Anticipatory apology if this is posted in the wrong thread (can't access philosophy threads, etc yet) and of perhaps a bore to some people, though I have only a handful of people in my day to day life with which I can discuss these matters... so I am very interested in anyones input.

I was thinking back to what gifts I have received from my psychedelic use throughout the last 15 years, and the greatest that I can think of is the restoration of novelty in how I view the universe around me. What I am intending to say by this is that coming from a background of hardcore atheistic materialism, there is the impression that all there is to know is already known, there are no new continents to discover and all advancements in science and knowledge will be merely refinements of what has already been tested to be true. I reluctantly adhered to this point of view as a young man, though I found it incredibly depressing as it left little room for growth. Questions are far more exciting than answers, and psychedelics have acted as a catalyst in my life for the realization that there is so much more to discover about the nature of existence and human consciousness, and our conceptions while interesting fail to capture the whole picture. In the words of Alan Watts, the menu is not the meal (or as I understand this phrase, our mental concepts of the universe are not the same thing as the universe itself).

My favorite circumstances when reading intellectual history is the advent of paradigm shifts. The Earth was flat once, anyone who expressed doubts was ridiculed, as this was as common knowledge as gravity is today. Then one day, the Earth was no longer flat. One day the Earth was no longer the center of the universe. One day bacteria and viruses were implicated in illness, as opposed to evil spirits. What I mean to say by these examples is that our knowledge based understanding of the nature of things is only true until it is disproven. This is exciting to me, how delightful to be wrong!

Even mainstream science itself is evolving, my laymans understanding of quantum mechanics illustrates a world that is so unbelievably bizarre, so much more 'mystical' than the world of static unchanging particles. I may be veering way off topic here, but what I wish to convey and am curious if anyone else has had this experience, is that my psychedelic use has given me so many more questions than answers, and opened my up to a world beyond strict materialism. I haven't accepted a cartesian dualism, but I must admit that electrical exchanges between common elements doesn't quite add up to human consciousness in my understanding. I eagerly await another radical paradigm shift in which human consciousness is not seen as a novel property emergent from neuronal computation, but possibly a component of the fabric of the world itself. I may be entirely wrong in this, in which I am also delighted.

Its a very big universe, micro and macro, filled with seemingly unlimited potentiality. I didn't believe this once, high dose psychedelics have opened me up to the possibility that there is more to existence than what we perceive and that is sooo exciting.

Anyone else relate to this at all?

Absolutely, our perception and interpretations, as finite being, or at least while we inhabit finite bodies, our understanding are such, very limited. As we try to understand something that is infinite, forever expanding(The ever expanding universe theory and the multiverse theory) we seem to understand the whole in the way a ant understand the earth as a whole. Or we are to the universe as a grain of sand is to the beach. We've only begun to scratch the surface. We as a race are very young, thought to be any where from 35,000 to 7 million years old, compared to the universe, thought to be 13.75 billion years.

But this is just my take and my thoughts on the matter, I could of course be wrong about it all but would of would welcome this just as much as if I were on to something

Thanks for the post btw, great thought provoking convo!