I see anything psychoactive as a lens. Something that changes your state of consciousness has the effect of ‘lensing’ your reality. This occurs in normal life, the 30 year old you sees things the 20 year old you didn’t. The 20 year old you saw things the 15 year old you couldn’t. But with psychedelics, we get to cheat. Whereas normally the lensing comes slow, over years as we grow, when we take psychedelics we are able to instantly alter our consciousness dramatically. Our brain functions differently, parts of it we usually use stop altogether, and others light up. You view the world differently, because you have tampered with the lens. Usually, this only happens when a person loses their mind. But because you cheated, you are able to see what it is like to lose your mind, and find it again. It is by this process of jumping back and forth between different states of consciousness that (I believe) we are able to zoom out on the mind that we are so trapped inside of. By seeing something from more than one angle (the one angle being the brain in its default, sober state) we get an idea of how much our brain’s processing determines the reality of what we experience, and how much wiggle room there really is within our brain’s interaction with the material world. A (compound) lens requires 2 pieces to focus.
