Psychedelics, the Spiritual and Consciousness-an Evolving Confluence in the Cultural Stream

in this time of ever ascendant materialism, greed, and pathological narcissism, when the delusion of the disconnected dominant individual grows stronger, the contrary life-affirming stream of connection and respect is gaining strength even as it is suppressed, vilified, and criminalized. This stream, which we can call ‘awakening consciousness,’ is the motor of civilization. It moves in the direction of the ultimate recognition of interdependency and the need for cooperation. Some think of this stream as the altruism of the individual and recognize it as a successful evolutionary survival strategy-the group versus the individual. The truth is more complex: the stream is the necessity of balance, cooperation and sharing as inherent principles, behind which are the complex deep pleasures of love, validation, respect, and nurture.The stream of awakening consciousness is the essential mammalian evolutionary lineage, moving historically into ever larger, more interrelated, and integrated social formations. All basically sane humans (those not bludgeoned into revenge seeking, suffering from complex PTSD, aggressive reactions, or seeking dominance because of their individualistic delusion) all wish for a healthy and equitable distribution of civilization’s prospects for good lives. The cultural transcends biological evolution and morphs it in its own selections of who survives. Ever burrowing-enlarging and faltering-threatened with obliteration by bomb and ecocide, this stream amplifies as the tools for liberating consciousness spread, as freedom of mind and association erupts.We often hear of disruptive technologies that claim to manifest, support, and often lead this awakening process. “Disruptive technology” is a recent term for new entries that foster powerful changes in how we function, in opportunities for transcendence of older technologies, and consequent changes in how we think and relate: the Internet and the atomic bomb are obvious examples. “Disruption” is similar to Kuhn’s notion of paradigm shifts-except disruptive technologies are more material and practical while Kuhn’s framework focuses more on worldview and conceptual schema.New technologies can support the process of awakening when appropriately distributed, used, and accessed; but they threaten that process when they are used for dominance, control and territory. The uncontrolled profit motive fosters this negative tendency. In our past century, its destructiveness has taught us that there needs to be some form of balance between the individual and the larger community, between the private and the cooperative, and that this is best obtained by full participation in educated discussion and the deliberate resort to persuasion by reason and dialogue. We have learned that this remains a difficult process-with successes, failures, changing social formations, distortions and consequences. Yet the continuation and development of our skills in this process is essential.We understand “disruptive technology” on terms that are overly mechanical because we often neglect two important points: (1) Consciousness (and its amplification over time) is the engine behind all disruptive technologies; and (2) Consciousness grows in earlier times within the complexity of the Darwinian process, and then is exceeded in pace and morphed by the motor of cultural evolution. Like the Darwinian, there is no endpoint, endless possibility, dead ends, constraints, regressions and advances.Technical innovation is a sprout growing from a soil rich with biological and social capacities that comprise the fundamental framework of being human. This soil contains the stunning interrelated integration of the prehensile thumb, bipedalism, the enlarged cortex, the hidden estrus, and the functional social capacities of tool and weapon making, nest building around the campfire, communication leading to language, group formation with cooperation, sharing, coordination and joint operations for food (foraging, hunting and later agriculture) and role differentiation within the group. Technology has an important role in the awakening process, but it must come second to an understanding of the stream that makes fertile the soil in which it grows.There are two strata to this stream of awakening consciousness: the collective conscious and its deep and often determinative unconscious. Conceived in this way, it appears metaphorically as an oscillating widening stream, dark periods of history contracting its flow and width-and bright and innovative periods expanding its breadth, complexity, and civil nature. Integration of units of people grows ever tighter and more unitary, with larger and larger social formations, and attenuation and removal of boundaries. This leads to both progress and reaction. Alterations and extensions of consciousness are interactive and ripple through social formations, at times visible and striking, like waves affecting minds, even when the means and direct causation to do so may not be apparent. The cultural unconscious is then its assumptive underpinning, particularly influencing us through social formations that are taken for granted, such as the structure of the dominant business/financial edifice. When awakened awareness of the nature and impact of dominant structure occurs, an alternative view can emerge which informs and cultivates change in myriad ways. That movement can be defeated but often persists in the conscious strata. It has moral fiber and a sense of the real to it.Changes in consciousness that are disruptive are reciprocally connected to individual innovations, group modifications, and acceptance/rejection. Historically, within hierarchical, class-based, and sexist social formations, innovations must be accepted and embedded within the ruling group/class, remain heretical and marginalized until a shift in the dominant group or its paradigm occurs, or, a mass movement and adoption of the new technology-progressive or regressive-moves the set point.In this sense, Baruch Spinoza impresses me as the first individual unattached directly to a religion and standing outside social convention to elaborate a personal view that is at the same time emanated from his religious background and the Enlightenment that was starting to sweep Europe. Spinoza could do this because of the limited tolerance of bourgeois Dutch society, and because he was meagerly supported by a few who admired his unconventionality.In this same sense of awakening consciousness, our notions of the spiritual morph and evolve. At various times historically, religion and its subsequent modifications have been disruptive technologies both in progressive and reactionary ways. Repeatedly throughout history, religion has served for implementing its own social formations in the form of rules and regulations that are both introjected and applied by force. This aspect has tended to be far more prevalent and influential than the emphasis on internal personal development. It is of note that the origin of the word religion is ‘to bind’. Never able to entirely smother the internal personal experience of awe, dream, and connection with its own finite imagination, religion has also been the site of awakening. Individual inspiration has played a major role in religious innovation, arising both through social critique as religion spreads its constrictive net creating privileged elites, and as breakthroughs to new levels of awakening mind.When the term ‘spirituality’ is mingled with religion and the coercive binding it too often entails, the relationship between the subjective and the external form become conflated. Spirituality is then commodified and sold as belonging to particular ‘pews’-form-ridden and desirable to ‘get,’ to not miss out on-be part of, to be inspired by. In the form filled realm, spirituality can be divided into the ‘hows’ of getting the most intense mystical experience; being in the most powerful church; accessing the biggest best truths, the ultimate truth; closest to G(g)od and validated and ennobled thereby. Of course, this leads to territorialism and self- aggrandizement. Notice these are all feeling-based spiritual materialisms, for the translocation from desire to behavior-acting as if you have gotten it-at least for the moment-all comes from our myriad of complex feeling tones.The ‘spiritual’ is of a different nature. It has its evolutionary source as the capacity for awe, love and connection. Mammalian nurture is one source. A second lineage is the capacity for awe, which need include appreciation for a sense of beauty, discriminating wisdom, sense of momentary safety, expressive ability, submission of individual importance. Awe is certainly complex neuro- psychiatrically. It is accessed from what Buddhists elegantly call ‘equanimity’- balance, lack of desire, greed, aversion and hate. It tends to be here and now, fully experiential, and formatted with untainted emotion. It may lead to feelings of ‘this is it’ and ‘I want to share it and spread the word.’ Often, we do wish to share what we experience as the good and great, as the pleasure of clarity and what feel to be unconstructed elevating extraordinary experiences that make our lives vital. And while we endlessly try, verbal descriptions do little justice to the primacy of these experiences.Indeed, we can create shared vehicles to enhance our access to the spiritual as we come to recognize them. And these tend to improve in quality and pleasure as they are equalized and distributed with respect and discourse. Take the ever- widening potentiality of sexuality as spiritual experience: this increasing equality of the sexes creates the ability for women to have pleasure, condemning male predation as non- sexual but rather aggressive and dominating. Democratization tends to spread the ability to access the spiritual. On the other hand, our history and present situation is replete with the regulation of both the pleasurable and the spiritual, creating obstacles and control of the entry points-for whose distorted sense of benefit is always clear beneath the sales pitch.The pure religious impulse is the desire to share experience and the pleasures of awe, love and connection-without coercion. As soon as this morphs into ‘I’ve got it’ and ‘You don’t!’ and ‘You need me to get it for you’- dominating territorialism exerts itself. Voluntary unions of those of like mind building community with a vision and developing each other and their format appear to me to qualify as ‘religions’. The covenant is to not oppress but rather inspire and support expanding consciousness and the investigation of life.Throughout time, people have longed for deep spiritual connection. Religions that emerged to help satisfy this need through various forms of experience regularly became ossified, coercive, plagued by power struggles, and opposed to the type of awakening they purported to cultivate. Psychedelics represent an incredibly powerful disruption to this process because they can foster the kind of experience that people often seek to get through religious institutions, thus lessening the hold of those institutions and deepening people’s connection.Psychedelic experiences are one of these potential vehicles for spiritual access and experience, especially when we support them with education, safety, conducive settings and knowledgeable guides. Psychedelics are fairly reliable in opening the imaginal, in reducing or eliminating the ego for varying periods of time, and for attaining a broader view of ‘ordinary reality’ by breaking through cultural and personal held assumptions. Evangelical psychedelicists tend to hype the moral vector of psychedelic experiences and find them self-sufficient as a practice. Yet, un-situated psychedelic experiences, while often of value, tend to the individualistic without integration with community and spiritual practices that lead to balance. Being a whole human takes a lot of effort, grounding, connection, and feedback. It is really not that simple or easy to get through this life with poise, clarity and equanimity.Within the psychedelic community, there has been a tendency to view the hallucinatory and imaginal-that many psychedelics evoke-the mystical-as the goal and the desirable state. In fact, the psychedelic experience is as broad as the human spiritual capacity allows. Psychedelic mystical states indeed can foster a sense of the cosmic, of color and landscapes that are not accessible with ordinary mind, of the incredible breadth of unrestrained imagination, of the profoundest of recognitions of our infinitesimal presence in the universe, and our modest and flawed experience with our immediate context and beings. Psychedelic mystical experiences take us into the realms of unfettered mind, what we call in other languages Dzogchen, Primordial Awareness, the Self. Having these experiences in a heightened state makes our capacity for similar experiences in non-enhanced states more available, more recognizable, and facilitates our living in the state of open-mind, and here and now potentiality. In this remarkable way, the psychedelic mystical state has democratized access to the spiritual and affirmed its various natures in our various beings. It negates privileged priesthoods dictating what is kosher to think, feel, and experience and therefore creates a liberating theology. For millions and millions of humans it has created clear personal ownership of personal spaciousness that can be enhanced by other formats such as the religious, but cannot be reduced to them-really, never could be. How I view Jesus, Moses, Mohammed, the Buddha, etc. has always been up to me-suggested in forms by the dominant social format, but always my exclusive realm.But the mystical with all its potentiality is far from the only psychedelic influence on the spirit. There has been an unfortunate tendency to separate out what psychonautical commentators call the ‘classical psychedelics’ (LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin mushrooms) in part to distinguish from the ever-widening expanse of synthetic new psychoactive molecules. This leaves out even more classical-that is with hundreds of more years of use and development-psychedelics including shamanic DMT, ayahuasca, ibogaine, and marijuana. Humphrey Osmond invented the term psychedelic to mean mind manifesting-and it is inclusive of MDMA, 2CB, ketamine and others fit into the descriptive term-psychedelic. We have come to call some of these ‘empathogens’ because of their ability to induce experiences of self and others that are more balanced, broad-based, accepting of flaws that can then be worked on, and conducive for processing trauma by enabling it to be relegated more to the past and less influential on present mind and behavior as if the trauma is still working its damage. All still may produce visionary states and enhanced states of love and connectedness. Some refer to psychedelics as ‘entheogens’-this is controversial (to agnostics, atheists, and again too encapsulating of experience), just as G(g)od is. Better to call them wowees, or awe-genics, or, neo-experi-genics, or, just-plain-amazing.This great democratization of psychedelic potentiated experience also moves and widens the life serving cultural stream. It amplifies our imagination, our dream lives, our creativity and sense of justice. It serves especially when we apply our new knowledge reciprocally with other spirit practices-myriad as they are-and in the building of community and peaceful ecologically-embedded lives. Suggestive is a just published paper. 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