Psychedelics & the Sacred
tl;dr: We are not paying enough attention to what is Sacred in the psychedelic experience So we end up toggling between ecstatic gluttony and a utilitarian approach.
Webdelics just listed me as one of the “Top 100 Thought Leaders” on psychedelics. It is an honor to be named along with some of the people I respect and look up to. Being included among these good people got me reflecting on where this movement is headed. And about how to approach what it is that makes it sacred.
Sacred. That’s the “S” that we are not talking about enough.
This is in part due to the very practical strategic choice. These compounds are illegal. And the best avenue to try and making legal is by using a “therapeutic frame.”
And there is very little room for the sacred when it comes to therapy. But when we don’t consider how to relate to what is Sacred in the psychedelic experience, we can fall into two traps: a utilitarian approach or ecstatic gluttony.
Yes. One of the more important bits of wisdom when it comes to psychedelics is that “set and setting” matter. That they in fact define your experience.
“Set” is your intention, why are you working with this compound?
“Setting” is your context, where are you doing this? What is the space for? Who is holding it? How?
Random weekend in your college dorm is not the best way to get initiated into the medicine ways. Raves and festivals can be magical experiences. And they are the closest many people can get to the experience of collective ritual. But if this was all that was needed for healing and liberation then we would already be free.
This work is not about taking a chemical compound that works like a magic pill. Your set, setting and commitment to integration will completely shape your experience. An experience that has the potential to change and shape your life.
Set, Setting and Sacred
Sacred. That’s the “S” that we are not talking about enough.
Sacred Medicine Ways have been part of human ritual through the millenia. It behooves to pause and consider why it is that our ancestors understood this work as a way to commune with the Mystery.
Today I want to consider two ways in which we are missing the mark on the sacred when it comes to psychedelics. On one end we have an overly “utilitarian” approach. And on the opposite end we have the “ecstatic gluttony” approach.
The Utilitarian Approach
This approach fits within a pattern. It is what happens to technologies like yoga, mindfulness and many therapeutic modalities. We get introduced to ways and practices. These have the potential to completely redefine our experience of reality. But we instead choose to “use” them to make us more “relaxed,” “productive” or “functional.” We narrow the scope of possibility. And we turn towards these practices as a way to become well adjusted to a sick society.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."
- Jiddu Krishnamurti
Jamie Wheal is eloquent on the topic. He writes about it in “Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That’s Lost its Mind.” Here I’m paraphrasing from one of his podcast interviews:
Meditation, through human history, has always been associated directly with the sacred. It is meant to support our inquiry into the nature of mind, consciousness, reality and ethics. But today it has become a way for overstressed office drones to manage working 70 hour weeks and not quit or get sick.
Here in the West, in the 1950s and 60s, from Aldous Huxley through the counter culture movement, psychedelics became tools for consciousness raising and rebellion. For critiquing the existing social structures and dominant paradigms of power.
But today the Psychedelic Renaissance is being co-opted by investments from Big Pharma. We're getting Prozac nation 2.0. We're getting health care and care for anxiety and depression. We’re getting smoking cessation. Not the Eleusidian Mysteries.
How in the hell does this keep happening?
It is our emphasis on the isolated consumer. On individual zoo animals. It's all about me. It's all about now. And I am conditioned to meet and soothe all my needs and fulfill my wildest dreams by buying shit. [Including experience, we buy and commodify the psychedelic experience.]
It is a perversion of all human culture ever.
And of course, if I've been conditioned my whole life to believe “I'm special.” (Main character syndrome is a thing!) I'm the center of my own movie. And now I'm videotaping it online and posting it for the world to see.
Ooof!
And look. I’m all for what psychedelics can do to stem the tide of psychological suffering. If these compounds can get you respite. If they can momentarily get us out of a deep depression. If they help you to breathe outside the grip of anxiety. Or if they create some space between you and your addiction, then I say: go for it. Find the right guide. The right context. And bring the right intention.
But do not be deceived by a false promise.
These medicines can bring you respite. They allow for a pause. And that pause is rich with the potential for transformation. But the transformation will not happen by itself. Transformation is not a product of the journey (the trip). It is not magically produced by the compound. There has to be a passionate commitment to integration. And integration can’t really be done all by one’s lonesome self.
We heal in relationship.
Integration is the ongoing practice of digesting, understanding, and embodying what a psychedelic journey reveals. It involves reflecting on the experience, identifying any teachings or insights, and taking practical, intentional steps to align one’s behavior, relationships, and worldview with what was learned. (More here, if you are interested in experimenting with being part of an Integration Circle.)
So if you are working with psychedelics you also need other tools. Complimentary practices like therapy, somatics, dance, meditation, 12 step groups.
You need a structure for your integration. A community of ongoing support.
Ideally a spiritual community. A connection to ritual and lineage. Some link to ancestral practice. Because these are how we open up to the Sacred. And when we open up to the Sacred we go beyond set and setting. We begin to work with psychedelics within structures that allow for the ineffable. And ineffable is the best way to describe the peak of the sacramental experience.
It is in this intentional engagement with the ineffable, with the Sacred, that we begin to unlock the true promise of psychedelics. We begin to taste and remember that we are part of something vastly greater than our isolated self. That there are other intelligences wanting to guide and support us. That the world is vibrant with aliveness and that it was always a mistake to see the universe as made up of dead matter.
We begin to heal the materialist wound of modernity. And we start to come into right relationship with spirit, with earth, nature, the more than human world.
When we allow these Sacred Medicines to redefine our relationship with reality itself, that’s when we open up to the fullness of their potential. We start to see the role of medicine within a framework. Part of a set of tools that may actually help us find our way towards a sustainable human presence on the planet.
Ecstatic Gluttony
Ecstatic Gluttony is on the opposite pole of the Utilitarian Approach. Where the utilitarian mode dulls the Sacred into a productivity tool, the ecstatic glutton indulges in it in self-deceptive escapism.
A bias towards the ecstatic allows us to be absolutely baffled by the ineffable. It allows us to ride the highs of revelation. And to endure the encounters with fear and the darkness that psychedelics sometimes demand of us.
This can be a good thing.
We know that the ecstatic is Sacred. That the ecstatic is one way to engage and encounter the most Holy. But when we just want more and more of it we are still approaching it as neoliberal consumers. We are commodifying the experience.
Here I go back to a Jamie Wheal:
Since the Aquarian 60’s, we’ve been wasteful in our ways. Guzzling bliss, spilling ecstasy, slopping around in our ooey-gooey feelings-first search for endlessly entitled enlightenment.
Self-absorbed cogs in the neo-liberal consumer machine. Convinced that our own Hungry Ghost consumption in the spiritual marketplace will be enough to save the world.
The current explosion in Instagram festival culture (from Coachella to Burning Man), combined with the “psychedelic renaissance” has basically enabled a fresh generation of indulgence and decadence, all in the name of science and healing.
Treating Aqua Vitae–the mystical Water of Life, as if hard times and drought would never come. As if the Party at the End of Time would never end.
It’s past time we learn to revere the "Water of Life" all the more because of its scarcity. It might be time to sip and not guzzle the bliss that remains accessible to us.
When I first heard Wheal use the term “ontological addiction” I immediately understood he was onto something. I knew he was talking about what I myself had fallen into.
If I can take a compound that helps me see the face of God, then why would I not do so over and over again?
If I found a tool that reliably helps me to fully experience my own wholeness, then why would I not wield it over and over again?
Well…
Because these medicines did not emerge to satisfy my need for consumption. Because there is no faith, process, medicine or practice that is meant to make a life that goes from one peak state to another.
If I’m not learning to experience God in the mundane, if I’m not aiming to see God in your face, and the face of everyone I meet, day to day, then I’m not actually learning how to live. I’m using medicine to take a break. To escape.
The work that these medicines are calling us into. The work that they can prepare us for. Is not work at the top of the mountain. Our work is in the valley. It is in the restoration of lands that seem fallow but actually need our tender care.
There is nothing in this world, no medicine or practice, that can change life and its terms. There is suffering, there is challenge, there is grief. There is no method, technology or tool that changes the fact that:
I am of the nature to grow old; there is no way to escape growing old.
I am of the nature to become ill; there is no way to escape illness
I am of the nature to die; there is no way to escape death.
All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change; there is no way to escape being separated from them.
I inherit the results of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.
(Yes. I come back to these over and over again!)
Faith, medicine, spiritual practice, therapy that is good instead of indulgent, these are designed to help us live with these inescapable terms. Not to move away from them. Which is what we do when we get gluttonous about ecstasy.
We peer through the curtain and remember that reality is much bigger than we’ve been taught. And we begin to change our perspective. The ecstatic experience can be like wind on our sails. We start to learn the way of acceptance, the way of courage, and the way of wisdom. We start to learn how to live right here. With reality as it is.
So we return to reverence. To community. To daily practice and integration. We chop wood and carry water. We do laundry and wash the dishes. We wipe our lenses every day, so we get better at learning to find the divine in the mundane.
The medicine, like the teacher, the old songs and the old stories all point us in this direction. The direction of “being here.”
Fully here.
Turning to one another.
Bowed before the mystery.