Don't Count On Psychedelics for Spiritual Awakening

Sometimes I think that North American spirituality hired TikTok influencers to handle its PR. While perennial Easternism views the awakening process as the removal of endless character masks in the discovery of our true eternal identity, the move these days seems to be putting on new masks—often ones that appear very spiritual (whatever that means).

Instead of contemplating the subtle, ever-enduring essence of consciousness we end up chasing some other way to feel good about our personalities. In the slippery quest of asking who am I really? we further conceal our deeper selves within ego’s need to feel special.

Is this any wonder? Our elders are impersonal podcast hosts or therapists that are just as unconscious as we are. In any case, we’re glad to accept spiritual participation trophies, maybe even getting a few likes in the process.

Disclaimer: I think that the word ‘spiritual’ itself is somewhat nonsensical since we are all inseparably part of the same cosmic process that is impossible to opt out of. I offer my own often hypocritical judgment of whether lifestyle choices support or hinder awakening merely as cheeky but thought provoking spiritual entertainment.

OK, Let’s Add Drugs

Meanwhile, psychedelics have crept into the public psyche, often so folks can become extra spiritual. But can these medicines create a meaningful zeitgeist of awakening when consumed from the western lens of treating sacred practice like a weekend trip to the higher-self store?

The question might be best answered if you reflect on whether your use of psychedelics is helping you develop quiet, humble and constant presence. Are you discovering a mountain-like equanimity in the face of the constant change that is existence? Or are you instead flooding with a host of new plot-lines, further entrenching you in the belief that you are your avatar?

More prompts:

Are things getting quieter or noisier? Are you more present in the moment, or is your mind racing faster than ever with new dopamine-hooks? Can you distinguish intuition vs. just thinking a lot while concluding your thoughts were ‘true’ because you had feelings while thinking them?

Is this you?

If you chronically overthink and then add psychedelics then there is a good chance that you will continue overthinking, but just do so while being high.

I guess at some point God works in mysterious ways became God is actually very invested in your hobbies and is gonna be pissed if you miss his deadlines. Surely, there must be a way for laypeople to include psychedelics in transcendental development that isn’t a trap door to spiritual ego.

While as my disclaimer made it clear that I’m not one to answer this question beyond my own fumbling through life, I have spent 20 years studying Mahāyāna schools of Buddhism, practicing meditation and having both harrowing and glowing experiences with psychedelics.

…So take what you will:

Five Foundations to Secure Before Using Drugs

Anchor Yourself in More Than The New Age

New age spirituality very often confuses the magic of the universe with magical thinking. It commonly approaches spirituality with piecemeal, young-soul energy that wants to customize the strange nature of cosmos to fit with what flatters our ego desires.

Sure, maybe you communicated telepathically with that deer and it told you Christ Consciousness will come from your next liver cleanse, but then what? I like Abraham Hicks but I also think this approach can lead to sidestepping humility in favour of satisfying our individual ego desires like hedonic toddlers high-fiving a genie.

Where are self-surrender and service to others? Do the classical and earth-old theologies sound boring and dry? Of course they do. We’ve been on a rapidly faster pace roller coaster of images and sounds blasting our attention into dopamine addiction. TikTok and Thich Nhat Hanh might sound similar but they offer different nutritional content.

Long-walked paths such as Vedanta and Taoism involve meditative inquiry towards the subtlest, ever-enduring form of consciousness underlying all existence. They provide gentle guiding principles on how to experience reality, beyond our dreamy projections.

While New Age spirituality is often like drawing beautiful images in chalk on the pavement, ancient Eastern practice is just as much about learning to notice the ground itself. In finding this foundation, we discover the only enduring source of peace there even is: Letting go of what you could only pretend to have grasped in the first place. This is different from our norm of clinging to chalk drawings that are already fading in the afternoon sun.

Don’t Get Drunk On Symbols

Drunk on symbols was an exasperated insult that Richard Dawkins lobbed at Jordan Peterson in a very chaotic yet entertaining interview. As someone who spent a lot of his life seeing manically positive patterns that oftentimes didn’t lead to lasting life change, I now find myself encouraging folks to be cautious how quickly they integrate their ‘insights.’

While we call the disorganized chatter in our heads monkey mind, for some reason on psychedelics we tend to view the constant images and dialogue as profound and clairvoyant. How can we be so sure? …especially when for the untrained mind—and let’s be honest, that’s most of us—thoughts are an unreliable hall of mirrors.

Thoughts, observed patterns, connections and coincidences may indeed be synchronous downloads from the Buddhic consciousness to which we all wake up to. They may also however just be stuff we are thinking about while feeling big emotions. A lot of people also make major life decisions within the very week they’ve had these experiences!

credit @namaste.at.home.dad

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“The Tao that can be told of is not the eternal Tao.” - Lao Tzu

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Ordinary thoughts are just the newest evolutionary toy of our prefrontal brains—a symbolic gizmo designed to represent the outer world to help us survive better. They aren’t reality itself, and so the facilitator wearing a wolf t-shirt while your late grandmother also liked wolves doesn’t necessarily mean you need to quit your job, leave your relationship and move to her cabin in the forest.

I personally suggest practicing a relationship with the peaceful consciousness behind each thought. In doing so, you’ll be on less of a quest to capture each insight like Pokémon but instead may notice the wisdom and restfulness that comes from clear and relaxed consciousness. From this spaciousness you will have more discernment to know which thoughts truly are insightful. You will learn the difference between manic thinking and intuition.

Practice Meditation

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“I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.” Mark Twain

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Meditation may seem like the boring, nutritious breakfast that isn’t making headlines but it’s quite the opposite. Staying present alone wakes us up from our ego-dream so that we remember what existence actually is (and if you’ve had a satori you know what I mean — it’s beyond words and nothing at all like what we were taught that existence is).

Meditation trains our indigenous conscious state. It reminds us that our primordial operating system isn’t about categorizing and separating everything into lifeless boxes in a world that we struggle and strive against. It is receptiveness and interconnectedness. It is spontaneous inner bliss independent from the changing outer environment including pain that is inevitable.

We move into the only moment that has ever existed, aware that the stories in our head are mere accessories to deeper reality.

Thinking that you are the endless stories in your head is called being unconscious because you are reacting instinctively to chatter (which also offers you mostly bad advice). Noticing the content and returning your attention to the moment is called becoming conscious because you are realizing you are not the constant noisy content—you are something quite surprising that is beyond words.

Psychedelics on top of a non-trained mind will often rev your system more towards what you are already doing. You may miss recognizing your truer subtle nature, instead confusing the stories in your head for reality. You might then mistake these for profound insights and perhaps even become upset when others don’t want to join you in these deluded subplots.

Meditation isn’t a hobby. It is an access point to reality.

Shift from Analysis to Experience

A by-product of meditation, you will get a lot more from psychedelics if you de-train excessive use of your analytical, trouble-shooting brain. Yes it’s great that we can problem solve from our left-brains, but when we spend most of our time doing so we chop the moving picture of reality into dead still-frames and exhaust ourselves with an endless search to fix something that is broken.

Worse than that, left-prefrontal thought evolved exclusively to solve problems and if you think this stream of analytical thought is your identity, you will only see what is wrong with the world and what needs to be corrected. You will never be happy.

If you view analysis as a tool that you use and then turn off when you’re done you are ready to study what being alive means. You discover that while indeed, reality has problems, most of them are imagined.

Heavily analytical folks who use psychedelics tend to resist trips and become unsettled. Psychedelics soften control which they find frightening, thus meeting with attempts to recapture control. They chatter nervously stuck in ‘fix it’ mode. They are the most disappointed folks because they expected this trip to go exactly like whatever they saw in a Michael Pollen show and feel betrayed as if reality owes their ego something.

What if the present moment didn’t need your help and you could take a day off? What if our conscious ego isn’t smart enough to know what makes us happy? What if a deeper part of us does know and it just requires us being quiet for once?

Do some groundwork first to at least realize how addicted you are to problem-solving. Spend longer periods experiencing the purity of the already perfect moment. Enter natural settings where chaos and order are synchronized. For example, watch waves come and go and marvel at how they are both scattered and perfectly organized. Let this be an analogy for your own relationship between thoughts and feelings… between the part of you that controls and the part that allows.

Closing

I offered some thoughts above, but the fact is you’re going to do what you’re going to do. I myself crashed into every wall with psychedelics while I was way too young to be touching them. I got blown up in the process, but fortunately found Tibetan Buddhism as a cosmic blueprint to save me from the collapse of my familiar world.

Similarly, you need to have your own experiences:

Thinky Substack lessons aren’t going to work in place of that. So in the spirit of undoing my preachy essay, let me change tones:

If I see you at a San Pedro circle and you tell me how the medicine triggered your witch-wound whose shadow frequency activated your dormant Akashic Pleiadian dimension code prompting a pilgrimage to commune with the 12 Sacred White Whales I’ll look at you and say fuck yea it did. If Spirit wills it, maybe I’ll even come join you.

Safe journeys out there and may all beings be free.

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“You are destined to play an infinity of roles, but these roles are not yourself.” Deepak Chopra

“You are at home in God, dreaming of exile.” Helen Schucman

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In 2014, Carson Kivari and Dace Mars founded Thrive Counselling Centre—an iconic North American destination for psychotherapy and psychedelic integration services. He has been passionate about the study and practice of Eastern Mysticism since 2004. He specializes in men’s work, psychedelics, trauma recovery and waking up. You can reach out to work with him here.