First, when you comment on someone’s article that it “wreaks of privilege,” well, isn’t that an ad hominem? Doesn’t matter that much to me, but wanted to be clear that was the first instance of why I responded that I saw judgment in your response.

I tend to forgive a person when they make one comment that sort of rubs me the wrong way, but it was the way you ended your comment that brought out the fire from me and started with three “judgments.”

I mean, telling someone you’ve never met they “need to take a good hard look at themselves” — wow. Really? Are you that confident in yourself that you can say that to someone you’ve never met?

The thing is, your comment shows you’ve absolutely no experience with how hard doing serious work with psychedelics can be and how it is precisely about taking a good hard look at oneself. It’s not at all about partying. When you do a psychedelic with the intent of doing inner work and you really focus on that, it gets very, very challenging. It’s not for the faint of heart.

I researched psychedelics for several years before I tried them and I am glad I did. It gave me the context that I needed to be able to learn from them. That said, it was still often very difficult as they really do bring up many things from one’s unconscious and, well, you can’t really be totally prepared for those things.

If you want to look into the answer to this, there are all sorts of resources but I’ll just recommend a long-running podcast that covers psychedelics and that is the Psychedelic Salon.

Now, can a person spiritually bypass with psychedelics? Of course. Just as one can spiritually bypass without them, or with meditation or with marathon running. It’s something one always has to be aware of, staying humble is one of the big challenges of being human and it’s definitely a challenge of taking a spiritual path.

As for the final comment I made, in reflection, perhaps it was an overstatement on my part (I really was fired up by your attack on this writer, who I thought wrote an excellent piece on taking a deeper perspective on this wild situation WE are in). I think I was hinting at how sometimes a person with a Postmodern perspective will use a defense of the very real suffering people in the world as a way to attack others they don’t understand.

So in this case, because the author writes a rather long Medium piece but doesn’t address another very big aspect of this topic, how COVID-19 and the reaction to it will hurt the disenfranchised disproportionately, somehow that means everything she has said should be discounted because she didn’t go into that aspect of this HUGE story.

If that’s how we write critique, I wonder: If I find an article focused on the disenfranchised, would it be fair for me to criticize the writer for not focusing on how COVID-19 has slowed down our world, allowing people some time off to take stock of their lives? Or how this slow down has had some positive environmental impacts, such as cleaning some of the air pollution our civilization creates?

Anyway, stay well during all this. No matter my disagreements with anyone, I tend to not use the Internet to get into debates, I’d rather work to find solutions. That said, sometimes to find solutions you gotta hash out the disagreements. I hope my answer helped clear up where I was coming from.