A New World Is Only A New Mind

Strange attractors, lines of flight, psychedelic futures, and other weirdness

My mind sometimes gets caught on certain topics or ideas and cannot let them go. Does this happen to you? And, if so, what topics tangle you up? Please let me know in the comments.

There are advantages and disadvantages to this tendency. It is part of what makes my thinking “weird,” in a positive sense. I want to explore “weirdness” — interestingly, etymologically the old English word “wyrd” meant fate or predestination — with a bit more intensity. Later, “weird” became associated with the supernatural, the eerie and uncanny.

In The Self Aware Universe, physicist Amit Goswami proposes that thoughts are, themselves, quantum phenomenon. Thoughts obey the uncertainty principle. We can follow the directionality of a thought (wave-form) or the thought itself (particle), but not both at the same time: “You can never simultaneously keep track of both the content of a thought and where the thought is going, the direction of thought.”

Goswami proposed that “mental substance”—thought—is made out of the same intangible elements that build up the “macro objects” of the physical world, but “mental substance is always subtle; it does not form gross conglomerates.” This makes sense to me. I often get caught up in the “particles” of a particular group of thoughts. Eventually I have to force myself to pull back to observe the wave-like patterning, the overall movement and directionality.

As I prepare for our upcoming seminar on what’s coming (please join us), my thinking has gotten tangled up, yet again, in the particulate matter of the global ecological emergency or what some call the “polycrisis.” Right now, I find it difficult to free my thinking from this insidious imbroglio. I honestly feel about the geopolitical polycrisis the same way I felt about psychedelics in 1999: The topic is one of the most interesting — and most important — things we need to focus on. But most people can’t focus on it. As with psychedelics twenty years ago, an unspoken cultural taboo, a subliminal shared suppression, holds us back.

How do we break this taboo? I have ideas on this too — but they are, I must admit, weird.

In my mind, the ongoing psychedelic renaissance and the possible “resolution” of the polycrisis or ecological emergency remain linked, on a level that few people realize and no institution studies, even as funding for psychedelics explodes (Harvard, apparently, just received a $17 million grant to create a division around “psychedelics and the humanities,” which sounds interesting). In what follows, I want to explore why and how this is so — why I feel we need to dive deeper, into the maelstrom.

My ongoing research into where we are at now with the polycrisis/emergency reveals that things are far more dire than the mainstream media tells us. I basically agree with the doomer-ish analysis of Jem Bendell (Breaking Together), climate scientist Kevin Anderson, John Michael Greer (Dark Age America), Chris Martenson, and Nate Hagens that we are spiraling inexorably into a period of decline as energy, food, and materials become more expensive and less accessible. This just isn’t going away — there won’t be a “return to normal.” The deepening strangeness is the new normal.

Of course, some regions of the Global South already undergo collapse (hence the refugee crisis in the US as dispossessed people stream north), and even subsets within the developed world have collapsed (one in four Americans experience some level of “food insecurity”). However, collapse hasn’t yet become a universal condition, as of yet. Many millions of us still live quite comfortable lives. Many still can’t quite believe such a disintegration could happen to people like us.

The goal of the establishment — represented by New York Times editorials as well as books like Hannah Ritchie’s Not the End of the World — is to keep us from collectively freaking out or panicking about accelerated warming, species extinction, peak oil, industrial pollution such as microplastics, or the near-exhaustion of the Earth’s mineral resources (because then we all might want to do nasty things like sit-down in front of corporate HQs, interrupt Broadway shows, or fling Campbell’s soup at museum masterpieces). They want us to believe that the current system — Capitalism, Neoliberalism, nationalism, liberal democracy — has the flexibility to adjust and hold things together, as it has done until now. We must maintain faith that we will keep enjoying the benefits of ongoing technological “progress,” as conditions keep mutating.

I find it fascinating to observe our contemporary discourse swivel and twist, while I try to tease out the underlying directionality. For instance, what does Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter — with its bizarrely dark rebranding as “X” and its amplification of White supremacist, Trump-ian, anti-woke tropes — tell us about where we are drifting? Or, at least, where certain forces seek to direct us? Instagram just silently toggled a switch which means that people do not see political content unless they have the wherewithal and care to change that obscure setting. What a sneaky, underhanded way to exert control over the public discourse!

It took ten or fifteen years (give or take) for the Internet — which the US government built with taxpayer funds and then simply handed over to private corporations without any public input — to mutate from a seemingly positive and helpful technology (Facebook promised to make the world “more open and connected;” Google would “do no evil”) to an insidious and manipulative Capitalist blob.  Artificial Intelligence made this same mutation in around six months. Increasingly, AI seems programmed to crush humanity’s creative industries willy nilly, making more money for the already obscenely wealthy while removing millions if not billions of jobs to increase profit margins.

Anyway, I start to digress, sort of. Here is the point I wanted to make:

What’s most interesting and important about psychedelics is not their potential to heal depression, trauma, cluster headaches, anxiety, or anything else. Also, we seem to have disproved the notion that psychedelics inevitably make people more holistic, integral, Leftist/ecological in their thinking. It turns out they can make people more susceptible to ungrounded conspiracy theories or lead them into delusions like the one in which a former reality TV series and pretend plutocrat is a prophetic redeemer and “Deep State” dragon slayer. At the very least, psychedelic libertarianism is a normal thing now.

What’s most interesting and important about psychedelics is that, as “nonspecific amplifiers” of the Psyche, they help to induce psychic and paranormal phenomena, from telepathy to synchronicity, to even more extreme stuff such as telekinesis or the mysterious manifestation of physical objects.