Welcome to the Psychedelic Renaissance pt.1
Psychedelic retreats are on the rise, and this is amazing news
Whole Blog Series
Welcome to the Psychedelic Renaissance pt.1 - This blog post was about the background of psychedelics in America and why I’m calling it a renaissance.
Welcome to the Psychedelic Renaissance pt.2 - This is my “trip report” where I go into great detail about my personal experiences and benefits.
Welcome to the Psychedelic Renaissance pt.3 - What makes Ceremonia special? Who should go? Why? How do you prepare?
Intro
I just got back from my first psychedelic retreat, so I want to tell you about it, and why we’re at the beginning of something truly amazing for humanity. The retreat I went to is Ceremonia Circle and this blog post is not a paid engagement. I am writing this article entirely for my own reasons—namely because I want to support Ceremonia and I sincerely believe the world will be a better place when there are more retreats like Ceremonia.
It is not hyperbolic to say that we are witnessing the birth of an entirely new movement in spirituality and healing. It’s difficult to find statistics on this topic, as there are no central monitoring authorities nationally or globally. However, several trends and benchmarks have been noted since around 2020, with bookings on the rise at established retreats as well as several brand new retreats opening in the last few years. The retreat-tracking website retreat.guru lists over 575 psychedelic retreats globally.
What is a “psychedelic retreat”?
For the uninitiated, the term psychedelic retreat might conjure all kinds of images, and indeed, within this container, there are many permutations of what it means. In general, though, a psychedelic retreat is an even that spans several days at a particular venue designed to create specific conditions (the “setting”) right for healing, spiritual experiences, insights, or whatever the retreat promises to focus on. The event takes places, generally, over several days—usually 3 to 7—during which time facilitators guide you through meditations, workshops, and of course, psychedelic ceremonies.
They are not so different from yoga and meditation retreats, where the days are filled with exercises, introspection, shared meals, and time outside. The key difference being the addition of psychedelic ceremonies or rituals.
The purpose is for visitors to heal, achieve enlightenment, and have deeply profound experiences. Now, this all may sound very boilerplate, but I’ll explain in greater depth what happens in part 2 of this blog series. For now, I need to finish setting the stage of the psychedelic renaissance.
Not your grandpa’s psychedelics
One of the ideas that might come to your mind is that of the beatnick and hippie counterculture movements of the 1960’s.
Turn on, tune in, drop out ~ Timothy Leary
Back then, it was very much the ethos of bucking the system and fighting the man. This movement was very much a rebellion, contemporaneous with the Vietnam War as well as the Cold War and the Space Race.
The hippie movement was ruthlessly crushed by Richard Nixon with is War on Drugs, which saw the criminalization of all psychedelics via the Controlled Substances Act of 1971, which classified all psychedelics as Schedule 1 drugs, meaning they represent absolutely no scientific or medical value, and only pose serious public health risk. We now know those assertions to be flat out lies. This act set American culture back fifty years. Research funding dried up, Timothy Leary was arrested, and we went into a psychedelic winter.
New Containers
When the American state decided that psychedelics were bad, it was not entirely an irrational decision. People who did these drugs tended to become anti-war and want to tell everyone else to fight the system, to break out of the repressive machine. Timothy Leary’s primary mistake, in my opinion, is that he did not try to operate within any existing container. Now, I’m not about to rant about how “society must have structure!” and appeal to the establishment and tradition like Jordan Peterson. At the same time, systems and structures are built by society for a reason. Here’s what I mean.
Religious Containers
America was founded on a few key principles, namely, religious freedom. Many psychedelic retreats now exist under this container. The retreat I went to is licensed as a religious institution in Denver, Colorado where psychedelics have been legalized and decriminalized. The psychedelic revolution of the 60’s made the mistake of totally ignoring this option, trying to operate entirely outside of the frameworks created by society for society. However, these substances, ceremonies, and temples were already protected by First Amendment rights. By thumbing their nose at the system, people like Timothy Leary doomed their efforts from the outset.
Clinical Containers
Many researchers and clinicians, going back into the 50’s, had been experimenting with MDMA, LSD, and other substances for clinical uses. Therapists had long identified MDMA as a “love potion” of sorts, able to help in couples therapy and other clinical needs. Nixon’s kibosh on the whole thing was overreactive, premature, and in my estimation, and act of pure evil. We could have continued work with psychedelics more than half a century ago, which could have prevented tens of thousands of suicides and ended needless suffering of millions with depression and anxiety. It is a historic irony, then, that DARPA, desperate for anything to help combat PTSD, was one of the first organizations to look at psychedelics again. The thaw began with concerted effort and awareness raising by folks such as Rick Strassman, author of DMT: The Spirit Molecule (2001) and DARPA’s 2019 investment to find new psychedelics. This created a thawing effect throughout the Department of Defense, including the VA, and has even made it into Joe Biden’s Executive Orders.
Sources for all this section here.
As we now have two maturing containers within which to explore psychedelics, as well as a legal thawing at the highest levels of state, we are primed and ready for a psychedelic explosion.
So, now we have two distinct avenues and containers for psychedelic retreats and therapy to exist in. But why do it in the first place? What’s the appeal?
What’s the benefit?
The health and wellness trends of today have us throwing around words like trauma and healing quite a lot. However, I’m going to introduce a new term: transformation.
People get all kinds of benefits from psychedelic retreats, including alleviation from grief and trauma, spiritual awakenings, and the cessation of many inexplicable maladies. No, I’m not about to sell you on magical healing and miracles or divine intervention, though some people certainly feel this way. What I will do, however, is just give you some of the immediate benefits I’ve personally felt:
Reconnected with my dad. I’ve had a frigid relationship with my dad for many years. My retreat helped me reconnect with him, remembering the good times and working through the pain of the bad.
Overcome burnout. My initial reason for going to the retreat was due to burnout, which literally feels like you’re dying slowly. Burnout is never caused by just one thing, it is anchored deep in your psychology and personal history.
Fully inhabit my body. I dance like crazy now. Before, it felt like my spirit was not fully inhabiting my skin, like my true self had retreated mostly into my head. Now, my hypochondria seems to be completely gone.
Mourn my mom. My mom died suddenly when I was 14 and we had not been well connected before then. I was able to revisit my childhood bedroom for a while and realize that I was the center of my mom’s world, and just feel how much she loved me, thirty years after the fact.
There’s a ton more that I gained from this experience, which I’ll unpack fully in part 2 of this blog series.
I’ve heard many people say that psychedelics are like “several decades of therapy in a few hours” and yeah, I can’t disagree with that assertion. I will also say that psychedelics can do things that therapy cannot. Other people in my cohort experienced a wide range of breakthroughs and empirical improvements to their quality of life.
So why use the word “transformation”?
I think this word is more accurate than just healing. Healing implies a return to a previous state of health, a backwards movement or a reestablishment of a status quo. Transformation is more about forward change and creating a new equilibrium. I am not the same person now who had decided to go on the retreat. Life comes at you, hard and fast, and we all have bruises and scars from the trip. Transformation is about integrating those experiences, and becoming something more, something stronger.
Healing is still an important part. Why do we want to “heal” in the first place? To feel better, to recover from sickness and injury. Spiritual transformation journeys almost always result in feeling better. In point of fact, many retreats refer to psychedelics as “medicine” though for legal reasons, they are technically sacraments. We believe that mushrooms and DMT and Ayahuasca are literal gifts from God (or the Divine, or Source) that exist here on Earth for our benefit. Contemplating why such things exist while under their influence is truly a remarkable experience.
If you know, you know. ;)
Why Renaissance?
I have been very deliberate about my use of the word renaissance. Literally, this word means “new birth” or “rebirth”—a new nascence. Indigenous people have been keeping shamanic medicine and sacred ceremonies alive for many thousands of years. Some of the oldest examples of psychedelic use in humans are ancient cave paintings. By and large, the rule of thumb is “Wherever psychedelics could be found, humans used them.” As far as we can tell, human cultures have been using psychedelics for at least eight thousand years.
Mushrooms were first launched into Western consciousness by Gordon Wasson in 1957, which was the first contact between Western curiosity and indigenous wisdom. The psychedelic revolution began not long after in the 1960’s with the counterculture movement. However, as stated above, Nixon put the kibosh on all that.
Today, however, scientific and spiritual consensus is undeniable: psychedelics are incredibly powerful with many uses. From treating depression and PTSD in clinical settings to provoking the most profound spiritual experiences that many people have ever experienced.
One thing that I’ve observed is that there tends to be some consensus and reverence amongst traditional indigenous shamans. These spirit medicines do seem to have a “mind of their own”—language which I know may alienate more rational readers. So let me express this in a more rigorous and scientifically grounded way:
Psychedelics and the Brain
As best we can tell, psychedelics seem to cause hyperconnectivity in the brain. This feature could explain all, if not most, of their effects and benefits. Nothing else, not even advanced meditation by the most enlightened monks, can achieve brain activation patterns like this.
The human brain has a lot of purposes and what I call its “operating system.” Most operating systems (like Windows, Linux, UNIX) have self-repair abilities. They want to be stable and maintain some level of operational homeostasis. The human brain, I believe, is no different. Carl Jung noted that the human mind and body stores “shocks to the system” (trauma) as “energy” that stays in the system until it is integrated and expressed. He said, quite succinctly, that this is the purpose of psychoanalysis—to fully integrate all our experiences (good and bad) and thus be transmuted into a more complete, whole entity. Furthermore, he (and many others) assert that the human mind and body want to return to a state of wholeness, it’s part of our operating system.
According to Jung, we all start off whole and complete, but starting with the trauma of birth, and everything else we experience in life, we become fragmented. Our Inner Child becomes frozen in trauma. In my case, my biggest childhood trauma was my parent’s divorce. A part of me remained frozen at about age 6 or 7, lost and scared and wondering why my mom and dad separated.
A part of our brain’s operating system is that it wants to heal, just like how a cut on your arm will naturally heal over time, so too will your brain. Time heals all wounds, as they say. What happens with psychedelics is that every corner of your brain is open to every other corner. Trauma and fragmentation are called compartmentalization whereby mental firewalls are created to section off experiences, memories, and parts of self that are too painful to deal with. This can include childhood parts, spiritual parts, and so many more. The hyperconnectivity is like defragmenting a hard drive. It brings all your separated parts back together and allows your brain to naturally heal itself at an extremely accelerated rate.
Now, this hyperconnectivity aspect is only one component of what psychedelics do. Another major part is connecting you with your body as well as your spiritual self. To the former, connection with the body, I suspect that the right ceremonial protocols makes use of the same effect as above. What I mean is that I suspect that hyperconnectivity within the brain, combined with the physical process of the ceremony, is the mechanism that is responsible for resituating the self fully in the body. If this part doesn’t make any sense, just wait until part 2.
As to the latter, reconnection with the spiritual self, I have no idea how or why it works. I have no idea why psilocybin has helped me commune with the Universe and experience the Divine. Perhaps it really is a gift from God? Perhaps God is always in our mind anyways? Maybe the hyperconnectivity just allows us to connect to the spiritual circuits that are always there? Maybe it turns them back on? I haven’t the foggiest idea so I won’t speculate further, but the data doesn’t lie. The vast majority of studies conducted on psychedelics show that the majority of participants experienced their most profound spiritual experience on these substances.
Now, the rationalists will sometimes say “Aha! See! This proves that spirituality is little more than a hallucination and serves no medicinal purpose! It’s nothing more than an evolutionary dividend!”
I won’t argue against such people, but what I will suggest is “Try it for yourself if you’re so certain!”
I once asked the Universe: “Is it all out there or in here?” The answer was: “What’s the difference?”
Reconstruction and Evolution
I have spoken and written extensively about the Nihilistic Crisis we are presently mired in. Following in the footsteps of many before me (Joseph Campbell, Seraphim Rose, Jordan Peterson), I have identified that nihilism is the symptom of the disintegration we are presently experiencing: the rise of secularism, the death of old religions and value structures, and the postmodernist deconstruction of everything to the point of trivial meaninglessness and intellectual one-upmanship. Anti-trans podcasters unironically say “Truth matters!” while disregarding mountains of scientific literature on the topic.
Scientific and rational inquiry, which was greatly accelerated by the invention of the Gutenberg printing press, started us down the inevitable process of deconstructing everything we thought we knew about the world. The pen is mightier than the sword, and over time, the pen has destroyed every foundation of society, from religion to monarchy. We now mostly live in secular liberal democracies, rather than religious monarchies. Patriarchy is rapidly going the way of the dinosaurs as well.
There are three generator functions that have forced us down this path:
Human Curiosity: We are insatiably curious as a species. We want to know for its own sake, and it is baked into our genes. We must dissect and understand everything.
Cognitive Dissonance: Our powerful brains evolved to use logic and reason, and also to detect when there are incongruencies in our belief systems. Cognitive dissonance compels us to reconcile mutually exclusive beliefs, which forced us to deconstruct superstitious belief systems.
Democratization of Information: Starting with the printing press, then newspaper, radio, television, internet, and now AI, rational inquiry and dissection of all beliefs was inevitable (see: curiosity)
The first two generator functions are part of human nature, and are thus totally immutable. When you combine curiosity with cognitive dissonance you must have intellectual evolution. Democratization of information via technology merely accelerates this trend.
Many people say we should just go back to the old ways. That we should all just go back to Jesus, which absolutely will work for some people. But to the rationalists and thinkers who find superstitious doctrine to be stifling, antiquated, and harmful, Christianity and other Big God religions will never satisfy. I agree with people like Peterson, Campbell, and Rose—that nihilism is a symptom of the destruction of these old foundations, and that we need something in place to serve the same function that the Big God religions have. I’m not saying that psychedelic churches will wholesale replace the desert religions, but I think they are a good place to start.
This is why I call it a psychedelic renaissance. We are all going through the pain and trauma of the Nihilistic Crisis, and we are preparing to be reborn, to go through a collective transmutation, a reconnection with meaning, life, and spirit. This is what one of my friends calls The Reenchantment with life. Not the final solution, but the beginning of a new phase of human social, spiritual, and intellectual development. With the impending rise of AI, we will have to look very closely at the salience of our own existence in the very near future.
Spiritual experiences are so powerful that they have coordinated empires, and we have systematically attempted to codify, capture, and repeat them. That’s what church is for, after all, to regularly get in touch with the divine presence of Jesus or God (at least for Christians). However, the reliability, consistency, and raw powerful of psychedelic ceremonies is undeniable. Between the legal frameworks as well as retreat systems being built, we are facing nothing short of a rational, systematic reconstruction and purification of spirituality. It is a new synthesis of ancient indigenous wisdom with modern rational inquiry.
Now, some people might find this synthesis to be distasteful.
From the rationalist side, you might be thinking “What is the instrumental utility of this? I don’t want to indulge in woo-woo superstition!” and likewise, from the purely spiritual side, you might be thinking “This is not mean to be studied and systematized and packaged up as product!”
I’m right there with both sides, and I am here to say that it is not an either-or, it is a yes-and. Yes, we can approach psychedelic as a powerful psychological medicine and as a conduit for spiritual connection. Yes, we can create and utilize institutions that can reliably and repeatedly create profound, life-changing spiritual experiences and we can nest them within the frameworks of secular liberal democracies and free market capitalism. Yes, we can approach these experiences with intense rational scrutiny and a sense of meaning, spirit, and Divinity. Yes, we can approach this with a Western mentality of utilitarianism and a perspective of indigenous wisdom and reverence.
Just as we are not simply rebuilding and regurgitating the Eleusinian Mysteries or the Ayahuasca ceremonies of the Shipibo tribe of the Amazon, we are compiling, transmuting, and evolving psychedelic medicines, shamanic rituals, and spiritual practices. We are experiencing a recombination and admixture of intellect and religion.
Long Term Impact
I could only speculate about the long term impact that this psychedelic renaissance will have on the world. But what I can do is tell you what I personally hope to see happen:
Above all, I’d like to see more people healed of their trauma. In my work on nihilism and intergenerational trauma, I have come to believe that hopelessness, despair, and the vicious cycle of trauma is the greatest threat to humanity. All the most vicious and destructive people in history have been deeply traumatized individuals. What if they (and their families, and their societies) had access to the profound healing that we do today through psychedelic ritual and clinical use? What if Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, and Xi Jingping all did Ayahuasca and psilocybin? What if Israelis and Palestinians did these same retreats? I honestly and sincerely believe that we can literally bring about an end to war with the help of these medicines. Individuals carry their pain and, without relief, end up projecting it outwards onto others.
Hurt people hurt people.
Even if a psychedelic-enhanced world doesn’t see the end of all war and healing of all trauma, I still believe that billions of people globally would feel better if we had more use of these medicines to integrate our experiences, recover from our shocks to the system and become healthier, happier, and more whole.
To that end, my hope is that you reading this will consider a psychedelic ceremony for yourself. You will know if you are not ready, and in a follow-up to this blog post, I will share infinitely more detail about my experience. That will be part 2. In part 3 of this series, I will explain what works, what doesn’t, what to look out for, and address some of the questions, controversies, and scandals around psychedelic retreats.
Secondly, I’d love to see a more spiritual world where more people know what their purpose is and experience the Divine. My first psychedelic experience shattered everything I thought I knew about existence and my place in the universe. That was four years ago. This psychedelic retreat was more powerful than that in many respects. The death of nihilism is not the pursuit of power, as Nietzsche suggested. Power and overcoming are a childish approach to the problem of life, a naive response to the Grand Struggle of existence. But now I’m getting ahead of myself…
Stick with me, and stay tuned for part 2.
Wow. What an article. Thank you, David. I feel so excited for your future as this new you. Thank you for spreading the message of psychedelic awakening.
I've long wanted to hear about your experiences with psychedelics, as you've hinted about them here and there in videos, and I'm very glad to hear that you've had some relief and therapeutic effects from them. I've personally received a lot of benefit from them and in fact partially realized that AI is going to be what it is and stopped putting up mental blocks out of fear that prevented me from understanding the significance of it for humanity during a psychedelic experience so the two subjects are intimately related for me.