Ian Dunt

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.

You don't have the apparatus in your mind to have understood how everything works, even if you had the data with which to try and comprehend it.

I was humbled in the face of that drug.

Like, it really smacked me around.

And that humility helped get me out of that sort of sense of crunching, smacking, bullying dogma that I'd had for the years leading up to it.

The second thing that happened was that by incredible stroke of luck, I stumbled on a TV series called The Ascent of Man by the physicist Jacob Bronowski.

I remember that.

I'm very in my dim, dark childhood.

1970s, that went away?

That's exactly right, yeah.

And there's an episode, it's episode 13, I think, which is called Knowledge and Certainty or Knowledge or Certainty.

You can find the full thing on YouTube.

And I really hope that people do because it's a truly profound and beautiful thing.

And it's about the importance of doubt in human affairs.

It's about the scientific method and why that makes it preferable to dogma, to the assertion of certainty.

He's Jewish.