On The India Philosophy Blog back on Sept. 28, Amod Lee wrote a post titled “Snakes wrongly grasped: on the psychedelic experiences of [Elon] Musk and [Charles] Manson.” Here’s a brief excerpt (I’ve changed the paragraphing slightly):
“…the transformation from self-centredness to Reality-centredness [following a transcendent experience from e.g. psychedelic drugs] is a fundamentally ethical one: to be far enough along it is to be a saint, one who has had ‘a transcendence of the ego point of view and its replacement by devotion to or centred concentration upon some manifestation of the Real, response to which produces compassion/love towards other human beings or towards all life’ (Interpretation of Religion 301). But I think we need to be very careful about that sort of claim. The point came up in my interview with Osheen Dayal of MAPS Canada, where I pointed to the example of tycoon Elon Musk.
“It is publicly documented that Musk has used psilocybin, LSD and more, and given his known involvement in psychedelic spaces like Burning Man, he’s probably done far more than the documents let on. He has almost certainly had multiple psychedelic experiences of self-transcendence in the face of a larger reality. And yet Musk is about as far as one could imagine from ‘compassion/love towards other human beings or towards all life.’ Rather, he is practically a caricature of a self-absorbed egoist, so confident in his own rightness that he used his brief time in government to destroy thousands of military veterans’ lifelong careers and end the lifelines of thousands of desperately poor people around the world in the name of saving a tiny fraction of money and sometimes nothing at all.
“Musk is to today’s generations what Charles Manson was to the baby boomers: a sobering reminder that psychedelic experiences can leave you a terrible person….”