"...I am dubious about the actual epistemic value of the psychedelic experience; my interest, like William James, is in what I can learn from the experience abo

"...I am dubious about the actual epistemic value of the psychedelic experience; my interest, like William James, is in what I can learn from the experience about myself and religion." If the mystical trip is what one is shooting for 10ug doses from blotter paper purchased from silk road in one's living room is just going to give you indigestion at best. If the author is serious about exploring this experience, I recommend to the author to step outside of his comfort zone and read as much as he can about what the psycohnauts (e.g. shulgin, mckenna, RAW, leary, watts, huxley, lilly) say (w.r.t. dosages, set, setting, _tools not toys!!!_, etc.) and then experiment with larger doses. Your life probably will change profoundly, for better or worse, but there is no going back. This discussion gives a glimpse into the material: < http://deoxy.org/t_weeke1.htm http://deoxy.org/t_weeke1.htm >. "And this brings us to one of the issues around psychedelics. There are a lot of wannabe experts running around who didn't take enough, because you have to take a lot -- not a LOT -- but you have to take a frightening amount to get into what it's really about. People who have taken, you know, 50 gamma of LSD or 100 gamma of LSD or two grams of mushrooms or something like that, they are not qualified to hold forth on the nature of the psychedelic experience, because those doses don't deliver it to you. What they deliver is the periphery of the psychedelic experience: accelerated thought processes, a kind of depth and richness to cognition that is unfamiliar, an ability to analyze situations from unusual perspectives, or to reach unexpected conclusions." If you don't want to go the drug route, I've had profound mystical experiences sober with flotation tanks and kundalini yoga. EDIT: I should also mention that I've had out of body experiences with light and sound machines (i.e. < http://www.toolsforwellness.com/light-sound-machines.html http://www.toolsforwellness.com/light-sound-machines.html >), but I'm hesitant to recommend these as they're newer and I suspect less researched (more fringe). Alternatively, ecstatic dance is a fun sober way to reach states of ecstasy, and there's lots of it in Silicon Valley!