Sunday Brunch 9/4/23

A weekly round-up of news on psychedelic and ecstatic integration - including the ethics of tripping in former slave plantations.

Happy Easter! And welcome to the second edition of the Sunday Brunch, the weekly round-up of the best links on ecstatic and psychedelic integration and harm reduction. It’s only open to paid subscribers, but here some quick links for everyone else.

For Easter Sunday, here’s an interview by Don Lattin of a Christian minister who studies mysticism and uses psychedelics on his mystic path (he’s from Berkeley, where else!). Don has a new book out soon on psychedelic religion and I’ll be interviewing him for Ecstatic Integration.

Meanwhile a doctor takes mushrooms twice, visits ‘the God Space’, and immediately writes a book telling the world about the nature of heaven and what God is / isn’t. This is why we need ecstatic literacy….

If you missed it, my Friday essay was on how testimonials have played a central role in the psychedelic renaissance, how this reminds me of the Christian church, and the potential for ethical issues to arise when clinics and retreat companies rely so heavily on ecstatic testimonials for marketing.

I wasn’t able to post the essay properly on Twitter because a fight has broken out between Twitter and Substack, triggered by Substack’s launch of a Twitter rival. Substack writers have circled the wagons, and I’ve found some great writing there. Here is Daniel Pinchbeck writing on a bad trip he experienced at Burning Man, which made him think he was in a fake / bardo-like reality - a classic derealization episode of the sort which has turned up a lot in our research on bad trips (more on this in a few weeks).

After the pay-wall, luxury retreats in the Caribbean grapple with the ethical questions of whether ot not to use former slave plantations and slaver mansions for retreats.