We are Experiencing a Mass Reawakening of Consciousness

In the 1960s and 70s, there was a psychedelic revolution. The availability of drugs like LSD lead people to wake up to the issues with the way that society was set up. A cultural revolution was born in San Francisco, when Owsley Stanley set up the first major underground LSD factory.

It is hard to package and bottle up the ideas that were experienced leading up the 1960s counterculture era. The recognition of cold war interrogation and abuse in psychiatric institutions are just a couple of notable examples of increasing lack of trust in the institutions we exist in.

Indeed, rising tensions lead to restrictive, prohibitionist policies. What were the true motivations for such policies, though? One of Nixon’s top advisors was quoted saying:

“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

An increasing divisiveness between so-called ‘hippies’ and the United States government lead to figures like Timothy Leary speaking out, as a figure of authority, against governmental top-down control:

“Think for yourself and question authority.” - Timothy Leary

Now, I am not on expert on what happened 30-years before I was born, and I am not a Timothy Leary advocate either, but what is clear to me is that people were starting to wake up to the problems of society and take their consciousness into their own hands. To that end, LSD was a tool, and expression through music was a vehicle for conscious growth.

Now, in 2023, psychedelics are having their day once again, but in a very different way and in a very different context. Indeed, Psychedelic Support has a database of 1,429 psychedelic clinical trials. Additionally, through Oregon’s measure 109, and Colorado’s proposition 122, psilocybin is becoming available to use in regulated contexts. In fact, in Colorado, it is now legal to take psilocybin in your own home, to gift it to others, to grow it, and to drive with it. You can even charge people for ‘harm-reduction’ services, or ‘trip sitting’ services under the decriminalization arm of the bill.

THIS PROVISION DOES NOT PRECLUDE THE DONATION OF NATURAL MEDICINE BY A PERSON TWENTY-ONE YEARS OF AGE OR OLDER, PAYMENT FOR BONA FIDE HARM REDUCTION SERVICES, BONA FIDE THERAPY SERVICES, OR OTHER BONA FIDE SUPPORT SERVICES, MAINTAINING PERSONAL OR PROFESSIONAL WEBSITES RELATED TO NATURAL MEDICINE SERVICES, DISSEMINATION OF EDUCATIONAL MATERIALS RELATED TO NATURAL MEDICINE, OR LIMIT THE ABILITY OF A HEALING CENTER TO DONATE NATURAL MEDICINE OR PROVIDE NATURAL MEDICINE AT REDUCED COST CONSISTENT WITH DEPARTMENT RULES.

Psychedelics like psilocybin mushrooms are also becoming available through religious freedom. Churches like Psanctuary offer psilocybin as a sacred sacrament, under the belief that this communion brings us closer to God.

We also now have authors like Michael Pollan, previously a prolific food-writer and journalist, publishing books like, ‘How to Change Your Mind,’ a popular book on psychedelic history and clinical use, as well as personal use.

Now, what do the psychedelics actually do?

It is my belief that psychedelics act as a tool to shift our perception and understanding of life - both personal, as our internal experience, and global, as metaphysical understanding of the world. Psychedelics lift the veil of our perceptual reality, allowing us to see the world as it really exist. They allow whole-brain communication, quieting down our ‘default-mode network’, associated with the ego, and enhancing communication in areas of the brain that don’t normally ‘talk’ to each other.

We are still uncovering the ‘under the hood’ mechanistic understanding of psychedelic experience, which is fundamentally very confusing and hard to parse out (See: Girn et al., 2023).

My decade of personal use, as well as two major life altering experiences on LSD, has given me a personal understanding of this medicine. Perhaps what is most confusing to me is how it seems that it is not only that the way in which I perceive the external stimuli changes, but that the external stimuli itself changes how it interacts with me. Carl Jung popularized the concept of synchronicity, “to describe circumstances that appear meaningfully related yet lack a causal connection."

I have seen a heavy surge of synchronicities in my daily life, but the psychedelic experiences I’ve had are especially synchronicity-laden. As in: it appears that the experience that I’m getting was all set-up to occur in this specific way to show me this specific thing, so that I might learn this essential lesson that I need to learn.

Now, not all of my psychedelic experiences are like that - and not all of psychedelic experiences that exist are like that. It is possible to have a ‘trip’, that is very difficult and uncomfortable without any meaningful content or ‘take home message’.

We would all be wise to recognize that psychedelics are not a panacea, nor a magic bullet. It is my belief that they are the catalyst to change. We often see people ‘stuck’ in a state of maladaptive consciousness given a new insight on their situations that leads them to realize that they need to change. It may also allow us a different perspective on our work and what we are contributing to the world. Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, was quoted saying:

Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important—creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.

What, then, do we do, when we receive a profound experience, magical and mystical, and then return to our day-to-day life? To me, when I have seen Truth (yes, with a capital T) on psychedelics, I immediately knew that I needed to make changes in my life. If I knew the Truth, and I wanted to go on living the lie, I would have to do so with full conscious awareness of lying to myself. I now seek to live my life in near-perfect alignment with Truth, and I know how to recognize it when it arises.

It is my hope that this new revolution of psychedelic experience will allow people to see their own Truth, and that they will then do the work to integrate that into their life and make changes. I think that this will lead to another psychedelic revolution. Our understanding of the reality of our situation through information sharing is waking us up to the problems we face. Our former president has now been indicted on 34-felonies. Jeffery Epstein consorted with high-profile individuals to run a child sex-trafficking ring. Systemic racism is baked into our institutions following centuries of slavery and abuse. Heart disease is the top cause of death in the United States, and 42.4% of adults in the US have obesity.

We need to wake up to the reality of the brokenness of our systems. We need to learn to treat people as primary, not profit. We need humans all over the world to take their consciousness seriously, and work to make themselves healthy and aware of all of the issues that we face. If we don’t wake up to the problems and make a concerted effort to bring consciousness into the world, we will remain unconscious, and continue to be taken advantage of by bad actors. Corporations will continue to feed us their crap - we’ll continue to eat McDonalds, to drink alcohol, to consume vast quantities of sugar. And our consciousness will suffer for it - we’ll remain glued to the couch, spending money, never questioning authority, and be stuck in a cycle of feeding our money and energy to rich moguls.

And, so, I ask you: Will you be a part of the revolution of consciousness? How will you contribute? Leave your thoughts below!