The Wisdom of the Human mind

Approach

Psychedelic treatment prompts our inner self to do the healing

The Centre for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins Medicine, Maryland USA

“I’ve learned to trust how wise the mind is, and how it brings things up the right way, at the right time,” says Dr Richards on the unpredictability of psychedelic experience.

Richards believes his methodist upbringing “saved” him from melting down when left alone in a 1963 testing chamber. His spiritual voyage was considered an intriguing anomaly at the time; other test subjects had indeed mimicked insanity when given LSD in an empty room with zero preparation for what may come.

Schoolin’ around– (L to R) Alan Watts, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, and Gary Snyder at the Houseboat Summit in 1967

Richards only ever enjoyed one more trip on that level, his fifth, after he and Walter Pahnke devised ‘set and setting’, venturing into nature for the first time.

Richards certainly relishes the mystical aspect now considered key to significant psychedelic healing. Though he advises that “It’s not a dud if it’s not transcendental,” and what arises from the experience is “what needs to.”

Revelation can occur with eyes closed or open, when installed firmly on the couch wearing headphones or roaming through the wilderness… and whether the experience transcendent, farcical, wild, philosophical, relaxing or downright awful.

“This is the growing edge of spiritual development. We must condone knowledge”

The attitude best to prepare the voyager with is one of “Courage, adventure, desire for development, and abandonment of persona,” says Richards.

In The Psychology of Money Morgan Housel points out that we all invest money with different reasons, tastes, and circumstances. Then we worry that we’re not doing what the other dude who’s supposedly doing it totally right is doing.

Steve McQueen and Nelie Adams in the steam rooms at Esalen

To some, guiding individuals towards their own neo-shamanic state is glib at best and dangerously foolhardy at worst.

But the most experienced western psychedelic therapist of the past sixty years says, “This is the growing edge of spiritual development. The Western World has brought many positive innovations to the experience, and we must condone knowledge.”