A Dialectic of Psychedelics

Psychedelics as Catalysts for Transformation, Part IV of V

Image: Theologue by Alex Grey

The previous three posts have explored how psychedelics, much like meditation, can open the door to profound mystical experiences. Both deep ecologists and meditation masters have found these practices to serve as portals to the kind of transformative shifts in consciousness essential for averting ecological catastrophe.

The third of these posts examined the concept of ego and unity consciousness, emphasizing that ego—while necessary for survival—limits our sense of connection with others and the universe. Mystical experiences, particularly those induced by meditation or psychedelics, can dissolve the ego and induce a sense of unity, but these experiences require careful preparation, supportive environments, and cultural integration to be safe and transformative. Otherwise, the speed at which ego dissolution ensues during the psychedelic experience can be frightening and counterproductive.

This post explores other drawbacks of using psychedelics as catalysts for change.

First is the problem of commodification, which is obviously not unique to psychedelics. Our culture turns all things sacred into the profane. Food is our sacred fuel and magically transforms itself into our living bodies. Petroleum has been the magic fuel animating most of modern society. And the semisynthetic compound LSD and the plant substances in peyote, psilocybin, and ayahuasca generate the mystical and ecstatic states of our minds. Civilization—especially in its most extreme Western form—has devoured these and all else that is valuable and sacred, as if in a drunken Dionysian frenzy.

(Recreational users may counter: “What’s wrong with having some fun, prude boy?” Good question. And what’s wrong with taking a joy ride in your gas guzzler when the world is on fire? Or indulging in meat at every meal when billions of people are hungry and malnourished? The answers require a meta-perspective.)

For many people, the plant substances that induce mystical states has been reduced to mere chemical products, commodified and consumed for recreation. This trivialization undermines the serious and intentional work being done by those exploring their medical, spiritual, and scientific potential. Their recreational use has also led them to be lumped together with drugs like heroin and cocaine, at least in the eyes of the government and the general public. This, too, has slowed the advancement of their potential benefits for society.

A second interrelated problem is that the power of psychedelics has made even their spiritual benefits seem subversive.

In the late 1960s and 70s, for instance, mothers and fathers watched their sons become suddenly long-haired and unshaven, refusing the clean-cut warrior ethics of their culture, and they saw their daughters speak of free love and use offbeat jargon once limited to the haunts of jazz musicians and Beatniks. Their children cavorted to loud, alien music and generally behaved as heathens in the eyes of a rigid and orderly Apollonian world. They questioned their culture’s traditions and values and challenged their parent’s most cherished beliefs.

So, whereas psychedelics were used in traditional societies to strengthen cultural cohesion by reaffirming cultural values, goals, and visions of truth, they are seen in our society as promoting worldviews that are contrary—or counter cultural—to society’s values and belief systems. For, indeed, psychedelics can often reveal the ugliness of the consumerist values of competition, greed, material acquisition, and ambition. Instead of strengthening the existing culture, they threatened it.

In opening one’s mind to the lie of the overlying structure (reverberating in the slogan “down with the Establishment”) psychedelics threatened the institutions and the orderliness and comfort of everyday reality. The town elders and the institutional elite foresaw the breakdown of the law and order in a system that kept them comfortably on top. Psychedelics—the mind manifesting spiritual openers—were banned nationally around the world and internationally in the United Nations, and they were forced underground.

So, the third major challenge is their illegality, which remains one of the greatest obstacles to meaningful progress. Instead of intelligent large-scale experimentation in controlled settings to scientifically determine how to best harness these powerful substances, it has been left almost completely to the underground and black-market.

And as with every other activity that is forbidden and forced underground, quality standards are unregulated and protocols for safe use are lacking. Every year, millions of people take illegal drugs of unknown dose and quality. And thousands of them end up in emergency rooms from their experimentation with psychedelics and MDMA (ecstasy, Molly).

Besides all the obvious guidelines that a sensible society could intelligently establish for mindset, environmental setting, and for the drug, itself, there are other less obvious standards that might also be considered. For example, psychedelic research done in scientific settings (and meditation courses in some meditation centers) carefully screen volunteers for pre-existing and potential psychiatric conditions that might be triggered by experiencing altered states of consciousness.

In a social climate that is hostile to all drugs without discriminating between their differences—between heroin and LSD, for example—a diverse group of intellectuals, researchers, psychonauts, psychotherapists, and respected meditation teachers have operated in a nether world that lies somewhere between secrecy and discrete openness, having a relationship with the government that is perhaps akin to the early C.E. Christians in the Roman Empire.

The psychedelic community has, in a sense, created a sangha, a Sanskrit term for a spiritual community. This community exists both locally and globally, over the internet and through books, magazines (the journal MAPS, for example), lectures, gatherings, and other media.[i] As with any sangha, a unifying myth and worldview is being discoursed and developed. For better and for worse, the values, beliefs, experiences, and history of the community and the stories of its main (mostly 20th century) heroes and villains are passed around through the various media and fortified through retelling.

And, because the psychedelic community is composed of many educated, intelligent, and well-intentioned people who are dedicated to the psychedelic potential for healing and spirituality, it is from this community that the protocols for safe, effective, and responsible use are being honestly explored, both inside the science laboratory and out.[ii] Because there is no established social context for psychedelic use, the members of this nascent sangha has, in Robert Forte’s words, “sought out those maps and practices which could enable them to understand their experiences.”

Since the mid-twentieth century there have been thousands of articles, online and on paper, and peer-reviewed academic papers on every aspect of psychedelics. They have rediscovered the protocols common to many of the ancient practices, which had been, as psychologist Neal Goldsmith put it, “honed through centuries of hard-won tribal trial-and-error experimentation.”

And—or perhaps, it should be said, however—they have reinterpreted the mystical experience within the 21st century psycho-spiritual paradigm. That is, rather than animism and equitable, nomadic lifestyles, we live in electrified settlements, are materially unequal, environmentally destructive, and embrace numerous (often violently antagonistic) worldviews. Mutually antagonistic as these worldviews may be to each other, they have in common a suspicion, if not outright fear and loathing of psychedelics. Too bad—psychedelics may still be the most powerful psycho-spiritual antidote to our self-destructive societies.

[i] As Goldsmith (2007) observes, “The online context is increasingly important as a supportive community, especially as such support is so sparse in the physical world in today’s predominantly conservative cultural and political environment.”

[ii] The anthropologist Marlene Dobkin de Rios and the medical doctor David Smith notes in a 1976 paper, “Members of the counterculture use drugs ritualistically to achieve many of the same goals that members of traditional societies sought to achieve through drug use. These goals include expansion of cosmic consciousness, enhancement of religious feeling, and improved self-understanding.”