This drawing was done in colored pencil. The antique oval frame fit it nicely.
Last night I dreamed about an old friend. Today I saw that this friend, Dr Sara Lewis, was recently featured on a podcast about how to survive a spiritual crisis, which is a subject I find interesting. The podcast discussed the crises some people face following psychedelic trips and touched on the importance of cultural context in psychedelic medicine.
It's only recently that such a context has begun to develop. In the 1990s, it was nowhere. When I was sixteen, I ate about twenty grams of magic mushrooms at a concert and left my body. When I was eighteen, I took a heroic dose of mescaline at a music festival and left my body for a much longer duration. At the time, I found these experiences to be very freeing. But coming back into my body, and back into my unfortunate life, proved quite distressing.
A few years later, I had a profoundly negative interaction with the mental health system. This system reflected a culture incapable of accommodating me and my experiences. It wasn't healing. It was abusive. And I resolved to avoid interacting with it.
A life changing accident and the onset of cluster headaches subsequently transformed my everyday life into a hell of physical pain and psychological turmoil. Psilocybin helps some people with cluster headaches, but it didn't help me. Unable to work a normal job, I spent a decade in poverty with a body that felt like my enemy. Mainstream culture could no more accommodate this experience than it could my more psychedelic ones.
Then, at age 37, I found myself unable to sleep for several days. I started to lose touch with reality, checked myself into a hospital, and was diagnosed as having a manic episode. The healthcare system seemed much improved from the last time I'd been subjected to it. Medication facilitated sleep which resolved my problem immediately. But the episode itself had a strong psychedelic component. So strong that I became briefly convinced that I'd taken MDMA.
To me, this was a good reminder that the human mind ultimately creates whatever experiences are typically attributed to drugs. My sense is that very few in our society are willing to take responsibility for being the origin of their own encounters with unusual psychological material, psychedelic or otherwise. Dominant culture tends to treat such material as unimportant except where it indicates deviation from somewhat arbitrary norms. This is a mistake on a grand scale. Fortunately, there are signs that this is changing.
Altered states of consciousness have healing potential. I have a friend who has been greatly helped by ketamine infusions. I know others who have been helped by psilocybin, MDMA, ayahuasca, peyote, and other entheogens. My own psychedelic experiences early on taught me to avoid conflating myself with my physical body, which became an essential survival skill when I started getting cluster headaches.
A single trip can create permanent changes in the personality, for better and for worse. In my case, it's possible that heroic dosing as a teenager in some way contributed to the onset of bipolar disorder later in life. And I've definitely seen these drugs utterly derail otherwise promising lives. That's part of why the medical community's increasing involvement in our nascent psychedelic renaissance is such a good thing. In our cultural context, this is the community best equipped to assess medical risk.
The field of psychedelic medicine is barely beginning to develop. Practitioners are popping up everywhere. Government approvals are happening. Big pharma is getting involved. These things are structuring psychedelic medicine for mass adoption.
This mass adoption of medical entheogens coincides with a pivotal global moment. The pandemic and civil unrest. Geopolitical turmoil and climate change. Increasing technological sophistication. Perhaps these new versions of old medicines can inform better perspectives on these challenges we're facing.