Meditation and Psychedelics: Between Mental Health and Spiritual Awakening

On the occasionally divergent goals of personal happiness, collective change, and spiritual realization. (A news-diet safe post.)

1. Two or Three Careers

One of the primary Both/Ands of my life is that, for most of the last 25 years, I’ve worked in two seemingly disparate fields: politics and spirituality. Of course, the intersection of the two is a primary subject of this newsletter, but well before starting Both/And, I was covering the Supreme Court for a major news website while also leading long Buddhist meditation retreats, or working at a meditation app while also doing political and legal journalism. For several years before that, I was working as an LGBTQ activist, but focused on religious communities and values. And so on. Throughout that time, I also worked as an academic, often studying these same intersections between religion, law, spirituality, and politics. I do not recommend this approach as a career strategy, but over the years I’ve come to accept that this is how I live, how I am.

Within the spiritual arena, I focused on Jewish spirituality for around ten years, then on meditation for ten more. But in the last two years, I’ve shifted to working in the psychedelic space; I am a Field Scholar at the Emory Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality, and in the spring will be a visiting professor at Harvard Law School (teaching on psychedelics & law, and also on Judaism and antinomianism). I now spend about half my professional time on this work, though because of the urgency of the election, I haven’t devoted as much space to it in this newsletter to it as I had initially planned.

I made this shift for a few reasons. First, while psychedelics have been part of my spiritual practice since the 1990s, they were mostly on the fringes of public discourse until quite recently. I didn’t see the “psychedelic renaissance” coming; in fact, when I first met one of its leading exponents, Rick Doblin, over twenty years ago, I thought he was nuts – like most visionaries seem to be at first. As for myself, I wrote about psychedelics a little here and there, but I stayed mostly in the closet.

When that began to change, thanks to Doblin and thousands of other scientists, activists, and writers (especially Michael Pollan), I was drawn in. The field was promising, interesting, and suddenly changing fast – a bit like the meditation space fifteen years ago, but even more so: more evidence, more hype, more potential, more grift.

Finally, I felt like there were places where I, as a religion PhD, rabbi, former activist, meditation teacher, and longtime spiritual skeptic-and-enthusiast (another Both/And) could make a contribution. (Fortunately, I went in aware of some of the problematic aspects of the field, so have not been overly disillusioned.) The work I’m doing now is continuous with the work I’ve been doing, including some interesting tensions.

2. Two or Three Goals

I generally say that my primary interest in spirituality, meditation, and psychedelics is their capacity to ‘upgrade the mind’ to use a

Dan Harris

-eque phrase. Our human brains have a variety of capacities for both beauty and ugliness, healing and harm. (I’ve written about this in the political context quite a lot lately.) Confirmation bias, negativity bias, anxiety over perceived threats, split-second decision-making, denial of the non-visible, and a fierce devotion to the in-group were doubtless of great value in the earlier millennia of homo sapiens’ history. But today, these same capacities of mind can make us miserable and violent. Even the fundamental animal impulse to want more of the good and less of the bad today trips us up all the time because, well, you can’t always get what you want, and as soon as you do, you want more. (“Hedonic adaptation” is a blessing and a curse.) Ditto our evolutionarily-wired desires for certain foods, for social status, for dominance, and for safety even when we’re already safe. A central mission of this newsletter is to connect the dots between these psychological and spiritual drives and our political crises.

The crucial piece is that, to quote Dan again, all these capacities are not unalterable factory settings. Your emotional set-point, your triggers, the relationship between your amygdala and pre-frontal cortex – all these can be changed with practice. Happiness, resilience, courage, and tolerance are skills that can be developed.

This has public as well as private consequences. Neuroplasticity, i.e. the ability of the brain to change as it grows, is, I think, a necessary, if long-term, ingredient in literally saving the world as we know it. We have to get inside the gears of the mind and become more aware of them, or else they’re going to continue to pull the strings of our politics. Arguably, these instincts—fear of difference, group adhesion, yearning for status, resistance to change — are more in charge of our political lives than are our conscious, reflective minds. One way I see my work is in terms of short term change (journalism, law, politics, activism) and long-term change (contemplative practice). I think the jury is still out as to whether meditation or psychedelics can really shift the recent trajectory of human history, but it at least seems worth a try.

I do believe all of this. But I have a second motive for working in contemplative fields, (Both/And yet again), which is simply my own attraction to them.

On an intellectual level, I just love this stuff. I find mindstates really interesting. I find weird religion – mystics, cults, messiahs, unusual belief – fascinating. Right now, I’m interviewing people for a book about psychedelic mystical experiences, and I’m riveted by their accounts. I am interested in these things the way my neighbors are interested in football.

Perhaps more importantly, on a spiritual level, I am a psychonaut, mystic, and contemplative myself. I prefer exploring altered states to foreign countries. I’m fascinated by the possibility of perceiving other realities, other consciousness, and have spent thirty years pondering what we can know about the truth of such experiences_. Even within the contemplative world, I am a bit of an outlier: it took me a while to realize that not every psychonaut felt this way. I remember being legitimately puzzled when, in a circle of explorers using a uniquely intense and other-worldly compound, I was the only one who talked about, you know, God.

Sometimes these motivations are at cross-purposes with one another.

On a six-week vipassana retreat back in 2004, I remember one of the more strict teachers scolding those of us who sat outside to watch the sun set. We were meant to be meditating, mindfully and non-judgmentally noting the arising and passing away of phenomena, not gawking at the pink-a-blue-a, as my daughter calls the colors of dusk. The purpose of meditation practice isn’t chasing after pleasant experiences, but liberation. Upgrading the mind, in a sense. That’s a lot more important than a pretty moment.

Screw him, I thought. My people are the sunset people. And the God-intoxicated people — not only experiencing bliss, equanimity, compassion, and consciousness but relating to them as Sat-Chit-Ananda, as You. And, as Heschel wrote, both cultivating experiences of radical amazement and integrating them into a life of meaning, kindness, and the pursuit of justice. (Of course, many Buddhists also have such intentions – this was just one teacher in a particular tradition.)

In psychedelics, the split is similar, but sometimes even more stark. For millennia, indigenous people have used these plants and fungi for spiritual purposes, to contact other consciousnesses, and also for healing of all kinds. For a few decades, Western adventurers used them for spiritual and recreational purposes. But in the last twenty years, scientists have documented how compounds found in these same plants and fungi can heal PTSD, intense anxiety, medication-resistant depression, and other often intractable conditions. That is a different set of aims, and calls for different methodologies, approaches to the medicine, and metaphysical orientations.

There are good reasons for this, of course. Integrating psychedelics into Western medicine means, to some extent, secularizing them – even though studies have shown that the more spiritual experiences one has in a psychedelic session, the better the mental health outcomes. (Scientists have invented the acronym SERT, for Spiritual / Existential / Religious / Theological, to capture the breadth of these experiences.) These compounds have real, demonstrated benefits for mental health, but for people to access them, the benefits have to be legible and measurable in a Western scientific context – just like the benefits of mindfulness.

3. Two or Three Divergences

Having now met many, many scientists and mental health practitioners in both the mindfulness and psychedelics fields, I can say that, in my personal experience, they are sincere about the potential for healing, whether in mindfulness or psychedelic contexts. In the mindfulness world, many are motivated by the Buddhist goal of reducing suffering – but even then, they are not doing some bait-and-switch, promising stress reduction but secretly recruiting for meditation retreats. They are guided by the science and they know that the benefits are real, and meaningful.

At the same time, there are many in the mindfulness world who are a bit like me: interested both in mental health and in some spiritual element and also in the possibility that by opening the mind in this way, we might improve our species’ odds of survival.

The psychedelics world is, in my experience, very similar. The science is the science, the data is remarkable, and there are many in the field who are solely guided by the potential of psychedelics for clinical use. There are others, though, who are more focused on spiritual transformation, or even global transformation. Sometimes these factions coexist, sometimes they diverge, and sometimes, the juxtaposition of secular and spiritual causes problems. As

Jules Evans

often covers in his newsletter, the transformative power of psychedelics can lead to a kind of “psychedelic messianism,” where practitioners believe so strongly in the power of the medicines that they’re willing to overlook (or commit) lapses in safety, ethics, and harm reduction. Some, of course, are just bad people doing bad things. But many more, I think, are sincerely zealous, and thus overzealous. The field has grown so quickly that it’s having to play catch-up on ethics and standards (which Jules just wrote about this week) even on measuring adverse events, which my colleagues at Emory are focused on.

This issue also haunted the FDA’s consideration, and for-now rejection, of MDMA-Assisted Therapy to treat PTSD. While opponents of the application pointed to some issues with the scientific data, they also cited some of the more grandiose statements made by Doblin and others that psychedelics would change the world. Those claims were mischaracterized, I think, but they did represent to the multiple motives that many of us do, in fact, possess.

Speaking personally, based on evidence and experience, I believe that meditation can improve happiness, reduce stress, and improve mental health; and that it might help save the planet by reducing the power of greed, hatred, and delusion in the mind; and that it can help awaken profound parts of ourselves that are, for lack of a better word, sacred.

I believe the same three things about psychedelics. Both-Both-And-And, I guess. But it’s sometimes an uneasy coexistence.

There is also an important difference between meditation and psychedelics: psychedelics are stronger. They can cause more rapid changes in the brain, more intense mystical experiences, and more harm. Yes, intensive meditation can also cause harm, as a few studies have now shown, but daily mindfulness is unlikely to do so. A single high-dose psychedelics experience, though, is capable of significant harm without proper guidance, safety, and screening. It’s not for everyone. (Indeed, I don’t know how anyone does psychedelics without some basic meditation or mindfulness practice to help them turn off the mind, relax, and float downstream; it’s been essential to me.)

At the very least, psychedelics make one extremely open to suggestion, which can be for good or ill. Thus, preparation and integration are as important as the experience itself, and finding the right clinician (or guide) is essential, since they have considerable power to influence a suggestible subject. Much more so than in meditation, these factors can make the difference between healing and harm.

Which, ultimately, might yield some resolution of the personal, societal, and spiritual aims of contemplative and psychedelic practice.

Ultimately, all views need to be held lightly – not treated lightly, but subject to review, revision, and questioning. It’s very easy to reify one’s peak experiences, whether meditative or psychedelic or any other kind, and come to absurd, even dangerous, cosmological conclusions. There’s a lot of wackadoo stuff out there, from magical thinking to conspirituality to horseshoe-nationalism, and a lot of it comes from the combination of imagination and suggestibility. Sure, there are clearly energies and capacities and, who knows, maybe entities that our science does not yet understand. But I probably don’t understand them either.

It’s also true that the categories I’ve wrestled with here are, themselves, culturally constructed and tentative. In the coming years, I wonder if we’ll see more permeability between what Westerners call spirituality, health, and ethics; I wonder if Western medicine will relate more to the religiosity that a large majority of humans experience, and to different understandings of the world that have been part of indigenous cultures for millennia. Then again, I wonder if these contemplative practices will really work.

In the meantime, there are incremental changes that contemplative and psychedelic work can bring about – and if that’s all they do, the effort we expend is worthwhile.

Whether in meditation or psychedelics, some epistemic and interpretive humility can make all the difference – even if it’s just holding the big “I don’t know.” I don’t know exactly how all this works. I don’t know if it will change the world. I don’t know if what I’m seeing is true. But there does seem to be more to heaven and earth, Horatio, than is dreamt of in your philosophy. I’m going to first do no harm, and continue to see what might be out there.

---

Hi everyone – thanks for reading.

As I mentioned above, because of the election, I’ve written only a little about psychedelics here, despite having intended to do so more significantly. That will change in coming weeks, as I find the subject fascinating and hope many of you will as well. I’m also aware that many of us are decreasing our consumption of political news for the time being.

Having said that, I don’t really know how interested you are, reader, in this subject. So I’m going to try to post twice a week during the weeks that I write on psychedelics, since the paid subscriber base has grown a lot lately (Thank You!) and I want to be responsive to the reasons people are here. Please let me know what you’re interested in, in the comments or chat. I’m working with a smart, small team of folks to enrich the Both/And experience and am grateful to hear what you find most of value.

In other news:

• I’ll again be co-leading the Adamah Jewish Meditation Retreat, December 22-27 in Falls Village, Connecticut. The retreat is filling up but there are still some spots available.

• Last year at this time, in the shadow of October 7 and the Gaza War, I wrote an essay called What I’m thankful for (even this year). I read it over just now, and think it has aged well (unfortunately). Gratitude is important especially when a lot of things suck.

• But if digging deeper into sadness is your jam, this year I made a Spotify Playlist of mostly gloomy songs to suit the mood for November 2024. Have a listen if you like:

Thanks, and Happy Thanksgiving! —Jay