Psychedelics and Transcendence

Most lead lives at worst so painful, at best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principle appetites of the soul.

- Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

The age where Aldous Huxley rose to prominence was a different time. Hippies, beatniks, and flower children flocked to Eastern wisdom in search of enlightenment. LSD filled the streets, offering spiritual experience in chemical form. Life down in the grit and muck of the working world was out, and transcending the lowly ego was in.

Psychology shared in this delight. Research during this time followed the same counter-culture zeitgeist: first the anti-psychiatry movement, then humanistic theory, transpersonal psychology, consciousness studies, Huxley’s “mind-at-large” and Maslow’s “peak experiences”. Now emerging from the sterile clinic, psychology was at the top of the pyramid, frowning down upon its past as a medical science. The doors of perception were open. If anyone was going to hold the door, it was psychology.

Of course, this sentiment was short-lived. Maybe it was Nixon and his war on drugs, or simply the older generations’ panic. Or maybe the high had simply worn off. In either case, psychology’s little experiment had to end: it was time to grow up and be a science again.

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After a long hiatus, transcendence has once again become mainstream. Every year new papers flood the journals: Psilocybin and Ketamine for depression, MDMA for PTSD; psychedelics not just for treatment, but spiritual transcendence. Patients are not just healed, but enlightened. In clinical trials, mystical experience is key. This is reflected in patient reports following the administration of Psilocybin:

Everything is swept up into a climactic epiphany of love as the universal essence and meaning of all things. The journey of spirit coming to itself, revealing to itself its own inner mystery, is nothing but the self-realization of love (My Experience as a Guide in the Johns Hopkins Psilocybin Research Project, MAPS).

Another patient reports a similar experience:

Once I was past the darkness, I began to feel an increasing feeling of peace and connectedness…An intense feeling of love and joy emanated from all over my body and I can’t imagine feeling any happier. I knew that the worries of everyday life were meaningless and that all that mattered were my connections with the wonderful people who are my family and friends (My Experience as a Guide in the Johns Hopkins Psilocybin Research Project, MAPS).

These anecdotal reports point towards a treatment that is transcendental. But what does this actually mean? To transcend—according to the Latin root word transcendere—is to rise above something, or taken more literally to climb over it. Let us stick to this image of “climbing over”. Patient reports after a psychedelic experience often embody this image: participants do not necessarily recover (from the Latin recuperare, a regaining or taking back), but instead climb over their pathology. But what happens to the initial distress? Where does it go?

Some psychedelic users claim to have confronted the root cause of their misery. During their trip they report going back to the source—that particular childhood trauma, painful divorce, or death in the family—and reckoning with it. We have no good reason to dismiss this claim; after all, it was Jung who pointed out that confrontation with the unconscious can arrive as a spontaneous irruption. So maybe—by bypassing the ego’s dominance—psychedelics can constellate the return of the repressed, leading to a confrontation with the forces below.

Yet we must be skeptical of the notion that confrontation and reckoning is the goal. To confront one’s traumas is mostly still a task of the heroic ego; to confront merely means to meet face-to-face. Ego meets Id—the “I” meets the “It”—consciousness stands across from the unconscious. In this state of newfound awareness, we think that because we have understood our problem’s origins, they will no longer bother us. We have climbed over. We have transcended. 

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In 1970, psychedelics were criminalized and largely disappeared from public life. The party was over. Where did all the transcended people go? The answer is back to work. Back to the hustle and bustle of the world, back down into life. Hippie became “yuppie”—the young urban professional, whose transcendence was merely a temporary illusion. Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water, says the old Zen proverb, in this case taken literally. Transcendence is not a replacement for life. “Enlightenment is naught to be attained, and he that gains it does not say he knows”, says Bodhidharma.

Problems do not disappear. Childhood trauma or adult despair lives on no matter how much we confront it, integrate it, or rise above it. Problems live on because they are complexes—tangles of a messy life that give our souls complexity. They might unravel to allow us to breathe, or change form altogether, transmuting into elements of personality and growth, but they still remain. The enlightened man still chops wood and carries water. Without this dirty work, the soul has no material. It prefers to swim in the muddied waters than climb out onto the sunny shore.

Let the history of psychedelics be a lesson: instantaneous transcendence, as mystical as it may seem, is also still an image of fantasy. Nobody is enlightened overnight. Enlightenment—if we are to assume such a thing even exists—arrives through the world, not above, around, or behind it. Without touching the world, there can be no transcendence. Jung put it best: “Space flights are merely an escape, a fleeing away from oneself, because it is easier to go to Mars or to the moon than it is to penetrate one’s own being (C. G. Jung and Hermann Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships, p. 102). Maybe we should put down the rocket ship, and return back to Earth.