Psychedelics are not about improving mental health. There, I said it.
Psychedelics are not about having a slightly better day at the office, productivity, or optimizing your portfolio of cryptocurrencies. There’s no guarantee that psychedelics will make you happy, or make your life easier. They might help you discover a life more rich with meaning, saturated in wonder, or centered in truth. But this is not an easy road. Myth tells us that there is no getting something for nothing, no reward or wisdom that is not duly earned. Unless you have a burning desire to sit for seven years beside a druid’s fire, peer into black temple doorways, descend into the underworld, break bread with serpents, shed your skin, and learn to feed eagles from your fingertips, this path isn’t for you. Within these pages you won’t find easy methods for self-improvement, or tips for an exciting new career. What you will find, however, are ten stories that speak to the soul, and stories from my own life and practice that I hope will serve you, no matter where you are on this spiral road.
A new generation of psychedelic facilitators, therapists, educators, researchers, and business leaders are emerging. Laws are changing, prohibitions are loosening, and modern culture is beginning to molt its skin into something that is increasingly strange and uncertain. On many counts, this is cause for celebration. Yet amidst the collective effervescence of the “psychedelic renaissance,” what if something is getting lost?
Coined by British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, the word psychedelic is often wrongly said to mean, “mind-manifesting.” Yet if we follow the trail of language back to its roots, the Greek word psyche actually means “soul,” while delos means “to reveal,” or “to make manifest.” Psychedelic, therefore, literally means “soul-revealing,” a necessary distinction that sets our compass squarely in the direction of this inner domain.
The mind is easy for modern Western culture to compartmentalize into a neat category of understanding. The soul, not so much. The soul escapes quantification, while the mind delights in it. The soul dissolves boundaries, the mind constructs them. The soul orients us towards the eternal, the mind towards the time-bound.
For many people, the very mention of the soul is an unsettling proposition, for to acknowledge it means to acknowledge that life is more than a random conglomeration of particles floating through cold, infinite space. To acknowledge the soul is to acknowledge that in fact there is something out there, down there, in there, that escapes our understanding and control.
To acknowledge the soul terrifies the ego.
The soul forms the foundation of my approach to psychedelic healing because the soul provokes our innate capacity for meaning-making: an introspective and solitary, yet socially-entwined, creative process that has its roots at the very beginnings of our species. Soul connects us to life, to death, to love, and loss, provoking and punctuating the very things that make us human. Always has. Always will.
Like vines weaving their way through dense jungle canopy or mycelial networks enmeshing themselves across vast forest ecosystems, psychedelics and the soul are bound together in ways that trouble our understanding of what it means to be alive in a human body at this time on the planet. To take the soul out of psychedelics by reducing them to molecules or psychological tools reveals not only a poverty of imagination, but an inability to move beyond reductionistic and financially driven models of healing which have proven themselves to be not only insufficient, but in many cases, unethical.
While the so-called “psychedelic renaissance” is just beginning, the roots of these traditions of plant medicine and inner exploration weave their way down into the foundations of human cultures and their mythic traditions. As the fledgling field of modern psychedelic healing continues to spread its wings, unless we remember to look back towards the soul, towards more ancient ways of knowing, and towards the earth itself, we risk flying perilously close to the sun.
At some point in many myths, a traveler arrives at a fateful crossroads. One road leads into the impending dark of the forest, the other back to the comforting lights of home. The first road is the path of initiation, transformation, and the mythic unknown. The second leads back to the comfortable life we’ve known before, and just more of the same.
All of us stand at this very crossroads. Collectively, our world faces multiple crises which interweave in inextricable ways. The most pressing of these is climate change, or the collapse of our planetary ecosystem due to centuries of colonial extraction. Nearly as urgent is the collapse of meaning, community, and rituals of belonging that permeate our daily lives. At its most basic level, we can understand this latter collapse as a crisis of mental health.
What fuels both of these dilemmas are a capitalist economy and a materialist worldview that exile the soul.
Depth psychology and psychedelics sit at the crossroads of these two modern emergencies: depth psychology because it offers a method of understanding the symbolic language of the soul as it is expressed through myth, dreams and altered states of consciousness, and psychedelics because of their ability to reveal the soul itself.
Yet how can the evolving field of psychedelic healing possibly begin to address these overwhelming crises? What stories might aid us in our search for individual and collective healing at this precarious moment? And how does a practice of psychedelic healing and mythic wisdom converge into a coherent path that can heal the soul?
To even attempt to answer these questions requires a certain kind of recollection, a look back into the pathways of collective memory that the traditions of mythology, depth psychology, and Indigenous cultures all arise from.
This is an excerpt from my book, Psychedelics & the Soul: A Mythic Journey Through Psychedelic Healing, Depth Psychology, & Ancient Wisdom, coming out fall, 2024.
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Thank you for eloquently articulating how I have been feeling about this for a long time. Looking forward to the book.
Glad to be here with you, Simon, and to be able to follow where you’re heading with your work. Very much looking forward to your book when that time comes.