Yaakov is a 30-year-old Orthodox Jewish father of two in New York. He was working with a life coach to try and improve his life and self-optimize. In May, the life coach suggested they go for a trek in a large park, wearing weights, on magic mushrooms. This, the coach insisted, would be character-building. Yaakov was unsure, having never done mushrooms before, but the coach urged him to go for it. Psychedelics are surprisingly popular among Orthodox Jewish Americans, and Yaakov decided to try it.

He arrived at the park to discover the coach had not brought any water for the trek. The coach told him to go for it anyway, so he did. He took two grams of mushrooms, and they set off. What followed was one of the most horrendous experiences of his life. Yaakov’s habitual anxiety was exacerbated. He didn’t feel safe at all. The coach was not a calm, sympathetic ‘space-holder’ but a militaristic bully. And the thirst was unbearable. The hours seemed to last forever as Yaakov staggered, gasping, through the park.

We might remark, in passing, on the casual fuckwittery of this ‘life coach’, presuming to incorporate psychedelics into his work as if they were no riskier than electrolytes or Omega oils. But that is not the focus of this article.

In the days and weeks afterwards, Yaakov remained in a state of extreme anxiety. He worried about losing his mind, worried about not being able to work, worried about the stigma of having damaged himself on drugs, worried about the derealization he could experience all day, and worried above all that these symptoms would last forever. Sometimes he would wake up feeling pure fear like he’d never felt before.

Yaakov has a therapist who, though not familiar with psychedelics, is still supportive and helpful to him. He has looked for other help, including the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project, which he contacted in August. He feels bewildered by all the options - should he try hypnotherapy or acupuncture or trauma therapy or medication? His health anxiety, exacerbated by the bad trip, sometimes goes into overdrive and he feels paralysed by choices.

Yaakov has now decided that over-thinking is making the situation worse. He says: ‘This week I’ve started with a very straight-forward approach of living life, not ruminating or fantasising about it. Today is Tuesday, and as I try the new approach of not ruminating, I’m having a pretty good day today, probably one of the best in the last three months. There’s times when I think ‘let me go and search for the best health supplements’ or something, and I think ‘no Yaakov, you’re not doing this right now’.

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Rumination as a causal factor for extended difficulties

Why do some bad trips lead to extended post-psychedelic difficulties? Why do some people feel bad for a few days, and others for months or years? We don’t yet know but it’s likely to be various reasons - how awful the experience was, how much support was available afterwards, the circumstances of the person’s life, and perhaps their childhood history or personality traits.

But I suspect one of the main reasons is rumination. Rumination is what turns a transient dip into a sustained one.

This is my working hypothesis of what happens in many cases of extended post-psychedelic difficulties: there’s an adverse event (a bad trip) which leads to unwanted symptoms, such as negative feelings, negative thoughts or unwanted phenomena like nightmares or visual distortions or derealization.

For some people, these symptoms arise and then pass after a few days or weeks without them obsessing over them, and the mind’s natural healing properties allow it to bounce back. But other people (and this is just a hypothesis) ruminate and catastrophize over the adverse event and the unwanted symptoms, they become much more self-focused and hyper-monitoring, and every time an unwanted symptom occurs it contributes to the catastrophising beliefs ( particularly the belief - ‘I am permanently broken’) and to worse mood, more negative self-focus, and to withdrawal from the world, from relationships, from work. It becomes a vicious loop, and people can be stuck in that whirlpool for a long time.

A few people I’ve interviewed for our ‘Stories of Recovery’ say that one of the key things that helped them recover from post-psychedelic difficulties was finding ways to ruminate less and turn one’s focus outwards. I met Matias at Psychedelic Science 2023 - he’d traveled there from Argentina searching for a cure for the intense derealization he experienced for four years after vaping DMT. I kept in touch with Matias, and he told me his symptoms eventually diminished. What helped?

When it all began, I assumed the way back would be more inner work — more meditation, more breathwork, more spiritual practice. I even thought I needed to do regular Holotropic Breathwork to work through the material. Over time I learned the opposite was true, at least for me. Any practice that turned my attention inward — meditation, breathing exercises, energy work, even “grounding” by walking barefoot — reliably made things worse. There was some pattern inside me that wasn’t working properly, and stirring it up was like pouring gas on a fire. What actually helped was the opposite direction: going to the gym, coming back into my body and into ordinary life.

This insight has a much broader application than post-psychedelic difficulties. Rumination is put forward by some psychologists as one of the main causes of depression and anxiety, as well as a key contributor to stress, insomnia, burn-out, procrastination and other common forms of vexation. The word ‘rumination’ comes from rumen, meaning one of the four compartments in which a cow slowly digests grass. What works well for cow digestion works much less well for human cogitation - excessive rumination can literally make us grind our teeth and give us a stomach ache!

So if we are prone to chewing the mental cud, what can we do about it?

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How to think less

From our first months, we are taught how to think and solve problems, and trained to live in a highly complex society and to play a part in the knowledge economy. We are thinking machines, and our problem-solving mind is like a chainsaw, helping us hack a way through the complexity of modern life. Every night we go to bed with the chainsaw, and sometimes we don’t know how to switch it off.

Many of the leading spiritual teachers of the last century recognized that over-thinking is one of the great psychospiritual issues that modern humans face. Alan Watts, for example, gets millions of views on YouTube with his talks on why modern humans over-think and get lost in the ‘symbolic world’, and how to use ideas from Zen and Taoism to think less and have a less mediated and more direct experience of reality. Eckhart Tolle became perhaps the leading spiritual teacher of the Noughties with his simple message of how to liberate yourself from an over-thinking mind.

In the age of smartphones and social media, we’re perhaps even more addicted to thinking and people flock to diagnoses and cures for this very modern ailment - my friend Alex Olshonsky, a life coach in the Bay Area, wrote an essay in February called ‘You’re probably addicted to thinking’, which got 5000 likes on Substack, leading him to launch a new course on the topic which is starting next week (you can see a brief interview I did with Alex after the paywall).

So how can we think less?

There are several possible methods to reduce rumination. Two experimental methods that I know many of you are interested in are psychedelics and Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS). A mini-review in 2024 found that psychedelic-assisted therapy significantly reduced rumination, while TMS for depression has also been found to reduce rumination (check out this recent ‘before and after TMS’ video featuring Owen Muir and a patient).

But there are less experimental techniques with a lot more evidence that one can try first. There’s plenty of evidence that regular exercise reduces rumination, especially if you try something that demands continuous attention, such as swimming, cycling, running, tennis/pickleball, martial arts, surfing. These are methods of re-directing your attention out of introspection and rumination and towards an external activity (sport also has the advantage of releasing endorphins, getting you in shape, raising your self-esteem and connecting you to others).

There are also various forms of cognitive therapy which have been found effective at retraining the mind and reducing rumination, such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Mindfulness-based CBT, Compassion-Focused Therapy, and a relatively new but promising form of therapy called Meta-Cognitive Therapy (MCT) which I have been finding quite helpful. In the rest of the article I’m going to briefly explain MCT and share some of its exercises and practices, then I’ll share the video of my conversation with Alex Olshonsky.

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Many humans have this deep need for enchantment. It’s closely allied with our need to alter consciousness. As a species, we are easily bored with the mundane, and want to be transported. Two of the main methods we use: drugs, and stories. Gather round the campfire, chew on some leaves, and listen to a story-teller conjure up another world.

This basic human need goes wrong when a person uses drugs, or stories, to habitually avoid reality and becomes lost in delusion. Both drugs and stories can heal, or they can become addictive labyrinths from which we cannot escape. Stories, like drugs, require discrimination and harm reduction.

Carlos Castaneda, the author of the Don Juan books and the subject of a new biographer by Ru Marshall, wove enchanting stories and millions of people fell for them. Some people really fell for them and followed the path he laid down, crumb by crumb, until they realized they were lost in his labyrinth. He was a world-class spiritual fabulist, the latest in a long line from Joseph Smith to Madame Blavatsky, from L Ron Hubbard to contemporary shamanic hucksters like Simon Buxton or [name deleted on legal advice]. The history of religion is, to a large extent, the history of spiritual fabulism. Give us an enchanted fairy-tale, a treasure hunt to follow, and we are hooked.

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On mythomania or spiritual fabulism

Carlos Castaneda was a young, affluent, educated Peruvian who went to study in Los Angeles, initially studying creative writing at Los Angeles City College, then transferring to UCLA to study anthropology. He was a bullshitter from the start - he changed his name (it was Carlos Araña originally, which means ‘Carlos the Spider’), sometimes claimed to be Brazilian, and left a daughter in Peru who he never mentioned or supported.

At UCLA he was particularly influenced by two professors: first, by a sociologist called Harold Garfinkel. He had a cult of personality around him, and only worked with certain special students, who he sent out into the world to do ‘breaching’ experiments. They would be instructed to do weird shit and see how people around them react when social norms are breached. Some would later wonder if the entire ‘Don Juan’ hoax was one long breaching experiment.

Secondly, there was a UCLA anthropology professor Clement Meighan, who told his undergraduates he would give any student an A if they managed to interview a real, genuine Indian. Young Carlos came back from this assignment with an extraordinary story - he had met and interviewed a Yaqui brujo (sorcerer) in Mexico called Don Juan, who had taken him on as his sorcerer’s apprentice! Carlos had supposedly travelled down to Mexico in between UCLA classes and undergone this life-endangering apprenticeship, smoking mushrooms, taking datura and peyote, undergoing various magical trials, being favoured by the god of peyote, ‘Mescalito’, and even turning into a crow!

It was a tall-tale perfectly suited to hook a certain sort of liberal white person who credulously romanticizes non-white cultures. His undergraduate thesis was published by University of California Press as The Teachings of Don Juan. It’s a good read, which takes the boring genre of student anthropology essay and turns it into a heroic fantasy of magical apprenticeship that’s straight out of H. Rider Haggard or Edward Bulwer Lytton. Carlos appears as the hapless representative of arid western academia, utterly clueless before the real master, Don Juan, who is constantly swatting away Carlos’ naive questions:

“Are you going to use witchcraft?” I asked with great expectations.

“Don’t be silly. No witchcraft would ever work on her. I have other plans! I’ll tell you about them some day.”

“Can your ally protect you from her?”

“No! The little smoke only tells me what to do. Then I must protect myself.”

“How about Mescalito? Can he protect you from her?”

“No! Mescalito is a teacher, not a power to be used for personal reasons.”

“Is Mescalito God- the only God? Or is he one of the gods?”

“He is just a protector and a teacher. He is a power.”

“Is he a power within ourselves?”

“No. Mescalito has nothing to do with ourselves. He is outside us.”

“Then everyone who takes Mescalito must see him in the same form.”

“No, not at all. He is not the same for everybody”

You can see the format - Carlos asks a question ‘is it X?’ and Don Juan replies ‘no, it’s Y’. His answers give the impression of this vast, coherent and hitherto secret body of knowledge about a separate magical reality. And Carlos the undergraduate just happens to have been handed the key to the secret garden. It’s as if an owl had flown into his bedroom with an invitation to Hogwarts.

Institutionalized fabulism

If you want to get people to accept a tall story, there are various ways you can increase the chances they will accept it. One way is social proof - get others to say they believe it, especially if the others are famous. Another way is institutional proof - somehow get your story imprinted with the legitimacy of a well-established institution, like the University of California. The University’s UC Press published The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge in 1968 and it was soon snapped up by Simon & Schuster. Carlos then went back for more teachings from Don Juan, which he recounted in A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan (1971); Journal to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan (1973) and so on. Journey to Ixtlan was accepted by UCLA as Castaneda’s PhD thesis.

Such extraordinary books, arriving with the official imprimatur of the UCLA anthropology department and the glowing approval of authorities like Michael Harner and Theodore Roszak, naturally caught the attention of all the young hippy undergraduates, themselves experimenting with mind-altering substances. Like Castaneda, the young hippies were all too ready to reject mainstream western civilization and search for alternative father-figures at the fringes. Don Juan reportedly inspired George Lucas to invent Obi Wan Kenobi, and Castaneda’s tales were also gobbled up by Oliver Stone, David Bowie, the Eagles, Bob Dylan. The adventures of Don Juan and his hapless apprentice made Simon & Schuster a fortune - eight million copies sold worldwide.

But slowly, sceptical voices began to be raised.

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1. Psychedelics as costly magic

Sharon Doni is a therapist and clinical director of the Israeli Center for Cult Victims. I came across her when she posted on Facebook about the rise in psychedelic cults and abusive facilitators in Israel. We had a great conversation, which I will share in the future, and she said this, which stuck in my mind:

People are drawn to psychedelics because it’s like magic. It’s a shortcut. But there’s something you need to remember about magic. There is a TV series called “Once Upon a Time” with a witch, and the witch often says that every magic comes with a price. And that’s a sentence I have really adopted. And I also realized: the bigger the magic, the bigger the price. Check the magic you’re taking because you want to realize what’s the price. If a facilitator appears God-like and says he’s going to save you from yourself, he’s going to be a father and brother to you and give you all the hidden knowledge you need…that’s very appealing magic, and there will be a high price for that.

We’re often wondering how psychedelics ‘work’ - neuroscientists, psychiatrists, therapists and pharmacists have put forward various theories of change. Curanderos and brujos, meanwhile, suggest that, sometimes at least, it’s a magical process, and magic can be a zero-sum game. You want to create a big effect - healing, harm, or some other effect - you need to pay a big price, or someone does. It is a dog-eat-dog world. ‘Whoever becomes the weed’s [datura’s] ally must pay the price’, Don Juan says in Carlos Castaneda’s tale of sorcery. Is that a voodoo way of thinking? Maybe. Sceptic as I am, I sometimes wonder if psychedelics really do involve magic in some zero-sum way, and what the psychic-societal impacts could be when that magic gets scaled up by Eli Lilly and the rest.

2. Psychedelic antinomianism

Reporting on the story of Dr Samuel Lee, the ‘spiritual psychiatrist’ who started working with (and taking) psychedelic drugs and became a full-on psychedelic guru, I interviewed a clinician who reported Lee, and the Within ketamine clinic where he worked in Austin, to the Texas Medical Board. This clinician told me how he often hired people to offer ketamine therapy, and then saw them get lost in the deep waters of psychedelic culture. He said:

When you employ therapists that have an interest in doing psychedelic-assisted therapy, a certain amount of them are either completely nuts to begin with or slip down a slope. It’s a certain percentage. I’ve had therapists that actually started out well, some of them straight out of school, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, by-the-book clinicians. Then they start doing underground work, they start working with a church or something, they dive off the deep end, it gets weird, they get into dual relationships and other sorts of unprofessionalism, and I have to fire them. I think that it’s an inherent challenge – people who go through profound psychedelic experiences sometimes feel like they’ve figured it out, they’ve heard the message, they know ‘the truth’.’

This quote reminds me of a fantastic paper by David E. Smith, founder of the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, on ‘the psychedelic syndrome’. I mentioned the concept a few weeks ago and someone has helpfully made a wikipedia page about it. Basically, Smith noticed that regular users of LSD around the Haight started to heavily believe in magic, vibes, energy, telepathy, curses, astrology and so on. He noted some workers at his clinic wouldn’t even come to work if their astrology reading was off that day.

The quote also hints at something very prevalent in New Age and psychedelic circles: antinomianism. This is a belief, often found in ecstatic Christianity, that because you’re so close to God, because you’re so 5D, the old laws don’t apply to you. As Crowley put it: ‘Do what you will shall be the whole of the law’.

Samuel Lee would say things like ‘drugs are legal according to God’s law’. Because Dr Lee is, in his own words, acting out of ‘pure love’, he cannot cause any harm. If clients die, they’re actually transitioning to a better place.

I notice, by the by, that Dr Lee is now required to put ‘this is not medical advice’ at the bottom of his videos. Imagine if every wellness guru had to do that.

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3. The worst harms from the psychedelic renaissance are not from psychedelics

They’re from two related drugs - cannabis and ketamine. These are, I suggest, more dangerous than the classic psychedelics because they’re much more likely to be used daily and to lead to dependence.

According to Leung et al (2020), 22% of cannabis users qualify for Cannabis Use Disorder. That certainly included me in my teens - I needed to smoke cannabis every day. Regular users then become susceptible to something called Cannabinoid Hyperemesis Syndrome (CHS), or ‘scromiting’ - daily cannabis use inflames the cannabinoid receptors in your gut so that you experience severe nausea, vomiting and abdominal pains. CHS only recently got recognized by the International Classification of Disease, and it’s affecting a lot of people - approximately 2.7 million a year. The CDC says the group most affected is 15-24-year-olds. People can die from CHS, but you can also recover from it, if you quit weed for a while to give your gut a chance to stabilize.

And then there’s ketamine. In the UK, there are weekly stories about young people experiencing severe physical effects from ketamine addiction, particularly damage to their bladder. In the US, meanwhile, ketamine seems to be ever more popular among psychonauts for recreational use, and ketamine addiction is becoming a growing problem in places like Austin and San Francisco. There seems to be a serious misunderstanding of the risk of ketamine addiction in the US and I worry about a generation of tech psychonauts having to wear nappies because their bladders don’t work.

4. ‘He would call it medicine’

The public understanding of the risks of ketamine is not helped by folks like the comedian Reggie Watts, a relentless psychedelic booster. Watts has promoted psychedelics through the Joe Rogan podcast, the Netflix documentary Have a Good Trip, a partnerships with MAPS, and so on. ‘I encourage all of you guys to get a [ketamine] prescription’, he told the audience at one concert. Watts consistently downplays the risks of ketamine or other drugs. On Rainn Wilson’s podcast, when Wilson brought up Matthew Perry’s death, Watts insisted: ‘Whatever he died of, it wasn’t ketamine’. On the Psychedelics Today podcast Watts said: ‘My message is ‘reduce the fear’.…Certain drugs [like ketamine] are very safe…People have fear of going into chaos…but…in the right context going off the rails is awesome.’

I have no problem with a person doing whatever drugs they want, and I have friends who can throw extraordinary amounts of drugs into their system without any obvious negative effects. But if you are a prominent psychedelic evangelist you have a responsibility to be accurate about the risks, or you are going to build up some bad karma.

In Watts’ case, he apparently loved to introduce friends and girlfriends to his lifestyle og intense drug experimentation - he’s like the guy in the pub who insists on getting everyone shots, but with him its ketamine lozenges. He told Joe Moore a story about an LA party where he handed out lozenges to guests at someone else’s party, and no one disappointed him by refusing. Is that a bit risky? No, because he’s ‘very good at dosing’.

At one such party, he met Katherine McCollough and (she said) gave her ketamine. They started a whirlwind romance and - according to a new Rolling Stone article by Cheyenne Roundtree - McCollough was introduced to Watts’ LA party lifestyle and on various occasions they took LSD, MDMA, DMT, MMCs, cocaine, Ritalin, Adderall, ketamine, Xanax, Valium, and Modafinil. What began as a dream romance soon spun out of control.

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The story of every psychedelic is outlandish, but perhaps none more so than the story of toad medicine, Bufo, or 5-MeO-DMT. It’s still hard to believe, but in five years it hopped from an dank underground populated by rascals and reprobates to a billion-dollar treatment acquired by Eli Lilly and now on the brink of FDA approval.

The leading wild man in this extraordinary tale is Octavio Rettig, and his story is told in Kimon de Greef’s rollicking new book, The Ego Trip: Psychedelic Toads, a Trail of Deaths, and the Guru Who Peddled Transcendence. In fact, Kimon tells the story of Rettig and also a little of the story of Countess Amanda Feilding, whose 5-MeO-DMT company was bought by Eli Lilly. Rettig and Feilding - two posh, drug-binging bohemians keen to bring chemical bliss to the masses, and not too concerned about the side effects.

How Octavio took the toad global

South American tribes probably used 5-MeO-DMT for centuries, through snuffs made of Anadenanthera seeds. 5-MeO-DMT was first synthesized by Japanese scientists Toshio Hoshino and Kenta Shimodaira in 1936, and was identified in the seeds of Anadenanthera peregrina (the yopo tree) by VL Stromberg in 1954. Vittorio Erspamer, the Italian scientist who discovered serotonin, identified 5-MeO-DMT in the secretion of the Sonoran Desert toad (Bufo alvarius) in the 1960s. It didn’t really play any role in the 60s psychedelic counterculture, and it was only in 1983 that an American hippy called Ken Nelson decided to try and smoke the toad secretions. He anonymously published a pamphlet - Bufo alvarius: The Psychedelic Toad of the Sonoran Desert - describing how to milk and smoke the venom, then he founded the Church of the Toad of Light. The church didn’t take off, but his method of getting high certainly did.

Through Nelson’s pamphlet, toad medicine spread in underground psychedelic circles and was pioneered by folks like Andrew Weil and Ralph Metzner. Then it was discovered by two Mexican doctors - Octavio Rettig and Gerry Sandoval.

Rettig and Sandoval were two privately-educated reprobates who met at medical college and discovered a shared love of drugs. Soon, Octavio was taking so many drugs he was homeless. But then Gerry introduced him to 5-MeO-DMT. After a long toad binge, Octavio emerged declaring he was clean (except for the toad, and the weed). Both he and Gerry became interested in the potential of 5-MeO-DMT in treating addiction.

Octavio got connected to an indigenous fishing tribe on the coast of the Sonora desert called the Seri. Octavio helped some of the Seri get off meth through Bufo, and he developed a relationship with some of them and began to weave a myth of an ancient indigenous toad medicine culture spanning Mesoamerica. There’s no actual evidence for this. Nonetheless, Octavio obtained a letter from someone in the Seri tribe authenticating his work, and he somehow managed to become a semi-official United Nations provider of ‘ancestral indigenous medicine’. He started a non-profit called OTAC (the Seri word for amphibian) and wrote a book, The Toad of Dawn: 5-MeO-DMT and the Rising of Cosmic Consciousness. The Seri were incredibly useful to him, providing (or selling) him indigenous legitimacy and adding a priceless (if illusory) ancient lineage to his product. And he was useful to them, helping some of the locals through his toad ceremonies, and bringing thousands of tourists to the impoverished town of Punta Chueca (population: 600).

Ana Maria Ortiz, who co-founded the OTAC non-profit with Octavio, was also crucial in taking 5-MeO-DMT into mainstream healthcare. She got a job at an ibogaine clinic in Tijuana called Crossroads, where Martin Polanco served ibogaine to recovering addicts and traumatized veterans. Ortiz incorporated 5-MeO-DMT into the Crossroads protocol, and the ibogaine / 5-MeO-DMT protocol is now used in many ibogaine clinics. That brought 5-MeO-DMT to Special Forces veterans looking for healing and some of them, like former Navy Seal Shawn Ryan, went on to sing the drug’s praises on their podcasts. Crossroads also inspired the first ever scientific studies of 5-MeO-DMT experiences, led by Professor Alan Davis of Ohio State University.

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In 2013, Octavio went to Burning Man and introduced 5-MeO-DMT to the global party set. So did James Oroc, an extreme sports enthusiast who tragically died in a paragliding accident in 2020, and Florencia Bollini, an Argentine facilitator who tragically died in a ketamine-related incident in 2025. Flor, who Kimon says was a great help to him with his book, played a central role in turning on the ultra-rich to toad medicine. Her clients included people like Alki David, multimillionaire heir to the Leventis-David Coca-Cola bottling company, who says he was smoked Bufo every day for six months, and billionaire Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberté, also introduced to Bufo by Flor, who now lives on a private Polynesian island, dresses like a frog, has a band named the Frogs, and surrounds himself with toy frogs.

Citizen Cane (Toad)

Other ultra-rich fans of Bufo include the ‘never die’ multimillionaire Bryan Johnson, who has the molecular structure of 5-MeO-DMT tattooed on his body and live-streamed himself smoking it; and billionaire investment manager Ron Carson, who changed his name to Omani after a psychedelic experience (it means ‘running into a stiff wind’ in Native American, apparently). Omani smoked 5-MeO-DMT and then started a church. When asked what his favourite spiritual text was, he replied ‘I don’t read spiritual books. I’ve done Bufo.’

Why are the ultra-wealthy so into 5-MeO-DMT? I’ve never done it, but am told it feels like a direct encounter with the Godhead. It sweeps you into a pre- or post-egoic state, beyond the self, beyond words or images. When it works, it can be profoundly liberating from ego patterns - people have told me their first 5-MeO-DMT experience freed them from decades of mental suffering. It’s also quick - it takes you to the Godhead in just 15 minutes - and it makes you feel God-like, which appeals to the super-yacht class.

Let’s get wrecked

But it’s not always plain sailing. Sometimes the ego resists dissolution, or whites out, and it can struggle to put itself back together. Ana Maria Ortiz and others have warned of reactivations, insomnia, terrible anxiety and suicidality after bad 5-MeO-DMT trips. It’s one thing to recover from a bad trip if you have your own island and private staff, another if you’re struggling to make ends meet and need to work to support your family.

There’s also a risk that the purveyor of the God-molecule thinks they’re God. This is ‘the ego trip’ of Kimon’s title - several of his interviewees compare the God molecule to Sauron’s Ring of Power. He mentions my article on Bruno Cluzel, a Miami fraudster who set up a retreat center in Mexico, smoked toad all day long, and screamed at participants until they accepted he was the Messiah. Octavio seems to have experienced some ego-inflation as well. It must have been intoxicating to be feted as ‘the prophet of toad’ and have followers get your face tattooed on their body.

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The psychedelic renaissance has not inspired an abundance of great artists producing great art (music, movies, fashion etc), unlike the Sixties counter-culture or the acid house movement of the 80s/90s. Maybe it’s too dominated by affluent people over 40, the kind who prefer a gentle ‘sound bath’ to Jimi Hendrix burning his guitar. But one genuinely great musician who emerged from the plant medicine scene is British folk singer Nick Mulvey. He spent many years in a Santo Daime church in the UK, and this inspired his 2017 album Wake Up Now, which is a stone-cold classic. I listened to it when I was on an Amazonian ayahuasca retreat and was astonished - he was describing my experiences! - then discovered he’d been inspired by ayahuasca as well. His song ‘Remembering’ was my most-listened-to song of 2017.

So it’s been a shock to some of his fans that this mellow proponent of psychedelic spirituality has now embraced what looks like evangelical Christianity.

The shift began, Nick has said, in 2023, when his life was ‘in pieces’: ‘Things in my life had started to fall apart, in more ways than one. I wasn’t living in alignment with who I wanted to be. Not as a partner, not as a father, not as an artist.’ He was struck by a Christian friend of his, who seemed to have the peace he craved. He yearned to surrender to the Creator of the universe - ‘what I’m aiming for is total dependency on God... I try, each morning, to give the first portion of the day to Jesus. To say, Lord replace my agenda with your agenda.’ He felt exhausted by a pick n’ mix spirituality where he was the selector: ‘what I eventually realised is that when you’re the one doing the picking, you remain in charge of the whole thing. You stay at the centre; your blind spots are built into it.’ He also had a keen sense that he was an imperfect, broken being, and felt rescued from his fuck-ups by the grace of the Lord. He didn’t reject his former nature-spirituality, but he decided it made more sense to pray to the Creator than to the created.

He now seems to be in the charismatic Christian subculture of HTB / Vineyard - the same subculture as Mumford & Sons. Charismatic Christianity can look quite similar to middle-class spirituality on the outside - the same scruffy, authentic, soulful, hipster-folksy vibe, the same beanie hats and lumberjack shirts - but the values are quite different when you get into it. No drugs, no spiritual pot pourri, no sex before marriage, a quiet disapproval of LGBTQ+, more emphasis on family values, much more emphasis on sin / imperfection / brokenness, an over-riding emphasis on surrendering to Jesus, and a focus on ‘the Enemy’ - Satan, the root of all evil. Nick hasn’t denounced ayahuasca yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he does.

The pipeline from ayahuasca to evangelical Christianity

Nick’s conversion is not unique. There are a whole bunch of ‘ayahuasca to Jesus’ video testimonies on Christian YouTube channels and other social media. There are far fewer videos of ‘mushrooms to Jesus’, even though magic mushrooms are much more commonly used than ayahuasca, or are there many ‘LSD to Jesus’ videos, or ‘DMT to Jesus’ videos. I’ll discuss why this might be shortly.

Claude and I did a qualitative analysis of 23 ‘ayahuasca to Jesus’ testimonies on YouTube. I searched for ‘ayahuasca to Jesus’ and selected the first 23 testimony or interview videos I could find on YouTube. I made sure none of them were by the same people, then turned the YouTube videos into Word transcripts, then uploaded the 23 transcripts into Claude and asked it to do a thematic qualitative analysis. I asked it to look for common themes or patterns in the conversion / salvation testimonies and to test my hypothesis - that people convert to evangelical Christianity after ayahuasca experiences because they get freaked out by either negative entities or brujeria and seek protection in Jesus Christ.

Was this hypothesis confirmed? For the majority, yes, but not all. More after the paywall. Plus - why ayahuasca leads to more evangelical conversions than other psychedelics, and why people convert to evangelical / charismatic / Pentecostal Christianity.

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It’s officially the Summer of Homer, with Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of The Odyssey making a fortune at the box office and sparking off an intense discussion about all things Homeric - is the film too woke, as Elon Musk has claimed? Is it trashy, as Odyssey translator Emily Wilso…

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This new army of psychedelic guides often had little idea of how bad things could turn out for their clients, or for them. If one of their clients died, they’re not dealing with the lax regulatory environment of the Amazon jungle. No, they’re in the US, and they might have to face the American judicial system.

If you sell someone a controlled substance and then they die, you could face a sentence of 15-25 years in prison on charges ranging from manslaughter, to distribution of a controlled substance leading to death, to failure-to-aid if you don’t seek prompt emergency assistance.

‘Spiritual psychiatrist’ Samuel Lee could face 15 years in prison if he’s found guilty of manslaughter in the state of Florida, after one of his clients died at a Miami retreat last year (he’s pleading not guilty). Jasveen Sangha, the ‘ketamine queen’, got 15 years from the US federal government after she sold ketamine to Matthew Perry, who then drowned in his pool. In Australia, the organizer and facilitator of an ayahuasca and kambo retreat were both charged with manslaughter this year after a client died at their retreat, and could face a maximum of 25 years in prison if found guilty.

Many of Samuel Lee’s followers have told me this week on my Instagram (check out the 400 comments, it’s an education) that people die in hospitals from ‘mainstream medicine’ all the time, so why is ‘the spiritual psychiatrist’ being accused of one death when (they say) he has helped thousands? ‘Why not focus on the light?’

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It’s true that accidents and deaths often occur in mainstream medicine. That’s why doctors spend a lot of money on insurance and indemnity. That doesn’t exist in the underground. The waiver form your client signed? It won’t make much difference if the client died.

Some underground guides have realized the shit they would be in if it emerged one of their clients had died. So they have hidden deaths, or at least, not faced consequences when clients died under their care. But, like Odysseus’ comrades who died without a proper burial, one day the dead may speak. How many have died in underground supervised sessions in the US in the last 15 years? Yesterday I heard from two sources about three deaths in the last three years, just in one US city. I know that’s nothing compared to deaths from alcohol, cigarettes or opioids, but it’s still three dead people.

Did thousand-dollar training courses warn about the risk of prison?

I might be completely wrong about this, but I feel the psychedelic renaissance has downplayed the potential legal consequences underground guides could face, including prison time. Reading Michael Pollan’s 2018 New York Times article, ‘The Trip Doctors’, which is about his journey into the world of underground guides, the word I would use is: genteel. Pollan takes us into a discreet, elegant world of high-minded, bourgeois guides, supporting people in plush living rooms while listening to Bach. It’s the elegant world of the New York Times weekend supplement. There is no mention of the possibility of death or psychosis, nor any mention that these discreet charming bourgeois guides could potentially go to jail for 15-25 years if a client dies. But that is important information. The suburban shaman-moms of the psychedelic renaissance need to know that. Is anyone warning them?

Pollan’s article features the late Ralph Metzner, emeritus professor at CIIS, telling CIIS students they have a moral responsibility to offer this treatment now, ie illegally:

It’s an underground culture, and underground cultures are good, in fact they can be lifesaving…[He then compared the psychedelic underground to the underground German resistance hiding Jews during the war]. [We have these] fantastically promising medicines that can cure all sorts of ills, and yet doctors can’t get them. We don’t have to accept that!

I get the feeling some of these courses are inflating their naive middle-class students with a saviour complex, and it would be a rude awakening if and when they discover the judicial system views them not as Oskar Schindler but as a drug-dealer.

Readers who work in the underground: did any of the training courses you paid tens of thousands of dollars for tell you what to do if a client dies? Because if they didn’t, they are leaving out a critical aspect of your new career.

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For 15 years or so, there’s been impunity, more or less, in the psychedelic underground. And that’s given providers a false sense that this impunity will last and that to all intents and purposes psychedelics have been decriminalized in the United States, psychedelics are entirely safe, and this is a golden opportunity to get very rich very quickly. But this is a dangerous bet.

The Department of Justice or State / District Attorneys may decide they want to start cracking down on illegal activity - that’s already happening in the ketamine industry, where some doctors have gone to jail for illegal prescribing. And the public may also become more emboldened to bring civil cases if they feel they or their loved ones were harmed by guided psychedelic sessions.

In Denver, a man was referred by his therapist to an underground guide (the therapist’s wife). They did a psilocybin session in a hotel room in May 2025 and - according to a law-suit brought by the client - the underground guide left him unattended during the trip, and the client fell out of a fourth-floor window. He says he spent nearly two months in hospital and accumulated $2 million in medical bills, and now he’s suing the therapist and his wife, according to the Denver Post. The defendants didn’t respond to the Post’s request for comments.

We’re already seeing lawyers recognize an opportunity to go after ketamine clinics where harm has occurred. If underground guides have overground businesses, clients and their lawyers could be emboldened to go after them too.

How can therapists and coaches reduce the legal risks?

The easiest way is simply: don’t work with illegal substances. Or don’t sell them to the client and just offer ‘harm reduction’ services. If you do sell them controlled substances, you still have a duty of care even if you’re choosing to conduct illegal activity.

• Before the trip: preparation, screening, informed consent (telling people what they’re taking, explaining the potential benefits and risks accurately, warning of contraindications), presenting your credentials accurately (not calling yourself a physician or licensed therapist if you’re not).

• During the trip: stay with them for the entirety of a retreat, keep them safe, don’t over-dose them, don’t give them multiple drugs, don’t make sexual contact with them.

• After the trip: if they’re in crisis, make sure they have proper care, refer them to emergency support if needed, don’t over-dose them in repeated sessions, don’t take advantage of them sexually or financially while they’re in the afterglow state, don’t allow dual relationships to form, warn them not to make sudden major life decisions which they might regret or which partners might resent and blame on you.

All of this is hard, and even if you take care, a person might still die, and you might still go to jail - but at least you could show a judge or jury you’re not a complete cowboy. Saying that, none of the above provides a legal defence for distributing Schedule I substances. Alternatively, you could go down the route of becoming a legal DEA-approved psychedelic church - this is happening more and more. But just saying you’re a church isn’t enough, as Samuel Lee may discover (or not, who knows how the trial will pan out).

It seems obvious but is worth saying clearly: illegal psychedelic work has serious legal risks, and if you haven’t been told that by your training course, you’ve been dangerously misinformed.

After the paywall, an update on the Amy Griffin ‘recovered memories’ law suits; an update in the Paulo Roberto Santo Daime trial in Brazil; a case against Netflix involving ketamine, wild developments in the Mango succession law-case in Barcelona; and (in a break from legal matters) why is China so into the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead?

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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 …

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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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