Home
Creators
Search Recent Random
Posts
Search DMs Popular Hash Lookup Tags Random
Importer
Import FAQ
Register Favorites Keys Review DMs Logout
Community
Telegram ThePornDude
Home Creators Posts Import Register Favorites Logout

Tangent: Psychedelic Experiences (Patreon)

Published:
2023-07-17 20:51:27
Edited:
2023-10-13 19:07:24
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

Hi friends,

Let's face it, Tangents have officially gone too far. I know I just said I was going to dial it back this month, but, well... I dialed it forward. The topic sucked me in! So here's another near-video-essay, a full 70 minutes of esoteric rambling that I spent way too much time on.

Truly, the next Tangent will be shorter and simpler, because I do want to refocus on main channel videos. But I don't regret putting the time in on this one, nor even acid testing myself twice for your viewing [educational and harm reduction purposes]. My consciousness is expanded, my ego is killed, and isn't that worth something?

I do regret that the gain was set just a little too high when I recorded this, apologies to audiophiles. I will Do Better.

Also, I age-restricted this video just to be hyper-compliant with the terms of service, so you'll need to be logged in to YouTube to watch. Hopefully that's not too inconvenient.

Let me know what you think, and thanks as always for your support!

-Natalie

Edit: here's the video link, should open the mobile app https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzKQ7ScY5vc

Files

Tangent: Psychedelic Experiences

EDUCATIONAL AND HARM REDUCTION PURPOSES ▬ Contents▬ Part 1: The Basics 03:14 Part 2: Past Trips 18:48 Part 3: Trip One 22:53 Part 4: Trip Two 43:24 Part 5: A Laughably Inadequate Attempt to Make Sense of Things 52:05 Part 6: A Laughably Inadequate Conclusion 1:03:31

Comments

Eli Fritch

the movies are back !!

Alex

thanks natalie it’s always a treat <3

Yousuf Kazmi

Only 70 minutes..! Oh well another quick one to watch :)

Haboon Hashi

Just at the right time for me! Thank you! Also, would love a quick thoughts kinda segment, where if a topic is interesting to you, you could share some quick thoughts i.e 20-ish mins of stream of consciousness type video. Just a thought 😊

Chrombus

Just do a fifteen minute video about which small time YouTubers deserve a bigger audience and you’ll be caught up! It’ll take two seconds!

Annunak

✨✨BLESSED✨✨

keratin10000mg

Does the video not load for anyone else on mobile (Patreon app)? Well boy do I have a workaround for you! Sign in to Patreon via your phone browser, open vid in the YouTube app.

lily c

babe wake up contra just dropped a new tangent

ContraPoints

this is what I originally envisioned tangents being 😭

ContraPoints

yeah I age restricted it to be extra ToS compliant so you need to be logged in to YouTube, hope that's not too inconvenient

Haboon Hashi

hahahha you're a certified overachiever 💛

Ted(dy)

Oh Naur - I had this same issue with another patreon podcast - Natalie could pwease put the actual URL to the video in text in the description? YouTube seems have issues with linking age restricted videos through Patreon

keratin10000mg

I am certain that your fan base includes enough IT professionals to handle this without issue lol.

Anouk Jones

It’s a red letter day here in Black Mesa! I love when your vids drop❤️

Iceberg Tech

I understand, and wish to proceed.

masterkawas

I like these tangents as much as the main videos tbh. Maybe you can post one of the older ones as sort of advertisement of the Patreon if it is hurting your output too much.

Ryan Relativity

for mobile users, if you put the link to the video in the description i’m pretty sure it lets us directly watch the unlisted youtube video

Ryan Relativity

also tysm for another video i love ur content so much😭😭

Pierre Brown

It’s not working for me and I’m signed it on YouTube too :(

Evelynn

Ok but how do I avoid the Minecraft police? Do I just say that I'm referring to in Roblox?

Nadia

Yeeeees perfect timing, was just looking for something to watch this eve.

Beaubah

I think Natalie is my new religion since stepping away from Mormonism.

Stephen Brealey

Here I was wasting my evening, thank heavens for this!

Ted(dy)

omg for some reason this won’t work for me! I’m signed into my youtube account everywhere on my phone and youtube won’t load the video :/

stushi

Honestly I wouldn't mind if u shared these with everyone else like a month after posting them for patrons. E.g. the parasocial one is so good it feels like a waste to not!

Robert

Omg tell us about your craziest K-hole experience

Finn Bratt

Joining the Patreon was the best decision I ever made

Travis

You’re the only reason at the moment I have a Patreon, I just adore your content so much. Keep up the great work Natalie!

Aaron Thiel

I think I'll sit this one out as I suspect it might include some triggering content for me. Looking forward to the next vid, patreon or otherwise <3

patroclus

This is got eerily close to Jordan Peterson in his pre-redpill days

Syn

If you want to fix the audio fast and free I suggest exporting the channel just containing your voice as a .wav and feed it to Adobe Enhance. I checked it with an audio engineer and the algorithm is better at optimizing voice recordings than anyone could do it manually in a lot of cases when the audio recording isn't optimal.

dxsimoneaux

Not Natalie going back on her promises to give away all her money/possessions. Disappointing.

Simon

Yeah I had only heard, JP in his pre red pill days, all that happened was got real intrested in Jung.

Jenny Spencer

Omg can’t wait! Popcorn and Contrapoints Tangent tonight!

Filip Åsberg Montgomery

As someone who doesn’t really induldge in drugs and psychadelics (literally the only vice i dont), i have NEVRR in my life felt as validated as natalie officially declaring trip-reports as worse than dream recounting!

Frankie

Ready for the next tangent on August 18th (ily Natalie)

Kristina

Re: tripping and symbols being useful visual concepts when thinking is hard- I had a friend whose meds (lithium) would often make her seizure while taking LSD (don’t do it kids) and one of the tools we could use to bring her back from the brink was the phrase “R U OK???” Written down or repeated, it was enough of a simple concept it cut through the fog a bit. I cannot answer why she continued to do acid and lithium, it was a weird time for her and kinda stressful for the rest of us, but she’s fine today.

Jessica Cheeri

Loved the trip notes! I've never done substance X, but your first trip notes reminded me of my experience of a massive panic attack I had in 2021 that left me feeling like I simultaneously did and did not exist for a few hours

Matty Z Naps

The omission of your “Colleen ballinger is the YouTube joker” note really hit me

Ocarina Solo

She added a text link at the bottom of the post, try that one :)

ROSE MAYER

this is a great breakdown, and welcome to considering consciousness more provocatively. <3

Sev

no mushroom can fix Elon Musk gnome mushroom can fix Elon Musk

Eric Jakows

I’m so excited to get stoned and watch this later tonight!

Crissa Kentavr

😅 I'm going to have to see if my spouse will watch this with me.

Nicola Callahan

What if Natalie made a tangent every other month? Maybe then she wouldn’t feel pulled constantly between main channel & Patreon videos. It’s just an idea. I would gladly pay the same rate for 6 of these videos every year.

A.E. Kieren

I actually find you reading the notes from the trip to be very charming and amusing :)

Austin F

MKUltra is the 2nd wackiest way the US government has tried to control people's behavior for strategy (with of course the 1st being the bomb developed in the 70s that was supposed to turn enemy soldiers gay)

Wayde Lovingood

Been looking forward to this one for a minute!

Richard Earley

Loved this vid. Cried laughing at parts of it. I wonder how much the archetypes and motifs that we each see on drugs are conditioned by our own exposure to different social structures for understanding the world? Perhaps ancient mesoamericans only had one type of experience on ayahuasca because their own religious cosmology was the only one they knew. Makes it more challenging (and more fun) for us moderns as we have a bunch of versions we’ve learnt about to choose from.

Kate Kater

Good vid. Be safe ❤️

conancat

Waking up on a Tuesday to this? This is gonna be the best Tuesday of my life

conancat

The lighting for this is ON POINT!

Chupaacabra

what was the name of the artist you mentioned at 56:51? The spiral painting homie

Cabbage

Terence Mckenna sounds almost exactly like Ben Shapiro lol

Beth Jerky

i'm ashamed to say i could navigate your notes. when you said "tessellations" i died laughing because in my hypothetical first mushroom trip i couldn't stop talking about "the wallpaper." as a former catholic, i laugh cried during said hypothetical trip and kept repeating "this is spirituality?!?!"

CrystalJade

Another great tangent! I love how you begin with scientific intent, then it’s like the experience just takes over. I guess that a minecraft experience of the second type might offer extra degrees of freedom from the symbolic order. Like it’s a partial release, allowing a kind of existential reprioritisation that wouldn’t otherwise occur. Being aware of the symbolic order, and how even your own language can’t possibly define you or your particular experience. It’s like the gaze of the other is diminished, unless of course for some reason you must interact with new people. Please don’t worry too much about making sense of this! 😆🙃🍄

Seed Oil Sommelier

Not Nat casually dropping that Bret Weinstein is in her DMs. 🤪

Box

Loved this!! Also just a plug for anyone sceptical of corporate psychedelia and medicalisation to look up the work of Psymposia and their podcast Power Trip ❤️

Syn

Definitely check it out, even if the recording is good, it will probably come out improved (getting rid of harsh plosives and balancing out the levels etc.)

Figgy Starship

So many of your notes resonate with meeeeeeeee.

Whatever

Great work as always. All I could think about throughout your video was would it be hard to take notes during an experience like the ones you had for this video. Also, your harpsichord videos are really good.

Nerine

I have a friend who's done acid four times and mushrooms once and she tells me that each time it was a couple of hours of vaguely interesting visuals and then it just got boring and she wished she could focus enough to do something she'd actually enjoy. Maybe she needed two tabs to get what Natalie got on one, but I can't imagine at this point in her life she'd be eager to try again. But in the context of the larger topic I can't help wondering if there are people for whom psychedelics just don't work?

Wissa

Esoteric psycho ramble: One of your notes stuck out to me as something I experienced in an altered state, where, paradoxically, your perception of the flow of thoughts and time narrows down into a single moment, decontextualized from everything preceding or arriving, so that everything feels like an eternity. Or the opposite—as if the shutter speed on the mind’s eye slows and exposure prolonged so that they’re all condensed into one. Thoughts, no longer fluid like a river or train, become decompartmentalized. Each thought/moment feels like it’s in an empty auditorium of its own. The past gets confused with the present, because I think the mind produces a thought before we actually observe it, but observing it automatically places it in the past, but also the present...at the same time..like an echo…Or…something… 🤷‍♀️

SarahKeith

I am 100% ok with full-on Capitalist paying for her content… I do miss Justine tho…

James Ross

On your 1st Trip’s notes on metaphysics: I would recommend reading up on Jewish Mysticism and Kabbalah, and on analysing the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. Alan Moore’s Promethea offers a very comprehensive graphic novel series that explains this! :) Edit: on your recurring motifs you touch on this! The yaweh religions citing this light of god. They use the metaphor of the sun being god and there being different “emanations” of god. The white light being the 1st sphere at the top of the tree of life where everything else comes from. It’s essentially the “source” of everything. Funny you also mention the Matrix, where neo returns to “the source”. (Hope this sounds somewhat coherent lol). Other occult connections I recognised was in relation to Alistair Crowley’s religion of Thelema. Where they talk about the Abyss (da’at sphere of the tree of life) and the great Mother whom Thelemites worship as Babylon.

Greg Kemble

I love your honesty and curiosity.

Cat Cannon

I turned 30 today. I thought I was above it bothering me but it actually hit me really hard. This helped a lot <3

ContraPoints

One possibility is people on some anti-depressants, SSRIs in particular, often have muted effects.

CelesteK

Do it! Got mine to watch, and he loved it. :D

Chris Godwin

I did acid exactly once in college, in LA, on Halloween, by accident. A friend of mine at the time dosed a some drinks at a party and then casually told the handful of us that drank them that we were about to start tripping balls. And he was right, we sure did. If you've ever been in LA on Halloween, you'll believe me when I tell you that the subsequent six hours were completely out of control. One of the most insane nights of my life, and I've had more than my fair share. That was twenty years ago this October and I still remember it like it was last week. That being said, I've also had some very positive experiences with shrooms in part because we took the time to get the set and setting right :)

Nerine

Oh, that's really interesting and something I didn't know, although she wasn't on any medications at the time. Maybe she should try again now that she's on HRT, for the science of course.

Andrew Herr

Love this so much Natalie, currently listening to your video during the come up on therapeutic ket, which has 100% changed my life. Thank you for sharing your journey

Elias

I've been low key waiting to hear info on your experiences with psychedelics. High key: I want to know how your hair is so on point girl. The 'homogenaeity' of your gender expression is to be envied if I'm being honest. But yeah drugs.. Pretty great content! Like fr fr. Seemingly comprehensive accounting and navve; I tip my cap for mentioning erowid and that other website for effects. I've never had any tab of acid before and I don't smoke weed fr fr. I'm curious to see what's next Natalie ContraPoints Wynn. Be well. I'm still a fan and prolly will be for a while. 😉

soph

When coming down from DMT, I once had a brief very intense period of time lagging as you described, only it was like the trail of movement was strobing different colored lights. My friend got up to go to the bathroom and it looked like every movement she made was trailing behind her in a rainbow and I said, "It looks like the 80s."

Olivia Rollins

"I'm ontologically insane" is a line I will definitely be using during intake with my new therapist next week.

Neil

Really excited by your cautious pivot into interest in spirituality. Your sceptical disposition & academic background combined with a fertile imagination are exactly the kind of approach that’s so often absent from discourse on these matters. This tangent was so well balanced, thought provoking & accessible on such an idiosyncratic, bewildering topic. Can’t wait to see where this takes your takes in the future! Xxx

Neil

Is there a possible, if tenuous, connection to your previous tangent on liminal spaces? If thinking can go from linguistic & conceptual to visual & then to a kind of fluid, ‘pure’ thought that’s neither of the other two, does thought then become itself liminal, as in transitory? Neither here nor there but in-between & on-the-way, a relational quality?

Raoul (just me)

I always chickened out of doing acid before. however, when I was 17 years old I ate shrooms with a friend because it’s „natural“😂lol.. which led to me needing pretty intense caretaking from a friend. now I question my choices. I have a friend who used to microdose acid on a regular basis and he‘s fine. By fine I mean crazy of course, but functioning in society. Honestly with a nice person around and the right dosage I can see myself trying it out sometime

Lipk

Isn't microdosing very different, in that it's not a trip? I don't know much about it so if I'm wrong please let me know :) My kinderspeed aka methylphenidate doesn't have the effect on me people seek while using speed. Granted, mf isn't the same substance, but they both up dopamine levels. I think dosages this low create a qualitative difference (as Natalie mentioned w the 1 <-> 2 tab difference), and the base neurotransmitter level of an individual makes a difference too ('base level' is an oversimplification of course).

Lipk

I was reminded of the liminal spaces tangent too, bc of the disconnect from time as we usually experience it, the visual echoes, the inbetween. An empty hotel corridor and the feeling of being between lives have a symbolic similarity I think

Damon Harris

Damn girl! You have to let us give you an easy one! When I voted for this I thought it was going to be a softball tangent. You know, tell a couple funny acid trip stories, ironically add some cheesy psychedelic video effects, and then play In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida on your harpsichord while credits roll. Done and done. Get a good night sleep and cash my Patreon check in the morning. NOPE, two minutes into an hour plus video and Natalie is like, “The only way to make this is to take twice as much as I am comfortable with and try to meticulously document my experience.” Girl please, we beg you, help us help you. A vote for Harpsichord Tour is a vote for Ms. Wynn’s self care.

Ivy Jenkins

I first discovered your videos on a psychedelic trip, It changed my entire perspective on reality, and triggered my realization of being a woman. three months later I had another trip where I had a psychotic episode, punched a loved one in the face, and swore to never trip again. (me and the loved one are fine btw, very close relationship now)

Prutt

Loved the trip notes. And Natalie, of course you’re entitled to redact whatever you don’t want to share. No need to apologise.

Neil

Exactly! It’s bizarre in being so immediate & intense while simultaneously ungraspable. Super ****ing liminal!

marco

Girl you knew tangents would go too far when you started tangents (excited to see this one)

MLVF

Peterson’s understanding of Jung is basically as bad as his understanding of Marx during his “debate” with Zizek. It’s a real shame that most searches for Jung these days leads people right to Peterson, a charlatan. In this brief video, Natalie showed a grasp, an intimation, of what Jung’s esoteric latter work pointed to - whereas Peterson twists it into fuel for his agenda.

thewhitezombieremixalbum

re: white light. last time I took mushrooms I decided to finish playing superliminal. maybe the last 20% which is very heavy on bright white light, as you know. I'm not a huge video game player and had never played any on psychedelics before but playing that specific moment in that game, without expecting it, while at the peak of the 'trip' was one of the most special experiences I've had. might be something to try but probably not so intense if you know what is coming. thanks for the video, Natalie. very good as always ❤️

Kristiana

it was really fun to watch this tangent. I have once again confirmed that acid is acid is acid on almost everyone. I have witnessed and experienced pretty much all of the things discussed with the only difference that I do enjoy thinking about oneness in sober life. P.S. - sex on acid is pretty bomb, too. you should definetely try it

Freya

Tangent: you know how there’s the theory that mitochondria were single celled organisms that were incorporated into others during the evolutionary process? I think that neurons came from fungi in a similar way. It explains the similarities between the connections between mushrooms and neural networks.

beanstalkk

I would highly recommend everyone listen to the album "Lucid" by Ravenaa. She is a indie r&b singer and the album chronicles her experience with sexual assault and trauma and how taking shrooms helped her confront and overcome that trauma. It's beautiful from start to finish, and certainly takes you on a journey!

Morhzov

I can't help but notice that the topic of Liminal Space dovetails into this video on Psychadelic Experiences quite well. It's like watching you be Alice going from the rabbit hole directly into wonderland when watched one after the other. You really are a wave. If you're following a pattern then the next one need be one where you get to rest, Dark Mother. <3 Speaking of Dark Mothers, I'd be excited about a short (real short not Natalie short) exploration on this theme or the theme of motherhood and birth. Also, thank you for your sincerity about how this has changed your mind to a bit more openness to religion and spiritual experiences. I know you mentioned that people aren't going to be saved by this stuff but perhaps it helps open us all back up to things we have shut out from our past traumas and what we find to be uninteresting about the human experience.

Andrea

This one is special because the very first time I took shrooms I was alone, and right during the peak my entire egg cracked in a second, a second where I saw every moment in my life where the signs where there and I refused to see them. It was the most painful, heartbreaking, vulnerable, confusing and lonely experience of my life. I didn't even understand what transgender meant, I just realized I was a woman and I didn't know where to go from there. Shrooms have a very special place in my heart now.

Lisa Browne

Another great tangent. Thank you for comparing the two trips with enough detail to share your amazing process.

LynnieBeep

This was fascinating. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences 💖

oldperson420

This and the last tangent were so good.. sad most viewers will not be seeing them

Chrombus

That was wonderful, thank you.

Ads

Much likes

Magali

Wonderful tangent! You described it so well that I too was reminded of previous experiences. ah, the coziness of the pink light and the terrifying darkness of the void but also the answer is the waves.

Martijn Busink

People can take with mystical experiences what they want it seems, guess the problem is that it's deeply personal, even when you get them in a group ritual, whether it's a concert, a church service or an ayahuasca ritual. When you think you have to convert people to save the world things get weird quick. I feel the whole tripartite nature of many systems is to rise above the duality, you need a third for a true balance. Anyway, not to go on a tangent here. Anyway, this reminded me of a time when I discussed these things a lot on a messageboard of a band that took influences from Hakim Bey, Henry Corbin and Suhrawardi, and everything was full of symbols. Hard to keep the eye on the ball and not fall for idolatry or parallelomania. Anyway, thanks!

Deconstruction Interactive

I love this video! Having never taken psychedelics, I've wondered what the experience is like, and it was very interesting hearing about your trips on magic substance X. Honestly a lot of the metaphysical trip deeply made sense to me -- I have these kinds of thoughts / experiences while sober, I guess. This and other things you said reaffirms my belief that I probably shouldn't trip, but it was super super interesting learning both the history and about your experiences. Thank you for sharing! I gotta watch Paprika, though.

Ash Gabrielle

Psychedelics are VERY much not for me (they seemed fun to me once but I realized long ago that if even weed is too much for me then acid just isn't in the cards for me) so I am looking forward to listening to someone with experience talk about it.

Christophe Spurling

Haha, this was perfect for tangents! I recognize your experience. When I'm high I'm totally lucid to the experience. But afterwards and before it's just not possible to anticipate or recall the feeling. I think you most accurately touched on it when you say similar to dreams you are interpreting your consciousness not through language and rational thought but more with the use of symbols and emotions. (Not sure if this is even what you said!) I also experience a trip in a cyclical way. Not just the Alice in Wonderland cycle of intoxication, experience and return to normality. But also the cyclical nature of euphoria - dysphoria, wild abandonment - confusion - remembering your high - wanting to return to normality coupled with a tactile sometimes grim fascination with both the divine and terrifying experience of observing your own mind. Hahah I know exactly how you feel trying to perform this tangent!

Noah Benjamin

I had an EXTREMELY difficult mushroom trip about a month ago and seeing you elaborate on some of the same difficulties i had (experiencing time moment by moment, being almost able to "predict" the future) has made me feel less insane and less defeated about how much i fell apart on an unexpectedly strong dose. Thanks, nat.

June Walker

"Ontologically insane" merch plz!! :)

ratboi

That was beautiful Natalie, thank you

Liv

this is great :D i remember babysitting a few weeks after i took acid and we were watching hercules. i noticed how the two year old was fine when the colors were bright and happy, but suddenly began to cry and get scared when the colors were purple and dark. similarly, i peaked while watching into the spiderverse and had the same reaction. that’s when it then hit me. my memory high feels similar to my memories as a child. not only emotionally but also spatially. this makes me wonder if there are ways to potentially activate parts of the brain we have not activated since childhood. could this be a potential avenue for treating deeply imbedded traumatic experiences? i no longer talk to anyone i experienced this with, and usually my memories with those people hurt to remember — but the memory of that day doesn’t really evoke anything similar to everything else. it just is what it is! i have touched acid ever since because i haven’t felt the need or the urge. i might try again one day, but i really don’t want to ruin my relationship with it. i’m curious if anyone else maybe reading this has had any similar experiences

Liv

also thank you for being so open and honest with us

Daniel Loizos

Dear Natalie, Please please, for the love of Mike. Be careful. I for one prefer you alive and reasonably sane. So, look after yourself, treat yourself with the care you deserverve.

Neil

Re: “Patriarchal bullshit invading the metaphysics”, Jeff Brown is very good on this in his book Grounded Spirituality. Characterises most world religions as patriarchal & criticises the act of “spiritual bypassing” emotions & suffering instead of embracing them to reach a deeper joy on the other side.

Ari Grabb

Really loved this tangent Natalie! Thank you so much for doing it. Its easy to get swept in the psychedelic-optimism about how much good these things can do, but you're right. I think the same thing that happened with meditation is happening with psychedlics (ie, "McMindfulness"). You brought up a lot of interest in monism, and if you're curious, I wanted to direct you to the first 20 minutes of a podcast where two meditators discuss the difference between nonduality (a philosophy) and monism (a metaphysical claim). Thought you might find it interesting. https://open.spotify.com/episode/304y3FXjB4yPYnFl9l5925?si=c3d947e59660422a

Philip Carter

Hi Natalie! Loooooved this tangent! It’s interesting to me that at the end of your trip notes you remark at an odd lack of musical insight… and more than a few of the things you’d written prior could practically be describing music, to my mind. For instance, “division of time into discrete momentary slices” is like the system of quavers… one piece of music is composed of tons and tons of tiny little interrelated moments and there’s a story running through it. This reminds me of divination systems like tarot and the I Ching. My limited understanding tells me those systems are premised on the idea of cyclical time and says the ‘quavers’ it’s comprised of have unique characters which we can identify and work with/against. Astrology is like this too. Isn’t the wheel of the zodiac just one big waveform? ‘Wave existence’ as an essential aspect of our being suggests vibration, which is the entire world of sound and music. As is the suggestion of eternal recurrence and reverberation/echoing… vibration IS recurrence; its constant recurrence is like gravity. Gravity in the solar system but also the intuitive power of tonal gravity in music. Expectation/anticipation/relief… it shapes the entire drama of the piece at every level. Rhythm is about recurrence, pitch is about rate of recurrence, and musical story (one might say) is like a dance of desire for predictable recurrence. And vibration begets more of itself constantly in the way it unfolds through the overtone series… there were groups following the work of Pythagoras that made this whole thing about the music of the spheres, understanding the solar system and the night sky generally to be a kind of auditory phenomenon; harmonic emanations of light, i guess? I would be totally gagged if you did a video about the philosophy of Pythagoras and the history of esoteric schools of spirituality. There’s this thread of similar ideas… the Greeks had the Logos, the Christians had the Word, the Hindus have this idea of primary Life Breath animating everything. I had a mushroom trip once where I wrote that ‘when we die, we dissolve into universal music; it’s a grander sort of song than the one we currently play our lives along to.’ One last thing, about “species truths.” When I hear that phrase I immediately think about more or less universal aspects of human embodiment. Like the evolutionary heritage of our nervous systems, for instance (check out polyvagal theory — Stephen porges). I also took a little internet dive into cognitive linguistics (I remember watching George Lakoff lectures on YouTube) awhile ago and came to understand, right or wrong, that our bodily mechanisms and conscious engagement w space and time are the building blocks of our language. They form and constrain everything including our grammar… verbal language is a structure built on top, so… experiencing a flow of information in a trip state might make sense in a right brained, spatial, body-orienting sense and carry a lot of meaning, but be way at odds w typical frames for verbal expression. Honestly the embodiment topic is fascinating and rich. I wonder if a lot of psychedelic (and religious) experience is a matter of exposing processes to consciousness which normally create our sense of direct perception and consciousness, rather than being the object of perception.

Ethan Good

Speaking as a boring, lifelong square who has never even tried alcohol, this gave me a useful framework to understand my friends when they talk about tripping balls.

octo

i recommend watching joseph campbell if you wanna see an old white guy talk about archetypes and comparative mythology, i found the power of myth tv series really enlightening (pun not intended) in my understanding of religion and spirituality. never done anything beyond weed or alcohol, but the themes and phenomenon he articulates match up almost exactly to what you described in your trips, and he doesnt even bring up drugs at all. he's very influenced by jung.

Damon Harris

When you said "I'm samsorry" I promptly spit out my wine and died.

Mikel

It's interesting that after these two trips you've acquired this new intuitive sense that there might exist some kind of afterlife. My first LSD trip two years ago (which was a pretty good one for most of it except at the very end of the peak, when it suddenly went horribly wrong; I definitely took too much, like 250 µg if I remember correctly) did the complete opposite to me. Ever since then I've become insanely fixated in these unwanted thoughts surrounding how unlikely seems to me the notion that there might exist some kind of afterlife, intrusive thoughts which fill me with intense, crippling existential dread: the idea that death might be (and most likely is) the end is just unbearable to me, and I've been thinking about it non-stop (unable to stop thinking about it) for the last two years lol I've tripped again since then a good number of times with a variety of different psychedelics, and it hasn't made this dreadful existential fixation that I've had for the last two years any worse (that trip was my first & so far only bad trip), but it hasn't made it any better either. Wish I could have an experience like yours & finally find peace in my vision of mortality.

Anthony Schiappa

The stuff about CIA and mind-control is wild, and largely in the Congressional record through the Church committee. Trying to see things from the paranoid Cold War mindset can lessen a knee-jerk skepticism about these things. Like the antiwar movement initially was comprised of lower- and middle-class families of the drafted, organized in churches, and included academics who, back then, were respected (it was the 60s!). Not people with real power, but people who could not be easily discredited in the media. There's this idea that the CIA promoted the use of psychedelics among college students, then associated the with the antiwar movement with people who the media portrayed as gibberish-speaking lunatics. No proof of course, but on a gut-level it seems plausible to me. "Tune in, turn on, drop out" is exactly what the CIA would love for an engaged, politically aware youth population to do.

alejandro antunez

Hi, first I wanna say this was the 5 dollars I’ve spent in a long time. I really like this tangent, it made me remember some stuff about my country Bolivia, there we have plenty of “fun plants/herbs” but the most popular by far is the coca leaf. Despite the pretty bad reputation this plant might have internationally, I’m Bolivia it’s seen almost like a holy medicine(for some at least) from white teeth to high altitude sickness, even to tell your future(no kidding look up coca leaves reading) it’s funny how much this plant means just because it makes you energetic and a little “funny”

Spinning Rail

Uggg. Didn't join Patreon just to have to make a youtube account to watch content. Bye.

Abbi

Love the comparison of trips! I definitely prefer mid doses of psychedelics - more sensual and expansive than full on ego death, collapse of reality. Regardless of dose, I always find myself looking at dualism, seeing the yin and Yang in everything, and the projection / shadows we avoid are so clear to see.

Emerson Whittaker

This tangent feels connected to the liminal spaces tangent to me in the sense of trying to understand through visuals some human emotional truths that can't be expressed well in words. I know I will never use these things myself due to anxious tendencies and family history, but I almost feel like the intuition I've gained from my physics/astro background combined with my sort of leftist Lutheran-ness has allowed me to intuitively understand this oneness you're talking about. For one thing, time and space are literally connected, and quantum entanglement tells us particles can be connected over vast distances. But even on an emotional level I think I feel the love for everyone that you talk about, the sense of oneness. I don't even believe in reincarnation, but sometimes I have the sense that I've been here too many times before. Anyway, really interesting stuff, and good luck on your dip into spirituality!

JP

Say sike right now

Ewen McNeill

As others have said, an excellent tangent. And I too feel the overlap between the psychedelic experiences described and liminal spaces -- both are "connected to reality" and yet not exactly reality, and the walls between reality and fantasy are thin. The visual editing in this tangent definitely added flavour to what was being described, and I appreciate the time taken to do that. (Although I'd have to say anyone prone to effects from visual flashing might need to skip this one, or at least watch with someone who can spot all the "look away for a bit" periods -- they're pretty much all while it's audio dominant though.) Thanks for sharing. It was worth the effort of logging in to Google to be able to see the video (and still play back on the TV); but hopefully that won't have to be a common requirement as (at least in my case) it involved juggling multiple devices. It's also encouraging you're going to be focusing on main channel videos again. Especially in the last couple of tangents it feels like the production levels have upped to "could be main channel videos" as is (although obviously the topic this month would make that problematic). So it'd be nice to see more topics available to the public again, rather this just being a "subscription service to high quality ContraPoints" :-) Ewen

Natasha

Curious what about the trip made you feel there was no afterlife? I had a bad trip last year and kind of got the opposite although similar feelings. There's an existential dread and nihilism of eternity. To exist forever. To be unable to escape the hold of awareness and consciousness. A lonely God forever incarnating to forget it's own aloneness. I've been working through it and appreciated Contra's more positive take on the matter but curious how your experience went?

Natasha

I did 1g of mushrooms for my first trip and definitely got a feeling of "oh, this it what I remember being a really young child feeling like". My theory is that the brain of young children haven't yet created strong Default Mode Networks and it's said that psychedelics disrupts the DMN of your brain, liking bringing you back to that similar brainspace of heightened awareness for your surroundings and time dilation. I suddenly couldn't ignore every stimulus that came across my experience but time stretched to fit it all so it didn't feel overwhelming. I believe as we get older, we need to filter out this stimuli and have a more focused perception.

Natasha

But when you take higher doses, the familiarity completely disappears. The experience is unlike anything in your sober reality or memories. So be careful.

Mikel

That's interesting, because I actually used to have the feelings you're describing before the trip lol Since I was a little child, like, since the age of eight or even younger, I've always questioned reality & wondered whether I actually am in a simulation. Coincidences in particular made me feel very uneasy & triggered a lot in me this train of thought of "this might just be a simulation" (which now that I'm quite educated about mental illnesses, including schizophrenia, I recognize as a train of thought almost bordering on psychotic delusion lol but I don't think I suffer from any psychotic mental illness & neither does any mental health professional I've ever been with). I wondered a lot in particular whether I might be the only being that exists & this is just some kind of dream I've self-induced myself into dreaming to not feel lonely & to entertain myself through the lonesome, boring eternity of being the only being that exists (which sounds a lot like what you're saying). I still lived my life as if I was taking for granted that this is not a simulation, but tbh I never was quite convinced that it wasn't, but I figured that I had no other choice but to act as if it wasn't & then find out once I died whether it is one or not. Then I had that trip, and what happened then is that I actually went psychotic for a bit at the peak of the trip & was convinced that the world was ending, that it was the end of times, and the terror I felt then when I believed that it was the end (not just of the world but also MY end) has stayed with me ever since (maybe it's that I'm traumatized by what happened in that moment?). But it's not just that, it also completely erased this train of thought I've always entertained about whether I am in a simulation, particularly that idea that I might be the only being that exists & this is just some kind of self-induced dream state, and I think that's part of the reason why I've become so terrified of death ever since then: now that I no longer question reality, death seems much more final than back when I still entertained a lot this idea that I might be in a simulation. I think that the reason why this happened is because for that bit when I went psychotic at the peak of the trip I basically left reality, but then I came back, so now it doesn't make any sense to me anymore this idea that I might be the only being that exists & this is just some kind of self-induced dream state: if this is a dream that I've created with my mind, why everything that I hallucinated in that moment when I left reality didn't become the new reality of this self-induced dream that I supposedly create? It might seem paradoxical, but what going psychotic & leaving reality for a bit did for me was solidifying that, yes, reality is reality, not a product of my mind, and something I no longer question (I mean, who knows, it might still be a simulation after all, just not one I've self-induced myself into dreaming as the only being that exists, but I just no longer entertain any of these thoughts). And, also paradoxically, this assurance I gained surrounding the fact that reality is reality has been crushing to me: existential dread isn't new to me at all, this train of thought I've always had since I was a tiny child surrounding the possibility that I might be the only being that exists has always filled me with a lot of dread, but man, this new intrusive fixation on death & on how unlikely seems to me the possibility that there might exist some kind of afterlife that I've been obsessing over non-stop for the last two years is much, much worse, the idea that death might be (and most likely is) the end is just completely unbearable to me & I'm unable to stop dwelling on it (to the point that I wonder a lot whether I might've developed OCD, like, these dread-inducing intrusive thoughts have been a constant, non-stop presence in my everyday life, literally every day, for the last two years). So I totally get the existential dread you're describing surrounding feelings of being a "lonely God forever incarnating to forget it's own aloneness", that was the existential dread I used to experience myself since like the age of eight to the age of twenty-two, but it's precisely stopping entertaining that train of thought combined with the somewhat traumatic experience of psychotically believing for a bit at the peak of that trip that it was the end of times what has triggered this much more severe & crippling existential dread surrounding death & the unlikelihood of the afterlife in me.

Sunbeam

Wow. This was the best explainer on psychedelics I've seen, especially since it combines the factual/historical, philosophical/spiritual, personal, and political elements so fluidly. I'm also pretty surprised at both how much and how little you wrote while you were under :). Also, it's OK if your future tangents are shorter and focus is needed for the main channel content, but I'm glad this one was so deep. Thanks!

Mark This

Oh my, this opens up a temptation that I know I am not going to resist and also know that I may well regret. Totally with the universal deadness of listening to someone else explain their psychedelic experience to me, and yet, sometime within the many minutes, hours, weeks that might take, there is sometimes something in there that resonates and even reminds me of how they have enabled me to understand something of myself and my relationship to the rest of the world/universe in a beyond verbal way. So, being in mind of kindness and consideration for others, this is the briefest description of the parts here that resonated with my own psychedelic experience. Back in the 70's when I was a young adult teen lots of older people (mainly boys) told me how great acid was, but I kept getting this thing from the ways they talked that it had something to do with religion. Having escaped from the unholy grip of pious Christianity around the age of 14 the last thing I wanted to do was to meet God or encourage any thoughts or feelings around there being a greater (judgemental) power. After a few years of weed and alcohol, giving into my curiousity I dropped acid a couple of times and then took some mushrooms (not all on the same evening). One of these experiences offered my the the broken branch of a small tree sticking up through the deep snow in my local park. The snow was so perfectly white and sparkled, the branch was jet black and as I walked around this black shape (something close to a Chinese character) for maybe a few minutes or several lifetimes, I started to understand that the necessity of black and white, good and bad, male and female, old and young, up and down, left and right, opposites... the contrast between extremes... was essential to there being any material existence for us humans here on this planet. Your sharing around the rejection of the white light moving onto the yinyang feels very similar to my take away that late snowy night in the park for me. Taoist ideas have always felt more... meaningful... relevant... useful... than any of our Abrahamic religious philosophies. And leave me more likely to check the IChing than the bible. And the patriarchy editing all the value out of our understanding history and finding connection, with you on this without the need for inebreation of any kind. So, I'll leave this here and maybe like a random pattern in the sand after the tide has just gone out, it might spark something for someone. Symbols to trump words every time and I have thought, written and said that so many times, like jumping to touch something I know is out of reach but can't resist jumping again. Thanks for caring, daring and sharing Natalie.

Natasha

That's so interesting. I've seen to come from the exact opposite direction. I was plagued with existential dread about death and annihilation from when I was 12 to 20. I do agree that existential dread can feel much worse in many ways, I don't wish it on anyone, but I at least don't think it's the only way to view reality, as I've personally felt like I moved through it. I've weirdly found what you said about coming back from leaving reality to be oddly comforting from my perspective. I had a similar experience on mushrooms but and even worse experience sober. I stepped out of the shower and suddenly felt a sense of all encompasing doom that all of reality was my imagination and my fear at realizing this was going to cause all of existence to disappear and I would be an alone trapped awareness existing in the void for eternity. I later realized this was a DPDR episode brought on by severe anxiety, but the lack of things feeling real lingered for quite some time to some degree. I couldn't shake the paranoia that everything was an illusion and I was akin to Descartes's Mind being controlled by a Demon. It was horrible. Now I feel much more grounded and that's in part (maybe) starting to understand that things exist outside of me in a sort of nondual way. I remember during my bad trip feeling like I could control time because reality felt so loose. I stared at my phone screen trying to make it 6pm (because I got it in my head that that would be when the trip would end) and I couldn't do it. Looking back on that experience, I found it to be one of the things that comforted me by reminding me that I couldn't actually control reality and that it exists outside of my fears and anxieties. I never felt more of a desire to be a materialist after my trip. I wanted things to exist outside of me. I think the reason, for me at least, this hasn't lead to a fall back into my dread and terror about death as annihilation is that I honestly cannot believe that the existence of "I Am" conscious awareness is not THE most profound thing you can understand. The fact that "I" am having this experience at all, right now, speaks to a Truth I thought I grasped intellectually but now truly understand experientially. I don't know how I can explain it and I'm still working through the fear and unreality of it but I don't think I can ever not live in a state of profound doubt for our normal perceptions of reality. I hope you find help and healing. Therapy might be good as this may be Existential OCD. And I know this sounds absolutely cheesy but love and community has been the thing that grounds me in threading this needle of eternity and meaning.

Noli P.

I'm so jealous of anyone who have amazing trips on acid. I wanted to love it as I have loved other psychedelics, such as mushrooms, DMT, and my personal favorite, MDMA. But three bad trips in a row and I just can't with it. It just does not love me.

no

good for you fr, wish it was abt dworkin lol. or for that matter about paglia? you seem to be reading through some of her stuff, what's your thoughts. <3

Almendra Rodriguez

I am Chilean, have gotten coca leaves from my northern neighbor Peru and I can attest to this as well. I love Coca. Such a fantastic plant with so many great benefits! I make tea with the leaves :)

Jeannot

Shame about the age restriction, I stubbornly refuse to get a google account. Understandable thought, I wouldn’t take any chance with Google ToS. Any chance it could be mirrored on Vimeo or some other service?

GK Wagner

I really appreciate your reflections on qualities of aesthetic enjoyment and the suspension of cynicism necessary to achieve. One of my most blissed out, transformative aesthetic experiences was while completely sober, attending a performance of the Paris Ballet at Opera Bastille. Although I had seen ballet in the USA before, the Paris company was beyond next level. My heart and mind cracked as I read the dance like a written page of revelation. I wept in awe of such beauty, and in gratitude that it exists. To feel deeply is a gift we each deserve.

Reese w

the question i have to ask is.... is natalie ready for contrapoints themed blotter?

Reese w

no, that's a bad metaphor. weed is not acid, and the paranoia of weed is nothing like lsd. So if weed is too much for you, that doesn't mean acid is too much for you

Ann C

I loved this Tangent. I didn't expect Natalie to give us a recent, first-hand description of the psychedelic, but it was even more compelling because she did. Even though she said it was hard to verbalize her experiences, she captured it well. My experiences with Substance X were years ago, but her descriptions were vivid and real.

Liv

that’s so interesting to think about! and thank you for the warning. my ex took six tabs accidentally (he thought he was taking three), and i don’t think he was ever the same after. whatever he was seeing and hearing was something i don’t think i ever want to experience. psychedelics can be beautiful but i really do believe you have to respect them and their potential

Ash Gabrielle

Haha fair enough! Suffice to say it like this then—drugs just aren't my cup of tea, personally. I don't have anything against them of course! But I also don't have much interest in doing them.

Noah Carlin

This was such a good tangent. It’s uncanny how similar the ethos of eastern mysticism or panentheism and psychedelics can be. Spinoza would’ve shit his breeches if he could’ve tripped.

Ten Tigers

Is anyone else having trouble with this tangent technically - as in I’ve tried to load it for like 3 days and it’s not working

Hadi Sayed

Since this video is age-restricted, you’ll need to be signed into YouTube to watch it

Candidtador

The comment about being more open to spiritual/metaphysical exploration def happened to me after some strong trips, and it's been a process squaring those experiences with mundane reality. The novelty/infrequency of trips compared to normal life can lend itself to placing higher import on trips, especially when you "see god" and other miracle-like feelings. I had that psychonaut nerd period where I thought more trips were better, getting me closer to the Ultimate Truth™, but eventually the well runs dry. Only after a bigger break and actually living do you have more to munch on mentally. It feels like a balance; inhabiting such a drastically different frame of mind is not the end goal, but it can be a powerful method of reflection given the environment is safe and suitable. In that way I think the parallels to religious mysticism start to make sense. This foreign element, something that doesn't observably exist in everyday life, could contribute to the initial fear ideas like ego death or an uncaring god instill in us, especially because they can't be known in the way we're used to. Whether through substances or otherwise, people tap into a different way of using their mind that can't be fully conceptualized with how we normally experience the world. That's rad af.

Taylor Brophy

This was incredible. The entire time I was wondering if you were going to mention the instagram user @sighswoon because she is the epitome of the tumbler-esque liminal space aesthetic. I think she has contributed to the popularization of this trend especially among the influencer girlies.

YogaDadBod

Elon et al proving once again there is no outside of wealth bondage.

Tyler Ray

Is this video still not working for anyone else?

Pauline Barry-Venture

It's because of the age restriction on YouTube, you have to watch it there

Pauline Barry-Venture

I've never done psychedelics, but I'd be very interested in doing one psychedelic while listening to Jon Hopkins' "Music for Psychedelic Therapy"

Tyler Ray

All of her other videos work on the Patreon app, but not this one.

Ash Gabrielle

That's correct, she age restricted this one in contrast to the other tangents. Quoting from the post: "Also, I age-restricted this video just to be hyper-compliant with the terms of service, so you'll need to be logged in to YouTube to watch. Hopefully that's not too inconvenient."

Tore Nielsen

Imagine learning that the CIA has funded you *ironically*.

Anastasia Le

Took me a few tries to figure it out. You can’t watch the video through the app, you have to copy the link to the video and open it through your internet browser.

Tyler Ray

That worked thansk!

Nikee Star

Hi Natalie. This was a wonderful tangent video, and a courageous one at that! I don't personally have any experience of psychedelics, but I'm interested in the psychology of altered states. The way that you approached the trip and described it was intriguing to me, knowing how hard it is to relay the experience to another person. Kudos!

Bara

I’m wary of tripping because weed makes me fall to pieces, so I appreciated your investigative methods and thorough reporting. It was like being along for the ride. Thanks!

Conzeit

you can try it out with really really really small doses. maybe microdosing shrooms or stuff like that can show you ti doesnt have to be mind obliterating to do good

Reed

I have two things for this. One it reminds me of how Ram Dass, after a ton of trips, found that it wasn't what he really wanted and he needed to focus on being compassionate in his life. It also reminds me of this Alan Watts quote about psychedelics “If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen.” ― Alan Watts

Conzeit

Natalie. even though I know 2 weeks in you'll prolly never read this. I want to say I am really really happy to read you talking of spiritual experiences! you said you rejected all of it after cutting off the dreads and that always made me sad. You said to put in the comments anything that helps you interpret the first trip, so I hope talking a little bit of my personal interpretations of em is helpful. White light, vs Darkness. The while light is the known, the white light is the ascension and union of all into one, and all that patriarchic stuff, yes. The darkness, is the unknown, the limitless potential of everything we cannot grasp, everything that is not even possible (insert McKenna quote). TBH I love the dark much more, I find it endlessly comforting. dark mother I suppose. They are equally all consuming voids in different directions, any anxiety about either of them is removed when I look at them both at the same time, when I look at the entire Taiji instead of either side, then it just becomes a matter of grayscale, a great, unending relativistic gray void. The void that you dread in the white is there, at both sides, you went and tried to slice it in two, took the wholeness out of it, you took all the endless variation between the extremes out of it and that is what is dreadful. The mandala to me is exactly equal to fractals. The cornucopia of form that is our reality used to seem to me ireconcilable with oneness, but I realized Fractals illustrate exactly how you create endless plurality out of oneness. Within fractals, there is one pattern, endlessly repeated, and yet the variations of it are so immense that it becomes the most overwhelmingly baroque excess of variation, fractals illustrate how the process of creation works. Mandalas just have that explicitly shown in there, with the oneness Bindu at the center from which the same immaculate symmetric ornate beauty emanates. I see your skepticism towards Terrence McKenna and I get it, specially after Rogan. god dammit. Games get Gamergate and Terrence gets Rogan, dudebros ruin everything. BTW. Mckenna did not choose 2012 because of anything to do with the Mayan calendar, he chose it because of "the timewave" his own, personal breakdown and reinterpretation of the I Ching that he came up with while on shrooms. he transformed the I Ching into his own little tool to predict all of time on a fractal way. Because of course he had to explain all of existence with everything that he did, he could never let good enough be. Dennis believes that Terrence actually found a reinterpretation of the I Ching as a paleolithic calendar, that if released as an Anthropological paper would have become received into cannon, but no, Terrence had to always consume all of reality with everything he said and that vision of I Ching remains unexamined. I do agree with Mckenna that Psychedelics are a window into a deeper, more real, reality. That is not to say that anything you think of while on psychedelics is true, you have to be skeptical of anything that positions you as savior of the universe, that is your ego disguising itself as god, the first thing people who take Ayahuasca for the first time do is think themselves better shamans than any who have come in the past. Mckenna thought himself better than the shamans who have discovered these compounds and all their traditions around them, Rogan becoming the face of McKenna's theories is the price Terrence pays for his arrogance (Rogan thinks Ayahusaca is irrelevant because he's taken DMT, fuck him). Like Rogan, many take his theories and make them into ideology and proselitize with them, that misses the entire point. Ultimately all that Mckenna had to say was that the felt presence of inmediate experience of the entheogenic state is all that matters (so kudos for your commitment to the fresh memory of the state and your 2 trips!) anyone else's silly trip reports or theories are hearsay, lies for all you know. Terrence didn't even take his theories terribly seriously, I think all they are is his attempt to recreate the entheogenic state of mind using the spoken word, so that as many people as possible actually go and experience it. Like you said he did that better than anyone. Psychedelics being a window into a deeper, more real reality is ALSO not to say that we're gonna fix everything by getting everyone on drugs (many perefectly good, sensitive and sensible people cannot even withstand psychedelics), we fix the problems in real life by facing them, psychedelics and other ecstatic spiritual experiences are there to remind us that whatever paradigm we become consumed by in our everyday experience is not TRUTH, but once we have that what we do is go back to the trial and failure that is real life and deal with it, we will not be overcome capitalism by waiting for novelty to come around and save us. Thank you so much for this tangent! you made me reevaluate a lot of this stuff which is really important to me

Zindagigi

So many comments here already that I know I'm shouting into the void, really, but here goes... As usual, of course, Natalie made a thought-provoking, entertaining and beautiful video. Here's the thing, though. My main complaint with psychedelics: the literature and media depictions are dominated with a sort of white academic/new agey/outsider mystic gaze on a topic that is then draped in exoticism and ethnic fetishization. Which certainly Natalie briefly acknowledges in this video. But it doesn't have to be that way. "Traditional" cultures that make use of psychedelics (or which have somehow gotten thrown into the mix with psychedelics for some reason, because how did Tibetan Buddhism end up here?) are mostly still around and can be accessed for their actual views on the topic, but instead self-identified psychonauts like to assign a sort of pan-Indigeneity to their beliefs and practices of use around these substances while expressing no interest at all in the actual people and communities who identities are being employed as some kind of badge of legitimacy on all this. Is it possible to just walk away from this part of the whole business? If we are not going to do the work of actually finding people and sources from these cultures we are claiming to be inspired by, can we just not leave those people alone and admit that what we are doing is something that we are making up, feeling our way towards, learning as we go?

sunlit_music

Thanks very much for this great video! You're right, drugs aren't more dangerous than alcohol and they should be regulated. I appreciate you mentioning the history of psychedelics around the world as well as the risks of taking them.

Bara

Great point - thank you!

J Jones

I think the 'Pure White Light' thing is some kind of collective unconsciously racist color superstition. Also some ancient solar deity worship stuff.

Justin Gloria-Jerman

I have no idea why, but this is the only video that I can’t watch. Patreon will sit there loading for 20 minutes and nothing.

Josep

i don't even know where i can get weed...

Jon Stewart

From a right-now perspective, psychedelics are a bloody brilliant way to get the most out of art. Just the right drug and dose, set the time aside, line up the videos and connect with humanity in a bath of overwhelming love (500mg mescaline and moonage daydream here). Should be normal/ritualised, say a couple of times a year IMO. But what do I know...

Jon Stewart

I absolutely hate weed, it sends me into a doomspiral instantly. But I love psychedelics. Mushrooms are quite serious IMO and I find low doses not particularly pleasant. It seems that the mescaline-based drugs more reliably produce a really euphoric, love-filled experience than psilocybin or LSD. 2-CB is really popular because it's incredibly fun, safe as any psychedelic (i.e. really safe physically, set and setting needed), cheap and doesn't last long (4h). Highly recommended!

S

This video won’t play. The psychedelics video has a bug or something blocking playing?

Sadie

Favorite tangent

Eric Williams

Also having a problem playing this

Jesse Pack

I really appreciate this tangent! I am someone who benefits from psychedelic therapy in addition to being fascinated by the history of psychedelic substances.

OpheliaHeine

I loved hearing about your experiences! I'm a big fan of psychedelics but also tend to not quite identify with the cultural zeitgeist of them being this kind of miracle drug. I started giving them a try as kind of an option to see how they would affect my own depression and PTSD and i wouldnt say they've ever made me feel "cured". I kind of just use them as a way to reset the ol noodle once in a blue moon. They get me out of just feeling totally consumed by all the meaning and stakes i put on my life in the pursuit of capitalistic "success". I personally prefer to do them alone despite the danger just because my people pleasing urges usually overtake me and make me just spend the whole trip making sure everyone else is ok and having a good time. When i trip alone i feel like im much more able to get in tune with my authentic desires and self.

chris

in the bern version of swiss german, the word for curious is "gwundrig", which could be translated as "open to wonder", "wondrous". in german, the term for curious is "neugierig", which could be translated as "greedy for the new", "craving the new". i think the two terms describe interesting ways of looking at (metaphysical or esoteric or religious or even scientific/rational and economic) stances towards the unknown and the limits of what can be known and the way those are defined and experienced.

Jeffrey Haught

I can’t play this video for some reason…

Sophie

Loving the baby goat hops!!

Timothy Morrise

I watched Suspiria 2018 recently and this idea of the Reclaiming / Yang / Death / Dark Mother is really intruiging to me. I wonder if there's something so offensive about that in Masculinity our art is designed to supress the Dark Mother as an archetype; which is one reason why I think Suspiria 2018's revelation of Becoming/Embodying the dark mother is really interesting. Also some interesting potential Freud stuff going on there.

Nathaniel Trent

I just wanna say that this Patreon is fucking CRAAAAZY. I’m sooo glad I subscribed. Longtime fan of Natalie and I’ve been sad recently about the lack of youtube content… little did I know there’s this absolute goldmine of content she’s been putting out here? Amazing. Love this. Take my money I beg you

Oronoro

Couldn't agree more! So much great content. I've already inhaled like three tangents. Stoked af to dive into the rest

Sappho's Friend

I cannot view this because it is age restricted :(. Youtube demands i give them my ID just to view this video (which i won't do ofc). PS; european union

Ale Kenward

This video showed me that my decision long ago never to try psychedelics was the correct one. The idea of losing control of my mind like that terrifies me. I'm a Mexican biologist, experimenting with mushrooms etc. is part of our "curriculum" but it's not for everyone.

Sappho's Friend

I found a way to watch it hehe. I've never done psychedelics, but I have temporal lobe epilepsy (focal impaired awareness seizures, often with with automatisms), and what you descrribed here kinda reminds me of seizures. A lot of these sensations i'd feel during a seizure don't exist otherwise, in a seizure free state; these weird forms of anxiety, very strong deja vu, odd sensations in the abdomen/heart, weird smells of burning leather (idk) that dont exist in real life. When my seizures werent medicated (docs didnt listen to me) and i often had several a day, i was just so drawn to spirituality and conspiracism, even though in a seizure free state I'm anti-mysticism, the rigid autistic atheist type. The frequency of seizures had fried my brain. When it comes to mandalas, i personally suspect they appear because our eye is radially symmetrical, it's circular, including the nerve, or really thats it's just a consequence of our anatomy, and we then assign secondary meanings to them in this state of loosened associations (sort of an induced psychosis) that a psychedelic trip is. *Gotta say not mentioning the QAnon shaman as a reactionary psychedelics-loving hippie was a missed opportunity xD

Sarah Derasp

Natalie i’m really late to this party, but have you ever heard of Deleuze & Guattari’s concept of the rhizome? it’s most commonly used in Education, but it might be useful to you. Reference: Deleuze, Gilles, & Guattari, Félix. (1988). A thousand plateaus : capitalism and schizophrenia / Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari ; translation and foreword by Brian Massumi. Continuum. Definition from Oxford Reference: https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110919111808348

Sappho's Friend

she has referenced a "deleuzian rhizome, a non-arborescent multiplicity with as many sinuous interconnections as the truffles on the pizza itself" in a joke included in her video on capitalism. Part 2 i think it was. So the answer is yes

Matoya's Hat

I don't have anything constructive to add, but I watched this video while lying on the couch, zooted out of my mind from post-migraine derealisation and associated brain fuckery. Which I think really added to the experience. Probably a lot less fun than actually taking drugs, but you take what you can get.

Anonymous

this was beautiful miss natalie. <3

Tree

I dont think Ive ever heard a more relatable look into psychedelics. Workers of the world...

Mk

Had a tab of what I was told was 500 mus, everything you’re saying is making so much sense

Andrew May

On dualistic monism: that’s a feature at the heart of Rudolf Steiner’s epistemology (which he called “anthroposophy” or spiritual science—a superfuckingcoconuts worldview but a fun thinking-playground).

abi

I don't think the video is working anymore :(

Anni Tendo

I paid for the membership to watch this video and it isn’t playing 😞

Luz

Omg why do all her notes make sense?? Like I can’t explain it, but I felt an intense feeling of “same, girl, same” to how I’ve experienced psychedelics. Also, most of my psychedelic experiences wrapped themselves around philosophy and religion until last year I finally watched One Piece and now there is a lot of One Piece motifs in my trips and they have taken on an overall more positive and hopeful tone than before. I think that’s interesting bc it’s not like I haven’t gotten hyperfixated on other shows and media before, but for some reason this one decided to show up in my psychedelic trips. Anyway, THE ONE PIECE IS REAL!!!

deebs

I wish I could watch this tangent - is it still working for anyone or is it broken?

Norika Dolmy

You have to sign in to YouTube to watch it since it's age restricted

deebs

I am signed in to YouTube

Elliot Lewis

Did you click on the link she posted underneath?

yorrith de bakker

@contrapoints Have you tried to read some Carlos Castaneda? This dude started out as an anthropologist studying the Yaqui way of using medicinal plants. And ended up in this controversial story about exploitation and weird cult like behavior. But his first fieldwork, the teachings of Don join. Are a great insight in these different stages of seeing, that he received from this sjamaan called Don Juan . The white light at the end of the tunnel they aptly named; THE MOLD OF MEN. and it is the actual shape your soul is pushed trough, to mold your consciousness to look like the astral body of a human. If that’s not spiritual patriarchy in a nutshell. There are some interesting concepts that could deepen your research and broaden your cultural diversity in understanding altered states and its common archetypes in seeing the beyond. 😘

abi

oh my god how did I not see the link... you are my hero mr. commenter! ty!

Fifi Dosch

FUN FACT: Terence McKenna once verbatim said in a lecture, "I'm actually a lesbian trapped in a man's body, but I've made the peace I can with that."

Lucien Danel

The video isn’t working for me, am I alone?

Anna

Natalie your look in this is so beautiful

CassieWasRight

Wait the "Take it easy dude, but take it!" guy is a famous spokesperson for psychedelic drug use? That's simultaneously shocking and completely unsurprising

Maddy Shows

some thots, because your notes DO make sense to me: just wanna say first off that psychedelic experiences both are and are not “insightful” in the sense that i believe you can, based on your intent and personal history, come away from a trip with worsened paranoia or truly useless information, or you can gain access to what feels (to me) (TO ME) like a little glimpse into universal truth - true in the way that math is conceptually perfect and accessible to anyone who can think about it, tripping is like learning that 2+2=4 in an emotional, symbolic, metaphysical sense. i think you gained access to that kind of symbolic, emotional universal math, similar to the collective unconscious. you could explain this in a materialistic way, but due to my own beliefs i think it goes beyond that. the preoccupation with metaphysics is just a natural effect of this kind of mental state. tripping also heightens the kind of pattern recognition software we have in our brains, so we become extremely aware not just of physical patterns (like the expressions of fractals in nature, the heightened textures on surfaces) but deeper macro-patterns within our psychological landscape. it’s embarrassing to talk about with other people, and really, nothing you say can capture your experience as you experienced it, which is the most important part! psychedelics, at their best, provide a greater intimacy with subjective experience.

Francisco Rosso

DOes someone has a list of each book she mentions in each video in Patreon? I am looking for a book that she mentions but I dont remember the name. I think it was mentioned in Psychedelic Experiences, she was explaining that is common to have trips relatable with your cosmogony, your metaphisical explanation of reality. thats explains the capacity that a someone who believes in devil could really see him.

Elliot Theodor

LOVE THE VIDEO. BTW, israelí, native Hebrew speaker ober here: a little question about how the word for old testament god's name is pronounced. We pronounce it "ye-ho-va", not "ya-wei". Is the ya-wei pronunciation kind of a joke or an intent to respect the religious rule that pronouncing God's name is forbidden?

Murguly Mátyás

Well, your rumblings kinda makes sense actually. I meditate since well, a young age and I had similar experiences. The point why it does not makes sense because of the missing culural framework around these experiences.

Faith Thompson

I suspect that the pronunciation is neither a joke nor an attempt to respect the religious rule about God's name. I can't speak for Natalie, but as someone else raised in the US, and in my case in Protestant circles, I have always been taught that "yah-weh" is the correct way to pronounce that word. I'm not saying it's actually correct, but that's how I was told to pronounce it. Probably Natalie is just pronouncing it the way that most people do over here without any particular statement intended.

Paul Chattaway

Just found this entry, and the bit about needing cannabis roughly half-way through the experience... heh, yeah, that seems to be nearly universal. It just soothes so much, softens the rough edges. However... it's not strictly necessary, one of the many symptoms of long-COVID for me (I caught COVID for the first time October 5th, 2024) is my nervous system seems to have become extremely sensitive to certain things, alcohol is one of them (I can't even have a single drink now without it triggering a days-long nasty headache), and THC unfortunately is another one of them, started to feel like I was being sliced up with cold steel whenever I had some. I say unfortunately because I was essentially married to the stuff for the past 25 years. Quitting it on February 1st of 2025 was... a challenge... hypothalamic dysregulation for like 3-4 weeks, the first two weeks were utter hell, the worst withdrawal I've ever experienced and I have more experience here than a person should (this apparently is a risk for 1 in 7 regular users of cannabis I have since found out). Anyway, I found out I can still use psychedelics, in fact they seem to reduce the symptoms of long-COVID for some days afterward. But yeah, that craving for THC after acid was a hard thing to deal with the first few times, although I've mostly gotten over it now, like 4 trips later. I have discovered that going through the entire acid experience and aftermath without cannabis can actually be a valuable experience, more "work" seems to get done on one's self this way, and recovery / reintegration is a lot faster (like I previously used to need at least a week off from regular life to recover, now it's like 2 days). But yeah, it's rougher, with more sharp edges.

Paul Chattaway

I was raised Mennonite (one of the early Anabaptist breakaways from the Catholic church), and the North American version of it anyway usually pronounced it Jehovah but Yahweh was not unheard of. The explanation I was told in Sunday School was that because originally only the consonants were written down, and saying it out loud was forbidden, the vowel sounds were lost and different sects wound up putting in different vowels. Not sure how historically accurate this is.

Elliot Theodor

Oh wow haha! Thanks for the clarification! Never would have guessed it

Armany Habed

I know the words alone from your trip seem unhinged on their own, but like any passage from a book, the words only make sense when reintroduced to their context. I think they'll make more sense in time

Griffin Deubler

Is this one not working for anyone else??

aR0

You need to watch on YouTube signed in as it's age restricted

M

For some reason this particular video is not working

Black_Moon

I'm doing shrooms for the first time now (a sort of microdose, really, because I prefer to go into it gradually) and girl, your voice is so soothing. I was watching the incense burning while the sunlight in from the garden was bathing me and I was listening to this tangent. I think I'm gonna rewatch other tangents because I love your voice so much ❤️

XYA|6782

It's been age restricted so if you click on the link below, (in the description) it will redirect you to YouTube. Just sign into your YouTube account if you haven't you'll be able to view the video.

Shaiyanne Mall

I’d love to make some friends via this community. Let me know if you’re interested.

Noémi

amazing thought on my lsd trip to share: as i am putting a picknick blanket back in my backpack, the dead bugs on the blanket are made out of billions of atoms of carbon, as is my backpack, in conclusion: who gives a shit, so i continue to shove it in there