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

“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.”