Beliefs, mindsets, and meaning, in psychedelic integration
[This is a response to a Facebook post that explores placing psychedelic beliefs or âknowingsâ along a spectrum from testable to untestable. The author gives aliens, reincarnation, crystals, and collective consciousness as examples of hypothetically testable beliefs, and koans/poetry as untestable (like âafter enlightenment, chop wood, carry waterâ.) This is all presented in the context of helping people work with psychedelic experiences.
Iâll be asking if I can quote it in more detail, and for now hereâs my reply.]
These questions are quite near the core of the things I care about, in terms of gathering useful tools for helping folks work through psychedelic experiences. To start, I have some resources here, including a detailed presentation on trip-sitting and a reading list.
On the bigger questions of meaning and mindset, I find it important to consider the context that each individual is coming from. If someone has a background of belief in things that donât match up with observable reality, and theyâre also experiencing a reasonably high level of wellbeing and function in their day-to-day life â Iâm quite hesitant to mess with that. Thereâs a significant risk of tipping people into nihilistic despair, if a fragile belief system breaks without any other scaffolding in place. Thereâs something to be said for co-creative, intentional belief restructuring, and itâs not something to take on casually.
If someone doesnât have the desire, support, or capacity to work on installing more robust and flexible frameworks for collaborative meaning-making⊠Iâd recommend encouraging them to focus more on things at the personal level (self-compassion, self-trust, etc.) rather than the epistemological level, for the time being. (Of course, you canât control whether something destabilizing will come up in a psychedelic experience, much less in reality in general!) I do think that mindset-level work is deeply important in the long run, both for individuals and for the survival and thrival of humanity as a whole.Â
I take a practical approach to working with psychedelic experiences as metaphors, which I sometimes call âpragmatic mysticism.â As Box and Draper said, âall models are wrong, but some are useful.â When applied to psychedelic states:
âThe measure of a metaphor lies exclusively in its power to model a situation in such a way as to most frequently provoke the most appropriate response to stimulus. Period. If your tobacco addiction presents to you as a demon, and you choose to deal with it that way, awesome. For some people thatâs a good lens to use. For others it might be better to stick with the chemical feedback loop model.â Â
â Teafaerie, âTo Believe or Not to Believeâ
If someone has a psychedelic experience in which a Pleiadian angel whispers to them, âYou can forgive yourself even when thereâs nothing to forgive, and move forward with a sense of compassionate agencyâ or if their chakras get recombobulated in such a way that they feel like a fundamental belief in their own unworthiness has been dissolved â I count that as a win for the day.
Now, if the aliens are saying something thatâs rather more worrying, or if someoneâs belief system has already broken on contact with reality â then, yeah, Iâd say thatâs an opportunity for some mindset work.
David Chapman is the most coherent thinker I know, on these topics of mindset and meaning. See, for example âRumcakes and rainbowsâ and âA bridge to meta-rationality vs. civilizational collapseâ.
One bonus challenge for psychedelic preparation and integration is that these substances can be ânon-specific amplifiersâ of whatever you bring into the experience. Psychedelics can crank the pattern-matching dial up to 11, and some (like ayahuasca/DMT) seem to be especially prone to amplifying whatever mental system puts faces on things.Â
Say that someone goes into a trip with a belief system thatâs not particularly coherent. If weâre using nautical metaphors, it might be more like a haphazard collection of boards and bolts than a watertight boat.Â
Now, sometimes psychedelic experiences can be disorienting enough to capsize that raft, dashing it against some kind of paradoxical rocks. Other times, psychedelics can take the raft, strap on anti-grav rocket engines made of pure dream logic, and infuse the whole thing with a deep glowing viscerally-felt sense of Significance.Â
Thatâs when you can get the grandiose delusions of being a messiah/prophet/channel, like people who suddenly realize their mission in life is to preach the gospel of ancient Egyptian quantum transdimensional star-crystal encabulation.
What usually happens, gradually or abruptly, is that the glowing aura of Significance will fade from the raft, and the dream logic engines will sputter and give out. Or, the turbo-charged raft hits an iceberg of reality (which, even if you donât believe in it, doesnât go away). Then youâre back in the sea of meaninglessness, clinging onto a few waterlogged boards.Â
Now, what Iâd recommend aiming for, is using the transcendent, mystical, ecstatic experiences that psychedelics can catalyze, along with reasonable baseline-state reflection, to help build better self-sustaining meaning-making systems.Â
What does that look like? Partly, it involves using a kind of Neurathâs boat maneuver to replace rotten boards with solid ones, while youâre still at sea. It also involves noticing that some boat structures are better at catching meaning (like sails), and others are better at rational seaworthiness (like hulls), and building on systems that incorporate both. (Or, consider abandoning the ship metaphor and navigating fluidly across contexts like a gannet!)
Also, going back to the spectrum of testable to untestable in psychedelic knowingness⊠Iâm not sure that itâs the most useful categorization, for me. Many of the examples the post mentions as hypothetically testable are likely to be embedded in / emergent from ways of understanding the world that donât include a deep commitment to âtrying not to fool yourself." I suspect that, if pressed, most of these belief patterns will defend themselves from scrutiny like the increasingly invisible, intangible dragon in Carl Saganâs garage.Â
And on a different angle, there are some unfalsifiable beliefs that are deeply functional for interacting with the world. Humans seem to need some kind of story, some narrative threads to weave themselves into the tapestry of being. Love, hope, purpose, meaning â these seem not to come baked in to the universe, resist being dissected out of it, and yet seem to exist as needs / narratives with causal power.Â
I have more to say about this, in relation to my experiences around ayahuasca (and their aftermath) â and thatâs a story for another post.
(To give a very brief overview: I was hired to be a facilitator and research director at an ayahuasca center in Peru, and then fired for being too rational. I came to realize that Iâd absorbed some thought patterns that I found alarmingly non-rational, and I dumped a bunch of core beliefs in a panic, to stave off this memetic "infection.â Turned out that Iâd thrown out the baby with the bathwater, and had also purged beliefs like âitâs possible to experience meaning and purpose in the world.â I was in a quite depressed nihilistic state for a few months, and have been gradually putting together a more seaworthy vessel from the pieces.)
