I’m on my phone (ack!) and intended to reply to both Jules and Dylan. ….Thank you both for this thoughtful and heart-filled discussion! Someone I am very close to recently recalled that during a ‘recreational’ LSD trip that occurred several years ago, he’d had an experience of “remembering” having been sexually abused as a child. It felt vivid and real. He does not know if this was an actual memory or was empathetic identification w me, because I myself was sexually abused when young—and as I said his emotional identification w me is strong.


Unfortunately we in the West have no tradition, community, or consistent cosmology to go on to make sense of the apparent reality of psychedelic experience. Divorced from community, from community’s connection to and reliance on Earth, we “psychonauts” can be like children blowing mental soap bubbles and trying to ride them to Neverland. Fortunately, as Dylan says, we still have our bodies, our ability to place feet in the earth, things we can trust in their simplicity. That’s what I’m grateful for. Psychedelics won’t save us. I hope the “movement” at large learns this lesson well in order to respectfully gain the help that psychedelics can indeed offer.