Embracing the Ethical Demands of Psychedelic Medicines

We have come to a place at which we can begin making some helpful suggestions about how to skillfully embrace the fuller ethical demands of working with the medicines of our world—any of them, including psychedelic medicines. We can’t do more than make the barest sketch of a few suggestions. We need to move toward more dialogue and more conscientious and comprehensive education.?

We have considered Jung’s warning about the “moral burden” that may come with these medicines, especially in relation to two aspects of our situation: First that largely unconscious patterns direct us to relating with psychedelic and other medicines in a personal manner, and second that the dominant culture adds to this a set of largely unconscious patterns in relation to values and ethics.?

The first issue leads us to reify a non-existent barrier between the personal and the impersonal, individual and collective. The second issue leads us to oversimplify our ethical ideas and practices. Taken together, we find ourselves in a situation in which we may work with the medicines of the world in ways that limit their healing potential and even end up deepening some of our most significant individual, collective, and planetary challenges.?

Let’s return to the letter from Jung that initiated these contemplations. In his letter to Father Victor White, Jung brings his reflections on psychedelics to a close like so:?

“I should indeed be obliged to you if you could let me see the material they get with LSD. It is quite awful that the alienists have caught hold of a new poison to play with, without the faintest knowledge or feeling of responsibility. It is just as if a surgeon had never learned further than to cut open his patient’s belly and to leave things there. When one gets to know unconscious contents one should know how to deal with them. I can only hope that the doctors will feed themselves thoroughly with mescalin, the alkaloid of divine grace, so that they learn for themselves its marvellous effect. You have not finished with the conscious side yet. Why should you expect more from the unconscious? For 35 years I have known enough of the collective unconscious and my whole effort is concentrated upon preparing the ways and means to deal with it.”

Some strong language there, and quite an image: A surgeon cutting open our soft belly, and then leaving us, wide open like that. Some of you may have heard of exactly this kind of experience in relation to psychedelics, or may have gone through this yourself. Contemporary psychedelic work vindicates Jung’s concerns.?

However, we also find some potential encouragement in these closing thoughts. Because of his passionate engagement and vast experience Jung himself might serve as a very supportive helper. He remains understudied, and underappreciated.?

Of course, he might caution us to avoid thinking we can study his writings and consider ourselves prepared for working with psychedelic medicines. In any case, even doing that kind of intellectual work would prove no small feat, since his collected writings, talks, letters, and interviews total thousands of pages. That alone stands out as a powerful statement about the vastness of the psyche (as well as Jung’s commitment to the psyche), and we can add to it hundreds of thousands of pages of guidance from the master psychonauts of the wisdom traditions (to say nothing of the countless hours of personal, verbal instruction from such teachers that never made it to paper).?

Here, we emphasize again the faults of the culture, the ecology of ignorance where so many of us find ourselves rooted. We have no blame here for those experiencing trauma and other forms of suffering, and we need sensitivity to their struggle, as well as deep respect for the healing some people have experienced.?

In his warning about psychedelics, Jung seems to say, “If you work with these medicines, they may deliver unto you a moral burden you cannot now imagine, and for which you likely have no optimal preparation.” We can perhaps do what we need to do in order to accept the burden ahead of time.?

Rather than working with the medicines, and waiting for the moral burden to reveal itself—then, either trying to face it as it emerges, or unconsciously repressing it—we can start preparing for and actively embracing an expanded ethical sensibility before we approach the medicines in the first place. We find a growing number of people trying to do that, but we then need to recall the larger context, and its profound ignorance.?

The context of the dominant culture—and that includes everyone and everything touched by it—makes it so that our actual practice doesn’t necessarily accord with such an ideal approach, despite our best intentions. We can—even if unconsciously—approach these medicines as if we will “take” the medicine, and it will heal or shift something.?

In many, many cases, this actually happens. It thus quite naturally becomes the default unconscious attitude. It often becomes the default conscious attitude too, but its unconscious aspect makes it subtle and hard to perceive, and even more challenging to shift in some cases.?

A wisdom-based approach—as we might find in a healthy Indigenous culture, or as the likes of Socrates and Plato might have wished for their fellow citizens in what was a significantly psychedelically-enriched culture—a wisdom-based approach would invite us to see that working with such medicines implicitly includes knocking at the door of the great mystery itself, approaching Sophia’s inner sanctum, venturing into foreign landscapes of the psyche, passing through the gateless gate of the Cosmos.?

Working with these medicines puts us in touch with the primal magic of our living, loving world, and veering away from the sacred (a veering that often begins with, or at least includes, proceeding without the support of a holistic philosophy of life) comes with greater risks than we may yet understand. We see easily-identified examples all around us, from disturbing stories about the official MDMA trials to the patenting of a form of psylocibin by Compass Pathways.?

Both of these examples should shock us all into a greater sense of compassion, care, and sacredness—and I mean shock. The patent application from Compass seems patently absurd (pun intended), and the ethical breeches in some of the official psychedelic research, as well as in more casual yet still power-inflected usage, seems outrageous and tragic.?

All of the medicines of the world—just like all of the teachings of the wisdom traditions—come with a demand ahead of time for us to commit ourselves to a holistic, and thus ethical, way of life, a passionate practice of our finest philosophies of living and loving, through which we cultivate the skills we need in order to fulfill our highest potentials and cultivate the whole of life onward. How do we work with these medicines within a common ground of wisdom, love, and beauty??

We could do a lot of things, all of which I would prescribe for anyone at all, and would only add emphasis to such a recommendation in the case of some of the more powerful medicines of our world. To begin with, should start expecting individuals and organizations working with these medicines to make some level of commitment to practicing a holistic philosophy of life, which includes studying and training in the nature of mind and the mind of Nature. It requires spiritual and ecological awareness, seen as interwoven.?

We need an understanding of how to arrive at more skillful experience, better ways of knowing and being, living and loving. This includes a realistic sense of the sacred, including the presence of the sacred in our way of knowing self and world (the technical term for this: an epistemology of the sacred, or a scared epistemology).?

Jung would concur about the need for functional preliminaries—serious, engaged groundwork that unfolds before we approach Sophia’s sanctum sanctorum via any of the medicines of our world. In a letter to D. Cappon, a former professor of psychiatry, he wrote, “There is no point in trying to make a patient understand archetypal material as long as he has not yet gained some insight into his personal complexes, and particularly into the nature of his shadow.” This bears on how one might more skillfully approach psychedelic medicines, which can unleash archetypal material—including projections onto facilitators or others engaging with the medicines along with us, which can increase the chances of inappropriate or doomed relationships.?

But we needn’t become Jungians. In fact, though incredibly helpful and worthy of careful study, Jungian psychology doesn’t suffice all by itself as a preparation for working with the medicines of our world. We instead need to find a venerable tradition and some competent teachers who have done more than take psychedelics and read self-help books.?

We need genuine refuge in order to work optimally with the medicines of our world. That includes refuge in a lineage of exceptional teachers, refuge in a community of spiritual friends (as well as in the community of life as a whole), and refuge in reality itself, and teachings that put us in attunement with that reality. We could crystalize that as Gary Snyder has: We need genuine refuge in teachers, friends, and the wild.?

We cannot overstate the importance of all three. Too many people lack a community that has an ongoing presence in their lives. Meeting once a month to drink medicine together isn’t enough. We need consistent contact with spiritual friends who have practiced compassion and know how to presence it for us, and we need consistent contact with teachers of significant realization.?

A good teacher and a healthy community of real friends will practice with the medicines of the world in such a way as to embrace the fact that ethics, wisdom, and contemplative practice go totally together. We always need to move from and toward wholeness, as far as possible.?

To speak more narrowly about the ethical (our focus in the present contemplation), we could perhaps begin to expect individuals and organizations working with these medicines to make some level of commitment to doing so in accord with the Earth Charter, the Five Mindfulness Trainings as developed by Thich Nhat Hanh, and formal compassion training. These three go well together, and we should aim to work with them in a manner that accords with the spirit of wholeness expressed above (i.e., they are not sufficient in themselves, or even taken together, but require a holistic ecology of philosophical study and practice).?

The Earth Charter stands out as a unique and unprecedented civil society document. Drafting the Earth Charter involved an inspiring and lengthy civil society process which unfolded over several years. It included sustained discussion and debate among, and input from, dominant culture scientists and academics, Indigenous peoples, religious and spiritual leaders, philosophers, advocates for justice, political leaders, and other global citizens.?

Indigenous participation matters for a variety of reasons, not least of which that the non-Indigenous cultures of the world may have a deep history with psychedelic medicines, but in most cases that has become degraded or functionally lost. Many Indigenous peoples enjoy more intimacy with the medicines of our world, and can help us recover our own ancestral wisdom.?

Moreover (and related), Indigenous peoples, though estimated to comprise roughly 5% of the global population, care for and protect 80% of the biodiversity of our world. We might suggest that psychedelic medicines will only reach their fullest potential as we allow them to help us all reindigenize (i.e., create a culture functionally attuned to the wild—for wisdom and wildness are not two things, and we must end the segregation between wildness and “civilization”). The Earth Charter can empower dialogue and practices in that direction.?

It makes little sense to try and invent a values framework from scratch when so much passionate effort went into creating a values framework that met with such broad acceptance. Why not at least begin with careful study, dialogue, and reflection on a common ground of values??

We cannot most effectively engage in that kind of reflection without learning more about the nature of values. That includes thinking about the way our highest values tend to overlap with the highest values of others, and how our values get manipulated by the pattern of insanity that has the whole community of life in its grips. We cannot arrive at the realization of our values without wisdom, discernment, and significant insight. That requires ongoing holistic education.?

Values and ethics don’t entirely overlap. We can think of values as what we hold most precious, what we think life is really all about, what we most sincerely wish to live for. We tend to most revere values we think of as somehow part of reality itself.?

Ethics in some sense has to do with how we take care of what matters most, how we live in attunement with reality. In other words, ethics has to do with the practice and realization of our values (which makes it quite clear why we cannot have an ethical version of capitalism). Ethics requires a holistic practice, integrating wisdom, love, and beauty. That means ethics demands reflection on the wisdom encoded in ethical guidance, it requires some semblance of compassion, and it requires a clarity of mind we associate with meditation.?

Thich Nhat Hanh brilliantly integrates wisdom, compassion, and the practice of a radiant mind by framing the basic, common ground ethical precepts as mindfulness trainings. Training with these precepts includes cultivating discernment, not merely memorizing a narrow ethical duty. Rather, such a practice opens the mind, expanding our horizon of understanding, and even inviting us into wonderstanding. As a practice of mindfulness, it also clarifies the quality of mind we bring to ethical thinking, speaking, and activity.?

One of the ways we narrow ethics relates to fancying that we can do the right thing with any old mental state at all. But, in addition to our level of wisdom, ethics goes together with the quality of our being. All told, a fully present, mindfully aware truth-telling carries more ethical potency than a begrudging, distracted, half-hearted truth-telling. Seen from one perspective, the same “truth” may get told. But quality of being makes a profound, if sometime subtle, difference.?

(Most of us have experienced this when someone has refused to accept our apology because they felt we didn’t really mean it. How we say, think, or do anything affects the meaning of the activity.)?

Inclusiveness stands out here again. We must emphasize again and again the need to cultivate a common ground of wisdom, love, and beauty. We may differ in countless ways on our understanding of life and our way of living it. Nevertheless, if we cannot find a common ground, the world as we know it cannot continue.?

Thich Nhat Hanh stands out as an exceptional figure in terms of the spirit of common ground. He had Christian monastics as students, as well as students who identified as Muslim, Jewish, atheist, and so on. He has presented the Five Mindfulness Trainings in ways that resonate with a wide audience, all of whom can recognize the wisdom we can activate by means of the training, and also recognize the essence of that wisdom in all the venerable cultural traditions of the world.?

The principles of the Earth Charter accord with the Five Mindfulness Trainings, which in turn accord with the principles of compassion training. The latter two have been verified by empirical science for their efficacy in improving our lives. I myself have taught compassion practice to veterans with PTSD—not as a “treatment,” but as part of philosophical education—and had them report that, with all the things the VA or their therapists had offered, compassion became the first experience of real healing where nothing else had worked.?

Compassion training goes beyond a simplistic practice. Rather, it accords with the basic ethos advocated by the wisdom traditions: A holistic training of heart, mind, body, and world. We have to study, learn, seek teachers and teachings, and engage in ongoing practice in order to realize genuine skill and poise when it comes to compassion and similar qualities of being. Wisdom, love (including compassion), and beauty come fully and inextricably interwoven.?

How much training and preparation do we need before meeting a reasonable ethical obligation for working with the medicines of our world? That depends on many factors, and for some of us it may take more time than our ego wants to face up to. It may also depend on how far we want to go with these medicines. We don’t all have to do everything in this particular lifetime. It’s not for every single one of us to become world-turning sages this time around. It may be possible for each of us, but highly unlikely for all of us.?

Each of us can reflect deeply—in solitude and in genuine community and dialogue—about what we’re willing to do in order to arrive at our fuller potentials. It can seem like a lot to get on an airplane and fly to South America. However, it’s not a lot in comparison to the kind of life lived by a traditional shaman in the cultures we visit on such a trip, or the life lived by people such as Buddha, Jesus, Milarepa, Rumi, and so on. These beings engaged in a great deal more profound study and practice than most of us, and even some of the lesser sages of the world spent many, many years engaged in demanding practices of heart, mind, body, and world, all nested in a holistic ecology of wisdom, love, and beauty.?

We may not have a very good sense of this if we have grown up within, or even affected by, the dominant culture. The culture can give us a distorted picture of what counts as truly skillful effort and truly profound accomplishment, and we can thus imagine that we have put out a lot more passionate energy and engagement, and realized a great deal more, than we actually have—as evaluated by people who have arrived at a lot more spiritual achievement than we ourselves have or are likely to realize in this life. Just recognizing this, just allowing more humility and not-knowing, can help us shift our practice.?

This has nothing to do with making everything hard or impossible, or ignoring the tremendous relief experienced by so many people who have worked with the medicines of our world. It just means we may have confused notions about both what is possible—and what is required if we want to minimize unexpected negative consequences. The Cosmos has its own imperatives and its own ontological obligations (obligations to the very beingness of the Cosmos) that it expects from us.?

If we put in skillful and passionate effort, any of us can have access to profound realization. But we need a realistic view of what might be possible and what that possible may demand. Too few of us have a clear sense of this. We don’t have much exposure to people who have put in years and years doing intense and dedicated work, under highly auspicious circumstances, maybe even after may have been recognized as spiritual prodigies at a very young age, and then being tutored, starting early on, in a holistic system of practice, embedded in a vibrant spiritual ecology.?

If we met someone who had been recognized as a musical prodigy at age 5, and who then went to the finest instructors, and eventually through Juilliard, we wouldn’t think we could achieve their level of skill by starting fresh, with little understanding of music, at age 25 or 30. Sure, we might have some chance at catching up to some degree. But not in a week or even a year.?

We may live for many years feeling basically uncomfortable in our own skin, and more or less unhappy and unfulfilled, both because of the nature of our culture as well as the nature of human experience. The dominant culture in particular reliably produces stress, strain, trauma, anxiety, and depression. So, we become quite encumbered.?

Then we hop on a plane, and it can feel like a significant adventure, which seems to grant us radical relief. We may think we have experienced a complete revolution in our being—and in some sense perhaps we have. But we still may need far more humility than we realize, since we almost surely lack the same depth of insight as the great sages of the world.?

Our culture doesn’t resource us to skillfully understand and thus contextualize such experiences in a broader vision of human potential. It then becomes easy to assume we have gotten much further in our spiritual development than we have, and it can become far easier ignore and even repress the kinds of things Jung wants us to recon with. Things get stirred up in the soul which we lack the training to work with. Our intense experiences are not themselves a training.?

In a healthier context, in a healthier ecology, we would grow up rooted in a holistic and Cosmic vision, a vision of the nature of reality, the nature of human beings, the nature of mind, the nature of Nature. This would include an explicit and implicit education for taking on the moral burden Jung invites us to appreciate in his warning about psychedelics.?

In the dominant culture, we might think that spending 2 or 3 months constitutes significant training and experience. Some others might classify 2 or 3 years as significant training. In contrast, many wisdom traditions might see 20 years as a minimum for being qualified to go out and teach anything, even the basics. And at 20 years, a person might not gain recognition as a sage, but only as a teacher.?

Zhaozhou is revered by some as the greatest Zen Master of the Tang dynasty. He ordained young, and then trained under another revered master, Nanquan. The latter eventually recognized Zhaozhou as a sage, but Zhaozhou remained with his teacher, continuing to study and practice as a student. After Nanquan died, Zhaozhou still refrained from becoming a teacher. Instead, he spent almost two decades travelling around the country to study with other teachers and interacting with lay people. Finally, at the age of 80, he established a monastery and began teaching. His recorded sayings and teachings survive to the present day.?

That doesn’t mean we need decades of education and practice in order to work with psychedelic medicines. Again, this doesn’t mean making these medicines unattainable. It just means we need as broad a vision and as deep a humility as we can muster. And the wisdom traditions of the world can offer significant help on all counts, including offering ideas and practices that can equip us to take on the ethical demands these powerful medicines may entail—ethical demands the sacred itself expects us to meet.?

It’s quite encouraging that psychedelics can evoke so many positive currents in the soul. For instance, these medicines often evoke an ecological sensitivity and a feeling of connectedness with Nature. And that only reminds us of our responsibility here, because these medicines don’t tend to reveal detailed instructions on how to skillfully respond to that feeling of connectedness to Nature. How do we honor it?

As a philosopher, people come to me all the time precisely because they feel a profound love for and connectedness to Nature (and/or to the arts, their family, their calling). And they recognize a need for an education that can further open, deepen, broaden, and empower that love and connectedness. If we start the education before people work with the medicines, we can provide a much more effective support.?

At bottom, we can say psychedelics activate our sense of wonder. But wonder has always been the entrance to philosophy. The wisdom traditions show us how to turn that wonder into the very path we can follow to arrive at the mutual healing of self and world. We live in a participatory Cosmos, and we need to learn a more skillful participation.?

The community of life depends on us. Now is the time for us to learn how to creatively and collaboratively cultivate the whole of life onward, for the benefit of all.