Alchemy for the People

Integration

The psychedelic revolution is already happening

By Brian Bolland from Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles

It’s time to take the psychedelic destiny that is rightfully ours. Which doesn’t have to involve anything too jarring.

Stanislav Grof said “It would be nice to see people be able to go for hikes, or go swimming.” Albert Hoffman insisted LSD was experienced in the wild.

“I used to go surfing, I’m a big fan of watersports on psychedelics,” giggles Dr Luke, “A lot of the outdoor-wilderness extreme sports have gone hand in hand with psychedelic culture.” James Oroc was the Burning Man face and 5-MEO author better known to extreme sports fans as paraglider ‘Kiwi’ Johnston, who passed away doing what he loved in 2020.

“Ecologists in Europe have druids involved. Which is my fault”

Morphic resonance – relating to the consciousness of others, said to be a skill of Shipibo ayahuasca healers – is strong in ceremonial groups.

“Will I ever be able to conduct forest therapy with a hundred, maybe ten thousand people?” dreamed aloud one Vital student in the Q&A after Dr Luke’s speech. “Ecologists in Europe have druids involved, which is my fault,” was all the esoteric scientist could offer unfortunately, with acceptance on that scale being so far away.

Although what with MDMA apparently being a psychedelic now, we’ve been in ceremony outdoors, admittedly with the drumming updated, for a while now. Here’s to James Oroc and all the rave ancestors.

The Wrong Mysteries

Integration

What is a mystery school? Are we in one? Should we be? And what are we doing there?

‘The Star’ by Devan Shimoyama available here

The Mystery School is a heartfelt trope amongst some psychedelic users.

It evokes not only the acceptance that us ‘remarkable’ former children of ‘unremarkable parents’ (er, Miller 1996) crave, but also a comforting sense of relevance. We, not the suits, are actually directing things from behind the scenes. After all, the ‘Illuminati’ pyramid-with-an-eye-on-it which appears on dollar bills was pinched off Martin Luther by the esoteric protestants under England’s Queen Elizabeth the First, hence its shadowy undertones.

Cliquiness is uncharacteristically intrinsic to psychedelic experience. From the in-crowds at Euleusis and the Platonic Academy through to Esalen and the 21st century Tyringham Initiative, to the “it’s only us tripping” bond between pre-acceptance users and the current impulse to put a gatekeeper on ‘shamanism’.

Students are undertaking ‘Diversity, Inclusion and Cultural Competence Tutoring’ as part of Vital. In the interests of silence being violence, I don’t feel it’s inappropriate for me to experience shame – the actually uncomfortable, ‘only way out is through’ kind – having enjoyed many benefits of multicultural society, let alone colonialism, with none of the drawbacks the people of colour around me faced. You don’t have to agree with that.

And if it helps the Vital student body feel safer with, and closer to, each other then it’s a monster I’ll enthusiastically “Dive into the pupil of” as Dr Richards puts it. So far this actually seems like it has worked. Which is fantastic.

“For many of us, intellectualisation is our primary form of armouring”

I do try, in my white way, to engage friends in this conversation. They’ll certainly speak about their racial experience in the UK, and sometimes painfully in that deadpan way that makes the aside so much more shocking.

But their tales are personal, because it’s a personal conversation. These valuable monologues end with “You know me, Steve, I’m not going to give you the narrative,” which is exactly the sort of thing I’d bloody say.

Squirming on my part has been met at least once by satisfied laughter and V-signs. This fragile white man will not be given closure via his intellectualised debate, and is sobered instead by the serene sort of first hand testimony that the righteous deliver so gracefully.

Vital brought in next-gen ‘Diversity, Inclusion and Cultural Competence Tutoring’. The lead facilitator was novellist and psychologist Ayize Jama-Everett. He wrote The Entropy of Bones an existential martial arts novel, so had me at that. If you’re reading this Ayize we can nerd out on all this any time here’s my email. Jama-Everett was keen to distance the programme from what we know as ‘diversity training’. His team’s approach is founded in work around differing, unsaid approaches amongst multicultural communities, which is actually necessary and courageous work.

Obviously there are differences in the American conversation – nobody in US race training mentions the excesses of the Raj, for example. Very few British people of colour descended from slaves; instead they emigrated to post-war Britain, brimming with optimism, to find a war-ravaged, poverty-stricken, tired and grey country that offered little welcome and sometimes outright hostility.

I actually do think that Western society is ‘institutionally racist’ (again you don’t have to agree) and was a bit embarrassed to find out that the approach wasn’t widely accepted. On the flip, I also think that the cultural competence movement would benefit from communicating using less academic language.

Dancing, playing sport and making love together I believe is the best way to begin healing the divides. But even spending meaningful, intimate time together is unlikely to confront the most difficult aspects of the matter. So I commend Jama-Everett for taking it on while admitting the drawbacks of the process, and gladly reward his bravery by taking part despite it involving a challenging experience for myself.

I can’t image doing it on acid would be fun. But that’s exactly the context.

Now. Nicholas Spiers, a British expert on western interaction with indigenous Amazonian peoples also headed up a lecture alongside talismanic thought leader Bia Labate. During a thorough truth-bombing about facile Western framing of Mazatec beliefs he pointed out that Marina Sabina, the shaman banker and mushroom pioneer Gordon Wasson brought to international recognition with his landmark Life mag feature in the 1960s, had her house burned down by her neighbours for attracting too much police attention to the tradition. She died isolated and poor. Today her image is abused to market tourist traps. Hardly part of any mystery school, or renaissance.

Read more and donate to Bia Labte’s Chacruna charity, intellectualise with Chacruna’s Psychedelic Justice: Toward a Diverse and Equitable Psychedelic Culture or rock this ‘Decolonise Your Mind’ T-shirt at your next gentrified neighbourhood BBQ.

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.”

The Eagle and the Condor

Integration

The Eagle and the Condor is a two thousand year old prophecy predicting unification of the American people

By Fellowship of the River cover artist Rai Weni

The propehcy that could be said to predict the colonisation of the Americas, the resulting cultural holocaust, and a re-emergence of mystical healing techniques.

The peoples of the Condor – indigeneous Americans – and the Eagle, western colonisers – will finally come together ushering a new paradigm of enlightenment.

Columbus’ First Voyage landed in the Carribbean in 1492. Syncronicity fans note that in 1994 Terrence McKenna published Food of the Gods and Dr Allan Schore released Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self.

“Be careful with anything, no matter what, because things can be tricky in those spaces. The medicine itself is not trying to trick us. If there is light, and positive healing spirit, it’s clear”

The aforementioned Shuar shaman John Perkins has alluded to the propehcy as prompting a shift from the West’s ‘Death Economy’ based on competiting over limited resources to a ‘Life Economy’ where wellbeing is paramount (in our abundant era, the Death Economy is arguably so past its due that its basis in scarcity has even had to be simulated by, for example, western governments implementing policies to artificially raise house prices).

This prophecy is not uncomparable to Western astrology’s Age of Aquarius (which both Carl Jung in Aion and Aleister Crowley with his ‘Age of Horus’ suggested will have a non-dual flipside, but that is for another day).

“Hearing ‘is it real?’ from the other end gets kind of boring after a while”

The prophecy offers the very seductive idea of ‘Pachakuti’ a time of reconciliation and healing. But is it real?

“Who knows what’s real?” says Dr Tafur, when talking about ‘entity' encounters’ and other sublime ingredients of the mystic experience, “we’re dealing with a mystery and we have to discern. Be careful with anything, no matter what, because things can be tricky in those spaces. The medicine itself is not trying to trick us. If there is light, and positive healing spirit, it’s clear. But if there’s any doubt, there’s no doubt – just wait. And don’t worry that you’re missing out, because you’re learning what could be good for you and what isn’t.”

It is your journey, and there are no clear answers. “Respecting your space is important, and these things should respect you too,” he says, “but this isn’t the sort of thing that can be learned on the internet. It’s messy and there’s room for projection and confusion.” Enforce boundaries as you should outside of DMT hyperspace.

“Hearing ‘is it real?’ from the other end gets kind of boring after a while,” says Dr Tafur.

Whether ‘entities’, or prophecies, or indeed ‘limbic resonance’ are facts is to miss the point.

Instead, ask – what are the feelings? And are they benefitting us?

Architecture is the trippiest job

Integration

‘Kiyo’ Azumi was a core member of the Weyburn team and tripped with the nurses

Kiyoshi Azumi built six ‘ideal mental hospitals’

Architects Henrik Bull and Erik Clough wrote chapters for Ralph Metzner’s The Ecstatic Adventure.

They took part in noted creativity and problem-solving exercises under the influence of LSD during the 1960s. Architecture has arguably become the trade most closely associated with psychedelic self-improvement since.

The first modern-day architect to get turned on though was Kiyoshi ‘Kiyo’ Azumi. Commissioned to revamp Canada’s asylum buildings by Osmond and Hoffer, you can probably guess what happened after they met in 1956 under the proviso of ‘learning how the patients perceive their environment.’

A long friendship developed: the first ‘ideal mental hospital’ in Yorktown, Saskatchewan was opened in 1965, another five were built in Canada, and a further in Pennsylvania USA.

Izumi’s book LSD and Architecture specifies the following conclusions:

1 Provide as much privacy as possible.

2 Minimise ambiguity of architecture's design and detail.

3 Bear no intimidating features.

4 Foster spatial interactions that curtail the frequency and intensity of undesirable confrontations.

More here.

Izumi passed away in 1996, and Weyburn was demolished in 2009.