Sarah Haider
speaker
106 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Sarah Haider’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I went into hell, I think. I don't know how else to describe it. It's hard to talk about this without sounding silly. You know, even to myself, I sound silly. It's like describing a dream. How do you do that without losing a little bit of your dignity?
Have you seen the show Stranger Things?
You know, the upside down?
So it was like our world, but it wasn't our world. It was our world, but had just a very nefarious smell about it. The hallucinogen was so powerful. I saw a lot when I closed my eyes, but I saw quite a bit when I opened my eyes as well. I had difficulty seeing faces. I couldn't see anybody's face, actually. When I started, if I would look at your face, I wouldn't be able to see it.
I would see like two dark spots where your eyes are and everything else would be just wiped clean.
A part of me was always lucid, was lucid throughout the whole thing. A part of me always knew that I had taken something. When I say lucid, though, lucid in the way that you're lucid in a lucid dream, which is not with your full capacities, but aware that something's happening. Aware that, yes, I've taken this. I've taken this drug, so what I'm seeing is probably a part of that drug.
So at no point did I feel as if this was real. I always thought I was having a hallucination.
It was very scary. It was very scary. And I was there for hours. And I remember looking around the room and being horrified by what I was seeing. The people in the room, the ones who gave me a bad vibe when I was sober, were monstrous on ayahuasca. There's something about people's, they give you a certain kind of feeling. It's not a big deal when you're sober.
When you're on psychedelics, vibes are important. And on ayahuasca, some people were monsters. It was as if they were monsters. And I didn't want to be anywhere near them or around them. And I would have to like turn away from them. At the time, in the deepest part of the trip, I remember thinking, I'm losing my mind and I'm incurring brain damage, like what must be brain damage.
and asking myself, why did I do this? Like, why did I do something that could really transform my mind, which is a good mind. It's served me well up until this point, so why would I play with such an important tool in my toolbox?
You know, it's hard to describe. I don't think it was awful. It was terrifying, but then when I was done, I felt very good. Immediately after, like as the hallucinogen was wearing off, as it was coming off of the high, I had this moment where I felt that my brain was finally on again. But it was on in a different way. It was creative in a way that it never is.
I mean, it is, but not in a way I had ever experienced before. I was able to make all these rapid-fire connections that I had never seen. I think that's why people are referring to when they say that ayahuasca is like 10 years of therapy in a day. I think what it literally is doing to your brain is creating an environment for new pathways to form neurologically. And
For some people, that can feel like therapy because your ego is decreased, if not eliminated. And so you can come to conclusions that otherwise you might be too afraid to reach. You can see things that would scare you and make you feel bad about yourself. And you can see them more clearly and come to terms with them under the influence of the drug.
I think that's why people feel so connected to it or people feel so driven to seek it despite the fact that it can be horrible. Because of this afterglow aspect of it, even when it is a bad trip, it can be useful.
No, no, no. Not at all. I wasn't thinking about work at all. I think it was just that I felt trapped in a lot of ways. I felt trapped intellectually. I felt nihilistic about the world around me. And the podcast had something to do with that. Not fully, but it played a part in that day after day, we would be staring into the abyss. We would be
reading these articles that were designed to make you a little mad because, of course, they want to provoke conversation. They want people to be a little bit riled up. And in paying attention to these things...
as part of what we were doing, as part of our quote-unquote job, I was forced to stare at that abyss day after day and contemplate it deeply all the time, but not deep enough that I could do something about it, not deep enough that I could find a solution, just deep enough that it would unsettle me in some way.
significant way, and then we'd have to move on to the next topic, the next unsettling culture war discussion. So something about doing that, I think, over and over again, it was not a healthy practice, but it also led me to have a definitely not a very positive view on human nature, on our... culture as a whole, on our society.
And I didn't want to think like that because it's a really terrible way to think, not just because it feels bad while you're feeling all these negative feelings, but also because it takes away your drive to be that positive force in the world.
I think the ayahuasca didn't really change the way that I felt about that. I think it made it impossible for me to pursue. You know, it almost said as if it took the option away from me.
Showing 61–80 of 106 · page 4 of 6
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