Author Archives: Robert Mitchell

Many times in my work, I come in contact with a client’s lifelong experience of how the intelligence that shapes the circumstances of their life, views them through images, sensations, memory, or emotional experience. This intelligence can be recalled in the present, or in the past. Often, this is the same intelligence that provided the decrees and stories of the Old and New Testament. The intelligence that instructed Abraham and Job is demanding, judgmental, and demands sacrifice. It provides rules and instructions on how to live and behave among a group of potentially hostile strangers. It is a collective image that rose out of humanity from its deep interior while small groups of nomad hunter gatherers, composed of family members and chosen friends came in from the wilderness to create city-states where they could grow their own food, shepherd their own animals, and collaborate with larger numbers of people, many of whom they did not know. This intelligence provided laws and judgements designed to protect strangers from one another’s selfish impulses.

The intelligence that is revealed by the Old and New Testament sprung right out of the collective unconscious of a nascent civilization. It is an intelligence statement that desired to reject the challenge of unending daily chaos that surviving in nature required, for a fantasized order resulting from civilization controlling the behavior of its members. This is a decree of laws, structure, right and wrong, and punishment. This intelligence requires a socialized religion, as humanity’s greatest challenge changed from the ambivalence of nature, to the ambitions of other humans living in limited spaces, competing for limited resources.

This intelligence rules with a double edged sword. It provides rules and regulations, and knows that transgressions against one’s neighbor, might release chaos in the human psyche that had been penned up since humans structured civilization. Its laws protected humans from their basest instincts, and their most selfish desires. But these same laws also block people from their deepest and most profound states of consciousness, and superimposed the laws of a strict and punishing intelligence over the structure of a loving and supportive one.

In the deeper levels of consciousness this intelligence warns about transgressing past its historical authority. That to travel beyond its boundaries, into the hinterlands of consciousness, one is threatened with death and the dismemberment that has in the past been the realms of aboriginal shamanism and is no place for a modern, civilized person. It threatens that once these realms are breached, there may be no returning to the sane world of order, structure, sanity, and civilization. It requires courage and faith to ignore the admonitions of this intelligence as its authority and powers wanes and another older more primal intelligence takes over in the deepest layers of human experience. Layers that extend beyond the reach of birth, death and historical biography.

At this point in this essay, we can utilize an esoteric branch of Christianity to guide our descent. Gnosticism, in reaction to New Testament Christianity, posited that there were lesser gods that were worshipped and could dominate the consciousness of groups of people, or even the civilized masses. After these “lesser gods” authority is exhausted, there is one god to be experienced. That god is a loving creator. A god that adores all it’s creations vegetable, animal, or human. This is the god that is encountered after all laws and decrees of the last millennia no longer holds sway on a consciousness lowering into its own depths. This is not the god Yahweh, that has ruled over Christians, Jews and Muslims for over 2,000 years, but more resembles Brahman of Hinduism. This is a god that experiences pleasure and adoration for all its creations, as it experiences all things as microcosms of itself.

This is a god that experiences itself through its creations, so how might it ever judge them as wanting, undeserving of love, or a source of dissatisfaction? This is also a god that was expressed as Hinduism developed thousands of years before the Western triumvirate of Judaism, Islam and Christianity. A religion that grew much more closely out of man’s shamanistic religious origins in a giant cultural maelstrom , than did the Old Testament which emerged from the psychological and civil demands of a rapidly forming city state.

Brahman encompasses everything physical and non physical, everything that exists before during and after this life, known and unknown, and arose in the west, in the 1960’s when Psychedelics became democratized in Western Culture. The Beatles, the avatars of all things 1960’s, turned to India, once they experienced Psychedelics. There they found an intelligence that existed beyond the borders of the Western Psyche Brahman has been there ever since. In the West’s fascination with Yoga, Meditation, Cannabis, and Psychedelics.

This is not the Intelligence that animates our thoughts and our ethics and our morality. Not the intelligence that recalls our history, our biography or of what our nervous system has perceived, and we recall since our birth. But an intelligence that formed your body, your flesh, your bones, your skin and your organs, and uncountable galaxies. The same intelligence in every cell of our body and in every atom in the universe. When we release our grasp and on intelligence of the Old and New Testament, and it releases our grasp on us, we fall into the hands of another intelligence, and this intelligence regards us differently with a loving and caring gaze that is much different than the intelligence that rules the culture we live in, and the families from which we come.

Of all the words I have learned in my life, metanoia is my favorite. Its origins are Greek, meaning transformation of mind. I first encountered it in college when I was studying Carl Jung’s theories about the Psyche. Jung believed that the ego was solely a dominant state that had no ultimate reality. He thought it was conditioned, habitual, and constantly screening out information that wasn’t part of the matrices of its beliefs about itself. If circumstances allowed or demanded it, it could be replaced by another state that was superior to it in every way. That was the goal of his psychology.

When people choose to work with me, it is usually because they wish to alleviate some symptoms that aren’t serving the Self, which is eternal and reaches beyond the historical boundaries of birth and death. . The cracks in one’s egoic state are the symptoms of this higher possibility, the clue that one’s history biography and self-narrative are obfuscating one’s true origins. Symptoms are a whisper of another state that is ready, willing, and able to take over.

If this metanoia occurs, it reframes all that has come before it. Assumptions that one has carried about themselves for their whole lives, no longer apply. Narratives that have accompanied someone through all their experiences evaporate in the light of new information. Problems are no longer seen as problems by this new state of being, they are metabolized by a new depth and breadth. Memories are reframed and re-contextualized by this new perspective. The very meaning of all of one’s experiences shifts into something bigger, more profound, and ultimately more loving and supportive. This should be the goal of all the therapies.

In the world of psychedelics, integration is a bit of psychedelic hipster phrase. But what does it actually mean, and how does it apply to the person having undergone the experience? Basically, integration implies layering the the insights of one’s psychedelic experience into life going forward. The ultimate value of a psychedelic experience is determined by how it impacts one’s understanding, perceptions, behavior, and decision making going forward.

Psychedelic experiences, if undertaken thoughtfully, can be incredibly profound and transformative. One’s normal state of consciousness is expanded to both allow in parts of oneself that are usually excluded from awareness,(this could include forgotten memories, feelings and insights) as well as impersonal awareness of a sentient intelligence with an investment of the well being of the person undergoing the experience. No matter how far out this reads, I’ve observed it enough times, that I know it to be fact. One’s self concept, as well as one’s existential orientation can be significantly altered over just a few hours. However, this is not the end goal of the psychedelic experience. Because no matter how far out or alien one’s experience becomes, the ego reforms in a familiar arrangement at the end of the day(or night). But no matter how profound the psychedelic experience, it is just the beginning of the process that can extend for days, weeks, and even years into one’s life.

Having a psychedelic experience is very much like having a dream. It occurs in the same region of the brain that dreaming does, and has almost identical brainwave patterns. Likewise, dreamwork presents a wonderful analogue for harvesting the most useful aspects of the psychedelic experience. Like dreams, psychedelic experiences are part of nature, and like dreams they speak their own language. In each case, experiencing revelations and insights during these altered states, is just scratching the surface of their potential. Dreams and psychedelic experiences exist forever, just as songs and poetry do. In both cases, it is not the experience, or the recall of the experience that is the goal. The goal is to continue to relate to the experience in the waking state so that its insights can be applied to one’s life. The experience can be mined for utility for a long time going forward if approached with an open minded curiosity. There are a variety of effective techniques for doing this.

The most important part of Integration is making changes going forward. Making different choices in one’s self presentation, thought patterns, and behavior is the only way to test out what was experienced in a psychedelic state. Without this kind of reality testing, the experience has no value beyond novelty. However, if one is able to implement changes in their behavior that reflects a new understanding or attitude, the psychedelic experience can come alive in everyday life. For this to happen, real world changes have to be made. One cannot return to the same habits, and environments, while hoping that things are going to change in their life. Things need to be thrown out. Old operating systems need to be dropped, so that updated operating systems can run new programs. This is the challenge of integration. One must go forward differently from how one was traveling before. It is the only way to prove to oneself and to life, that something important has occurred, and been understood.

The world of psychedelics is in formation. Many factions wants to claim it for themselves. Neo-shamans want to claim indigenous practices, and powers. The medical community wants to explain how psychedelic chemistry affects the brain. Psychologists want psychedelics to end up in their clinics, with its users on their couches. I’m going to turn psychedelics over to the example set by surfers, who pursue ecstasy through alignment and balance within an invisible force of nature.

Psychedelics don’t work because they come from the amazon, or because of their impact on neural functioning. These are red herrings. Psychedelics work because the consciousness of almost any person, when placed within the proper aperture of experience, will self correct. It does not self correct because of the chemistry of the substance they use. It does not self correct because of the insights of the person they are working with. It does not self correct because of brain changes(This is actually the tail wagging the dog.) Consciousness self corrects because the majority of it exists outside of space and time, beyond the brain, and its conditioned. Psychedelics align a timeless consciousness with the awareness field of a consciousness limited by space, time, biography, and history. When utilized properly, psychedelics open an aperture into a sub atomic, trans physical reality, that is the actual source of each person’s existence.

In the barrel, is where historical consciousness aligns with its transpersonal origins, and is transformed by it. It is the place where conditioned consciousness realizes that it is not just the result of it experiences, but beyond its usual state, animated by the source of it. When the historically conditioned consciousness is aligned within a the barrel of its origins, the unconscious awareness that lies outside conditioned states, releases its treasures. As the experience of one’s origins take their proper position alongside history and biography, the historically conditioned consciousness is reshaped to incorporate its new posts of orientation. As consciousness moves toward fuller awareness, the brain reacts. The pre-psychedelic position is relativized, and the brain is animated toward the new awareness. Just as it had once had been animated by history, biography, successes, trauma, and transformations.

Psychedelics don’t require shamans. They don’t require burning sage(though it smells nice). They don’t require clinicians, or futurists, or experts on flow experience. They require understanding and humility. They require a respect for the timeless and compassion for the suffering, born from its absence. They require the humility to track that suffering as a pathway to our origins. Those who work with psychedelics successfully need take little credit for their efficacy. They will simply bear witness to the awesome power of a consciousness that exists outside of space and time making itself known to a conditioned awareness. Physical life is not seen as an arbiter of all experience, but a platform where quantum consciousness can be experienced and shared, for personal and collective benefit. In the barrel, is where it happens.