Does Wonder Make You Wonder?

Do peak experiences (religious, psychedelic, or otherwise) make us question our beliefs and identities? And does that make us better people?

1.

Recently, I had a conversation with a well-known psychedelics pioneer, and confessed to him that thirty years ago, I would have said that 90% of people who consume high doses of psychedelics become kinder, wiser people — not only healed from various afflictions or inspired by visions and insights, but also more compassionate, more open to new ideas and, well, more liberal. But given what I know now, I said, I wonder if it’s more like 60%.

To my surprise, he replied that it was probably 51%. But that the work was still worthwhile.

If you asked the average psychedelic enthusiast, I think they’d give you a higher number. For the last sixty years or so, there’s been a prevailing view among psychonauts that psilocybin, LSD, ayahuasca, 5meo-DMT, and even MDMA generally lead to views that roughly align with Sixties spirituality: a sense that all of life is One and thus deeply interconnected, and that the games people play — boundaries, competitions, status contests, wars — are not the truest expression of human life. Psychedelics open the heart to love and open the mind to deeper levels of reality than those ordinarily apparent to us, and we see through many of the preoccupations of modern society.

As Timothy Leary elaborated on his famous dictum ‘Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out’ (which, it is said, was originally told to him by Marshall McLuhan), the idea was that after Turning On with psychedelics, people Tune In, which Leary’s words meant they “interact harmoniously with the world around you—externalize, materialize, express your new internal perspectives,” and then Drop Out of “involuntary or unconscious commitments.” Which is to say, most of the mainstream world.

And from that, the view contends, emerges a progressive or even radical politics.

Sixties-era opponents seemed to agree with him. The danger of psychedelics was not only that they can lead to adverse effects like bad trips, brain damage, or even suicide, but that they were causing nice, middle-class white kids to drop out of American capitalist society and become hippies, left-wing politics included. (Ironically, both then and now, the psychedelic hippie lifestyle may often entail political disengagement, as Sixties radicals themselves knew well.) Leary, it is said, semi-seriously proposed giving LSD to Richard Nixon to turn him politically Green.

Notably, this popular conception was never the prevailing view among the vast majority of psychedelics users in history, i.e. indigenous people. In indigenous contexts, plant medicines can be used for good or ill, help or harm. Black-magic brujos are not benevolent hippies; they venture to other realms for their own ends, which may include cursing one’s opponents, and the entities one meets in may be unreliable, even malevolent. Shamans used their powers to help soldiers win military victories. Roadmen and ayahuasceros are not in the business of revolution.

These days, of course, many indigenous figures do claim that plant medicines will save the planet by elevating human consciousness. But there is no universal “indigenous spirituality,” let alone a peace-loving, touchy-feely one that just so happens to align with post-Sixties New Age sensibilities. (Ironically, while such constructions of indigeneity are often deployed to fight against colonialism, they are themselves variations on a well-worn orientalist myth: the noble savage on drugs.) The cultural/historical record is far more varied.

So do psychedelics make us better people, or not? In working through this question, I’ve realized that it is actually a set of several questions that are worth disaggregating:

• First, does psychedelic experience generally soften hard beliefs about the world or oneself, leading to both personal growth and the openness to questioning deeply-held views? Does wonder (i.e. the peak experience) make you wonder (about one’s deeply-held beliefs and identities)?

• Second, does psychedelic experience sometimes/often/always cause pro-social traits like empathy, generosity, and kindness?

• And finally, those personal qualities lead to a basically liberal or radical politics? Not in the details; those will always vary. But in general, do peak experiences, and the changes in character that they may bring about, lead people to adopt some version of Richard Rorty’s axiom that cruelty is the worst thing we do?

Notice that these questions are orthogonal to the central question regarding psychedelics today, which is whether they can safely alleviate serious mental health conditions. If that question answered in the affirmative, that is reason enough to take psychedelic medicine (and spirituality) seriously, regardless of psychedelics’ impacts on ethics and politics. It is also true that the psychedelic experience may be of value in and of itself. As my friend and colleague Noah Feldman recently explored in a lecture on the psychedelic humanities, altered-state experiences are a part of the meaning and value of being human. For now, though, I’m interested in whether the psychedelic experience generates ethical and political change.

I want to start, though, with a bit of self-reflection.

Carl Gustav Carus , Gothic Windows in the Ruins of the Monastery at Oybin

2.

For basically as long as I can remember, I’ve obsessed over how humans develop their capacities for wonder and compassion, and what if anything can be done to increase them. Are these capacities inborn? Learned in childhood? Shaped by experience? Can they be developed, like a skill, or are they more like talents?

Wonder and compassion are, in a sense, the two categories of Jewish commandment, framed traditionally as duties to God and duties to fellow human beings — in Hebrew bein adam l’makom and bein adam l’havero. They are mysticism and justice, ritual and ethics. And they are, it is sometimes said, related. For the Jewish philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel, the experience of wonder necessarily invites a response. We experience what Heschel called radical amazement, and we feel compelled to live our lives in the light of it, which entails a holistic path of cultivating the sacred and building a more ethical world.

Wonder, in other words, makes you wonder. The transpersonal experience of awe and love causes a reevaluation of previous ontological and philosophical commitments. That doesn’t determine any particular outcome, but it tends toward more compassionate ones.

This seemed more true and more durable than rationalistic philosophical reflection, for example. (Obedience to authority, perhaps the main source of ethical behavior, was never going to do it for me. Nor was desire for reward or fear of divine punishment, both of which seemed transparently counterfactual without a whole lot of make-believe.) Not that political discourse or philosophical debate don’t have their place – they obviously do. At the very least, they illustrate the specific ways in which general ethical imperatives are translated into real-world actions, from racial justice to feminism, environmentalism to liberal politics. But for me personal, no amount of left-brained consciousness-raising compared with whole-hearted consciousness transformation.

It was also true in my own experience, in a series of contexts. In my twenties, I had an Orthodox-seeming Jewish practice (though never an Orthodox theology) with a rich community and a sense of the sacred invested in the ethical and the ritual. I drank deep from the wells of Kabbalah, Talmud study, and the immersive community of Jewish religious practice. It seemed that the sacred and the good were intertwined, at least ideally.

Gradually, though, I came to see how some of the great practitioners of Kabbalah and Jewish Spirituality held views that were not just right-wing but ontologically ethnocentric: we are different from them, we have a status that they lack, and we are justified in doing whatever it takes to prevail. I also met many followers of this path whose personal ethical conduct and ways of living in the world were, to put it kindly, messy. To be sure, I know many Jewish spiritual practitioners who are loving, ethical, and compassionate. But that seemed orthogonal to the depth of their practice. I still love the Kabbalah in some ways, but I don’t think it makes us better people.

And so, in the 2000s and 2010s, I shifted my personal spiritual energies, and my professional teaching, more toward meditation and the Buddha Dharma, which seemed like a clear handbook, almost, for more just and awakened living. Meditation relieves stress, sure, but more importantly, it enables a kind of meta-cognitive self-reflection that was shown to generate pro-social outcomes. And it led to profound insights about the nature of reality (or at least our experience of it). By and large, meditation makes us better people as well as happier ones.

And unlike Kabbalah, it was accessible, secularizable, and scalable. For five years, I worked for a meditation app that was working to translate meditation (and, to an extent, Buddhist philosophy) into language that millions of people could relate to – and did. And still do believe in that. At the very least, mainstream mindfulness is a gateway drug to deeper practice, but I think it is more than that; based on objective data and my own subjective experience (of myself and others), it makes us less reactive, and more kind, patient, and open to love.

And yet, it’s also true that, in translating mindfulness into the marketplace, choices of emphasis must be made – and the choices are usually those that resonate with what people already want. Sure, liberal, disproportionately Jewish therapist-types emphasize compassion and justice. But Wall Street types often choose forms of meditation (like TM) that focus primarily on deep concentration, not ethical self-reflection. Optimizers focus on productivity gains. Enlightenment jockeys focus on meditative attainments. And plenty of good, ordinary people are really only in it to relax. Which is totally understandable, of course, and generally good for the world.

But, as I’ve written about elsewhere, psychedelics reentered my life personally and professionally several years ago – decades after my first experiences at college and twenty five years after my transformative ones at Burning Man and similar environments. For me personally, they replaced extended meditation retreats (no longer practical in the parenting phase of my life) as pathways to expanded consciousness and the sacred. And professionally, the field felt fresh and exciting, in ways meditation had felt fifteen or twenty years ago.

And psychedelics are a stronger intervention. That is their strength and their danger: they are powerful neuroplastogens that can change how the brain wires itself together. Unlike beginner-level meditation, they reliable generate peak experiences – not only ‘ego death’ but also healing from trauma, connection with one’s ancestors and people, and, often, the sacred, however that is understood by an individual. They generate a lot of wonder. And the data is persuasive.

And yet, maybe because I’m just older, I never believed in the hippie vision of psychedelics. I knew too many psychedelic burnouts, narcissists, and jerks – along with, once again, many truly awesome people who walk the walk of spirituality, not just talk the talk. This makes sense. Psychedelics are, as Stan Grof put it, “non-specific amplifiers.” Of course a hippie will likely come out of the experience more hippie-ish than before. But a transhumanist eugenicist might just come out more transhumanist and eugenicist than before, especially if their community and their integration context reaffirms that.

Once again, I asked, does wonder make you wonder?

Joanne Leonard, Romanticism is Ultimately Fatal

3.

Obviously, this being Both/And, the answer will be both yes and no.

If we consider three major data sets — indigenous experience, scientific studies, and anecdotal data of several hundred people I know — there is unanimity that the sublime wonder of peak experience, psychedelic or otherwise, does yield forms of knowledge (of self, of world, of entities, even of the divine) that are almost totally inaccessible otherwise.

Neuroscientifically speaking, the prevailing models suggest that psychedelics create a kind of temporary chaos — the “entropic brain” in Robin Carhart-Harris’s formulation — that enables old neural connections (and accompanying psychological patterns) to be loosened and new ones to be formed. For what Gul Dolen calls the “critical period” (which lasts for some time after a high-dose psychedelic experience), the mind and the brain are more open to suggestion, change, social learning, and growth. It’s neuroplasticity on steroids.

So that kind of wonder — wondering if what I’ve always thought about myself or the world or my relationships or my trauma is really necessarily true — does very often result from psychedelic experience. Even without the scientific explanation, the sheer novelty of the experience, particularly in religious or spiritual contexts, is enough to cause one to question one’s beliefs. I experienced things on ayahuasca in 2007 that I still have not resolved ontologically or metaphysically. Though I suspect that if I had grown up in a culture with concepts of other realms, nature spirits, and divine entities, I would be quite sure that this world is only one small part of the whole.

What about the ethical consequences of that wonder? Here the data is more mixed.

In one sense, the range of indigenous experiences makes clear that it is definitely not the case that everyone emerges from psychedelic experience kinder, gentler, and more likely to compost. Plant medicines can be used for healing or harming. Entities that one encounters in psychedelic experiences may be real or unreal, benevolent or malevolent. And the same is true in non-psychedelic spiritualities. You might meet an angel or a demon, or a trickster figure whose morality is hard to discern.

Even for Heschel, the consequences of the peak experience depends on integration; wonder generates the question of “how am I to live?” but the answer comes from reflection, community, practice, text, and tradition. I’m not aware of any contemplative tradition that said if you Turn On, you will eventually Tune In in the harmonious way Leary described. It doesn’t seem to work that way.

But indigenous and spiritual traditions didn’t do quantitative analysis. Returning to the opening question, do 90% of mystics/experiencers/patients become better people? Or 50? Or 10%?

Enter the researchers. A clinical study published in 2018 found that six months after a high-dose psilocybin experience, individuals showed significant positive changes on measures of interpersonal closeness, gratitude, life meaning, and forgiveness, as well as changes in daily spiritual experiences and equanimity regarding death. Moreover, the rate of change varied directly (correlation or causation, we don’t know) with both the mystical-type experience in the trip itself, and subsequent meditation or spiritual practices.

A 2020 study showed that mystical-type experiences — characterized by feelings of internal and external unity, transcendence of time and space, a sense of awe, and a distinct shift in one’s understanding of reality — have been found to produce lasting positive effects on subjective well-being, openness to experience, perceived meaning in life, and prosocial attitudes and behaviors. According to a 2023 study, this may because the “critical period” extends to “social reward learning” as well. With integration, there can be weeks after a psychedelic experience in which people are more able to shift their behavior and experience the ‘rewards’ of doing so.

And more broadly, beyond interpersonal behavior, a 2022 study found that people who had a ‘mystical’ state during psychedelic use scored significantly higher on pro-environmental behaviors, openness, and agreeableness compared to those who didn’t have a full mystical experience.

Outside of psychedelic experience, there have also been studies of the impact of awe-inspiring experiences on ethical behavior. A series of four UC Berkeley/UCI studies published in 2015 showed that awe-experiences — such as standing in a grove of towering trees — enhanced prosocial helping and generosity. Even weekly “awe walks” showed measurable effects.

Of course, there are plenty of caveats. As I’ve written about at some length, the tools with which researchers measure ‘mystical experience’ are problematic. There is almost always functional unblinding in psychedelic studies, even when conventional double-blinding practices are followed, so it’s unknown how much of the positive impact is due to placebo effect. And we may know more about the importance of the mystical experience when there are more studies of “no-trip” psychedelics currently in development; if these, too, lead to these changes in pro-social behavior, then it’s not the phenomenology of the mystical experience that is determinative.

But still.

Of course, walking in the redwoods isn’t the same as supporting policies that will save them — that is to say, becoming an enlightened liberal like me. Interestingly, one of the studies on awe suggests that the former does lead to the latter:

We review recent empirical evidence showcasing how awe shifts focus away from the self toward the larger entities one belongs to. These reductions in self-focus are, in turn, associated with systematic shifts in social-cognitive processes key to cohesive collective life: attentiveness to others, prosociality, conformity, and social connectedness. Given its socially-binding functions, awe may help inform solutions to pressing global challenges, including economic inequality, political polarization, and climate change.

But is that necessarily true? Social connectedness and conformity may serve to reinforce ties to the in-group and animus toward the out-group — I see that among many people I know, including right-wing psychedelics folks. And, as I wrote about two weeks ago, there is ample evidence that psychedelics coexist peacefully with conservatism, nationalism, tech-libertarianism, post-liberalism, and whatever MAHA is. At the moment, there seem to be more liberals, radicals, and progressives than conservatives in the psychedelic space. But that is probably attributable to psychedelics being largely illegal and countercultural, two qualities that don’t attract many conservatives. And now, post-April 18, governments and universities that were hesitant to legitimize psychedelics are now falling over one another trying to get a piece of the pie. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to put pronouns in their Zoom IDs.

In a way, this is “good news” for psychedelics in America, as I wrote about in the earlier piece. It means there are broader coalitions for change, and it means that conservative folks can obtain the benefits of psychedelics without worrying that they’re going to blow up their worlds. It would help mitigate the growing conservative-religious resistance to psychedelics if it were clear that Christians who drink ayahuasca don’t necessarily become animists or polytheists or liberals (whichever is worse).

But of course it’s bad news if one hopes that psychedelics are going to play a part in some planetary transformation to higher planes of consciousness that will bring about peace, love, and the world of John Lennon’s “Imagine.” I guess the way I’m framing it, that view seems ridiculous. But many thoughtful people, with deep political and psychedelic experience, hold it. Entire organizations are built on it.

That said, I don’t think psychedelics have no effect whatsoever on one’s public-ethical — that is, political — views. So, in true Both/And style, I want to conclude with a more modest, pluralistic proposal for how the two actually relate.

4.

At a recent conference at Emory, my colleague Charles Raison said from the stage that “you can take the psychedelics out of spirituality, but you can’t take the spirituality out of psychedelics.” This seems factually true; very large percentages of psychedelic users, including those in strictly clinical, medical contexts, report spiritual, existential, religious, or theological (“SERT”) experiences, even if they hadn’t been intending to have them. And, as we’ve seen, there is ample evidence that such experiences are generative of wonder, that wonder does make you wonder (i.e., it promotes cognitive malleability), and that such experiences correlate with a variety of positive changes in personal-ethical traits.

That may be enough — and, I will suggest, actually better than the Leary-hippie claim.

First, malleability is, in general, a good thing. As I recently wrote about in the most contentious political issue of all, we are in a period of profound hardening of political opinions, views, positions, and orthodoxies of all kinds, and this is equally true on the right, left, and center. To the extent the “critical period” after a psychedelic experience is one of greater malleability and openness, that can only be of overall benefit. Sure, some people will be ‘open’ to some extremely wacky ideas. But I would argue that is still better than not being open enough to questioning values derived from centuries of patriarchy, capitalism, and caste. And if there is one article of faith I still hold, it is that compassion arises naturally in response to suffering unless it is shut down by cultural conditioning. So more openness should lead to more compassion, at least some of the time.

Does the good outweigh the bad and the weird? I don’t know. But it’s really, really hard to cultivate the “good” — that is, the openness to new ideas, new self-conceptions, new values, new relationships. We know from heaps of depressing studies that it’s almost impossible to change someone’s fundamental political orientation, especially after young adulthood. It often takes something traumatic to do so, because otherwise people will rearrange whatever mental furniture they need to in order to avoid cognitive dissonance. So even if all psychedelics do is shake up the system and make it more open to the possibility of more compassion, patience, and empathy— I’ll take it.

That core movement of the heart is necessary but not sufficient for liberatory politics. It is possible to be compassionate and still pursue politics that lead to more suffering; it is very easy to delude ourselves, especially when our own status is at stake, and there are gigantic industries invested in deluding others. And of course, there is room for legitimate disagreement. For example, are Thiel and Musk right that AI is the only thing that really matters in terms of saving the human (or trans-human) race, and thus whatever politics maximizes the development of AI in a relatively free society will lead to the greatest reduction in long-term suffering? I don’t think so, but maybe. And at least in theory, it is a view that is consonant with compassion. Which is far better than the views that are not.

This perspectives on psychedelics’ capacity also reaffirms the centrality of integration. People emerge from these states more delicate and more open than they may realize. Yet our spiritual, ethical, political, and communal structures have little capacity to support them, especially if they don’t know where to look. That ought to change, and if psychedelic use is legalized, regulated, and de-stigmatized, it can change. Maybe the wisest course of action for progressives who believe in the capacity of psychedelics is not to gain more access to the drugs, but to create structures of integration that guide and nurture people after they take them.

Ultimately, this relatively narrower conception of psychedelics’ impact on public ethics is, I think, preferably to a broader one. I don’t want a world in which people drink the soma and all come out with the same political opinions. That may be a psychedelic utopia for many, but it isn’t for me; it’s dehumanizing, like the uniformity of Pluribus or the episodes of Star Trek where Captain Kirk violates the prime directive to disturb a harmonious society. While an interconnected world of universal harmony does have a good vibe to it when you’re high, in actual life it sounds awful.

The utopia is awful even before it happens. Many times, I’ve sat with psychedelics folks who are sure that conservative psychonauts are just doing it wrong, or missing the point, or being blocked by the medicines themselves. Are these well-meaning “radicals” even aware of how condescending, arrogant, reductive, and fundamentalist they’re being? Not to mention ignorant of indigenous histories? Do they really believe that there no thoughtful conservatives who are motivated by conceptions of the Good and disagree about how best to achieve it? Obviously, there are plenty of greedy, corrupt, oppressive, racist, complicit, and abusive conservatives in the world. Many are in Washington, D.C. But the idea that one cannot possibly be awakened to the central truths of the human condition and also be a conservative is, itself, shockingly fundamentalist. These people need to read more.

No, psychedelics do not make people more politically progressive. But they do appear to create the conditions for more openness, more questioning, and more wonder — and those capacities can help us soften our opinions and open our hearts to those who are marginalized, dehumanized, or rendered invisible by structures of power. That is a world I want to help build. And if psychedelics can help to bring it into being, then the effort is worth it.

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Thanks for reading — and special thanks to my paying subscribers. This is another mid-to-longform essay that was made possible by your responses to my recent appeal. Without that support, this would not have been written. Thank you.

This week, I’ve taken comfort in data:

• Paul Krugman did an outstanding summary of all the ways Americans are less happy and healthy than people in other countries. He wonders what might happen if people find this out.

• DeSmog and the Guardian did an excellent investigative piece into the billion dollars a single British ad agency has spent on behalf of oil companies denying climate change. DeSmog has also exposed how leaders of the Heartland Institute, probably the single biggest source of climate disinformation, are now fully embedded in voter suppression efforts.

• Popular Information tracks the huge drop in crime in “Democrat-run cities.” For some reason I haven’t seen this story on Fox News.

• The Argument debunked some pseudo-science and motivated reasoning about Waymos.

Meanwhile, while dozens of pundits took apart Nicholas Kristof’s incredibly bad piece on sexual abuse in Israeli prisons (combining true, horrifying facts with preposterously false, unreliable crap), I managed to write an ill-timed piece about the Great Hardening of views on Israel/Palestine and what might be done about it. Can’t nail the zeitgeist every time, I guess.

Here’s the speech of Noah’s that I referenced in the text:

See you next week.