Psychedelics and Climate Change

What if there is no "new consciousness" coming?

Last week, I spoke at an event organized by my friend Marissa Feinberg on “Psychedelics and Climate Change.” The event was held at a private club in an old townhouse on West 14th Street that another friend, Will Etundi, has taken over. There were fifteen speakers. Each of us got about five minutes to speak, which is not much time. Usually I don’t get nervous before speaking—I look forward to it—but this time I did. For me, it is much easier to speak for an hour than a few minutes, particularly on a theme that I have thought and written about in depth. When I am nervous and pressed for time during a speech, I end up filling my pauses with a dreadful litany of “you knows,” which makes it unbearable (for me anyway) to listen to afterward. 

I haven’t been so involved in the psychedelic movement recently. I probably should have gone to the last MAPS conference in Denver, where 12,000 people showed up. The psychedelic movement seems to be going through that inevitable process where any new, unforeseen, spontaneous expression of vision or creativity gets simplified and turned into pablum so it can be assimilated into mainstream institutions and corporate structures. For this to happen, all of the rough edges of the once-threatening and difficult thing must be sanded down, its inherent paradoxes and contradictions smoothed over. I find this weird and unsettling to witness. Part of me hopes it backfires. 

Contemporary Western society continues to be locked into a narrow construct of rationality (or, in Herbert Marcuse’s phrase, “irrational rationality”), based on simple binaries. We tend to strip the soul and spirit out of everything we encounter, leaving behind a desiccated husk. We are always in a huge rush to do this — it can’t happen fast enough. If there is any mystery or ambiguity left anywhere, it seems to torment, to haunt, the technocratic rationalist. It might undermine our fervent commitment to scientific absolutism and instrumental control. 

Maria Sabina, the Mazatec shamans who accidentally introduced the mushrooms, her “sacred children,” to the modern world, later regretted it. “From the moment the foreigners came to find God, the sacred children lost their purity,” she said. “They lost their force, one has spoiled them. From now on, they will no longer have an effect. There is nothing one can do about it.” With psychedelics, we find a massive, ongoing effort to unravel their synaptic, neurological effects on the mind and brain.

This is why I deeply appreciate the analytic idealist philosophy of Bernardo Kastrup (as well as other thinkers, such as Jeffrey Kripal, author of The Flip, and Patrick Harpur, who open new spaces in the desert of the rational). Kastrup was a scientist at CERN. He proceeds with disciplined, logical rigor. Yet following his logic, he ends up surmising that the universe is surely an expression of an instinctive, unitary field of consciousness. This consciousness emanates individual humans as temporarily “dissociated alters” within its amazingly elaborate dream-projection.

Understanding this, Kastrup argues we can, once again—as our animist ancestors did and indigenous people still do—approach the world as a system of allegories, laden with meaning. The real things that happen to us in the world are not innately different from symbols we encounter in dreams. They can lead us toward a deeper reality, if we let them.