Homestasis is where the heart is

Therapy

Seeing your shrink will never be the same after MDMA-AT

By Jeppe Hein on display at Albion Fields till 22 Sept 2020

MDMA-AT consists of three ‘blindfold’ experiences each a month apart.

These are punctuated by fifteen therapy sessions dedicated to assessment, preparation and integration. Each stage – indeed, each appointment – includes a detailed, mindful strategy.

The ‘inner healer’ concept is described as a the mind mending itself in the same way the body might gradually heal a graze or cut. The method and therapy is described as the dressing that might be put on a wound, providing the correct environment for the miracle of human evolution to do its stuff.

Homeostatic instinct is the term used by men and women of science for the inner healer. Freud (who isn’t dead, it’s just a headline. Well he is physically of course) said instinct is a ‘demand made on the mind by the body’. Back in the renaissance Spinoza wrote that ‘Joy is associated with a transition of the organism to greater perfection’ as noted by top scholar Antonio Damasio.

Could denial of our human instincts – personal drive, logos, awen, true will, whatever you want to call it – land us in a chronic long-term disease ward? Not serving animal instincts certainly does.

“It’s only when the process begins that they understand”

During the MDMA time itself, patients are encouraged to spend time both talking to the therapists and by themselves processing beneath the blindfold, “although we are focussing on the inner experience” says Michael, and discussions during the experiences are intended to facilitate “a self directed experience. They don’t even have to wear the blindfold if they don’t want to, but often they end up doing so.”

Patients are shepherded towards their own “personal alchemy” to quote Michael, a bespoke therapy style unique to them. This can be cultivated by honing one’s ‘self energy’, a calm, curious and compassionate state that provides an emotional container for patients to open up to themselves. 

“Usually therapists have goals or ideas of where they should go, but the patient directs that,” notes Annie, “which can be difficult for some people – they want to be told how they can cure their PTSD! It’s only when the process begins that they understand.”

The MAPS dyad and MDMA-AT designers quote psychology colossus, emeritus professor at Stanford and When Nietzsche Wept author Irvin David Yalom, who wrote, “The therapist must strive to create a new therapy for each patient, or strive to encourage the patient to create a new one for themselves.” 

Surprisingly perhaps, patients’ individual inner work often has a similarity to popular methods. One that come up in particular is Internal Family Systems (IFS), where patients discuss talking to the ‘parts’ of themselves that play different roles in their ruminations. 

“The therapist must strive to create a new therapy for each patient”

“We see again the value of allowing space and time for something unexpected, terrifying or beautiful, to come through from the inner healing intelligence”

A patient who allowed themselves to be filmed for educational purposes discussed acknowledging, listening to, and comforting his aggressive/defensive self – Jungian shadow work, essentially. I asked Dr Michael Mithoefer in the after-lecture Q&A if he had suggested the method: “if I even had, I wouldn’t have described it as ‘shadow work, which is part of the work of Sigmund Freud’s protege Carl Jung’. I would’ve put it in layman’s terms.” 

‘Imaginal exposure’ – fictional examinations of how thoughts and feelings may play out in reality – and ‘active imagination’ – using fantastical metaphors to better comprehend stark reality in classic ‘psychedelic insight’ style – are two methods patients turn to naturally. Call it a ‘Jungian archetype’ or a ‘spirit animal’, it’s imaginative right brain activity processing complex thoughts to achieve balance. “We see again the value of allowing space and time for something unexpected, terrifying or beautiful, to come through from the inner healing intelligence,” says Michael. 

“We’re clear that the process isn’t designed to suppress their symptoms… but get to the root”

Transference issues can be used to highlight areas of behaviour to work on. Freudian psychodynamics, the examination of unconscious motivations, is still relevant despite me declaring ‘Freud is dead’ last week.

Other methods patients organically, roughly, incline towards range from the practical such as somatic experiencing (feeling trauma in the body) and corrective attachment (establishing a healthy behaviour model) to the totally way-out transpersonal. 

“We’re keen to normalise transpersonal experiences, letting the patent know we won’t think they’re weird. Transpersonal experiences aren’t essential. Patients that don’t have them tend to do very well also.”

What is impressed upon patients is that they will get the most benefit from leaning in to their inner turmoil, not suppressing uncomfortable feelings but letting them flow forth instead. Moreover, this is not entirely linear, themes can wax and wane in importance, and it might be unpleasant and uncomfortable in places: “They might get worse before they get better. We are clear that the process is not designed to suppress their symptoms, but get to the root.”

The celebrated MAPS dyad call processing under the blindfold ‘going inside’.

“They never have to, and we are aware when they are avoiding it and help with that. But we will say ‘maybe now is a good time to go inside’ when we think it’s a good point in conversation for them to process. If they come up with a connection themselves it’s more powerful – for example, ‘I notice every time I start talking about ‘x’ I ask to go to the bathroom.’

We explore that first before prompting them to go inside: ‘Would you like to experiment with that for a little bit?’ We make it clear they don’t have to hang out with something they want to avoid. It’a matter of is it needed at all, timing, and offering the option so it doesn’t sound like we’re pressuring them.”

The hardest part, say the pair, who’ve worked with MAPS for two decades, is not barging into the process. “IFS creator Dick Schwartz [who’ll be talking to Vital students later this year] uses the acronym ‘WAIT’,” says Michael, “why – am – I – talking?” 

The therapist is not the ‘healer’ – that’s inside the patient. Defence mechanisms mean it can be a long struggle to help patients come to the conclusions that would benefit them: for instance, decorated commandos who refusing to believe that their PTSD could have anything to do with all the combat missions, or rape victims desperate to bury their experience. “One patient commented, ‘I now have a battle plan when before I was thrashing about in the undergrowth’,” says Michael.

Freud is dead

Therapy

‘ACE’ is a new therapeutic approach devised by Drs Ros and Richards, with inspo from Stan Grof

‘Icosahedron’ by Anthony James from Unit London

Freud is Dead. And we have killed him.

My loose understanding of the gossip in the ivory towers of psychology is that Freudian psychoanalysis maintains an iron grip on legitimacy. 

This seems to have crumbled almost overnight like empires do. Psychoanalysis’ spiritual home The Tavistock Clinic has been rocked by scandal. And Imperial College didn’t use psychoanalysis as such in PsiloDep 2. Because it’s only been an initial part of psychedelic therapy as documented by Stanislav Grof. 

Indeed Grof’s former colleague, TV’s Dr Bill Richards who’s still kicking it himself at John Hopkins (and on Netflix) advised on Acceptance, Connection and Embodiment (ACE) therapy, the model applied by Imperial College in its landmark trials testing psilocybin against a market SSRI anti-depressant.

“The trials followed a standard psychedelic psychedelic therapy format: preparation, the high dose, and then integration alongside an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy [ACT] adapted model,” relays Ashleigh. 

ACT is a kind-of proactive mindfulness to encourage ‘psychological flexibility’ an adaptive mindset resilient to stressful events. The psychological flexibility model or PFM is referred to in the title of Dr Ros’ stealth bomber of a paper, The use of the psychological flexibility model to support psychedelic assisted therapy which points out the approach is in use in trials at NYU and Yale, too.

And guess what? Everyone prefers it to being told stuff in the past they were doing their best to forget has ruined both their present and future, so it’s going to cost them £200 a week. Plus, ACT’s explanatory infographic is a freaking icosahedron, the sacred geometric form that’s like a 20-sided Dungeons & Dragons dice.

Acceptance and commitment therapy’s ‘hexaflex’ graph

ACT is empirically proven in all of these tests we’re beginning to think will be endless, and approved by EG the NHS.

“It's a very complex experience that people are going through. So we're using lots of different influences”

But because ACT’s not Freudian analysis, it gets crap from the old guard. Seems like nobody cares what they think any more, though, because their way hasn’t worked, except for them. And they gave kids gender reassignment.

That’s not all. “As clinicians, we were drawing on a lot of different psychological theories to support people because it's a very complex experience that people are going through. So we're using lots of different influences,” says Ashleigh.

ACE is Dr Rosalind ‘Ros’ Watts’ remix of ACT. It even has P-ACE (for preparation) and I-ACE (for integration). It includes aspects of polyvagal theory, lived experience and non-dual thinking to name but two.

And there’s even deferral to the inner healer or ‘homeostatic instinct’ to give it its new scientific name in ACE. Metaphors employed for the healing process include ‘diving for pearls’ illustrated by specially prepared visualisers. Plus, let’s not forget, a new ambient John Hopkins’ LP bespoke-made for the trials.

“We're asking people to open up to emotional pain at a pace they may never have experienced”

Stan Grof says psychoanalysis was useful for the earliest stages of treating in-patients, but soon gave way to even more fundamental realms of the psyche – and body – that required knowledge not only of cutting-edge thinkers.

“I wonder how possible it is to grasp”

He names William Reich for perinatal matrix III when the body spasms start (not seen many of those on the course yet) and Jung in his Red Book days, but the ‘transpersonal’ (IE weird), plus theology, literature and philosophy too.

“We invite them to tap into a sense that there may be wisdom and guidance to be learned from emotional pain, and difficult experiences in life,” says Ashleigh. There’s practical considerations that don’t come up in that room your therapist has in Finsbury Park with the knitted throws and knackered dreamcatcher on the ceiling.

“We're asking people to open up to emotional pain, to an extent, and at a pace they may never have experienced before,” says Ashleigh, “I wonder how possible it is to grasp. We wrangled over what we tell people beforehand, so they can make an ethical and informed decision about taking part in a treatment like this.”

‘Must we ourselves become gods simply to appear worthy of it?’ opined Nietzsche upon his most famous line, ‘God is dead.’ The firebrand philosopher meant a sense of shared, guiding ideology rather than the monotheistic biblical concept of God.

He was mostly right, because us stupid normies did come up with a new God – science. The bits of that which considered our relationships to each other, so the only ones that counted, originated from Sigmund Freud, and Richard Dawkins via Charles Darwin.

The new anti-religion preached a mirror image of historical spirituality: humans were essentially chimpanzees, except cleverer, so even more unpleasant to each other.

Arts, achievement, compassion, shared laughter… all just tactics in the game to get ahead. Beneath it all we were just throwing our turds at each other, and pretending not to enjoy getting screwed by the alpha male.

Who hasn’t been seduced by this perverse science at some point? Especially on cocaine, like Sigmund Freud was half the time. 

Eventually though it gets… depressing.

Who’s therapy is it anyway?

Therapy

Probe your own intentions, for the floor of the abyss is littered with wounded healers

From Phantom VII by Neil Krug

The will to power exists even in the most open hearts: “Every ethical misstep has a healing impulse,” says therapist ethics expert Kylea Taylor.

73.9% of therapeutic professionals entered the field due to their personal history. The ‘wounded healer concept was flagged by Carl Jung, who wrote "A good half of every treatment that probes at all deeply consists in the doctor's examining himself... it is his own hurt that gives a measure of his power to heal.”

A psychedelic guide must wrangle with their reasons for being in the space. Achievement, hoping the voyager enjoys a significant experience, is a forgivable impulse; influence too if we’re being as honest like both the medicine, and the guide’s role, demand.

“Mistakes are an opportunity for improvement and change”

But the guide isn’t drilling the patient like a sports coach. Complementing the voyager’s experience is akin to dancing with them, says Taylor in the deft analogy she uses in her book The Ethics of Caring.

“We do best in the dance when we are not ahead of ourselves,” she explains of letting the process and the client lead this technicolour two-step, “we are able to know what we need to know in the moment.” One must be instinctively aware of one’s dance partner, the music and the dance floor. “A foot in the client’s world and the other in our role of providing safety,” illustrates Taylor, “The container is the ballroom; others are dancing there too… it’s set and setting, preparation, relationship, and relational dynamics – and the psychedelic space itself.”

The effortless presence of mind honed in meditation is considered the number one skill required for psychedelic therapists, claims Taylor’s presentation, and she is consulting for two different written codes of ethics currently in development. Taylor calls this ‘bi-modal’ consciousness. To me it seems quite demanding; out of reach of many perhaps. “Unawareness leads to missteps and sore toes,” says Taylor, “but mistakes are an opportunity for improvement and change.”

Hymn of the Big Wheel

Therapy

My home town of Bristol boasts a psychedelic ‘amazement’ park and therapy clinics. How did that happen?

Jeremy Deller, ‘Wiltshire Before Christ’ photo by David Sims for Aires Arise

“Bristol is the San Francisco of Britain” declares Dr Ben Sessa of my home town where Awakn Life Sciences is based.

How? Not only with Britain’s first psychedelic clinic – accessible without a referral – but also the world’s first immersive psychedelic ‘amazement park’. Bristol is making up ground, perhaps, for its heritage in tobacco and slavery.

The clinic is the first branch of Awakn Life Sciences, opening also in London (opposite Euston Station) fronted by Psychedelic Renaissance author Dr Ben Sessa and addiction treatment icon Dr Celia Morgan. As of earlier in 2022, AWAKN’s main investor is the UK government. 

Wake the Tiger is the name of the day trip destination. A lockdown brainstorm from festival innovators Boomtown, it is actually named after Peter Levine’s trauma tome Waking the Tiger. Creative director Lak Mitchell’s wife is a shadow-specialising psychotherapist, and suggested it. Wake the Tiger’s backdrop narrative offers a journey to an alternative dimension where all the unwanted clutter of consumer culture ends up; the sequence begins with a luxury living development where the only thing really living is a tree in the lobby.

Wake the Tiger in Bristol, the world’s first psychedelic ‘amazement park’

Stu Tallis who sorted the branding at Taxi Studio, told the website Business Leader, “It pushes the boundaries of imagination and represents the truly unique and fantastical experience that fuses ancient wisdom and creativity… it needed to be scalable to accommodate the possibility of replicating the experience across the country and becoming a multiverse. It is a category-defining moment representing a sea change in how immersive art experiences are created.” 

Opening in late July 2022, Wake the Tiger received £1.85 million in crowdfunding. Reviews are gushing, from those microdosing or otherwise. Kids get in free. They don’t know they’re born. Dropping a Purple Ohm to watch Bristol City lose at home to Swindon (by four goals) was all that we had in my day.

“Wake the Tiger is a unique and fantastical experience that fuses ancient wisdom and creativity”

Bang in the middle of the upmarket Clifton district is AWAKN’s Bristol ketamine clinic. The Times dispatched its most simultaneously verbose and glib columnist, David ‘Fatty’ Arranovitch to check it out. Unlike more intrepid reporters (hem-hem), he did not try it out. Although he does end the piece by pointing out the potential for psychedelic treatment of obesity, after beginning by complaining about the walk up Constitution Hill that I and my chums made to school most mornings, while daydreaming of the next time we could obliterate the pain of a rigid, parentified upbringing in service to the slave morality. Sorry, flashbacked and regressed a bit there.

Professors David Nutt and Celia Morgan, who form the Awakn dream team with Dr Ben Sessa

Anyway, another AWAKN is planned for Manchester later this year while Oslo in Norway was the first AWAKN to open. AWAKN’s chief advisor is Professor David Nutt, a national treasure since he was sacked as the government’s drug policy advisor for saying LSD (and ecstasy, and cannabis) was less harmful an intoxicathan alcohol on daytime TV. Dr Sessa, who Vital students will hear from in Week 13, I believe is the most forthright and refreshing middle-aged man in the psychedelic space internationally right now. 

AWAKN’s special sauce though is arguably provided by Celia Morgan. The fabulously clever redhead is also Exeter Uni’s head of psychopharmacology, and inspires fervent adoration from her Phd students. The National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) are funding two-thirds of the costs for her alcohol use disorder treatment programme with the very British name of ‘Project Kestrel’, although KARE was used instead once the bureaucrats got their hands on it.

Professor Morgan appeared in Business Insider’s list of the most important women in psychedelics earlier this year. Devising the first official cure for alcoholism, though would assure her a place in medical history. There are no flies on Morgan, who has discussed the dangers of chronic recreational ketamine use on BBC Woman’s Hour – “I’ve met teenagers who have to wear catheters,” is her conversation-stopper.

Professor Morgan has even adapted psychedelic therapy for both the addiction and ketamine aspects of Project K: “We designed it to go with the ketamine effects,” she told The Guardian newspaper in its own report, “We wanted something evidence based, a therapy that has been shown to help people avoid alcoholic relapse. But also something that would work with what we know about the brain in the ketamine state.”

Morgan embarked on Project Kestrel as a final year student at once-mighty University College London (which is about to open its own psychedelic mega-department headed up by the highly plausible Rosalind McAlpine). She pulled together strands of her friend’s experiences of recreational ketamine use with her family’s of addiction, and laid the foundations of an approach that could wrest thousands of sufferers and those close them from the living hell of alcoholism. Plus cut the £5.5 billion the UK loses to the condition every year. Morgan’s test subjects stayed clean 87% of the time after six months, compared to a measly 2% beforehand.

Many have pointed out that it could be the therapy itself that’s making the difference, provided at very high quality in the trials for free, just like in the depression trials. (That this is not your regular psychoanalytic therapy is a matter for another time, although props to Arranovitch for quoting a patient as saying “it was more about the boozing than my mother”). 

Only 8% of addicts ever seek treatment as it is, due to stigma or the way they’re not guzzling miniature brandies on the commute like a TV stereotype. It’s this ‘not quite in crisis, yet’ group who suffer too and are arguably more motivated to seek treatment should it be available without a CV-staining, divorce-prompting  diagnosis. Dr Sessa too stresses that childhood trauma isn’t usually born of what we know as ‘abuse’ – corporal and cruel punishments – and instead is a feature of many material-focussed western upbringings.

“We wanted evidence based therapy shown to help people avoid alcoholic relapse, plus work with the ketamine state”

Dr Sessa is a soundbite slinger, which I as a journalist appreciate. “Bristol is the San Francisco of Britain” is one of his best shots, and he’s done a lot to catalyse that.

‘There is only one good use for a small town. You hate it and you know you'll have to leave,’ sings Lou Reed on the opening track of Songs for Drella, his and John Cage’s 1990 concept album dedicated to Andy Warhol.

I left my own home town of Bristol for university in 1992, aged 18. Since, it has realised its media image as a Mecca of skateboarding, street art and… intentional drug taking (plus plasticine animation, as local artist Banksy rarely misses the opportunity to point out). And in the past six months, Bristol has even superseded modern-era triumphs such as the aforementioned world’s favourite artist’s Dismaland exhibition, in the admittedly dismal Weston Super-Mare, a former holiday resort notorious for its quicksand beaches. 

But I remember my home town for its repression, casual violence, and nihilistic ennui, caused mostly by traumas and addictions that while ‘low-level’, eat away at the soul and body nonetheless. And it’s partly because they will never be seen as a source of necessary concern; we change only when we have to. If the West of England is coming unstuck from those behaviours, then I shall never slag it off again. I might even go to Wake the Tiger. 

Re-Story-Ation

Therapy

Ancient principles for living encourage a wondrous view of the world. Is this the ‘re-enchantment’ with life we need?

From Modern Alchemy, photographs by Viviane Sassen, available from by JBE Books

Rainforests gave the West spectacular medicines for the body. Could their way of life provide healing for the mind too?

Half of all pharmacological medicines are derived from plants, including recent innovations, and 25% come from global rainforest. Curare, the muscle relaxant Amazonian tribes used to stun animals, prompted a revolution in anaesthetics and modern medicine. Quinine was the first cure for malaria. Vincristine and Vinblastine from Madagascar, used the treat cancers, have vastly extended the chance of surviving childhood leukemia.

Now, thousands flock to ayahuasca retreats to balm their souls. But passionate field researchers both young and old claim the lifestyle and ideology around the medicine is essential to redemption.

“Our profound alienation is a consequence of turning relationships into things”

Washington-based Joseph Mays, wields a master’s in ethnobotany from the University of Kent – a likely hotbed of radical thought – after observing responses to globalisation from the Yanesha in central Peru. He’s published a smart medicinal plant guide for the Jama-Coaque Ecological Reserve and works as the program director of Chacruna’s arse-kicking Indigenous Reciprocity Initiative (IRI).

From Modern Alchemy, photographs by Viviane Sassen, available from by JBE Books

Mays cracked his bonus Vital lecture off by quoting Karl Marx like a boss.

“Marx spoke about the ‘metabolic rift’, man’s alienation from nature,” says the scholar and activist, “We are now in ‘The Anthropocene Epoch’.”

That’s the conceptual geological era we’re living in now. The official one’s the Holocene. The Anthropocene represents a time man begins to have geological impact upon the Earth, roughly marked by the detonation of the first atomic bomb.

“We should think of our bodies with alchemy in mind”

Ernst Junger warily observed the march of technology throughout the 20th century. He wrote that it was best explained by the senseless, arbitrary nature of the First World War. Not only in the power new weapons had to slaughter hundreds in a moment, but the absence of any serious evaluation of why it was happening.

Junger considered the endemic, fatalistic nihilism he witnessed in the trenches, and in the commuter era that followed it, “a new, terrible practice” and spoke of “the loneliness of man in a new, unexplored world, whose steely law will be felt as meaningless.”

Vincent Blok, in his acclaimed Ernst Junger’s Philosophy of Technology writes that our enlightenment values of '“Reason and humanity, of morality and individual freedom” count for nothing now they are wedged within the indefatigable gears of… The Anthropocene.

“The resources of our inner and outer worlds are inseparable”

Mays quotes feted Brazilian anthropologist, Cambridge lecturer and writer of Cannibal Physics Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, who writes that our profound alienation is a consequence of “turning relationships into things” and “perceiving life as a collection of detached objects.”

The animistic view though is “inherently subjectifying” in contrast to the objectified modern era. It also stands alongside our own subjective spiritual beliefs, working as a system to integrate Earth and consciousness.

“We are now in The Anthropocene Epoch”

Breaking the dichotomies – mind-body, mankind-Earth, civilisation-environment – can also free us from our alienation. Our energy spent on tweaking existing problems could go into designing alternatives. “Maybe we should think of our bodies with alchemy in mind, and imagine many other compositions or assemblages,” says The Life of Plants writer Emanuele Coccia in his introduction to Modern Alchemy, a new series of photographs by Viviane Sassen published by JBE Books, photos from which you see here.

From Modern Alchemy, photographs by Viviane Sassen, available from JBE Books

Learning on the job develops a deeper relationship with the non-human elements of vocation and personal growth. Individual responsibility and local ‘bottom up’ development puts ownership for our immediate experience in our own hands, away from the distraction of political infighting.

Communities are marginalised in a similar manner to the environment. Energy is better spent providing a container for them to address their “own needs, and their own priorities in a self-directed manner from the ground up” as a forest would. Or like Somerset UK’s Frome Model of Compassionate Primary Care that has slashed hospital admissions by 40% over a decade, which you can read about in this issue’s Medical section.

“Biological and cultural diversity are inextricably linked,” says Mays, “And the culture of plants and communities are inter-dependent. The resources of our inner and outer worlds are inseparable.”

This may hurt a little…

Therapy

Constant reflection and tireless self-work are essential to handle the rigours of psychedelic therapy

Paul Smith, ‘Awaken’ via here.

“Doubt is core to the psychedelic movement,” says Dr Strassman, “We question authority, we question belief.”

The top-flight ego dissolver leaves no current controversy unexamined in his Vital lecture on contemporary research, evoking the hard truths of psychedelic experience.

The fearless researcher starts by probing the supposed mental health revolution. “I don’t think these miraculous cures are going stick,” he warns, “The figures are good, but there’s an open question abut regularity. With ketamine it looks like you’re having to come in every week. Psilocybin looks like every month or so. People ‘come down’ and revert to the old patterns.”

He’s most keen to impart the value of self-examination and ‘shadow work’; on behalf of the therapists themselves. “Consider your own prejudices. Take what you believe to be ‘right’ and and be very careful not to project it,” he warns.

“There’s been a suicide in testing. One subject was so disappointed he didn’t have one of these ‘life-changing mystical experiences’.”

Dr Strassman is an ordained key buddhist priest and a student of Hebrew mysticism who’s developing a way to communicate with entities using conversational models inspired by the prophets of the Old Testament. But he’s not sold on the ‘mystical experience’ allegedly key to healing.

“I think if we left it secular we’d be better off,” he says, “the scientific plane can coexist. There’s been a suicide in testing because one subject was so disappointed he didn’t have one of these ‘life-changing mystical experiences’. Part of the setting should be not to have it as a goal.”

This actually echoes Stan Grof, who in LSD Psychotherapy refers to Einstein’s ‘cosmic consciousness’ that can be considered universal, practical and even scientific. Therapists should allow ‘a symbolic framework that is emerging spontaneously from the subject’s collective unconscious, and is the most appropriate form for their spiritual experience.’

“If this is a simulation, there’s still cause and effect. You do things, think things, they have repercussions”

Dr Strassman’s standpoint extends to arguments from the religious use movement. “There’s a movement to you relabel these compounds divine, or specifically ‘generating God from within’. That assumes a lot: first of all, that there is a spiritual level of existence, specifically God, and that’s within us, you know, which is questionable. That a drug can generate divinity, or a real religious experience, I don't think is an established fact."

Humans are capable of transcendence without a particular faith, says Strassman: “My colleague Daniel Freidman used to talk about the ‘portentous’ moments – the feeling that what you're seeing is the most significant thing you've ever undergone. That can be truly meaningful even without religious belief.”

Even once the more fantastical effects of the treatment have worn off, “it will still strengthen aspects like ‘vocational efficacy’, one’s sense of self.”

Strassman prefers ‘unitive experience’ to the ‘spiritual’ term, and reminds “there are plenty of ways to achieve a mystical experience without drugs, in particular traditions for example.” [EG tantra, or alchemy].

“Doubt is core to the psychedelic movement. We question authority, we question belief”

Plus he advises sensitivity with any spiritual props in the treatment room. A multi-faith approach might work for the irreligious but some communities can be actively triggered by some psychedelic tropes: “a lot of the official music is Wagner, which the Nazis played to jews arriving at the concentration camps. Imagine you’re a jew presenting with generational trauma and hearing that as you’re coming up. Or lots of christians believe Buddhism is idolatry and paganism. If a christian opens their eyes and the first thing they see is a buddha… it may be cool, it may not be.”

Challenging experiences is a term he’s equally wary of: “Challenging ‘reactions’ is possibly less onerous.”

With Strassman it all comes down to results. Asked where he stands on Anil Seth’s simulation theory, he replies “If this is a simulation, there’s still cause and effect. You do things, think things, they have repercussions.  I don’t think we need to spend a lot of time figuring that one out.”

Tremendously more important, he says is that “We make ourselves better people and the world a better place. If psychedelics can contribute to that, more power to them.”

The Strass is so promethean that he debunks his own landmark hypotheses. Like the one about DMT originating from the pineal gland AKA ‘third eye’ in mystic circles.

“I don’t think it’s as important as it was when I put it out,” he harrumphs, “I write a wild-eyed but scientific article about the pineal gland in 1991. The group in Ann Arbor picked up on that 12 years later, and produced the study in the living rodent pineal gland. Now a 2019 report thinks the 2013 data was the result of the probe going through the brain into the pineal snagged brain tissue, not pineal tissue… What’s much more interesting is the brain makes DMT – in very high quantities.”

How will the stark nature of psychedelic science play out within our comically dysfunctional human condition?

Turning to tragedy, ‘Kill the physician and the fee bestow upon thy foul disease’ says the Earl of Kent to King Lear in act one of Shakespeare’s masterwork. Lear has disowned his loving but frankly-spoken daughter, after her honest efforts to protect him from hubris; the complacent monarch is suffering from a ‘disease of the ego’ according to Shakespeare buffs. 

Become one with your Moomin cup…

Therapy

Can psychedelic philosophy explain our innate sense of the cosmic whole?

By Wolfgang Tillmans from Fragile, showing at Art Twenty OneEko Hotel and Centre for Contemporary Art, Yaba, Lagos, Nigeria till 10 July 2022

Psychedelic philosopher par eminence Dr Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes pictures a new breed of consciousness doctors to work alongside clinicians and therapists.

“The metaphysician will see you now,” he jests about his notion of a service combining thinker, spiritual advisor and life coach.

“Spinoza, Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Darwin, and Albert Einstein all agreed nature was ‘God’,” says Dr Sjöstedt-Hughes, “and it doesn’t love you.”

God is still all around. Like never before; ‘pansychism’ is the term for consciousness in all things. Like philosopher Jussi Jylkkä half-jests in this recent video interview with Sjöstedt-Hughes for The Philosopher, “So… I become one with my Moomin cup?”

Before you marvel, “My ashtray is alive?” the consciousness operates at an atomic level, obvs. But, it’s still an ashtray. Keep up.

“You should be doubting all the things you doubted before; you are uncertain about being certain”

Psi-Phi, ‘philosophy of psychedelics’ presents an academic argument for the significance and benefit of psychedelic drugs. A sub-school of ‘psychedelic metaphysics’ explores belief structures like panpsychism. Legitimisation and education of reality-organising frameworks might aid mental health, like the personal ‘higher power’ 12-steppers are urged to take guidance from.

“The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes,” wrote Johann Goethe. And the psychedelic philosophy material is dense. My clumsy, infant sense of the subject is tempted to conclude that philosophy is to psychology what Lego Technic is to Duplo; it’s been debating the stuff YouTubers think they’ve just discovered for 500 years. Arguably, 5000.

Psychedelic philosophy’s nemesis is the comforting delusion.

“Is psychedelic therapy,” in Charles Grob’s phrase, an “existential medicine?”

Or is it, as Michael Pollan wondered, “Simply foisting a comforting delusion on the sick and dying”?’

Chris Letheby addresses the ‘Aren’t you just taking acid?’ question in this article for MAPS. Letheby also cites Danish wellbeing guru, former special forces operator Nikolai Moltke-Left and his doctrine of “unbinding self” that echoes psychedelics, and how popular he is with the chattering classes (Moltke-Left is collaborating with Lego, sync).

And anyway, Aiden Lyon reckons “You should be doubting all the things you doubted before; you are uncertain about being certain,” so that’s that.

It’s all quite radical in places. Psychedelics have a habit of flipping over sacred cows. This wannabe trickster never tires of reminding the psi-phi lads that most of their favourite philosophers met with sticky ends at the hands of the mob: “Often I have the impression that I am writing on paper already browning in the licks of the flames,” mulled Ernst Junger, coiner of the term psychonaut. Who actually lived till 102 years of age.