“Implications”
Selections from:
Psychedelic Healing: The Promise of Entheogens for Psychotherapy and Spiritual Development (Inner Traditions, 2011)
Unity “Versus” the Frontal Lobes
It was a devil’s bargain: thought, ideation, intent, objectification, ego, the finger-eye-frontal lobe complex. A devil’s bargain, yes, but supremely adaptive, as we now dominate nature and occupy every corner of the globe. This was the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil: the first division, into light versus darkness, soul versus body, energy versus matter, humans versus nature—enabling discrimination, analysis, conflict, extraction, distillation.
It is an old story by now, how life started out natural yet brutish, and how we evolved adaptations to help us survive. The story of life continues today, as the very traits and brain functions that enabled us to excel thus far are now proving counteradaptive in the form of pollution, extinctions, cancer, obesity, overcrowding, competition and egocentrism, war, addiction to money and material possessions, mechanization, and social alienation. Will we adapt fast enough to see that it is no longer discrimination and analysis, but rather unity and empathy on the global scale that would be most adaptive, that would contribute the most to our survival?
How do we heal that rift, transcend the duality between brutish nature and alienated modernity? How do we maintain the benefits of dualism—discrimination, analysis, improved adaptability—and yet transcend the struggle of dualism, to be just one, in our lives, in nature, in the universe?
We must power through today’s modern alienation from nature, all the way up and around the spiral of human development to an integral, post-postmodern worldview, not slide back down to a premodern state, as Theodore Kaczynski (the Unabomber) and Osama bin Laden would have it. The integral, post-postmodern position is in alignment with the animist tradition, but a full circle and one level up on the spiral of development. The idea is to embrace a neoanimism, this time with our eyes open, fully conscious, Buddhist-style, for a post-postmodern reintegration of animism and higher awareness. This, then, is a worldview that can accommodate shamanic states and quantum mechanics in one truly natural science.
There are many such related dualities—industrial vs. tribal, mechanistic vs. spiritual, superego vs. id, East vs. West—and yet every duality comprises two halves of one whole. When these seeming dualities are viewed as two halves, the whole question can be seen as the true unit of analysis, not solutions A or B. We can take as our example the neologisms from quantum mechanics, used to describe two perspectives on one thing that can’t both be right, but are. The best-known such word is wavicle, used to capture the ineffable meta nature of light that is alternately “proved” to be a wave and then “proved” to be a particle. The truth is that it depends on the observer’s perspective, derived largely from the measuring instruments one uses to observe the light phenomenon.
As with a wavicle, when we are healed of Cartesian duality, humans might best be seen as a mindbody, a thing of intense intrinsic energy, sometimes dubbed spirit, capable of such godlike flights of perfection in thought or art that the distinction between hand, or eye, or brain and spirit becomes petty and incapable of capturing the true integral nature of our wholeness. Psychedelics have the potential to help precipitate and facilitate that process.
When we finally bind that rift, between matter and energy, brain and mind, body and spirit, particle and wave, what will our science be like? Our psychotherapies? Our religions? Moreover, what can we do today to help society in that maturation? For one, we as individuals must develop beyond the simplistic dualities of brain chemistry versus spirituality, tribal versus modern, monotheists versus animists, self versus the outside world. We can develop this unitary worldview—and prepare for an integral society—by accommodating the tribal perspective within our own.
An Integral Approach to Reality
Every worldview contains the seeds of its own eventual dethroning, contradictions that will be explained only by the superseding worldview. Today, it is the integral that is supplanting modernity and postmodernity—the dualism of Descartes being replaced by a worldview that accommodates and integrates opposites: of technology and art, self and other, spirit and flesh. We might refer to this integral approach as a poetry science—not the science of poetry or poetry about science, but a higher-order worldview that positions modern, industrial, extractive science within a broader, poetical, undergirding context of cosmology, creativity, spirituality, and community.
This integration of seeming opposites seems counterintuitive only when viewed from a Newtonian perspective. When we think of the cosmic level of the universe as a whole, counterintuitive, non-Newtonian concepts such as the big bang, time dilation, or a “finite yet boundless” universe are now accepted as normal. Likewise, at the subatomic level of quantum mechanics, we accept seemingly counterintuitive behavior (such as matter springing into existence, or particles communicating instantly over great distances) as the new normal. Yet despite this wonderful insight on nature at the extremes of the subatomic and the cosmic, we still insist that at the human scale, reality is linear, logical, predictable, and mechanistic.
An integral science that can theorize alternate universes can (and must) also accommodate alternate ways to understand living on Earth. How do states of mind differ from the action of neurotransmitters— and how do both differ from spirituality? It is from an integral perspective that we can finally see that even at the human scale, reality is not fundamentally Newtonian. This integral, human-scale perspective is more consistent with the perspectives of quantum mechanics, relativity, and cosmology that supplanted Newton.
This perspective is based on a nondual, natural philosophy that sees the universe at times as counterintuitive, but never supernatural. We must also apply that idea to viewing the mind: nothing supernatural, just complex and holistic with emergent properties, such as intelligence and consciousness or self-awareness. The same argument can be applied to the universe as a whole: it is emergent—so what some refer to as “miraculous” is still a fully natural gestalt process. The seemingly miraculous or supernatural is just the nature of the universe itself—the whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-the-parts gestalt process fully in effect.
This is a holistic, spiritual perspective, but also a scientific one. The integral worldview must successively pass through both spiritual and scientific sieves to reveal its fundamental convergent validity. This requires a holistic approach high enough in perspective to recontextualize and with broad enough inclusiveness to embrace the range of what we’ve been referring to as the “spiritual.”
Many thinkers describe a complex universe, alive at essence, fundamentally, with consciousness (and, ultimately, love) as an emergent property of this complexity.8 A poetry science sees global mind as the emergent property of life on Earth, spiritual wisdom as simply the fully blossomed end point of normal human development, and the planet as a Gaian organism, embedded in a Gaian universe—and sees all this not as supernatural, but simply as the normal state of nature.9 Over the course of my personal and professional development, I have observed three different perspectives on psychospiritual development:
- A material view of visionary plants as containing psychoactive chemicals, often extracted or re-created in a laboratory as pharmaceutical drugs, that are seen to interact with endogenous neurotransmitter receptor sites. From this perspective on our personal (and societal) development process, we are conceptually, experientially, and phenomenologically separate from our true self and from everyone else’s true self, or soul.
- A psychological perspective oriented toward healing medical “pathology.” In this second perspective, we connect with our true underlying self to provide love for our process of personal development, but we still feeling separate from others—feeling empathy and compassion for our inner child, yet still cursing the person in the car in front of us who cuts us off on the highway on the way to our job caring for the sick.
- A spiritual view of us as incarnated energy, best conceptualized as love or care for others. In this third perspective, we are finally connected to both our true self and to that of all others. Our personality has become transparent and is no longer calling us, distracting us from our underlying true nature. We see the fundamental unity of reality, of all souls, and radiate spiritual love for everyone and everything.
There have been important tools that have helped me to see these perspectives: psychedelics such as psilocybin and the Mother Vine ayahuasca that open the heart and illuminate the soul; ayurvedic and tantric philosophy; guided visualization techniques; and daily meditation and yoga, each of which I have found to be effective, nonpsychedelic practices for experiencing transcendence and catharsis in the loving balance so crucial to transformative psychospiritual development.
My fervent hope is that in reading this article, you have been brought along on the path of my own journey in such a way as to better understand and release your own personality, to reidentify with your own true, underlying self—your soul—and that your own life journey will now be clearer, facilitated by, and bathed in, the love of self and others that I believe to be our truest nature.