Why are psychedelics reemerging in the culture right now?

A guest post about a subject I can't stop thinking about

Hello! Today I’m testing out a guest post feature, this one from one of our community members, Kailey Brennan. I asked Kailey to expand on her thoughts after she left some thought-provoking comments in a thread on a Recovering Roundup post.

I’ve written more on psychedelics since this was published. You can find those pieces here, here, and here.

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Why are psychedelics reemerging in the culture right now?

by Kailey Brennan

Marcus Loke, Unsplash

Psychedelics, specifically psilocybin aka Magic Mushrooms, are having a hot moment in the culture right now and I’m not quite sure what to make of it. 

If you’ve been paying attention you’ll probably remember quiet stirrings starting a few years back. I remember reading a New Yorker article about Ayelet Waldman’s book A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life and thinking it was really brave and kind of subversive for a former federal public defender to talk openly about ingesting therapeutic microdoses of LSD to treat her plummeting mood, which had proven resistant to pharmaceutical intervention and was having a corrosive effect on her marriage and family life.

And now you’ve got Fantastic Fungi on Netflix and Michael Pollan’s massive tome How to Change Your Mind and a burgeoning conversation on using psilocybin to therapeutically enhance the treatment of mental health, post traumatic stress, and addiction. In 2019 psilocybin became decriminalized here in Denver where I live, making it the city’s lowest law enforcement priority. 

I’m super fascinated by this topic for lots of reasons. I’ve had a longstanding interest in healing, spirituality, and consciousness for close to two decades. I’m a practicing acupuncturist and herbalist, so I’m attuned to the zeitgeist when it comes to all kinds of wellness fads and trends—which psilocybin is being categorized as in some circles.

I’ve also felt a growing dissonance between the Instagram-inspired, sanitized presentation of the “healing journey” and what in real life is often a very messy, visceral, transgressive, paradoxical, idiosyncratic, expansive, and not-easily-categorized path for many people when they decide to embark on any kind of healing work and really wake up to this weird and mysterious business of being a human being. I’m also interested in what gets siphoned out and lost as the deeply human pull towards healing, self transcendence, and spirituality become increasingly shaped by economic incentives, sleek marketing, and the process of commodification. 

So I like to noodle on these topics, oftentimes while mindfully drinking my morning coffee and watching the sunrise as my husband likes to joke. And even though I really dig this stuff and I meditate and yada yada, and even attended a quirky alternative Buddhist-inspired college for my undergrad, that also doesn’t preclude me sometimes being “a peace and Zen loving asshole” as a family member recently told me. 

So one of the big questions for me lately is: Why are psychedelics making a big appearance in the culture right now? What about right now at this particular point in history is making it ripe for their reemergence? 

I’m currently on my second reading of Ram Dass’ fantastic biography Being Ram Dass. You may remember Ram Dass as a pioneering spiritual guru, former psychology professor, and researcher who, back when his name was Richard Alpert, got booted out of Harvard University for giving LSD to an undergraduate while he and Timothy Leary were spearheading research into the psychological and social uses of psychedelics. 

In his biography you get a sense of the stultifying social mores, widespread oppressiveness tolerated and upheld by society, sterile conventionality, and the all-around sense of claustrophobia that shaped and defined reality back then and which backlash against helped usher in the cultural and political upheaval of the 1960’s, as well as the growing interest in Eastern spirituality, psychedelic experiences, alternative lifestyles, and the desire of lots of folks to want to blow up their consciousness and experience themselves and their lives in an altogether radically different way. 

And what’s going on nowadays? You’ve got a burgeoning interest in psychedelics as we are dealing with deeply entrenched political polarization, surveillance capitalism, deepening economic inequality, racial injustice, the destruction of the natural world, and the very real threat posed to our existence by climate change and our consumptive patterns, as well as the need for urgent governmental action that should’ve started decades ago. 

Add to that: epidemics of loneliness and addiction. Constant connectivity and the inescapable influence of Big Tech trying to leverage our brain chemistry to work against us. Social media and what has become the exhausting rigmarole of self-reflective conversations it has inspired about how everyone is so over it already, but the disquieting sense that it’s too personally and professionally consequential to completely opt out of altogether. Material abundance but a scarcity of time and presence and depth and spaciousness. 

Oh and the fucking pandemic. And Putin. Reality feels all too real, the stakes are high, and if you’re trying to stay informed about everything going on in all corners of the world, it can feel like a completely sadomasochistic endeavor and a deep dive into existential despair. Psilocybin shows back up on the collective scene during a time of real widespread angst and a feeling that the wheels are coming off the bus altogether.

My sense is also that a big part of the deep appeal of psilocybin right now is the fact that we are consumed by the idea of the individual ego, especially here in the United States, and it’s grown so heavy, cramped, funky, and claustrophobic under the weight of this colossus of heavy burdens, fears, and expectations for many of us. Psilocybin offers an opportunity to strip the whole thing off, at least for a brief moment in time.  

Buddhism provided such an island of respite for me when I first encountered it in my teens because it extends an invitation to come into a healthy relationship with the ego; to hold it lightly and flexibly, to question the solidity we unquestioningly and unconsciously imbue it with, and to recognize the ground-level truth of interdependence—how what I call “I” could not exist without the sun in the sky and photosynthesis and plants and farmers in the fields who grow the food without which “I” could not exist without eating. Buddhism isn’t about slaying or eradicating or getting rid of the ego. It’s about peeling away our fused sense of identification with it, coming at it from a much more spacious and magnanimous perspective, questioning deeply and contemplating with curiosity how and why we become so attached to it and give it so much power and primacy in our lives. It provided an invitation to explore - Who am I, really? 

But in the United States we are enthralled to the individual ego and enshrine it as The Ultimate Thing.

We over-identify with it and take it to be who we really are. We give it solidity and continuity and narrative cohesiveness. Childhood and the socialization process instill the highly-valued attributes we most celebrate as a culture: productive, focused, hardworking, a sense of agency, competency, resiliency, grittiness, a sense of being self-possessed, individuated, individualized. We need it to be Instagram presentable. We mythologize it, idealize it, fasten it into a legacy. We give it a personal brand. We especially need it to measure up to our culture’s arbitrary definition of “success”.

Even if we understand that we contain multitudes, we place the stultifying expectation of one-dimensionality and cohesiveness on ourselves as we present this ego to the world, day after day after day. Fused with it, we unquestioning accept it as ultimate reality and we suffer for it deeply and pay a huge price. 

Psilocybin is so powerful because it allows you to see this centering, exalting, and fusing with the flat, limiting ego as an honest and well-intentioned mistake we all make that somehow ends up haunting us, making our lives feel like a cold, cynical, zero-sum game we’re playing with ourselves and other people. You’re offered a different vantage point, a more open expanse, where you can see how ego is a constructed patchwork of habituated thoughts and conditioned behavioral patterns and old stale ass narratives you’ve been telling yourself ad nauseam about who you are and how the world really is, while at the same time being completely alienated from the fact that you are life and the mystery and life and the mystery is living through you, as you, even as you pick your nose and drink your 7th can of LaCroix while you’re reading this article on the internet. 

No one can deny there’s tremendous therapeutic value in getting an opportunity to peak behind the curtain and see the fact that we are not simply this limited construction of the individual ego we take ourselves to be out in the world; that ultimately consciousness and who we really are is far deeper, wider, vaster, more mysterious, complex, multifaceted, and undeniably beautiful. 

Human minds do not come with built-in operating instructions, and life and living seems to have all these built in trip wires that can lead us to enfold back in and completely torture ourselves. The topic of the therapeutic potential for psilocybin to reduce real and pervasive human suffering deserves a deep, thoughtful, and nuanced treatment. And there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that humans have been messing around with psychedelics for ages in order to induce mystical and religious experiences. This as well deserves deep and thoughtful consideration. 

Back to Ram Dass. Ram Dass took many beautiful and inspiring trips and felt reverence and deep gratitude for the inner doorways psychedelics opened up for him. But all trips must eventually end and unfortunately you can’t twerk in the Astral Plane in perpetuity; you eventually have to come back down to Earth and clean the litter box. After the ecstasy there’s the laundry. 

Trying to stabilize or find consistent ground in an altered state is a losing game. Ultimately Ram Dass was a proponent of the path of disciplined practice (ew boring, right?) involving yoga, meditation, breathwork, chanting, acts of service, and beloved community as a way to integrate, stabilize, and deepen into the same kinds of expanded states of consciousness one can touch into on a psilocybin trip, which include feelings of oneness with the Universe, a deep sense of inner quiescence, and a vast, open-hearted presence of unconditional love. It can be easy to feel cynical about attributing this kind of potential to these practices as of late, especially as it seems like we’ve diluted the practice of yoga primarily to aspiring to have a Lululemon-clad ass you can bounce a quarter off of. 

In recent years one of the big criticisms of the mainstreaming of practices such as Buddhist mindfulness meditation (see: McMindfulness by Ronald E. Purser) and especially as they’ve been taught and disseminated in corporations is that the onus for more skillfully dealing with burnout/grinding stress/existential ennui is put back on the employee, making it an “individual problem”, and this helps to shield companies from criticism around their toxic and inequitable work environments/unreasonable demands for productivity/general bullshit. 

In a similar vein; will a wider acceptance of psilocybin function as a way to try to detach individual suffering from larger complex collective issues and cultural/societal forces that are corrosive to human well-being? Will it simply become an appealing way to “go within” and “enhance your own individual reality”, especially when we can’t seem to get our shit together in a constructive manner around the deeply entrenched, looming, seemingly endless and unsolvable issues in our country and beyond? 

And how is the current appeal of tripping out related to the pervasive influence of Big Tech, shunting us further into our own little silos and echo chambers? Is there some kind of perverse parallel process going on as Silicon Valley tries to seduce us into the augmented reality of the Metaverse? 

Is the appeal of psilocybin nowadays functioning as a doorway into the sacred, or an escape hatch out of an increasingly scary and overwhelming reality? 

Key to navigating this all seems to involve holding on to a big fat dose of discernment. Psilocybin disrobes the apparent solidity of the ego, and as a culture utterly enthralled to it, it does feel like there’s a medicinal impulse wrapped up in this whole thing; some kind pull towards healing and wholeness.

Who knows, maybe the reappearance of psilocybin at this moment in time is reality or the Ultimate playing games with us, reaching out and dropping breadcrumbs in an attempt to wake us up from the dream, talked about as “Lila’ or “the divine play” in Hinduism? I think Ram Dass could appreciate that perspective. 

Ego is a bad master and a slippery and dangerous thing to make your god. If you’ve got millions of followers on Tik-Tok, ego tells you you are top shit. If you come upon social embarrassment or feel like you are failing to live up to society’s (or your own) very rigid expectations, ego is a phantasmagoric nightmare. The open secret is that all of us experience differing flavors of both ends of the spectrum at various points throughout our lives. Somehow the key seems to be able to step back and hold the whole thing a little more lightly, compassionately, with grace. And what’s the most skillful, least harmful, and ultimately constructive way to facilitate this? We’ll see if our culture’s embrace of psilocybin will be able to offer a worthwhile take.  

Kailey Brennan is an acupuncturist, herbalist, and meditation instructor in Denver, Colorado. She’s always on the hunt for the perfect shade of nude lipstick and owns too many pairs of sensible footwear. You can find her on Instagram @gratitudeacupuncture and kaileybrennan.substack.com

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