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The book stands as an adventure. In particular, it copiously details various compounds consumed by this US-born professor of history and philosophy of science has ingested. These encompass psilocybin, LSD, weed; quetiapine and Xanax for anxiety; mood stabilizers, fluoxetine, escitalopram and tricyclics; stimulants (“I've consumed espresso every single day since the early 90s”); and, at least for him, the consistently lackluster booze.

The Deeply Reality-Shifting Aspect

The truly astonishing aspect, nevertheless, is less about Justin Smith-Ruiu’s accounts of his substance journeys, instead that they come from a rigorous analytic philosopher, who knows AJ Ayer’s Foundations of Empirical Knowledge alongside mystical psychedelic-fueled consciousness studies. Moreover, he delivers them intending to dissolving the egos of his academic colleagues and general readers arguing that psychedelics dissolve the ego and make us part of universal awareness, which leads to us free in the manner the 17th-century thinker the ethicist defined it (expressed by the author with “an agreeable acquiescence in the way the self functions in the necessary cosmic structure”).

Dissolving the Cartesian Tradition

The melting metaphor fits well, because the primal scene of Enlightenment-era rationalist tradition came when the French philosopher French thinker René Descartes transformed a solid lump. The lump might transform its properties, odor, dimensions, width, but still, he claimed, we still claim with certainty that it is the very entity. The thinking mind might misperceive concerning each experiences related to the wax but not, Descartes argued, that they are thinking: this is the basis of his famous “I think therefore I am” – through which the rationalist made us reason-driven, science-respecting beings we have been to this day.

The philosopher, astonishingly, flips the script regarding the mental exploration: what if, rather than melting the wax, the philosopher had “expanded his consciousness” via psychedelics, or one of those hallucinogens newly introduced across the continent from the Americas alongside new crops and tobacco, including sacred cactus or DMT brews? Suppose that he had not prioritized reason but rather celebrated the visionary capacities that the author proposes, are released through substances? European thought could have become seeing the world in a wholly new way, and people as “boundless sources of illumination and understanding”.

Beyond Traditional Thought

There’s more in Smith-Ruiu’s consciousness expansion, one might say, than is dreamt of in conventional colleagues’ philosophies. His thinking appears related to these voguish, reality-altering intellectual trends as the new realism of perspectives, and the holistic views of implosive holism and non-human-centric views. Kant argued the noumenal was by definition inaccessible, deducible maybe yet never experienced. It was impossible in this world, perceive the divine. In this work, consciousness-expanders can potentially pierce that illusion. Due to this proposition alone I’m amazed – and inspired – that he got tenure.

Clarity Insights

Important to note here that the book is far from like those gonzo books composed while the author is under the influence. Smith-Ruiu differs from the gonzo journalist. Named Regarding Substances but it was not created under influence (except, likely, from the drugs he mentions earlier and regular caffeine jolt). “I am as I write, lucid, focused, and completely dedicated to the work.”

A Surprising Plot Twist

The book ends with a remarkable plot twist (warning: insight ahead). Not long ago, Smith-Ruiu attended religious ceremony after decades in 40 years at the church near his home. His claim at this point proposes that the psychedelic experience resembles the experience of spiritual practices: everyday perception is regarded as a distortion, and during mass one might perceive, similar to his on mushrooms, something like the infinite. An additional connection concerns how one submits personal agency in church as on a consciousness-expanding journey. Smith-Ruiu expresses: “Substances, akin to spirituality, like poetry constitute an abandonment of ego to go it alone.” The philosopher shows awareness enough to note how absurd this may seem: that entheogens have become his entrance to religious experience.

Accessible Consciousness Expansion

It isn’t necessary to take magic mushrooms from any source in Amsterdam (like the author) to melt your mind. The author references the beginning of Proust’s novel by Marcel Proust, when little Marcel dreamily imagines identifying as {some of the things