The shadow, obvs. And it has unfinished business… with you

A significant event like taking a step forward in human consciousness has got to involve some kind of challenge, like a hero’s journey, right?

“We will have to bear the tensions of the opposites. There are no easy ways forward. We will have to grapple with the unknown,” said the magnificent Maria Papaspyrou, editor of The Psychedelic Divine Feminine and founder of Brighton’s Institute of Psychedelic Therapy, at July 2022’s Breaking Convention conference.

Paradigm shifts in society though begin at home, with our own ‘shadow work’.

The Jungian negotiation process with complex urges that we feel from sheepish to psychotic about, is crossing over fast. The subculture is throwing out stardust like London’s Kemetic shadow witches High Priestxss.

“The greatest sense of agency and healing is often found at the centre of the storm”

And start-up bros are said to be seeking a fresh challenge that even sounds like the psychedelic version of an iron man triathlon.

“Serenity, salvation and strength are not always found in the upward sense to the light,” commented a richly experienced trauma specialist in my Vital study group, Kelli Ann Dumas, “they spring from inward: deep, in the ripeness of the trauma. The darkest part of the night is just before dawn. The greatest sense of agency and healing is often found at the edge of the depth, at the centre of the storm.”

Crucially insiders say shadow work is mandatory for psychedelic therapists and guides, to clear any lingering sense of grey areas from the set and setting for example, and to engage in a regular process of checking one’s motivations: “The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is,” wrote philosopher Baruch Spinoza.

Dr Sjöstedt-Hughes’ psychedelic philosophy, explained in his lecture to Vital students, takes shadow work a step further. It challenges our status quo that inherently considers stability and comfort to be desirable; the ‘slave morality’ of Nietzsche.

Over to another of Sjöstedt-Hughes’ worldly philosophers, Ernst Junger:

“I am an anarch in space, a meta-historian in time. Hence I am committed to neither the political present nor tradition; I am blank and also open and potent in any direction. Dear old Dad, in contrast, still pours his wine into the same decaying old wineskins, he still believes in a constitution when nothing and no one constitutes anything.”

Sjöstedt-Hughes has poured over Whitehead’s personal copy of The Will to Power written by Nietzsche in 1887-8.

“There are no easy ways forward”

He points out Whitehead has double-underlined the line, ‘The contempt and hatred of all that perishes, changes, and varies: whence comes this valuation of stability?’

Whitehead also finds Nietzsche pondering inter-connectedness, another psychedelic philosophy staple. He also gets his luminous marker out for, ‘It is essential that one should not mistake the part that ‘consciousness’ plays: it is our relation to the outer world; it was the outer world that developed it.’ Sjöstedt-Hughes draws further parallels between the will to power and Alfred North-Whitehead’s examination of consciousness providing our sense of purpose.

“I am an anarch in space… a meta-historian in time”

Repressed by the slave morality, we are mostly forbidden to sate the instincts that torture us unheeded. Honing our arete, the ancient Greek term for a sense of purpose that they aspired to instead of ‘happiness’ contemporary Western society considers irresponsible and selfish.

It certainly does not encourage or revere our cyclical development like the ancient Egyptians. Let alone steaming around openly admitting “I am no man. I am dynamite,” like Nietzsche.

Terrence McKenna considered ‘lived experience’ to be the ultimate form of spirituality. The path to virtu, notoriously, involves actions we find daunting yet fulfilling.

Although hedonists will be pleased to know arete and the will to power don’t need to involve soul-shattering grail quests, or crossing the abyss, all the time… or not at least.

Ask Ernst Junger. He might have decreed, "What doesn't kill me makes me stronger; and what kills me makes me incredibly strong,” but he also swore by:

“The Epicurean is the master of pleasure and knows how to moderate it, not so much from subjection to discipline as from the love of pleasure itself.”

Always Dionysus – never the crucified.