(Psychedelics as catalysts for consciousness change)
Alienation from nature and the loss of the experience of being part of the living creation is the greatest tragedy of our materialistic era. It is the causative reason for ecological devastation and climate change. Therefore I attribute absolute highest importance to consciousness change. I regard psychedelics as catalyzers for this. They are tools which are guiding our perception toward deeper areas of our human existence, so that we again become aware of our spiritual essence. ALBERT HOFMANN APRIL 19, 2007
That there is an intelligence behind the things that exist in the universe, That there is purpose exhibited by this intelligence, and That it is humanly possible to access some elements of this intelligence and learn some aspects of its purpose.
Under the influence of psychedelics, we get an expanded stream of information, and most of that stream is still considered illusory by the modern mind. We need to take steps to ensure that the information we apprehend through the chemically modified receptivity of our brain is genuine, even when it goes beyond the modern mind’s understanding of reality, and this is the task of critical philosophical reflection.
The passionate longing of the human heart has always been to press beyond the boundaries of the known, to break through the limitations of our understanding, to extend the horizon of awareness. This is perhaps our most fundamental and essential freedom. ANNE BARING, THE DREAM OF THE COSMOS
(Psychic inflation and the limits of altered access)
We must stay mindful of our shortcomings if we are to avoid the greatest danger of working with psychedelics—psychic inflation. Psychedelics give us temporary access to realities beyond our pay grade, allowing us to experience things beyond our ordinary capacity.
I trusted what I saw there. Both the Eastern and Western spiritual traditions I had studied emphasized death of self as the gateway to liberation, and this seemed consistent with Grof’s emphasis on ego-death.
Where meditation is a path of self-clarification that allows the layers of the mind to open gradually, the sacred medicine path cultivates intense but temporary surges of awareness. By amplifying our present awareness, the medicine path opens us more quickly to a deeper communion with the universe.
For enduring change to take root in our lives, we must also create a container for holding our experiences in between our sessions—for remembering them, pondering them, and putting their lessons into practice. If we don’t do this, we will be pulled to chase new experiences before we have fully digested the gifts we’ve already been given.
(Two modes of psychedelic therapy: psycholytic and psychedelic)
Psycholytic Therapy Low-dose psycholytic therapy (75–300 mcg, typically around 200 mcg) activates the unconscious more gently, allowing a gradual unfolding of the psyche to take place. At this dosage level, the psyche releases its secrets and pains in layers. Emotional abreaction and other therapeutic mechanisms are intensified, calling for a flexible, dynamic engagement with the therapist. Grof’s early work at the Psychiatric Research Institute in Prague was primarily psycholytic therapy where sessions took place at one-week to two-week intervals and numbered between fifteen and one hundred sessions, averaging about forty sessions. Psychedelic Therapy High-dose psychedelic therapy (300–500 mcg) is a very different form of psychedelic engagement. In this therapeutic modality, consciousness is much more powerfully amplified, and the strategy is to push through the psychodynamic level of consciousness and trigger an experience of ego-death and transcendence. Rather than working through one’s personal issues layer by layer, psychedelic therapy seeks to evoke an ecstatic state
in which the boundaries between the self and the universe are dissolved, allowing one to reconnect with spiritual reality and gain a new perspective on one’s life.
(The generative intelligence of the cosmos)
I do not know the limits of this Being and I hesitate to even call it a “Being” at all. As I have experienced it, it is the fabric of existence itself. I think of it as the generative intelligence of our universe, the Mind of the Cosmos—both transcendent source and manifest body of existence, beyond all categories of He or She yet infinitely more than any It.
There is an energetic momentum that builds in one’s sessions if you work consistently over a long period of time. It is a tangible power that accumulates and drives you through periodic breakthroughs, similar to the way an athlete in training develops a power that periodically carries him or her to peak levels of performance. It took years of sustained work for me to build sufficient energy to enter the levels of reality I was entering in the later stages of my work.
In a collaboration of many years, Stan Grof and Richard Tarnas have proposed the bold hypothesis that people’s experiences in deep nonordinary states move in synchrony with the rhythms of our solar system. Using case histories, Grof has argued that natal and transit astrology can illumine and even predict the tenor of one’s psychedelic session on any given day.13
With persistence and practice, cognition can be trained to operate in these unusual and novel conditions. Profound experiences are not simply given to you; you have to train yourself to receive them and hold on to them. I cannot emphasize this too strongly. This is especially important if you want to incorporate psychedelic work into any critical endeavor.
(Awakening inside physical existence, not escaping it)
The Creative Intelligence that gave birth to space-time and to everything in space-time thinks in terms of magnitudes that dwarf our horizons. We are waking up inside a garden that has been in the making for billions of years with billions more still to come. From this perspective, the purpose of spiritual awakening appears to be not escaping from physical existence, as these early religions proposed, but awakening ever
completely inside physical existence and participating in its continuing self-emergence through our awakening. If this feels initially disappointing, it may be that we are underestimating what the fruition of the divine project on this planet might look like.
When nirvana (enlightenment) and samsara (cyclic existence) are truly one, when full transparency lives in the sea of perpetual change, then heaven is realized on earth and there is no felt need to go elsewhere.
(Ego death as the price of cosmic citizenship)
We cannot transport the egoic self into these depths where it can then “have an experience” of how the world works there. In order to know the universe at these levels, we must become a citizen of these levels. We must become the levels themselves. To do this, our smaller sense of self must cease to be the container of our experience. It must die. Giving up everything is simply the price of inheriting everything else.
Deeper states of consciousness are higher states of energy.
Our subtle energy system has to be conditioned and strengthened to sustain the enormous flows of energy evoked by the LSD state.
The oceanlike immensity of joy Arising when all beings will be freed, Will this not be enough? Will this not satisfy? The wish for my own freedom, what is that to me? SHANTIDEVA, THE WAY OF THE BODHISATTVA
Completion is the key that keeps this suffering from becoming lodged in your system as trauma. If you take each round of suffering through to its completion, peace follows.
I am being given a new mythos in which to understand my life, replacing the mythos of family history psychodynamically construed. With this new mythos comes a deeper understanding of karma and a deeper sense of responsibility. (S 12)
(Reincarnation as evolution of the individual soul)
After years of study, I have come to accept reincarnation as a natural fact of life. I accept it not on the basis of faith but on the basis of strong empirical evidence. Fifty years ago, this evidence did not exist; today it does. The discovery of children from around the world who have active memories of their most recent former lives, memories that have been documented and verified through careful research, stands as one of the great achievements of our time. With decades of meticulous research, Ian Stevenson, the Carlson Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia from 1967 to 2001, has proven beyond a reasonable doubt, I think, that reincarnation is simply true. Stevenson has had his critics, of course, but his work has held its own against them.34
It is something Nature is doing. For me, reincarnation is part of the genius of evolution, a higher octave of evolution and its cutting edge in human beings. In evolution, nature grows whole species; in reincarnation, nature has found a way of growing individuals within certain species. Evolution folds collective learning forward in time; reincarnation folds individual learning forward in time. If we do not understand the cycle of rebirth, we chop our lives into bits and pieces and miss the larger picture of what’s actually taking place. It would be like pulling one chapter out of a complex novel and trying to make sense of what’s happening. Without the larger context, we simply can’t grasp the deeper significance of events or the full consequences of the choices being made. As long as we insist on viewing ourselves as living on Earth only once, we make our lives completely inscrutable, subject either to arbitrary caprice or God’s “unfathomable will.” But when we begin to begin to understand the cycle of rebirth and observe the learning curves generated across history by the choices we make, our frame of reference expands.
learning opens, responsibilities deepen, and the timeline of the Soul emerges. Only once we have made this transition can we begin to comprehend the true scale of our participation in the universe. We are part of her evolutionary journey, not just for a few decades but for uncounted centuries.
is, with all its mysteries, pains, and pleasures. It all seemed to be about learning. “Have we not learned anything?” I felt shattered by the vastness of God’s adventure in knowing himself. All the galaxies had continued to turn while I was in hell today. Suns flared into supernovas, and all this was him. Nothing was not him. “Have we not learned anything?” I was silenced.