Atman Retreat provides safe, legal psychedelic experiences outside of Montego Bay, Jamaica.

Upcoming retreat dates: September 23-26 (7 spots left; as of September 2nd) September 27-30 (5 spots left; as of September 2nd) November 13-16 November 17-20



Atman recently introduced tiered pricing and a low-income ticket program.

About Atman Retreat (source)

Psychedelics are known to produce profound, meaningful, transformative experiences when used in a safe and intentional manner.1 However, many people don’t have access to psychedelics, or to a safe setting within which to use them. Others simply don’t want to break the law. Until we adopt more compassionate, evidence-based drug policy, there are few ways for people to experience these extraordinary states of consciousness safely and legally. Atman Retreat exists to fill this gap.

Our core mission is to help people explore the full potential of the psychedelic experience, in all its healing, transformative, and transcendent qualities. Retreats are held in Jamaica, where psilocybin mushrooms are legal. Participants stay at a spacious villa, with comfortable rooms and a scenic private beachfront. Our team of experienced facilitators is passionate about creating space for inner transformation, insight, and breakthroughs.

Whether you’re completely new to psychedelics, or a seasoned psychonaut interested in a different kind of journey, Atman Retreat is a complete 4-day experience that allows you to explore psychedelics safely, legally, and in a setting designed to maximize their benefits.

When you feel ready, you can apply here .

Why am I sharing this announcement? I think that Atman Retreat is especially suited to Qualia Computing readers for the following three reasons:

I know some of the people who started it and I can confirm that they are good, rational, and tactful people trying to make the world a better place. The retreat is open-ended in nature. Sadly, most legal psychedelic retreats come with heavy “memetic baggage” in the form of unquestioned beliefs about spirituality or strong ideological commitments. At the very least, the focus of most legal psychedelic retreats is explicitly therapeutic. Atman Retreat is a good place to simply explore your own mind and study the nature of consciousness without having to accept any spiritual, therapeutic, or ideological framework. For example, their website has a research section which lists and summarizes recent studies on the effects of psilocybin, which shows a willingness by the staff to engage with a scientific approach to psychedelics. The participants in previous cohorts of Atman Retreat have been very aligned with both Effective Altruism and the scientific study of consciousness. In other words, the attendees are typically smart, curious, ethical, and epistemologically sound.

To this, I will add that one of the visions of the Qualia Research Institute is to create an empirical consciousness research center in which psychedelics are taken by the brightest scientists, philosophers, and engineers to explore alien state-spaces of consciousness directly.

Indeed, consciousness research is currently at a pre-Galilean state, where brain scientists refuse to “look through the telescope” so to speak (or at least if they do, they are not talking about it publicly). Scientific culture is such that discussing the EEG measurements of members of the general public under the influence of psychedelics is acceptable but as soon as one talks about one’s own direct experience with such compounds one’s scientific credibility becomes suspect.

We can change this, and one of the first steps is to establish a legal framework for consciousness researchers to be able to engage in fruitful self-experimentation. Real scientific progress on consciousness will only take place with a twin track that combines both analysis of third-person data and the use of an empirical research methodology of direct experience by the researchers themselves. By pointing to the Atman Retreat I am hoping to elevate it to the status of a sort of Schelling point for rational psychonauts to converge on for the time being.

Perhaps this is a crucial first step in establishing a legally-viable Super-Shulgin Academy* for a post-Galilean science of consciousness.

*From the QRI Glossary –

Super-Shulgin Academy (coined by David Pearce; ref: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8): This is a hypothetical future intellectual society that investigates consciousness empirically. Rather than merely theorizing about it or having people from the general population describe their odd experiences, the Super-Shulgin Academy directly studies the state-space of consciousness by putting the brightest minds on the task. The Super-Shulgin Academy (1) trains high-quality consciousness researchers and psychonauts, (2) investigates the computational trade-offs between different states of consciousness, (3) finds new socially-useful applications for exotic states of consciousness, (4) practices the art and craft of creating ultra-blissful experiences, and (5) develops and maintains a full-stack memeplex that incorporates the latest insights about the state-space of consciousness into the most up-to-date Theory of Everything.

Featured image: source.

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