Ian Dunt

You go to IKEA, the ideological IKEA, and you bring in new sofas, but the house stands.

The other way is you smash the house down.

And that's you get rid of the sense of certainty and the emotional need for certainty.

You embrace doubt, the capacity for doubt, the importance of doubt in human affairs and in the advancement of human civilization and in our capacity to think about things and to relate to one another.

And that involves real proper demolition work.

And it's a much scarier prospect when you're a dogmatist than the alternative.

But it gives you the potential to be a real, free, alive human being.

So how were you drawn out of that?

So, I mean, there were a lot of things.

Two of the most important.

One of them was drugs.

It was actually psychedelic drugs.

I took a drug called 5-MeO-Demethyltryptamine, which is an extremely powerful psychedelic.

It's a very short-acting drug.

It just sort of lasts for 15 minutes.

But really, within 30 seconds of taking it, you just thought, well, time has no meaning at all, so the fact that this is 15 minutes won't save me.

You know, I'm in real trouble here.

I'd lost all sense of time and space or identity or self.

Everything was lost.

And I had this profound sense of just how absurd it was to be this kind of like former bipedal ape at the bottom of a gravity well, thinking, oh, you figured out everything there is to know about the universe and how everything works.