Uneasy Riders: Part One

Do Psychedelics Erode the Boundary between the Physical and Psychic Worlds?

A three-headed Rakshasa: “The spiritually repressed or unrecognized reality of our condition is unconsciously being precipitated into our world in the societal form of technology, but in the psychological mode of the demonic.” - W.I. Thompson

I feel slightly apologetic that I have been so focused on political content over the last month. Soon I will start a second stream of this newsletter for purely creative explorations: I hope you will join me there as well.

Right now, I am finding the dire shift toward despotism — a new, hopefully brief, octave in American life — strangely invigorating, weirdly inspiring. I sense a new build-up of creative force inside me. It feels volcanic. Perhaps you feel the same?

What follows, today, is a thought experiment: A lightly held hypothesis. I propose there is an intrinsic relationship between the current geopolitical state of the world — the breaking apart of “consensus reality,” the decay of sense-making, the collective surrender to a bizarre, chaotic despotism — and the psychedelic movement of the last twenty years, which has, unwittingly, eroded the boundary between the psychic and the physical, leading to a leakage of demonic forces and energies.

My first books were sincere contributions to the psychedelic movement. I believed the recovery of the visionary, psychedelic experience by the contemporary world was the great hope for our future. Now, I am recalibrating and reflecting. Yes, psychedelics are very powerful tools. Like all tools, they can be used constructively or destructively. The problem is that we lack the conceptual register and knowledge base for grappling with their subtler negative impacts.

“Something” has gone off with today’s psychedelic movement, just as something has gone wrong with the world. I feel the two are connected. Instead of helping people make better sense of their lives and our shared reality, excess psychedelic use seems to be contributing to breakdown and disorientation. We know psychedelic use can exacerbate individual confusion and paranoia. They can make people feel certain about things that may not be true — conspiracies, political delusions, or anti-science paranoia — where they lack evidence. Psychedelics can intensify the solipsism and alienation we feel around us, encroaching on us.

I realize many people still find great personal benefit in taking psychedelics, particularly when they first explore them. My concern is the cumulative effects — the psychic effect of the mass, unprotected use of psychedelics — and how this is impacting or deforming society as a whole. I think of people like Joe Rogan, Aubrey Marcus, Elon Musk, the Austin-based “tech bro” culture, and the Burners who gravitated to RFK and Trump in large numbers.