Our Second Psychedelic Renaissance
Table of Contents:
The Second Psychedelic Renaissance—
“Turn on, Tune In, Drop Out.”
The Sacred Past
The Scientific Present
The Sacred-Scientific Future
Text (10 books)
Audio (5 collections of podcasts)
Video Playlist (40 videos)
Organizations & other resources (10 websites)
The Second Psychedelic Renaissance—
Abstract: “Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy is undergoing a second renaissance with renewed interest in treating mental ailments such as addiction and the fear of dying. Stanislov Grof, the godfather of this type of therapy, says, ‘potential significance of LSD & other psychedelics for psychiatry and psychology was comparable to the value of the microscope for biology or the telescope has for astronomy.’ Now a new generation of scientists are continuing to test psychedelics’ value for not just the ‘sick,’ but also the healthy adult.”
In what would become a prelude to the infamous “Summer of Love,” the Human Be-In event of January 1967 has largely been forgotten by mainstream history books. In more esoteric circles, the event is known for introducing the term ‘psychedelics’ to regular Americans. The etymology of the word ‘psychedelic' comes from ancient Greek meaning “mind-manifesting” or “soul visible.”
The Human Be-In event was also the setting for Timothy Leary’s famous challenge to the attendees: “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out.” Leary’s saying would become the scapegoat reason for politicians to clamp down on the incredibly promising psychedelic research in neuroscience that had been taking shape over the preceding decades. Cultural pearl clutching out of fear of uncertainty about chemical compounds influencing the brain had reached fever pitch, thus tipping political fervor to demonization and making them illegal. Even though, unbeknown to most of the general public, the same compounds that were being associated with a growing tide of young people with anti-war values were used in thousands of clinical brain science studies with quite incredible results. “More than 40,000 patients were administered LSD alongside therapy between 1950 and 1965, and more than one thousand scientific papers were published.”
Did you know that??
Try to imagine what 1967 was like. The Vietnam war was in full swing, along with its opposition. A stone's throw away from where the Human Be-In event took place, the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco was the epicenter of the late 1960s counter culture - aka hippies. Those crazed and ideological young kids upsetting the regular social order of 1950s America by being interested in blasphemous topics like “personal empowerment, cultural and political decentralization, communal living, ecological awareness, higher consciousness (with the aid of psychedelic drugs), acceptance of illicit psychedelics use, and radical liberal political consciousness.”
Leary would explain in his 1983 autobiography Flashbacks what he was really trying to get at with his often-misconstrued statement:
"Turn on" meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers engaging them. Drugs were one way to accomplish this end. "Tune in" meant interacting harmoniously with the world around you—externalize, materialize, express your new internal perspectives. "Drop out" suggested an active, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments. "Drop Out" meant self-reliance, a discovery of one's singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change. Unhappily, my explanations of this sequence of personal development are often misinterpreted to mean "Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity."
Regardless of Leary’s intentions, the death knell of the first psychedelic renaissance was struck. An entire generation of critical research, bordering on two, was lost from apprehension of the “bad trip” boogeymen and other fear-mongering reasons not based on science.
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The Sacred Past
The Tassili n'Ajjer national park in southeast Algeria is home to ancient rock art carvings (7,000 - 9,000 years old) that point to a lengthy, deep relationship between humans and psychedelic mushrooms, in what was most likely a ritualistic ceremony to ingest a sacrament for mind-altering experiences. The ancient artists must have thought of these mushrooms’ importance enough to carve depictions of them and their users into rock for future generations. Rock art is the first permanent form of visual communication known to mankind. The art in itself can only be described as, and I hate to be cliche: “trippy.”
The author of the paper “The Oldest Representations of Hallucinogenic Mushrooms in the World,” Giorgio Samorini, says that these rock art carvings are particularly interesting as they depict not just people holding mushrooms but also the mind being influenced by the mushrooms.
“One of the most important scenes is to be found in the Tin-Tazarift rock art site, at Tassili…Each dancer holds a mushroom-like object in the right hand and, even more surprising, two parallel lines come out of this object to reach the central part of the head of the dancer, the area of the roots of the two horns. This double line could signify an indirect association or non-material fluid passing from the object held in the right hand and the mind. This interpretation would coincide with the mushroom interpretation if we bear in mind the universal mental value induced by hallucinogenic mushrooms and vegetals, which is often of a mystical and spiritual nature. It would seem that these lines - in themselves an ideogram which represents something non-material in ancient art - represent the effect that the mushroom has on the human mind.”
Ritual dancing was not the only way the rock art carvings depicted mushrooms. An affinity with animals, especially of the four-legged bovine kind, are clear in other examples. It points to a symbiotic relationship between ancient humans constantly following large herds of animals, and the mushrooms that grow on the dung of these animals.
“This specific ecological phenomenon cannot but have been taken into account with regard to the sacramental use of psychotropic mushrooms, leading to the creation of mystico-religious relations between the mushroom and the animal which produces its natural habitat. Furthermore, the dung left by herds of quadrupeds were important clues for prehistoric hunters on the lookout for game, and the deepening of such scatological knowledge probably goes back to the paleolithic period (the long period of the hunter of large game). Thus we have a further argument in favor of the version of events that would have it that there have been mythical associations, with religious interpretations, on different occasions, between the (sacred) animal and the hallucinogenic mushroom.”
The urge to transcend self-conscious selfhood is, as Bertrand Russell put it in The Doors of Perception, a “principal appetite of the soul.” From betel petals to cannabis, from san pedro cactus to the poppy, the ancients used the natural ingredients of their environment in a sacred way to expand their own consciousness.
Every human culture since prehistory has had experience with mind-altering substances and could be one of the earliest indicators of religions being formed. Elisa Guerra-Doce, a Spanish archeologist who studies the use of psychoactive substances in ancient cultures, says, “psychoactive plants were woven deeply into belief systems and spiritual practices in every corner of the globe. There are certain scholars who believe that the idea of religion itself emerges from the use of psychoactive plants around the world...We find drugs in tombs, in ceremonial places—always connected with ritual activity.”
I want to drive home the point that for ancient cultures taking psychoactive substances was revered and respected, as one of the most sacred and influential experiences of one’s life. It was the ancient way of seeing behind the curtain of reality. Even more important was to journey back to this existence, hopefully more capable of handling regular life with knowledge gained from the “other side.” In addition to personally journeying, the collective was also influenced by integrating the experience(s) with others in your community who have also gone through this rite of passage.
To read the rest of the essay, go to either the Substack or Medium link.
Substack: https://eclecticspacewalk.substack.com/p/eclectic-spacewalk-10-the-second