Radical Acceptance IS Freedom

     We all hold firm to the ideas we've - mostly unconsciously - formulated that are essentially survival strategies. A few of these are important & useful throughout life; while most are just life lessons in various disguises. 
    And yet, our old dogmatic rules for life can keep us imprisoned in a tight little box, fearing that even examining & questioning them consciously is to risk death & eternal damnation. Of course it's far easier to see such rigidity of speech & behavior in others. 
    We might clue in to our own imprisonment whenever our anger is suddenly triggered, when we refuse to look deeper into, consider alternative ways of thinking about, or further discuss certain ideas. Religion, politics & personal finance seem to be common no-go zones - triggers for rigid little box certainties. 

    At the bottom of the page is imho Helen Hamilton's most valuable guide to help us experience freedom from unnecessary suffering. 
    Fully 90-95% of our suffering is unnecessary because we unwittingly bring it upon ourselves by rejecting parts of reality we don't want, and by clinging to parts of reality that we do want. The mind only understands controlling our environment, even when it cannot be controlled - which makes no sense & of course causes prolonged, unnecessary suffering. 
    Especially those who've had a great deal of success controlling life using the mind, may find it very counterintuitive & almost impossible to shift from our common hyper-rational, head-centered operating system to a supra-rational (NOT irrational), spiritual heart-centered one. We may have to suffer needlessly, for a very long time before we allow ourselves to make this ESSENTIAL SHIFT.
    Helen skillfully guides us to radically accept ALL of REALITY - saying: "Yes to everything!” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUOtVI_LnUU

    "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
    Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
    It is our Light, not our Darkness, that most frightens us." Marianne Williamson

    “There are only two ways to live your life.
    One is as though nothing is a miracle.
    The other is as though
    everything is a miracle.” Albert Einstein 

    "The Great Way is not difficult
    for those who have no preferences..." Sengstan 

    "The light within you, when resolutely recognized in all circumstances, has the capacity to embrace everything. This uncompromising acceptance is, in fact, your true nature." Amoda Maa 

    "There never was a time when you or I did not exist.
     Nor will there be any future when we shall cease to be." Bhagavad Gita

 
    As soon as we're ready to let go of fearful certainties, the spacious mystery of who / what we truly are & actual reality awaits!

    "Try to be mindful, & let things take their natural course. Then your mind will become still in any surroundings, like a clear forest pool. All kinds of wonderful, rare animals will come to drink at the pool, and you will clearly see the nature of all things. You will see many strange & wonderful things come & go, but you will be still. This is the happiness of the Buddha." Ajahn Chah

"We are stars wrapped in skin.
The light you are seeking
has always been within."
Rumi

 

 Helen Hamilton's MOST VALUABLE teaching - listen to ALL of it

Unknown Depths of Anger

    I once knew a man who dearly loved his wife & sons, and loved to take them skiing, hiking, canoeing, fishing, camping. My family and I gladly did all of these with them. He was a very honest, hard-working, sincere, 'straight-as-an-arrow,' 'by-the-book' fellow. He'd happily chat except about anything to do with religion or spirituality. These were strictly off limits, and we never learned why. All his hard work seemed to pay off when he landed a strikingly lucrative job as one of six in-house lawyers for a multinational lumber company. But within a month or so, his boss asked him to sign off on a document that our friend knew was shady, so he refused to sign. This immediately got him fired.
    His whole world collapsed. He abandoned his family, changed his name, joined a religious cult, and moved to Europe. When his existing worldview crumbled, he 'flipped' to its opposite.  

 

David Whyte’s poem “Anger”:

    "ANGER is the deepest form of care, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly about to be hurt. Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger points toward the purest form of compassion, the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for. What we usually call anger is only what is left of its essence when it reaches the lost surface of our mind or our body’s incapacity to hold it, or the limits of our understanding. What we name as anger is actually only the incoherent physical incapacity to sustain this deep form of care in our outer daily life; the unwillingness to be large enough and generous enough to hold what we love helplessly in our bodies or our mind with the clarity and breadth of our whole being.
    What we have named as anger on the surface is the violent outer response to our own inner powerlessness, a powerlessness connected to such a profound sense of rawness and care that it can find no proper outer body or identity or voice, or way of life to hold it. What we call anger is often simply the unwillingness to live the full measure of our fears or of our not knowing, in the face of our love for a wife, in the depth of our caring for a son, in our wanting the best, in the face of simply being alive and loving those with whom we live.
    Our anger breaks to the surface most often through our feeling there is something profoundly wrong with this powerlessness and vulnerability; anger too often finds its voice strangely, through our incoherence and through our inability to speak, but anger in its pure state is the measure of the way we are implicated in the world and made vulnerable through love in all its specifics: a daughter, a house, a family, an enterprise, a land or a colleague. 
    Anger turns to violence and violent speech when the mind refuses to countenance the vulnerability of the body in its love for all these outer things - we are often abused or have been abused by those who love us but have no vehicle to carry its understanding, who have no outer emblems of their inner care or even their own wanting to be wanted. Lacking any outer vehicle for the expression of this inner rawness they are simply overwhelmed by the elemental nature of love’s vulnerability. In their helplessness they turn their violence on the very people who are the outer representation of this inner lack of control.
    But anger truly felt at its center is the essential living flame of being fully alive and fully here, it is a quality to be followed to its source, to be prized, to be understood fully at the very spring of its birth: it is an invitation to find a way to bring that source fully into the world through making the mind clearer and more generous, the heart more compassionate and the body larger and strong enough to hold it. What we call anger on the surface only serves to define its true underlying quality by being a complete and absolute mirror-opposite of its true internal essence."

 

      I emailed Whyte's poem above, as well as the link to his imho wonderful interview (bottom of this page) to a relative who is on a spiritual path, as well as an old friend whose dogmatic belief is that we live in a cruel meaningless mechanical Cosmos, and who has, on a couple of previous occasions, become very angry when I suggested otherwise. I had (naively) hoped that Whyte's nuanced, compassionate understanding of anger might soften my friend's rigid armor.

    My relative's response started like this:
    "I watched 5 minutes of Whyte and stopped.
     Not because it's useless but because it resonates so well and connects with so many thinking points that I had to put some down before resuming. ..."

    My friend's response started like this: 
    "I have read the "poem". This guy, Whyte, has trouble with language. For example, when is a poem, a poem? And when is anger, anger? He keeps ..." 
    My friend made no mention of the interview - probably too angry to notice the link, or the mention of it in the subject heading of the email. Coincidentally, David Whyte is a well-known, highly-respected poet, with multiple published books, so the "trouble" may not be in Whyte's use of "language."

    Whyte's interview skillfully addresses anger about aspects of life we cannot control, and much more:

    Interviewer: “… the intersection between powerlessness and anger. When we’re made to make contact with that sense of helplessness or powerlessness, our immediate response is rage, anger. Can you unpack that?”

    David Whyte (DW): “Well you can immediately see its actual practical physical evolutionary necessity, in rage and physical defense in people you love. So the inability to actually be able to do something about something that doesn’t involve physical defense (invokes frustration & anger). What's actually needed involves another kind of deeper cradling, or holding, which our physical bodies are unable to do. We have to be able to hold another person in our heart and our mind. And that heart energy is often what we feel lies below the horizon of our inner line of resistance. So opening the heart is always a very powerful path for a human being to take. 
    Albert Camus, the great French writer & philosopher, had a beautiful invitation. It was just one simple line, ‘live to the point of tears.’ This is not an invitation to maudlin sentimentality. This is asking you to feel things, right to their Essence. If you just have an edge of dread about something, then feel that dread more, don’t resist it. Get to the center of it until it starts to change into something else. 
    The Greeks had this beautiful word, which we don’t have in modern English, which is, ‘enantiodromia,’ and it means the ability of something, once it becomes its absolute essential self, to start changing into something completely different, and quite often its complete opposite. Which is why immovability always changes into incredible fluidity, once you’ve got through that. So to be able to feel things until they actually start to have a life of their own, and start to mature … 
    This is a received understanding in psychology, that parts of us when they’re traumatized, stay stone-like inside you for good reason, and refuse to grow older, until that trauma has been resolved. The traumatized part doesn’t want to move on until it’s healed. And maybe it would be very destructive if it moved on prematurely. So finding the parts of you that are stuck – is a wonderful thing actually. It’s not a pejorative thing. And to feel the stuckness even more, to get right to the heart of your stuckness, your inability to say it, and then you start saying it, it’s quite remarkable really.”

    Interviewer: “It’s brutal though. I find that there’s something beautiful and brutal about it.”

    DW: “This is why in all real Warrior Traditions, there’s always been a parallel discipline of poetry. You look at Samurai, the Japanese tradition, Chinese tradition, Indian tradition, and in the West we have the first World War poets like Sassoon. Poetry is the way in for anyone at all, man or woman or anything in between. But for men, it’s a real doorway. We all instinctively understand what poetry represents. Even people who’ve hardly read a line of poetry in their life, will come away from a football game saying, ‘it was sheer poetry, that touchdown!’ We instinctively understand about the verve and vitality and mutability and movability and tidal forces of the world, if you can capture these in speech (poetry). And if you can capture these in movement on a football field, why couldn’t you catch it in your own voice? So I would say, besides the practical activity of something that concerns all heterosexual young men, which is getting into real conversations with young women, I would recommend poetry rather than a Maserati.

    It can be comforting for a young man to know that under this inability to speak my emotions, underneath this inability to feel what I feel, underneath this inability to bring those two poles together, feelings, emotions and articulation, there’s something really quite astonishing waiting for me. The great German speaking-poet Rilke said, ‘Stretch your well-disciplined strength between two opposing poles, because inside human beings, is where God learns.’” 
    David Whyte "Facing The Unknown And Finding Meaning" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=or44UlIKQuE SUPERB interview imho - HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

David Whyte - "Facing The Unknown And Finding Meaning"

What Can We Do?

    Imagine shortly after your birth, you were cold, hungry, thirsty, wet, uncomfortable & unhappy. So you cried as loudly as you could for help. You had no way of knowing or comprehending why you were no longer being held in safety & unconditional love like you (more or less) were for your timeless 'eternity' in the womb.
    What went through your completely innocent mind? Overwhelmed by the primal fear of abandonment & death - attachment trauma.      

    “Children can be traumatized, not just by terrible things happening to them, but just by not having their needs met – by not being seen, not being heard, not being held. Those are wounding for a child.” Gabor Maté MD

    Now imagine as an adult, waking up alone, in great pain, lying helplessly in the recovery room, immediately following major surgery. So you ring the button to call for help - even start yelling, and wait, and wait ... You have no way of comprehending why nobody comes to help.
    What goes through your mind? Fear, anger, frustration - abandonment, dying alone.
    "Trauma is not so much what happened to us, but rather what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic mutually connected witness." Peter Levine PhD

    Imagine watching the evening news: escalating war in the Gaza / Israel; endless war in the Ukraine; enthusiastic "proxy" participation by most of the world's dictatorships & "friendlies" - with repeated threats of nuclear weapons; thousands killed by yet another earthquake in Nepal. Meanwhile, in the world's most privileged countries, escalating numbers of homeless "living rough" in severe winter conditions; rapidly increasing deaths by drug-overdose, direct suicide even of children & insane levels of "gun violence". Then, 'in other news': much faster-than-anticipated global warming, rise in sea levels, rise in CO2 levels, extinction of species, toxic air pollution, etc etc. Reptilian world leaders continue playing colonialist 'rape, murder & plunder' games, as they confidently destroy our one-and-only earth.
    What goes through your mind? Fear, anger, frustration, disgust, cynicism - am I alone in a hostile, meaningless universe?

    Indeed, what can we do?
    Many refuse to watch or listen to the news - "It's too depressing!" Well yes, but immature & unhelpful.
    Then some aspire to at least be "well adjusted." However,
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society" Krishnamurti

    Which brings to mind a scene from the Viet Nam war movie, Apocalypse Now, showing Lt. Col. Kilgore, shirtless, cigar in mouth, practicing golf drives into the South China sea, surrounded by his young soldiers in uniform. Behind him, American fighter jets rain down bombs, evaporating countless Vietnamese in the jungle below. With great gusto Kilgore says, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
    This timely topic: “The Myth of Normal. Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture.” is carefully examined by Gabor Maté MD & Daniel Maté, in their excellent 2022 book.

    How, one might wonder, does a sweet, innocent, loving & lovable little baby turn into a Kilgore? None of us are born to ideal parents who are able to make us feel consistently safe & unconditionally loved. Therefore, very early in life, most of us experience some degree of attachment trauma, and learn to escape the present moment by dissociating whenever we find situations unbearable. Many other forms of trauma occur later in life.
    “Pathological dissociation generally results from being psychically overwhelmed by trauma. Trauma is everywhere & highly prevalent." Elizabeth F. Howell. “The Dissociative Mind.” Routledge, 2008.

    Dissociation is almost universal. However, while dissociating we can't be intimately engaged with whomever we're with, or whatever we're doing, because we divert attention elsewhere - from urgent self-preservation to mere distraction. For many, dissociation becomes habitual, occuring even in the absence of triggers.
    "… studies on attentiveness show that people are only briefly & unpredictably attentive. Attention habitually diverts to unrelated thoughts & feelings, leaving any task at hand to be managed 'on autopilot.' These studies suggest that mindlessness ('mind wandering,' 'zoning out,' 'task-unrelated thought') is 'one of the most ubiquitous & pervasive of all cognitive phenomena' and that it often occurs unintentionally, without awareness, occupies a substantial proportion of our day, and leads to failures in task performance."
    Lovas JG, Lovas DA, Lovas PM. “Mindfulness and Professionalism in Dentistry.” J Dent Educ 2008; 72(9): 998-1009.

    Dissociation due to fear is a fundamental problem - the precise opposite of intimacy arising from love. All wisdom traditions, through their saints & mystics, as well as artists (intermediaries between spirituality & materialism) have been trying to tell us this for thousands of years. 

    As infants & children, numbing / being closed down can be more important than feeling / opening up.
    But now, as adults, "it's time to pull up our big boy pants" and have “the spaciousness to allow any quality of mind, any thought or feeling, to arise without closing around it, without eliminating the pure witness of being. It is an active receptivity to life.” Stephen Levine

    We get into & easily remain stuck in adversarial relationships - involving even siblings, parents vs children, intimate partners, co-workers, ideologies, races, religions, countries. Our conflicts can & do lead to horrific, prolonged, unnecessary blood-baths.  

 

    A short excerpt of Gabor Maté MD from a wise, compassionate recent interview:  

    “So what’s the way out? Self-examination is the first step.
    Krishnamurti said that action has meaning only in relationship. And without understanding relationship, action on any level will only breathe conflict. The understanding of relationship is infinitely more important than the search for any plan of action.
    It's so true, if we want to understand something, let's at least begin with the willingness to look at our role and our own contribution to that relationship in which we're suffering.
    Again, that doesn't justify any particular action but at least it provides a context and it's not about taking the wrong path.

    Robert Sapolsky talks about the absurdity of hating any person for anything they have done, given that in his view, everything we do is determined by the past. And he also says there's no such thing as free will, and blame & punishment are without ethical justification.
    No, I don't I don't agree with him. I think it is possible to get to a position of free will, but I don't think most of us have free will most of the time.
    To get to free will, it takes extraordinary effort to become conscious. To be conscious means you're aware of what's inside you.
    So there might be rage inside you, perfectly understandable. There might be hatred inside you, perfectly understandable. There might be a desire for revenge inside you, perfectly understandable. Understandable? Absolutely. But they're not guides for action.
    The only guide for action is when we're in a non-defensive state. An emotionally non-defensive state is where the prefrontal cortex, the mid-frontal cortex, whose job is to have insight, empathy, self-regulation, compassion, is online THEN we might talk about free will.
    But when we're regulated by our emotional reactions, collective or personal, there's no free will.

    The Buddha never told his followers ‘not to feel’ hate, or not to feel angry, or not to feel grief, not to feel sadness, or fear. He said you will notice when there's fear in you; you will notice when there's hatred in you; you will notice when there's grief; you'll be aware of it, so that it doesn't rule you.
    Those are just human emotions. They're going to happen. The question is, what's going to govern our actions?

    Dan Siegel a psychiatrist, and Stephen Porges a psychologist, both point out that at times of pressure & fear, our perspective narrows. And the part of our brain that takes over, is more the fear-based & defensive-based, fight-or-flight, so we lose the governance of our pre-frontal cortex, which is capable of taking a broader view.
    An Israeli friend with a daughter, who lives in the North of Israel, where as a result of recent events, they had to evacuate some communities, owing to the threat of further violence not just in the South, but also in the North of Israel.
    And she wrote to me very honestly, she says, ‘Dear Gabor, I really appreciate the things you wrote. The days here are unbearable. We moved in with friends because we live in an unprotected ground floor, surrounded by gardens so beautiful usually, but home no longer feels like a safe place for millions right now.’ And she’s talking about Israelis. She’s well aware, by the way, of the Palestinian situation. But she’s describing her own situation.
    ‘The rest of the time I work at a mental health center, and we collapse under the referrals, and the meetings, and the frantic courses we take to treat ongoing trauma. I’m exhausted. The (words of support) you wrote are beautiful, but perspective expands when people are not under physical threat. And so, those close to me, and my point of view is very narrow.’
    That’s a very honest statement. She’s making no apology. She’s not taking a political stance. She’s saying, right now my perspective is very narrow. She doesn’t want to identify with that narrow perspective, but she understands that under the pressure, that’s what happens. Now most people are not that self-aware. Peoples’ perspective narrows of course, and it becomes subsumed in group identification, and thoughts of revenge, and thoughts of hurting the other.
    Under threat, or what we perceive as being under threat, we go into this narrow place. That’s a place of slavery – when we’re enslaved to our unconscious. Where we’re governed by our emotions and where the heart closes down. 

    And if there was ever a time for people to actually open their hearts, to not get stuck in a narrow place, to not repeat the past, to not perceive themselves only as victims, but in relationship with the other, and have the willingness to examine my role in that relationship, which is all we ask for in any marriage or in any relationship. ..."
    A Call for Healing: Gabor Maté on Palestine / Israel : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0WJM9RfRD8 

“The words of the Buddha offer this truth:
‘Hatred never ceases by hatred
but by love alone is healed.
This is an ancient and eternal law.’ ”
Jack Kornfield

A Walk to the Paradise Garden by W. Eugene Smith

No Worries Old Friends!

    Serious, skillful, regular meditation practice gradually & progressively ensures awakening - an endless process which is usually very different from what we had initially hoped for, yet is what we needed. "But meditation is not for everybody."
    Many older folks are rigidly stuck in a closed loop of negative thought patterns. Most of them have no interest in meditation or any other deeply meaningful spiritual practice, but might be open to one or two sessions of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.

    "I think the Greeks had a more subtle understanding of drugs: we tend to either celebrate them or condemn them. They called them ‘pharmakon,’ and a ‘pharmakon’ could be either a blessing or a curse, a poison or a medicine. Whether it’s one or the other doesn’t depend on the drug so much as the context in which it’s used and the reasons for which it’s used. The drugs aren’t inherently good or evil; it’s very contextual. And that’s a subtle idea. It's about set & setting. Set & setting definitely affects all drugs.

    Psychedelics offer people benefits, particularly as we age. We become more deeply mired in the grooves of habit, the older we get. We have developed a set of very sophisticated algorithms to get us through the day, get us through arguments with our partners, get us through how we do our work — it all becomes kind of habitual, and very efficient for that reason But there’s a trade-off — habit dulls us to reality. Habit helps you get stuff done, but habit cuts you off from experience, fresh experience, from seeing things with fresh eyes. ... maybe psychedelics are wasted on the young. I know lots of young people who’ve had very powerful and valuable experiences. But I think they have a unique benefit to people as we get older and as we’re thinking about death, as we’re thinking about these spiritual questions, but also as we’re set in our ways and as a result, losing contact with experience. On psychedelics, there’s a kind of cleaning the doors of perception that’s going on.
    There’s a wonderful metaphor that a Dutch neuroscientist working in London gave me. He said, ‘Think of the mind as a snow-covered hill and your thoughts as sleds going down that hill. Over time, the more runs of the sled, the deeper the grooves, and it becomes very hard to go down the hill without getting drawn into the grooves. They become attractors. Think of psychedelic experience as a fresh snowfall that fills all the grooves and allows you once again to go down the hill, along another route, any route you want.’ I thought that was a beautiful metaphor." Michael Pollan and Katherine May - The Future of Hope 4 - On Being with Krista Tippett : https://onbeing.org/programs/michael-pollan-and-katherine-may-the-future-of-hope-4/  EXCELLENT Interview

    “It’s important to note that the kinds of problems psychedelics seem to be effective with, have a lot in common. They’re all at the end of the spectrum where people’s thinking becomes too rigid, too trapped in deep grooves of habit, whether mental habit or behavioral habit, people in these loops they can’t break out of.
    And what the psychedelics seem to do is give a real jolt to the system that gives people the kind of perspective on their lives that can actually break the mental habit.
    And it needs to be accompanied by lots of therapeutic intervention … these are guided ... People are very carefully prepared in advance, told what to expect, how to deal with difficulties if they come up because frightening things can happen, especially if you’re facing your mortality. And then during the experience, the guides are with you the whole time. … the idea is to basically give you a sense of safety. So you can surrender to what can be a very disturbing set of mental events. And then after the session, you come back, usually the next day … and you have an integration session where you tell the therapist what you saw, what happened, what you’re puzzled by, and with the therapists, you try to come to some interpretation of what’s happened and figure out how you can take the lessons, the insights, and apply them to the conduct of your life." Michael Pollan & Chris Bache EXCELLENT interview : https://batgap.com/michael-pollan-chris-bache/

 

Where Science and Sacred Meet

    As individuals & as groups, we cling to habitual opinions, beliefs & behaviors for decades past the time we became aware of irrefutable evidence in favor of far better alternatives. There are many reasons for this, perhaps most commonly, we're far more interested & invested in our comfort / status quo & our personal / group identity / ego than in truth eg 'my country - right or wrong.'
    And yet we look back and laugh at surgeons who in 1846 vigorously & effectively opposed the science proposed by Dr. Semmelweis that they must wash their hands before delivering babies & performing surgery. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/01/12/375663920/the-doctor-who-championed-hand-washing-and-saved-women-s-lives
    Winston Churchill quipped, “You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else.” Most of us are fiercely proud, quick to rationalize our behavior, despite all evidence to the contrary, AND desperately slow to change!
    But we CAN always CHOOSE to learn & evolve!

    Below is a short transcript of an excellent lecture by William A. Richards PhD, whose 2015 book, “Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences” was described as: "An inspiring testament to half a century of scientific research and personal exploration into the responsible, beneficial use of psychedelic substances. William A. Richards's work is visionary, personal, and transpersonal, instilled with kindness, deep humanity, and quiet wisdom."

    “Psychedelics, wisely and responsibly employed, really are valuable tools in the exploration of consciousness, akin to the telescope in astronomy, or the microscope in biology. Sometimes I have felt like Columbus, having just landed in the West Indies with his primitive maps, and then having somehow been placed in a supersonic jet and shown the vistas of the entire new world, stretching far beyond the wildest fantasies of his imagination, and leaving him almost speechless, with a profound sense of awe. Sometimes, when sitting silently beside research volunteers, when their everyday consciousness has been transcended, and mystical experiences are occurring, it is no exaggeration to say that I humbly feel as though I am sitting beside the Buddha under the Bodhi tree as enlightenment is dawning, or sitting beside St. Paul on the road to Damascus, or beside Isaiah during his temple vision.
    What we are beginning to study here, on this frontier where science & sacred are meeting, truly is profound in its magnitude, its vivid intensity, and its potential relevance. With the best experimental designs we can devise, as we begin to probe this multifaceted field, we are at best novices with very limited conceptual tools and linguistic frameworks.
    I think of Alan Watts’ suggestion: that one reason we have tended to avoid this field of inquiry arises out of the taboo of knowing who you are. That we tend to fear too much knowledge about the mysteries of our own being.
    As I know many of you appreciate, it is common for volunteers, under the action of psychedelics in relatively high dosage, to report phenomena that do not appear to arise from their personal life histories, and that entail different perspectives on time & space. Experiences that call into question some of the most basic assumptions that undergird our normative consensual definition of reality, and the manner in which we customarily define ourselves [self-concepts], and orient ourselves in the world [worldviews]. As expressed by Thomas Kuhn, whether as scientists or philosophers, we really are in the midst of a major paradigm shift at this point in history.
    It is clear that there indeed is a multidimensional cartography of inner space, with many discrete alternate forms of consciousness, and they seem to form a continuum that is influenced by dosage, by personality structure, and the capacity to relinquish ego control, and by the growing edge of a person’s unique personal & spiritual development. Simply expressed, the continuum begins with mild alterations of perception; may deepen to unravel the psychodynamics of personal life; may deepen further to invite participation in visionary or archetypal dramas – the realm of mythology, as presented by Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung; and may deepen even further, into transcendental realms of awareness, in which the everyday self or ego is encompassed into unitive mystical dimensions of mind that usually are experienced as profoundly sacred & eternal. In addition to these stages, there are many unique states of consciousness, about which we know very, very little.
    Although we like to think spatially, and attempt to speak a language that may correlate to phenomena encountered in consciousness, with neuronal structures and biochemical activity, to some extent, it continues to make sense, at least to me, to stress that the experiential content of a particular foray into the world of alternate states is to be found not within the drug, but within the human mind itself. What the human mind is continues to remain a tantalizing mystery, especially as there is good reason to question the reductionistic philosophical assumptions that have tended to prevail in the community of Western scientists, in spite of quantum physics. It is time to take a fresh look at the writings of philosophers such as Henry Bergson, who viewed the human brain more like a television set that receives processes, limits, works with the information, than as a primary source of mental phenomena. Perhaps psychedelic drugs still may be understood simply as skeleton keys that provide access to other realms of human consciousness. The experiences reported, therefore, are not ‘in the drug,’ but rather in and through the mind of the person who is experiencing.
    Now there is a lot of ignorance & lore here, even among those who possess a reasonable personal cache of psychedelic experience. All too often, a person has taken a particular dose of a particular substance, had a particular experience, and then concluded that whatever occurred is ‘what that substance does.’ It is highly probable that even if the person took the same dose of the same substance at another time, there would be a different experience to report, even if it further revealed and extended the themes encountered earlier. The major substances with which I have worked appear to differ from one another not in terms of the experiential content they reveal, but in terms of factors such as required dosage, rapidity of onset and termination, and duration of action. If any particular molecule has a higher probability of facilitating a particular state of consciousness, that only will be established in time, as well-designed, double-blinded research projects are implemented. Does Mescaline produce more vivid colors? Does the DMT in Ayahuasca really produce more images of anacondas? Is the onset of Psilocybin more gentle than LSD? Only patient research will provide the answers we seek."
    Psychedelic Psychotherapy: Insights from 25 Years of Research - William Richards : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhbjKizniOU - HIGHLY RECOMMENDED 56 minute lecture

 

 Neil Young, performing John Lennon's "Imagine"