Ketamine: Is it just a drug experience or does the drug provide the experience needed?

Read Sober Psychonaut disclaimer for people in sobriety exploring psychedelic medicine

I was curious about this question, posed in Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. 

When you take ketamine or psilocybin or ecstasy or LSD or whatever it is in a therapeutic setting or under clinical guidance, and then you emerge with some new form of consciousness or a message from the Universe, is it just a drug experience or does the drug provide the experience you needed to move into a new frame of mind? To alter your consciousness as it were.

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Someone on the outside looking in might well say, "Well of course that happened, you were on drugs!"

But one of the practitioners that was mentioned in the book reminded Pollan such a point is irrelevant. You're getting what the Universe is delivering no matter what and the drug is facilitating that particular possibility.

In which case, there is really no case to be made for, "Yeah, but you could get a message from the Universe without the drug."

You're getting what the Universe is delivering no matter what and the drug is facilitating that particular possibility.

Some may argue that we get messages, inclinations, intuition, judgment all the time without taking psychedelic medicine. Shouldn't that be sufficient?

I say it's sufficient if you find it so.

For me, all the dis-ease and mal-aise that guided me to this path has indicated to me there must be something more or that I must find something more. I am not an easily satisfied human being. I always seek improvement, greater clarity and  connection with self and others and beyond. When that went missing, I went looking. So I consider whatever comes up from psychedelic journeying as crucial to my all-around self-exploration and well-being.

​Have you tried psychedelic medicine?

What are your thoughts on having a "drug experience" vs. the drug facilitating an experience that allows for something else to open up?

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