Psychedelic Integration, part 3 - Knowing less, not more

DISCLAIMER - Psychedelics are still largely illegal in the United States. I am not a medical doctor and cannot recommend any types of medication. This post is not encouraging anyone to engage in illegal activities or consume illicit substances, and I cannot provide the substances themselves or any help in obtaining them. The decision to try such substances should only be made with careful consideration and in consultation with your physician, as there can be an array of complications including negative interactions with other psychotropic medications. But if you are considering using these substances in your own healing work, then you should have scientifically accurate information about them, and about how to get the most from these types of experiences.

Before we dig into integration any more, I want to make an important part of my perspective explicit - if you’re doing psychedelics (or any other personal growth path) right, then you will come away knowing less, not more.

I’ll say that again. If you’re doing psychedelics right, then you will come away knowing less rather than more.

What do I mean by this? Surely you’re pursuing this path because you want to learn new things about yourself, right? To become more clear on the direction and intent of your life? To get clearer on all those hidden nooks and crannies of yourself? Of course, and chances are you will come away with all sorts of insights. That is, of course, very valuable, and not to be discounted.

But the real change happens in the growing comfort with NOT-knowing. Truth time here - all your concepts, all your dearly-held beliefs about yourself and others and the world at large, they’re all just illusions. They’re all chimera that help you organize yourself and the world into perceptible forms, but they don’t have much substance beyond that. Many of them are really helpful illusions, especially the shared ones that help us move through the social worlds that we all inhabit. But they’re still illusions. And the real growth, especially the spiritual growth, comes from being able to let go of the illusions and just see the messy formless reality of things as they are in this moment.

The forms we project onto the world become so deeply embedded in our minds that they serve to shape our very perception of reality. Once we are wedded to particular ideas about the world’s forms, we see everything in terms of those ideas. (see my post about narratives for more). And indeed, this is a good thing! It’s part of how the brain operates so efficiently, by using these base-level assumptions about reality to be able to quickly suss up situations and move through them. As a way of moving through day-to-day life, perceiving self and the world as undifferentiated, formless mass isn’t very conducive to survival.

But there are also times when we want to step out of our habitual perceptions, dissolve our ideas about reality, and make space to see ourselves and our worlds in new ways. This need is why meditation practices are so immensely useful - you are regularly practicing stepping outside of your conceptual mind and seeing the world as it is, rather than as your concepts have conditioned you to see it. And in often coming back to that space you are giving your concepts a chance to evolve in response to deep reality, rather than just allowing your old conceptual frameworks to become more and more rigid and self-referential (and indeed, in our modern world, to then shape reality in accordance with them rather than the other way around).

This is the effect psychedelics have as well, but on overdrive. Which is where both their power and much of their danger comes from. In this spirit, a trick of these big growth paths, and especially of psychedelic journeying, is therefore to take your experience seriously, without taking it as gospel. It can be really tempting to treat your experience as “now I’m REALLY experiencing reality!” 

But psychedelic journeys, and the perceptions experienced in them, are as much chimera as all other perceptions. Like dreams, they can tell you a lot about yourself, but they tend to conform to and follow deep and often unconscious psychic structures, often relics of how you learned to approach the world in early childhood, encoded in implicit body memory. And THAT means that, like all your other concepts, they should not be taken as truth, but as a pattern in the sand that can tell you something about the shape of the earth beneath it.

If you haven’t experienced this, then I imagine this post might sound like gibberish. And that’s okay. Just file it away, and keep it in mind as you proceed on your path. Maybe it will speak to you at some point. Or maybe not. Regardless, I wish you luck on your path, and please reach out if you need support around these processes!