Shamanism, Philosophy, and Ancient Greece with Dr Lenny Gibson

My unofficial Vital Study Zine #4 with observations from Vital Psychedelic Training and recent happenings in the space

‘Bacchus’ by Caravaggio at The Uffizi, Florence

Consciousness expansion: from cave painting, to the pyramids, and the first Psych Symposium at London’s National Gallery. How far have we got?

In week three Vital students heard from Dr Lenny Gibson, a clinical psychologist, philosopher and breathwork pioneer with ‘50 years of experience working with non-ordinary states of consciousness’ who nonetheless fitted in a storied career and founded transpersonal psychology non-profit Dreamshadow.

Gibson’s winsome and poingnant presentation elegantly examined western attitudes towards conscious thinking. His key point was that the world beyond words is no less valid – more so, even – than what we can describe. Psychedelics connect us with our intuition: as represented by the ancient gods Cerrunos and Baal, the greek god Dionysus (Bacchus to the romans) and, yes, Jesus of Arimathea who ‘turns the water into wine’. The first art, storytelling and culture derived from rites around this divine archetype.

Gibson references philosopher du jour Iain McGhilchrist, and I’ll pull out this particular quote from the Matter with Things author:

“As soon as you start saying anything about this realm, you falsify it. There are certain things that simply are resistant to normal language, normal exposition. But don’t for that reason not exist.”

But he began with a comparison to the Baka tribes whose genetics diverged 70,000 years ago. They describe their ceremonial group singing as “so beautiful the self melts away” just like both psychedelics and the ‘ecstatic’ techniques the rest of us have taken just as long to work out using science instead.

In the Zine this week, arranged in the synaesthesic schema used for Vital’s curriculum:

Approach: Move any mountain with neoshamanism

Therapy: ‘Celebrating the mysteries’ is the new euphemism of choice

Space: Can you hold your own?

Medical: The Microdose Age

Integral: Learning to fly

Plus! Graph of the Week and second hand books

These five items I pulled from the week’s research are themed along Vital’s natural element-themed structure. Air provides an overview of psychedelic use, Fire concerns therapeutic applications, Water covers ‘space holding’ – the art of keeping it together, Earth is where you’ll find medical matters, and Ether discusses integration, the process of bringing psychedelic power into regular life. Click straight through to your pet subject below.

Approach

Move any mountain with neo shamanism

Therapy

‘Celebrating the mysteries’ is the new euphemism of choice

Space

Can you hold your own?

Medical

The Microdose Age

Integral

Rising from the ashes of God, a new mythology

Kool-Aid Corner

To finish: trippy clippings, merry pranks, and psychedelic student life

Next issue: Dr Rick ‘Spirit Molecule’ Strassman spares no set or setting in his evalutation of the space right now

Move any mountain with neo-shamanism

Approach

LSD is a promethean invention that has democratised the sacrament, and given humankind the ability to heal itself says Dr Gibson

A neo shaman

The S-word, problematic from the start, is getting ever more laden.

No surprise, when you consider that the criteria for shaman-hood range, depending on your understanding, from genetic lineage, grave dedication, and fighting spirits to cure treatment resistant diseases all the way to a dubious certificate, some bongos and an Instagram account. 

‘Neo shamanism’ to Gibson is humankind’s recent ability to be his own wise counsel and medicine woman. The synthesis of LSD, a colourless tasteless substance able to inspire psychedelic states in minuscule amounts, he believes has democratised the role.

Poetically, this most scientific of revelations has inspired a rebirth of personal spirituality and philosophic examination. Scholars will point out that it’s the first time in 500 years, a la Joe Tafur’s Legend of the Eagle and the Condor, that science and religion have conjoined, whether in the form of transpersonal psychologist Stanislav Grof or the discoveries of quantum physics.

"For once, and for everyone, the truth was not still a mystery. Love called to all”

Mystical healing may be associated with the Shipibo curanderos but they don’t use the word shaman themselves. In many communities associated with ‘shamanism’ the healer role itself is rare, considered apart, and special. Scientific medical training is not uncommon amongst indegeneous mystical healers.

Personally I understand exactly why usage is revered and not to be bandied about, certainly in an “I can cure you by battling with entities” manner. Gibson’s own understanding is that the neo shaman is a contemporary voyager into the new frontiers of the ‘Psyche,’ itself the name for the Greek goddess of wisdom and the soul. Obvious candidates for 20th Century LSD neo-shamanhood might be Grof, Aldous Huxley, Amanda Fielding or Jimi Hendrix. And Timothy Leary, who was scolded by RD Laing for democratising LSD… But if LSD had remained the preserve of the elite, Hendrix might never have wrote in his personal poetry after Woodstock in 1969, "For once, and for everyone, the truth was not still a mystery. Love called to all.”

Mankind’s destiny calls, and we are all ordained to answer.

‘Celebrating the mysteries’ is the new euphemism of choice

Therapy

The inner healer remains the preserve of the elite but its gatekeepers look ever more ridiculous

Above and below: kylix cup depicting Hades and Persephone from 430BC now in The British Museum

Accessibility is a hot topic in ‘the space’ right now. As ever.

At the inaugural Psych Symposium in London’s National Gallery earlier this May 2022, itself undeniably elitist at £400 for a basic one-day ticket and £1,000 for full access and the drinkies, MAPS spokesperson Natalie Lyla Ginsberg told suits that “PTSD is most common in the marginalised communities who cannot currently access these treatments.” Author Zoe Cormier eviscerated corpos with lines like, “So if it’s okay for somebody dying of bowel cancer to grow their own mushrooms, why is it not okay for normal folks?” (Answer: ‘because dosages’, to a lack of any audible groans). 

The Greeks famously all tripped together at the Eleusinian Mysteries, an invite-only annual bash held at the festival of Demeter for the best part of two thousand years. It’s heavily referenced in Shakespeare’s esoteric play The Tempest. Supposedly ‘The Mysteries’ was reserved only for the ‘invisible college’ wyrd and wonderful types, but high society were in on things too: “The beautiful people following the interesting people, and the rich people follow the beautiful people” as a wise lady once told me. Indeed, the use of psychedelics was only proven recently when a gruelling, decades-long investigation into the local availability of psychedelic ergot was trumped by legal records prosecuting a notorious socialite for ‘celebrating the mysteries’ at dinner parties back home in Athens (he got exiled to Sparta, by the way). Current podcast staple Brian Muraresku will tell you all about psychedelic use by the early Christians. And has been recently in great interviews like this around his book The Immortality Key.

The ancient greeks believed “Life can only be experienced in a truly terrifying, but transformational, encounter with death.”

Ritually, the Greeks supped from elaborate kylix cups (above). Medieval witches got rampant on datura, best taken internally via the mucus membrane, by inserting it vaginally – ‘riding the broomstick’. In 2022 ketamine bumps are delivered in £5,000 inhalers, and while no one is sticking DMT up their bum just yet, the common folk are hunted and persecuted by the agents of mediocrity still.

Can you hold your own?

Space

In psychedelic therapy as any other, you have to take responsibility for your own mental health

Kelsey Brookes, LSD Poster, available here

The Imperial College testing rooms are the most British thing I’ve ever seen.

There’s a blanket thrown over the studio kitchen in the corner, a drape with some trees on and a lamp stuck behind it, plus some spiritual tat.

It does look surprisingly cosy nonetheless, especially with Dr Ros beaming angelically from her seat in the corner. But you almost certainly have to dream the Albion way to appreciate its understated succour. Bar the open heartedness oozing from the ever-radiant Dr Ros, being served the Mysteries by the priestesses of Demeter it is not. Neither is donning a blindfold plus headphones, and boasting a grin like the one that betrays the fact you don’t normally fly business class, an experience surely at all comparable to the jungle ayahuasca one.

12-step style integration and ceremony – my bad, ‘celebrating the mysteries’ – circles were mentioned as future possibilities by Psych delegates in a huddle with Imperial College trials participants Iain Roullier and Leonie Schneider, unsung heroes of the UK space who also spoke onstage with Dr Ros repping their PsyPan set-up. In the meantime there is… an app.

“The substance is only 51% of the process”

‘Holding space’ doesn’t seem to have been much of an issue during contemporary scientific tests and education regarding bad trips-stroke-challenging, purgatorial experiences may take the edge off them so to speak. Admittedly a guide, let alone a skilled psychotherapist or shaman, may be good for a bad trip too. Because surely MindMed’s ‘off switch’ jab is cheating*.

An old pal has just reminded me that our sitter was a table leg with an acid house smiley face drawn on it which we kept in the back of the van. The Wild Hunt rides.

*Take the off switch if they offer it or at least don’t say I told you not to

The Microdose Age

Medical

LSD’s versatility is wildly underestimated say thought leaders Beckley Psytech

Lady Amanda Fielding of The Beckley Foundation and now Beckley Psytech

“Microdosing is a step forward for humankind.”

Beckley Psytech’s Lady Amanda Fielding (for it is she) declared so at Psych Symposium. If psychedelics can be for the everyman, can they be for every day?

While it’s less spectacular than ‘spiritual doses’, DMT, or ayahuasca, and an ongoing science to say the least, microdosing’s arguably taken a stronger foothold in popular culture than the next-level psychedelics. Users report similar effects to integrated major experiences, like enthusiasm, geniality, consideration and walking in the woods while listening to Jon Hopkins. Famously though microdosing – which Beckley are researching throughly – is one of the few contemporary psychedelic phenomena to fail the placebo test. Small doses are being tested on some conditions: MindMed are on stage two for 20µg of LSD twice a week, while sticking someone in a room and giving them a proper tab (200µg) did okay for GAD . The likes of New Health Club are poised to bring acid to the workplace (at last). Lenny Gibson’s observation was that ‘psyche’ also means ‘breath’, and Stanislav Grof’s holotropic breathwork could be the only option – and also a better one – for many.

Professor David Nutt pointed out in his Psych presentation that it’s the ‘wellbeing’ scores that are really impressive in psychedelic therapy’s efficacy results. But according to a neuroscientist I spoke to outside when the fire alarm went off, “there are no criteria for developing drugs for ‘wellbeing’ like there might be for mental health conditions already treated pharmacologically. So everybody’s trying to make drugs, which is ruinously expensive as it is, without knowing precisely what to aim at, certainly in terms of approval.” The Mushroom Nation is at once already here, and still so far away.

NB Psychedelics are prohibited in most places even if labelled ‘cacao’ and sent in gaudy packaging. You can still get busted for them like this guy.

Learning to fly

Integration

Is there more to integration than walking in the woods while listening to John Hopkins?

‘Hyperbolic Depth’ by Wolfe Von Lenkiewicz available here

“The substance is only 51% of the treatment” said Imperial College PsiloDep 2 trial clinical lead scientist Dr Rosalind Watts at Psych Symposium 2022.

It was vehemently echoed by the PsyPan patient support group alongside her on stage at London’s National Gallery. Blasting off into hyperspace is not entirely the point either reminded week four Vital lecturer Dr Lenny Gibson, who evoked Stanislav Grof: “The ecstasy of a noumenal moment, a psychedelic intoxication, is not enough for mysticism. Such a moment comes to nothing if it does not become part of a process of lived expression and expressed thinking.”

Less than a week previously Dr Ros launched her Acer Integration project at the Earth Centre in Hackney. It’d take a heart of stone not to give the team at Acer credit and I, for one, liked the singing in the round. The mystic is sorely lacking in European research as Dr David Luke points out, and metropolitan Londoners, their dopamine receptors worn down to ichorous stubs, are polarised in their spiritual awakening or total lack thereof. I suspect it might be better for many if we stick to burning massive effigies and people just ‘get it’ on either a collective unconscious level or whatever.

Meanwhile the stock images of millennials in the blindfold and headphones are beginning to look sinister, I reckon. Once again I find myself drawn to the intriguingly complex MAPS PTSD therapy programme, where the mystical concepts so potent for healing trauma must be dealt with ever so sensitively, because the soldiers have been driven far further from God than even my neighbours in this modern-day Babylon (I like London really; non-dual thinking).

“Be kind to the guy at the grocery store. Make new friends. Put the art pedal to the floor.”

While veterans and the treatment-resistant depressed crave healing – and should go to the front of the queue – the rest of us scrabble for meaning, humanity, or merely playfulness. Nonplussed yet fascinated by doxa, Plato’s term for shallow concerns, we struggle to ‘participate in eternal totality’ as Spinoza urged. Raves, ‘sex positivity’ and Burning Man-type festivals are our attempts to break through. And ‘meaning making experiences’ may indeed prompt a breakthrough or two, but that will only be the start of a long and confusing journey for some.

Others, like us BJJ bores and Dragon’s Den/Shark Tank wannabees, ponder our lack of the right kind of trauma, that sweet spot sought by Neitzsche, Jung, and others who rarely left their desks.

The greeks did put down their books. Even Plato excelled at wrestling, competing at the Pytheon (like The Championship in English football) and Isthmian games. Both of which featured culture and sport combined incidentally. Immortality Key writer Brian Muraresku says in this great Lex Fridman interview that the greeks were also fond of saying, “Life can only be experienced in a truly terrifying, but transformational, encounter with death.” He quotes Huxley on mass radical self-transcendence and deeper understanding. Plus Alan Watts on authority being threatened by mass outbreaks of mysticism. 

Myth, or ontology if you like, in the West and far beyond teaches that less thought is better than more. Lenny Gibson’s lifestyle advice: “Be kind to the guy at the grocery store. Make new friends. Put the art pedal to the floor.”