Tl;Dr

• modern society is facing a meaning crisis and has left a religious-sized nihilisti hole.

• Psychedelics may help fill this hole, but they are often co-opted by digital narcissism and toxic enterprises.

• Psychedelics aren’t the magic fix we’re hoping for.

  • Often they don’t help us transform our lives and can actually make our lives worse

• Real transformation requires years of inner work.

  • if supported by psychedelics cool, but psychs can’t be the main course

Everybody Worships

What do you worship? Psychedelics. Peak experiences. Fame. Success. Money

The new age spiritual communities aren’t much better than their money and clout-chasing counterparts — just that they’ve disguised the hunt a little better. A heuristic that I find particularly valuable is Tell me what you value above all else and I’ll tell you what your God is.

I heard in a video by the Center for Humane Technology recently that a survey found the number one dream job of young children these days is an influencer. The icons of the younger generations are those that amass the most followers on social media.

Even scarier, these influencers are trusted more than most reputable sources. The fabric of what’s true and what’s happening in the world is literally being warped by the power of algorithmic technologies like tik tok, twitter and google.

For many there is no god, but if you peer a little deeper under the hood you’ll find that there’s always a replacement for this absolute reality beyond all understanding. And not all substitutes are made equal.

Psychedelic Use Has been Captured by Digital Narcissism

We’re seeing tons narcissism, hedonism, and commercialism in the psychedelic sphere. Jamie Wheal points out Burning Man as the prime example saying that “there was an inflection point at burning man 3-4 years ago, where instead of interacting with this burning man art as psychedelic and ecstatic pieces to be moved by, they’re using these pieces as backdrops for their social media profiles” which sums up the cultural capture of psychedelic for virtue signaling purposes. It goes everywhere from Burning Man to Ayahuasca/Bufo ceremonies for the gram in the jungles of Peru and Latin America.

The 21st century has stripped the youth of all spirituality and left and gaping hole of religious magnitude in it’s wake. Psychedelics can give us access to these profoundly religious experiences, but how we interpret the meaning of these experiences afterwards is something that we’re all still grappling with. For some, the meaning is that we had the courage to dive into consciousness and we should post on tik tok to game some likes as a result. For others, it’s that they came face to face with Jesus. For others, it’s all a great mystery and there’s nothing to do and nowhere to go.

Others are left completely psychologically obliterated, not knowing what they got themselves into, left with #ItWasRogansIdea.

Social media is telling us that it’s cool to “hit my DMT pen this mornin.” like cool ass Yung Gravy. I’m not sure where these ideas are coming from but the lack of safety measures in place. Plus, don’t get me started on pseudo-shamanism.

Once again, Wheal says it nicely:

I don’t have the answers. What I’m proposing is that this meaning crisis is something that needs to be confronted.

The fact that psychedelics are possibly the most potent tools we’ve discovered to transcend our egoic patterns and limitations and for so many people they’re being co-opted by these even greater cultural tools of digital-narcissism and enterprises.

Now it’s just can I gain money, fame privilege, prestige by doing these psychedelic journeys and becoming someone who can lead others. Or what type of spiritual influencer can I become? 

Or can I start my very own medicine retreats where you can download the secrets of the universe from Bufo Alvarius, and I as the intermediary will receive a small $5,000 cut from each participant. If this ain’t cultural appropriation I don’t know what is.

😖 Symptoms of the Meaning Crisis

In America I’m witnessing firsthand all of the symptoms of the meaning crisis. Nearly every week at this point see another gun violence / mass-shooting incident in the news.

Just last week at the local target store I’ve went to my whole life there was a shooting scare, and yesterday there was another shooting scare at a high school 2 miles away. It terrifies me and makes me contemplate why all of this is happening. The only conclusion that feels plausible is that society has gone unmistakable insane. What we perceive as normal life has become a type of insanity shared by everyone around us.

Because we don’t have anything else to compare it to we’ve agreed that this is normal, when in reality it’s the furthest thing from it.

Not to mention the growing drug addiction and depression epidemic plaguing the USA and other European nations. I saw this youtube short the other day and don’t know the validity of it but it got me thinking.

What would a more sane way of life look like? I honestly don’t know.

Are Psychedelics Really Helping?

One of the books that completely shifted my approach to personal development was Recapture the Rapture by Jamie Wheal. In it, he talked about the fact that 3-5 psychedelic sessions with a depressed person can release a serious psychological load off them and change their life, whereas 33-300 sessions doesn’t change all that much and there’s a decreasing return on investment. It’s unclear whether these psychedelics are actually making us better people, or whether it’s just a continuous cascade of novel but fleeting awe-inspiring experiences.

What Does Real Transformation Require?

Jamie Wheal mentions in a podcast that he’s engaged with many, many people who have done 5-MeO-DMT and he hasn’t seen a single one meaningfully transform the structure of their self after that experience.

Which means, flocks of people are experiencing pure godhead, absolute infinity, the ultimate truth of the universe and no one really knows how to transform their life when they come down. It becomes one more ball to hang on the metaphorical christmas tree as Wheal likes to say. One more check on the spiritual bucket list.

I’ve been grappling with the validity and reductionism of developmental theories recently, but one thing I do know is that they seem to give a realistic picture of the difficulties of personal development. Transforming our self-structures takes years if not decades of arduous work. No amount of psychedelic-mystical interventions absolve us of the necessity of grueling inner work.

There’s a reason that it’s so foreign in our culture to leave society and engage in contemplation and meditation for months at a time — aka monasticism. There’s also a reason that these monastic traditions had so many checks and balances to accessing higher states of consciousness. Ultimate reality is nothing be messed with if you’re a noob to all this work (which I’d characterize myself as).

Conclusion

All in all, I argue that modern society is facing a meaning crisis and has left a religious-sized hole. Psychedelics can help fill this hole, but they are often co-opted by digital narcissism and enterprises. I question whether psychedelics are truly helping us transform our lives and suggest that real transformation requires years of inner work.