We cannot hope to fully repay our debt to nature. But we can give it a go

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.”

Vital Zine #5 featuring observations from my studies and recent happenings in the space

The next stage of human consciousness is calling. Are we brave enough to answer?

Dr David Luke is the most intrepid researcher of the psychedelic renaissance – ‘the real new psychonaut’. Straight out of London but living “on the edge… of Sussex” his inspirational investigations include DMT space exploration, the psychedelic divine feminine, biophilia (tree hugging) and psionic powers – often conducted “in the field”.

David Luke dropped out of lecturing to study shamanism, and returned to Britain with consciousness expanded. Since he’s been at the vanguard of the psychedelic renaissance, consistently leading by example. Senior lecturer at all the best universities, co-founder of Breaking Convention, and director of the Ecology, Cosmos and Consciousness salon at the Institute of Ecotechnics which sounds incredible, he is a global figure in the transpersonal psychology movement. And he spoke to Vital students about it.

In the Zine this week:

Approach: Transpersonal psychology is back and this time it’s real

Therapy: The Psychedelic Divine Feminine

Space: Field Research

Medical: DMT Vs Death

Integral: Alchemy for the People

Plus! Graph/Visual Aid of the Week and second hand books

Transpersonal psychology is back and this time it’s real

In the 1980s transpersonal psychology staple and Way of the Psychonaut author Stanislav Grof found himself inventing holotropic breathwork out of necessity after LSD faded from grace.

Reflecting courageously on the flaws of transpersonal psychology, where science meets the super-normal, he nonetheless pointed out that the approach showed enormous potential for a range of treatment resistant diseases. And that it could be applied to other fields: like ecology, business, social work, maybe even medicine itself again someday.

“The psychology of transformative experience” is how Dr Luke describes ‘transpersonal psychology’. Back in polite conversation thanks to Iain McGilchrist’s philosophy blockbuster The Matter with Things it’s the shrinks’ most progressive field, big in the 60s at Esalen and back with a vengeance thanks to everyone from ecologists to talk therapy refuseniks and engineers of the zero-point field, to pharma giants and governments with nationalised healthcare and their eyes on psychedelics’ potential to cure disease and reboot productivity. 

“The only revolution that can work… is the inner transformation of every human being”

The transpersonal are “moments that evolve your current ego identity… by stepping outside normal consciousness to connection with a wider other,” explains Dr Luke. You’re in the realm of the transpersonal when you’re feeling warm and clear after meditating or making it to church: plus when acknowledging childhood trauma, or during a full revelatory, inner-visual spiritual experience… or being abducted by aliens, having a spontaneous DMT exprience, astral projecting, arguably dreaming and so on.

The discipline is “ethnogenic, cognicentric and pragmacentric” meaning entirely inclusive and accepting of other modes of consciousness. It evolved throughout the 20th century from William James’ ‘radical empiricism’ – scientific testing for the mysterious and hitherto unknown – to include Burke’s ‘cosmic consciousness’, Jung and Maslow’s pining for the mystic, and ‘post religious’ belief systems like Ken Wilbur’s integral.

You still have to do the graft though. “The only revolution that can work… is the inner transformation of every human being,” said Grof, and transpersonal psychology includes a faith in humanity’s ability to evolve not only physically but mentally, spiritually… and psionically. 

“The mycelium is the message” grins Dr Luke, “other societies have sanctioned altered states, while ours refuses their existence.”

Don’t confuse transpersonal psychology with quantuum psychology.

Psychedelic Mysteries of the Feminine

Dr Luke’s diverse body of work includes goddess energy. And not just the kind that cooks.

He co-edited of Psychedelic Mysteries of the Feminine: Creativity, Ecstasy, and Healing. To co-editor Maria Papaspyrou the psychdelic feminine represents self-expression, spontaneity, intuition, inclination towards change, mindfulness, connection, and acceptance. It isn’t gender-specific but archetypal: “the feminine is an elemental pattern we all carry within ourselves, whether we are men or women,” says Papaspyrou.

She cites Gareth Hill, a Jungian analyst who divided the feminine into ‘static’ and ‘dynamic’ aspects. Static “serves the impersonal goals of life on Earth, species preservation and survival.” The dynamic “receives her wisdom by engaging with direct experience, and is receptive to knowledge that belongs to the deep inner worlds”.

“The realms beyond that space belong to the feminine, and there we meet what is beyond words”

It is the dynamic in particular that we deny at our disservice and peril: “The dynamic feminine represents spaces that can be fascinating and ecstatic as well as terrifying and disorienting, that as a society we have learned to resist.” This is represented in myth by tantric goddess Kali who tramples men that gaze ecstatically up at her as a result, as she finally frees from the constraints of ego. We’ve all been there chaps.

The feminine is psychedelic in that it encompasses concepts like cosmic union, timelessness, rebirth, and ego death. “The realms beyond that space belong to the feminine, and there we meet what is beyond words and immediate perception,” says Papaspyrou. Never mind that many sectors of the psychedelic renaissance are, or will, be served by women from social work to psychotherapy and luxury tourism.

Out in the Field

“What can the medical sector learn from the psychedelic subcultre? Everything.”

“It’s citizen science at its finest – but tragically illegal,” further replied Dr. Luke to my question.

‘Field research’ is his term for the surveys and private research projects he’s conducted on the fringes of everyday reality.

“I’ve invented ‘psychograms’ to represent all sorts of altered states. I have about four art-stroke-science virtual reality projects on the go right now rangng from inducing synaesthesic meditation to interplanetary inter-connectedness and the tarot,” says Dr Luke, “It’s the inverse – you alter your perception to change your brain, rather than alter your brain to change your perception. We have things like that at the festivals, they supposedly replicate the effects psychedelics… at least on paper according to the tests. I slightly don’t believe it, but there is massive potential.”

While keen to stress that “psychedelics are not a panacea” like all authentic experts, extensive surveys conducted by Dr Luke and his team “show that they can be good for all kinds of things actually, from autism to Parkinson’s.”

“This is the intersection of science, and genuine transcendence of time/space to bring back information”

In the suburban living rooms of Britain something stirs. “We go round to people’s houses, it’s much more pleasant for the subjects. We did some experiments with precognitive individuals, and put shared experiences declared by ayahuasca users under the microscope: two people, experienced users who didn’t know each other, weren’t allowed to talk beforehand, attempted to join each other in the experience, and were interviewed separately afterwards. I haven’t fully evaluated the data as indepenent judges are interpeting the reports and images. But just eyeballing the material, I thought it was a long shot but… it looks like we’re going to get something quite significant. Albert Hoffman saw the doctor coming with an obsidian knife and feathered headdress. He knew where the provenance; his colleagues in Basle had similar visions, but no idea of any connection to Mexico or the Inca.”

This is the intersection of science, “and genuine transcendence of time and space to bring back information,” declares Dr Luke, “I’ve been looking into creative problem solving with scientists in DMT, bridging the gap betwen shamanism and science. It speaks to the very nature of reality, the meeting point between worldviews. And nobody’s asking these questions. They’re asking ‘What does it do in the brain?’ questions. And they’re getting ‘What it does in the brain’ kind of answers. They don’t engage with the glaring ontological questions about the nature of reality.”

He believes the obvious experts to turn to, like many actually do, are the DMT explorers of the Amazon. “Collectively as a culture they have thousands of years of expertise They were the original keeps of the wisdom and the substances. They haven’t been invited to the table at these multi billion dollar conferences.”

DMT Vs Death

Is DMT space the afterlife, and do we go there when we die… to be an entity?

According to a recent paper by proper brainbox Dr Christopher Timmerman, DMT replicates the near death experience (NDE).

Judging by his own enthusiastic research “the truth is “going to be more complex,” says Dr Luke, who has studied more than one shamanistic tradition first hand in detail. “There are features of the DMT experience you don’t get with NDE. Intense geometric patterns and colours for example, which are fundamental. Encounters with deceased relatives, and premonition [predicting the future] are less common in DMT. But 4-5% of people who take DMT have a ‘deceased encounter’ – but no ‘life review’ or ‘tunnel’. Then there are the encounters with little people that have been around for a long time. Graham Hancock made a direct comparison to modern-day alien abduction experiences. Although traditionally they were associated with the world of the dead. There’s many layers – the two not the same, I would say. They may be related. DMT may be ‘released’ at death. It may be created in the pineal gland. But we don’t have enough hard evidence.”

There are many other hypotheses: “I have colleagues who believe DMT entities are ‘intro-ceptive.’ You’re encountering your own micro-biome, mitochondria or other internal structures. Interesting theory, but it doesn’t account for the 25 -foot tall preying mantises.”

DMT is prevalent at much higher levels in the human body than previously believed. Maybe to the same extent as serotonin, to which it is increasingly compared

So should we, like our mate says, avoid taking DMT in case it uses up all our death high, and our eventual moment momet of union with cosmic whole is, like, a dud? According to hardcore research where scientsists monitored the brain activity in rats while they died, DMT is produced at six times the normal level at the moment of extermination. But other chemicals, including serotonin, noradrenaline and dopamine are blasted at many more times the normal levels.

“There’s very good reasons to think DMT is produced in the human pineal gland,” says Dr Luke, “but it could be made in the body.” In 2019 a heavyweight paper from the DMT Quest organisation concluded DMT is prevalent at much higher levels in the human body than previously believed; even to the same extent as serotonin, to which it is increasingly compared. The pineal gland is tiny, points out Dr Luke, and said expirements on rats were also conducted on another set of rats who’d had their pineal glands removed. DMT was still produced at large quantities upon death.

While we’re asking questions like ‘are entities real?’ in the pub, more ambitious brains are looking into the relationship between the pineal gland, DMT and autism (upon which Dr Luke has conducted surveys suggesting “extremely promsing data”) while dudes like Andrew Gilmore and Anton Bilton are talking about setitng up a DMT hyperspace station for extended exploration and communion.

Alchemy for the People

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 conuct forest therapy with a hundred, maybe ten thousand people?” dreamed aloud one Vital student in the Q&A. “Ecologists in Europe have druids involved, which is my fault,” was all Dr Luke could unfortunately offer, 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.

Kool-Aid Corner

To finish: trippy clippings, merry pranks, and psychedelic student life

Graph/visual aid of the Week

Comparison of entopic phenomena with the cave art of the San, the Coso and of Upper Paleolithic Europe

After Lewis-Williams and Dowson, 1988

From: Visionary: The Mysterious Origins of Human Consciousness (The Definitive Edition of Supernatural) (2022) by Graham Hancock

My bookshelf weighs a ton

Notable new purchases for the occult library. Strictly second hand snap-ups only

This week: The Secret of the Yamas by that John McAfee

Before he invented anti-virus software and became a tech billionaire John McAfee was a meditation teacher. He wrote this book, considered a classic amongst aficionados.

Eventually there was the whole thing in Belize. The abyss claims another: “Arrakis has seen men like you come, and go.” Non-duality is not necessarily peaceful. The anima works in notoriously, poetically mysterious ways.

Next issue: Contemporary Philosophy of Psychedelics

This blog is not affiliated to Vital beyond my study on the course. The content shouldn’t be taken as representative as it’s a personal reflection and includes my own lived experience of the sector too.

Psychedelic drugs are prohibited in the UK, other countries and most US states. I do not condone their use nor am I evangelising for, or recommending them to you. There are more qualified people you can turn to in the Resources section but if you are considering psychedelic treatments the best person to speak to is probably your own therapist, counsellor, or doctor.

Issue #4: My weekly unofficial Vital Student Zine features observations from the course and beyond

Dr Bill Richards is a staple of the modern-day mystery school researching psychedelics. He’s worked alongside Abraham Maslow, Stanislav Grof, Walter Pahnke and more. Now installed at the John Hopkins Centre for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research, he passed trade secrets on to Vital students.

Week four lecturer Dr Bill Richards volunteered for LSD testing as a restless theology student in post-WW2 Germany. He began working alongside Hanscarl Leuner, the German psychologist who invented Guided Affective Imagery (a perverse form of which was used in the brainwashing sequence of A Clockwork Orange), plus added both art and group therapy to LSD tests. Richards went on to become the most prolific psychedelic researcher of all time, working alongside Walter Pahnke, Abraham Maslow, Stanislav Grof, and now Roland Griffiths: he was last out of Spring Grove in 1977, first into the fledgling John Hopkins Centre for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research in 1999, and is still working today. His book Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences is out now.

Thumbnail image: Jane Graverol, ‘L’École de la Vanité’

In the Zine this week, arranged in the synaesthesic schema used for Vital’s cirriculum:

Approach: Wisdom of the Human Mind

Therapy: Healing Power of Laughter

Space: Cosmic Midwifery

Medical: LSD – Did it Ever Go Away?

Integral: The Wrong Mysteries

Plus! Graph/Visual Aid of the Week and second hand books

The Wisdom of the Human Mind

“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.

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, farcial, 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 personna,” 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.

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.”

Healing Power of Laughter

It’s okay to have a chuckle, or a cry, ‘in ceremony’. We could all probably do with one.

“Some patients have an intuitive understanding of the transcendent. Some just giggle,” says Dr Richards.

“For many of us intellectualisation is our primary form of armouring,” continues the seasoned psychedelic therapist, “tell participants to appreciate their thinking minds, but let themselves go out and play. See your patient going through states of wisdom, vulnerability…” and be prepared for pranksterism. The voyager might not be feeling especially mystic today, and that’s their prerogative. “A playful experience may actually be what’s needed,” says Richards. The god of laughter deserves reverence also.

“We are primarily dealing with human consciousness… a meaningful proces unfolding from within”

Reverence is appropriate to tradition, but welcome to the aeon where do what we wilt, not least out of necessity. Fortune favours the brave: the two-guide format, for example, began because researchers couldn’t hold their subject’s hand and change the record on the turntable at the same time. There’s an anecdote that might get you some laughs in over-intellectualising psychedelic circles.

Cosmic Midwifery

Guides are “like midwives, they create a container” to encourage the voyager’s “own choreography of the experience.”

The guide offers presence, but don’t require reporting. “At a very high dose, we are beyond words anyway,” advises Dr Richards.

Voyagers should be prepped to “dive into the pupil of the monster” lest one pounce from the shadows of their psyche. Challenging experiences are actually quite unusual (only 40% of users say they’ve had one) but “we all have our cross to bear – our trauma” reminds Richards.

“We are primarily dealing with human consciousness,” says Dr Richards, “a meaningful proces unfolding from within.” He says objects, personal or otherwise can be offered to the voyager who appears inquisitive.

“At a very high dose, we are beyond words anyway.”

Guides practising in legally permitted conditions from my study group say music is a fine changer of mood, especially with those who may have difficulty expressing their mystical sides. These “external routes to mystical consciousness” as Richards dubs them, like the classic rose bud or family photo used by silver age guides, can ‘make the energy dance’ like Alfred North Whitehead suggested. Suddenly everything is important, but somehow irrelevant, and both are absolutely fine. Unless they’re not.

“Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity,” wrote Whitehead in Process and Reality: An Essay on Cosmology, “[it] may not neglect the multifariousness of the world — the fairies dance, and Christ is nailed to the cross.“ Quite.

Everything you need to know about this season’s essential LSD revival trend

The psychedelic renaissance wrote LSD off as impractical, fuddy-duddy, and just so, like long as to be downright subversive. But Sandoz-25 is back in style and the ouroboros eats its tail again.

“To my mind, LSD is the best, the purest” declared Beckley Foundation’s Lady Amanda Fielding at the 2022 Psych Summit held at London’s National Gallery.

After all only the bohemian elite would have the time, right? And time is money more than ever before (usual disclaimers re: existence and/or nature of time). One shudders to think that LSD is the new jetset drug of choice. Beckley are actually conducting the first serious test into microdosing with LSD. The old fave has also found favour with the restless rabble. MindMed’s stage two tests for ADHD are underway at 20µg of LSD per week, hot on the heels of its success with LSD for anxiety. MindMed’s base of Switzerland is the home of LSD after all.

Meanwhile, Milanese glamour power house Dolce & Gabbana offers the tripwear of choice for sartorial psychonauts in its spring/summer 2022 menswear collection. See you at the sample sale.

The Wrong Mysteries

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

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 – that we, and 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 unchracteristically 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 fantasic.

“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 aproaches 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 cometence 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 in the process despite it involving a challenging process for myself.

Now. Nicholas Spiers, a British expert on western interaction with indigeneous 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 landlmark 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 Charcuna charity, intellectualise with Charcuna’s Psychedelic Justice: Toward a Diverse and Equitable Psychedelic Culture or rock this ‘Decolonise Your Mind’ T-shirt at your next gentrified neighbourhood BBQ.

Kool-Aid Corner

To finish: trippy clippings, merry pranks, and psychedelic student life

Graph/visual aid of the Week

The first patent for MDMA

Merck, Germany, 1912

From: The Rave: Spiritual Healing in Modern Western Subcultures by
Scott R Hutson (Anthropological Quarterly, January 2000)

My bookshelf weighs a ton

Notable new purchases for the occult library. Strictly second hand snap-ups only

This week: Strange Ecstasies edited by Michael Parry

Stories of space narcotics by major authors collected by druid of derring-do Michael Parry (d. 2014) , including The New Accelerator by H G Wells, Subjectivity by Norman Spinrad and What to Do Until the Analyst Comes by Frederik Pohl.

Plus a superb cover naturally.

If you like this sort of thing and haven’t read The Employees, a 2020 Booker Prize nominee by Danish author Olga Ravn, a ‘disconcertingly quotidian space opera’ (The Guardian), do so at light speed.

I can’t look at books like this without being hauntd by a sci fi short story about a co-ed college on a space station where the boys get these pets called teasels. I couldn’t find any reference to it online which was chilling in itself.

Next issue: London’s Dr David Luke talks transpersonal psychology and much more

This blog is not affiliated to Vital beyond my study on the course. The content shouldn’t be taken as representative as it’s a personal reflection and includes my own lived experience of the sector too.

Psychedelic drugs are prohibited in the UK, other countries and most US states. I do not condone their use, neither am I evangelising for, or recommending them to you. There are more qualified people you can turn to in the Resources section but if you are considering psychedelic treatments the best person to speak to is probably your own therapist, counsellor, or doctor.

Observations from my study on Vital and recent happenings in the space

Consciousness expansion: from cave painting, to the pyramids, and the first Psych Symposium at London’s National Gallery. How far have we got?

In week three Vital students heard from Dr Lenny Gibson, a clinical psychologist, philosopher and breathwork pioneer with ‘50 years of experience working with non-ordinary states of consciousness’ who nonetheless fitted in a storied career and founded transpersonal psychology non-profit Dreamshadow.

Gibson’s winsome and poingnant presentation elegantly examined western attitudes towards conscious thinking. His key point was that the world beyond words is no less valid – more so, even – than what we can describe. Psychedelics connect us with our intuition: as represented by the ancient gods Cerrunos and Baal, the greek god Dionysus (Bacchus to the romans) and, yes, Jesus of Arimathea who ‘turns the water into wine’. The first art, storytelling and culture derived from rites around this divine archetype.

Gibson references philosopher du jour Iain McGhilchrist, and I’ll pull out this particular quote from the Matter with Things author:

“As soon as you start saying anything about this realm, you falsify it. There are certain things that simply are resistant to normal language, normal exposition. But don’t for that reason not exist.”

But he began with a comparison to the Baka tribes whose genetics diverged 70,000 years ago. They describe their ceremonial group singing as “so beautiful the self melts away” just like both psychedelics and the ‘ecstatic’ techniques the rest of us have taken just as long to work out using science instead.

In the Zine this week, arranged in the synaesthesic schema used for Vital’s cirriculum:

Approach: Move any mountain with neo shamanism

Therapy: ‘Celebrating the mysteries’ is the new euphemism of choice

Space: Can you hold your own?

Medical: The Microdose Age

Integral: Learning to fly

Plus! Graph of the Week and second hand books

Move Any Mountain with Neo Shamanism

The ‘S-Word’ is getting laden.

No surprise, when you consider that the criteria for shaman-hood range, depending on your understanding, from genetic lineage, grave dedication, and fighting spirits to cure treatment resistant diseases all the way to a dubious certificate, some bongos and an Instagram account. 

‘Neo shamanism’ to Gibson is humankind’s recent ability to be his own wise counsel and medicine woman. The synthesis of LSD, a colourless tasteless substance able to inspire psychedelic states in minuscule amounts, he believes has democratised the role.

Poetically, this most scientific of revelations has inspired a rebirth of personal spirituality and philosophic examination. Scholars will point out that it’s the first time in 500 years, a la Joe Tafur’s Legend of the Eagle and the Condor, that science and religion have conjoined, whether in the form of transpersonal psychologist Stanislav Grof or the discoveries of quantum physics.

“For once, and for everyone, the truth was not still a mystery. Love called to all.”

Mystical healing may be associated with the Shipibo curanderos but they don’t use the word shaman themselves. In many communities associated with ‘shamanism’ the healer role itself is rare, considered apart, and special. Scientific medical training is not uncommon amongst indegeneous mystical healers.

Personally I understand exactly why usage is revered and not to be bandied about, certainly in an “I can cure you by battling with entities” manner. Gibson’s own understanding is that the neo shaman is a contemporary voyager into the new frontiers of the ‘Psyche,’ itself the name for the Greek goddess of wisdom and the soul. Obvious candidates for 20th Century LSD neo-shamanhood might be Grof, Aldous Huxley, Amanda Fielding or Jimi Hendrix. And Timothy Leary, who was scolded by RD Laing for democratising LSD… But if LSD had remained the preserve of the elite, Hendrix might never have wrote in his personal poetry after Woodstock in 1969, “For once, and for everyone, the truth was not still a mystery. Love called to all.”

Mankind’s destiny calls, and we are all ordained to answer.

‘Celebrating the mysteries’ is the new euphemism of choice

Accessibility is a hot topic in ‘the space’ right now.

At the inaugural Psych Symposium in London’s National Gallery earlier this May 2022, itself undeniably elitist at £400 for a basic one-day ticket and £1,000 for full access and the drinkies, MAPS spokesperson Natalie Lyla Ginsberg told suits that “PTSD is most common in the marginalised communities who cannot currently access these treatments.” Author Zoe Cormier eviscerated corpos with lines like, “So if it’s okay for somebody dying of bowel cancer to grow their own mushrooms, why is it not okay for normal folks?” (Answer: ‘because dosages’, to a lack of any audible groans). 

The Greeks famously all tripped together at the Eleusinian Mysteries, an invite-only annual bash held at the festival of Demeter for the best part of two thousand years. It’s heavily referenced in Shakespeare’s esoteric play The Tempest. Supposedly ‘The Mysteries’ was reserved only for the ‘invisible college’ wyrd and wonderful types, but high society were in on things too: “The beautful people following the interesting people, and the rich people follow the beautiful people” as a wise lady once told me. Indeed, the use of psychedelics was only proven recently when a gruelling, decades-long investigation into the local availability of psychedelic ergot was trumped by legal records prosecuting a notorious socialite for ‘celebrating the mysteries’ at dinner parties back home in Athens (he got exiled to Sparta, by the way). Current podcast staple Brian Muraresku will tell you all about psychedelic use by the early Christians. And has been recently in great interviews like this around his book The Immortality Key.

The ancient greeks believed “Life can only be experienced in a truly terrifying, but transformational, encounter with death.”

Ritually, the Greeks supped from elaborate kylix cups (above). Medieval witches got rampant on datura, best taken internally via the mucus membrane, by inserting it vaginally – ‘riding the broomstick’. In 2022 ketamine bumps are delivered in £5,000 inhalers, and while no one is sticking DMT up their bum just yet, the common folk are hunted and persecuted by the agents of mediocrity still.

Can you hold your own?

Westerners are sorely lacking in psychedelic ritual. 

The Imperial College testing rooms are the most British thing I’ve ever seen, with a blanket thrown over the studio kitchen in the corner, a drape with some trees on and a lamp stuck behind it, plus some spiritual tat.

It does look surprisingly cosy nonetheless, especially with Dr Ros beaming angelically from her seat in the corner. But you almost certainly have to dream the Albion way to appreciate its understated succour. Bar the open heartedness oozing from the ever-radiant Dr Ros, being served the Mysteries by the priestesses of Demeter it is not. Neither is donning a blindfold plus headphones, and boasting a grin like the one that betrays the fact you don’t normally fly business class, an experience surely at all comparable to the jungle ayahuasca one.

12-step style integration and ceremony – my bad, ‘celebrating the mysteries’ – circles were mentioned as future possibilities by Psych delegates in a huddle with Imperial College trials participants Iain Roullier and Leonie Schneider, unsung heroes of the UK space who also spoke onstage with Dr Ros repping their PsyPan set-up. In the meantime there is… an app.

“The substance is only 51% of the process”

‘Holding space’ doesn’t seem to have been much of an issue during contemporary scientific tests and education regarding bad trips-stroke-challenging, purgatorial experiences may take the edge off them so to speak. Admittedly a guide, let alone a skilled psychotherapist or shaman, may be good for a bad trip too. Because surely MindMed’s ‘off switch’ jab is cheating*.

An old pal has just reminded me that our sitter was a table leg with an acid house smiley face drawn on it which we kept in the back of the van. The Wild Hunt rides.

*Take the off switch if they offer it or at least don’t say I told you not to

The Microdose Age

“Microdosing is a step forward for humankind.”

Beckley Psytech’s Lady Amanda Fielding (for it is she) declared so at Psych Symposium. If psychedelics can be for the everyman, can they be for every day?

While it’s less spectacular than ‘spiritual doses’, DMT, or ayahuasca, and an ongoing science to say the least, microdosing’s arguably taken a stronger foothold in popular culture than the next-level psychedelics. Users report similar effects to integrated major experiences, like enthusiasm, geniality, consideration and walking in the woods while listening to Jon Hopkins. Famously though microdosing – which Beckley are researching throughly – is one of the few contemporary psychedelic phenomena to fail the placebo test. Small doses are being tested on some conditions: MindMed are on stage two for 20µg of LSD twice a week, while sticking someone in a room and giving them a proper tab (200µg) did okay for GAD . The likes of New Health Club are poised to bring acid to the workplace (at last). Lenny Gibson’s observation was that ‘psyche’ also means ‘breath’, and Stanislav Grof’s holotropic breathwork could be the only option – and also a better one – for many.

Professor David Nutt pointed out in his Psych presentation that it’s the ‘wellbeing’ scores that are really impressive in psychedelic therapy’s efficacy results. But according to a neuroscientist I spoke to outside when the fire alarm went off, “there are no criteria for developing drugs for ‘wellbeing’ like there might be for mental health conditions already treated pharmacologically. So everybody’s trying to make drugs, which is ruinously expensive as it is, without knowing precisely what to aim at, certainly in terms of approval.” The Mushroom Nation is at once already here, and still so far away.

NB Psychedelics are prohibited in most places even if labelled ‘cacao’ and sent in gaudy packaging. You can still get busted for them like this guy.

Learning to fly

“The substance is only 51% of the treatment” said Imperial College Psilodep 2 trial clinical lead scientist Dr Rosalind Watts at Psych Sumposium.

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 Neitsche, 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 ontonolgy 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.”

Kool-Aid Corner

To finish: trippy clippings, merry pranks, and psychedelic student life

Graph of the Week

Ego-dissolution scores of test subjects

On DMT

Placebo

From: DMT Models the Near-Death Experience, Christopher Timmermann, Leor Roseman, Luke Williams, David Erritzoe, Charlotte Martial, Héléna Cassol, Steven Laureys, David Nutt and Robin Carhart-Harris (Frontiers in Psychology, August 2018)

My bookshelf weighs a ton

Notable new purchases for the occult library. Strictly second hand snap-ups only

This week: Listen, Little Man! by Wilhelm Reich with illustrations by William Steig

What flirtation with western neo shamanism would be complete without a reminder that the boy who points out the emperor has no clothes is actually banished to the wilderness? It’s only in the modern version he becomes king. Other innovator-pranksters like Reich, and Plato’s favourite Socrates, end up dead.

Reich never intended for this 1945 manifesto to be published. This 1977 version features incredible illustrations by William Steig, who’d go on to write Shrek. Reichian bodywork is part of helotropic breathing and bioenergetics is taught in schools.

It’s more relevant than ever for detoxifying western armouring, but undoubtedly too much like hard work for most. Homemade orgone accumulators at the ready for a pssible comeback nonetheless. Buy my teacher’s new book on Reichian Character Structure to get going, it’s brilliant.

Next issue: John Hopkins’ Dr Bill Richards talks 60 years of LSD

This blog is not directly affiliated to Vital beyond my study on the course. The content shouldn’t be taken as representative as it’s a personal reflection and includes my own lived experience of the sector too.

Psychedelic drugs are prohibited in the UK, other countries and most US states. I do not condone their use nor am I evangelising for, or recommending them to you. There are more qualified people you can turn to in the Resources section but if you are considering psychedelic treatments the best person to speak to is probably your own therapist, counsellor, or doctor.

Observations from my study on Vital and recent happenings in the space

In Vital’s second lecture Dr Joe Tafur blew minds with a clinical overview of shamanic plant medicine healing. It included his staggering current research into conditions possibly related to epigentics that range from PTSD to cancer.

The family doctor from Phoenix, Arizona is also a shaman in the Shipibo curanderismo tradition trained by Maestro Ayahuasca Shaman Ricardo Amaringo. He’s the author of ayahuasca blockbusterThe Fellowship of the River (‘with introduction by Gabor Mat´é’) plus the co-founder alongside Amaringo of Nihue Rao healing centre near Iquitos, Peru.

In the Zine this week, arranged in the Vital cirriculum’s colour scheme:

Approach: Saving souls for three million years

Therapy: The art of healing

Space: Sing your song in the key of life

Medical: Epigentic disease and plant medicine

Integral: The Eagle and the Condor

Plus! Graph of the Week and second hand books

Saving lost souls for three million years. Now, with MDMA

Dr Tafur saw ayahuasca’s positive effect on beleagured veterans.

He took this as a validation of his own conversion to plant medicine after ayahuasca was instrumental in his recovery from a depressive episode.

He told Vital students that transcendent unconditional love, of the kind received in a sacred ceremony, has a positive effect on psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) just like family love (the good enough kind).

It can be transmitted via ‘limbic resonance’ – a theoretical term for hormonal interaction between one or more people. With its support our subconscious processes difficult emotions more efficiently. The healing effect moves from the psyche (P) through the nerous system (N) into the immune system (I), bolstering the body’s own intuitive ‘inner healer’.

The importance of empathy has recently been recognised within western medical treatment. But we are all understanding that professional clinicians can only give so much of themselves.

However. Try instead exotic ceremonies, remarkable locations, skilled practicioners, devout participants, and zealous dedication in the form of the ‘only was out is through’ strategy of taking high-strength ancient jungle acid five nights in a row – and you have the missing element required to treat a range of psychoneuroimmunologically-related conditions currently frustrating doctors and destroying families.

The spiritual sector, to its eternal credit, provides the social role of offering salvation to those mired in confusion, or paralysed by ethical quagmire. It can provide rare complex moral reconciliation, of the kind that PTSD treatment benefits from enormously. Where though does MDMA come in? It’s an ‘empathogen’ as opposed to a psychedelic.

Nonetheless the ‘love drug’ too can augment some characteristics of psychotherapy just like psychedelics and traditional healing ceremonies. Not only does MDMA increase the level of limbic resonance between doctor and patient, it’s also been shown to activate areas of the brain used during childhood to ingrain healthy social behaviour patterns.

Besides, “The MAPS PTSD programme going up for FDA-approval has a mystical element,” sa Dr Tafur, responding to my disbelief that western psychotherapy can rapidly replicate the awe of ayahuasca, “in my experience the clinical sector is increasingly intertested in ceremony. There are some really open-hearted therapists at MAPS,” he expands, referencing the completely accepting nature of spiritual fulfilment… historically known as ecstasy.

Psychedelic therapy is an art first and a science second

“It’s living in the jungle for four months, eating right,” says Tafur, “You can’t read it and write it.”

You can train to be a shaman with Dr Joe! But there’s what would be considered, in this modern world, a catch: you actually have to go and do it.

Even for psychotherapits practicing MDMA therapy at MAPS, Dr Tafur points out, “There’s no running away when you’re in there with people who have these issues for eight hours.”

Whether delivering the icaros in that delightful yet dread-laden way, or deftly reaching out with your neuroceptive aura, Dr Tafur is keen to stress, “this is an art.”

A powerful combination of the sacred, the empathic, and experience in healing epigentic-related conditions is central to his hypothesis (see Medical below). It’s why the clincial sector is fascinated; even in this 1950s archive footage a researcher asks his test subject “how does your soul feel right now?” Plus it’s also why ravers aren’t cured of mental health issues after a big weekend – context and other important characteristics are key to the drug experience having a self-healing element. The spiritual factor prompts an ever deeper form of self-healing when combined with the therapeutic. “Current medical science cannot match the transpersonal, or the moving,” says Dr Tafur.

‘Psyche’ in classical greek means ‘soul’. Dr Tafur explained that indigenous perspectives consider spirituality and healing to be one and the same. Music, prayer, ceremony, connection and affirmation: all augment the ‘spiritual experience’ that research shows is key to healing with psychedelics.

Songs in the key of life: energy and entropy

Mystic healing is far from an established vocation in the West. And the spectre of cultural appropriation casts a deep shadow.

The western neoshamanism AKA core shamanism movement has gone through its highs and lows since explorers came across ayahuasca in the 1800s.

But there’s a gulf between Instagram ‘shamans’ and the type of grassroots work conducted for example in communities affected by the opioid crisis, where very well-intentioned and ultimately effective healers face risks of incarceration and rupturing their own community relations.

How then can mystical healing’s beneficial elements be adopted by western health and wellbeing practicioners?

Apprenticing under an authentic expert would likely involve the path taken by, for example, Reiki healers who are also encouraged to search and wait for the correct master, and may need to prove their dedication upon finding them.

“It’s about real people and some real conenction that you might have,” says Dr Tafur, “What opportunities do you have around you? Where are you? Is there somebody in your area where you can explore that?”

There are nonetheless fundamentals to the approach that can be considered. MAPS training assets for example refer to the importance of the therapist exuding ‘loving presence’. And somatic experiencing (which Dr Tafur recommends) coaches are trained to cultivate a ‘neuroceptive aura’ radiating a sense of safety to encourage ‘interoception’ a constructive dialogue between the body, emotions, and conscious thought.

“We’re trying to help somebody, and using our faculties as human beings in order to do that,” is what Dr Tafur distills the healing process down to. During his lecture he was hardly dismissive of authentic western efforts to replicate the process – but it’s essential that these are conducted with an ‘open heart’.

Singing icaros-type songs with substituted words in a shared language is not misguided… as long as it creates the required atmosphere for a mystical healing window to open. Sincerity of feeling is essential, but localised interpretations may be actually more effective than exotic traditional ones.

The most graceful nuances of ayahuasca are said to be ontologically lost on outsiders. Occultist Jason Louv points out that eastern spiritual systems like buddhism are guides to living well in different cultures. In response to social media claims that ‘Putin should take ayahuasca’ to end the Ukraine conflict, Shaur-trained shaman and former financier John Perkins recently pointed out that the experience is traditionally believed to make fiercer warriors to highlight how we can’t overlap a different approach entirely onto our own worldview. Tactics specific to western society may have more impact on local patients, if conducted with the same levels of intention, craft and sensitivity.

The “energy” to quote Dr Tafur directly is what is key – its purity of purpose and its intensity. Icaros have an improvised element and he himself will substitute spanish or english words if required. Nonetheless the language has a vocabulary that is ideal to express the ayahuasca experience, as does the rhythm – but this itself features aspects that might well go over the heads of anyone who can’t claim lineage in the local society and culture.

Equally any expert will tell you that it is best to learn an established system before beginning to develop your own. Dr Tafur feels that his traditional Shipibo education gives his practice, “A strong base. But I’m interested in singing for patients undergoing ketamine therapy for example. So there’s room to mix it up. But there must be a reason why. Is it because it’s better for your patients or just because you don’t like tradition? Learning something well, then applying it elsewhere is more powerful than just coming up with whatever.”

Europeans have been feverishly dreaming up a shamanic culture using both fact and myth for the past few centuries, resulting in for example Wicca. They have also looked to the future in the form of ‘chaos magic’, a method of creating personal spiritual systems based on esoteric techniques passed down the millennia. Even a traditional ‘christian mysticism’ featuring, for example alchemy is in vogue now thanks to writer Damien Echols.

All this will still be a massive culture shock for the average agnostic westerner seeking alternative healthcare, especially hipsters raised on Richard Dawkins (who also has his place). But often the psychedelically-active patient will have become curious about these areas allowing for fundamentals to be touched upon at least. In 2015’s Transcendent Mind (see bottom of page) published by the famously orthodox American Psychological Association, Drs Imants Baruss and Julia Mossbridge present serious, rubber-stamped research that pairs ancestor worship with the collective unconscious and (I paraphrase) ‘that way you know your parents are about to call just before the phone rings.’ Refer to that last bit and riff from there…

To end. Experts like Dr Ido Cohen point out that the shamanic path is a calling as opposed to a blessing. Like other (supposedly) rewarding life paths, it comes with its own trials and sacrifices. Dr Tafur says, “if this makes you feel special, like you’re right and others are wrong, it’s not working. It’s suppsoed to make you feel part of something, working together.”

Spiritual healing could help cure epigentic diseases and transform treatment

“Ultimately we’re reopening metaphysics. The research is in review now and we’re looking forward to sharing it with the world,” says Dr Tafur.

Modern Spirit, Dr Tafur’s non-profit org has collected genetic samples from some of the 107 patients in MAPS’ 12-month MDMA therapy trial (see above) where a stunning 68% of patients had statistically recovered from chronic, treatment resistant PTSD after three treatments. They’d been suffering for an average of 17.8 years.

“To a doctor, the sacred isn’t important. But to close your mind is a hiding place. People need to see something. Mental health? It’s competitive. But cancer is largely epigenetic and that’s one of the fields they’re saying they want to put more energy and understanding into.”

The research could also validate other holistic practices ranging from somatic experiencing to reiki.

“Ultimately we’re reopening metaphysics. The research is in review now and we’re looking forward to sharing it with the world,” he says.

He recounts a pivotal moment in his shamanic career, when ayauasca visions insisted that a penitent’s disease was “on” as opposed to “in” her genes as medical consenus assumes.

This tallys with the compelling field of epigenetics, which examines changes in our DNA (nature) brought about by environment (nurture). These can be passed down the generations, and include traumatic experiences. This was proven by landmark surveys using data assembled from descendants of Holocaust survivors. Of course it also works for colonialism, industrialised warfare, poverty, patriarchy and lovelessness. It’s a new and complex but far from fringe area: my mother is an identical twin who has been taking part in NHS epigentic research funded by good old Wellcome Trust for decades.

The Eagle and the Condor

‘The Eagle and the Condor’ is a two thousand year-old 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.

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).

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?

Kool-Aid Corner

To finish: trippy clippings, merry pranks, and psychedelic student life

Graph of the Week

Attribution of consciousness to living and non-living entities before and after a psychedelic belief-changing experience

After psychedelic experience

Before psychedelic experience

From: A Single Belief-Changing Psychedelic Experience Is Associated With Increased Attribution of Consciousness to Living and Non-living Entities (supplementary material) by Samdeep M Nayak and Roland R. Griffiths, John Hopkins University (2022)

My bookshelf weighs a ton

Notable new purchases for the occult library. Strictly second hand snap-ups only

This week: Transcendent Mind by Imants Barrus and Julia Mossbridge. Swept on for £50 when I noticed prices were going up quickly

Despite what the sort of thing I write in my day job would have you believe, government-backed public education openly invests in paranormal research (for better or worse). It even issues press releases about the positive findings. Here in the UK Northampton University is the crucible of not-so-forbidden learning, with parapsychological research taking place across several departments.

Published in 2015 by the notoriously conservative American Psychological Association Transcendent Mind contains an enthusiastic review of official investigations into consciousness, the soul, supra-physical existence and the cosmic whole.

Drs Julia Mossbridge and Imants Baruss, a former engineering scholar who quit to work as a roofer before taking up psychology, are heavy-hitters in the field. You may also enjoy Alterations of Consciousness: An Empirical Analysis for Social Scientists.

Next issue: Ancient Greece and the Mysteries of Eueleusis

This blog is not affiliated to Vital beyond my study on the course. The content shouldn’t be taken as representative as it’s a personal reflection and includes my own lived experience of the sector too.

Psychedelic substances are prohibited in the UK, other countries and most US states. I do not condone their use nor am I evangelising for, or recommending them to you. There are more qualified people you can turn to in the Resources section but if you are considering psychedelic treatments the best person to speak to is probably your own therapist, counsellor, or doctor.

To finish: trippy clippings, merry pranks, and psychedelic student life

Graph of the Week

Ego-dissolution scores of test subjects

On DMT

Placebo

From: DMT Models the Near-Death Experience, Christopher Timmermann, Leor Roseman, Luke Williams, David Erritzoe, Charlotte Martial, Héléna Cassol, Steven Laureys, David Nutt and Robin Carhart-Harris (Frontiers in Psychology, August 2018)

My bookshelf weighs a ton

Notable new purchases for the occult library. Strictly second hand snap-ups only

This week: Listen, Little Man! by Wilhelm Reich with illustrations by William Steig

What flirtation with western neo shamanism would be complete without a reminder that the boy who points out the emperor has no clothes is actually banished to the wilderness? It’s only in the modern version he becomes king. Other innovator-pranksters like Reich, and Plato’s favourite Socrates, end up dead.

Reich never intended for this 1945 manifesto to be published. This 1977 version features incredible illustrations by William Steig, who’d go on to write Shrek. Reichian bodywork is part of helotropic breathing and bioenergetics is taught in schools.

It’s more relevant than ever for detoxifying western armouring, but undoubtedly too much like hard work for most. Homemade orgone accumulators at the ready for a pssible comeback nonetheless. Buy my teacher’s new book on Reichian Character Structure to get going, it’s brilliant.

Next issue: John Hopkins’ Dr Bill Richards talks 60 years of LSD

Observations from my study on Vital and recent happenings in the space

Historian Dr Erika Dyck lectured on the “ground zero of LSD research,” conducted by Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer at Weyburn Asylum in remote Saskatchewan beginning in 1951.

Osmond, a British expat, was observing Native American peyote ceremonies by 1956. A year later he coined the term ‘psychedelic’ in his correspondence with Aldous Huxley. Hoffer trailblazed nutritional approaches like fasting and vitamin treatments.

I studied history at university (specialising in Renaissance Florence and the Medici, cheers) so Vital’s inaugural week lay seductively inside my comfort zone. I seized the opportunity to go down a historical rabbit hole… and this zine is longer than future weekly updates will be. Stay locked for bonus history posts out of all the feverishly downloaded PDFs.

Dr Dyck recently published graphic novel Wonder Drug: LSD in the Land of Living Skies, Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD on the Canadian Prairies and  Psychedelic Prophets: The Letters of Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond. The latter she painstakingly assembled from private collections and museums alongside a team of volunteers. She’s identified the first woman to take LSD, Albert Hoffman’s assistant Susi Ramstein Weber – who also served as spontaneous sitter on Albert’s first two trips.

Dr Dyck is a key contributor to The Chacruna Institute of Psychedelic Plant Medicines, an organization founded by Brazilian anthropologist Dr. Bia Labate ‘promoting a bridge between “traditional ceremonial use” and clinical and therapeutic settings.’

You can watch her regular lecture on Psychedelic History in Canada on YouTube, plus I thoroughly recommend What about Mrs Psychedelic? And a bunch more I put on this YouTube resource channel.

These five items I pulled from the week’s research are themed along Vital’s natural element-themed structure: 

Air: Historical and Current Approaches

Fire: Psychedelic Therapies

Water: Spaceholding and Navigating

Earth: Medical and Clinical

Ether: Integration

Plus! Stay on the dancefloor till the end for Graph of the Week and second hand book porn

Is ‘corporadelics’ doing enough for spirit, set, setting… and society?

The early days of LSD research are easily vilified. Spirituality is a dirty word in scientific circles right now: let alone reincarnation or astrology, both of which Stanislav Grof is quick to mention. It’s even considered unprofessional for the healer to develop a connection with the patient. 20th century Western scientists are easily cast cast as distant, privileged figures electro-shocking schizophrenics behind the asylum gates, collaborating with the CIA in return for research permits.

And now the spectre of ‘corporadelics’ hangs over LSD’s renaissance. I asked Dr Dyck what she learned about human nature from her research, that we can apply to the present.

”There’s a risk of reducing history to a cliché to push against,” she responded “or seeing history as ‘they had it wrong and in the past and we’re better now’.”

“However there’s still something that we can take from the spirit, the optimism, the motivation, the intentions,” says Dyck, “for example, a lot of people who went into these trials were designated as patients – but came through feeling they were collaborators. It pushes back against the competing model of engaging in scientific rigour, where methodology overwhelmed the need for investigating human behaviour in a more diverse way.”

Osmond, Hoffer and their in-house architect Kyoshi Yazumi (more of whom below) were revamping Canada’s mental health system as part of an ambitious pledge by Canada’s new socialist government. Their innovations included day trips outside the famously forboding asylum for inpatients, art and music therapy, and family visits, plus more autonomy for the nurses… who took LSD to ‘empathise better with the patient exprience’.

“The early researchers definitely were trying to align a health access point within a publicly funded system,” she responded, “That is certainly not on the horizon today. We see lots of competing, profit-seeking ways of turning psychedelics into something that, I would argue, are going to be less accessible.”

Alcoholics Anonymous founder Bill ‘W’ Wilson’s psychedelic use inspired Twleve-step and cured his depression

Hospitalised three times already in less than two years during the mid-30s, Wilson checked himself into hospital for rehab bearing a copy of William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience. He was given the Towns-Lambert treatment for detoxification made using deadly nightshade, henbane (both lively natural psychedelics) and morphine over a period of days.

A close converted christian friend and recovery fellow, Ebby, visited, and pressed the conversation towards Wilson’s atrocious treatment of his wife Lois. Wilson hit ‘rock bottom’ – ego death – smiled up at Kali, and, as he writes in autobiography Pass it On:

“Then came the blazing thought, ‘you are a free man!’ A great peace stole over me, and this was accompanied by a sensation difficult to describe. I became acutely conscious of a Presence which seemed like a veritable sea of living spirit. I lay on the shores of a new world. ‘This’, I thought, ‘must be the great reality.”

Wilson also experienced visions of “a chain of drunks” extending around the globe, assisting each others’ recovery. This would become Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Wilson also came to value spirituality, and etched its practice into The Twelve Steps. According to his I am Bill biographer Francis Hartigan, Wilson thought depression grew from a “lack of faith” and a dearth of “spiritual achievement.”

Vitally, he “did not see any conflict between science and medicine and religion.”

Thanks to Osmond’s work, church and community leaders were (at this stage) pro-LSD, having seen Osmond’s patients rejoin functional society. Wilson met Osmond and Hoffer in his role as an abstinence thought leader to discuss addicition in 1954. At this stage our favourite post-war sub-arctic boffins were blundering around believing LSD would prompt delerium tremens attacks that might shock drinkers out of their rut. Osmond: “We found, in fact, that this wasn’t quite how it worked… not unlike Bill’s experience. It gave us pause for thought. Not on the grounds of how terrifying it was, but how illuminating it was.”

In 1955 Wilson took LSD under supervision from consciousness pioneer Gerald Heard and psychiatrist Sidney Cohen (who also provided Aldous Huxley’s deathbed LSD). He wrote to Betty Eisner, one of his therapy team plus an especially innovative researcher into addiction and LSD, reporting:

“Since returning home I have felt — and hope have acted! — exceedingly well. I can make no doubt that the Eisner-Cohen-Powers-LSD therapy has contributed not a little to this happier state of affairs.”

AA’s narrative was that it healed through a combination of complete sobriety and the ‘higher power’ (the latter Wilson considered contactable via LSD). Psychedelics and even psychology didn’t fit with that. To fervent AA members, “Bill’s seeking outside help was tantamount to saying the program didn’t work” writes Hardigan. 

In 2020, a systematic review published by Frontiers in Psychology compiling figures from alcoholism LSD treatments over many decades said, “LSD is revealed as a potential therapeutic agent in psychiatry; the evidence to date is strongest for the use of LSD in the treatment of alcoholism.”

John Hopkins stand-out Matthew Johnson began trials on psilocybin for smoking cessation in 2014, and has since racked up an 80% success rate that dwarfs other approaches. His team are also starting or planning studies using psilocybin therapy for a wide range of other conditions, including opioid addiction and alcoholism. 

Bill ‘W’ Wilson caved into pressure and stopped LSD therapy in the mid-60s. Neither his depression nor drinking returned.

Women invented chill out DJing

And their style remains the template for chill out mixes – plus MAPS therapy sessions – today.

After Abram Hoffer’s wife Rose soothed a tripping patient by changing a jarring record to an elegant Bach number, she was thenceforth delegated I/C the tunes. 

Hermina E Browne, director of music therapy at New Jersey State Hospital, began testing music for effectiveness during psychedelic sessions for alcoholics in 1956. Her major innovations were to divide the soundtrack into five thirty-minute parts plus – I love this one – put the music on for half an hour, then turn it off again for the same time. Her playlist categories were:

1 Relaxing to tense

2 Very tense, disturbed with a purpose

3 Solemn, meditative, self-searching, spiritual

4 Relaxing, spiritual

5 Reconciling, restoration of confidence, feeling of hope and faith

Browne passed her findings on to E Thayer Gaston, ‘The Father of Music Therapy’ who eschewed her policy of ‘Five Moods Projected’. Instead he insisted on music ‘familiar’ to the patient. (The handbook says have them ask to change it once, stand ground gently, then cave in if they ask again).

Enter during the 1970s Helen Bonny, who considered music ‘intersubjectively verifiable’ and set out to prove it. Her Maryland Hospital is noted for using four therapists in psychedelic sessions, always including a music therapist.

Bonny’s unpublished research did so, but she’s even better known for conceiving Guided Imagery and Music, the leading form of music therapy in the prsent day.

Public opinion had a huge effect on research back then. It still does

Dyck’s presentation began with a curved ball. She pointed out that pharmaceuticals were bang on-trend during the 1950s after the successful roll-out of anti-psychotic chlorpromazine (Thorazine). This generated goodwill for tests on more ‘wonder drugs’.

However, in the early1960s the startling effects of thalidomide on pregnancy came to light. “Images of deformed children caused outcry and a moral panic over testing ethics,” plus the emerging anti-modernity movement fuelled a backlash that brought LSD – brand name ‘Delysid’ – testing to a halt in Canada by 1962. Leary was fired from Harvard in April 1962. Research was legal elsewhere, but funding and support rapidly became non-existent.

Architecture is the trippiest job

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 Pensylvannia USA.

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

1 Provide as much privacy as possible

2 Minimize 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

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

Kool-Aid Corner

To finish: trippy clippings, merry pranks, and psychedelic student life

Graph of the Week

The relationship between ego-dissolution and ego-inflation for experiences
occasioned by:

Classical psychedelics

Coacine

Alcohol

From: Ego-Dissolution and Psychedelics: Validation of the Ego-Dissolution Inventory (EDI) by Matthew M Nour, Lisa Evans, David Nutt and Robin L Carhart-Harris (2016)

My bookshelf weighs a ton

Notable new purchases for the occult library. Strictly second hand snap-ups only. This week: Albion Dreaming by Andy Roberts. Replaced after my first copy accompanied a close friend to his new life in NY

From the first chapter: ‘William Blake drew on Albion as a symbol of man before the Biblical fall and historian Peter Ackroyd has used the term for the title of his book charting the origins of the English imagination.

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.

Thus, Albion embodies the mythological imagination of these Isles, a state akin to the aboriginal Dreamtime, to which everyone should have access. This, then, is Albion’s dreaming.’

Andy Roberts is Britain’s answer to Erika Dyck; our national chronicler of the far out. Psychedelic Renaissance author AWAKN’s Dr Ben Sessa says:

“Andy is an anti-authoritarian, free-thinking individual who has happily nailed his colours to the weirdness mast without being lost in its sea of ethereal fluffiness.”

Indeed he’s unafraid of toppling sacred cows, like in this forensic inquisition into the Francis Crick LSD-DNA connection and his biography of disruptive-at-best prankster Michael Hollingshead. Grab his recent collection of essays from Psychedelic Press and see vids on the New Psychonaut YouTube depository.

Next issue: Dr Joe Tafur explains traditional and modern indigeneous perspectives

This blog is not affiliated to Vital beyond my study on the course. The content shouldn’t be taken as representative as it’s a personal reflection and includes my own lived experience of the sector too.

Psychedelic substances are prohibited in the UK, other countries and most US states. I do not condone their use, neither am I evangelising for, or recommending them to you. There are more qualified people you can turn to in the Resources section but if you are considering psychedelic treatments the best person to speak to is probably your own therapist, counsellor, or doctor.