Salt, Acid and Light

Why psychedelics change everything (and nothing)

Three interesting studies and articles in the news this week, first from Cornell psychiatrist reflecting on psychedelics without the trippy shit. And another from Slate Star Codex psychiatrist Scott Alexander exploring anti-depressant placebo effects of ketamine under anesthesia. Last on risk mitigation retweeted by Michael Pollan from Vox.

These and a whole slew of others are generally reckoning with the other side of the psychedelic hype cycle–namely, what exactly is it we think these wonder drugs are good for, who are they good for, for how long, and to what eventual end?

Making sense of it all can be a little confusing sometimes. Constantly reported hockey stick redemption tales from every trial and study. Pretty muddled DIY control groups cavorting in the wild.

***

A few years ago I was guiding one of our Flow Genome Project leadership courses in the canyons of Utah, and a group of students missed a key trail turnoff and got way off route.

By the time I’d caught up and turned ‘em around, they were in for an extra 10-12 miles of hot desert hiking.

We didn’t make it to our planned camp that night, and instead slept up on the slickrock of the canyon rim. Thirsty and bone-tired.

Next morning we descended into the giant canyon and took a layover day by the creek and cottonwoods to recover.

But despite plenty of water to rehydrate, by afternoon of that next day, the lights still hadn’t switched on in everyone’s eyes. That’s when I realized “oh, they got so dehydrated yesterday they must’ve tanked their electrolyte balance.”

So we rummaged in the spice kits and found a salt shaker, went around grinding sea salt into everyone’s cupped palms and told them to lick ‘em clean.

Pony at the salt lick

Blink! Plink! Wink! Their lights came back online. Everyone’s cognitive function and muscle coordination restored. We were back in action. No more thousand-yard stares.

Smiles, laughter and conversation. A great trip.

So the next year we made sure to pack LMNT electrolyte packets for everyone. (a staple of podcaster promos, right up there with Athletic Greens). Folks used them every day to add to their flasks like Gatorade. It covered the taste of the treated water and made everyone feel like they had a secret performance hack.

But on the drive back from the trailhead I noticed something: I couldn’t take my Oura ring off to recharge it. My knuckles seemed way too swollen to budge. “Huh! “ I thought. “All that rock climbing and rope work must’ve really beat up my hands more than I realized. Guess it’ll take a few days to recover.”

Then the next year it happened again. Coming off the course, my hands felt tight and I couldn’t take off my wedding ring. One student had remarked that her ankles seemed unusually swollen. We had a doctor on that course, and he probed her legs and grew concerned. “This amount of edema could indicate a cardiac or pulmonary weakening, you should really get this checked out when you get home.”

By this point though, we were beginning to gather enough data to spot the trendline. It wasn’t my hands or that student’s heart that was at issue. It was those super salty electrolyte packets! (we now use Liquid IV and find them much better balanced)

We had veered from one season where folks could barely function without enough salt, to finding ourselves distinctly out of whack from having too much of it.

And that’s kind of where we are with psychedelics these days.

But rather than sodium, you could argue that the missing ingredient in our Late Stage Everything consumer lifestyles is Awe. Mystery. Wonder.

We stopped believing in traditions, institutions and denominations. We celebrated that God was dead and elevated everything to the Almighty Cult of Me.

In this disenchanted world of bits, bytes and stuff we had nothing to inspire us but our own reflections. It’s unsurprising, that the light kind of went out in our eyes.

That’s how we ended up with so many Diseases of Despair. When all we have are our bank accounts and our newsfeeds to tell us how we’re doing, it’s understandable some of us have given up the (Holy) Ghost.

But just one lick of the magic potions floating around these days and BLAM! Effortless initiation into the Mysto. Capital M “More” as far as the third eye can see.

Some abiding sense, as Eden Phillipots remarked (not Yeats, as it’s often #inspo’d)

“the world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper!”

The lights come back on. Just. Like. That.

Clearly though, that’s not the whole story, or we’d be in a very different spot in “the psychedelic renaissance” than the one we find ourselves in. We’d be in a very different spot as a community of nations, for that matter.

After all, if psychedelic benefits extended linearly from the studies we’ve been reading lately, then by all accounts, baby boomer hippies would be Galactic Time Lords by now.

If three sessions of MDMA therapy can cure everything from depression to PTSD, why aren’t thirty-three sessions turning that Cat in the Hat Raver into a Bodhisattva?

Because there’s a dark underbelly to the groundbreaking research that’s been pouring out of places like Johns Hopkins and Imperial College over the last decade. Beyond the truly astonishing statistics and accounts of complete remission of depression and PTSD symptoms in just a few sessions are the quieter, sometimes desperate queries from patients six months later.

And six months after that. Once the all-too-real limitations of their flawed world and selves return. Back to the bottom of the slide, only this time, there’s no going back to their old games.

Old-timey mystics used to call that the “Dark Night of the Soul”—the hair ball period after you’ve seen the light, and then had it unceremoniously whisked away. It’s always darkest (and coldest) just before the dawn. Sometimes, that next sunrise takes a lot longer to arrive than we hoped.

Which begs the broader question: How transformative can entheogens, or “sacred substances,” really be? And are we using them right?

This is a real issue. Arguably, it is the issue when it comes to appropriate use of psychedelic substances. Can we ever, as scholar Huston Smith once mused, “transform our passing illuminations into abiding light?”

As asymmetrically positive as initial experiences can be (especially in structured, therapeutic settings), there appears to be an equal and opposite asymmetrical drop-off in benefit to subsequent efforts.

That’s where that backpacking salt analogy sheds some light. Too little and we suffer from an Awe deficit. Too much and we simply become awful.

But those first licks of psychedelic salt that are so revelatory and uplifting—i.e., “I don’t have to live a life of suburban conformity!” or “I am worthy of love!”—can quickly become existentially overwhelming.

Once I’ve had my Eureka experience, I realize that all of that Awe, Mystery, and Wonder we’ve been missing so acutely still irreducibly contains the human condition within it.

Welcome to the Brother-Sisterhood of the Screaming Abyss. There’s a good reason why most never peer over the Edge. Sometimes More isn’t always Better. It’s just More. A lot more.

***

Another way you can think of it is the Pareto principle gone wrong.

If the first 20 percent of my experience of cathartic healing delivers 80 percent of the whizbang insights and breakthroughs, I am going to rationally conclude, “Holy shit! This is the most game-changing thing ever. I need to clear the decks and dedicate my life to this transformative practice—at this rate, I’ll be enlightened in no time!”

Except that’s rarely how it goes. Pareto twists on us, and we’re now facing the disappointing reality that the remaining 80 percent of our time, money, and effort will be dedicated to gleaning only 20 percent more growth and integration.

And that can take a lot of frustrated searching to figure out.

The principle applies to ecstatic techniques of any stripe—psychedelics, group work, breath work, body work, tantra, music: succumb to the irrational exuberance of your initial hits of healing, and you can lose yourself. We can become addicted to the states without ever raising our stage.

We’re familiar with the overprescription of antibiotics and how it’s creating super bugs. The same can be said of excessive and unstructured use of psychedelics. When they’re used for everything from therapy to biohack to weekend fun, we can end up overprescribing them too.

Only in this case, we don’t get superbugs coming back to plague us, we get superegos.

The very medicine intended to get rid of our selfish attachments can actually create even more virulent versions of the selves we were so desperate to transcend in the first place.

Not swollen hands and hypertension as we experienced in the desert. Swollen egos and magical thinking instead.

The technical term for this is what Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa called “spiritual materialism”—often, our practices can become a source of pride that calcifies our egos even more. Instagram shamans. Venture capitalists “called in” to disrupt the psychedelic therapy space. Preening yogis who care more about how their butts look in leggings than their adherence to any eight-limbed path. Self-appointed mystics convinced their “downloads” hold the keys to unlocking Ancient Egypt or Atlantis.

This is the downside of Oliver Sacks’s observation that “drugs offer a shortcut; they promise transcendence on demand.” No need to practice Vipassana or pranayama for years. No prerequisite to cultivate ethics and right-livelihood ahead of time.

“Buy the ticket, take the ride,” as Hunter Thompson said. Millions of people are heeding that advice. It’s not surprising that with such inconsistent preparation and repeat visits to the cosmic carnival, some of those roller coasters go off the rails.

***

Our current relationships to “entheogens” or substances used with sacramental intent are erratic and without precedent.

Today, you can order the strongest psychoactives ever discovered and have them delivered two-day priority to your front door. Ayahuasca tourists flock to the Amazon. Twentysomething kids puff DMT (one of the most powerful and disorienting drugs out there) at EDM shows, and Silicon Valley CEOs smoke Sonoran toad venom as one more merit badge for the “tech-titan who has experienced everything!”

Hunter Biden’s laptop is somewhere in the 11th dimension (we presume the toad ate it, along with Evander Holyfield’s right earlobe)

This is not normal. It’s like breaking the sticks off bottle rockets and still hoping they’ll go where you point them. Never have we combined such unstructured and open access to such powerful tools in all of human history, anywhere, ever. The medical and recreational use models aren’t up to the job of guiding us safely and ethically through this complex terrain.

Maybe the simple lesson of electrolytes can help us understand how both things can be true at the same time:

These compounds change everything (when bringing us up from an Awe deficit to baseline).

These compounds change nothing (when going from baseline to excess.)

Bruce Lee famously said “I don’t fear the man who has practiced a thousand kicks one time. I fear the man who has practiced one kick a thousand times.”

We might adapt that maxim for the psychedelic renaissance:

“I do not trust the man who has taken twenty trips in this year. I trust the man who has taken one trip every year, for twenty years…”

As we hope to soar angelic, our “pinch of psychedelic” might best be taken with a pinch of salt.

And if you enjoyed this feel free to check out Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God Sex and Death in a World That’s Lost Its Mind for more on the state of the world, neuroanthropology and ethical culture building…