Sam Harris on MDMA

Sam Harris started his long history of thinking about religion, philosophy, psychology and neuroscience after taking MDMA in 1987. Here are some of his thoughts on it:

"It was an incredibly simple experience in the context in which I took it, it was just feeling so much neurosis drop away in a way that you never thought was possible. It was a sense of being much more nakedly aware of your experience than you have ever been; many of the things you have always been trying to get rid of without knowing you want to get rid of them, like anxiety and fear and judgement and apprehension about the future, all of that was just dropped away. It suggested that there really was a path whether it's pharmacological, or attentional, or through happenstance, or whether you just happen to have good genes. Whatever it is there is a difference between how I was tending to feel and how it was possible to feel."