Can DMT Cause Tinnitus?

On the subreddit r/DMT, there are many posts from users who describe developing tinnitus after using DMT. This wasn’t a potential risk of DMT – or any psychedelic – I had considered before. Admittedly, the link between DMT use and tinnitus is mostly anecdotal at this point. Still, the number of DMT users reporting newly…

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Fear of the Void: Cosmic Anxiety in ‘Aniara’ (2018)

Aniara (2018) is a Swedish sci-fi film written and directed by Hugo Lilja and Pella Kågerman. It is an adaptation of the 1956 Swedish epic poem of the same name by Harry Martinson. It depicts a dystopian, distant future in which extreme climate change, war, famine, disease, social collapse, pollution, and lawlessness force humans to…

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Have You Met the DMT Jester? How Expectations Influence Entity Encounters

One of the most popular blog posts on my site is my essay on DMT jesters and tricksters (a modified version of it became one of the essays in my book, which includes a new section about my personal experiences). Several people commented on my blog post to say they have also encountered jester entities.…

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Schopenhauer’s Insight Into the Psychology of Pain

One of my favourite insights from the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer relates to the human negativity bias, that is, our tendency to focus on what bothers us. As he writes: Just as a brook forms no eddy so long as it meets with no obstructions, so human nature, as well as animal, is such that…

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On the Stigma Against Antidepressants in the Psychedelic Community

On his site Ecstatic Integration, the writer Jules Evans published a post titled ‘Are you a psychedelic cultist?’ It features a ‘Psychedelic Cultism Questionnaire’ to help readers assess how ‘culty’ they are when it comes to psychedelics. It consists of eight statements – all in the vein of a rosy, utopian, ‘no bad vibes allowed’…

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