Emerging landscapes with Dr Bennet Zelner

My unofficial Vital Study Zine #8 with observations from Vital Psychedelic Training and recent happenings in the space

‘Liquidated Chanel’ by Zevs, works avaialble from Magda Danysz gallery

The final lecture in Vital’s first core module of five, Psychedelic Therapies: Historical and Current Approaches focussed on the future.

And not only that of psychedelic use, medical or otherwise. 

Dr Bennet A Zelner is developing and applying ‘biomimetic’ solutions inspired by the natural world, to on-the-ground business practice. Right now he’s associate professor of business and public policy at the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. His research there includes a radical study on the impact of psychedelic insights on organisational leaders, with the petri dish being a local copper mine. 

“Around 2013 I felt disconnected from work, marriage and life in general,” he explains of his psychedelic journey, "I put the blame on myself; after all, I had external measures of success supposed to fulfil me. I was reintroduced to psychedelics, this time in an intentional setting. The insight was that my profession was completely dysfunctional, which wasn’t supposed to happen.”

After examining this with his psychedelic circle, “Gradually I realised I could use what I had learned to possibly affect change. I started working with a focus on psychedelic assisted mental health treatment.”

Dr Zelner’s experience of the vastly successful Frome Model of healthcare in Somerset, UK provided the evidence for his economic solutions that integrate business, community, wellness and health.

“Pharma has leveraged the social and financial disconnection which contributes to mental distress”

He now advises a plethora of businesses and orgs, including the MIND European Foundation for Psychedelic Science and Europe’s Synthesis, where its first leadership retreats with Zelner and Sampson are underway. Dr Zelner is teaching along with fellow psychedelic academic, lawyer Rachelle Sampson. Plus, in the spirit of altruism he helps out with his local Brooklyn Psychedelic Society. Plus, he’s behind the investment fund trying to turn on business, Transformative Capital.

“Today, about 40% of Americans report that they feel isolated and don't have meaningful relationships,” says Dr Zelner. The pharmaceutical industry has leveraged this hyper-individualism, the social and financial disconnection, which itself is contributing to the mental distress they're supposed to be trying to address the first place.” And which it is holding at bay at very best, with big pharma profits tripling and patient numbers rising steadily. 

“Frightening as it may be, the chaotic state of our systems holds the potential for true change”

This happens across the business sector. ’Extractive economics’ where resources and revenue are taken from a community and applied elsewhere, contribute to the sense of disconnection impacting healthcare, says Dr Zelner. “The CEO to worker pay ratio rose from 24 times to over two thousand, between 1980 and 2017. That’s one example; another is chain stores taking over local businesses, Main Street to Wall Street.”

Re-connecting finance and communities will benefit healthcare in and of itself, while bottom-up innovations in healthcare provide fertile ground for communities and local businesses to grow organically. 

“The current chaotic state of our current systems, as frightening as it may be, I think, also does hold the potential for true change,” says Dr Zelner. 

Here he is talking to London’s Psychedelic Society plus you can see more of Dr Zelner over in the New Psychonaut YouTube lecture hub.

Next issue: As the first psychedelic park and Awakn’s clinics open in Bristol we ask: is Albion here? Plus guest lecturer Courtney Barnes on US law

Healing of the Nation

Approach

Become a tree, mushroom, bee or flower with pollination models and mycelial economics

By Tabita Rezaire in Black Fantastic at the Southbank Heyward Gallery, London till September 18

Psychedelics have been totally colonised, of course. But mushrooms even have the answer for that.

Dr Zelner didn’t just quit the rat race. He found a way to disable the money trap.

‘The Pollination Approach’ that he originally outlined in a landmark article for MAPS is a new community based healthcare structure, inspired by the vastly successful Frome Model that you can read about in this issue’s Medical section.

He further acknowledges that if community, business, economics and health are interconnected, then it’d only truly work if systems other than healthcare change too. Especially if we’re to avoid a psychedystopia like that set out in illustrated story We Will Call it Pala, which my Reichian body work coach would call ‘evocative’.

Wielding his understanding of biomimetics, Dr Zelner says “Fungi control the allocation of resources to plants, and they don’t set it all up so one can get much bigger than the others,” he says, “The social shift is from a disconnected pattern to a connected pattern, where people in social organisations are linked in multiple ways – which is also nature’s pattern, the mycelial network, the root networks if you will, of mushrooms. Resources are circulated through the entire system, keeping money local and creating economic multipliers.”

It’s the kind of thing both Banksy and my dad would agree on.

Dr Zelner’s Transformative Capital Institute is allocating funds to those kind of projects.  

“None of us needs to take on the responsibility to change the world. Incremental, emergent change is how life’s process works”

Regenerative economics, the ‘community and wellbeing first’ business strategy has also been completely colonised. You can do an MSc in it. Zenner says, “I’m not anti-capitalist, but in regenerative economics shareholders can’t be prioritised above all. I saw the phrase crop up in a traditional venture capital firm report, saying they like my pollination approach and it could help double their profits. Obviously there’s a conflict there.”

He continues, “Wellness has been colonised,” of course, “any change we can make through the policy process is incremental at best.” Ranting at your Twitter feed about the latest moral-political infraction is finally over.

“None of us needs to take on the responsibility to change the world, says Dr Zelner, “Incremental, emergent change is how life’s process works. Positive action at a micro level is regenerative. Individual behaviours quickly become a pattern shift. You are a pollinator.”

And yes, psychedelics could still be the healing of the nation as ‘The first lady of LSD history’ Dr Erika Dyck stated in this rallying Charcuna piece. “Psychedelics help people question their beliefs, and we are socially constructing this reality. They shift people from disconnection to connection. It’s an embodied experience of the regenerative pattern.”

We don’t need to get everyone on board immediately. “Tipping points happen only at 15-20% of a network,” advises Dr Zelner.

Switching to ‘steward ownership’ is one way socially-minded firms new and old can limit their exposure to extracting finance. The format allows a business to legally put purpose over shareholder returns, capping revenue-based financing returns after eight years. Late in 2021 Europe’s Synthesis Institute raised its Series A round of $7.25 million investment funding under a stewardship model becoming the first psychedelic company to do so.

Back around the neighbourhood, Dr Zelner’s local Brooklyn Psychedelic Society are drawing up a Frome-style health co-op to great excitement. 

I grew up near Frome, and my parents remain active in community life: amateur dramatics, parish council, village hall management committee, ‘walking football’ for the boomers. The internecine clashes within village life have inspired endless hours of situation comedy over the years, plus recently a lockdown viral sensation. 

Research from Imperial College, no less, says psilocybin treatment for depression increased nature awareness and softened any authoritarian politics amongst the test group. I ask Dr Zelner if psychedelics can even heal neighbourly squabbles. 

“I don’t have as many funny stories as I’ll probably have this time next year,” he grins, “The Brooklyn project is very new and run by a guy called Colin Pugh. They’re still at the phase where they’re figuring out if to be a traditional co-op, versus a non-profit co-op, how to engage the existing membership of their traditional psychedelic society…” 

Maybe a dose of non-dual thinking will still be required before life’s committee meetings.

Till then, we can but dream.

Re-Story-Ation

Therapy

Ancient principles for living encourage a wondrous view of the world. Is this the ‘re-enchantment’ with life we need?

From Modern Alchemy, photographs by Viviane Sassen, available from by JBE Books

Rainforests gave the West spectacular medicines for the body. Could their way of life provide healing for the mind too?

Half of all pharmacological medicines are derived from plants, including recent innovations, and 25% come from global rainforest. Curare, the muscle relaxant Amazonian tribes used to stun animals, prompted a revolution in anaesthetics and modern medicine. Quinine was the first cure for malaria. Vincristine and Vinblastine from Madagascar, used the treat cancers, have vastly extended the chance of surviving childhood leukemia.

Now, thousands flock to ayahuasca retreats to balm their souls. But passionate field researchers both young and old claim the lifestyle and ideology around the medicine is essential to redemption.

“Our profound alienation is a consequence of turning relationships into things”

Washington-based Joseph Mays, wields a master’s in ethnobotany from the University of Kent – a likely hotbed of radical thought – after observing responses to globalisation from the Yanesha in central Peru. He’s published a smart medicinal plant guide for the Jama-Coaque Ecological Reserve and works as the program director of Chacruna’s arse-kicking Indigenous Reciprocity Initiative (IRI).

From Modern Alchemy, photographs by Viviane Sassen, available from by JBE Books

Mays cracked his bonus Vital lecture off by quoting Karl Marx like a boss.

“Marx spoke about the ‘metabolic rift’, man’s alienation from nature,” says the scholar and activist, “We are now in ‘The Anthropocene Epoch’.”

That’s the conceptual geological era we’re living in now. The official one’s the Holocene. The Anthropocene represents a time man begins to have geological impact upon the Earth, roughly marked by the detonation of the first atomic bomb.

“We should think of our bodies with alchemy in mind”

Ernst Junger warily observed the march of technology throughout the 20th century. He wrote that it was best explained by the senseless, arbitrary nature of the First World War. Not only in the power new weapons had to slaughter hundreds in a moment, but the absence of any serious evaluation of why it was happening.

Junger considered the endemic, fatalistic nihilism he witnessed in the trenches, and in the commuter era that followed it, “a new, terrible practice” and spoke of “the loneliness of man in a new, unexplored world, whose steely law will be felt as meaningless.”

Vincent Blok, in his acclaimed Ernst Junger’s Philosophy of Technology writes that our enlightenment values of '“Reason and humanity, of morality and individual freedom” count for nothing now they are wedged within the indefatigable gears of… The Anthropocene.

“The resources of our inner and outer worlds are inseparable”

Mays quotes feted Brazilian anthropologist, Cambridge lecturer and writer of Cannibal Physics Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, who writes that our profound alienation is a consequence of “turning relationships into things” and “perceiving life as a collection of detached objects.”

The animistic view though is “inherently subjectifying” in contrast to the objectified modern era. It also stands alongside our own subjective spiritual beliefs, working as a system to integrate Earth and consciousness.

“We are now in The Anthropocene Epoch”

Breaking the dichotomies – mind-body, mankind-Earth, civilisation-environment – can also free us from our alienation. Our energy spent on tweaking existing problems could go into designing alternatives. “Maybe we should think of our bodies with alchemy in mind, and imagine many other compositions or assemblages,” says The Life of Plants writer Emanuele Coccia in his introduction to Modern Alchemy, a new series of photographs by Viviane Sassen published by JBE Books, photos from which you see here.

From Modern Alchemy, photographs by Viviane Sassen, available from JBE Books

Learning on the job develops a deeper relationship with the non-human elements of vocation and personal growth. Individual responsibility and local ‘bottom up’ development puts ownership for our immediate experience in our own hands, away from the distraction of political infighting.

Communities are marginalised in a similar manner to the environment. Energy is better spent providing a container for them to address their “own needs, and their own priorities in a self-directed manner from the ground up” as a forest would. Or like Somerset UK’s Frome Model of Compassionate Primary Care that has slashed hospital admissions by 40% over a decade, which you can read about in this issue’s Medical section.

“Biological and cultural diversity are inextricably linked,” says Mays, “And the culture of plants and communities are inter-dependent. The resources of our inner and outer worlds are inseparable.”

Complex cosmologies, explained

Space

Syrupy new age spirituality cannot hope to illustrate our lived experience. What can?

From Modern Alchemy published by JBE Books

‘Psychedelic rhetoric’ is a term I’ve been searching for.

I can’t claim to have coined the phrase or for it to be sacred ceremonial insight.

Instead it is the words of academic hotshot Reanne Crane, a linguistics expert at the ever-more radical University of Kent. She spoke at The University of Exeter’s Philosophy of Psychedelics Conference 2022. On the programme, one of the keywords listed for her talk was ‘synthesisers’.

“Everything’s ineffable. If I had to describe the experience of sitting on this chair I’d have trouble”

Music’s only one method we use to communicate notions language – especially this one – can’t. Words certainly don’t do justice to the psychedelic experience, as we are all painfully aware. In her talk Scrap the Book: Polymodes, Metaphors, and the Psychedelic Skyline at The University of Exeter’s Philosophy of Psychedelics Conference 2022 Crane asked, what damage might that be causing and what can we do to make it better?

Crane, also a bedroom producer and songwriter, used ‘cleaning the filter’ as an example of witless psychediatribe, employing contemporary sound design to demonstrate her point. 

Making a rockstar late entrance, Crane strode down the auditorium steps and took straight to the stage declaring, “Everything’s ‘ineffable’. If I had to describe the experience of sitting on this chair I’d have trouble.”

Lumbering late Anglo-Saxon lingo requires myth and story to weave in philosophy and perception. “Indigenous people don’t need to say ‘ineffable’ because they have complex cosmologies,” Crane delivered in her plain-speaking Yorkshire accent. “Losing our grip on absolute truth might be what we all actually need right now,” she declared to a hall of hardcore truth seekers while hovering cross-legged above a conference chair.

Awareness of other realities is the key to coming to terms with our own, say the modern-day explorers returning from in-depth field research.

“If we remove the mushroom from our taboos it loses meaning. And efficacy”

Back at Vital where we’re drilling down on meta-awareness with a no-holds barred lecture on the realities of Amazonian shaman-hood.

“Poetry can include nuance and euphemisms avoiding difficult subjects,” says Nicholas Spiers, a courageous anthropologist and film maker who directed space smash hit The Peyote Files and is Chacruna’s research coordinator.

Nonetheless “Difficult questions are not answered by the new age” says Spiers to rapturous applause from this website. The West has been ‘addicted’ to positivist spirituality for decades. Our crystal-based codswallop is a sanitisation of the post-industrial Western mysticism inspired by Helena ‘Madam’ Blavatsky in the 1800s. Can we cope with the lessons of the plants?

Because this particular medicine might be difficult to swallow. “Objects with particular material value are considered profane,” expands Spiers, “neither does anybody ‘own’ the trees, or the forests.” To put it another way: Chihones, morally ambivalent spirits of nature, can infect you with illness for not respecting natural customs. Does that somehow strike more of a chord?

“It’s OK to use the mushroom to find a missing rooster”

It gets worse: “If we remove the mushroom from our taboos,” as we do seem set on doing to some extent, “it loses meaning… and therefore efficacy,” warns Spiers.

Human ingenuity and good old acceptance can see us though. During his time with the Maztecha, Spiers was taken by one way the gentlemen of the village compete in their craft. “They use permaculture farming styles to grow organic coffee using natural predators to kill pests. The ferocity of the wasps’ nest on your farm is highly valued.”

It’s not all “cosmic diplomacy” with the Chihones and working alongside wasps amongst the indigenous though. Spiers points out there are other advantages besides a resolution with nature: “It is seen as appropriate to use the mushroom to do practical things. Like, find a missing rooster.”

Village Green Preservation Society

Medical

A radical healthcare program centred on human interaction emerges in Somerset

Frome stained glass artist Jo Eddleston

Here in Albion a new psychedelic model of healthcare is saving the National Health Service millions.

“What we should be doing is spreading wellbeing with an integrative approach, not just treating diseases,” says Dr Zelner, "Wellbeing is an inherently holistic concept. You can only create it with an integrative approach.”

Glorious Somerset is the supposed site of King Arthur’s Camelot and the 4,500 year-old stone circles in Stanton Drew where Currunos and The Wild Hunt roam (it is also reasonably close to glastonbury and Stonehenge, yes). It’s also a hotbed of middle-class flight from post-COVID London. Property prices are going through the thatched roof. Born within this liminal fuzzbox is The Frome Model of Enhanced Primary Care. In place for over a decade it’s saved the NHS £6 for every £1 spent on it.

This gently radical approach to public health provision is focussed on community interaction, especially including the most vulnerable. Over its 12 years in progress, the sleepy West Country town of Frome’s accident and emergency admissions have reduced by 16% while the local average has risen 30%. 

“It proves community improves wellbeing”

‘Primary care’ is health work intended to prevent disease before it requires any treating. Face-to-face contact has proven to be the most effective way to do this. The model mixes primary care innovations with organic community development programs. 

Dr Zelner explains, “Around fifteen years ago the health workers in Frome observed a lot of patients coming in were suffering from loneliness. They decided to treat loneliness as a medical condition: training up health connectors who’d look out for people who seemed lonely, and community connectors who connected them with community organisations.”

‘Why buy when you can borrow?’ is A Library of Things’ slogan

Further innovations followed in what Compassionate Communities director Dr Julian Abel, former vice president of Public Health Palliative Care International, calls ‘Integrated well being networks that enhance naturally occurring ones.’

“They set up ‘talking cafes’ where you could chat to strangers freely,” expands Dr Zelner, “in-person visits for hospital dischargees, and hubs inside the surgeries. It became known as ‘Compassionate Frome’. There’s been enough time for empirical evidence and all admissions have declined by 30-40% relative to neighbouring areas. It proves community improves wellbeing.” Indeed, 81% of patients felt their wellbeing increase and 94% said they found it easier to mange their health.  

The programme is being rolled out across the UK.

Echoing Stanislav Grof’s view of the Freudian mental health model, Abel writes, “‘Survival of the fittest’ is not a phrase that accurately reflects our evolution. Instead, ‘survival of the kindest’ describes how animals, especially humans, have evolved to be social creatures. We are dependent on each other, and how we treat the people around us has a profound effect on us all’.”

Infinite Debt to the Biosphere

Integration

We cannot hope to fully repay our debt to nature. But we can give it a go

From Irving Penn – Burning Off the Page at Pace gallery Los Angeles till Sept 3

Feeling that familiar Western guilt? Motivated even to actually do something?

But what?

Never fear. You can pay money, like normal, and it’s (kind of) fine.

Plus you can also change your behaviour. I offer genuine compassion for how tough this can be. Especially when it involves not only stepping outside of your comfort zone, but abandoning the concept of comfort zones althogether.

Anthropologist and documentary film maker Nicholas Spiers is The Chacruna Institute of Psychedelic Plant Medicines’ lead researcher. He’s written an Annotated Bibliography of Key Texts on the Indigenous and Historical Uses of Psilocybin for them, and he co-directed this year’s plant medicine TV smash The Peyote Files with Chacruna founder Bia Labate. He’s also made films about Salvia divinorum and Racist Psychedelic Myths. Nick, who spent several years embedded in the Sierra Maztecha, is, like many animistic converts, not one for any sort of BS whatsoever. 

“Our own society seeks ‘catharsis’ which technically means a ‘balm’ or ‘quick fix’,” he explains, “we look at ‘unwellness’ rather than ‘wellness’ leading to a a culture of fear. True reciprocity would be a titrated experience, expanding our capacity for both the comfortable and the uncomfortable.” Sure. Can you give us an example, Nick? 

“Well, what you’re doing here on Vital is trying to address mental health. Right now, for example, bipolar diagnoses struggle to find work, and marginalised communities may display what appears as ‘psychosis’,” he replies, “The foundation of Western psychology is at fault, but nothing is done to help them or address it.”

The West currently looks to epistemology – drilling down to a single truth – to inform its purpose. Cultural beliefs, which cannot be measured empirically, don’t count towards epistemological truth.

“Plant medicine is inseparable from people”

Ontology though considers the nature of existence instead, where consistencies can still be found – including in matters less easily pinned-down, like the regularity of change or the source of creativity. 

Joseph Mays, program director of Chacruna’s Indigenous Reciprocity Initiative of the Americas, puts our dysfunctional dependence on epistemology into an economic frame. “The indigenous communities are suffering from the same extractive system that takes from our own environment and wellbeing. It externalises as many costs as possible,” this includes exploiting tribes and its local workers he says. So “reciprocity can happen in any relationships, human or non-human, employer to employee. Or with ones friends, family, and neighbours: “the conservation of nature requires the conservation of communities,” adds Mays.

Ernst Junger floated many of these themes in 1951’s The Forest Passage, which is gradually becoming his most referred to treatise.

Therein Junger holds court in spectacular fashion. “Before our eyes, fields that sustained owners and tenants for thirty generations are carved up in a manner that leaves everyone hungry,” he wrote in one of the first broadsides at extractive materialism, “Forests that supplied wood for millennia are laid level; and from one day to the next the goose that laid the golden eggs is slaughtered and its flesh used to cook a broth, that is shared with all but satisfies none.”

Junger’s life coaching centred on his concept of ‘the forest rebel’. I pretend to be one while I’m doing my forest bathing. Junger’s archetype focuses on retaining a sense of freedom, without plunging into the abyss of ‘fatalism’ by deciding you’d better just be more of a bastard than everyone else seems to be. Instead, you can hold on to your own morals and independence.

In Icelandic myth, Junger explains, “A forest passage followed a banishment; through this action a man declared his will to self-affirmation from his own resources. This was considered honourable, and it still is today, despite all the platitudes.” Others may roll their eyes, but really they cannot help but be impressed by your autonomy.

The forest rebel has not given up hope, either. “Freedom is prefigured in myth and in religions, and it always returns; so, too, the giants and the titans always manifest with the same apparent superiority,” quoth Junger with characteristic confidence, “The free man brings them down; and he need not always be a prince or a Hercules. A stone from a shepherd’s sling, a flag raised by a virgin, and a crossbow have already proven sufficient.”

Which leads us to handing over your disposable income. Chacruna’s Indigenous Reciprocity Initiative aims to ‘decolonise philanthropy’. Existing programs demand certain concessions from the recipients of their charity dollar; the IRI is strictly ‘no strings attached’ and works directly with 20 community groups distributing donations equally.

Reforestation, peyote conservation, traditional storytelling documentation, and a Shipibo Plant Medicine Garden that shares its seeds with other communities are only a few examples. It’s raised over $100,000 in tis first year with only 7.5% of that going on overheads. 

“Plant medicine is inseparable from people,” says Mays, “studying the perspective hinted at by visionary plants can give us a guide forwards.”

‘Be the change you want to see’ then, like the cushions at Ikea implore you to do. That trite quote is attributed to Mahatma Ghandi when he actually said was more profound: “As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is, and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.”

Kool-Aid Corner #8

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

Graph of the Week

Impact of traffic noise on heart disease:

From: Impact of road traffic noise on annoyance and preventable mortality in European cities: A health impact assessment by Sasha Khomenko et al, published in Environment International Volume 162, April 2022

My bookshelf weighs a ton

Notable new purchases for the occult library. Strictly second hand snap-ups only. This week: Cosmic Serpent by Jeremy Narby.

From World of Books for £4.79

I understand why Cosmic Serpent is overlooked in favour of writings from more local experts like Eduardo de Luna. But it does at least come from the PoV of an intrigued, enthusiastic westerner. Plus it contains not only descriptions of the ceremonial process, but the animistic lifestyle that informs it.

Narby was only in his mid-20s when he travelled to Peru, and soon after first published the book in France in 1995. It was 1998 by the time it made it to the UK. That’s still 25 years ago. Kudos to Narby’s instinct for picking up on the vibe so long ago.

Next issue: Core module two Psychedelic Therapies begins with Courtney Barnes on the legal situation