There were times during certain depressions of mine that I would become so disillusioned with reality. Viewing this world through the lens of depression can be reality-warping and can lead to a fear that your world may never be the same again. Deepak Chopra’s ending monologue in Netflix’s “Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics” was incredibly insightful for me and helped me understand the distinction between reality and our perception of it.

“You know, what we call everyday reality, is a projection of consciousness. In reality, there’s no such thing as colors or sounds, or textures, or tastes, or smells, in the so-called real world. The real world is a radically ambiguous and ceaselessly flowing quantum soup. It’s a fluctuation of energy and information in an infinite void. The sky that an insect sees is not the sky that you and I see. A honey bee experiences, um, ultraviolet radiation. I have no idea what that looks like, you know? So when a honey bee looks at a flower, it doesn’t see a flower the way you and I see, although it can sense honey from a distance. A snake experiences infrared radiation. A bat experiences the echo of ultrasound. A chameleon’s eyeballs swivel on two different axes. You can’t even remotely imagine what this would look like to a chameleon. So, what’s reality? And the answer is there’s no such thing.”
– Deepak Chopra via Netflix’s “Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics”

My take on this passage is the same concept taught in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy which is that external circumstances are not usually the cause of our emotional reactions, but rather our thoughts about the external circumstance. If I can hate the world during a depression, but love the world when I am not depressed – I’ve proven this concept. The world didn’t change, but rather my perception and thoughts of the world. And the realization that I have the ability to change the course of my thought patterns allows me to perceive the world any way that I would like to. *Psychedelics not needed*