Let them know it’s Saturnalia time

Integration

Heal the world from collective trauma says Thomas Hubl

2022’s Medicine Festival in the UK

My journalism network brother Matt Green is the author of Aftershock: fighting War, Surviving Trauma and Finding Peace (New Statesman: ‘Outstanding’, Spectator: ‘A work of integrity and substance’, TV’s Bear Grylls: ‘Compelling, humbling and inspiring’).

He examines collective trauma in his new blog Resonant World – and ways to heal it. Like the UK’s Medicine Festival whereupon he has hence returned. 

“I’m going to sound too idealistic and starry-eyed about what is basically a fun gathering in a field,” Matt reports, “But a core part of me knows I came away feeling more peaceful, grounded and inspired than when I arrived — and I’ve learned to trust that felt-sense more than my fear of sounding naive.”

Matt, who’s on the environment beat for Reuters right now, worked as a war correspondent in Iraq and Afghanistan. He spoke on the launch address call for The Collective Trauma Summit 2022 (oh yes), cooked up by guru Thomas Hubl author of Healing Collective Trauma. Which features basically everyone from the wonderful world of 21st century wellbeing. 

“Trauma on a personal level is energy, on a collective level it’s a storm,” says Hubl, who talks about activating our ‘collective immune system.’ He maintains “it’s an important function of collective health and if we don’t even have it, that’s a sign of our health.”

Matt addressed journalism’s part in mankind’s burnout. “The media is frozen, reporting what’s ‘out there’ as if it’s on a glass screen, stuck in a psychic sludge,” says the father of two married to a children’s therapist, “we’re ‘looking at broken glass through broken glass’ to borrow Thomas’ own phrase.”

Us media scum need unconditional loving too, says Matt: “That’s true of journalists as much as the rest of us who were born into this traumatised society. Journalists are recognising they need to be healing themselves as individuals, having perhaps been part of environments that encourage trauma-causing behaviours. Clinging to the notion that objectivity could protect us, was a fiction.”

When Sunday Times suits wouldn’t sign off heroic war reporter Marie Colvin’s expenses, hacks left a cow’s eyeball on the accounts desk in reference to the eye Colvin lost to a rocket propelled grenade blast while covering the Sri Lankan civil war in 2001 (it gave her PTSD). She sported her signature eye patch thereafter.

Driven on by her own unique quest for homeostasis, Colvin died reporting under news blackout from the siege of Homs in 2012 when her building was hit by Syrian artillery.

“Journalism can be a form of healing too though,” says Matt.

Decorated foreign correspondent Dean Yates was shattered by PTSD after two of his team were killed by an Apache gunship crew. Wikileaks dug up pilot cam footage that made for difficult viewing. Yates beat himself up further for not making enough of a storm with it. Eventually he was admitted to a psychiatric ward.

Now, Yates talks about his experience at edgy institutions. He and Reuters set up a blog site and mini-community where burnt-out broadcasters and wobbly world-slingers could exhume a bit of trauma by banging out some posts. 

“Slowly the culture started to change a little,” says Matt, “I’m not saying there isn’t a long way to go for the media…”

My cousin’s in Ukraine right now with the BBC. The most traumatic my journalism career ever got was when I reviewed Ian Schraeger’s new hotel and the remote for the TV in the suite didn’t work. No it wasn’t. It was when a close colleague and I were on the wrong end of a corporate ‘moral injury’ and he killed himself. 

Not that I, he or anyone in that position was, or is, above such behaviour ourselves. Neither are we discouraged to be, like Matt points out. And we’re the lucky ones. “None of this is possible without a community system that offers support, equity and justice,” points out Matt’s fellow host on the Collective Trauma summit, heavyweight sociologist Dr Ruby Mendenhall. Her work highlights the need to address racism as a health crisis given its eventual, detrimental effects on health, lives and budgets.

“Our own experience of trauma is not deep enough to feel deeper traumas holistically,” says Hubl of social engineering, “We provide properly; we see them as problems and patch them up with ideas. Yet there is an intensity of emotions we are not able to address.” Mendenhall’s work with communities in Illinois includes community wellbeing centres like those in Compassionate Care Frome, plus business incubators, career roadmaps and personal financial advice. 

When not kicking ass, Medenhall dabbles in poetry. Jotting down some rhymes has sort-of neuroscientific healing properties according to the summit’s Dr Laura Calderón de la Barca: “It’s using imagination as a container for healing. Beyond words alone, elements from the future and the past can meet.” Careful or I shall be forced to publish my Burroughs-style cut-ups.

IRL is a bummer

Integration

Returning to everyday existence brings depression patients right back down

Nick Cave ‘Soundsuit’ at In the Black Fantastic Hayward Gallery till September 18

Psychedelic integration isn’t the ideal topic for water cooler chat with your line manager on a Monday morning.

Meditation, vegetarian diets, forest bathing and volunteering, all inspired by the cosmic visions on a magic mushroom trip. It all sounds suspiciously like hippy stuff, guaranteed to create even more disconnect between you, your news cycle-bedevilled colleagues, wine-guzzling borderline alcoholic partner, and rigid family. 

“Most of the people I’ve worked with have had a disappointing crash. Integration is partly about managing that disappointment. You can’t separate the drug from the therapy – and the community you go back to after a session,” said Dr Ros, AKA PsiloDep 2 clinical lead Dr Rosalind Watts at Psych Symposium’s integration panel earlier this year also featuring Ian Roullier, co-founder of trial subject support and campaigning group PsyPAN. 

“My colleagues think it’s extreme… whacky”

PsiloDep 2 trial subjects were given 35 to 40 hours of therapy, which is more than I’ve had in my life. But costs, for a start, kept post-experience integration services light. The trial subjects’ woe prompted Dr Ros to manifest ACER, her integration platform that “involves getting into nature and a closely bonded support group, that’s saved all of us during the pandemic,” says Roullier. 

Former international-level professional sportsman and Iboga advocate Rory Lamont was on the panel too. played rugby, a traditional contact sport that’s notorious for its conservative values. He only had the informal WhatsApp group set up by the folks on his retreat for succour. 

“I went through some difficult challenges post experience,” he told the panel, “The connection with the medicine is just the start: we want to embody the insights but if we’re not being met by our family and friends it’s isolating and can bring back the loneliness, and the depression.”

The new approaches his insights compelled him to take were nightmarishly distant from his existing lifestyle. “These medicines get to the root of our suffering, the trauma and disconnection from family, friends, society,” he says, “Instead we get a connection to mother nature and community, that brings about the profound healing.” After the experience is over though it’s straight back to ‘real life’, such as it is. Most of my colleagues think it’s extreme, whacky,” says Lamont.

“The worst part is when you feel the effect fading, and you can’t access it any more”

PsyPAN co-founder Leonie Schneider says psilocybin was “the start of a long healing process which I’m very grateful for, but it’s quite a thing to be involved in. I didn’t get the ego death, the mystical experience, and came out slightly disappointed. But I got some other, incredible things that we wren’t what I expected.” Schneider may not have been able to get those benefits without experienced integration support. 

Ian Roulllier also took part in Compass’ psilocybin trials, where “my depression came back as soon as the drug wore off. But there was a strong focus on integration with a group centred on Maudsley Hospital [where Compass and the UK NHS public healthcare provider are building a dedicated centre in woodlands of New Bethlehem AKA ‘Bedlam’ asylum].” 

The drugs are catalysts and require the integration to have long-term tangible effects, says Roullier. Trial subjects can’t breeze into Imperial for another heroic dose top-up, “The worst part is when you feel the effect fading, and you can’t access it any more.” 

Although there were moments of oceanic boundlessness. 

“The best is every now and then I check in, and just go out on the grass, and feel it under my feet,” muses Roullier, movingly and sincerely, “But I did get attacked by a swarm of wasps once. I thought, am I still tripping?”

Impeccable you

Integration

It’s not enough to simply do good as psychedelic therapist. Better look good on the CCTV too

This is jazz musician Sun Ra, definitely don’t turn up for a client’s first session dressed like this. Unless it’s your thing and they totally expect it.

“The whole field of psychedelic therapy is at stake,” says Ethics of Caring author Kylea Taylor.

Taylor graduated in marriage and family counselling, started on addiction services in 1970s, and worked in the transpersonal sector since the mid-1980s. I should think she’s seen it all.

“We have to be impeccable, like supreme court justices – not just what we are doing but what it looks like we are doing.” An attitude bordering on the priestly seems to be required of the would-be 21st century shaman. 

Back at the ancient initiation, everybody in the village was in attendance and could keep vigil on one another: “Likewise in a holotropic breath work session where there are several sitters, and the issue of substance use is void,” says Taylor. The very modern trend for online ceremonies, with huddles, couples and individuals on a video call, offers a robust container of sorts, if a slightly dystopian one.

“The role requires impeccable preparation for the client’s work in an extraordinary state”

I pointed out during the Q&A session after a Vital webinar on harm prevention at dance festivals, etiquette between ravers developed organically and quickly in the heady early days of underground, intentional, ceremonial, group sacramental MDMA usage, during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

That seems like very long ago. In the psychedelic therapy rooms, a new code of behaviour must be established during an age when there are few universal codes; and this in itself has become so confusing that it’s tempting just to assume everyone is following ours. Plus get terribly upset when we find out they aren’t.

No wonder ‘trust’ has become the professional buzzword of choice. Fortune magazine just launched a newsletter dedicated entirely to the topic of trust earlier this summer, offered to subscribers every Sunday so the 1% can enjoy a hit of piety via smartphone. Companies where the staff trust leadership work quicker and make more money.

“Trauma comes up for healing when people feel safe and the time is right”

But reputation marketing firm Edelman’s latest Global Trust Barometer is titled ‘World in Trauma’ and declares ‘double digit trust inequality in 13 out of 14 countries’ meaning the mass population distrusts institutions significantly more than the ‘informed population’. The latter is not defined, but we all get the idea. This gap has reached record levels in the UK and France.

With even daytime UK TV fitness coach Joe Wicks threatening to “do ayahuasca” the mass population of a world in trauma are likely to turn up at your informed psychedelic clinic. And they probably won’t trust you, but they do want to, and it’s downright key that they do. Because “the extraordinary state makes clients feel even less safe,” reminds Taylor.

“Trauma comes up for healing when people feel safe and the time is right,” says Taylor, a highly qualified transpersonal psychologist, kundalini energy expert, and holotropic breath work coach.

“The role requires impeccable preparation for the client’s work in an extraordinary state,” adds Taylor, “If we’re aware of ourselves and behave in an impeccable way then we’re in the best place.”

Attention to both detail and the bigger picture, following through on all assurances including paperwork, accepting how challenging processes unfold and their use to the inner healer, are all tips from the psychedelic ethicist who helped sculpt the MAPS Code of Ethics and more.

“You don’t have to be perfect, because no-one is, but you should be compatible and do whatever comes to mind to protect the space. Wish the client truly well on their journey, through your actions as well as words.” Generating and expressing goodwill is apparently one of the three pillars of trust, alongside competency and reliability – and that goes back to Aristotle. If you need to pull out someone more on-brand, there’s always Huxley: “Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced.”

Once and future Albion

Integration

Is this actually it? Builded here? Amongst the mills?

Jeremy Deller’s 2022 cover for The New Statesman magazine’s ‘A Dream of Britain’ issue guest edited by actor Michael Sheen

“It’s a hopeful, optimistic interpretation… blended, dynamic, fantastical,” says British artist Jeremy Deller of his vivid cartographic A Dream of Britain pictured above. 

The vibrant painting of the United Kingdom closed the British Museum’s smash Stonehenge show of spring/summer 2022. Deller is colourblind so sees it differently to you and I. This he says reflects a national identity that is forever intersubjective, and in flux.

In issue one of the Vital Student Zine I pulled out Albion Dreaming Andy Roberts’ history of psychedelic Britain. “From the Sixties onwards sections of the counter culture used the term Albion to refer to their vision of a land, society and individual consciousness based on the insights offered by LSD” he says of the romantic goal gathering pace in pop culture.

All the big gun historians from Pliny the Elder, through Marinus of Tyre, to Geoffrey of Monmouth cite Albion as the original name for these sceptred (in a non-dual way) isles. The legend is kick-ass. First, the original King of Syria, or a King of somewhere in Greece maybe, had 43 (or possibly 33) illegitimate daughters who all got married on the same day, killed their husbands on the same night, and fled right here. Where there were no men. So they had it off with incubi – the male equivalent of a saucy ‘succubus’ sex demon – and produced a race of giants. The sisters named the place after their alpha female, Alba.

William Blake’s ‘The Dance of Albion'

In the sequel, beleaguered Brutus of Troy is fleeing his eponymous horse fiasco when the freaking goddess Diana appears and tells him to voyage beyond Gaul to “raise a second Troy”. There were only 24 giants left by then including the fearsome Gogmagog, who got chucked off the white cliffs of Dover. That’s my GoT-style swashbuckling version with apols to Geoffrey of Monmouth and the crew.

“To the counter culture Albion refers to a land, society and individual consciousness based on the insights offered by LSD”

Any sort of ‘New Albion’ got off to an auspicious start after Sir Francis Drake used it as the first name for California upon landing in 1579. Since then it’s had further ups and downs. The Esoteric saint, the poet and painter William Blake named Albion the primeval titan from which his four aspects of man sprang, and pictured it as a giant wearing nothing but a broad grin against a rural Utopian background featuring splashes of pastel colour… apropos of nothing. Blake implores Albion when in need of a term to idealise Britain: his Vision of the Daughters of Albion is a feminist protest poem influenced by his friend and collaborator Mary Wolstencraft Shelley, while he cries “does this thing happen on Albion’s shores?” in Little Boy Lost, an ode against child cruelty. The English cricket, rugby, and Commonwealth Games athletic teams all use Blake’s proto-socialist hymn Jerusalem instead of the official national anthem.

Pete Doherty’s Margate HQ The Albion Rooms

Shadow side ‘Perfidious Albion’ was a term invented by French bishops to bemoan England’s Dark Ages clerical set-up. Later, French Revolutionaries assumed support from the country that toppled its monarchy and installed a puppet aristocracy a century previous. When it didn’t come, the former miserables ran with the term propagandising an, erm, supposed track record of diplomatic betrayal, even bringing up the whole Joan of Arc thing again which everyone knows they were in on.

Two Roman Legionaries Discovering The God-King Albion Turned Into Stone by Mark Sheeky

Two Roman Legionaries Discovering The God-King Albion Turned Into Stone is a 2008 painting by Mark Sheeky. He says, “It’s inspired by Brief Encounter, a film from 1949 that showed a Britain which no longer exists, a country and time so alien to the Britain of 2008 that it is difficult to believe that a place like that ever existed. I wanted to represent the end of that old Britain, so I chose the end of another era as the setting. Two foreigners, Roman legionaries, walk towards the edge of Britain in the grey rain. Through mud, to the grassy limit of the country, the top of the great white cliffs. As they reach the edge they discover a giant stone man standing in the sea, the once king Albion, now dead and grey and cracked. A statue preserved like a memory. A reminder of an ancient time now gone forever.”

Or has it? Under re-story-ation rules fiction can be considered as powerful as the imagined past, right? And in terms of syncronicitous relevance, the phrase Albion cropping up like this must be some sort of sign?

“I’m not an activist, I’m a fantasist”

Here in C21 the Dionysus figure of our second Atlantis, musician Pete Doherty evokes Albion so strenuously that he’s opened a hotel in Margate (it’s like Portland crossed with Oakland, by the sea) called The Albion Rooms. ‘Reebok classics, and canons at dawn; terrible warlords, good warlords, and an English song” goes his band Babyshambles’ gentle rabble-rouser Down in Albion. “I’m not an activist, I’m a fantasist. Inverted snobbery is just as dangerous as snobbery itself, you know – that pride in having nothing.”

By Erwin Wurm at Albion Fields sculpture park

Over at the other end of the quantum funnel from this grass-roots desire for a new national identity lies Albion Fields sculpture park, open till end of October 2022. It’s an outdoor exhibition free to anyone but to which nonetheless ‘the glitterati are flocking’ according to Tatler magazine. 

The woodland’s owner (in fact it was planted at his birth) is Michael Hue-Williams, an art dealer who first showed Ai Weiwei in the UK and represents generation-defining photographer Nick Knight. He says, ‘Walking through these beautiful grounds during lockdown, I realised I have a unique opportunity to share the experience.’ Perhaps reciprocity can exist at all levels. Once and future.

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.”

Peak sexual experience

Integration

DMT is possibly responsible for the female full body orgasm

Eternal Phoenix by Carolyn Mary Kleefeld

There’s a new emphasis on returning to the womb.

An intrepid Vital student asked Dr Strassman a very pertinent question, going forward: “I’m a sex therapist. Should I ever mix psychedelics with that?”

Dr Strassman does have something of the ‘unlikely sex symbol’ about him. A volcano festers within, and I can imagine bookish, imaginative girls becoming rather intrigued by the quietly uncompromising genius. 

This image is compounded by The Strass’ involvement in the science of women’s cervical ‘full body’ orgasms.

“I posted an interview about this on my Facebook page,” he coyly replies to my fellow psychedelic student, “and it got a ton of likes compared to everything else,” (He probably means the Old Testament stuff). 

The splendid Double Blind magazine were first on it. The psychedelic lifestyle leader matched the sterling work of Olivia Bryant’s Self:Cervix project to spread awareness of earth-moving sex, with sex therapists who link that cervix to the vagus nerve. If the ‘full body’ orgasm activates the vagus nerve, the part of our nervous system responsible for the ‘rest and digest’ state, swinging from the chandeliers would bring significant health benefits.

“You do hear reports of experiences with a sexual character during DMT states”

The article quotes one of Bryant’s students: “Time both expanded and stood still. I understood everything and nothing. I was both God and unborn. The micro and the macro. The purest form of ecstasy and surrender I could ever hope to experience.”

Writer Nicolle Hodges pointed out that in The Spirit Molecule Dr Strassman writes of DMT, “There is a powerful dynamic or tension between the two roles it may play—one spiritual and the other sexual.” Asked if the brain releases DMT during orgasm The Strass wouldn’t take the bait: “That’s not known,” he replies in the interview. ‘Is sexually-activated DMT production perhaps one of the major motivating factors in reproductive behaviour?’ comes the follow-up question. “It’s educated speculation,” he says. “We don’t know for sure one way or the other.”

Undaunted, Hodges hit up Imperial’s Dr Chris Timmerman. “You do hear about reports of people having sensual experiences, which have a sexual character to them during DMT states,” he conceded, “Maybe [orgasms] have not been reported as much because sex has a taboo connotation to it, and the same can happen when sex is associated with DMT and psychedelics in general.” 

Britain’s cannabis journal Leafie ran with the ball. Neuroscience graduate Bethan Finnegan pointed out that women with major spinal injury can still have cervical orgasms and the clitoral orgasm deactivates the pre-frontal cortex leading to miniature ‘ego death’, with French lingo for orgasm being le petit mort, ‘little death’.

Back in the Vital Q&A, Dr Strassman falls back to scientist mode. “You’d have to be methodical and incremental with your research! Study the DMT like properties of orgasm with psychedelic questionnaires, to make a cogent comparison. I think you’d find a relationship, strong correlation. Then you can look into how it occurs.”

He has some trade secrets for anyone carrying out cutting-edge research in mainstream science…

“Don’t worry about risk. Find some good mentors, keep your head on your shoulders, and do your research step by step in a Trojan Horse manner. That’s how I did mine.”

Dr Timmerman in Double Blind adds some London-based understatement: “You would need to collect blood samples when people are having these experiences to detect DMT levels in their bodies when this is occurring. This might be tricky to do in a lab environment for obvious reasons. But not impossible.”

Rising from the Ashes of God

Integration

A new mythology is the psychedelic philosophers’ highest ambition

By Kevin Quigley , works available via Gallery 46

Hardcore philosophers like Junger, Reich, Nietzsche, Spinoza and Whitehead were happiest wandering around the woods.

You’d be forgiven for thinking they were only content when their books were being burned by all three of the Stalinists, Nazis and the Christian Evangelists (Spinoza and Reich’s actually were).

Yet “God is nature” proclaimed Spinoza (who also was not beyond emotional intelligence, advising: “The more clearly you understand yourself and your emotions, the more you become a lover of what is.”)

“We live in a post-cartesian, post-christian world,” Dr Sjöstedt-Hughes said to introduce the panel ‘Should we return to the gods of nature?’ at Amsterdam’s 2022 Institute of Art and Ideas festival, “the ecological crisis and the hard problem of consciousness steam from the bifurcation of nature. Déscartes split mind and matter; now we have thought as an extension of thought, science as extension of knowledge. and still don’t know how we get mind from meat. Viewing nature as simply physical discounts any part it plays in that.”

“What are the laws of nature? Physicists say they’re constantly changing”

In his Vital lecture on philosophy during the course’s first module on approaches to psychedelics, Sjöstedt-Hughes summarised: “Whitehead had the advantage of relativity and evolution: he is a combination of Einstein, Darwin and Spinoza. He concluded that nature has an intrinsic worth, not just spiritual worth. If a virus can be determined ‘living’ why not an atom or a molecule? The future is creative, not yet formed.”

He cites Whitehead’s ‘Process Philosophy’ as the closest to a post-quantum physics spiritual framework humanity has. With humility – “We have to acknowledge that we are nowhere near the answers, and that 5-MEO DMT and other peak experiences bring up ontologies unfathomable to the regular Western version, or any other.”

Dr Sjöstedt-Hughes’ philosophy goes beyond even the ‘panpsychism’ touched upon by voices like Anneka Harris in Conscious, where all matter contains some spark of life. It brings both ancient and renaissance hermeticism into the era where God is dead: “It combines process philosophy with Amerindian-style metaphysics, which are complex as opposed to animistic. God doesn’t ‘love’ you – he is comparable to Aristotle’s ‘prime mover’ rather than a benevolent force as such. Eternal life is now, stepping out of time.”

The psychoneural, where consciousness and the physical nervous system combine, exist within and are one with the natural, material world; the ‘lived experience’ that Terrence McKenna considers superior to any spiritual system: our purpose, vessel and environment in an infinitely expanding, spherical space opera.

“De Quincy said, ‘memories are never lost only found again. But what is memory?” Bellows Dr Sjöstedt-Hughes like a young Brian Blessed, “What are the laws of nature? Physicists say they’re constantly changing. If the past doesn’t exist, should it have more status than fiction?” Before whispering conspiratorially, “the druidic yearning we see in Britain could be connected.” Dr Aiden Lyon believes psychedelics could create a new mythological wisdom to underpin society.

“We have to acknowledge that we are nowhere near the answers”

There are now at least three Druidic orders vying for eyeballs in 21st Century Britain. Six thousand people turned up at 4:49am on summer Solstice 2022 to watch the sun hit the Heel Stone in the centre and spread rays throughout the circle.

Stonehenge at Summer Solstice 2022

In a British major kind-of newspaper, noted for usually disapproving of this sort of thing, a top-rated comment below its article on the gathering reads, (sic) ‘You don’t have to travel to Stonehenge and dress up to show your love of nature, the natural world and the Earth's life force, it is all around us. Feed the wildlife, plant flowers and trees, celebrate it that way, and respect it, it’s in us all ,we are part of it. We have a Female Blackbird that literally follows us around our small garden and stands at the green house door to be let in to help herself to the box of wild bird food we have in there, what a privilege for a wild animal to communicate with us and trust us to enter into the greenhouse when we are there. There’s magic in our own gardens and stones.'