Psychedelics

As you may have noticed, there has been a recent resurgence in the field of psychedelic science. Why is it that these plant medicines have the power to heal in remarkable ways when so many "conventional" treatments have failed?

This is obviously a complicated topic, but there are a few hints. The first is that healing during a psilocybin ("magic") mushroom trip is strongly correlated with the degree of "mystical experience" that the subject experiences.

Why is that? I appreciate the words of this gentleman who took ayahuasca:

[T]he medicine was saying, “You only need to come here when you forget! Remember that the miracle is the dimension you normally live in. The more you can find the Divine in what you think of as the ordinary world, the less often you need to come back here.”

...

The lesson (of which I’ve had variations in the past) was this: We are welcome to come to this place (the other dimension) when we need reminding, but we must not obsess that the miracle is somehow “over there.” The real miracle is in the physical world we normally inhabit, all around us. The problem is that everything has decayed into a cliché. We look at trees and grass and the Sun and stars and just think, “Oh yeah, same old trees, grass, Sun, stars, etc.” We forget we’re living inside a miracle, and are miracles ourselves. It’s the purview of sages to be fully present, and we fall short.

Ayahuasca reminds us (deeply) of the Great Mystery.

Notice how different this lesson is from the experience of other drugs (including alcohol and marijuana), which send a message more like this:

"Psst... the fun is over here! Keep taking me! Regular life sucks in comparison!"

Of course, psychedelic trips are not always comfortable. One of the other transformative lessons can be a profound empathy. It is one thing to understand in the abstract that we are all fundamentally the same. It is quite another thing to have that sameness shoved in your face:

My most recent mushroom trip (also the largest dose I've ever taken) I became fixated on a news story I had heard that week. About an 8 year old girl from a tribe in the Amazon, who was tied to a tree and burned alive in order to scare her people off their land so it could be logged. I realized that at the moment he did it, whoever lit that gasoline actually felt/thought more or less okay about what he was doing. And my mind was illuminated with dozens of the parallels between that man's malformed, horrific perceptual/behavioral state, and mine. I saw the same mistakes in value attribution, the same willful ignorance of the consequences of my acts and words. And there was nothing I could do to deny the similarity.

The lesson here is that it is foolish to rail against the darkness in others before we've deeply confronted it in ourselves. You are the logger, cutting down the Amazon, destroying anything that stands in your way. When you see this, only then can you understand how to permanently stop him. Otherwise, every time you stop one, another pops up, as if being sucked into the vacuum left behind by the last one; as if being cast into an unfilled role that we are unconsciously creating through our own actions.

If we haven't understood this yet, it's only because we are afraid of looking deep within. It is something that Carl Jung understood well, but that we still have a ways to go before seeing as a species:

[T]he immunity of the nation depends entirely upon the existence of a leading minority immune to the evil and capable of combating the powerful suggestive effect. ... Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is also in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow, he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved problems of our day.