It's my view that it's this psychological transformation that is the end goal of many spiritual traditions; Jung's "process of individuation," various notions of "enlightenment," the alchemical "Great Work," the Greek notion of "anagoge," "union with the Higher Self/Genius/Logos," the Thelemic notion of "Knowledge & Conversation..."<p>Unfortunately such flowery and offputtingly religious sounding language sounds quaint to our postmodern, secular ears. I think psychedelic, cogsci, and psychological research as explored in this paper offers fruitful avenues for recasting such religious or spiritual language in the vocabulary of science and empiricism.
This in part explains PTG (Post Traumatic Growth) after PTSD.
As I started recovering I had a large ability to learn, I got 3 qualifications within a month, and won 2 workplace awards for innovation within ~6 months. I also excelled in the workplace in terms of workload and quality of work that it was noticed (and believe me sometimes you don't want that attention, it irritates the competitive types).
Around 2 years later this level of attainment dropped, but it was great while it lasted.
Cautionary note:<p>The same department recently completed a good-quality RCT comparing psilocybin and escitalopram (plausibly the most effective SSRI antidepressant) for the treatment of Major Depressive Disorder. While psilocybin was shown to be marginally more effective than escitalopram, the difference was not statistically significant. A subsequent Bayesian reanalysis did show a statistically significant advantage to psilocybin, but this difference was not clinically significant. Other RCTs investigating classical psychedelics have shown similar results.<p>There's a lot of excitement about psychedelics, a lot of hype, a lot of people who dearly <i>want</i> them to be a breakthrough (and god knows, we need a breakthrough), but the data we have just doesn't justify that excitement. This article presents a compelling narrative explaining why classical psychedelics might be a radically effective psychiatric treatment, but that amounts to nothing if psychedelics are not in fact radically effective; although it is still far too early to make any firm conclusions, the evidence we do have suggests that psychedelics are, at best, only a modest improvement over the current state-of-the-art.<p>This does not preclude the possibility that psychedelics could be the best available treatment for a subset of patients, nor does it invalidate the personal experiences of people who believe that they have experienced dramatic benefits from psychedelic therapy, but it is grounds for considerable caution. Pepole enduring the misery of mental illness deserve better than <i>yet another</i> cycle of hype and disappointment.<p><a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33852780/" rel="nofollow">https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33852780/</a>
<a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37337526/" rel="nofollow">https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37337526/</a>
<a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36322843/" rel="nofollow">https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36322843/</a>
>Psychological transformation (defined here as rapid, marked and enduring psychological change, where ‘psychological’ refers to perception, cognition and action or behaviour) has been the focus of previous psychological and philosophical texts (Miller and C’de Baca, 2001; Paul, 2014) as well as influential therapeutic programmes (Wilson and Cohen, 2015), but it has received surprisingly little formal scientific investigation and past definitions have been vague.<p>I'd argue this is one of the very few fields where religion, specifically Buddhism, is more advanced than modern science. I'm not joking either, Buddhists have been concerned with this exact thing for over 2,000 years.<p>When studied, I think scientists will find that certain mystical practices induce these pivotal mental states, at least in a percentage of the population.