Category Archives: Psychedelic Musings

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.

“It’s all just one long song, man” – Keith Richards on the Rolling Stone’s cannon of 373 songs.

I get a lot of questions about how I work. It’s not easy to define. I am not a therapist. Though I was trained, and have worked as one. For me, the therapeutic relationship has too many conventions, and too many formalities. The best work I ever did as a therapist was unconventional. I also like to joke that I’d like to wear a T shirt that says, “I’m not your fucking shaman,” because the notion of someone being a shaman is ridiculous to me. Shamans are not even from the Amazon. They’re from Mongolia. But these days, a lot of them are from Brooklyn.

The experience I have with each client seems to be informed by the experience I’ve had with my previous one. I can’t overemphasize how miraculous this is to observe. What I work out with one person for their benefit, also directly benefits the client who follows them. I choose to work with individuals, not groups, because groups diffuse attention and are not as effective. Yet, it seems even though everyone works one on one, we are all part of an imperceptible(except in retrospect) group experience. What I learn from working with one client usually directly applies to the very next one. A client comes to work after I have worked out how to be helpful to them with someone else.

When I was educated and worked as a therapist, I found myself feeling like most therapists were too process oriented, and were not as creative as I wanted to be. When I worked in creative endeavors, I felt the people I worked with often didn’t value personal development as I did. The creative process, in its most successful agents, is often enough. But, in my experience didn’t offer the kind of transformation I imagined it would. The work I do now, seems to bridge these worlds. I work with, and not for my clients. Our work much more resembles writing a song together, then it does any kind of therapeutic dyad. Together we write a song of transformation that is unique to, and for them. But this song, exists in a canon of transformative experience that is available to all who follow, and will be added to by all as well…

MEDITATION IS PSYCHEDELICS IN SLOW MOTION

I often have people reach out to me who are interested in utilizing psychedelics for personal growth. I am able to instruct and guide them in this experience. I have an extensive background in the subject and my track record in utilizing this technology successfully, is excellent. psychedelics, if used thoughtfully and methodically, can bring about great personal transformation. However, psychedelics are not the be all and end all of transformation. They may not even be the best tools to transform one’s consciousness and its relationship to what is eternal and unchanging. The most effective tool for this undertaking is without a doubt, meditation.

Oftentimes when people wish to consult with me about creating a relationship with psychedelics, my first question is, “Do you meditate?” Whether or not, they do, at that point does tell me something about their orientation toward life, themselves, and reality. If they are in fact interested in transforming their experience of reality, it is meditation, not psychedelics that offers the greatest long term benefits. In my experience psychedelics present a doorway of experiencing oneself, and one’s inner landscapes in a new way. Meditation offers the propulsive system that can move one from perceiving the doorway, to moving through it.

The Macdonaldization of Meditation has brought us reams of books about mindfulness. Mindfulness moves one’s attention from one’s thoughts to one’s sensations. This is a good start. But it really is meditation for dummies. To be aware in the moment of what one senses is of course much more desirable than being inundated with thought patterns birthed of suffering, pain, history and neuroses. Mindfulness works to a degree, but it is a band aid, compared to what is really possible with meditation. What is possible is moving from one’s thoughts about life and oneself, and one’s suffering, into the awareness of the intelligence that forms one’s body, energetic systems, and origins. This is meditation’s great potential. It does all the same things that psychedelics do, and it does it at its own speed. Psychedelics can take over one’s consciousness, sometimes at an unwanted speed. Meditation can be risen out of, at will. It is entirely safe, and entirely manageable. Using these tools together increases each of their efficacy.

Psychedelics and Meditation overlap in their ability to peel away the layers of identity. In both cases, we leave our usual manner of thinking and perceiving, which is created out of a mish mash of our immediate environment, our social relations, culture, media, and the historical origins of our thinking and feeling state. As we leave this experience, and the habits it creates, we re-connect with the origins of our experience. As our breath moves through our sensate physical state we encounter structural systems based in history, biography, pain, trauma, and avoidance. Using just the breath, and the more important tool of determination, we can move through these states to what lies beneath. And what lies beneath can be as spectacular as anything one might ever experience on a psychedelic trip.

Beneath the thinking mind, in the realm of sensation, we contact our true origins. We may find our original structure, as created by nature, and the intelligence that gives rise to everything. Beyond history and biography and the sensations they birth, are the formative intentions of the intelligence that gave birth to us in this lifetime. Our actual raison d’etre. These are that kind of depths available in meditation, and they are not as far away as one might think. In the depths of meditation, one encounters one’s karma, the actual dynamics of what has created the structures and purpose of one’s life. The purpose that precedes all experience. The logos of one’s life. It is right there beneath the usual mind chatter and recycled habitual physical sensations. One may find in how they hold their body, a narrative they have spoken their entirely life. But lurking just below these habits is an eternal purpose that gives rise to all transitory experience. Connecting with this can be the most transformative experience available. It returns life to its origins in holism, after life has been experience only in the fractioned aspect of the origins of the ego.

For me, psychedelics are a cypher. People come looking for psychedelics, and what they find is their origins. And once they have discovered their origins, they will never again be confused about what their life is about. This confusion swirls around the illusion that ego is constructed only to maintain a cohesive narrative that begins with our first memories of our life, and will end in our physical system losing its integrity. Between these origins and these endings, lurking below our habits of thinking and being, is the eternal field of our existence. It is this field that has brought us into this life, and it is to this field we will return at its end. Meditation, and to a lesser extent psychedelics, grant us access to this field during this very life.