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Despite what members of the older generation might have told you growing up, taking hallucinogens, otherwise known as psychedelics-like acid, magic mushrooms, and DMT-is not guaranteed to turn your brain into scrambled eggs. Neither is it guaranteed to make you dress in tie-dye.
On the contrary, many people who have tried "tripping" on psychedelics have reported better mental and brain health.
Now, psychedelics like magic mushrooms have recently become a hot commodity in Canada, according to ShroomsDeliveryCanada. And this means it's easy for people to see for themselves just what exactly tripping can be like.
Psychedelics can help you see the world anew, with fresh eyes, and the experience can linger long after the trip ends. Once people take psychedelics, in fact, they might never be the same.
Paul McCartney Hesitates
At least, that's what Paul McCartney believed, and it was one of the reasons he was unsure about trying acid when fellow Beatles band members John Lennon and George Harrison insisted that he and Ringo Starr give them a try.
Lennon and Harrison had already tried acid and it had had a profound influence on them. As a result, they felt that they could no longer relate to Starr and McCartney.
"John and I had decided that Paul and Ringo had to have acid," Harrison said, "because we couldn't relate to them anymore. Not just on the one level-we couldn't relate to them on any level, because acid had changed us so much. It was a such a mammoth experience that it was unexplainable. It was something that had to be experienced, because you could spend the rest of your life trying to explain what it made you feel and think. It was all too important to me."
Starr was down: "I'd take anything," he later said. But McCartney refused. "We'd heard that you're never the same," he said in Anthology, and he didn't like that.
"It alters your life," McCartney said, "and you never think the same again. John was rather excited by that prospect. I was rather frightened by that prospect...never get back home again. I was seen to sort of stall...because there was a lot of peer pressure."
Peer pressure is never a good reason for anyone to try a substance, so it was wise of John to not give in.
George Harrison Saw God
The first time Harrison tried acid, he told Rolling Stone in 1971, he had had a profound and life-altering experience. "I had such an overwhelming feeling of well-being, that there was a God, and I could see him in every blade of grass. It was like gaining hundreds of years of experience in 12 hours."
However, Harrison's experience wasn't exclusively so enjoyable, and neither was Lennon's. At one point, riding an elevator with their wives, who had also ingested acid, they all thought there was a fire in the lift.
McCartney Changes His Mind and Also Sees God
One year after being peer pressured by Lennon and Harrison into trying acid, McCartney decided to give it a try. With the gallery owner and art dealer Robert Fraser (a major member of the Swinging Sixties scene), McCartney took LSD and had as profound an experience as Lennon and Harrison did the first time they tried the psychedelic substance.
McCartney later said in a 1967 interview that he saw God, "this amazing towering thing, and I was humbled."
He said the drug "opened my eyes to the fact that there is a God... It is obvious that God isn't in a pill, but it explained the mystery of life. It was truly a religious experience."
He also said, about his band, that LSD "started to find its way into everything we did, really. It coloured our perceptions. I think we started to realize there wasn't as many frontiers as we'd thought there were. And we realized we could break barriers."
The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead
Around that time McCartney was in some ways the most intellectual and lettered member of The Beatles and would recommend books he liked to his friends and bandmates. He took Lennon to India where Lennon came across a book at a bookstore called The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead and got so engrossed he read the entire thing in the store.
The book was authored by Ralph Metzner, Richard Alpert, and Timothy Leary. All three were psychologists at Harvard University who explored how psychotropic substances like LSD affected the mind. They were highly contentious figures, especially Leary, who caused quite a stir, to say the least, not only among academic communities but also across the country.
The Psychedelic Experience was both an argument in favour of psychedelics and a manual on how to take them. It was based, as the title indicates, on the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
"Do not cling in fondness and weakness to your older self," wrote Metzner, Alpert, and Leary in the book. "Even though you cling to your old mind, you have lost the power to keep it...Trust your divinity, trust your brain, and trust your companions. Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream."
In another memorable passage, the three authors wrote, "The fact of the matter is that all apparent forms of matter and body are momentary clusters of energy. We are little more than flickers on a multidimensional television screen. This realization directly experienced can be delightful. You suddenly wake up from the delusion of separate form and hook up to the cosmic dance. Consciousness slides along the wave matrices, silently at the speed of light."
Harrison and Lennon were Bonded by LSD
Harrison and Lennon-Lennon took the most LSD of all the Beatles-would remain bonded by LSD for the remainder of their lives.
"After taking acid together, John and I had a very interesting relationship," Harrison later said. "John and I spent a lot of time together from then on and I felt closer to him than all the others, right through until his death. As Yoko came into the picture, I lost a lot of personal contact with John; but on the odd occasion I did see him, just by the look in his eyes, I felt we were connected."
