The Loudness of Now
In the years of the “Psychedelic Renaissance,” psychedelics and psychedelic experiences have accumulated many layers of chatter, discussion, and expectation. This influx of interest and intellectual energy is certainly an improvement over the paranoia and disinformation of the War on Drugs, which forcefully disseminated ideas to public consciousness that these substances are inherently destructive, self-indulgent, and without value. But as the sea of digital communication and social media rises into our personal space, saturating most aspects of our lives, it can be hard to hold your own mental center.
Outside of the simple quantity of information we must wade through, we face an additional challenge that this information is not inert but often comes with an agenda. Each of us now exist as target audience for a pervasive Influence Industry hoping to hook our attention and imprint a lasting impression into our consciousness. Voices in digital media space of various reliability latch onto, dramatize, and/or spin topics for their own personal brand visibility and according to incentives of career, money, and stature. (I write this blog with some sense of irony). To state the obvious, in our digital environment, information quantity is not information quality, and as with any large-scale industrial process, pollution is created.
When engaging with psychedelics which greatly heighten our sensitivity, we have to be mindful of those pollutants.
Set and Setting
In a psychedelic state the two elements of “Set” and “Setting” are the most important overarching considerations for safety and a good outcome in a psychedelic journey. They can steer a person in dramatically diverse ways, towards dramatically different outcomes, and encompass an extremely broad range of personal and situational factors.
- “Set” includes your frame of mind, intentions, experience, personal history, and health that you bring to a journey.
- “Setting” includes the physical, emotional, relationship, and spiritual environment that surrounds your experience. It is the situation and stimuli from the outside world which influences our inner experience.
This makes most, if not all psychedelic use, interwoven with the specific culture, zeitgeist, and material conditions we interact with, and have absorbed through our lives. Both Set and Setting very much include thoughts and sentiments surrounding the specific substance one has taken, the manner it was taken, and with what intent.
The Feedback Loop
And here we get into some distortion: The expectations and discourse around psychedelics can seep into our own experiences and become amplified making it harder to find our way through the noise back to our genuine experiences, and back to ourselves in an integration practice.
Heavy-handed or contradictory interpretations can distort our integration process as well, and we might end up trying to shoehorn the experience into a framework that doesn’t fit, or is inauthentic for us, and miss what our inner voice is actually trying to tell us. What we think we have learned, then doesn’t stick the way we expected. Or conversely, it could leave us burdened with very literal, invalidating, de-personalizing, or judgmental messages that get in our way.
The quest to find oneself amidst the noise of society brings to mind a difficult truth, that as Terrence McKenna once said, “Culture is not your friend,”. This applies to psychedelic culture as well as any social consensus-built reality; they can obscure or drown out the subtlety of our real process.
Catching Smoke
Almost as soon as we return from a profound journey, elements of our mind start trying to contain it, characterize it, simplify it, put it into language, tame and control it intellectually. The organizing function of our default consciousness usually likes information translated and stored in neat, well-defined and easily understood packages, as solid objects it can grasp. The reality that experience is actually flowing and constantly changing in the present moment like a moving stream and can’t actually be grasped sets up a certain friction with that organizing function, but that is another story.
A budding psychedelic culture now on the fringe of the commercial mainstream is a chorus of voices/minds attempting to grasp, characterize, or define (according to their interests) psychedelic experience, something that remains quite personal and mysterious for most of us. Is it “neuroplasticity”? Is it spirituality? Is it commodifying the sacred? Is it an investment vehicle? Is it a career industry? Is a fun way to party? Is it therapy? Is it appropriating indigenous culture? Is it revolutionary? Will it make you a kinder, more nature-oriented person? Will it turn you into a literal alt-right Nazi? Will it “re-set” and “re-wire” your brain? Will it cure your illness? Will it make you live longer? Should you do it with a blindfold? Should you do it at Dead and Co and watch John Mayer’s guitar solo face melt into a Cheshire Cat?
…And the Pitfalls
Examples abound of expectations and stories gone wrong in the real world, such as the great grandfather and lifelong engineer who reads that psilocybin can “re-set” his brain to rid him of an addiction, and instead finds himself in a retreat experience so bizarre, sensorily intense, and overwhelming a-rational, that he wills himself to sleep in order to escape it.
Or a psychedelic clinical trial participant who finds their deeply personal therapy experiences undermined, re-framed, or challenged by critics of the study who want to tell a different story.
As much as we might gravitate to any of these interpretations, what can be absolutely true is that none of these are the ultimate truth of our experience. And that is what matters in our work, re-centering around our own personal experience and felt sense of self.
The Value and Limitations of Explanations
Many of us have learned various models describing psychedelic or mystical experiences. Mine came heavily from the work of Stan Grof. Some came from elders in the Western tradition such as Ram Dass, or Aldous Huxley. Others come from indigenous Shipibo, Huichol, or Mazatec culture. The good models have staying power because they are somewhat accurate, and can effectively describe and interpret a lot of things that can happen in a psychedelic experience, in a ceremony etc.
But the catch is, when we are looking at the model, or some kind of “objective” idea, we aren’t fully in ourselves. As good as any descriptors can be, they can also be an abstraction that takes us out of our direct and personal experience and contributes to us feeling lost in the ether. Among the many spiritual proverbs illuminating this tendency to abstraction, the Buddha describes his own teachings as raft that carries a seeker across the river, which she/he then discards when they reach the other side. Or, as Zen Buddhist metaphor via Bruce Lee in Enter The Dragon:
“It’s like a finger pointing a way to the moon….
Don’t concentrate on the finger,
Or you will miss all the heavenly glory.”
For years I interpreted these proverbs through a purely intellectual lens, that if you are thinking someone else’s thoughts, you aren’t thinking your own. Or that if you are thinking about an idea, you aren’t seeing the real thing right in front of you.
Be Rooted In Your Self
But I think the meaning is deeper still: If we are out there in the clouds of mental narrative, ideas, or social chatter, or politics, we aren’t down here with ourselves feeling, which is where we need to be to be whole, to grow, and to heal. Our goal is not to try and capture an experience intellectually (though it can help to round out our integration). We are endeavoring to incorporate and welcome the new information emotionally, and in our bodies, without needing to change it.
And so, it is vital to take time and intention to carve out and claim a space for our own perspective, feeling, and self-discovery.
Jung used the term “Individuation” to describe the process of self-discovery and becoming rooted in one’s self. Where at once, we become more complete within our psyche through self-knowledge and Integration, we also become more distinct to ourselves from the influences pervading our environment, and more actualized as an individual. With felt self-knowledge it becomes much easier to identify what is us, and what is not; what messages are authentic to our experience, and what are just noise, or falsehood. And with that, we can save ourselves a lot of wasted attention, mental, and emotional energy.
With practice, we can feel confidently rooted in our truth and knowing of who we are, feel trust and satisfaction in our personal process, enjoy a sense of mental quiet, the fruits of a fabulous bullshit filter, and be more at ease in our body and the world. And bit by bit we all chip away at the noise.