The Role of the Natural World
In Psychedelic Experiences
Even as momentum and corporate power gathers, along with the critics that will continue to come with steps toward psychedelic legalization in the West, I suspect non-Westerners are still better at talking about certain aspects of the medicine than we are, including the way these fascinating substances subtly invites us back into our place in the natural world, perhaps as a crucial part of our healing.
For me, this has taken a number of forms. On three different occasions, for example, there was an interaction with a cat. Well, two of them were the kind of cats we see as pets (one was inside, the other outside in the morning on a walk) and one of them was a raccoon on the sidewalk at night. I won’t get into the “meaning” I drew out of all of these experiences in this space, but they took on symbolic importance at the time, and I have since adopted a couple cats of my own, a commitment that gives shape to my daily life.
Cats weren't, by any means, the only significant natural element that were part of my psychedelic experiences. Most recently, when I went "under" in a friend's backyard, I can recall the importance of the loud chorus of cicadas, which seemed to rise and fall with the rhythm of my own experience that night. Rhythm, that’s one word I’d use here. As people who have in so many ways tried to cut ourselves off from nature, who have tried to control it, I think one consequence of psychedelics medicine is a falling back into it.
I want to be clear that I don’t mean by that some kind of Pantheistic utopia, though there are psychonauts who would view it and advocate for something like that. Nature is mysterious, but there is violence written into the cycles (Christians explain that as a consequence of “The Fall,” which is an interesting philosophical idea, though it sort of functions as a way to prop up a God figure who is, you know, Really Nice Guy, rather than a wild-enough representation of the confusing chaos that sometimes surrounds us). But there are cycles, and there is a rhythm in nature, a kind of dance I think we can participate in without putting blinders on that prevent us from seeing that there are wolves out there, and that wolves can kill us. Be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves…
There is still another Christian image here, that of the lion lying down with the lamb, that might actually be better than over-extrapolated certainty about the Genesis story laying the foundation for sin and evil. What I mean, to get back to cats (and this serves well for human relationships, too) is, like, in their lack of familiarity, even pet cats can freak out in the midst of fear, and their claws respond by instinct to that. So when I first got mine, I got scratched a lot more than I do now. Partially because I didn’t know what I was doing with them, but I think also in part because they are much more comfortable with me now, and therefore more careful with me (they trust me!) than they used to be. They know I’m mostly not dangerous to them.
Change the context to human relationships, and I think the phenomenon is consistent, though a philosophical mistake we often make is to make fear and defensiveness the enemy. No! Fear and defensiveness are productive; they help us protect and survive. But it’s not our only tool in the tool box, and if we never find ourselves in situations where we get to let the claws down, the problem is that we don’t get to love, which I increasingly think is more anomaly than default (Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.) and perhaps our ability to participate in love only comes from a spiritual process, though what that process might be can come in diverse forms.
Love often requires laying the sword down, if only for a moment or with a person. Love will require an engagement with conflict, no doubt about it, but to commit to loving someone is to say something like: I probably will get angry with you eventually, but I won’t stab you when I’m angry with you. And I’ll be unprotected enough that you’ll have the ability to hurt me, but I’m trusting you here not to take advantage of that.
Let’s keep going with the role that nature has taken during my own psychedelic encounters. One time I was face down in the grass for much of it and when I was finally about ready to sort of come out of it, I first felt compelled to bite and eat a mouthful of grass. It was a completely uninhibited-action. Then I sat up and started making various pronouncements about my life, both backwards (the past) and forward (the future). Some of which I knew had huge stakes, would mean big changes. I thought then and I still think now—in reference to the eating of grass—about Christ using mud to give someone the gift of sight. There is a way in which the physical reality embodies the paradoxical metaphor, and then the metaphor becomes the unforgettable insight that lives on in your consciousness. This is, in part, why psychedelics have such potential within therapeutic (and religious) settings, because the insight or insights are experienced so much more fully (the mind-body connection, we might call it, though that’s too Western, it’s more like mind-body-emotional-nature connection or just “wholeness”) than mere cognitive acknowledgements (“I’m going to stop drinking!”).
On still another experience I had with psychedelic medicine, I lied down on a blanket outside for much of it, and being on eye level with ants became a profound part of the day. Both in bearing witness to the nuances of those creatures’ lives, but also in realizing we're not that different, in our smallness and our tasks, than ants.
Later that day, I would walk into a pond and stand there for who knows how long, as fish approached me, came right up to my hands and nibbled on my legs. This spoke to me about the power of stillness, about rhythm that isn’t forced or coerced. In academic and popular psychology, much gets said about motivation, and I increasingly think the best motivation arises when we accept and live out of who we really are rather our desperate attempts to conform, to please other people, and to therefore take on tasks and roles that aren’t really ours. It’s an exhausting way of living. Not that life is or will ever be only “easy” (we come into and go out of this life needing), but it gets easier when we’re not out to prove all kinds of things to people who have preconceived notions of who they want or need us to be rather than really seeing us.
People, and especially Westerners, like to think of psychedelics as this fantastical experience in the mind, allowing some of our repressed elements to surface and to grapple with those less conscious desires and fears. In fact, the prospect of that is what brought me to the substances in the first place, the hope of going into myself at a really deep level.
If that’s the Western version, a shaman might say something like, look, when you ingest the mushroom, the plant then gives you its knowledge, or something like that. A few years ago, I would have thought that’s really crazy, but now I’m not sure why our version of storytelling what’s happening is really any better than plants giving us knowledge. I mean, psychedelics do, I think, invite us to engage with our repressions, but it seems to at least be as much an outward dance as an inward one. A chance to get out of the defenses and the coping and the loneliness of the mind and into a more full experience of life, of a deep communion in our relationships but also the ability to notice the flower or the leaves changing or the beauty of a life lived when we lose somebody.
There is a lot of language around psychedelic use that doesn’t seem quite right to me, and hallucination and/or hallucinogenic belongs, I think, in that category. Before I ever touched a psychedelic, or imagined that I would, I thought of hallucinations as a kind of internal or external movie or something. Something two-dimensional and passive, at best. I'm watching it. Now maybe this kind of thing can happen as a result of psychedelic use, but it mostly hasn't been my experience.
The closest I think many of us have to a psychedelic experience on a regular basis might be our dreams. Dreams in the sense that they’re so creative, we can be surprised and confused by images and memories and insights, but also dreams in the sense that we don’t just watch a dream. We’re a character in them; we feel dreams, and therefore can be pretty unnerved by them when we suddenly wake up.
Sometimes a psychedelic encounter has felt to me like the experience of multiple dreams happening at once, maybe even my immediate life interacting with the unseen world full of spirits and the interactions across generations that still impact us now, and you’re sort of lost and losing control over it, and so you just submit and let it happen and then out of nowhere the multiple dreams can sort of meet or intersect, and then there’s a moment or two of coherence that you probably remember later and are sort of stunned by, though maybe it doesn’t last very long and you’re falling back into so much happening at once.
Then later, you’re like where did THAT ONE MOMENT come from? And, holy shit, the answer might very well be: it was there all along, but your early survival depended on your not seeing or acknowledging what was right in front of you, and to acknowledge it now will either kill you…or set you free.
This is good, Chris. Thanks for writing it.