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This volume proves to be a mind-bending experience. In particular, it copiously details various compounds consumed by this American-born scholar in scientific thought has taken. They include psychedelic fungi, LSD, cannabis; prescription drugs to manage stress; mood stabilizers, fluoxetine, modern medications and tricyclics; stimulants (“I've ingested caffeine daily since September 13, 1990”); and, personally speaking, the perpetually underwhelming spirits.

The Deeply Mind-Bending Aspect

The truly astonishing aspect, however, is less about the philosopher’s narratives of his drug experiences, rather that they’re written by a tough-minded logical thinker, who knows empirical Foundations of Empirical Knowledge alongside Aldous Huxley’s expansive The Doors of Perception. Additionally, they are offered with the aim of eroding the egos of his academic colleagues and the rest of us by suggesting that hallucinogens break down the ego connecting us to universal awareness, thus making liberation in the manner Baruch Spinoza’s theorist the ethicist defined it (summarized by Smith-Ruiu through “a pleasant surrender to the manner one’s own body is moving amid the fixed cosmic structure”).

Transforming the Philosophical Paradigm

The transforming metaphor is apt, since the primal scene of Enlightenment-era western philosophy was exemplified when the French philosopher French thinker Descartes transformed a wax sample. The lump may change its shape, smell, size, extent, and yet, Descartes supposed, we assert with certainty that it remains the same piece. The observer might misperceive about all experiences related to the wax yet not, Descartes argued, the fact that cognition exists: this is the foundation of his well-known “I think, I exist” – by means of which Descartes made us reason-driven, science‑venerating individuals we have been to this day.

The author, astonishingly, reverses the narrative on Descartes’ philosophical exercise: what if, in place of melting the wax, Descartes had “expanded his consciousness” via psychedelics, or through psychedelics starting to arrive to the West from overseas together with new crops and tobacco, like peyote or DMT brews? Suppose that he had not emphasized reason but rather extolled the creative powers which Smith-Ruiu suggests, are activated via entheogens? European thought could have become understanding existence through a transformed lens, and individuals not as rational agents but as “infinite reservoirs of light and understanding”.

Challenging Mainstream Epistemology

There’s more within the author’s psychedelic experience, it could be argued, than considered in rigid academics’ philosophies. His perspective seems kin to these contemporary, mind-blowing intellectual trends like the new realism of perspectives, and Timothy Morton’s philosophies and ecological thought. The German philosopher argued the divine is inherently unknowable, deducible maybe but not directly perceived. We could never through sensory experience, experience transcendence. In this work, psychedelics might help pierce that illusion. Because of this idea alone it is astonishing – and inspired – that he got tenure.

Clarity Insights

Important to note now that this is not one of those wild narratives written while the author is out of their gourd. Smith-Ruiu is not the chaotic writer. Named Regarding Substances but it was not composed while high (apart, probably, including the medications he describes above and the odd espresso hit). “During composition, lucid, focused, and fully focused on the project.”

A Remarkable Plot Twist

This work finishes with a remarkable plot twist (philosophical spoiler alert!). In 2023, Smith-Ruiu attended Catholic mass after many years since early adulthood at the church next door to his Paris apartment. His argument in this section is that substance-induced states parallels the experience of ritual worship: everyday perception is regarded as a distortion, and in worship one might perceive, similar to his on mushrooms, a glimpse of the infinite. Another parallel lies in how a person relinquishes one’s will in church as on a consciousness-expanding journey. Smith-Ruiu expresses: “Psychedelics, like religion, as with art are among other things a letting go of the will to remain separate.” He is self-aware to acknowledge how ironic this sounds: that entheogens have become his entrance to religious experience.

Everyday Consciousness Expansion

It isn’t necessary to use magic mushrooms from some geezer in a shop (as described) to expand consciousness. He points to the beginning of In Search of Lost Time the classic text, as the young character vividly envisions that he transforms into {some of the things