You'll learn more about sober, typical perception through these than you will on drugs, the carpet bombing approach to psychedelia. And it's that exploration that's most interesting for me.
I don't disagree with you, but "carpet bombing" is going a little far. I don't think psychedelic drugs are the best way to explore one's mind for most people, but they are interesting and can be valuable in some circumstances. Unfortunately, we as a collective know very little about how to use them, and individuals generally know less.
This is the big lie of psychs, that they allow you to "explore your mind" as if somehow you're not fully understanding it while sober (and through meditation).
Psychs rewire how the brain handles and deals with sensory input, so that when you do them you're not exploring the mind you have while sober, but entering into a completely different "mind" based on distorted perception.
It's like thinking you're exploring new rooms in your own home when in fact you're 9 blocks away checking out a house that's entirely different in structure and form. Of course that adventure will bring in fresh new perspectives, but in no way does that help you discover more about your own home.
I don't think that's correct: one can still be mostly lucid while having the drug affect some part of their mind. You can sometimes bring things back.*
Often it's not really sensory at all; it seems to work at a higher, conceptual level. For example, I once looked in a mirror and saw myself, but recognized different people, with different personalities, my mother, my siblings, my different personalities.
I looked out into a room, and I saw all the elements, but my experience of it was flat, as if someone took a picture and laid it out on paper. Then the shading in the picture implied lighting, which quickly implied depth. Objects rotated into consciousness. I saw a tree, and then suddenly the existence of leaves and branches screamed out to me, as if to say "we are entities too! we are not simply parts of the tree! we are objects of our own." A friend of mine was standing near, but still. At a conceptual level, my perceptual experience of her was of an extremely accurate statue of her. As in "my, what a life-like Sarah." And then she moved, and she was animate again, a real person.
A friend of mine studies perception. He tells me there's a lot of evidence for these kinds of 'perceptual layers,' and that a lot of the subconscious visual classifications that I was experiencing. Self, not self. Person, not person. Animate, not animate. Object, not object. Flat, not flat. One expects it's the sort of thing that we do naturally, for many other sorts of things. Male, female, old, young, intelligent, dim, aware, tired, happy, sad, etc. And it's the sort of thing that neural networks can do, too.
So I definitely think that there are things that you can bring back. I think if you try hard, you can hold on to the experience, and see how much of it makes sense in the real world. But I'm not sure this is the experience of most people. I hear lots about people seeing pretty colors.
* Note, all this happened on half a hash brownie, alone. This experience suggest that I stay away from anything harder.
For some people, it's a harmless way to alter perception and consciousness. For some, they never come back. Dropping LSD, in particular, can be, to some minds, catastrophic. Someone close to our family now claims, among other things, to have been approached by the reptilian leader Pindar, disguised as Prince Charles, to be his understudy.
My understanding is that it's pretty rare for someone to develop those sorts of mental issues from psychedelic drug use alone, though these drugs can provoke an episode. (There's a neverending debate over whether those events "would have happened anyway".) Frequent use of psychedelics, however, can be really dangerous. Acidheads aren't profound, shamanic people; they're often really boring and screwed up.
Drugs have an utterly opposite marginal utility behavior to that of meditation. Drugs take off rapidly (too rapidly for some people) but the marginal utility drops off (and becomes negative) very quickly. Meditation starts more slowly, but the marginal utility increases as one progresses.
The problem with stories like this is that they never compare the rate of psychological distress amongst users of hallucinogens versus the general population.
It's easy to point the finger and say it's the acid's fault, but what about all the schizophrenics who never took a drug in their life?
Of course, there are people who also think that people who have a predilection to psychosis are also more likely to try drugs as a form of self-medication.
I'm not pro or con drugs in general, with the exception of thinking that marijuana laws are somewhat baffling; but this seems like one of those cases where otherwise highly logical people get sucked in by convenient explanations, regardless of their basis (or lack thereof) in fact.
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Editing to provide my own counterpoint: Since I honestly don't have any kind of deep knowledge on the matter, I spent some time with Google and found this:
There are indigenous tribes who use peyote in religious rituals, and users have no higher rate of mental illness than nonusers.
However, drug use in our society doesn't occur under such safe circumstances, and I know people who have been burned by drug use. One is a schizophrenic who used obscene amounts of ecstasy, shrooms, salvia and DMT throughout his 20s and early 30s. When he was 24, he was popular, a great basketball player, and able to interact normally with other people. At 35, he's incapable of holding a job and has been in trouble with the law countless times. His psychological collapse might have happened anyway had he not been using psychedelic drugs, but I suspect it wouldn't have happened in the same way, and it might have been more manageable.
I don't know anyone, though, who has burned out on a small amount of psychedelic drug use. I believe it can probably happen, but I've never seen it. Also, there are a lot of people out there who've used these drugs and had few or no ill effects, and their cases simply aren't reported.
