“All that glitters is not gold. Such a maxim might well serve any psychic voyager on a journey into the weirder realms that psychedelics can serve up. After all, out here on the edges there is seldom firm evidence that the beatific or hellish visions beheld whilst chemically neurohacking your wetware have any basis in consensus reality. Indeed these visions are often so extravagantly strange and terrifyingly ineffable that reminding yourself they are not real can serve to keep your sanity on a short leash when madness looms. Nevertheless, as John Lilly put it, how does one recognize one’s insanity from one’s out-sanity? And in any case, how would one even begin to try and prove the ontological credibility of the psychedelic experience of visiting some other world or meet-ing some alien entity?”
