Psychedelic Yin-Yang

I was once a psychedelic advocate. I still am, but I once was, too.

I waved the flag, I carried the torch. And people followed. I spoke with authority on the psychedelic renaissance, the paradigm change.

Then, I realized the paradigm change isn’t really about psychedelics - it’s about connecting to God.

Through a series of difficult experiences, I started to realize the duality of the psychedelic experience. With its revolutionary potential came, too, a unique ability to cataclysmically alter the user, to be abused, to be taken advantage of, to be used for making money, making careers.

That is not to disparage the psychedelic experience as useless or wholly harmful. The careful reader will see that there is a yin-yang - a dark side and a light side.

I sat for a psychedelic session that was very painful for the user. This person left feeling unhealed, and possibly harmed. Later, I heard of friends and colleagues of mine taking psilocybin for a training and not being able to really move through the energy and having a really bad time. Not long after that, I did a high-dose psilocybin session that ripped reality out from under me. I started to hear on podcasts and online about scarring trips that really did not have any value, and read studies about people who just had a bad time and didn’t get anything out of it.

I had a hard time through all of this, trying to make sense of this component of psychedelics that I had previously not paid much attention to. I felt a pain and a sorrow and a confusion - a deep cognitive dissonance at my ignorance of this. In realizing that I really did not understand this component of the bad trip, I started to realize how me being a passionate advocate for the potential psychedelics for mass healing, without recognizing the dark side, could lead some users to potentially harmful situations.

I then started stumbling across stories on Reddit (see #14 for an in-depth review) of casual users having a straight-up bad time. Many of these stories left well-meaning users in a bad way, and they were unable to recover.

At this point, you might be reeling, feeling like I am disparaging psychedelics and painting them in a bad light. That is not what I am doing, nor my intention. I am only examining the whole picture of what it means to provide psychedelics to mass numbers of people (millions!) without an in-depth understanding of them. Unfortunately, due to politics in the West, we have been left unable to fully research and understand psychedelics in all of their various forms.

It is not unheard of, in fact it is quite common, for users to report feeling touched by God, connected to the Divine, to themselves, to nature, under psychedelics. That may be jarring to the reader who is turned off by the cultural baggage now associated with the word God due to the mass religious exploitation of people for centuries. I can understand that.

So, science takes these psychedelics, realizing their potential for healing in terms of outcomes, but doesn’t want to let God into science. Again, understandable, as it would be great for the field of psychology to have the sort-of mechanical rigor of a strong Newtonian mechanics, never needing to fit God into our theories. Funnily, quantum mechanics busted a gaping hole in the Newtonian mechanical worldview that everything that we can ‘see’ comprises everything that exists. Quantum mechanics opened a big door to all sorts of strange and mystical interpretations of physical reality. So, too, do psychedelics challenge our cognitive-behavioral treatment paradigm that seeks to get under-the-hood of the mind and literally shift around thoughts like cogs-in-a-machine and uses behaviorist principles to alter behavior via reward and punishment, as if we are lab rats.

I cannot claim to understand psychedelics, really. None of us can. I took a course on psychedelic neuroscience, which was excellent, and I learned a lot. My take away? There’s still so much we don’t know. Most of what we do know about neuroscience, and about psychedelic neuroscience, is based on animal models. We do have neuroimaging studies that can show us what activity is happening in the brain under the psychedelic experience, which is quite fascinating. What does that tell us, though? Unfortunately, we don’t have any causality or directionality. We cannot say: I take a psychedelic, these changes happen in my brain, and then my depression goes away. Instead, it’s: When I take a psychedelic, I have this experience where ‘strange’, not wholly describable things occur, which are reflected in certain brain activity, suggesting what is happening in the hard-to-describe activity to lead to change. That still leaves us asking what is ‘causing’ the experience to occur.

It is my belief that connection to God is personal. It is a relationship to the Divine, a connection that is fostered. When you close your mind to the possibility of divine connection, you do not allow the experiences that would affirm that reality to occur. When you open your mind to God and His existence, life starts to change, and strange experiences occur - a person enters your life at just the right time, you pick up just the book you needed. As a bee finds a flower, you are connected to what you need to grow in the most authentic way possible.

For me, connection to God can often times feel like a sharp blade, doing surgery on myself. I have to question my intentions, what I am compelled to do - to examine my shadow side and live according to the principle of Truth which I prescribe to. It is an active relationship that requires giving and taking.

I believe that individuals who understand this connection to God, and who seek to really understand the Psychedelic experience, and are dedicated to healing can facilitate the right psychedelic space. This requires a deep questioning of one’s intentions in giving the psychedelics, and a deep moral commitment to help the other person in your care. I worry what happens when we take this element out of psychedelics, as it is critical. If people are reporting a connection to God under psychedelics, is it not also important that people holding space share that same commitment?

For clarity, I am not talking about a traditional Judeo-Christian God. I am talking about God of your own understanding. God, to me, is what sits at the very top of the hierarchy of Good when we consider the co-existent realities of Good and Evil, and the hierarchies that are associated with them. God is the animate spirit that lives in all who choose to accept God into their hearts, and, even those that don’t use that language, but are dedicated to making the world a better place, to me, believe in God, because they act in a way that moves toward the hierarchy of Good, and consciously away from Evil.

This may be my most controversial post yet, but perhaps the most important. I realized, in sparking controversy over cannabis, that people were feeling defensive because there is an element of truth to what I was saying that was attacking their belief systems, and it was easier to shut it out with an ideology that doesn’t allow for any nuance in belief. This is important to take into consideration.

Take care.