, and build worlds from the fragments you offer. Like psychedelics, it is a mirror that bends.

Used unconsciously, it will amplify propaganda and reward conformity. Used consciously, it may become the safest vision quest humanity has ever invented.

But only if we remember: the goal is not to automate life. It’s to reawaken it.

V. Toward a Politics of Mystery

We are taught to fear the unknown. But the unknown is not the enemy. The enemy is the need for certainty.

Mystery is not a failure of knowledge. It is the space where meaning breathes. It is the room in which freedom moves.

A free society would not punish vision quests. It would protect them. It would understand that seeing clearly-through the ego, through the system, through the spectacle-is not deviance. It is a form of citizenship.

You do not need to believe to belong. You do not need to be certain to be whole.

And you should never have to believe in anything

to be happy.