Psychedelics and the Spiritual Path

Some Thoughts.

To distract himself from facing his wrongness, man seeks out the very things that made him wrong in the first place: self-love and sensual pleasure. Gratifying himself in this way, he feels “right” again—but only temporarily. Actually, he has only become more wrong, so that he now needs even greater distractions, and even greater shocks, to make him feel that he is right. In this way he progresses further along the path of self-destruction, trying to overcome his predicament by its very cause.

—Hieromonk Damascene. Christ the Eternal Tao.

What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Brothers Karamazov

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It has long been a dream of mankind to solve the problem of the human condition. We suffer, sometimes unbearably, and this fact is seemingly baked into the very nature of being human. To add insult to injury, the source of much of our most grievous suffering comes from within ourselves, an inside job. We are often our own worst enemies and though its source is obviously within us, there seems little or nothing we can do to get at it and fundamentally change it. All of it can appear to us as perverse and gratuitous and our brief sojourn on the planet marred to the point of despair.

Understandably, we wish there were another way. Despite the ever-proliferating array of therapies and forms of healing, the human condition remains as stubborn as ever. We don’t want to accept this. We are continually being offered the hope of the latest breakthroughs that will finally offer us relief from our own brokenness. The most recent iteration of this—actually a quite ancient one—is the use of psychedelic drugs to heal trauma. It should come as no surprise that there is also quite a lot of money to be made in this. So the rush is on and we seem poised to leap into the void, come what may.

I recently had a conversation over zoom with journalist Ed Prideaux on the topic. I don’t know if anything I said was insightful or not, but it was an interesting talk, and it certainly got me thinking. Ed has an article now up at Unherd on the commercialization of psychedelics entitled, The psychedelic industrial complex is evil: Ecstatic states have lost their mystical roots. If you are interested in this topic I highly recommend giving it a read. This is an important subject and Ed does an excellent job conveying what is at stake. Given the prestige that psychedelics such as DMT are currently being afforded, it is highly likely that an increasing number of us will be giving it a try.

There is a great deal of nonsense, as I see it, regarding the efficacy of psychedelics not to heal the psyche, but to heal the world. Stubborn human nature has blocked the way, not only to our personal happiness but to utopia. If we can finally reengineer ourselves then, finally—finally—the sky is the limit. I tend to agree with those who take a darker view of this need to remake our humanity in the image of some utopian design. It isn’t merely that we will remake ourselves, but that we can be remade. And not necessarily for our own personal benefit. Consider the declaration by Yuval Noah Harari, that we are “hackable animals”. Whether he is correct or not, this is a horrifying thought. Who gets to decide what is worth changing and in what way? Other than those who have the power, resources, and desire to do so.

The human unconscious—which we hope to explore through psychedelics—remains a mystery to us, an undiscovered country, and is, I think, central to the transhuman project. No matter how rational we like to think that we are, our motivations are frequently baffling and our counter-productive behaviors even more so. If we can “hack” the unconscious, then we might reprogram ourselves along more “rational” lines. And despite the long, bloody history of human irrationality, this is hardly a comforting thought. All of this assumes, of course, a purely materialist metaphysics, so those of us not on board with this worldview are simply out of luck. The transhuman project moves forward with or without our consent.

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This morning I came across a quote from St. Sophrony of Essex and I think it is relevant to the topic. It is worth quoting in full:

He is deluded who endeavors to divest himself mentally of all that is transitory and relative in order to cross some invisible threshold, to realize his eternal origin, his identity with the Source of all that exists; in order to return and merge with Him, the Nameless transpersonal Absolute. Such exercises have enabled many to rise to supra-rational contemplation of being; to experience a certain mystical trepidation; to know the state of silence of the mind, when mind goes beyond the boundaries of time and space. In such-like states man may feel the peacefulness of being withdrawn from the continually changing phenomena of the visible world; may even have a certain experience of eternity. But the God of Truth, the Living God, is not in all this. It is man's own beauty, created in the image of God, that is contemplated and seen as Divinity, whereas he himself still continues within the confines of his creatureliness. This is a vastly important concern. The tragedy of the matter lies in the fact that man sees a mirage which, in his longing for eternal life, he mistakes for a genuine oasis. This impersonal form of ascetics leads finally to an assertion of divine principle in the very nature of man. Man is then drawn to the idea of self-deification – the cause of the original fall. The man who is blinded by the imaginary majesty of what he contemplates has in fact set his foot on the path to self-destruction. He has discarded the revelation of a Personal God. He tries to strip himself of like limitations and return to the state which he imagines has belonged to him since before his coming into this world. This movement into the depths of his own being is nothing else but attraction towards the non-being from which we were called by the will of the Creator.

All of these current efforts—whether in the commercialization of psychedelics or in transhumanism—point to this perennial desire for self-deification. However the universe came about it is, in this view, something of a botched job. Some of us think we can do better. Human life then becomes a technical problem to be solved. And once solved all will be made easy. This is the essence of hubris and will not end well but in our destruction. For if the transhumanists are successful, it will mean, by definition the end of humanity. I don’t think they will be successful.

But when all is said and done, if we can let go of our desire for power and control—a big if, mind you—then there is a much better way to proceed. The path is a simple but rarely easy one. In fact, it can be, and often is, excruciatingly painful. It is to acknowledge that we are not in control and that rather than gaining power, we find that weakness is our strength. It only requires our continual cooperation, the less we meddle in it the better. But in the end, it is the only path that can or will satisfy us. And this holds true whether we are hackable or not. The only path is the path of love—costing not less than everything.

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In practicing non-action, we do not try to heal ourselves; rather, we allow ourselves to be healed by the Way. We do not ambitiously strive to get rid of our problems, for when we return to our original nature by connecting with the Way, we find that our problems find their own solutions, spontaneously.

—Hieromonk Damascene. Christ the Eternal Tao.