What Brings You Meaning In Life Is Bad & You Should Feel Bad

How to break people (including yourself) out of a toxic self-identity.

“The most exquisite paradox… as soon as you give it all up, you can have it all.” — Ram Dass

It’s so simple it can appear anodyne, and yet it’s one of the hardest truths to grasp in the human experience: to advance in life, one must give up that which is holding them back. If you’re addicted to heroin, every instinct in your body will tell you to take just one more dose, again, and again, and again. But if you can do the hard thing and give it up, on the other side of addiction can be a life experience so beautiful it’s hard for an addict at their lowest to imagine.

This basic principle is obvious to most people. If you want to succeed in your career, you must stop procrastinating. If you want to be healthy, you must stop eating garbage. Etcetera. But Ram Dass meant something much deeper than that: to have it all, you must be willing to give up everything you think you know about who you are. Few are able to recognize that truth. Worse, even those who do are rarely willing to actually practice it.

Ram Dass meant what he said in a spiritual way; he was speaking of the dissolution of the ego in the search for enlightenment. But the first steps of practice don’t have to be thought of through a spiritual lens. The identities that form our most core sense of self: our ethnic group, family heritage, nationality, religious membership, political ideology, etc.—our attachment to these things and to the worldviews that we construct around them may be holding us back in ways we don’t realize. Giving up that attachment can be the path to a deeper truth.

Rarely do people enjoy being told they should abandon identities that give them a sense of meaning and purpose, but it’s often needed. Consider some clear-cut examples:

• The Racist: Gaining your sense of meaning through your skin color and your affiliation with others who share it has led to some of history’s greatest horrors. While The Racist will generally say they don’t hate other races and merely love their own, they fail to see that the love of one’s race will require seeing others as lesser. In the short-run, renouncing one’s racism can be painful; it forces The Racist to lose the quasi-spiritual feeling they gain from being a member of a group bigger than themselves. Yet in the long-run The Racist will find themself better off for renouncing it. Renouncing racism opens up The Racist’s “peoplehood” to become something better, since he can now welcome anyone into his community who improves it, regardless of superficial characteristics.

• The Princeling: It’s unreasonable to expect people not to take advantage of the conditions of their birth, but when one gains their sense of meaning from their family heritage, a normal part of the human experience becomes twisted. To gain self-esteem, The Princeling grafts their pride onto the accomplishments of their parents or grandparents, while failing to accomplish anything impressive themselves. This state is only sustainable for as long as the family supports The Princeling. Assuming the family eventually grows tired of their child’s dependence, The Princeling will be forced to sink-or-swim on their own merits. While the pain of realizing how worthless The Princeling truly is may feel severe in the short-run, in the long-run it can drive him to genuinely be great instead of merely feeling like he is.

• The Cult Member: Cults tend to prey on lonely, troubled, and purposeless individuals. By joining, The Cult Member gains a community, supposed answers to the cause of their troubles, and a spiritual mission to save the world. However, over time the cult will become more and more authoritarian, demanding that its members cut off those outside the group, accept increasingly ludicrous beliefs, or even commit crimes. Leaving the cult could mean losing one’s family and friends, and make one a target of harassment or violence. But however dire the consequences of leaving the cult are, they’re better than staying. If one fails to leave the cult, they could end up dead in Jonestown or spraying chemical weapons on civilians. The opportunity to identify and follow a better spiritual path awaits The Cult Member on the other side.

These extreme examples prove the point: humans must find meaning, but getting it from the wrong place comes at great cost. While most people won’t be flying to Jonestown anytime soon, the experience of attaching one’s self deeply to identities that give them meaning, but are not maximizing their well-being, is ubiquitous. Everyone has had a time in their lives when an event forced them to recognize that a deeply held belief or a group membership was not serving them as well as they once thought it was, and were forced to make the painful choice to go a different way. Black sheep are those of us who have come to this recognition, but rather than departing quietly we use our voice to teach the group what we’ve learned.

So what can black sheep do when they have recognized that a worldview has become toxic, but others remain drinking the Kool-Aid?  

Unfortunately, the left-wing cultural milieu dominant amongst younger generations takes the value of multiculturalism as a given, and thus treats it as taboo to criticize other people’s identities or lifestyles. Today even “tolerance” is considered a moral failing by many, who argue instead that all different ways of living should be “accepted” and “affirmed.” To challenge others' identities is referred to as “invalidation,” which by making people uncomfortable allegedly threatens their “personal sense of safety, as well as their physical safety.” This obsession with affirming identities has even infected Western Buddhist organizations—a religion directly based on the pursuit of non-identification—which have instituted race, ethnicity, class, age, gender identity, and sexual orientation-based affinity groups in the name of making those with “marginalized identities” feel safe away from the “barrage of physical and psychological attacks… in gatherings of those with dominant-culture power and privilege.”

It’s no coincidence that multiculturalism is the hegemonic worldview in the West at a time when so many terrible cultures are spreading. In a classically liberal society–which the West is supposed to be–we are required to respect everyone’s right to live in the way that they want, but many misinterpret this to mean that we must respect the way people actually live and think. It’s productive for people to drop maladaptive beliefs and values and adopt better ones. I wrote previously in The Black Sheep about the beauty of “the melting pot,” a society in which each member voluntarily participates in this process, thus integrating to create a better culture than whatever existed before. This process is impossible under multiculturalism, as groups are encouraged to maintain their distinctness.

This culture of “safetyism,” in which challenging others’ identities and beliefs is considered in the same class of harm as physical violence, may help people feel comfortable in the short-term, but it comes at the cost of self-improvement in the long-term. It’s not surprising that a culture which encourages the continuance of maladaptive outlooks would contribute to drastic decreases in mental health, as was meticulously documented by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in their bestselling book The Coddling of The American Mind (now a feature film, co-starring friend of The Black Sheep Kimi Katiti!)

The number of identities within the left-wing cultural sphere going unchallenged in the pursuit of psychological safety is enormous. Nonbinary identity is one such example, allowing people to flee from discomfort with their biological sex at the cost of risky medical procedures which have caused irreversible harm to many teens who have pursued them. Neurodivergence is another. “Neurodivergence" may be a helpful descriptive term for people with non-pathological deviations from normal psychology, but it’s often used as a justification for continuing pathological behaviors under the banner of respecting difference. Some neurodiversity advocates “label those who express a desire for treatment or cure as Nazis and eugenicists” and claim neurodivergent people are “disabled more by society than by their [condition.]”

The claim that one’s problems are not their own, but the fault of society, is a thread that ties many left-wing identities together. Perhaps nowhere is this more clear than in the political identities sweeping across younger generations—from progressivism to socialism and communism. Yes, it’s true that societal systems can be set up in unjust ways that need correction, but people tend to be highly ego motivated when judging what is a changeable system versus the nature of reality, and what is unjust versus just. In his classic book The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, economist Ludwig von Mises explains the psychological draw of leftist philosophies. Under socialism, “the individual can ascribe adverse fate to conditions beyond his own control.” Under capitalism, if a man fails to succeed “he becomes conscious of his own inferiority and feels humiliated.” Mises elaborates,

If a man's station in life is conditioned by factors other than his inherent excellence, those who remain at the bottom of the ladder can acquiesce in this outcome and, knowing their own worth, still preserve their dignity and self-respect. But it is different if merit alone decides. Then the unsuccessful feel themselves insulted and humiliated.

Hate and enmity against all those who superseded them must result.

Salomé, my co-founder of The Black Sheep, has spoken at length about how in her past life as a communist, fighting the system gave her a sense of purpose while allowing her to displace blame for problems that in truth were her own. On the rare occasion when her beliefs were critiqued, Salomé would snap back with cliched ad-hominems of “privilege,” “selfishness,” and “callousness,” disincentivizing challenges to her toxic worldview. Salomé’s attraction to this political identity—despite her being the daughter of a Cuban refugee—is proof of its psychological power.

How could anyone reconcile this family history with communism? How can neurodiversity advocates reconcile their hardships with their disregard for their diagnosed pathologies? How can Buddhists reconcile their pursuit of non-identification with a hyper fixation on identity?

The answer is cognitive dissonance.

The phenomenon of cognitive dissonance is a lot like architecture. It’s the way our mind constructs its outlook.

Our minds are sense-making machines for the purpose of predicting and planning actions to achieve our goals. These goals may be material, emotional, social, or anything else needed for our well-being. We attach ourselves to our earliest ideas because they demonstrate themselves to work at achieving those goals—at least for the time being. A child, for example, may encounter a nice cat and develop the belief “animals are friendly,” a belief that brings him joy since it encourages him to approach cute animals. Once a foundational belief has enmeshed itself in our mind, new beliefs build on top of it. If the child’s positive experience with the cat encourages him to approach a friendly dog who tries to play, his belief may develop into “animals are friendly and like to play,” bringing him further joy by increasing his engagement with animals he likes.

If new information comes into contradiction with a developed belief, it causes mental discomfort—“cognitive dissonance.” To relieve the discomfort, the new information must be successfully accommodated. For example, if the same child later sees a snake, tries to play with it, and is bitten in return, his belief that “animals are friendly” will no longer be tenable. Instead, the child may revise his belief to “animals are generally friendly and sometimes like to play, but not snakes.”

The purpose of cognitive dissonance is plainly evolutionarily adaptive. If you have any foundational belief your mind has accepted as true, it makes sense that you’d want new information to fit within your understanding.

The child had been given good reason to believe that animals were friendly and like to play. If the incident with the snake led him to fully revise his belief to “animals are unfriendly,” then he’d be discarding information that had already proven itself to serve him well. Similarly, If you’re a zookeeper who owns five tigers, but you only see four in your enclosure, you might want to feel some discomfort! You certainly shouldn’t revise your belief that you own five tigers to “I guess I actually only ever had four.” The experience of cognitive dissonance is what motivates your mind to search for a solution for what happened to your fifth tiger, and to have that solution fit with what you already know.

If we didn’t experience cognitive dissonance, it would be literally impossible to change our minds. In his book How Minds Change, science journalist David McRaney tells the story of a woman who suffered a stroke that damaged her brain’s anterior cingulate cortex, making her unable to experience cognitive dissonance. When she was asked to close both of her eyes she was able to close only one, also due to her stroke. Her doctor then asked her if both of her eyes were closed; she said yes. Her doctor tried holding up three fingers and asked how many she could see; she said three. Her doctor asked how she could know it was three if both her eyes were closed. She said nothing. Her doctor next put a mirror in front of her and asked if she could see her reflection; she said yes. Her doctor again asked her how she could see her reflection if both of her eyes were closed. She said nothing. Without the ability to experience any discomfort when her ideas were proven wrong, she couldn’t update them. She wasn’t alarmed or confused, but completely calm, and because of that she couldn’t answer the doctor’s questions.

Unfortunately, even for those of us with functioning brains, assimilating new information into our worldview isn’t easy when it contradicts our prior understandings. Our bias to protect our understanding of what we already believe to be true leads us to try to make new information fit alongside it however it can. Cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber point out that this bias helps protect us from misinformation and deception, but at the same time it prevents us from trusting new information that truly does contradict what we thought we knew. This can lead to irrational behavior such as generating low-quality rationalizations for one’s original beliefs, full-blown denial of facts, and ad-hominem attacks against the purveyors of true but inconvenient information.

This problem grows in scale the more we have built upon false foundations. In one of the earliest studies on cognitive dissonance, psychologist Leon Festinger and team infiltrated an apocalyptic UFO cult. The cult members had given away their possessions, ended relationships with non-believers, and quit their jobs to prepare for the date of the prophesied apocalypse. But when the date came with no event, rather than give up their beliefs, many of the cult’s members developed rationalizations that made them even stronger believers and expanded their proselytization efforts. 

Just like if you were constructing a skyscraper, if you find a flaw in the foundation that needs to be fixed, it might be frustrating if you’re already constructing the second-story, but it’s a surmountable problem to tear one floor down and fix the foundation. However, if you find a flaw in the foundation while you’re constructing the fiftieth-story, after having invested enormous amounts of money into the project and knowing that your company will go bankrupt if you’re forced to start over, you’re very likely to find any way you can to plaster over the flaws and convince yourself, your investors, and the public that the building will hold up fine. This is the situation we face when speaking with those who have built the core of their self-identity on top of faulty premises.

Be it for a skyscraper or a mind, in this situation one has prioritized their short-term comfort over their long-term rational self-interest. If the skyscraper collapses, not only will the company go bankrupt anyway, but hundreds might die and the architect will face prison. The risk of the mind protecting faulty premises is no less: approximately 100 million died from Communist’s refusal to recognize that their system didn’t work. The very same year (1957) that psychologist Leon Festinger published A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, author and philosopher Ayn Rand published her magnum-opus Atlas Shrugged, in which she coined the term “evasion” to describe this phenomenon. Rand described the “fear and guilt” that were the deserved "chronic emotions” of those who evaded the truth to protect their worldview. In other words: if what brings you meaning in life is bad, you should feel bad, and you can only feel better when you’re willing to properly resolve your dissonance.

Unlike in construction, where it’s relatively easy to discern if a building was built correctly or not, someone having their worldview challenged can play nearly endless shell games to retain their beliefs. It’s always possible to claim that whatever happened in a far away nation “wasn’t real Marxism.” You can dismiss anyone as a bigot if they don’t support your preferred flavor of identity politics. Postmodern philosophy provides a tool to redefine words like “racism,” “whiteness,” “gender,” and even “reality” into unfalsifiable social constructions. Many religions have entire areas of study devoted to protecting their beliefs from challenge, no matter the charge. 

With this much evasion to overcome, how in the world can we get people to recognize when they’re wrong?

While people do need to feel bad as part of the process of changing their mind, it’s almost certainly counterproductive to try to make them feel bad. Giving someone the right information, but in the wrong way, is documented to backfire, entrenching them even deeper in their previously held views and pushing them further away from you. If you position yourself as someone’s opponent, as someone they don’t want to agree with, their incentive to trust themselves over you will only increase.

The better question than whether someone with maladaptive ideas should feel bad, is who should be responsible for their bad feeling. All of the most scientifically validated persuasion techniques rest on the idea that change must come from inside oneself. Trying to insert your own thoughts into other people’s minds generally fails to trigger that process, but getting them to start questioning their own thought processes and how they came to their conclusions can work much better. This is known as “technique rebuttal,” a category of persuasion techniques which ask people to question their own reasoning. The key to why these techniques work is that they help people move past the simple heuristics we use to efficiently—but often ineffectively—process information: does this information make me feel good? Is this person part of my in-group? Am I even interested enough to consider this information? With technique rebuttal, people are instead primed to logically think through their ideas with an open mind.

According to McRaney’s summary of the science, if you want to persuade another person, this is what works:

1. You must appear “trustworthy, credible and reliable.” This is essential to preventing heuristic-based dismissals from kicking in.

2. Your message should be "paired with popular counterarguments.” In particular, you want to demonstrate that you accurately understand the other person’s perspective, and treat their views with dignity. 

3. Your message should rely on the other person’s “processing abilities and motivations” to do the heavy lifting. Ask questions that encourage your listener to think up their own explanations for why your position is correct. Meanwhile, avoid saying things that encourage them to think up further justifications for their entrenched position. For example, if you ask a leftist “why do you think so many people died under communism?” they are likely to generate a spate of rationalizations for why their ideology wasn’t really to blame. If instead you rhetorically ask “wouldn’t it be nice if impoverished Cubans and Venezuelans had more freedom?” they are more likely to agree, and will need to generate explanations within their own mind for why their intuition led them to agree.

4. The medium you communicate through matters. Face-to-face communication builds rapport and provides the greatest opportunity to change minds. But if you can’t do that, still try to be personal and bring as much of your best self as you can to your message, and try to encourage listeners to engage face-to-face with others who agree with you or have also heard you with an open mind.

When it comes to deeply held worldviews, even the best persuaders following these tactics perfectly will still face monumental resistance. The best time to approach people for persuasion will be if and when their worldview has already begun to crack.

While one’s shell games to retain their views can go on almost endlessly, they can’t go on literally endlessly. Anyone holding wrong ideas will still have an upper limit, however high, at which point they can no longer continue to assimilate disconfirmatory evidence into their worldview and their cognitive dissonance becomes too much to bear. When this happens, a person reaches their “affective tipping point” where they stop trying to conserve their worldview and become willing to learn.

For Salomé, this tipping point came when she moved to Los Angeles to be with a now ex-boyfriend and hit rock bottom after their breakup. Her communism was rooted in a deeper worldview—that life was inherently unfair and the only way to achieve the life she wanted was for this unfairness to be ended, until which she would be dependent on other people to find happiness and provide for her needs. When her relationship failed and she was no longer able to live vicariously through her partner's success, she was faced with a life where she worked a meaningless and low-paid job, was nearly homeless, had few friends in her new city, and was diagnosed with depression. Feeling hopeless (and with a bit of spite towards her ex), Salomé felt the need to find her independence and prove her worth—so she started writing. From writing she started to build a clientele as a professional copywriter and an audience as an essayist, proving to her that she could change her situation through her own effort. She started to notice others online holding worldviews in conflict with her newfound success, and she recognized their flawed worldviews as being the very same that she used to hold. However, while the foundations of her prior worldview were shattered, she still identified as a socialist; nothing had yet risen to replace it. But through conversations with an entrepreneur who had a decent philosophic understanding of capitalism—conversations similar in format to the one described above—she began to understand that the world could be viewed in a different way.

One of the thinkers whose work helped her come along in this understanding was Jordan Peterson. Peterson’s message to “clean your room” has successfully helped countless depressed young people to start making positive changes in their lives, proving for them that they have the power to direct their future and aren’t perpetual victims at the mercy of society’s whims. Similarly, Argentina’s rock bottom of 211% inflation led the nation to elect Javier Milei as their president, with the anarcho-capitalist vowing to overturn the nation’s cronyist socialism that had promised special favors to every interest group under the sun. When a government impoverishes everyone, an entire nation can reach its affective tipping point together.

Fortunately and unfortunately, in America we live in relative abundance, making it much harder for people to reach that tipping point through such harsh consequences. But to hopefully get them to their tipping point before they hit rock bottom—or to help put them on the road to recovery after they do—it’s important to remain in the lives of people with bad ideas, no matter how abhorrent you find their views.

Making positive change after hitting rock bottom is a well-studied phenomenon known as “post-traumatic growth,” and a strong social support system is an essential component to experiencing growth instead of PTSD or other psychological distress. Post-traumatic growth theory was first developed in the 1990’s, but the knowledge that social bonds are important for supporting people’s worldviews has been known since Festinger’s original research on cognitive dissonance. As was shown in his study of the UFO cult, people are able and highly motivated to resolve their dissonance in a manner that retains their wrong beliefs if it will keep them in good standing with their peers. And people are more able and willing to break with dysfunctional peers if they’re also members of other social networks that will support their decision.

Daryl Davis, who I worked closely with as an employee at the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism, is a powerful example of just how big a difference being in someone’s life can make. Daryl, a black man, has gone out of his way to befriend klansmen and neo-nazis, and while for many of them it's taken years, Daryl’s friendship has led over 200 white supremacists to leave their lives of hate. Similarly, Megan Phelps-Roper’s path to leaving the Westboro Baptist Church (a group whose rabid homophobia was discussed in a previous article at The Black Sheep), was made possible through her friendship with a man the church had picketed against. Their friendship developed primarily through Twitter DMs, proving that contact and kindness even in the internet’s "war zone” can make a difference.

Black sheep are particularly important for this process. Unlike apocalyptic cultists, racists, and homophobes—all fringe and disreputable worldviews in contemporary times—the people we hope to reach tend to have more hegemonic perspectives. Without us taking action, the indoctrinated may fail to ever find the avenues for social support needed to help free them from ubiquitous but toxic groupthink. McRaney illustrates the vital role of black sheep:

Imagine a group of people trying to get into a college classroom. The classroom is empty, but the first person who shows up makes a conscious decision not to attempt to open the door and check. The reason he doesn’t check has something to do with his disposition, what sociologists call an internal signal. Let’s say he opened a door his first week on campus. The class was still going, and they all turned around and laughed at him. It was extremely embarrassing, and since then he is overly cautious. Today, he has decided to stand by the door and play on his phone because he assumes the class will let out shortly. The next person who shows up has never experienced the same sort of embarrassment, but he doesn’t want to make small talk with a stranger or make a fool of himself, so he just avoids eye contact and starts playing with his phone over in the corner. Now a third person shows up. Normally, if she were the first person on the scene, she’d have no problem checking to see if the classroom was empty, but since there are two people already waiting, she assumes they know something she doesn’t, and bases her behavior on their behavior. She ignores her internal signal thanks to the strength of the external one. …

Now the cascade is already self-propagating. The power of the behavioral cascade comes from how, with each additional person, the gumption required to break the cascade increases. The fourth, fifth, and sixth people to arrive at the door will base their behavior on the crowd’s behavior ahead of them, and as the crowd grows, it becomes more and more unlikely that a newcomer will be the sort of person who doesn’t care what so many people might think of them if they embarrass themselves publicly. …

To break the cascade, someone who is more brave and willing to look silly by checking the door than anyone else in the crowd so far must arrive, and at a certain size of group, for that sample of people, there might not be any such person. The only way the cascade will break is if new information is added to the system, like if the professor opens the door from inside to see what’s wrong with everyone, or if enough time passes that the anguish of waiting outweighs the predicted pain of embarrassment should that person be incorrect.

Black sheep are those brave enough to take a risk and break the cascade. Our actions don’t merely help to pull individuals out of harmful identities, but can eventually lead to the collapse of worldviews that are poisoning millions.

As Thomas Kuhn pointed out, people tend to reject evidence that challenges prevailing paradigms, even when those paradigms have led them into crises. Often progress fails to come from years of steady advancement, but requires moments of revolutionary change that overturn broken paradigms.

Without black sheep such revolutionary change is impossible, but as any critic of Marxism should know, revolutions aren’t always good. Before we trigger any revolutionary cascade, and before we seek to change anyone else’s mind, we should be certain that our own worldview is actually correct. As human beings, we are prone to the same psychological biases that conquered the minds of those who have adopted toxic identities. It may turn out that what brings us meaning in life is bad, and we should feel bad.

Fully conquering our own biases is impossible and we wouldn’t want to even if we could; our biases evolved for their utility. But we can do more to be aware of them and take note of when they might be going haywire. When we catch ourselves feeling bad after hearing a challenging idea—be it annoyed, frustrated, offended, etc.—we can be mindful of that feeling and choose to run towards it, thinking through what we are hearing carefully (what’s called the “central route” of information processing), rather than running away by giving in to the concise heuristics that caused our brain to generate the feeling.

Nobody likes pursuing things that make them feel bad, but we must do it for the same reason we must exercise. There was a time in human history when it was impossible to go without exercise; movement most of the day and every day was a requirement to obtain enough resources to survive. Thus the instinct to relax and conserve energy was adaptive, as we needed that energy for the next day’s hunting and gathering. But in today’s era of technology and abundance, we can avoid exercise much more successfully, and so we must overcome the bad feeling and force ourselves to do it for our health.

Our mind is also in an environment that’s changed from what it evolved for. On the internet our ideas are challenged more frequently than they ever have been, yet we still respond just as we always have. The internet also makes it easier than ever to reject challenges by connecting us with sources for confirmation bias. Just as we do physical exercise, we must do intellectual exercise by making a practice of setting aside time to pursue information that challenges us and carefully considering its argument step-by-step, staying conscious of the bad heuristics and logical fallacies we can fall prey to.

Even those of us whose worldview has already shifted away from a broken one may still be wrong. The Cult Member whose troubles lead him to join a toxic group is one example of someone who has rejected a failed worldview, but merely replaced it with another.

And even those of us who have adopted better worldviews likely still aren’t perfect. Like an economic model that has worked for decades but then fails to predict a recession, a worldview can work until it doesn’t, at which point it must be updated or replaced.

One tool we can use to challenge ourselves is called “street epistemology.” Based on the socratic method, street epistemology was originally developed by my friend Peter Boghossian to help those of religious faith question their beliefs. However, street epistemology has since expanded to help anyone with any belief question and update their thinking. Street epistemology uses a technique rooted in the same four steps McRaney identified to open people to changing their mind; with the help of a partner to facilitate the questioning, you can apply street epistemology to yourself.

Another technique to aid your pursuit of truth is to join a community of other individuals who share your pursuit of open-minded, anti-dogmatic inquiry—regardless of the conclusions that process may lead one to. One must be cautious in identifying such a community, as humans are predisposed to seeing themselves as open minded while only being open to what they already were, and seeing themselves as anti-dogmatic while only opposing others’ dogma. However, since so much of our psychological need to maintain our pre-existing views is rooted in fear of social repercussions from an unsupportive community, finding a community where such questioning is valued can break the spell. Attempting to successfully build such a community is an important goal of ours at The Black Sheep.

Perhaps the most powerful technology humanity has found for opening “the doors of perception” is psychedelics. Ram Dass came to his enlightenment after years of psychedelic use, but these substances come with significant risks and must be used responsibly, ideally with an experienced guide or therapist (I certainly wouldn’t recommend taking LSD every four hours for three weeks in a row, as Dass did). Nonetheless, psychedelics make it possible to reevaluate one's deeply held worldview with an open mind instead of our instinctual defensiveness, and to make needed changes we may have resisted our entire lives.

Terence McKenna, a famed psychedelic researcher, has also recognized that “psychedelics dissolve opinion structures” and “open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.” Regardless of whether you get to that openness through psychedelics or not, having the humility to question who you think you are and what you think you know, no matter how personal it is, no matter how much you’ve designed your life around it, and no matter how bad it feels—because it will—is something we can all benefit from.

“You have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your responsibility, because the only understanding of the universe that will be useful to you is your own understanding.” — Terence McKenna

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