Ben Sessa
speaker
244 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2018
last heard Jul 2019
Ben Sessa’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
These drugs, more so than many other drugs, are very dependent upon the set, which is the mindset at which you go into the experience, and the setting, which is the kind of environment and the conditions.
And when you pay attention to these things, then the risks are reduced to an absolute minimum.
The opportunity to explore different mental states and different states of consciousness is very valuable, and it's actually a very fundamental part of human existence.
It's only relatively recently, in the last hundred years or so, that we've found something dirty or forbidden about altered states.
Altered states are a very important part of humanity's development, and you see this in non-Western cultures today.
They are at the birth of all religions.
So these experiences can be wholly positive for personal growth and development.
and for community cohesion and bringing people together.
But there's an immense amount of fear around this.
I have no doubt that the listeners, even hearing me say these things, would be shocked.
I ask you to reflect on that.
Why are you shocked?
It's the fear that's been induced by the drug prohibition.
And the danger is this pushes people towards a more dangerous use of the drug.
If we want to control drugs, we need to regulate their use, not attempt to mindlessly ban them and eradicate them.
Humans have been using them for tens of thousands of years.
We're not going to ban the human desire to alter consciousness, but we can get it under better control.
This means setting up a system in which people can use these drugs in safe settings for personal growth and development.
In terms of psychedelic drug use, they became banned and they became blamed, and then we then had this 30 or 40 year hiatus where these drugs were very demonized.
What's happened in the last 10 or 15 years is we've started to see an interest in them again, not just within medicine but within culture and the arts as well.
Showing 101–120 of 244 · page 6 of 13
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