Uneasy Riders, Continued

Has the Psychedelic Movement failed?

Is this what we want?

I have this constant, nagging, sad feeling that the psychedelic movement, in its current form, is a failure. For this to make any sense, I realize I must say what I think it would mean for the psychedelic movement to succeed, as I see it. Let me try to get there. What I am going to share today is my personal — admittedly totally biased — perspective on this. But of course, that it is biased and personal doesn’t mean it is not helpful or perhaps even accurate.

The psychedelic movement seems, on the surface, to be a fantastic triumph. Over the last twenty years, interest in these compounds has skyrocketed while a whole “psychedelic ecosystem” of companies, media, academic institutions, and retreats has developed. Despite the legal hurdles, hundreds of companies have entered the field. A few have billion-dollar market camps. New academic departments focused on psychedelics have launched at Harvard, Berkeley, and elsewhere. The substances have been decriminalized in Denver, Portland, and Oakland. The mainstream media, which once mocked and dismissed psychedelics, now covers them, for the most part, positively — often enthusiastically. A coalition of wealthy investors support the psychedelic ecosystem. From being utterly rejected in the 1990s, psychedelics are now wildly glamorized. Despite setbacks, they are being integrated into the mainstream — as I only dreamed might happen, some faraway day, as I wrote Breaking Open the Head.

With the Trump Presidency, psychedelics may soon be deregulated comprehensively. RFK Jr and Elon Musk support this. It fits with a Libertarian agenda (although the Opus Dei contingent may object). In a few years, psychedelics may be openly available, as cannabis is now (with ambiguous results for society).

When I say the psychedelic movement has failed, I admit I am being intentionally provocative.

We might approach it, instead, as a question of stages. Perhaps the psychedelic movement has completed a certain stage in its development. Then we can inquire into what the next stage of the psychedelic movement might be. One current report, The Psychedelic Listening Project (download it here), has tried to do this: They interviewed thinkers and practitioners in the field, including many friends of mine. I have only skimmed this report so far. I plan to read it fully and respond.

One thing I realized about psychedelics a long time ago. It doesn’t actually matter what people say about their trips: How many glamorous deities or entities they meet, how much healing they say they have done, and so on. What matters is how people act, over the long term, after their experiences. Are they kinder, more responsible, more generous, more caring? Do they make wiser decisions for the sake of their community and the Earth as a whole?

I admit I experienced the downside side of this. In retrospect, I realized I over-indulged in psychedelics for years, and this impacted me badly. After my first book came out in 2022, I was proclaimed the “new Timothy Leary” by Stephen Colbert and others. I felt I was supposed to live up to that, somehow. I also ascribed to the tradition of the Romantics. I believed in William Blake’s maxim, “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom; for we never know what is enough until we know what is more than enough;” and Rimbaud: “The poet becomes a seer through a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses.” Blake also wrote: “If the fool persist in his folly he will become wise.” I nurture hope that this has, finally, happened to me. Perhaps I know what is “more than enough.”

My ongoing breakthroughs into other levels of consciousness became jarring and destabilizing. I became more impulsive, quick to anger. At times I behaved poorly, erratically, in my personal life. I now understand I had underlying, undealt-with trauma. This was never addressed, despite many ceremonies.

Years ago, I worked with a Shipibo shaman who told me I had a number of attachments. Over a series of sessions, he and his assistant removed them. I scaled back psychedelic use after that. I think many people — more than admit or even realize it —have been “thrown” or damaged by their trips. I sense there is a “spiritual war” happening, but we lack the conceptual tools to understand it in a deeper way. People intuitively feel it, but they end up embracing over-literalized conspiracy theories, because we lack the conceptual framework to hold a more multi-dimensional understanding.

I am not seeking to make some naive, alarmist, blanket dismissal of psychedelics. They are incredible, revolutionary tools. They transformed my life for the better. I still love them. But reviewing my past, in Alan Watts’ infamous phrase, I discovered that I should have hung up the phone after getting the message — at least for some years. A small number of people lose their minds on psychedelics and end up in psych wards. But the more widespread danger is much subtler. It can’t be quantified or empirically verified: It might be a barely noticeable tinge of dissociation.

Of course, teachers from many different esoteric lineages have warned about the danger of psychedelics. Some say that psychedelics are bad for our subtle bodies: They can damage our subtle energy channels (nadis) or subtle energy centers (chakras). Rudolf Steiner (1865 - 1925) never addressed visionary plants directly, but he would have seen use of them as a dangerous way to trespass into the astral or spiritual worlds abruptly, without sufficient preparation. Steiner tried to define a healthy path for exploring these “super-sensible” worlds. He thought this should be done slowly, using a system of meditation combined with living an exemplary life.

People like myself — from this postmodern desacralized / nihilist culture — start as hard-core skeptics and materialists. We require very strong, overwhelming evidence before we even start to question our beliefs. And even once we’ve started to shift our beliefs and values, it is still a huge leap to believe there could be occult dangers, subtle traps and lures, as various traditions tell us.

For Steiner, what we experience of the subtle or “super-sensible” worlds can only reflect our level of development. If we are immature or mentally ill and we push too hard and fast for occult knowledge, we will encounter distortions that amplify our character flaws. Consider Aleister Crowley, who channeled various ambivalent entities that he believed were gods. These contacts massively inflated his ego. It is not surprising that Crowley as well as Carlos Castaneda — equally imbalanced — became the most celebrated icons of occult knowledge in our postmodern world. Their popularity reveals our culture’s lack of grounding and immaturity when it comes to the esoteric realms.

In the contemporary West, we remain, for the most part, spiritual tourists, esoteric flâneurs. Personally, I have found myself unable to wholeheartedly embrace any spiritual teacher or guru from any other tradition or lineage. But my own tradition and lineage offers me no legitimate or clear path for esoteric development.

I just watched Tukdam: Between Worlds, an incredible documentary which I heartily recommend. Tukdam is a well documented phenomenon in Indo-Tibetan practice. Tukdam happens to a small number of Tibetan monks who have practiced meditation for many decades. These monks die sitting up in the lotus position. Their bodies remain in that position and do not decay for an amount of time that ranges from a few days to several weeks. These monks do not use psychedelic substances. They reach this level of attainment purely through meditative techniques.

It is believed these monks continue to maintain themselves in a state of meditative consciousness even after their breathing and heartbeat have stopped. According to the Buddhist understanding, during Tukdam, the monks enter enlightenment and choose their future incarnation. Modern science has no explanation for this (although some Buddhist monks, in the past, undertook a self-mummification process through extremes in diet, as this article explores).

I have many thoughts about Tukdam that relate to the theme of this essay. I believe it is a legitimate phenomenon that reveals our contemporary science-based perspective on life, death, and transcendence is limited and, basically, wrong. Ian Stevenson’s Where Biology and Reincarnation Intersect, on children who spontaneously recall their past lives, presents excellent evidence for reincarnation. Amit Goswami’s Physics of the Soul provides a hypothesis, within quantum physics, for the existence of an aspect of our being that continues beyond this life.

What Tukdam reveals is, I believe, much more fascinating and crucial for humanity’s evolution than any purely external or technological quest. Billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos fixate on building cities on Mars. Transhumanism seeks to extend our individual ego-based consciousness via physical immortality or by uploading individual consciousness to a Silicon matrix. Yet according to the Buddhist philosophy behind the practice of Tukdam, we have the capacity to anchor “immortality” and “eternity” via the innermost dimensions of consciousness, through disciplined practice and dedication.

At the moment, the psychedelic movement focuses on two main areas: Healing for the individual through psychedelic therapy, and enhancing creativity, self-optimization, often via microdosing. I would propose the ultimate goal of psychedelic research and experiment should be to accelerate humanity’s access to profound esoteric abilities like Tukdam, if we can access them in a healthy and harmonious way.

In The Psychedelic Future of the Mind, Dr Tom Roberts proposes that the future frontier for humanity is not the tedious technological Singularity, but what he calls the “Neuro-singularity:” We can investigate, scientifically and experientially, the vast range of possible “mind-body states.” Many of these mind-body states have “state-specific” knowledge and abilities which we still don’t understand. Joseph Chilton Pierce’s The Crack in the Cosmic Egg explores some of the superhuman capacities that become available to human beings via intensification of their psychic field. This intensification can happen through trauma or in fugue states or flow states. We can apply our contemporary technical acumen to explore the infinite depth dimensions of consciousness, as a phenomenological inquiry.

The problem with the psychedelic movement is linked to the question of the underlying vision for our society: How do we understand the deepest questions of purpose, meaning, and mission?

This is rooted in a society’s ontology: How it understands the nature of reality itself. Our society remains rooted in evidence-based materialism, with a narrow view of scientific inquiry, seeking utilitarian ends. This leads to a focus on accumulation of capital and material wealth for the few, and consumerism plus hyper-individualism for the many. Unfortunately, the psychedelic movement, in this early stage, absorbed this materialist bias, focusing on the tangible value of psychedelics to fulfill certain narrow metrics, like improved mental health or optimization for work.

Next time, let’s explore the question of how we might claw our way back to some civilizational ideal of “the good, the true, and the beautiful” — ideals of courage, character, nobility, and so on — which we have completely forfeited at this point. Based on that, could we redirect the psychedelic movement toward a deeply transcendent, universally beneficial purpose? Could we address the mistakes we made up to this point?