The Frequency of Existential Meaning ($)

Psychedelics are the easy part of altered state therapy.

“Psilocybin can offer a means to reconnect to our true nature—our authentic self
—and thereby help find meaning in our lives.”
— Mary Cosimano, psychedelic therapy facilitator

Is Your Mind Healthy?

I’ve been experimenting with psilocybin. It’s been many years since I chemically altered my state. Since everyone is talking about psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, and few people are speaking with much insight, I felt I should continue exploring it directly.

The reason I say that there is little insightful conversation is because the people who are theorizing about the effects of psychedelics are not navigating altered states. Most practitioners of psychotherapy have no experience with induced states. The way you know this is by listening to their well-organized, rational thoughts.

You cannot understand altered states using well-organized, rational thoughts. That’s why they’re called “altered.” If they were well-organized and rational, then they would just be a different story or opinion, but altered states are far more than another point of view. From an organized point of view, these states appear psychopathic, but that only emphasizes how poorly they are understood.

Psychonauts know this, but psychonauts are not practitioners of psychotherapy and, at this rate, there is little reason for them to become such practitioners. You’re no more likely to learn of altered states from a therapist than you are to learn about science from the Pope.

Psychedelic states are considered psychopathic, and this is a problem. We are told that psychopathy is a condition that you either do or don’t have. People don’t understand induced psychopathy—which is what you get with psychedelics.

Therapists presume they are not psychopathic and avoid inducing psychopathic states in others. This is why dream work has never gained a following in psychotherapy: dreams are another altered state that logical thinkers cannot understand.

The naive, linear thinking that asserts you either have a healthy mind or you don’t, prevents a person from learning about themselves. The idea therapists are now exploring is that altered state experiences might restore your mental health.

This is not how our minds work. There is no such thing as a singular, healthy, mental state. Our mental state is a dynamic response to our physical and existential condition. Our mental health is a functioning organism whose effect depends on controlling all the individually unbalanced forces that both affect and compose it.

Rivers of Mind and Ecology of Life

Our minds are a river that runs within the banks of our world. There are obstacles and there is turbulence, and sometimes we get turned around. The “healthy mind” is the one that flows within its banks. It has waves and turbulence, and it is not lacking in strong forces. The healthy mind does not become stagnant, flood its banks, or dry up. A healthy mind also does not flow as one uniform, laminar, Mississipean current. Turbulence is normal and can appear as psychopathic.

There are various problems of mind, and there are various effects of psychedelics. Some psychedelics create turbulence, and others create calm. This has as much to do with the state of a person’s mind as it does with the chemistry of the psychedelic. We could say the same of our lives as we experience interpersonal turbulence, but psychedelics effect internal events of memory, perception, and response.

To think that an induced altered state is going to help anyone out of their particular mental state—be that flooded, parched, turbulent, or stagnant—is ignorant. It’s similar to the assumption that random tinkering with your car’s engine will improve its performance, or random behaviors will improve your marriage.

It’s ignorant to think that by controlling one’s mindset and immediate environment--the so-called set and setting—one can shape the therapeutic experience. Certain psychedelics may affect a person’s state of mind in a specific way, but to say this leads to certain results is only a conjecture. There must be a match between the influence you add, and the insights you need.

We can control the chemistry of a psychedelic, we cannot do the same for a person’s state of mind. Repeating the set and setting does not return a person to their previous mental state. Simply adding a psychedelic does not resolve anxiety, depression, or trauma. Psychedelics are not antibiotics, and unbalanced mental health is not a disease.

What psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy asserts, though not clearly, is that by pigeonholing a person according to some mental health diagnosis, and then identifying some psychedelic as having a regularizing effect, we can combine the two and let the chemical straighten out the mind. Only a person with limited experience with psychedelics and altered states would make such an assertion.

What one can do, and what those who presume to learn the therapeutic use of psychedelics should do, is to explore the different, changing territories of the mind—the different properties of our rivers of thought—and how these territories are affected by induced psychopathic states. And that’s why I’ve been experimenting with psilocybin.

Standard Psychotherapy is Factory Farming

There is no substitute for experience. Many of the failures of psychotherapy are due to the lack of it. Freud’s success stems from his introspection, and his failures from theories that he projected onto others.

Freud obscured these failures by claiming that his theories were based on observations, but his case reports were invented. He was no scientist, he was a fake. As a result, his inspirations and his follies are mixed together.

Psychology asserts that mind can be classified according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, a small book’s worth of categories. Actually, those who wrote the DSM never presumed that they were categorizing the mind, they were categorizing behaviors. The DSM does not make that clear, but it’s clearly stated by the authors of it.

It is typical of the shoddy science of psychotherapy that the differences between being and appearance are overlooked. Because of this confusion, tomorrow’s therapists are being trained to think that psychedelics can correct pathological behaviors. There is an ecology of mind that is nourished by many factors. In this regard, today’s psychotherapy is factory farming.

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