“The causes of the crisis are political, economic, legal and cultural systemic issues but underneath that are issues of human trauma, powerlessness, scarcity and separation. The system resides within us and the psychedelic medicines are opportunities to help us shift our consciousness,”
- Gail Bradbrook, co-Founder of Extinction Rebellion
“Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.”
Looking around the world today, many of us would likely agree that the kind of culture we’ve adopted in the so-called “developed” world has been a failure on its own terms. Where we are supposed to see “progress”, we see instead a society which is in may ways hyper-consumptive, aggressively militaristic, routinely bigoted and oppressive, and roundly intolerant of differing worldviews. As a society, our highest values appear to have become material wealth and status, though we spend great amounts of time paying lip service to abstractions like “enlightenment values” and “democratic ideals”. We are also more depressed, more anxious, more fearful, suicidal, psychotic, and generally psychologically unwell than at any other point in history, despite apparent advances in our understanding of the mind. Our sciences have been routinely used against us, turned into powerful engines for programs of environmental destruction and the creation of illegitimate theories of race, identity, psychology and false images of mankind. We think of ourselves as “economic actors”, “rational actors”; all the while ignoring the very real and very human, irrational, and un-economic traits we all display on a day to day basis.
This kind of a cultural environment runs on delusion and illusion, lending itself to forms of narcissistic self-justification and grandiose mythologies of exceptionalism on the part of the individual, the corporation, the nation, the faith, the party; and so on. The basic assumptions of the Christian universe; that man is the head of nature and therefore its owner, have not been unseated by scientific advancement; in many ways they have been codified into a more powerful set of assumptions and propagated into such developments as the atomic bomb, chemical warfare, mass deforestation, industrial fishing and the extraction of mineral resources.
Similarly, the Christian terror of apocalypse and the associated flight out of the world of matter and into the realms of the high heavens has snuck its way into the tech-no-logic century under the guise of Futurism; it’s proponents singing the hymnals of the transcendence of this dense world of sinful material and the emergence of the human spirit into realms of light and bliss. These grandiose narratives are constructed under a naivety of self-reflection, an incapacity and a boorish unwillingness to see the inhumanity and the selfishness that lurks at the foundations of these now top heavy and wobbling ideals and programs.
Our culture relies on people staying within their lanes, so to speak; on normal individuals going about business as usual and questioning only that which it is suggested for them to question. The whole edifice of control and abuse upon which the palaces of the oligarchs are built runs on arbitrarily defined boundaries. Without these artificial prisons of gender, race, class, faith, ideology and so on, we are faced with the uncomfortable yet empowering fact that we are all basically akin, human; and responsible for not only the present moment and our own affairs but also the vast future into which we travel. None of us fully knows what’s going on here. We are part of some astounding mystery that beggars all belief, an unfolding of cosmic harmony, dissonance, and shifting patterns of unimaginable proportions; a great and beautiful dream.
The experience presented by the psychedelics, and why they may be our best hope to overcome our present woes, is one that dissolves arbitrarily defined boundaries and brings us into direct contact with this mystery. Deeply conditioned modes of behaviour and thought fall away, the mind becomes vibrant and lucid, and one is transported out of the familiar and into the realms of the mystical, the unknown, the terrifyingly beautiful, the ancient and the yet-to-come.
Our basic justifications for our ways of doing things, for our ideas about the nature of reality and so on, all fall down under even the most basic examination from a psychedelic perspective. Nothing is as it seems, and nothing is self-evidently justified. The idea of “normality” is seen as an elaborate fiction, placed into the minds of children for the purposes of convenience and control; to make the usually unpredictable human predictable, so that they may be ordered and set to task by self-appointed masters of mankind who believe their lofty aims to be adequate justification for enslavement and murder.
What floats to the surface of consciousness in this destruction of the dominant cultural narrative are values that stretch back into prehistory and millennia into the future, values which honor and raise humanity, nature, and life. We see ourselves, when we have taken off the lead blanket of culture, identity, the normal and the known; as fundamentally related to and perhaps made of love, as participants in a great and mysterious experience of growth and change, as co-creators with the intelligence of the universe. We come to know ourselves as the inheritors of billions of years of evolutionary successes, as the unspeakably strange experiencers of the here-and-now. We see the perfection and the preciousness of our consciousness, our form, our body, and this universe, this world and its nature. We feel deeply and intimately responsible and connected to this life, and filled with a newfound respect and warmth towards all living beings and that from which they emerge.
Traveling through alien vistas of light and magic, where language builds boats to take one across the river of the stars, the notion of subjection of one’s thoughts and affairs to another human primate becomes immediately and laughably absurd. It is seen for what it is: a hoax, a shell-game, a dirty trick! In the embrace of such incomprehensible beauty, in direct contact with their heart of hearts and in touch with the totality of all being, what being would choose slavery?
And in that, we discover why the suppression of this explosive experience has been the prerogative of governments and organizations of every sort, from so-called scientific institutes to the Catholic church, from Islamic theocracies to First-World secular democracies. Anyone with a vested interest in the earthly power game has some rap about how these things turn you insane, or make you an immoral person, or give you brain injuries or chromosomal defects. Of course, a good portion of these people abuse children and finance resource wars, so to be frank and short; we owe it to ourselves to disregard their opinion on the matter. We do not need to take advice on the nature of our own minds from the ethically bankrupt purveyors of deathtraps. Flies ought not pay heed to tales spun by spiders.
This worldwide culture of psychedelic suppression should tell you something else rather obvious about the psychedelic experience: it’s real. It works. It’s not a hoax. It’s not an ideology, or a theory, or a religious narrative. There’s no giant leap of faith to make, no convenient foundational myth you need to swallow before it makes sense to you, no dear leader to pledge allegiance to: all that is required is that you ingest enough of the material to elicit the effect, and then pay attention. In this sense then, the psychedelic experience stands alone, above and away from our other efforts and enterprises to come to the nature of reality, to see ourselves, to find the mind or the self, or to understand the meaning of life. It is not abstract, symbolic, or coercive as are most of our other systems and myths, science included. It is direct, first-hand, and experiential. It requires curiosity and courage; an open mind and an open heart. And when people open to that experience, many of them discover gifts of strength, resilience, love and wisdom that they barely suspected were within them.
Through this process of boundary dissolution, the psychedelics clear away the dead wood of our bad habits and allow us an opportunity to reform as more fully integrated and cohesive beings. They empower the individual to make sense of their world on their own terms. They provide the raw datum from which intelligence and coherence can be forged. They destroy the prisons of belief and accepted fact that distort and limit our perceptions of reality, and open us to new ways of thinking, feeling and doing. They help us live without fear; and all oppressors rely on fear for their power. They help us awaken from the path of sorrow and death, and remember who and what we really are.
In such a state of consciousness, the false assumptions and delusions that give rise to belief systems of isolation, in-group/out-group identification, national pride, religious zealotry, call-out cultures and so on become simply untenable: they are seen for the absurdly partial and incomplete notions they are, and discarded accordingly.
Currently, imaginary boundaries between self and other, “us” and “them”, economy and ecology, “here” and “there” and so on are making the world an increasingly dangerous and unstable place. These imaginary lines between people and phenomena, abstract definitions grossly grafted onto the living flux of our universe, are driving some very strange and very anti-social behaviour. People have become so attached to these boundaries, these linguistic definitions of who, what and why they are what they think they are, that they are willing to kill for them. And of course, this is nothing new, but perhaps the range of groups and sub-groups who are willing to go to these extremes is. What is clear is that without some rather hasty intervention, this situation will get dangerously out of hand. We are too close to the precipice of our own extinction to allow such courting of disaster to go unchecked.
So, I propose that one of the single most valuable political, social, intellectual and individual acts a person can undertake in 2019 is to take a high dose of psilocybin, alone, in silent darkness. I suggest psilocybin because it has a long history of healthy human use and is next to impossible to overdose on. This is one action that we can trust to get to the root causes of our social, environmental and political issues; the premature certainty, the false images of mankind, the hubris of technological solutionism, the faith in god, gun or grand idea. It can allow us to reach down past the floor of our culture and into the seldom seen and labyrinthine basement, and to dredge up from there that which is basic and universal to us. It can give us new eyes with which to appraise our situation of considerable malaise.
Perhaps no other method can do the trick. We have tried everything else. Religious solutions, political solutions, economic solutions, technological solutions: all have brought us closer to the brink, all have exposed us to greater dimensions of risk with comparatively little reward to show for it.
If we are to truly change our world for the better, I think we’re going to have to get in on the ground floor, at the fundamental level where perceptions, thoughts, experience, identity, embodiment, mind, nature and reality all interweave. We must peer into the foundations of consciousness itself, and attempt to appreciate the mystery insofar as we are able. Without this source of data, this self-knowledge; without accounting for these experiences in our physics, our biology, our psychology, our methods of governance and economics and our basic ways of relating to and thinking about the world, we are likely to continue to repeat the mistakes that have led us to the brink of extinction.
This is why it might be wise to sit in your room, alone, on a head full of mushrooms before waving a sign in someone’s face at a rally. Few minds are changed through ideological warfare in the streets. Political action is toxic when conducted from a place of partiality, when there are “sides” involved and people taking them seriously. The effective modern activist is a psychedelic activist, a person who sees through the illusory dualisms of the political sphere and acts right over the top of them, right through them, to speak to that which is fundamentally human in all those present. We are one life, and when we speak and act from that place we have a real chance of creating a more beautiful world.
So, munch before you march. Swallow, don’t follow. And most of all, think for your self. Touch the mystery directly. The fate of the species is in your hands, you might as well enlist a helping stem, cap, or two.