“I can’t make sense of this!”
Why this is a wall:
I read the following in a fantastic NYTimes article recently and it made me think of how precious and delicate the stuff is that we get from psychedelic journeys: “Epiphanies are real, but they’re fragile. They are a one-leafed seedling, pushing up through the crust of the ground, or a blind hatchling waiting, naked and alone, for its mother to return with a worm. They are easily crushed under foot or done in by harsh weather. If they’re not protected and nurtured, they will crumble and blow away in the wind, as though they never existed.” Right. I think it’s true that if we don’t integrate the epiphanies received in medicine, we will lose them. But I think we can also lose them if we try too hard.
Sometimes we try to protect and nurture our epiphanies by keeping them all simultaneously active. Like a juggler who keeps adding new and differently shaped/weighted objects, we struggle to keep our squirrely epiphanies in the air, moving in an arc we can predict and manage. But epiphanies aren’t balls—they have a life of their own. They move, expand, connect, and morph whenever we engage them. We might successfully name them, but we never really capture them. They don’t yield easily to linear thought, and they sure as hell don’t lend themselves to simple application in our day-to-day. This is why “making sense” of them is often the wrong inclination.
Some psychedelic experiences bring up deep existential questions, leaving us feeling unmoored or uncertain about reality. Working only cognitively on such issues—"from the neck up” as they say—can confound us because the insights we received in medicine aren’t necessarily rational. They may be metaphorical, visual, spiritual, embodied, spectral, cosmic, and/or magical. Especially for those of us logical positivists firmly anchored in Cartesian, Western, Enlightenment-based, scientistic rationalizations, the ineffability of the epiphanies received in medicine can shut down our typical sense-making apparatus. In those cases, the tendency to throw our hands up in cognitive defeat and perhaps reject the “weird stuff” is a kind of spiritual forfeit. It’s a big game we signed up for—don’t we wanna play?
I think we’re capable of holding big, mind-blowing visions alongside our pre-existing durable beliefs. We contain multitudes, and our brains and bodies and spirits (whatever those are!) are highly capable of dualities and multiplicities if we let ourselves wander into them. Some mysteries aren’t meant to be solved so much as they are invitations to explore. So don’t sweat the indefinable. Don’t try to capture it all in a spreadsheet. Have a look around and see what’s there, then let it be what it is. If this seems scary, remember that you can trust that you’ll still be you on the other side of it, and you can come back to the rational anytime. You have nothing to lose here.
Potential ladders:
Playing Without Committing. Existential crises are actually terrific opportunities to play. Sure, they’re serious and urgent and life-changing, but that’s all the more reason to approach them with the most open and playful parts of ourselves. We can do this when we ask gentle questions that allow us to poke around without committing to anything quite yet. Picture yourself shopping for new pants, at a cool store somewhere, grabbing different garments off the rack, and heading to the dressing room to try them on, one-by-one. Some will fit, some won’t. Some have features you really like, others you can’t stand. A few look ridiculous, but you may find a pair or two that make you feel fabulous. Here's a question that kinda works like pants shopping, one you can ask about the existential revelations you may have encountered in medicine: “I’m not saying I believe it yet, but what would I have to acknowledge, feel, or do differently if what I perceived in medicine is true?” Here you’re not accepting wholesale that the question or observation you’re entertaining is your new reality; you’re only playing with the possibility that it holds some morsel of truth for you. You’re trying it on for size, looking in the mirror, and asking, “Does it fit?” If it doesn’t, you’re under no compulsion to buy it. Another way of asking it is, “What would be required of me if this epiphany carries the weight of truth?” Play around with different prospects here, and be secure in the knowledge that no one is forcing you to accept anything that doesn’t work for you. The point is to try stuff on with that same sense of openness and exploration you feel when shopping.
Ritualizing your connection with insight. Where do the days go?! If we’re not intentional and perhaps a bit protective of our time, our waking hours can fly by with nothing but tasks in them. To derive the most meaning from our days, we sometimes have to pause the relentlessness and reconnect to the insights we receive. To do this well, we need ritual. Rituals are ceremonial actions that connect us to something important. They can be as grand as a coronation and as simple as how you brush your teeth. Whatever they are, to be meaningful, they have to be deliberate, symbolic, and repeatable. One way of handling the ineffability of our psychedelic journeys is to craft our own small rituals that stimulate a focused return to an insight we want to keep alive. We can do this by designing a daily or weekly practice of some sort that reconnects us with those notions or visions that have gravity for us. This could be lighting a candle while setting an intention, reading a meaningful poem or a short passage, meditating on a specific symbol from your journey, repeating a phrase that came to you as you pondered a big idea, or listening to a song that connects you to the insight you want to remember. It’s less important that you construct the perfect practice here (feel free to try a bunch until one feels right); what’s key is that you actually get into some sort of rhythm in ritualizing your attention. When you do that, you’ll likely find that you look forward to the ritual, that you crave the stillness, focus, and reverence it provides you, and perhaps relish the clarity it allows. And you’ll also be tapping into what humans have always done, which is to attach a ceremony to the things in life that define us. You’re one of us!
Digging into the lit. If the stuff you’re trying to make sense of is messing with your head, sometimes it’s good to get inside others’ heads to see how they sorted it all out. Exploring the philosophical, psychological, and/or spiritual frameworks others have devised to integrate their experience can help us navigate out own. Really smart people have spent big chunks of their lives devoted to asking big questions and searching far and wide for solid answers. Not all of them will speak to you, of course, but there are likely many who will. Rather than list the classics or supply some recent faves, it’s perhaps best to just go searching for yourself. Or ask those you trust to tell you which texts or authors most informed their explorations? Ask them why. What was it about those people or those books that made them so illuminating for you? What did they help you see and do? When you start hearing things that resonate for you, give ‘em a try. And if you want to cheat a little, go to an AI search engine and ask it to summarize the main observations, recommendations, and exercises recommended by a particular author or text. If the stuff the robot cranks out speaks to you, then get the text it references and dive in.