Psychedelics in a World at War

I still believe in both immediate action and long-term transformation.

This week’s piece is eventually going to be about psychedelics and politics, but it’ll take a minute to get there.

I’ll start here: As the name of this newsletter implies, I’m not a big fan of dichotomies, binaries, and either/or decisions.  Some of this is ideological (binaries tend to flatten reality, create hierarchies, and build unnecessary boundaries) but a lot of it is just temperamental. I’m an Enneagram Type 7 — the enthusiast.  I want to have every possible experience, even the difficult ones.  I’m, in Buddhist psychology, a “greed type” — I want it all.

As a result, I’m not great at choices.  This is true on a small scale (ask my husband about how I get dressed or order dinner) and on a large scale. I work as a journalist/pundit and a rabbi/meditation teacher — stressing people out in one job, relaxing them in another.  I’m in love with the spiritual/mystical and the material/sensual (that tension is one of the core themes of my new collection of stories, coming out next week).  I’ve been the gay rabbi, the Jewish Buddhist, the novelist lawyer, the Burner professor.  It’s just how I am.

Politically — or perhaps, more broadly, when it comes to the survival of life on earth — I see the absolute necessity of both radical, fundamental change and incremental, pragmatic progress.  And by “appreciate,” I mean I vacillate between them, like the moment in The Beatles “Revolution” when John Lennon says to the radical left, “but when you talk about destruction, don’t you know that you can count me out… in.”  He couldn’t quite decide, and neither can I.

On the one hand, it’s clear that our worst problems — like the rise of authoritarianism, the climate crisis, economic and social inequality, polarization and rage, war, multiple mental health crises — are deeply rooted both in fundamental socioeconomic structures and in psychological, even spiritual, features of the human mind and heart. There are deep causes of our societal woes, and it seems fruitless to run around putting out fires without addressing the reasons they get started in the first place.

On the other hand, in the meantime, voting really matters, the two major parties are not in any way the same, and we need to work within the system as well as beyond it.   

This particular Both/And has shaped much of my life’s work.  Meditation, spirituality, Jewish and Buddhist work, artistic production, psychedelics — these are, as I see them, connected to the deep work of human growth. But my activist work, which these days takes the form of political journalism, legal writing, LGBTQ activism, and mainstream speaking and teaching — these are me trying to help put out fires.  I do not advise this bifurcation as a career path; it’s not good for branding.  But I get itchy when I’m only doing incremental work or only doing deep work.  I thrive on both, and lately have tried more to integrate them, in this newsletter but also in my teaching, CNN work, and written work. 

It's in this context that, in the last two years, I’ve begun doing more work in the emerging exploding field of psychedelics.  Like a lot of folks, psychedelics have played a significant role in my life, in the healing of some of my own ‘stuff,’ and in the development of my spiritual path, but owing to legal bans and social stigmas, I’ve mostly kept quiet about it – closeted it, even, for fear of losing credibility.

Thankfully, these stigmas, and some of the legal restrictions, are now lifting.  Decades of dedicated activism have suddenly borne fruit, in the form of scientific research, proven clinical applications, serious religious/spiritual exploration, and a renewed openness to the profound benefits these substances can bring about for healing, mental health, and human potential.  So, as I mentioned in a previous newsletter, I’ve recently taken a position as a Field Scholar at the Emory Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality, which has been doing impressive work at that particular intersection, and enabling the careful, prudent use of psychedelics in the mental health space.  I hope to contribute my background in religious studies (as well as my background in LGBTQ activism and my apparently incurable love of writing books and articles) to the work ECPS is doing. 

Dall-E prompt: “A mystic enters expanded consciousness while around her a battle rages.” There were some more literal results but I liked this weird one.

To be sure, there are already significant challenges in this brave new world: there’s a ton of money flowing in, bringing with it the tendencies of capitalism to exploit and enshittify everything; there’s a whole lot of hype (and the charlatans that come with it). There are abusive and negligent providers, and the exploitation of indigenous cultures and marginalized communities who bore the brunt of the Drug War and are often not included in the privileged psychedelic renaissance.  It’s a bit of a Wild West Meets Venture Capital world out there, and plenty of sharks in the water.

But there are a lot of good people involved too, and I feel like there’s a chance this revolution might play a part in, well, saving the world.  This, for me, is a form of the “deep work.” As a species, we clearly need new and better ways to help human beings upgrade their minds and become wiser, more compassionate, and less driven by the reptilian brain.  And psychedelics, which have a tendency to offer new ways of understanding both world and self, might play some role in that.

There will be no silver bullet, obviously.  Just as the outer tools for change are many, so are the inner ones: progressive forms of religion; meditation, yoga, and other contemplative practices; changes in our educational system; new healing modalities; philosophy and ethics; and, I think, psychedelics as well.  But something has got to get “under the hood” of the human brain.  Our drives to exploit, divide, dominate, rationalize, and ignore the consequences of our actions are all well-documented, and often are in charge of our politics.  But we have other capacities as well – for empathy, mercy, understanding, reason, and openness of mind.  What, over the long term, can help us grow those capacities?  What, if anything, can help human beings be better? 

Admittedly, in the last month, I’ve wondered about this kind of work. When war is raging, to focus on deep, slow, profound changes may itself seem rather privileged, or unrealistic, or at least disconnected from immediate concerns.  There’s a war on, after all, which is why I’ve written and spoken so much about the conflict. 

But then, dig just a bit beneath the surface, and along with all the economic, political, and intergroup conflict elements in play, the factors of mind that cause interpersonal conflict on a small scale are right there causing conflict on a large scale.  Tendencies to dominate, oppress, and dehumanize are present on all sides.  We’re all motivated by fears, traumas, and rage.  We’re all in communities of meaning, living in perception boxes that create different cognitive realities from the ones that others experience. 

So, clearly, both longer-term and immediate work have their place.

There was a brief, horrible moment in the war when the worlds of psychedelics and politics collided, when Hamas ‘soldiers’ came upon a trance music festival that they apparently hadn’t known was taking place, and proceeded to kidnap, rape, terrorize, and massacre hundreds of people — many of whom were on psychedelics at the time, which is truly painful to contemplate. 

It was a brutal juxtaposition: the peace/love/unity/respect ethos of the Tribe of Nova suddenly shattered by violence and hate. It was a collision of consciousness (or escapism) and desperation; a long-term dream and an immediate reality. Suddenly, all those innocent kids seemed naive — only, they weren’t naive. They were, in part at least, creating a different kind of sociality based on different modalities of mind and spirit. Sure, it was a party, but also a kind of exploration and expansion that, in some seemingly messianic future, might contribute to the healing of the world. Anyway, long-term change can always seem naive or utopian when confronted with immediate, brutal reality.

But in the long term, human beings are already so powerful that we’ll either grow up as a species, or we’ll go extinct. In dark times as well as bright ones, I still firmly believe that to be true.

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As I gear up for next week’s publication of my book of short stories, I’m mixing a bit more non-politics in with the politics. It was great talking about the absolute and relative — another iteration of the same dichotomy — with meditation teacher David Nichtern on his podcast “Creativity, Spirituality, and Making a Buck.” More book-related podcasts are coming soon. Next week, we’ll be celebrating the book’s publication with a free online launch party on Tuesday, December 5. And I’m busy planning the upcoming Adamah Meditation Retreat, which will happen December 24-29 in Connecticut.

Oh, and you can order the book here. As you may know, Amazon reviews matter a great deal to how the algorithm decides what to recommend, so if you feel inspired to leave one, I’d be grateful! Thanks for reading.