New Age parenting and the risk of spiritual projection

Are little Cosmo and Moonbeam really so special?

A young western kid who was recognized and enthroned as a ‘tulku’, ie a reincarnation of a Tibetan lama

Donca Vianu is a Romanian psychiatrist who lives in Portugal, and has been part of psychedelic culture for the last 20 years. She got into it when she heard Professor Benny Shannon speak about ayahuasca at a conference in 2004. She decided to try the brew to see if it could aid her spiritual growth, and had such an extraordinary first experience she became immersed in ayahuasca culture in Holland for the next decade. She then moved to Portugal, and during the pandemic gradually began to work more in the psychedelic renaissance. She is a consultant psychiatrist for retreat company Inwardbound and also for Portuguese psychedelic clinic Liminal Minds. And she occasionally offers support to people dealing with post-psychedelic difficulties.

I met Donca a couple of months ago, and we exchanged emails on our mutual interest in post-psychedelic difficulties and what helps people navigate them.  She and I met on Zoom recently to discuss some of the cases that have come her way. Today we’ll look at one particular case study of hers, a case of a person recognizing they are projecting spiritual narcissism onto their child, following a psilocybin ceremony.

Raymond

Raymond (name changed) is a 33-year-old British man who went to a psilocybin retreat in Holland while his wife was pregnant with their first baby. His intention, he later told Donca, was ‘enlightenment, self-improvement, perspective’. He took part in two ceremonies. The first went well, although there were some challenges. The next day, Raymond shared a bit in the sharing circle:

I shared my experience with the group and told them that I was going to be a father, and how wonderful it was. Shortly before the second ceremony, I chatted with one of the guides and mentioned what my mother-in-law said the previous year, that if she could have any wish, at this point in her life, it would be for a grand-child. The guide joked and said, “Well, I would have wished for world peace personally, but whatever.” And then in the second ceremony, just after I had drunk the psilocybin tea, the guide who made the joke earlier, walked past me and whispered “World Peace,” and gave me a wink and a grin.

Raymond had an incredible second ceremony. He felt in the presence of a deeply-loving intelligence – God or some higher power. He felt he had passed some cosmic test. The presence said to him: “This light you have inside you is special. You are special. You have a higher purpose now, to save this world with your light.”

Raymond said:

Everything felt so important, like it was God himself speaking to me or even just a higher being. It was one of the most incredible moments of my life.

He asked the presence about his daughter. And it told him to turn his light on her, as “her purpose is to achieve world peace, and she will save the world.”

Raymond continued:

My reaction was to smile at this news. Even the concept of World Peace is….well, almost ridiculous……But this is what I was told and this is the story I will eventually share with my daughter. I have no idea how she should achieve this.

He didn’t take to the streets to preach that his daughter was the Messiah. And yet the idea stuck in his mind – his daughter could save the world and bring world peace! – because the encounter with the loving presence had been “the most incredible experience of my life.”

He could see that the moment might be connected to what the guide had said to him before the ceremony – and he even felt some anger towards the guide. At the same time, was it possibly a cosmic synchronicity, or did the guide perhaps see that he was special? Psychedelic ceremony guides have lots of experience in the numinous - they may see things which other people cannot see.

His main complaint – why he came to see Donca – was that 10 months later, he was still “thinking about this every day.” And it disturbed him in how he related to his daughter, that she supposedly had this mission to save the world. He said “I want to see my daughter just as my daughter” – and not some world-saving avatar.

How did Donca help him? Two methods she often uses with clients. First, she gets clients to write their biography, to see if the experience fits into certain long-term psychological patterns or tendencies. Second, she uses hypnotherapy to go back to the psychedelic experience and sometimes replay it in a new way.

In Raymond’s case, through conversations and his biography, she could see he was a bit insecure, sometimes felt low self-esteem, and sometimes swung to a sense of being special. She tells me:

We went back to the experience and how it somehow related to this dynamic of either being worthless or being exceptional. We explored how this related to the supposed mission of his daughter. He did experience this otherworldly love, which was a transpersonal experience…but everything related to his own and his daughter’s cosmic mission more likely came from his personality. He suffered from recurrent light depressions. He always thought it was the depression that made him feel worthless, while now it dawned on him that the depression was rather a reaction to some event which hurt him in his self-worth.

She adds:

We did exercises to imagine interacting with his daughter and to see her as she is, a one-year-old toddler. To take away this smoke screen and to connect with his daughter from heart to heart. His homework was to practice this, to stay with his daughter in the present moment. And we also did a role play where he spoke to the guide, who he still felt anger towards.

After this, Raymond felt he had more ground beneath his feet, and he understood better his tendency to swing between feelings of worthlessness and feelings of specialness, and the possibility of coming to the centre.

There are various things to note in this story. First – and this is something I hear about a lot – the amplified impact of some apparently-minor stimulus in the immediate run-up to a trip. The guide makes a throwaway remark, a bad gag, and it gets amplified into this grand cosmic drama that has had a big impact on a person’s relationship with their new-born daughter. That is the challenge of working with psychedelics! A remark, a painting, a song, a look – these tiny cues can be massively amplified and projected to absurd proportions on the cave-wall of a person’s mind.

Secondly, Raymond had difficulties after an incredibly positive psychedelic experience. The challenge was ego-inflation – ‘this experience is so wonderful, I must be a very special person’. And thirdly – and this is what I want to explore this week – the ego-inflation or spiritual narcissism was projected onto his child. ‘My child is special. My child is a world-saviour.’ How often do New Age parents project their own spiritual narcissism onto their kids?

More on this topic, plus links from around the web, after the paywall. This week, Lykos researchers speak out, and a snapshot of the Swiss legal treatment model.