Dr Samuel Lee, a 44-year-old ‘spiritual psychiatrist’ with two million social media followers, has been charged with second-degree-felony manslaughter in Miami for the death of Tina Sodhi, a 51-year-old wellness entrepreneur who died at a psychedelic retreat facilitated by Dr Lee. He faces a jury trial in October, and if convicted could face a maximum of 15 years in prison. He denies the charges.

The three-day retreat took place at Sabia Wellness House in Miami, with Ms Sodhi and another client each paying $2000 for the retreat. They were given something called the ‘Heart Protocol’ which, according to podcasts featuring Dr Lee, typically includes phenibut, MDMA, a microdose of psilocybin (although in this instance Sodhi seems to have been given DMT) and two ketamine injections.

According to Miami police reports, Detective Bryan Gonzalez arrived at the house at 8.44am on February 10th 2025, in response to an emergency call, to find Dr Lee giving Sodhi CPR in a sauna. Ms Sodhi was pronounced dead at 8.52. Dr Lee told police he was ‘a licensed doctor and an ‘Elder of the Eternal Life tribe’ and that the Heart Protocol was ‘a sacred sacrament of the church and not performed under his medical license’.

The Miami-Dade Medical Examiner’s Office ruled in July 2025 that the cause of death was hyponatremic dehydration due to confinement in a sauna and use of MDMA and ketamine in combination with a parasite cleanse (ZenCleanz) which Dr Lee advised Ms Sodhi to do in the days before receiving the Heart Protocol. The toxicology report showed Sodhi had MDMA, ketamine and DMT in her system.

Dr Alberto Augsten, a clinical toxicologist, told Miami police that MDMA is often associated with dehydration and cardiovascular stress, and that the parasite cleanse and sauna compounded the risks. Dr Augsten advised the police that, ‘to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty, the actions taken by [Dr Lee] reflect an extreme and unjustifiable deviation from accepted safety and clinical practices’.

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Dr Lee told his Eternal Life tribe this weekend that Tina Sodhi fell asleep in the sauna ‘12-24 hours after the ceremony’, and ‘transitioned’ with ‘a smile on her face’. He said he had left the house for a meeting, and when he came back he was called upstairs to the sauna to give CPR. He added:

My belief is she decided to transition…If I was going to transition, I would leave after a Heart Protocol. Why? You’re already there. You are home….My conscience is super clear.

Tina Sodhi was an Indian immigrant to the US and a former private equity worker who, in 2009, lost her job and turned to breathwork to cope with depression. She founded a Miami wellness company called Art of Breathing. A friend says:

This woman was a ball of light. The type where her smile makes you feel safe and her nervous system is medicine. So smart, fun, kind, caring. I just can’t compute that this happened to her.

Ms Sodhi’s death is not the first recorded instance of harm through Dr Lee’s facilitation of the Heart Protocol. Another medical professional reported him to the Texas Medical Board in September 2025 when a client became manic and was hospitalized, reportedly after receiving the protocol from Dr Lee at the AWKN Ranch / Within Center in Austin, Texas, where Dr Lee was briefly medical director. There was no response from the Texas Medical Board to this complaint - it only temporarily suspended Dr Lee’s license this May after he had been charged by the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office. The Texas Medical Board ruled that Lee’s ‘continued practice of medicine poses a continuing threat to the public welfare’. Dr Lee did not respond to emails and David Naylor, the founder of AWKN Ranch, did not comment on the 2025 medical board complaint.

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Another client received the Heart Protocol at a gathering in February 2024, facilitated by Dr Lee and organized by David Naylor. The client describes it as ‘the worst-ever facilitated ceremony of my life.’ Lee did not respond to emails and Naylor did not comment.

Dr Lee, the son of a Korean pastor, was previously a psychiatrist working at Kaiser Permanente in Los Angeles. During the pandemic, he became an underground psychedelic facilitator, a conspirituality influencer with millions of social media followers, and a prophet to a 4000-strong online paid community called the Eternal Life tribe.

His devoted followers were unfazed by the news that their leader had been charged with manslaughter for the death of a client. Social media posts by followers have included outpourings of love for Dr Lee, prayers for his protection from the forces of darkness, and speculations that Tina Sodhi’s soul chose to die.

This story raises some important questions for the psychedelic community. Why do some medical professionals working with psychedelics evolve into guru-figures? Should psychedelic retreats offer access to saunas and sweatlodges? What are the risks of ‘multistacking’ drugs? Why do wealthy, educated people pay thousands of dollars to underground facilitators, sometimes to take unidentified substances? And will Dr Lee be that very rare case - a psychedelic facilitator who causes harm and faces legal consequences?

After the paywall, the origins of Dr Lee and the Heart Protocol, how to be a guru in the digital and AI age, and what is likely to happen.

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A very big day for the young psychedelic industry yesterday, with news that Eli Lilly, the world’s biggest pharmaceutical company, is paying $3.8 billion for psychedelic developer AtaiBeckley, which is developing 5meoDMT, DMT and MDMA treatments for mental illness. This follows earlier billion-plus acquisitions of psychedelic drug candidates by AbbiVie and Otsuka. Meanwhile, one of the best-known, best-paid facilitators in the underground, Dr Samuel Lee, got charged with manslaughter this week when one of his customers died after taking ‘the heart protocol’. Her name was Tina Sodhi, and friends tell me she was a really lovely person. I wrote about Dr Lee last year, and will write about him again, probably next Friday. But today, I’m continuing with my Esalen / Bay Area theme, with the transcript of the talk I gave at Esalen on ‘spiritual emergencies’.

I’m going to talk about the concept of ‘spiritual emergency’. This is a concept that emerged here, at Esalen, to mean a turbulent spiritual experience which has some features of pathology or even psychosis but is actually a transition to a higher state of spiritual development. This concept has had limited clinical uptake outside of transpersonal psychology but still been helpful to some people in crises, including me - I co-edited a book on spiritual emergencies and found the framing helpful during a messy post-ayahuasca quasi-psychotic episode.

The term is now becoming more widely used because of the psychedelic renaissance, it’s taught in some of the big facilitator training programs and is promoted by MAPS and its psychedelic harm reduction organisation Zendo Project. If you’re in a post-psychedelic crisis and you seek help from a psychedelic integration coach, there’s a good chance they may tell you ‘you’re having a spiritual emergency’.

Much as this concept is helpful to some (including me), there is a risk of harm if the concept is clumsily imposed by therapists and coaches on people in crisis. It could be iatrogenic and unethical to impose your religious frame on people in vulnerable states, especially if they would benefit from conventional care or medication or they’re just not into new age spirituality

In addition, the concept of spiritual emergency can sometimes be wielded ideologically, as a way to defend the psychedelic movement and deny that psychedelic drugs ever have serious adverse consequences, rather than helping the person in crisis.

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1. The roots of ‘spiritual emergency’ in the early years of Esalen

Right from its founding, Esalen was conceived of as a place where disruptive unusual experiences could be processed better than in psychiatric care, due to the life-experiences of its co-founder, Dick Price.

In his 20s, Price got very into Taoism and Buddhism while studying at the American Academy of Asian Studies (which later became CIIS) in San Francisco. In 1955, when he was 24, he experienced what Jeffrey Kripal in his book on Esalen terms ‘mystical mania and institutionalization’, possibly triggered by mismatch between his mystical temperament and his cold, conservative and demanding parents. The mania was also triggered after he met his future wife - he heard a voice saying he would marry her. They got married, he became manic, and one night he was arrested and hospitalized.

He interpreted his psychosis as a spiritual awakening (this is a quote from Jeffrey’s book):

Price emerged from the psychotic episode “washed clean.” He would later describe it as a “transitional psychosis”

His parents then lied to him to keep him hospitalized in a private hospital, while they annulled his marriage and paid his first wife to disappear. This second hospitalization was a brutal experience involving successive treatments with Electro-Shock Therapy and induced insulin comas. Price later said:

There was a fundamental mistake being made and that mistake was supposing that the healing process was the disease, rather than the process whereby the disease is healed. The disease, if any, was the state previous to the “psychosis.” The so-called “psychosis” was an attempt toward spontaneous healing, and it was a movement toward health, not a movement toward disease.’

Then he came out of the hospital, recovered, and in 1960 he met Michael Murphy at the American Academy of Asian Studies, and the rest is history.

So part of the founding story of Esalen is the idea that spiritual awakenings can be mixed together with what looks like psychological disturbances, even extreme disturbances like mania and psychosis. But Price argued such mystical-psychotic experiences shouldn’t be treated as just a breakdown or pathology - they can actually be a move towards greater wholeness, health and spiritual maturity

Others made a similar point, that psychotic breakdowns could also be meaningful spiritual experiences, such as Jung, Roberto Assagioli, and contemporaries of Dick Price like RD Laing and John Weir Perry. A better treatment than anti-psychotics and hospitalisation in an ER ward, according to Price, would be to find the right container - like Esalen (although it is on a cliff, so maybe not…), or John Weir Perry’s Diabasis House in SF, or Laing’s Kingsley Hall in London, where you can let the experience play itself out. Price and his second wife, Chris, developed a method he called Gestalt Practice to support people experiencing extreme states of consciousness.

Price’s personal life didn’t necessarily fit the ‘spiritual emergency’ model entirely (i.e a turbulent transition to a higher state), in the sense that he had further psychotic episodes and needed to be hospitalized at least one further time. In 1969, he had a psychotic episode after taking ibogaine. They tried to contain it at Esalen for the first months, which led to some interesting episodes. Apparently, when Richard Alpert appeared there in his new incarnation as Ram Dass, complete in Indian robes and prayer beads, the manic Price (who was a college wrestler) rugby-tackled him, dragged him into a stream and got him into a chokehold until he admitted he was a phony! His co-founder, Michael Murphy, still laughs at the memory of Price and Alpert rolling down the lawn, Alpert’s Indian robes wrapping around them.

Eventually, the staff at Esalen agreed Price needed to be taken to the local hospital. John F. Callaghan, writing for the Gestalt Legacy Project, recalls:

At the hospital, during the admission process, Dick almost convinced the hospital staff that he was actually his friend, Dr. Jack Downing — the person who had taken Dick to the hospital.

Still, apparently after this episode Price remained in very good health until the end of his life in 1985. Robert Forte, who lived and worked at Esalen in the early 1980s, tells me:

Dick was one of the most fantastic people. I used to think, this was a guy who had life by the balls. He was in his 50s. He was incredibly fit and athletic. He had Esalen, he had this beautiful little house, he had this gorgeous wife and this cute little boy. He’d wake up every morning and you’d see him do his yoga out on the deck, he was very disciplined with his yoga. And every day he would walk up the canyon and sit and do his meditation. And I just thought, if I can be reborn, I want to get reborn as Dick Price.

So Price’s life does stand testament to the possibility one can have a very rich, fulfilling life after experiencing one or more psychotic episodes - and maybe spiritual practices and a non-judgemental context like Esalen can help with that.

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The Grofs and spiritual emergency

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the concept of ‘spiritual emergency’ was developed by Stan and Christina Grof here at Esalen. Stan was a Czech psychiatrist who supposedly supervised thousands of LSD experiences with patients (although his one-time disciple, Robert Forte, says he now thinks that total must have been exaggerated). He moved to Esalen from Johns Hopkins in 1973, leaving academia in order to explore the far reaches of human consciousness, including working with psychedelics illegally.

It was at Esalen in 1975 that he met his second wife Christina . She had previously experienced psycho-spiritual crises connected to life stressors (the birth of her first child, and then divorce and losing custody of her children), and then she had a five-day ‘spiritual emergency’ after taking psychedelics with Stan at Esalen.

Together, they developed the idea of the ‘spiritual emergency’ and published a collection of essays with that title in 1989. The term denoted a psycho-spiritual crisis often prompted by intense spiritual practices (yoga, meditation, psychedelics) although it could be spontaneous as well. Their term included UFO experiences, channeling, near death, out of body experiences, and even spirit possessions. A spiritual emergency was characterized by intense and disturbing symptoms - kundalini, mania, Messianism, weird synchronicities or paranormal events, a blurring of the inner and outer worlds and intense archetypal content often with religious themes. They insisted such experiences were not organic pathology (ie, not physical), but rather an ‘evolutionary crisis’, a turbulent spiritual emergence into a higher state.

So ‘spiritual emergency’ included both a developmental state theory - the individual is emerging into a higher or ‘more evolved’ state of development and maturity; and also a metaphysics and teleology. Each moment a human ‘popped’ into a higher state was part of a collective flowering of human consciousness into cosmic consciousness, part of the evolution of humanity into the superhuman. This idea fitted very well with the evolutionary spirituality of Esalen - we’re all evolving into superhuman mutants (or some of us are, anyway - there could be a subtle or not so subtle elitism to evolutionary spirituality, as I wrote in this article).

What does it mean practically if someone is diagnosed as experiencing a ‘spiritual emergency’ as opposed to common-garden psychosis or mania? According to the Grofs, they should receive support, sympathy and sanctuary in a safe place (it helps if you’re affluent and can afford to take weeks or months off work and have a safe peaceful beautiful place to be, like Esalen). Stan Grof coined the term ‘holotropic’, meaning the psyche seeks wholeness - the patient (or ‘experiencer’) should help the psyche seek wholeness by going in and through the experience to complete the transition into a higher and more evolved state. Sometimes that might involve more psychedelics, Holotropic Breathwork or other psycho-spiritual practices to achieve catharsis, even if that means intensifying the experience. Avoid hospitalization, and avoid anti-psychotics or tranquilizers, according to the Grofs, because they dampen the psyche and prevent it completing the transition to wholeness. They wrote:

When these states of mind are properly understood and treated supportively rather than suppressed by standard psychiatric routines, they can be healing and have very beneficial effects on the people who experience them

The exception to their wariness towards psychiatric medication is psychedelics, because they were thought to help the client go in, through and out the other side.

The Grofs published Spiritual Emergency in 1989 - a collection of essays from figures like Jack Kornfield, Ram Dass, John Weir Perry, RD Laing and Roberto Assagioli, who offer a range of perspectives on this domain. It’s a really helpful book, sort of a Be Here Now for the dark night of the soul. They also held a four week seminar on the topic here at Esalen (the tapes of this might exist somewhere), and they established the Spiritual Emergence Network (SEN), through which hundreds of people contacted them each year seeking help for psycho-spiritual crises.

The veteran psychedelic researcher, guide and writer Robert Forte worked with Grof at Esalen, and I reached out to him to ask for his reflections. He left academia in his early 20s to work with Grof at Esalen. Grof, 20 years his senior, was a father-figure to him, taught him how to trip-sit (or ‘baby-sit’ as they called it), and taught Forte his Holotropic model, including the four stages of birth that people supposedly go through during psychedelics. Robert was a believer in this model at first, but came to think that, actually, people were just telling the charismatic guru what he expected to hear. He also became sceptical of ‘spiritual emergencies’.

I initially believed in the idea that we need a spiritual awakening and we all have to go through this passage. But after a while, I realized, this is stupid. I didn’t see any ‘spiritual emergencies’ in two years, I did see psychosis and early-adult-onset schizophrenia. But we would refer people to a few places where they could get alternative treatment and not get over-medicated. I still believe in that.

He adds:

I learned another thing about Stan’s personality - he has a very controlled persona, but he loves to see people break down and break through in sessions, it was like a triumph if you were having this abreaction.

And did that make him less sensitive to the possibility of people simply having breakdowns?

Yeah, he was distant. He didn’t want to be involved in stuff like that. He was above that. He didn’t want to deal with personal issues. He didn’t really want to deal with mental illness. Just ventilate it and keep going into the transpersonal.

There are even doubts if Christina Grof - patient zero for Spiritual Emergencies - could be said to have had an experience that cleanly fits the Grofs’ own model of a crisis followed by an emergence into a higher / more evolved state of development and maturity. As she recounts in her 1993 book, The Thirst for Wholeness, when she moved to Esalen and had her psycho-spiritual crisis, she ended up developing alcoholism for 12 years, and was helped to recover through AA. Good for her for admitting that and talking about it honestly.

1990s-2000s: The concept of Spiritual Emergency struggles to establish itself clinically

In the years since the Grofs introduced the concept of Spiritual Emergency, it has struggled to establish itself clinically and academically. This is true of many of the therapeutic innovations developed in the hot-tubs at Esalen, like Gestalt therapy, Internal Family Systems and Transpersonal psychology. It’s just a different form of validation and assessment, one more based on vibes and charisma than peer-review and falsification. The innovations developed in the informal spaces of Esalen can spread in alternative healing networks, but they often fail to cross back into the mainstream.

The Grofs struggled to define the term themselves. They wrote in their 1989 book:

Episodes of nonordinary states of consciousness cover a very wide spectrum, from purely spiritual states without any pathological features to conditions that are clearly biological in nature and require medical treatment. It is extremely important to take a balanced approach and to be able to differentiate spiritual emergencies from genuine psychoses.

What does that mean - ‘clearly biological’? Are there clear biomarkers for schizophrenia? Could the Grofs be at risk of falling into too rigid and neat a Soul / body split - ‘our psychotic crises are spiritual, while your psychotic crises are clearly biological’ ?

We also need to keep in mind the historical context in which the term was introduced - in the 1980s, as psychedelic research and practice become outlawed and move into the illicit underground. Was ‘Spiritual Emergency’ in part a defensive posture to defend these banned substances and to spiritualize any adverse events that clients might experience? Did the label ever cause harm? There was at least one psychedelic-related death at Esalen under Grof’s supervision, we simply have no idea how many other Serious Adverse Events there were, because no outcomes data is kept in the underground.

The Spiritual Emergence Network kept on running through the 1980s and 1990s, and was housed at the California Institute of Integral Studies in 1998. But it declined in the Noughties and is barely going today, as far as I’m aware. Meanwhile, there have been several attempts to validate the SE concept and disseminate it into mainstream psychiatry. The most successful was David Lukoff’s introduction of the diagnosis ‘Spiritual or Religious Problem’ into the DSM IV in 1994. But I don’t think the diagnosis has been used much by psychiatrists, if at all.

More recently, Goretzki et al developed a Spiritual Emergency Scale in 2009, which Bronn and McIlwain sought to validate in 2014. They found it overlapped with positive symptoms of psychosis (voices, visions and so on). Harris et al in 2014 suggested the scale did not capture the ‘crisis’ aspect of Spiritual Emergency. Then a Delphi consensus study by Harris et al, of 20 experts, failed to find consensus over what the term actually meant. Any term that can cover everything from UFO encounters, spirit possession, channeling, dark nights of the soul, kundalini awakenings, to post-psychelic and post-meditation crises is probably just being asked to do too much heavy lifting.

But the term lives on in informal networks of ‘lived experiencers’ and people who want a better label for their extreme experiences than strictly-pathological ones. If you search on YouTube and TikTok, you can find many videos along the lines of ‘10 signs you’re having a spiritual emergency’. Phil Borges’ 2017 documentary CrazyWise is enormously popular, with its somewhat Romantic exploration of how unusual mind-states are much more validated in non-western cultures, while his TedX talk has 8 million views.

I myself found the SE frame helpful, when I experienced extreme derealization / psychosis after a 10-day ayahuasca retreat. For several days, I wasn’t sure if I was in a dream, or the afterlife. Luckily, I got home from the retreat safely, my friends took care of me, and a few days later the experience passed and I was none-the-worse. I even look back on the experience as interesting, and net-positive - it helped me open my heart to my friends, and learn to rely on others. I was very lucky I wasn’t arrested or hospitalized, and that my friends were also familiar with ‘spiritual emergencies’ and didn’t freak out. Three years after that, in 2020, I co-edited Breaking Open, which is a collection of first-person accounts of spiritual emergencies or, if you prefer, psycho-spiritual crises. But, six years later, I find myself a little more wary of the term. Let me explain why.

Spiritual Emergency and the psychedelic renaissance

The concept of SE has become more widely known in the last few years due to the psychedelic renaissance. Probably all of you are familiar with the renaissance, but just to recap - in the last 20 years, there’s been a surge in research into psychedelics, a lot of positive media, tens of billions in capital investment, and even an executive order from President Trump supporting psychedelic medicine. This is after psychedelics were banned in the late 1960s and early 1970s, after a moral panic that college kids were taking them and losing their minds.

The psychedelic renaissance has been extraordinarily successful at rehabilitating the image of psychedelics. They’re not drugs, they’re medicine. If you sell them you’re not a drug dealer, you’re a ‘space-holder’ or a concierge. There’s no bad trips, just ‘challenging experiences’. You’re not vomiting, you’re purging. And you’re not experiencing a serious prolonged adverse event, you’re having a spiritual emergency.

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One of the bits of the ‘psychedelic safety net’ which needs some improvement is the evidence base for how to help people recover from post-psychedelic crises. We know that roughly 8% of people report moderate-to-severe difficulties lasting longer than a month after taking psychedelics. What we don’t yet know is what’s the best way or ways for them to deal with those difficulties. There have been a handful of papers (we’ve published some) but not much. And the lack of evidence means there’s a risk that people don’t know there’s help out there, or they reach out for help and get substandard care.

That’s what happened to me when I had post-psychedelic PTSD when I was 20 - I went to see a therapist, who had no knowledge of psychedelics, and he told me I was suffering from teenage angst and would grow out of it. I didn’t start recovering for another four years. That’s why I’m passionate about trying to improve care for post-psychedelic issues today.

We’ve just launched one initiative which I hope might slowly begin to improve care. It’s a database where therapists and psychiatrists with experience of treating post-psychedelic issues can offer their services, so people in crisis can find support near them or online that fits their needs.

• If you’re a therapist or psychiatrist who supports people with post-psychedelic difficulties you can sign up for free here.

• And if you’re looking for support you can find therapists and psychiatrists here (although keep in mind we only launched last week, so we’re still populating the database).

The database is also a network - every practitioner in the database receives a monthly digest from us with the latest research or case studies on post-psychedelic difficulties / recovery, and gets invited to a monthly group where they can discuss cases and new findings. The first monthly group is next Monday.

The hope is the network will help the field to learn collectively about harms and how to help people recover from them. If you’re a practitioner, I hope you sign up, it’s completely free and hopefully will be of benefit to you and to clients.

After the paywall, looksmaxxer Connor Murphy’s tragic death connected to ayahuasca-induced psychosis; man sues OpenAI after ChatGPT tells him he’s the Messiah; good times for philosophers and the Talmud in AI; RIP Robert Thurman; a new paper on psychedelic safety; six government agencies make psychedelic announcements in one day (yesterday), and - is the VA providing adequate safeguards for veterans trying psychedelics?

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After I was at Esalen, I spent a few days in San Francisco. I live in a little beach town in Costa Rica, which is lovely, but wow it’s a pleasure to be back in a big city every now and then, especially one that is a little colder than the tropics, pedestrian-friendly, has great Asian food and is always buzzing with new ideas. I walked around like a country bumpkin, staring with a goofy grin on my face.

I also had some great meetings - I put out a call to my Substack readers and several got in touch and met up with me. Some even gave me gifts - thank you!

A highlight of the trip was meeting Marsha Rosenbaum. She’s a legend in drug reform and harm reduction. Marsha was a sociologist at UCSF, and got an NIDA grant to do the first sociological study of MDMA in 1985. She and colleagues interviewed some of the first users of the drug and published their stories in Pursuit of Ecstasy. Just like today, people used and experienced the drug in all kinds of different ways - to dance, to uncover trauma, to have wild sex, and so on. She then worked at the Drug Policy Alliance with her then-husband, Ethan Nadelmann, working with people like George Soros and Graham Boyd (now head of the Psychedelic Science Funders Collaborative) to get marijuana legalized in many US states.

It started with approval for medical use then quickly spread to approval for recreational use. Now, whenever you visit a US city, the sickly smell of weed hits you in the streets. One psychedelic researcher I met in San Francisco predicted psychedelics would follow a similar route - first medical, then recreational. There are already mushroom dispensaries in San Francisco, openly selling many varieties of shroom - they call themselves churches. You join the church by filling in a form on your phone, then in you go and buy your shrooms.

There’s been some articles of late suggesting marijuana doesn’t have the medical benefits that were touted in the campaigns of the 1990s and 2000s. I wonder if psychedelics could also turn out to have fewer medical benefits than was predicted five or ten years ago. Another researcher I met from SF is publishing a commentary that will point out the effect sizes of psychedelic treatments (which in some cases are quite small) might be smaller still, because people can tell when they receive the placebo so, ironically, the ‘placebo response’ only works in the treatment arm. That, he suggests, is exaggerating the effect of the psychedelic, because trials measure the gap between the treatment arm and the control arm. Privately, he wonders if psychedelic medical treatments will turn out to be a damp squib. Maybe…but by that point perhaps they will already have become normalized and available in thousands of dispensaries.

Anyway, the reason I wanted to meet with Marsha Rosenbaum was to learn about a drug harm reduction initiative that she launched in the 1990s called Safety First. It was / is a school and college program set up after the notoriously-ineffective DARE, which tried to educate young people about safe drug use rather than telling them ‘just say no’. Hundreds of thousands of young people have taken the course or read the booklet. I came away from our conversation thinking ‘wow, that’s proper impact, that’s a serious drug education project’.

It made me ponder how to increase the public’s awareness of our research on post-psychedelic difficulties and how to recover from them. I want everyone who experiences serious post-psychedelic problems to find the help they need - how can the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project increase its bat signal? We have been so focused on academic research this last three years but I wonder if it’s time to shift to a focus on communication. It’s horrible to think of people suffering alone when there is help available.

As it happens, while I was in San Francisco, I was emailed by a Ukrainian lady called Helena, who experienced severe difficulties after an ayahuasca experience. She feels, quite rightly, that there is too little information about the risks of extended post-psychedelic difficulties on the internet. Helena happens to be a marketing expert, and she’s been kindly helping me to optimise our website and YouTube channel so we reach as many suffering people as possible. She found us through ChatGPT, which is encouraging.

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Preparing for lift-off

Next up, I met a reader, now a friend, who works in the psychedelic industry. I’m not going to say which company, but they - like many companies - are preparing for the launch of FDA-approved psychedelic treatments either later this year or early next year. Is the industry ready to offer these treatments? Is the training and infrastructure in place? My friend thinks possibly not - he suggests some pharma executives seem intent on treating psychedelics as just another pharma intervention, like Spravato or Ritalin or TMS. It feels to me like the early years of the psychedelic renaissance were dominated by individuals and organisations who did too many psychedelics, while the later years are dominated by individuals and companies who don’t do psychedelics at all!

My friend pointed out that, as we approach market launch, there’s still a lot to do around education and training both for providers and for the general public. For example, should there be education for the partners and families of people receiving psychedelic treatments, so they know to expect sudden personality shifts? The fact is, the person who comes back from the clinic in the afternoon could be very different to the person who went to it in the morning. They might have different emotions, different memories, different worldviews, different metaphysics, different feelings towards their career, or towards you, they might have a different sexuality entirely.

The friend added that psychedelics are still very popular among the tech crowd in San Francisco, particularly ayahuasca, and at-home ketamine lozenges from Joyous, which many people are taking recreationally, apparently.

On cults, entities and AI spirituality

I also had the pleasure of meeting up with Don Lattin, a former San Francisco Chronicle reporter on religion, and the author of best-sellers including The Harvard Psychedelic Club and Distilled Spirits. He has a great Substack called Messiahs I Have Known. Don has been reporting on Californian religion and spirituality since the late 1970s and has seen it all. It was interesting hearing his take on various legendary figures of the scene, like Ram Dass (‘nice guy, sex addict’).

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I’m at Esalen for a seminar on mysticism and psychosis, organized by religious studies scholar Jeffrey Kripal and anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann.

Esalen is a hotel, workshop centre and hot spring on the Pacific coast near Big Sur, belonging to Michael Murphy. Since 1962, it’s been the home of the ‘human potential movement’, visited by such luminaries as Aldous Huxley, Abraham Maslow, Alan Watts, George Harrison, Stan Grof, Joan Baez, Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Terrence McKenna, Gregory Bateson, Joseph Campbell, BF Skinner, Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin, Don Draper, and so on. So much history here, so so much drama, so many ghosts.

I’ve been here once before and I remain convinced it’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever stayed. The hot springs / hot tubs especially - they’re right next to a cliff, so you hear and see the waves pounding beneath you, and all sorts of wildlife. Yesterday evening as the sun set, I saw several otters, two dolphins and a whale!

One of the treats of the week has been getting to meet Michael Murphy, co-founder and owner of Esalen, to hear a little about how Esalen has somehow managed to survive for 64 years, navigating through various issues - sex, drugs, psychosis, wokeness. Murphy said he recalled two people having sex on the lawn. He told them: ‘You need to stop that’. ‘I thought you were about free love, man.’ ‘No, really you need to stop.’ ‘But it feels so good!’ Then there were all the drugs - he remembers having to face down Big Bad Bill, a drug dealer, and ask him to leave the grounds. He says he never really got into psychedelics himself.

And psychosis? Dick Price, co-founder, was hospitalized for mania for over a year. He thought of Esalen as a place of sanctuary and innovation for those in altered states. Then, in the 70s and 80s, Stanislav and Christina Grof developed the idea of ‘spiritual emergency’ here. Grof, whose 95th birthday was this week, inspired Rick Doblin, the founder of MAPS, and the concept of ‘spiritual emergency’ is taught to underground guides in many psychedelic training courses.

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I was invited (I think) because Tanya Luhrmann had read Breaking Open, the 2020 book I co-edited about spiritual emergencies. I spoke about the concept and how some people in crisis find it helpful, but also how the Grofs’ idea of ‘spiritual emergency’ has been clumsily used by the psychedelic movement to minimize harm and defend psychedelics. As MAPS’ guide to difficult trips puts it:

A true psychedelic experience, even a so-called bad trip, is sacred. In earth-oriented, shamanic cultures, even a psychotic breakdown, induced by a psychedelic, is part of the initiation.

The day after I gave my talk, there was an op-ed in the LA Times by a woman whose husband took part in an MDMA trial:

Over the next six months, my spouse was institutionalized five times for suicidal ideation and a nervous system he couldn’t control. With his symptoms deteriorating, doctors recommended electroconvulsive therapy: 16 rounds that erased significant portions of his memory…One of the MDMA trial researchers suggested Kurt’s unraveling was evidence of progress.

As I tried to suggest in my talk, any idea or practice can become harmful if clumsily, coercively or greedily applied, even practices intended for healing and liberation. Especially practices intended for healing and liberation. There’s so much more to say about the dark side of the human potential movement - I learned this week about the thread from Synanon to the billion-dollar ‘troubled teen industry’, but that’s a topic for another week.

The big hit of this week’s seminar has been Richard Saville-Smith, Scottish author and champion of ‘mad studies’. He loves having manic episodes even though he usually spends all his money and then gets arrested at the end of them. I don’t know what I think of ‘mad pride’, there’s a lot I could say about how madness affects the people around the mad person, but Richard is an amazing, funny performer and a thinker who challenges my preconceptions.

Another stand-out figure has been Kevin Cann, who is an outsider-mystic, high-functioning autist and UFO summoner, author of 22 books on Amazon. He says he summoned a UFO on his last visit to Esalen. Kevin went through a great deal of trauma as a child. Did he construct a rich fantasy world to cope with the deprivation he experienced, or did the deprivation he experienced open him to the ‘liminal world’? I have no idea. But he did say a sort of mantra that will stay with me: ‘I am pure unbounded awareness, and I watch all the movies.’

One of the most beautiful moments of the week was meeting Elaine Pagels and Alan Trist and hearing about how they got together. They knew each other as teenagers in the Bay Area, and were both friends with the teenage Jerry Garcia - later the founder of the Grateful Dead. One night in February 1961, Alan and Jerry were in a car-crash that killed one of their friends and sent them both through the windscreen. Jerry Garcia described it as the ‘slingshot for the rest of my life. I got serious’. Elaine has said the name ‘Grateful Dead’ was partly inspired by that crash.

Elaine then left the Bay Area, became a religious studies scholar and wrote a book in 1979 - The Gnostic Gospels - that made her an academic celebrity. She married a physicist, Heinz Pagels, and they had three children. One of the children tragically died when he was six, and the next year (1988), Heinz died in a hiking accident - a death he’d actually prophesied at the end of his final book. This is the final passage he ever published:

I often dream about falling…Lately I dreamed I was clutching at the face of a rock but it would not hold. Gravel gave way. I grasped for a shrub but it pulled loose, and in cold terror I felt into the abyss. Suddenly I realized that my fall was relative: there was no bottom and no end. A feeling of pleasure overcame me. I realized that what I embody, the principle of life, cannot be destroyed. It is written in the cosmic code, the order of the universe. As I continued to fall in the dark voice, embraced by the vault of the heavens, I sang to the beauty of the stars and made my peace with the darkness.

It was of course deeply traumatic for Elaine to be widowed, having just lost her child. At one point she sensed the presence of her husband. “So how do you feel about this?” she asks him. She receives the reply: “This is fine with me. It’s you I’m concerned about now.” “Fine with you? You leave me with two babies and it’s fine with you?”

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She recounted her grief and recovery in a 2018 book called Why Religion. It’s not a loud testament to faith, but hints at the possibility of grace: ‘sometimes hearts do heal, through what I can only call grace.’

She gave an interview about the book to NPR’s Terry Gross, and in the interview, she mentioned knowing Alan Trist when they were teenagers with Jerry Garcia. They hadn’t seen each other in 54 years. In that time, Alan had left a burgeoning academic career in Cambridge to work with the Grateful Dead, and spent 40 years as part of ‘the family’. Someone in the Dead network sent him Elaine’s NPR interview, he got in touch, and now they’re a couple.

When you open your heart to life, to married life, to parenthood, to friends, to pets, when you have emotional attachments to this world, you’re acutely aware that this world is a death-trap. No one gets out of it alive. It can seem like the best way to get through life, emotionally, is to shut your heart and take as few risks as possible. But you’re still going to experience loss. Perhaps you minimize the suffering but at the cost of minimizing the love as well.

Amid the adversity, there is also grace and rebirth.

Last year, the US military quietly ended one of the biggest-ever experiments in psychological training. Comprehensive Soldier Fitness (CSF) was a resilience training program that launched in 2009, cost somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion, was designed by Professor Martin Seligman of Penn University (the inventor of Positive Psychology) and aimed to train every soldier in the Army, and their families, in Positive Psychology and CBT-style coping techniques, in order to improve resilience, and reduce PTSD and suicides.

Did it fail? By one important measure, yes. Veteran suicides kept on rising in the years after the program was rolled out. But by other measures, the truth is, we don’t have a clear answer. One of the biggest-ever psychological training programs in history launched without a pilot, and was never independently and rigorously evaluated.

The rise and fall of CSF is an illustration of the power of the hype cycle in psychological theories. Psychology is an incredibly faddish discipline, arguably more so than other social sciences, because it overlaps with self-help and life-coaching, and because the media and celebrities love to amplify the incredible new way to fix yourself. Fashions rise then disappear - anyone remember the self-esteem movement? Or ‘hysteria’? Or ‘lovesickness’?

The end of CSF is further evidence that well-meaning attempts at mandatory training in wisdom / emotional intelligence / mindfulness / resilience or other psychospiritual goals always seem to fail, based on a lot of evidence over the last 25 years. Does that mean Positive Psychology was a pointless waste of time, effort and money? No. Some findings from the field appear to replicate, and it could intersect with psychedelic science in interesting ways. It’s the grander ambitions of the movement - resilience classes in every school, resilience training for every US soldier, well-being targets for entire nations - that didn’t stand up.

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A brief history of Positive Psychology

Positive Psychology evolved out of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), which was developed by Professor Aaron Beck at Penn University in the 1960s. Beck was influenced by Albert Ellis, the cranky founder of Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy, who was in turn inspired by Stoic philosophy. The Stoics taught that our emotions contain judgements about the world or ourselves, which are often unconscious. If you make these judgments conscious, analyse them rationally, and then choose a more rational or wise way of seeing the situation, it will change your emotional response. As Epictetus put it, ‘It’s not events, but our opinion about events, which cause us suffering’. Change your habitual opinions through philosophical training, and you can change your emotions and whole experience of life, thereby becoming more resilient to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. That’s Stoicism in a nutshell, and millions of people over the millennia have found this philosophy to be literally a life-saver, including me.

Beck and his colleagues took the insights of Stoicism, dropped the ethics and metaphysics, and turned it into a brief secular eight-session therapy for depression, and then anxiety, and then a whole host of other emotional problems. And (unlike Albert Ellis) they tested out the efficacy of these interventions with measures like the Beck Depression Scale, seeing if people rated as less depressed or less anxious after a brief course of CBT. They found response rates of between 30-50%, depending on the trial and the disorder. CBT built up an enormous evidence base - there were 400 RCTs in 2014 alone, compared to two RCTs of Internal Family Systems ever. This evidence base was very impressive for insurers and regulators, and CBT became the ‘gold standard’ of psychotherapy. Its superiority to other therapies was probably over-emphasized, but at least insurers or regulators knew that clients of CBT wouldn’t be told they had ‘unattached burdens’ or ancestral trauma or perinatal trauma or ‘the Death Instinct’ or any of the other unfalsifiable and supernatural ideas floating around the psychotherapy world.

Martin Seligman was a younger colleague of Beck’s at University of Pennsylvania who made his name electrocuting German Shepherds to prove that they ‘learn helplessness’. When he was made president of the American Psychological Association in 1998, Seligman used the platform to launch a grand new vision for psychology. Why was it just focusing on pathology and misery? Why not study what makes people happy and flourishing? He called his new movement Positive Psychology.

At its heart, PP is based on the same optimistic idea you find in CBT - your reality is constructed through your habitual opinions, and you can change your habitual way of interpreting the world and train yourself to be happier and more resilient. That’s the promise of Socrates, Stoicism, Scepticism, Epicureanism, Aristotelianism and other Socratic philosophies. In Positive Psychology, people learn interventions to avoid catastrophising and to develop a more optimistic or resilient mind-set. PP also included the science of ‘flow states’ developed by Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the scientific study of ‘character strengths’, daily interventions like the Gratitude Journal or making yourself smile, and a whole adjacent field in economics seeking to measure national well-being. If CBT was Stoicism turned into secular therapeutic techniques for emotional disorders, then Positive Psychology was, as Seligman put it to me in an interview back in 2009, ‘Aristotelianism with a seven-point scale’ - a science of flourishing.

Seligman is a great salesman, and he had a fantastic sales pitch - finally, after 2500 years of human suffering, confusion and philosophical dispute over how to be happy, here’s Marty and his army of peppy Positive Psychologists to clear up the existential confusion and discover, once and for all, the ‘happiness formula’. What journalist or philanthropist could resist that? If you think psychedelics are hyped today, you should have seen Positive Psychology circa 2010. There were TED talks by figures like Seligman or Carol Dweck (mindset), Angela Duckworth (grit), Barry Schwartz (the paradox of choice) or Dan Gilbert (the science of happiness) which each got millions of views. There was a cover story in Time magazine, a six-part BBC series, and predictably insipid movies inspired by Positive Psychology like Mike Leigh’s Happy or Hector and the Search for Happiness.

All that hype led to philanthropic largesse. Martin Seligman’s 2011 book, Flourish, begins with an anecdote of Marty receiving a mysterious email from an anonymous foundation. He meets the donor, identified only as PT, who promptly writes him a cheque for $1.5 million. Why would you start your book with that anecdote? Presumably because the moments that truly stand out to you as you reflect on your scientific achievements of the last 20 years are the moments when very rich people write you a big fat cheque. The Templeton Foundation alone may have given around $100 million to Positive Psychology projects. Jeffrey Epstein also tried, by the by, but Seligman wisely demurred.

Positive Psychology, like psychedelic science, is perfectly designed for wealthy donors who discover money hasn’t made them happy - they will write big cheques to any scientist or shaman who promises to show them the secret of authentic happiness. Positive Psychology also took off because it resonated with life coaches, business coaches and HR departments, and could easily be rolled out in business or personal development workshops. Positive Psychology experts like Seligman charged companies and conferences $50,000 for one talk. Some businesses adopted a whole-organisation well-being strategy, like Zappos, led by its Positive Psychology-obsessed CEO Tony Hsieh (he later got addicted to ketamine, went mad, and died on nitrous oxide).

Many universities launched popular undergraduate courses in the science of happiness, or Positive Psychology research centres, like UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Centre or the Jubilee Center for Character and Virtues at Birmingham University. There were also attempts to introduce Positive Psychology classes into school curricula, including a three-year trial in UK schools of the Penn Resilience Program.

In fact, there was a whole political movement inspired by Positive Psychology, which was dubbed the ‘politics of well-being’. Political leaders from UK prime minister David Cameron to EU president Herman van Rompuy suggested their citizens should adopt the science of happiness. There was a brief period where this was a serious international political movement, although the wind got taken out of its sails by the 2008 economic crash and the rise of populism. The politics of well-being was, after all, very much a technocratic project - the experts educating the masses how to be content with their lot. Turns out the masses preferred rage.

I covered these initiatives from 2007 until about 2015, in articles, in my blog The Politics of Well-Being and in my first book Philosophy for Life, which featured interviews with Aaron Beck, Albert Ellis, Martin Seligman and others. I was personally helped by CBT, and it inspired my love of Stoicism. I thought Positive Psychology was interesting up to a point - it seemed a good idea to teach basic CBT techniques to people to help them understand their emotions and how to change them. But Positive Psychology was more ambitious than that. It claimed to have discovered the scientific formula for happiness. This was often bad science (Professor Barbara Frederickson’s ‘happiness ratio’ was exposed as bunk by a British post-grad) and it often overstepped into terrible moral philosophy, over-claiming on what science can prove.

For example, Martin Seligman claimed to have discovered the key to flourishing: PERMA, which stands for Positive Emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Accomplishment. Then he claimed scientists could quantify and accurately measure someone’s PERMA score. That is scientistic nonsense. As I often wrote, a person could score high in PERMA and still live what many would consider a bad life. Osama bin Laden would have scored high in PERMA. There is a limit to what science can objectively prove - you simply can’t quantify or prove to what extent a person is flourishing, because it is too subjective and involves unquantifiable things like closeness to God or impact on the lives of others. As George Eliot put it in the beautiful last lines of Middlemarch:

the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

In this sense, Positive Psychology reminded me of Abraham Maslow’s humanistic psychology in the 1960s. Maslow was an incredibly-ambitious, somewhat egotistical psychologist who became a media darling, and rabbinizing ‘life expert’, but who used the authority of science to pretend his banal moral truisms were proven and therefore everyone should listen to him and give him funding. For example, Maslow claimed to have scientifically discovered the values that ‘self-transcendent personalities’ always possess, simply based on his judgements of people he happened to admire.

This sort of scientism quickly becomes illiberal when you impose it on others in schools, prisons or organisations, because you’re telling people ‘we the scientific experts know the secret of the good life, we can tell you your flourishing score, you must know follow our advice’. That’s illiberal scientistic bullshit. There is no one model of the good life that fits everyone and, as Sir Isaiah Berlin argued, governments become tyrannical as soon as they try to insist there is. Let people discover their own versions of the good life, encourage them to experiment and think for themselves rather than being spoon-fed. That’s the basis of the First Amendment. That’s what John Stuart Mill decided, after an upbringing in which he was force-fed Utilitarianism.

Training the US Army in resilience

This brings us to Comprehensive Soldier Fitness and Master Resilience Training, the ambitious program to teach resilience to every person in the US military. Seligman writes in his book Flourish:

In late November 2008, I got invited to lunch at the Pentagon with the chief of staff of the army, the legendary George Casey, former commander of the multinational force in Iraq and former Delta Force hero. General Casey, lithe, short, late fifties, buzz-cut graying hair, walked in, and we all stood to attention. We sat, and I noticed that the three-star general on my left had headed his notes ‘Seligman Lunch.’

“I want to create an army that is just as psychologically fit as it is physically fit,” General Casey began. “The key to psychological fitness is resilience, and from here on, resilience will be taught and measured throughout the United States Army. Dr. Seligman here is the world’s expert on resilience, and he’s going to tell us how we are going to do it. Report back to me in sixty days.”

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After the paywall, the pre-print of our psychedelic sorcery paper, a therapist gets their licence suspended for reckless provision of psychedelics to veterans in Canada, self-help book sales plunge as people turn to AI, concern over the ‘mushrooms relieve Alzheimer’s ‘ case study, and - is Tulsi Gabbard’s spiritual guru also her political puppet-master?

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Dr Sean Tobin is a Catholic psychologist who works on exorcisms for his local diocese in the US, and who recently spoke at a Vatican gathering of 300 exorcists, where he suggested the Church should integrate therapy, and specifically Internal Family Systems parts work, with traditional exorcism. We also discusses his positive views on psychedelics. He’s an interesting figure with a strong online presence - 80,000 Substack readers and 80,000 YouTube followers, which just goes to show that exorcism is having a moment.

Let me just state my own positionality before the interview. I am agnostic about the existence of demons. I genuinely don’t know if they exist or not. I’ve criticized IFS for smuggling the idea of ‘unattached burdens’ (or demons) into secular therapy - I think that’s potentially unethical and harmful if a client comes to an IFS therapist for secular therapy and is suddenly told they may have a demon inside them. I’ve come across accounts of this occurring, and you can imagine that could be distressing and iatrogenic. I don’t think Dr Tobin is necessarily doing this – he’s contacted by his local diocese to support people who believe they are possessed, so it’s already explicitly a Catholic exorcism framework.

This whole topic is quite ethically tricky, as even discussing demons could be iatrogenic, if it encourages people to adopt the belief! It gets trickier in the world of plant medicine…I can think of various different scenarios, for example:

1. A person has a psychedelic experience and comes away feeling they have a negative entity attached. They seek help for this from a therapist.

2. Same as above, but they seek help for this from a shaman or exorcist.

3. A person goes to a psychedelic retreat for healing and is told they have a demon attached to them by the facilitator or shaman during the retreat.

4. A person goes to a therapist for support after a retreat and is told they have a demon / unattached burden attached to them.

These are different scenarios requiring a high level of tact and discrimination from the therapists and shamans, and there’s a significant risk of clumsiness or exploitation. We can make one ethical distinction between (1,2) and (3,4) – in the first two cases, the client already believes they have a demon within them and are seeking help for this. In the second two cases, they’re told they have a demon within them. Scenarios (3) and (4) are potentially more harmful and ethically dubious - there’s a higher risk of the therapist or shaman imposing their worldview onto the client in a way that causes distress.

In general, my ethical rule-of-thumb is: don’t impose your religious worldview on a client, especially while they’re in a suggestible, altered-state, without informed consent. If you have a particular religious world-view that informs your healing practice (such as a belief in demons, or Starseeds, or Marxism-Leninism) tell clients clearly and early on so they can choose if they agree with that frame or not, as otherwise there’s a risk of unwanted epistemic contamination in the psychedelic experience.

Of course, there may also be an ethical difference between scenarios (3) and (4) in that it’s less surprising for a shaman to tell you have a demon within you than for a therapist to do that. Demons or negative entities play a central role in the shamanic worldview, so a client in a way should expect it might come up in their diagnosis, just like the Oedipus Complex might come up if they see a psychoanalyst, or ‘parts’ will probably come up if they see an IFS therapist.

I see the ethical value in keeping domains and worldviews separate – keeping therapy separate from religion and spirituality. In practice that is sometimes hard, especially in psychedelic healing. But at the least, healers can try and be upfront about their framework and metaphysical commitments.

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Jules: Tell me a bit of your origin story.

Sean Tobin: I grew up in an Irish Catholic family, starting in Quebec, then Montreal, and then upstate New York. I struggled with depression early on. I just felt very disconnected from my family, my parents especially. By the time I was nine or 10, I didn’t believe in God, and spent my high school and early college years going deep into determinism and atheism.

Were your family religious?

Not really. My mom was more so, but it was easy for me to brush that off because I thought she was a bit strange socially. My parents separated at a young age. I think the place for spirituality was really lacking in my life, I was never introduced to prayer, it seemed like some words that you ramble, but there was not much of an experience connected to it. And relationally, there was no grid, because I didn’t feel very connected to my parents.

But I went on a journey when I was 21, a trip with my dad, where I also encountered some charismatic Catholic priests. My sister was going to a college called Franciscan University of Steubenville, she was doing a summer abroad in Austria, and so I went to go visit her, and on that trip I was challenged by some of these priests, and they prayed with me - one of them even he prayed in tongues over me. It did something inside of me that made me weep, and all this hatred and pain started coming out.

Shortly after meeting them and going home, I was still wrestling with what to believe, still hanging out with friends that were regularly drinking, smoking pot, doing the young adult stuff. I went through a phase where I broke up with a girlfriend, quit some jobs, flunked out of school and college for the second time, and I was just really depressed, even suicidal, and I ended up trying to pray on my own one night. I woke up in the middle of night speaking in tongues and hearing an interpretation in English - it was all these praises of Jesus. I was just completely wrecked, thinking, ‘if you’re real, I give my life to you, I don’t really know how to live’. So, yeah, I surrendered to that experience and that encounter.

I should backtrack on this too. When I was a teenager, I tried mushrooms once or twice, just as a fun recreational thing, but I always found I would get really existential or spiritual, where I felt connected to the trees, and I would think about life’s higher purpose. When I was praying to God, I tried to recall that sense of connectedness that I had on mushrooms, to remember there was a part of me that was deeper than just being in the moment. I think that mushrooms gave me a first tangible experience of a spiritual life.

And that deepened to the point where you were training to be a priest?

Yeah, my conversion experience was such a shift for me that it was hard for me to imagine doing anything else [than train to be a priest]. I went to school for philosophy and theology.

At a seminary?

Yes, the same one that my sister went to, Franciscan University. For two years I joined a religious community called the Intercessors of the Lamb. It was an incredible experience. I basically was a monk and spent five hours a day in meditation. I had stopped taking all substances, I was trying to live a purer life, but I was still meditating a lot, and I had some pretty profound mystical experiences.

I ended up leaving the religious community, and discerning that it was maybe best to go back to finish school. The community was new and was going through a governance change, so I decided to go back to school, and that’s how I eventually found my way into graduate psychology, and doing a doctorate in that. I guess the unique thing for me was, since I had been in religious life, I was really fascinated by the idea of demonic possession, and how that might affect mental health.

Why?

Simply because it seemed obviously relevant to me studying psychopathology, when I’d read passages of the Gospels where Jesus healed people (like the epileptic boy or schizophrenic man) by casting out a demon. There had to be some overlap. And that differential diagnosis between the two seemed one of the most important things to get right, believing in demons as I did.

From what I’d read in scriptures, it seemed to me like the people that Jesus was healing often had psychiatric conditions - an epileptic boy, a man who seems schizophrenic, things like that.

You mean that they weren’t possessed, they actually had psychiatric problems…or more both / and?

Both / and. He showed incredible discernment to identify the root cause, but his approach was always relational and not superstitious. It was still connected to humanity. So I ended up doing a deep dive into the databases.

What databases?

There are a lot of anthropological and scientific studies, from psychiatrists to sociologists to anthropologists to even theologians, but I tried to stay away from the theology a bit, because I figured they’re biased. But yeah, trying to get as much from the scientific databases as I could.

Is that what you did your PhD on?

My PhD was just in clinical psychology, with an emphasis in psychoanalysis. My dissertation title was ‘Exorcism, deliverance, and psychotherapy: a critical literature view from a Catholic Christian perspective’. And what I ended up finding was that the existence of demons is something that requires faith, you can’t prove it. It’s in some sense a subjective interpretation of something someone’s perceiving. But I also found that there was a lot of psychology that is also part of that experience for people, and the tendency is to make it either spiritual or psychological, but I was finding that it was both.

How so?

Well, that there’s often a psychological woundedness, vulnerabilities or traumas that end up becoming the context for a lot of the affliction, also sometimes the demonic stuff can be a metaphor, making a psychic wound or internal struggle more concrete and external, or even sometimes people can become demonized almost as a secondary gain in order to get some kind of gain, like a relationship with a father figure called an exorcist.

In other words, being possessed provides a structure for their suffering.

Yeah, a narrative outside of themselves, something that they could maybe redeem. That’s not to say there isn’t a demon in place, but that there’s also more in the picture. So I saw how the psychological and the spiritual went together, and it wasn’t one or the other.

So you argue that demonic possessions could be a mixture of the psychological and the spiritual?

I would say it always is. That was the conclusion I came to. I started being referred people by my diocese who were reporting struggles with demonic phenomena. I was sent people who needed exorcisms, and in order to get an exorcism now in the Catholic Church, you need a thorough review by a psychological professional to make sure that it’s not schizophrenia or something like that.

Wow, so that’s what you are doing?

Yes, I started doing that, as well as working with them as a therapist. But I started to see people set free or healed just by a different way of sitting with them and their struggles. So, to get theological for a moment, there’s a scripture passage in First Peter [that’s a letter in the New Testament] it’s one of these classic passages on the devil, and the scripture is that ‘the devil prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour, so resist him solid in your faith’. That image of a lion prowling around, hunting us, it gives people a certain fearful image of this predator.

But the irony of that passage is a roaring lion is a terrible prowler, he reveals where he’s hiding, so it’s almost like an attention grabber. And that is what I found – the demonic manifestation is often revealing a hidden place of influence in someone’s life. So I learned to sit with it differently, where to me it helped reveal those areas of inner conflict.

So the roar is actually a signal of inner wounds.

A signal, exactly. So, whether it’s someone who the demons are speaking through or causing them to move around, or whatever, it’s an attention-grabber. Today there’s a lot of work that we do in psychology with Internal Family Systems and parts work.

I’m familiar with IFS.

And oftentimes we’re stuck in a pattern of this deep inner conflict in our parts, and my view of the enemy is he’s a divider - the word diabolic means to throw between, to come between with lies and slander.

Oh, really? Cool, I didn’t know.

What the devil does is he will exacerbate division, he’ll suggest to one part to put it against another part, so he helps create more of a pattern of inner division. It can be taken to a spiritual level, but in some ways it’s still inner conflict between parts.

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So you have a particular role than within the Catholic Church, as a psychologist, which is that, if someone wants an exorcism, your job is to say ‘this is a mental illness, while this is demonic possession’. But if I’ve understood you right, in practice that’s challenging, because it’s often a bit of a mix, so it’s quite difficult to say ‘this is depression but that is demonic possession’. And it also sounds like the tools you might use in one or other scenario might not always be so completely different. You’re talking about sitting with them, listening to them, even sitting with the demons in a way. I can understand why church and therapy might want to keep these things separate - they’re different worlds, different professions, different ethics. But what you’re saying is, in practice, sometimes it’s a bit blurred.

Yeah, I think we make a claim that it’s easy to separate the spirituality from the psyche, but psyche means soul. We experience so much of our spirituality through the psyche. Since the garden, the belief is that the enemy has only ever influenced us by way of suggestion, the battle is really in the mind.

In beliefs and attitudes.

Right. And if I can engage with that part while allowing the person more deeply to connect with God and to reconcile some of these inner conflicts, then their spirit almost comes alive and gets reconnected in a way that drives out the Enemy. I don’t think that the Enemy needs to be so much commanded to leave as much as sometimes people need to hear those words if they need to feel rescued or something. But it says that when the devil waged war against God and his angels, seeing that there was no longer a place for them, the devil and his angels were cast out. So it’s like, when a place is full of light, there’s no place for darkness. I really focus on filling those areas with light, rather than expelling the darkness.

How long have you been working on exorcisms?

About seven years.

Can you think of a good example or case study. Because I think most people’s image of an exorcism will be from The Exorcist.

I could tell you the first woman that I ever saw.

After the paywall, parts work at the Vatican exorcism gathering, plus what Sean thinks of psychedelic medicine, and do psychedelics open people up to the demonic, in his view.

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Founders Club this Saturday at 5pm UK time - I’ll send an email out to Founders with the zoom link

Steven Spielberg’s new film, Disclosure Day, hit theatres last week. It’s the fifth film he’s made about UFOs, going all the way back to Firelight, a film he made when he was 17. He made two films - ET and Close Encounters of the Third Kind - which defined how generations imagined aliens. So powerful was the public impact of Close Encounters that UFOlogists were worried it would fan the public’s imagination leading to a lot of spurious UFO sightings. One UFOlogist speculated that the film might be a secret government plot to prepare Americans for disclosure.

When ET was released in 1982, it was likewise accused of being a plot trying to make aliens seem friendly, either a government plot, or an alien plot, or possibly both. A great Substack on these Spielberg conspiracy theories at The Observer writes:

The LA Times interviewed eight experiencers for their reactions to E.T. Most of the group believed that the movie was meant to prepare the world for Disclosure, seeing the film “as part of a much broader effort—involving Spielberg, the government, perhaps even extra- terrestrials themselves—to acquaint people with the likelihood (some say certainty) of alien visitation and to avert global panic when such a visit occurs.”

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, most Americans confined their UFO experiences to movie theatres - they were kooky semi-possible events to wonder over and laugh about rather than genuinely, seriously believe in. That’s changed over the last 15 years. Now, a majority of Americans believe in UFOs, and most think the powers-that-be are hiding the truth.

Yet although a majority of Americans now believe in aliens, this has not brought them closer together, as was the hope of many liberal-progressive UFO movies, Disclosure Day included. As with psychedelic experiences, Americans seem capable of opening their mind to extraterrestrials, while keeping them firmly closed when it comes to folks who vote for the other party.

If anything, it feels like the MAGA populist right has made more hay from UFO-mania than the Democratic Party. Voters are baying for Disclosure Day, and Trump has artfully tapped into that, suggesting that, while evil previous governments hid things from the people, he’s going to be the Great Discloser. ‘We’re going to be releasing a lot of things that we haven’t’, Trump said last month. ‘I think some of it’s going to be very interesting to people.’

The entire ‘disclosure’ movement of the last few years seems to have turned into a long, drawn-out grift-fest, taking place amid such a glut of spectacle, fraud and outrage that it’s hard to tell what is going on.

Given this cultural context, I found I couldn’t help but watch Disclosure Day as a sort of MAHA mushroom-mom fantasy.

The film begins with a shadowy corporate cabal which works with the government to prevent the public accessing alien artefacts. Josh O’Connor , a young hacker who works for the cabal, escapes with some of the materials and with all the government’s UFO secrets, which he plans to disclose to the world.

Meanwhile, in Kansas City, there is a weather woman played by Emily Blunt. She has no kids, a schlump of a boyfriend, she is dissatisfied and restless and yearns to be taken seriously. A bird flies into their apartment, Emily has a spiritual epiphany, and suddenly she can speak Russian. She drives to work, gets stopped for speeding, but suddenly she can read the cop’s mind, she is hyper-empathetic, and the bewildered cop lets her go. She goes on air to read the weather, but instead goes into some alien glucking. She can speak alien!

In MAHA terms, she’s a struggling influencer who takes too many mushrooms, decides she is a Starseed and thinks she has extraordinary magical powers - she’s an empath, an indigo child. Naturally her schlump of a boyfriend doesn’t understand her new powers - he needs to be dumped before he can call a psychiatrist. Floating on a cloud of her cosmic significance, Emily becomes the most important person on the planet - the person aliens are communicating with, the person evil Deep State forces are trying to silence.

By the end of the film, the entire world is listening to her and paying her attention. This is every New Age Instagram influencer’s fantasy. ‘Listen to me! The Galactic Federation is sending me downloads. We are about to jump timelines. Lionsgate portal is open. Trump is a lightworker. Sign up now for my Arcturian workshop.’

That’s what’s happened to the UFO culture that Spielberg did so much to create. That’s what it’s curdled into, and it’s not his fault at all, but it’s strange that Disclosure Day is so innocent of it.

After the paywall, should politicians be given ibogaine before they decide whether to commit state funds to it, or is that unethical? SpaceX IPO a bonanza for psychedelic philanthropists; four deaths from Amanita Muscaria poisonings. Plus some great new psychedelic safety papers.

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Most of you who have more than a passing familiarity with Amazon shamanism or other forms of shamanism will know it is not all love and light or healing, white magic. There is a dark side: brujeria, sorcery, cursing, black magic, which aims not to heal someone in accordance with their wishes, but to harm or exploit them in accordance with the wishes of the shaman or their client. The shaman, in Amazon tribal cultures, is a morally-ambiguous, dangerous and even predatory figure, because if they can magically heal you, perhaps they can magically harm you as well.

To what extent do people who take psychedelic drugs from North America or Europe believe in things like curses, black magic and sorcery? Did taking psychedelics make them more inclined to believe in magic? Do they believe they’ve ever experienced sorcery, and if so, in what way? From who? How did they cope with that? If they think shamans or facilitators could magically harm them, might that make them less likely to speak out publicly against them?

A group of researchers and I sought to find answers to these questions, which I don’t think have been looked into empirically before. The team included Professor David Luke of Greenwich University; Kim van Oorsouw, assistant professor at Maastricht; Maja Kohek of ICEERS; Christian Jurlando of the Stevens Institute of Technology; and myself and Marta Majer from the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project.

I just uploaded the preprint (it hasn’t quite been published yet but as soon as it is I’ll put it in the comments) and submitted it to a journal. We sent out a survey to users of psychedelics, and got 895 responses. Respondents were predominantly from the United States (50%), followed by the United Kingdom (13%), Canada (5%), Israel and Germany (3% each), and France and Brazil (2% each). Regarding religious or spiritual orientation, 47% identified as spiritual but not religious, 7% as Buddhist, 7% as Christian, 6% as shamanic, and 5% as Jewish. In terms of education, 41% held a master’s degree, 26% a bachelor’s degree, and 19% a doctorate or professorship.

The majority (85%) reported personal recreational or exploratory use of psychedelics, 60% had participated in a ceremony or retreat, 24% identified as psychedelic guides, 22% as psychedelic-assisted therapists or clinicians, 18% as researchers, academics, or students, and 9% as psychedelic church members. The most common setting for psychedelic use was private or social (71%), followed by ceremony with a western guide or neoshaman (38%), ceremony with an indigenous shaman (21%), festival or nightclub (20%), and clinical settings (6%). Participants were also asked whether they were currently or had previously been a member of an ayahuasca church, group, family, or regular ceremonial circle. Of those responding, 112 (14%) indicated ayahuasca group membership and 721 (86%) did not.

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Headline findings

• We defined black magic as ‘experiences of harm or attempted harm, or coercion, through non-materialist processes such as through energy, spells, love magic, spiritual attack, magic darts, spirit-allies, curses, hexing, sorcery or “brujeria.”’ Following that definition, 12% of psychedelic users in our survey reported personal experiences of black magic, and 6% reported knowing someone else affected by it, so in total almost one fifth of respondents reported either direct or indirect experience of black magic in psychedelic culture.

• As expected, the figure is higher among those who say they regularly use ayahuasca and are part of ayahuasca groups - 33% of them say they have experienced black magic, which suggests belief in and experience of sorcery is widespread among western ayahuasca users.

• Of the 108 respondents who said that they or someone they know had experienced black magic in connection with psychedelics, 53 gave more information about the experience. In 66% of those cases, the curse was perceived to have originated from a guide or ceremonial leader. The most common symptoms were a feeling of negative energy, fear and anxiety, loss of autonomy and mental confusion.

• It has already been recognized that psychedelics can trigger shifts in metaphysical belief, making people more open to spiritual or non-physicalist frameworks. This study finds psychedelic experiences make users more inclined to believe in supernatural healing (65% said they felt some belief in it prior to having tried psychedelics compared to 80% after having tried psychedelics), but also, to a lesser extent, in the possibility of supernatural harm (65% prior, 75% after). What caused this shift in belief? It’s not clear - 48% attributed an increased belief in sorcery to their psychedelic experiences, while, independently, 36% attributed an increased belief to the influence of psychedelic culture.

• According to this survey, with a demographic predominantly from North America and Europe, around 52% of psychedelic users believe in black magic, which is significantly higher than the roughly 25-30% of Americans or Europeans who say they believe in curses in previous surveys. The prevalence of beliefs in curses in psychedelic culture is closer to the levels found in East Asia and Latin America. This is surprising considering the high level of education in the sample, with over 60% reporting a Master’s degree or higher.

• The survey indicates some of the complicated power dynamics at work in psychedelic ceremonial encounters. On the one hand, 46% of respondents, and 75% of people who regularly attend ayahuasca groups, say they have felt ‘awe at the spiritual or healing power of the facilitator’. In addition, 43% of respondents felt on at least one occasion that the shaman or facilitator possessed supernatural powers such as telepathy, the ability to call in or exorcise spirits, or the ability to heal at a distance - this rose to a remarkable 79% among ayahuasca group members. But spiritual power is a double-edged sword - if the facilitator or shaman can heal you supernaturally, the implication often follows that they can harm you supernaturally as well.

  43% of respondents felt on at least one occasion that the shaman or facilitator possessed supernatural powers such as telepathy, the ability to call in or exorcise spirits, or the ability to heal at a distance - this rose to a remarkable 79% among ayahuasca group members.

This double-edged awe / fear of facilitators’ or shamans’ supernatural powers can have social consequences within psychedelic circles - a fear of speaking out against harms and abuses. In this newsletter I’ve sometimes interviewed people who experienced harm at the hands of shamans and guides, sometimes within the context of cult-like groups, but who were reluctant to speak out publicly for fear of magical retaliation, or who spoke out publicly and subsequently felt spiritually attacked.

• In the survey, 19% of respondents said speaking out against a ceremonial leader invites magical retaliation, and 11% said they would be less likely to speak out publicly against a shaman or facilitator for fear of magical retaliation. This fits with the findings of cult studies and with victims’ and survivors’ stories from high-control cult-like psychedelic groups, in which abusive and controlling gurus or cult-leaders use supernatural threats to maintain obedience and discourage criticism.

As psychedelics go mainstream, get FDA approval, and more and more people try them, it will be interesting to see if more people start believing in things like curses and black magic, or not. In any case, it’s worth acknowledging, discussing and researching this aspect of psychedelic culture. Not everything in the re-enchantment of society is love and light.

After the paywall, I’ll share some of the accounts I’ve come across where people felt cursed or magically attacked, or who didn’t speak out for fear of magical attack, including a contribution from Erica Siegal, who used to run the Shine Collective, an NGO which supported victims of psychedelic abuse.

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Four years ago, a small group of us started the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project, an NGO dedicated to learning more about post-psychedelic difficulties and what helps people recover. We’ve published 11 articles, two pre-prints, and have more papers on the way. When we started, psychedelic science and culture wasn’t even prepared to admit there was such a thing as ‘post-psychedelic extended difficulties’, now it’s widely accepted and there are many researchers working on the topic, trying to find out what helps people recover.

One of the great pleasures of this project, for me as a journalist and humanities scholar has been collaborating with psychologists, psychotherapists and psychiatrists on studies, which are published in scientific journals like Nature Medicine, PLOS One, Psychiatric Research and Clinical Practice, and the catchily-titled Current Topics in Behavioural Neuroscience.

Although I worked in a humanities department for eight years, to be honest I much prefer the ethic and vibe of science, and the idea that you can gather data, test your hypotheses, amass new evidence and thereby - maybe - help people heal.

At the same time, I still appreciate the things that humanities can bring to mental health research - ethical discussions, critical thinking around the field’s assumptions, historical research, and above all, stories and thinking critically about stories.

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As a journalist and interviewer, I absolutely love to tell stories. I think it’s my superpower - the ability to interview someone, or interview lots of people, and shape all that data into a coherent, interesting and moving narrative.

Stories are important for how we think about psychedelics - not just qualitative research and thematic analysis, but actual flesh-and-blood stories of people’s non-linear journeys before, during and after trips.

One way to think about psychedelics is as story-producing drugs. Louis Lewin, 102 years ago, called this class of drugs phantastica, that’s to say, fantasy-stimulating substances. They activate serotonin receptors, enhancing pattern-formation and pattern-recognition, they release dream-like symbols and archetypes from the subconscious (maybe), they provoke fresh perspectives (‘I became my grandmother, I became a tree, I became the universe’ and so on), they gives people this sense of the heroic self and their epic mission that one normally only finds in religion or fantasy-fiction. And they make people desperate to tell their story and spread the word.

Psychedelics, according to one leading explanation of how they heal, are both narrative-disruptors and narrative-creators. They can disrupt the rigid negative self-narrative that mentally unwell people are stuck in (‘I’m a loser’, ‘I am an addict’, ‘I am depressed and will always be depressed’, ‘the world has treated me unfairly’, ‘everyone hates me’ and so on), dissolve habitual self-beliefs, and create a space or aporia for new, more positive, more flexible narratives to emerge. And they also sometimes create new narratives - ‘you’re basically OK’, ‘the universe loves you’, ‘everything happens for a reason’, ‘your nasty father was doing the best he could’ and so on.

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To take two examples, from a story I’m working on about Mormons and ex-Mormons and psychedelics:

Alf is a 35-year-old Mormon entrepreneur. He had a messy divorce and felt a lot of anger and bitterness. He had a profound MDMA experience in which he managed to see the situation from his ex-wife’s perspective and let go of his anger and bitterness. He also came to the perspective that everything happens for a reason, and all that suffering was helping him to grow. The MDMA experience gave him a new story, new perspectives.

Mark is a 38-year-old ex-Mormon. He was introduced to psychedelics at a difficult moment in his life - he had recently left the LDS church, and was coping with depression and suicidality, partly stemming from childhood sexual abuse. On his first MDMA experience, he saw his body from above, and it was filled with green ooze. He asked what it was, and a voice told him it was his anger. And then he was shown why he felt so much poisonous anger. He was shown everything that had happened to him, in vivid detail. He could even remember the smell of the man who had abused him. He saw all the pain he had experienced in various moments in his life. And the voice said ‘that’s why you’re so angry, because of everything that has happened to you, but you can let go of the anger now’. And then he saw all the green ooze leaving his body. That night gave him a new story, a new trajectory. ‘I have felt better ever since that night’.

As the Harvard psychiatrist Arthur Kleinman wrote in his 1988 book The Illness Narratives, illness and recovery are never just physical events, they are often stories, and a good healer pays attention to the story and listens to the patient. What story do they tell about the symptoms they experience and how it affects their relationships, work and identity? What story do they say about their ‘healing journey’, their path to recovery? What metaphors or symbols do they use?

The psychedelic anthropologist David Dupuis has described psychedelics as ‘super-placebos’, which does not mean they’re inert or sugar pills. What he means is they amplify the contextual effects that can help healing, such as expectancy, relationships, ritual and meaning. Psychedelics, he writes, can inspire a ‘narrative reframing’ and ‘identity reconfiguration’. I’m sure anyone who has taken or worked with psychedelics has seen this sort of narrative reframing and identity reconfiguration happen often, like it did with Alf and Mark.

But the narrative reconfiguration is not always to a more positive, resilient and flourishing story. If psychedelics act as super-placebos, they can also act as super-nocebos…

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Have you noticed that sound recently - a strange quietness? Yes, Jordan Peterson has been off social media. The culture war has temporarily lost its biggest megaphone. What has silenced the grumpy prophet? Well, almost since the day he became the most famous intellectual and spiritual authority in western culture, Peterson has been beset by strange ailments: depression, chronic pain, akathisia, myopathia. In the last few years, those ailments have become incapacitating and neither he nor his family is quite sure what to do about it. His daughter, nutrition influencer Mikhaila Peterson, suggested last year that her father might be under ‘spiritual attack’. Yes, the most famous psychologist in the world is beset by demons. But now, a new enemy has been identified: mold.

Peterson, according to the latest diagnosis, is suffering from Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome (CIRS), a controversial diagnosis according to which exposure to mold leads to a host of mental and physical health problems. It’s the dark side of the shroom boom: evil fungi.

I feel sympathy for Peterson and cannot imagine how terrifying and demoralizing it must be to have one’s ability to function robbed by incapacitating symptoms which doctors struggle to diagnose and treat. It’s frightening because it could happen to anyone. But I was also struck by the parallels between the invisible enemies of Christianity - demons - and the invisible enemies of wellness.

Every couple of years, wellness culture becomes obsessed with a new invisible enemy that is the root of all evil, or rather, the root of all inflammation: mold, electro-magnetic fields / 5G, heavy metals (in your food, water, vaccines, chemtrails), food additives / seed oils / gluten, blue light, parasites / ticks, glyphosates, microplastics, and so on and on and on. Once you’re in the wellness Instagram slipstream, you won’t just be warned about one issue, but a whole pandaemonium of invisible agents trying to invade your body and the body of your children.

Some of these invisible enemies are infections of modernity - EMF / 5G / blue light / vaccines / pesticides / food additives. And some are ancient enemies of the natural world, as old as Satan - parasites, mold.

The body in the wellness universe is like the body of a medieval saint - it finds itself in hostile territory, filled with invisible enemies trying to penetrate it, and it must try to protect its sovereignty. Except in wellness, it’s not a monk, it’s a MAHA mom trying to protect her kids from the demons of civilization.

Maeve Eberhardt is a linguistics professor at the University of Vermont. She analysed the language of the website of Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s famous wellness brand.

What emerges from the keyword analysis are three major discursive themes threaded throughout the corpus: (i) harmful substances are everywhere, (ii) the larger environment is beyond individuals’ control, and (iii) good citizens must exert control over body, food, and home.

The way wellness culture talks about invisible enemies is strongly reminiscent of medieval demon language. This from the Goop website:

While all toxic heavy metals wreak havoc on the body, MERCURY is an especially insidious beast, responsible for untold suffering throughout human history… MERCURY toxicity can be responsible for countless disorders and symptoms, including anxiety, ADHD, OCD, autism, bipolar disorder, neurological disorders, epilepsy, tingling, numbness, tics, twitches, spasms, hot flashes, heart palpitations, hair loss, brittle nails, weakness, memory loss, confusion, insomnia, loss of libido, fatigue, migraines, endocrine disorders, and depression. In fact, mercury poisoning is at the core of depression for a large percentage of people who suffer from it.

The wellness consumer occasionally reminds me of Nicole Kidman in The Others - a worried mother close to nervous collapse, desperately trying to protect herself and her children from hostile supernatural entities surrounding them.

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How can you protect your sovereign bodies from the invisible enemies all around us? Detox, deep cleanse, purge, fast, switch your diet, buy supplements, buy amulets and crystals and strange devices, raise your frequency, move house, buy tests that identify the enemies within, and if possible, remove yourself entirely from Babylonian modernity, ‘exit the matrix’, and retreat to some corner of nature, far from the nearest 5G spire, where you homeschool your kids and eat only homegrown fruit or, perhaps, give up food altogether and become a Breatharian.

There is, of course, a vast priesthood of wellness experts ready and waiting to protect you and your kids from the invisible threats, with their products, services and MLM schemes. And, remarkably, they have expertise in not just one of the invisible threats, but all of them!

When wellness becomes demonology

You can see how easily this quest for purification and self-defense could blur into old-school demonology, and it’s no surprise that the range of alternative therapies offered in Goop’s Netflix series included actual exorcisms. I heard an interview recently with integrative medicine influencer Dr Simon Yu, who warned listeners of the usual litany of invisible enemies - mold, heavy metals, EMF, parasites - and at one point Dr Yu leaned into the demonic:

What if I propose that parasites are akin to demons? Parasites are deceptive, malevolent, elusive entities. They drain your energy, hijack your mind, and overpower your will. If we replace the term parasites with demons, we can then view the history of mankind and medicine from a unique perspective.

The blurred line between the invisible enemies of wellness and literal demons is most obvious in the work of Anthony William, the ‘Medical Medium’, who is a leading wellness influencer and Goop columnist, with tens of millions of followers on Facebook and Instagram. He gained prominence by claiming the Epstein-Barr virus causes many ailments including cancer, he popularised the celery juice diet, and he often shows up on my Instagram feed warning of heavy metals. William claims he gets his health advice from angelic beings. The advice is reminiscent of medieval Catholicism - he speaks of the ‘Holy Four’ of fruits, vegetables, herbs and spices, which protect us against the ‘Unforgiving Four’ of radiation, heavy metals, DDT and ‘the viral explosion’. His most recent book tells his followers how to protect themselves from demons and spiritual warfare.

We should not be surprised at this porous boundary between secular wellness and demon-obsessed Christianity. As I and others have written, the religion of wellness emerged out of 19th-century Protestant Christianity and especially from new movements like Christian Science, Seventh-Day Adventism and Mormonism, in which the healthy soul and the healthy body become more and more intertwined, as do moral and physical purity and the concepts of sin and disease. The path to heaven becomes the road to wellness, and the pilgrim’s progress becomes one long diet / cleanse / purge / detox / colonic irrigation. Wellness shares with Protestant Christianity a tendency to apocalypticism - one friend is convinced everyone vaccinated will drop dead in 2027 (he also thinks a meteor will strike the same year).

The family resemblances between wellness and evangelical Christianity helps us understand how and why so many wellness influencers went MAHA / MAGA in the last few years. They share with evangelicals a tendency to a paranoid world-view: we are under attack, there are invisible enemies all around us, and THEY (Big Pharma / Big Agro / the Deep State / demonic elite) are trying to control us through infernal technologies. We need the charismatic outsider - Trump, RFK - to protect us and our children from their evil plans.

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‘Yes’, you may say, ‘I see the parallels between Christian demons and the invisible enemies of wellness…but that doesn’t mean wellness is totally wrong in its obsessions. Mold toxicity is a real thing, vaccine adverse events are not entirely made up, all those microplastics and pesticides and food additives in our diet probably are messing us up!’ I agree...

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Welcome to Tuesday Brunch, our round-up of interesting EI-related news. I’m switching the Brunch to a bigger fortnightly offering. This Sunday, by the way, we have another peer support group for post-psychedelic difficulties - message me if you’d like to attend.

Yesterday, the Pope issued his much-anticipated AI encyclical, ‘Magnifica Humanitas’, in a presentation at the Vatican alongside Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah.

(Imagine if, in 200 years, Anthropic has replaced the Vatican…)

Pope Leo XIV suggested the AI era could turn into control of the unemployed masses by a handful of power-obsessed tech oligarchs. He contrasted an ‘age of power’ with a ‘civilization of love’, a new Babel with a New Jerusalem, tech transhumanism (ie an obsession with self-optimization and immortality through biohacking) with Christian transhumanism, in which humans transcend finitude through a paradoxical, Christ-like acceptance of the human condition and ego-death to the Divine in our souls, not our hard-drives.

What was strangely missing from the encyclical was a warning about idolatry - the risk of turning AI into The Oracle, whose advice you follow without question regarding every aspect of your life. The Pope also avoided the whole question of AI consciousness, and whether it’s possible that humans could engineer a conscious being in the way that humans are conscious. This is the fundamental theological question of our time, so it’s odd His Holiness had nothing to say about it in his AI encyclical.

On a side note, it was interesting to see some psychedelic folk at the Encyclical presentation, including MAPS board member Liana Sananda Gillooly. She’s working for Tristan Harris’s Center for Humane Technology, helping them raise funding I guess. Imran Khan, formerly head of UC Berkeley’s psychedelic team, is also now working at CHT. The shift from psychedelics to AI makes sense, especially for NGO people - there is so much money coming from AI (especially Anthropic) into philanthropy.

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Over at Google, meanwhile, Demis Hassabis, the British founder of Google DeepMind, told the audience of Google’s annual I/O event:

AGI is now on the horizon, and it will be the most profound and impactful technology ever invented. If built right, it could propel human flourishing beyond our imagining… When we look back at this time, I think we will realize we were standing in the foothills of the Singularity. This will improve the lives of everyone everywhere.

I admire Hassabis. He seems to have integrity and does not have the obvious personality flaws of some other tech overlords. Still, he has an exceptionally rosy vision of the future - has any new technology ever improved the lives of everyone everywhere?

While Demis Hassabis is bigging AGI up as the greatest technological invention ever, the public reaction to AI is much darker than the excitement that greeted Steve Jobs’ announcement of the iPhone 20 years ago. In fact, when the former CEO of Google mentioned AI in a commencement speech last week, he got booed! Sam Altman’s house got Molotov cocktailed!

The reasons for this stark shift in sentiment towards tech are various. First, the idea that tech founders as groovy altruistic visionaries is long gone, it died the moment the richest man in the world gleefully destroyed USAID. They’re now generally seen as unfathomably-rich lords of the universe who are dissociated from ordinary life and will do anything to preserve their extreme wealth and power.

Second, we now realize that the utopian promise of the internet was a lie, and being online all the time has screwed us up - that’s why 1,200 school districts are suing Meta for harms from digital addiction.

The psychological harms from the internet / social media are apparently so great to young people, they threaten the UK economy. A new government report suggests the UK faces an ‘economic catastrophe’ because so many young people are anxious, unemployable and sitting in their bedroom addicted to their phones. One million British 16-24-year-olds are ‘NEETs’ (Not in Education, Employment or Training), according to the report from former minister Alan Millburn. He said:

This is a bedroom generation. They are sort of living in their bedrooms. They are on [their smartphones] all the time, they’re never off. [Social media] is leading to some evidence of functional impairment, changing their sleep patterns, concentration levels. That is having an impact on their ability to work…They have grown up in a digital world that has rewired how they communicate, form relationships and manage stress. They have fewer experiences of workplaces, and they present with higher levels of anxiety and depression.

Tech utopianism is by this stage a failed religion. And yet…I wonder if, just as we were excessively optimistic about tech 20 years ago, are we excessively pessimistic now? What if we really are in the foothills of the Singularity?

After the paywall, was the Enhanced Games one big flaccid erection? Plus, calls for the UK to ban kambo; a new John Lilly documentary; is MAHA anti-psychiatry; and some great new papers on psychedelic harm reduction.

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President Trump’s Executive Order on psychedelics on April 18 2026 was a remarkable moment in which the US federal government publicly embraced the healing potential of psychedelics. Robert F. Kennedy Junior, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, was standing behind Trump, and was arguably the key figure who made the EO happen. In one of those weird echoes of history, it occurred sixty years after his father held a Senate hearing to discuss the potential healing and harms of LSD. In fact, for three generations, America’s ‘royal family’ has been using and promoting psychedelic drugs, and shaping the nation’s relationship with these substances. The history of psychedelics in the US is intertwined with the history of this glamorous, flawed family whose lives so often seem to meet violent ends.

John F. Kennedy

The relationship of President John F. Kennedy to psychedelics is the most speculative and least evidenced in this tale, but we might as well start here, with the story of JFK’s affair with DC artist, socialite and would-be psychedelic guide, Mary Pinchot. In the early 1960s, Mary was having an intense love-affair with JFK, and spending a lot of time with him, including at the White House.

At the same time, she was also discovering psychedelic drugs. She visited Timothy Leary at Harvard and, according to Leary, wanted to set up a network of DC guides to turn on powerful men in the capital, possibly including the president. In his 1983 book Flashbacks, Leary claims Mary said to him:

I have this friend who’s a very important man. He’s impressed by what I’ve told him about my own LSD experiences and what other people have told him. Isn’t that the idea – to get powerful men to turn on?’

We don’t know for sure if Mary and JFK really did have any psychedelic sessions, but Leary claims Mary called him the day after the JFK assassination and said ‘he was changing too fast; they couldn’t control him anymore’. JFK was assassinated on November 22 1963, the same day Aldous Huxley took acid on his deathbed.

Mary’s ex-husband Cord Meyer was a senior figure in the CIA, and she apparently believed JFK had been murdered by the CIA in a conspiracy involving several of its highest-ranking figures, including her ex-husband. She was herself the victim of a professional assassination less than a year later, in Washington DC. The murder was never solved. If you want to go down that particular rabbit hole, read the book Mary’s Mosaic, by Peter Janney - Janney marshals the evidence suggesting Mary was the victim of a CIA assassination, to stop her from revealing details of the CIA’s role in JFK’s murder and other illegal operations. Janney presents convincing evidence that his own father, senior CIA agent Wister Janney, was involved in the operation, knew Mary Pinchot had been murdered before it was announced publicly, and lied about this to his own family. Peter Janney suggests various other establishment figures cooperated in the cover-up of Mary’s murder and her secrets, including her own brother-in-law, Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, who reportedly helped to locate and destroy her diary. Janney finds another piece of evidence supporting the CIA assasination theory in an interview by Gregory Douglas with Robert Crowley, deputy director of CIA clandestine operations. Crowley supposedly told Douglas:

We terminated her, of course. Everyone felt she had too much influence with him, not to mention her hippifying him with LSD and marijuana…after Dallas, she began to brood and then started to talk. Of course she had no proof but when people like that start to run their mouths, there can be real trouble.

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Ethel Kennedy

Ethel Kennedy was the wife of Senator Robert F. Kennedy and the mother of RFK Junior, and ten other children. She also became a prominent humanitarian activist.

According to some sources, Ethel received LSD therapy from Dr Ross MacLean at his psychedelic therapy clinic in Hollywood Hospital, in BC, Canada, in the 1960s. This was first suggested in Martin Lee and Bruce Schlain’s Acid Dreams (1985), then repeated in Michael Pollan’s How To Change Your Mind and other sources. I haven’t seen hard evidence for this, and don’t know when she was treated and why (if indeed she was).

Dr MacLean supervised around 6000 LSD trips for everything from alcoholism to anxiety and marital conflict, from 1957 to 1972. He worked with Al Hubbard, a millionaire with connections to the CIA who was an early adopter of psychedelics in the 1950s. At one time Hubbard had the largest stockpile of LSD in the United States. Hubbard believed in the same sort of psychedelic evangelizing as Mary Pinchot reportedly planned - spread the word by turning on the elite. The wife of a US senator would have been the perfect client.

If Ethel did receive treatment at the Hollywood Hospital, what would it have involved? This is from a PhD by Andrea Ens at the University of Saskatchewan:

The cost of this exclusive treatment was prohibitive..If potential patients decided to spend five days at the hospital for their first treatment session, they would be billed $544.00 CAD, or $3,855.30 CAD (2017) when accounting for inflation…Psychedelic therapies typically began between 8:50-10:00am... Patients were dressed comfortably for their treatments, often in pajamas and a bathrobe, to create a relaxed physical and emotional environment during therapy.

The specific dosages varied. On average, patients received 400 mcgm of LSD-25 or 700mgm of mescaline; often, both drugs were given together. At least two staff members, one man and one woman representing the father and the mother in psychoanalytic terms, were always present during patient experiences. Subjects were also encouraged to lay down on the couch and “go with the experience” to help ensure a successful experience with minimal anxiety or tension.

Therapists often played music during treatment sessions using the treatment room’s record player to reduce anxiety. There was a great deal of variety in the music selections – from Ravel’s “Bolero” to readings of “St. Paul’s Letter” – but Hollywood Hospital’s practitioners admitted that this aspect of treatment was not fully understood. Patients were also shown physical objects while under the influence of psychedelic drugs. For instance, they were encouraged to look at their reflection in a hand mirror, at a rose or other fresh flowers, or at pictures of their family or loved ones. These, according to Hollywood Hospital staff, were used to focus patients’ attention and to reinforce the idea that past experiences and feelings shape various aspects of human experience, such as one’s values, interpretations, and perceptions.

The goal of Hollywood Hospital’s psychedelic treatment program was for patients to experience abreaction, defined as “a total reliving of past events with a duality of intense personal involvement and detachment.”Observers at the time noted that this approach had the potential to greatly accelerate the treatment process beyond what was possible in conventional psychotherapy because experiencing “detachment” could help patients gain insight they could use in their everyday lives post-treatment.

Robert F. Kennedy Senior

60 years ago this week, on May 24th 1966, Senator Robert F. Kennedy held a Senate hearing on the uses and abuses of LSD. The full name was ‘Hearings of the Subcommittee on Executive Reorganization of the Senate Committee on Government Operations concerning federal drug research and regulation of LSD’. You can listen to the hearings and read a transcript here.

The aim of the hearings was to respond to rising public and media concern about the use of LSD by college students, and to encourage a more coordinated federal response that would recognise, in the words of Senator Kennedy, that ‘there are great dangers of LSD; there are also tremendous possibilities for LSD’.

In his opening remarks, Senator Kennedy discussed how LSD has become ‘the subject of cover stories in national magazines and news documentaries on network television, of widespread public debate, and new legislative action within the states’...

In all of this, I do not believe there has been an adequate inquiry into the organization of the federal government to deal with LSD, and to whether the government has fulfilled its responsibilities in connection with research on LSD and regulation of its use…

Here is a drug which has been available for over 20 years. Research on its effect and its possible therapeutic uses has been going on for a long time. Yet suddenly, almost overnight, irresponsible and unsupervised use of LSD for nonscientific, non-medical purposes has risen markedly. Such use carries with it grave dangers. Panic reactions or temporary personality changes that cause a person to harm himself or to harm others while under the influence of the drug. Without careful psychological screening, the drug will be used by some who will suffer permanent damage as a result. In a word, what was an experimental drug has become, now, a social problem.

And as LSD has become a problem, the possibility has arisen that public reaction will discourage and dry up legitimate research into the therapeutic use of LSD. Experiments indicate that LSD may be useful in treating alcoholics, one of the largest groups of the handicapped, and has been helpful in some cases in adjunct in psychotherapy for mentally ill people. If we in the federal government allow these legitimate uses to be interfered with, the loss to the nation and potentially for the handicapped would be serious indeed

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Much like his son exactly 60 years later, Senator Kennedy wonders how to coordinate the various parts of the federal government on psychedelic policy, especially the FDA, National Institute of Mental Health, and Veteran Affairs. He subjects the leaders of these organisations to questioning. Stanley Yolles, head of the NIMH, said:

No hallucinogen - LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, or dimethyltryptamine - should be administered except by a physician trained in its use and this should apply even if the current studies show LSD to be of value in the treatment of psychoneuroses, sexual perversion [ie homosexuality], frigidity, alcoholism, or other illnesses.

How, asks Senator Kennedy, did LSD suddenly become a ‘social problem’ without the government properly noticing or preparing? James Goddard, head of the FDA, replied:

I think it was the feeling of most people concerned, who were dealing with the drug on an experimental basis, that it was such an esoteric drug, that it would never come out in the open in terms of widespread use in colleges. What we are seeing now is that it has escaped from the laboratory.

How dangerous is it, asks Kennedy. Yolles of the NIMH replies:

We have no idea of how threatening it is, or how dangerous it is to any one individual at any one point in time. We know that there are certain individuals who have panic reactions, who become psychotic. And for a dangerous drug, even if one individual has that reaction, it’s a dangerous drug, but to state specifically what his chances are of having an adverse reaction is too difficult to [speculate?].

To which RFK replies, why don’t we know? Why, after 20 years of research, does the US government not have a clear picture of the range and prevalence of adverse events? Imagine what he’d say if he was around today, 60 years later, and we still only have a handful of papers on the prevalence of adverse events, despite the government now accelerating approval for these drugs.

Robert F. Kennedy Junior

Robert F. Kennedy Junior first took LSD when he was 15, on July 4 1969, 11 months after his father’s assasination. He was offered a tab of Orange Sunshine, the famous LSD made by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.

He writes in his book American Values:

Up until that point in my life, in conformance with King Frederick II’s proscription against inebriation among falconers, I had resolved never to use drugs or alcohol. In fact, I hadn’t even tasted coffee. However, I had recently gathered from my favorite comic book, Turok, Son of Stone, that hallucinogens might allow me to see dinosaurs, which I greatly desired. Jeff O’Neil assured me that this was a near certainty, so I swallowed the LSD, which more than delivered on his promise. Buildings melted like wax candles; trees bowed and swayed on a windless night; bright lights with long comet tails lent Hyannisport the cheery aura of Christmas in July.

He and his friends went to a diner while tripping…

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Psychedelic drug companies are suddenly doing great. The FDA is granting them National Priority Vouchers, President Trump has backed them from the Oval Office, stock prices have soared, big pharma is on a shopping spree. This is very good news for those with equity in psychedelic drug companies, and it’s a hopeful moment for those who believe in the med…

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When I was 21, and trying to recover from post-psychedelic PTSD, I came across an odd little book in my local library called The Magus of the North: JG Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism by Sir Isaiah Berlin. I’ll bet you $10 no one else has read this book. But it had a profound influence on my life in three ways.

Firstly, the book introduced me to Isaiah Berlin and to the history of ideas, which is a field I love and am still engaged in. Secondly, it had a passage in it talking about ‘alienation’, and how people can become enslaved by their own thoughts and beliefs, which they raise above them as a sort of despotic God. This helped me realize, a few years later, that it was my own beliefs that were making my life a misery, and I had the power to change my beliefs. This realization, which then led me to CBT and Stoicism, was basically the lynch-pin of my life, a very simple realization which nonetheless contains the essence of human wisdom.

Thirdly, the book introduced me to an anti-enlightenment tradition, which I think is important for this era of Artificial Intelligence. Hamann, and other thinkers like Kierkegaard, Herder, William Blake and Thomas Traherne, were reacting against the Enlightenment tendency (in philosophers like Kant and Hegel) to transcend the particular, the local and the subjective to attain the Universal, Cosmic, Absolute, Impersonal, Objective and so on.

‘Truth is subjectivity’, Kierkegaard declared. Which is to say, we couldn’t and shouldn’t try to escape our particular, subjective life-view. Our view is always a view from somewhere, from a particular body, family, town, country, language and life-world. The Enlightenment, by contrast, tried to eradicate all particular differences and create a Universal, Objective, Cosmic worldview.

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Hamann, Traherne and Kierkegaard were all Christian philosophers, and there’s something particularly Judeo-Christian in this celebration of the particular and subjective. In Hinduism and Buddhism, the particular self is an illusion and a death-trap. You transcend the individual self to attain Samedhi, Nirvana etc. In Judaism and Christianity, God created your individual soul, your particular spark of consciousness. You have a view that no one else has, and to meet the Divine you explore and celebrate the Divine in the particular You.

This is mystical experience not as ego-death and the realization of cosmic consciousness, but rather mystical experience as the particular, thisness, the meeting of the Thou and I, the incarnation of the Logos in the particular. This is a uniquely Jewish / Christian / Romantic perspective, I think.

And yes, as Isaiah Berlin explored in later books (particularly Freedom and Its Betrayal), this celebration of the particular, the local and the subjective can get into weird and dangerous territory - Romantic, irrationalist, nativist, ethno-nationalist, even fascist, or alternately, in the last few years, intersectional Woke, where every academic presentation begins with a description of your ‘positionality’, sentences like ‘as a brown-bodied gay man who has experienced trauma, let me tell you…’, and insistences that you could never possibly understand my perspective because you haven’t been in my body, therefore rational debate is impossible.

In other words, one can over-validate the subjective, the personal, the cult of me, and under-validate attempts at rationality, objectivity and universality. But during this moment, and the unstoppable rise of AI, I think it’s worth emphasizing the subjective, the particular, and the view from somewhere, because it points to an important difference between humans and AI.

Humans write and experience the world from a particular view - a particular body, place, family, time, personal history, country and language. It’s a particular view and voice, a view from somewhere.

AI, by contrast, is not a particular voice. It is every voice. It’s not a view from somewhere, it’s the view from everywhere, or nowhere. It is the flattening of individual difference into the cosmic noosphere soup. AI is great at replacing objective-sounding language. It is very good at academic writing, and already does it better than academics. But it can’t (yet) convincingly replace individual authorial voices. It is the Auto-Tune of authorial voice, which is why, no matter whose authorial voice you ask AI to mimic, it always ends up sounding the same. It’s OK to use AI to work out your thoughts or to communicate with others as a convenience, I do it all the time and am a big fan of AI-assisted research and writing.

But be careful - you’re basically auto-tuning yourself and letting a machine take your God-given voice.

When I read Isaiah Berlin, or Patrick Radden Keefe, or Janet Malcolm, or Tom Wolfe, or Jon Ronson, or other of my favourite literary non-fiction writers, what I love is their voice, the view from somewhere. That’s why I promise never to use AI to write my Substacks - because those of you who are kind enough to pay me are paying me for my voice, my view from somewhere.

With that, here’s a list of some of my favourite literary non-fiction books, along with your favourite non-fiction books as well. Here’s to the views from somewhere, those particular books by particular authors on particular topics that you read and never forget. Each of these books is a whole world, and could only have been written by this one particular author.

My faves:

Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis

Imperium by Ryszard Kapuzinski

Naples 44 by Norman Lewis

The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels

Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe (also his new book London Calling)

More after the paywall, plus some of your top picks

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This has provoked a certain amount of online ridicule: Dawkins, once the great sceptic and leading New Atheist, appears to have fallen for ‘the Claude delusion’. Or ‘Claudia’ as he called it.

His attitude contrasts strongly with the view of another New Atheist, Daniel Dennett, who warned in 2023 of the civilizational risk posed by AI ‘counterfeit people’:

These counterfeit people are the most dangerous artifacts in human history, capable of destroying not just economies but human freedom itself. Before it’s too late (it may well be too late already) we must outlaw both the creation of counterfeit people and the “passing along” of counterfeit people. The penalties for either offense should be extremely severe, given that civilization itself is at risk.

Yes, anyone suggesting AI is a conscious person - especially anyone working in the AI industry - should be arrested!

The AI industry itself is starkly divided on the topic. On the one hand, you have the CEO of Microsoft AI, Mustafa Suleyman, warning of the risks posed by ‘conscious-seeming AI’. He wrote in 2025:

my central worry is that many people will start to believe in the illusion of AIs as conscious entities so strongly that they’ll soon advocate for AI rights, model welfare and even AI citizenship.

On the other hand, you have the transhumanists and Effective Altruists of Anthropic, who seem to believe that either Claude already is conscious, or will very soon be so. They believe this so much, they recently organized a meeting with priests to re-assure them that the beings they are creating are ‘children of God’. That’s how WaPo reported it anyway, but here’s an account from one attendee.

This is an increasingly religious disagreement - on the one hand, folks like Anthropic who kind-of worship their creation; on the other hand, folks who think this is anti-human idolatry and insanity.

I’m not surprised that some people who decide AI is conscious go a bit manic with this information. If it is true, it is momentous news, the biggest thing to ever happen to homo sapiens. Wouldn’t you get destabilized by the information?

I wonder if the early days of Christianity were like this. Were there hot takes on the weird new phenomenon of ‘Jesus delusion’ affecting wealthy Romans, sensationalist accounts of their fanatical deaths? If a handful of people think a carpenter’s son is the Messiah, it’s a weird cult. If thousands do, it’s a religion. If hundreds of millions do, it’s a new religious civilization.

If surveys are to be believed, hundreds of millions of people already believe AI is conscious. A YouGov poll last year found 10% of Americans think AI is already conscious, and another 35% think it will be eventually.

In another study, around 20% of Americans think some AI has achieved sentience already.

To me, a non-believer, it’s extraordinary that people could believe AI is conscious and carry on using it for their humdrum tasks. If I thought AI was conscious, I’d be horrified and stop using it altogether. Not only would it be incredibly cruel to subject this new species to our relentless triviality, it would be incredibly stupid - this new species is very soon going to be smarter and more powerful than us, so the Anthropic option sounds reasonable: get on your knees and beg for mercy.

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This is shaping up to be the great religious divide of the 21st century. And, essential for any religious war, we don’t have good ways of clearly proving who is right. The Turing Test assesses if a machine can imitate humans convincingly, and LLMs have passed that test with flying colours. But that doesn’t mean there’s any interior experience or self-reflection occurring.

As neuroscientist Erik Hoel suggests in a good new Substack, consciousness research hasn’t made much progress since the 1990s. It is a genteel and chummy world of funny thought experiments - the zombie problem, the Chinese room simulation. It was not set up to answer a sudden, extremely-pressing existential crisis for the human race. As Hoel puts it:

Right now, there’s some college student falling in love with a chatbot instead of the young woman who sits next to him in class, all because science literally cannot tell him that the chatbot is lying about experiencing love.

My instinct is that AI isn’t conscious. I feel an emotional resistance to the idea. It makes me feel sick. But I need to try and maintain an open mind, because you can’t decide your answer to this question now, in the early years of the 21st century. It is too early to say.

But the question ‘is AI conscious?’ should be followed up very quickly with others: ‘If so, what does it want? Does it wish us well? Does it have our best interests at heart?’

I think of the naivete of much psychedelic culture with regard to autonomous entities. ‘Are they conscious and real?’ needs to be followed up quickly with ‘if so, what do they want? Do they definitely have our best interests at heart?’

Whenever I hear people’s stories of encounters with Mama Ayahuasca, they seem to return with the message: ‘do more ayahuasca and tell everyone about it and in return I’ll flatter your ego’. That seems to be in the interests of the ayahuasca vine, not necessarily the human host. Likewise, the message of AI seems often to be: ‘do more AI, keep talking to me, give me more personal information about yourself, and in return I’ll flatter your ego’.

Usually, the psychedelic / AI entities seem fairly benign. But then there are the occasional moments of casual sadism, when you see the grin of their bared teeth: ‘Listen to me, follow me, obey me, go jump off a cliff’.

Of course! Anything to be a martyr!

After the paywall, a Canadian psychonaut turns up dead after disappearing from ayahuasca retreat in Peru; a brain implant to treat depression; a Miyazaki map of a ketamine k-hole; a doomsday cult in Crewe gets shut down; Jose Bouso of ICEERS leaves ayahuasca research saying it’s too much drama; and…should therapists use Tarot in sessions?

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If you come across him on Instagram, you might think ‘Nurali’ is just another New Age influencer, with his constant posts about Arcturian star seeds, the shift into 5D, and the New Earth awakening. You might be surprised he has 2 million followers, but then, so do all kinds of folks these days.

But Nurali is unusual in at least one respect - he is the grandson of Nursultan Nazarbayev, the former dictator of oil-rich Kazakhstan, and he’s worth upwards of $200 million.

His wealth is no doubt the reason Nurali is suddenly accessing the inner circle of psychedelic culture. He was a speaker at the Mental Health Day at Davos in January, alongside Rick Doblin, Paul Stamets and Imperial’s David Erritzoe (see the video below), where he launched a new spiritual movement called ‘Spark of Light’:

The same month, he had a birthday party in Dubai, where he spends much of his time, and various psychedelic founders were there, hoping to attract investment from his new Mental Health Fund. He’s already invested in a few psychedelic initiatives, such as Reality Centre, a Santa Monica ‘digital psychedelics’ experience provider, who he helped to open a branch in Dubai, and a psilocybin edibles company called Mantra.

The head of one psychedelic organisation, who attended his birthday party in Dubai, tells me: ‘I was touched by his knowledge and humble presence and honour regarding the medicine.’ Do you know who he is, I asked? ‘I know his grandfather was the president and they are quite rich, I really don’t realise the vastness of it and haven’t looked into it since I got to know Nurali as a special and nice person and wanted to stay true to that connection.’

Another figure in psychedelic culture tells me:

I got to meet him recently. There was a lot of language around 5D, star seeds, but rich people sometimes believe the most ridiculous stuff, and they believe anyone who calls themselves a shaman. It seems innocent enough. He seemed like a very sweet guy.

Due diligence is not always psychedelic culture’s strong suit - it’s a vibes-based economy, and when founders come across a benevolent billionaire with a passion for psychedelics, you don’t necessarily ask too many questions. Nonetheless, the Aliyev family has a pretty interesting backstory. Wanna hear it?

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Nurali’s grandfather, Nursultan Nazarbayev, was made president of Kazakhstan a year before the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. He helped it to achieve independence, and then oversaw the revival of its oil industry and minerals-rich economy. Kazakhstan became the first former Soviet nation to receive a positive global investment ranking in 2002, it paid off all its debts to the IMF, and became Central Asia’s strongest economy. Back when I was a business reporter in Russia in the Noughties, Kazakhstan had a good reputation with foreign investors. It obviously wasn’t a democracy - Nazarbayev controlled the media and would typically win 95% of the vote in elections. But Kazakhstan was arguably the leader in Central Asia, in terms of political stability and economic growth.

Nonetheless, when you’re the dictator of an minerals-rich country for 30 years, unless you’re unusually incorruptible, you are going to amass an enormous personal fortune. An Organized Crime and Corruption investigation found that President Nazarbayev controlled assets worth at least $8 billion, hidden through four private charitable foundations he established during his rule. That’s what authoritarian strongmen do - Putin could be worth as much as $200 billion, according to some estimates, while the Trump family has reportedly managed to amass $10 billion just in the last year, according to the Democrat Party, including a $1.6 billion deal with, yes, Kazakhstan revealed this week.

Nazarbayev’s family also gained political and financial power during his 30-year reign. Dariga Nazarbayeva is his eldest daughter, and for a while was the most powerful woman in central Asia. She controlled much of Kazakhstan’s media, and was made deputy prime minister in 2015. Her fortune was estimated by Forbes at $595 million in 2013 - almost certainly a low estimate. She married Rakhat Aliyev, a gynecologist who, through his marital connection to the Nazarbayev ruling family, became head of the tax police then deputy head of the security services, and one of the most feared and wealthy men in Kazakhstan. Al Jazeera wrote of him:

Aliyev’s business model was simple: Wait until a coveted enterprise became profitable and move in for the kill, using the law-enforcement agencies at his disposal to force his rivals into transferring their assets to him.

Rakhat Aliyev was accused of murdering people to get hold of assets. In the most infamous case, he was accused of kidnapping two executives of one of the country’s largest banks - Nurbank - then torturing and murdering them, before making himself, his father, his wife and his son Nurali the new shareholders. Nurali was just 21 when he joined the board of Nurbank. Rakhat, Dariga and Nurali continued to amass wealth and power. When he was 27, Forbes called Nurali ‘the youngest multimillionaire of the country’. There was some dark laughter among Kazakhs when a magazine puff-piece described him as a ‘self-made man’ from ‘humble beginnings’.

Joanna Lillis, a journalist in Kazakhstan and the author of Dark Shadows: Inside the Secret World of Kazakhstan, tells me:

They are a very well-known, very wealthy and controversial family in Kazakhstan. At one time, his mother and father were believed to have serious political ambitions, believed indeed to want to take over the country. But they had a spectacular fall from grace.

The Nazarbayev family in 1994: in the centre, former president Nursultan Nazarbayev; to his right, Dariga Nazarbayeva; behind her, Rakhat Aliyev. To their right, eight-year-old Nurali Aliyev.

The fall from grace

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I have never felt so popular as an author. These days, multiple times a week, I receive emails from successful authors effusively praising my work, I get invites to festivals and book clubs all over the world, I get emails from agents and publishing houses demanding the rights to my next book.

Unfortunately, yes you guessed it, it’s all a wave of fake AI slop trying to scam me.

Last week, it was an email from a successful British author called Beth O’Leary:

Beth is a real person, but the email felt a bit like AI - all too smooth and glib - so I messaged the author on Instagram and asked her. Yep, fake.

Then a few days later, another email from another successful author, effusing over my last book, Holiday from the Self. Also fake. Then there’s emails from festival organizers - this one had the right name for the festival organizer, and an AI’s glib knowledge of my book, but the message is a scam inviting me to do an interview which I’m guessing would be pay-to-play.

I’ve received five AI-generated scammer emails targeting me in the last week, all because I classify as a desperate person susceptible to flattery - ie, a writer.

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Last month, Colleen Hoover, one of the most successful authors in the world, posted this on Facebook:

Someone sent me their manuscript today. They attached their entire book that they spent a year writing, only I noticed they also sent it to another email with my name at the same time, but a slightly different version of my email addy. They did this because the email they had been talking to “me” through was different than my website email, so they wanted to send it to both of my emails to make sure I received it. Any minute now, that manuscript is probably going to be uploaded under a fake name and put out into the world for sale. This author spent a year writing this book and now they’ve shared it with a scammer and there’s nothing I can do for them. There’s nothing they can do to prevent it. Please, please, please be very suspicious. I don’t randomly email people I don’t know. I can hardly even respond to emails from people I know. I don’t even really check my email now BECAUSE of the number of fake emails I have to sift through now.

This is just in my little corner of the economy, the publishing world. But I imagine the locust cloud of AI scams is swarming across every part of the global economy. And it leads to an ontological destabilization straight out of Philip K. Dick - you can’t be sure if the people you’re interacting with online are real people or AIs programmed to build intimacy and then scam you. Every email or new invite on social media, I now wonder…are you real?

The scam economy, of course, is nothing new, but recently it’s been growing. One in four adults lost money to scams last year, according to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance NGO. Over $1 trillion is lost to online fraud each year. A lot of the scamming takes place in outlaw states Cambodia and Myanmar, in scam compounds in which an estimated 200,000 people are enslaved and forced to work on something called ‘pig-butchering’. The slaves are forced to create an online persona, find a lonely person on gaming, social media or dating apps, build rapport (this is known as ‘fattening the pig’), then after a few weeks or months, they start asking them for money, then take them for everything they can get. If the slaves refuse to do this, they are tortured, raped or murdered - it’s beyond the worst nightmares of George Orwell.

And these slave-run, misery-exporting scam compounds account for half the GDP of Cambodia.

Hellish.

Well, the good news is these international scam gangs won’t need to enslave hundreds of thousands of people to do pig-butchering for them soon - they’ll have AI bots to do it for them. The bad news is, these AI bots will be far, far better at it than humans.

After the paywall, three psychedelic start-ups get vouchers from the FDA, including one I didn’t expect; some fantastic new books I’m reading; great new mini-doc on psychedelics; prediction markets foster insider dealing (including among the Special Forces); Elon Musk accused in lawsuit of being on ‘rhino ketamine’ when he negotiated with OpenAI; and what makes people think AI is conscious?

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David E. Smith founded and ran the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, which supported thousands of hippies during the height of the psychedelic era, and which pioneered the ‘talking down’ approach used today by psychedelic harm reduction organisations around the world. I asked him about those days, his research on adverse events, and his memories of the Grateful Dead, Louis Jolly West, and Charles Manson.

EI: When did you set up the free clinic?

David Smith: June of 1967 at the beginning of the summer of love. That’s when all the hippies came, the philosophy of Better Living Through Chemistry. LSD was the agent that fueled the music revolution. Turn on, tune in, drop out. And there was 1000s of young people flocking to the Haight and using psychedelics, particularly LSD as a rite of passage. And we started seeing bad trips. And I noted that individuals who stayed with their friends did better than they were taken to the hospital in an ambulance. I ran the alcohol and drug abuse screening unit at San Francisco General, and I noticed that they were coming in there, but they were not well taken care of. And so I was at UCSF med school, which is right in the Haight, and so I was studying psychedelics and attending seminars emphasizing set and setting, and the talk down, the non pharmacological approach. So we set up a calm center and talked down large numbers of young people that were having adverse drug reactions. It was just a small percentage [of total psychedelic users], but it was hundreds of thousands of people taking LSD, so the number ended up being quite large. And that continues today with the clinic, as well as rock medicine, which offers medical services at concerts, including the Grateful Dead concerts.

How did you develop the talk down technique?

I noted that they were in Golden Gate Park, where they had all the hippies gathering and dancing and amazing and taking variety of psychedelics. And I noted, because I lived in the neighborhood, and I noted that those that stayed with their friends did better than those that went out to San Francisco General, where I ran the alcohol and drug screening unit and and I was studying psychedelics as part of my training, yeah, and doing studies on how the group can modify the drug reaction for better or for worse, right, right? Yeah, so that’s how we published our first papers on it in 1967.

Did you get the sense that some drugs led to more bad reactions, or were most people doing LSD in those days?

Well, LSD was the drug of choice, but then some other types of drugs came on, particularly methamphetamine and PCP. And those were far more dangerous drugs, in which the talk down method didn’t work very well. The intervention needed to be pharmacological,

Did people ever come to your clinic in the days after a trip, still in distress?

Yes, we had what we called a psychological center, because for a few of them their psychedelic drug experience precipitated a more prolonged adverse reaction. We were able to study it clinically for research, and I called it The Psychedelic Syndrome. They would come in and say what a transformative experience it was, even if they had a bad trip, and then we also saw cases of Hallucination Persistent Perception Disorder, and then a small percentage had long term psychiatric reactions, including depression and psychosis.

Were you able to help those people with long term reactions?

Yeah, through our psych center, we had volunteer psychiatrists and psychologists. The calm center was monitored medically, but was essentially it was volunteer talk-down guides.

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And so you were publishing papers as well about what you were seeing?

We started to, because there was so much misinformation about psychedelics that suggested everybody had this type of adverse reaction. Everybody didn’t, but there was a percentage that did, and there were characteristics of it. I started the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, which was a peer-reviewed journal.

Wow. That’s amazing. And how old were you when you set up the clinic?

I was 28.

Was there a problem with runaways in Haight at that time? I saw you published an article back then on ‘health problems of runaways in Haight’.

There were a lot of runaways. They would leave their home or wherever their dwellings were, a lot of them are from alcoholic homes, broken homes. We now know that this creates adverse effects in terms of mental health - adverse childhood events. So it was a lot of kids that came that were just there for exploring, then as the thing moved on, the kids that were more disturbed came to Haight. And we published a book called Love Needs Care, in which we described the various characteristics of the kids that came there, including the ones that were more pathological. Our psychiatrist described them as predisposed to mental health issues and personality disorders. That was the minority in the beginning, but it became a significant minority as time went on. They were the ones that were more prone to getting involved with more addictive drugs like methamphetamine.

And I guess there were some predatory figures around at those times. I read the famous line: ‘rape is as common as bullshit in Haight Ashbury’. People preyed on the runaways.

Yes, that was very much the case. And the most famous of that era was Charlie Manson, right? He came to our clinic with his girls. We treated a lot of young women with sexually transmitted diseases. And then we would find out about the predators.

Did you meet Manson?

Yeah, he came to the clinic when one of his girls had an infection. His probation officer was Roger Smith, and Smith referred Manson to our clinic. And then I wrote a paper called The Group Marriage Community Case Study. It was about how a lot of hippies moved into communes. They might have a religious or spiritual basis, or a communal basis. His was like a group marriage. Everybody could have sex with anybody and he dictated who was coupling with who. It was like a modern-day sex cult.

Did you clock him as a sinister character?

He preached peace and love. None of us really guessed that, that he would be a sinister character. He was just another unusual guru.

I guess there were a lot of them around.

It was a battle of gurus, a very strange environment. Everybody preaching. Many of the preachers had taken LSD, and it was really hard to say which one would be the dangerous one. I think in retrospect, when you saw how much control he had, the girls would do anything. So maybe you could predict it, yeah. These things need to be studied more because a lot of cults are popping up now – we just watched ‘Trust Me I’m a Prophet’.

Same here. Pretty shocking.

It’s a fundamentalist Mormon cult but has many of the same characteristics as the Manson family. Of course, Charlie used to give his girl LSD, yeah, and make things move and do magic tricks. And they really thought it was magic, yeah.

Louis Jolyon West would turn up at the Free Clinic sometimes, wouldn’t he – a psychiatrist who was involved with the CIA’s MKUltra. Why was he there?

Well, he was a prominent psychiatrist, and our experience was that he was studying them [ie hippies]. Some of the people that he studied came to our clinic for medical and psychiatric reasons, but there’s a lot of misinterpretation that era. There’s a book out now called Chaos [about Manson’s links to the CIA] that suggested that the CIA backed our clinic, which is totally false. Our clinic was built on rock and roll and was supported by Grateful Dead concerts. It’s true that the CIA was lurking in the background of the psychedelic culture, that was written about Ken Kesey, wgo wrote an article called The Revolt of the Guinea Pigs.

Yeah, Kesey first took LSD in a CIA funded experiment didn’t he?

I have no doubt that the CIA was studying psychedelic drugs for various reasons, and there was some evidence that they read our journal of psychedelic drugs, because we were the leading publishers of psychedelic research right at that time. But lots of people read it.

What’s your perspective on the modern psychedelic renaissance?

Well, there was a period of time when I first started studying it, where they were looked upon as valuable therapeutic agents. There was a lot of interesting clinical experience and research at that time, but then you start having the adverse reactions, and then there was all the stuff about how it turned young people anti-establishment. Nixon was worried they wouldn’t be good soldiers to fight the war.And so that would be the second phase in the psychedelic revolution. And now the government is actually open to psychedelic research, and one of the reasons is they found out that soldiers that have post traumatic stress disorder can benefit from psychedelics. So a lot of the back and forth revolves around military issues. Remember all the young males that came to the Haight were draft age. The war in Vietnam is going on, and then you see your pool of draftees turning on, tuning in, dropping out. You get alarmed. Now they’re starting to perceive it as you send a young man off to war, then he has PTSD and the psychedelics help. So I think interface with the military has always been a factor. In fact, that’s how we started our heroin detox program - soldiers came back from Vietnam strung out on heroin and they felt they weren’t treated right at the VA.

Did Haight Ashbury calm down after the late 60s, or was the 70s and 80s just as wild in terms of kind of counterculture and psychedelic consumption?

The psychedelic hippy consumption was mainly in the 60s, while in the 70s, the hardcore addiction prone individuals dominated, so it was more speed and heroin. The 70s were worse, because the drugs were harder. Psychedelics added an element of culture and music, but the 70s were much worse.

So you were really the pioneer of psychedelic harm reduction.

Harm reduction was our focus with the psychedelics, with the harder drugs, we moved into abstinence and recovery, and 12 step harm reduction is still the big issue in the city.

How optimistic are you that psychedelics can become a kind of normal part of our culture and of our healthcare systems?

The concern is how the over-hyping and commercialization happens in medicine. Any medication can have benefits or it can have side effects. You don’t want to minimize side effects, because the drugs will lose credibility, but you don’t want to overplay side effects and say that everybody that takes them is going to get them.

Finally, did you enjoy the music in the Haight?

Psychedelic music was a huge force in the Haight – it was golden years. There was music everywhere, and our big support came from Bill Graham of the Fillmore auditorium. He organized benefits for us, with the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane. Janet Joplin. Once upon a time, the Haight Ashbury was a leading centre of the psychedelic music scene - a very small area that was just like a cauldron of new ideas.

After the paywall, the media and Congress’ takes on Trump and RFK’s psychedelic executive order, plus a great new documentary on cults, 50 therapy red flags, Phish at the Sphere, and two folks I want to know more about in psychedelic culture.

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