Hi there.
Today, instead of my usual poem, I’m sharing an interview I published earlier this week on Wakeful Travel, a blog for microdosing journals run by my friend and collaborater Jenalle Dion. But first, a few — okay, maybe more than a few — words of introduction.
What’s the best way to take psychedelics? At a festival surrounded by colorful crowds and performing artists, in a controlled therapy setting monitored by a trained facilitator, or as part of a ritual ceremony led by a shaman?
I can speak from experience that doing it alone — with no one to guide or share the journey, within a culture that not only discourages but criminalizes such altered states — is not the preferred context. But neither is one that’s entirely controlled and strictly prescribed behind a bureaucratic paywall, which is what the legalization and medicalization schemes being drafted in Oregon under Measure 109 seem to take as their ideal.
There’s a tendency we have, as individuals and as a culture, towards polarization, either prohibiting something as unequivocally bad or reactively embracing it as unequivocally good, which glosses over the nuances inherent in just about any subject we can imagine. Such is the case with the so-called psychedelic renaissance. The push by major medical institutions and VC-funded corporations’ to commodify psychedelic plants and fungi like psilocybin as curated consumer experiences is, in many ways, the flipside of the War on Drugs’ decades-long ban on studying or taking them entirely.
Both efforts to create a standard that can apply to everyone — whether framed by the narrative that “psychedelics = good” or “psychedelics = bad” — mislead us into a very un-psychedelic, hierarchical, and one-size-fits-all model of viewing reality. They take for granted the pivotal importance of context when it comes to these substances; how there is no universal best practice for taking them, because their effects will invariably vary based on the set of beliefs and preparations every person and community comes to them with beforehand and integrates out of them after. The hard truth of it is that, in America at least, both medical institutions and privately-traded companies are not all that well-equipped to contextualize the sanctity and spirituality necessary for a psychedelic trip to have the greatest positive impact.
A lot of these ideas had been floating around my head even before I stumbled upon an article in the Anthropology of Consciousness journal called, “Dark Side of the Shroom: Erasing Indigenous and Counterculture Wisdoms with Psychedelic Capitalism, and the Open Source Alternative,” written by Richard Doyle, Trey Conner, and Neşe Devenot. Inspired, I reached out to Doyle, a professor at Penn State, to set up an interview, which wound up going on for two hours and running the gamut of psychedelics’ modern history and related subject matter — from the scientific argument for plant sentience, to why The Grateful Dead are more influential than Johns Hopkins researchers in spreading the psychedelic gospel of non-dual consciousness, to why bicycling and meditation may be just as important as psilocybin or ayahuasca for awakening from the Western materialist worldview..
My hope is this might be the first in a series of “Conscious Conversations” I can facilitate with other researchers, artists, scientists, and advocates hoping to reintegrate the shamanic psychedelic worldview into our modern culture. Read the interview on Wakeful Travel here, and stay tuned for further updates on this series. I hope you enjoy reading our conversation as much as I enjoyed having it.