Finding Stability in Discomfort

Initial reflections on the PAWA conference

When I was between the ages of eleven and twelve, I spent something like eight months in hospitals, three months in a body cast, because of an infection in my spine. I would say it was one of the defining experiences of my life, with both good and bad consequences. 

From that period, I gained at least one superpower: the ability to linger in areas of thought that are very uncomfortable for most people – to wait patiently, reflect and consider, until clarity, new understanding, emerges. You have a lot of time to think — and little else you can do — while in a body cast. At that age, a month seems like an eternity.

According to Carl Jung, “The wound is the gift.” This fits with my own life experience. Astrologically, Chiron represents the archetype of the wounded healer. Chiron is an asteroid that erratically orbits the solar system. Astronomers discovered it in 1977, the same year I was hospitalized. I identify with this archetype, particularly as I developed scoliosis as a result of that illness. I am not a physical healer or any kind of “shaman.” What I seek to do through my work is heal the broken beliefs and wounded ideologies of our society. I propose new ideas to take their place. 

The capacity to remain comfortable or at least find stability in uncomfortable circumstances was a prerequisite for writing my first book, Breaking Open the Head. When I started researching psychedelics in the late 1990s, the subject was still completely taboo, off limits, in the mainstream and among academics, journalists, even artists. Smart people would laugh at me or look at me incredulously when I said I was seriously investigating it. Cultural perception has shifted very far in the last twenty years.

I realized that our culture exerted multiple forms of repression on psychedelics to keep the subject off the table, This included legal interdiction, peer-group shaming, media ridicule, and even boredom and disinterest. Now the cat is out of the bag. As the psychedelic renaissance goes on, I suspect we will see, slowly, a deeper shift in cultural priorities: Some of us are starting to realize that the scientific and phenomenological investigation of consciousness itself is the next frontier of human evolution. What we saw as peripheral (altered states of consciousness) and what we perceived as the center of our society’s priorities (reductive materialism) are switching places.