What is the role of risk in psychedelics and spiritual practice?
Are you a 3 or a 9 on the risk appetite scale?
We’re at a moment in the psychedelic renaissance where there’s a lot of focus on safety and ethics. There’s a new Psychedelic Safety Institute, a Congressional initiative to create better psychedelic safeguards, and a growing body of articles and research papers on the risks and harms of psychedelics and how they might be mitigated. This is part of a broader conversation on spiritual risks and harms – the adverse effects of meditation, the dangers of Vipassana retreats, the tendency of spiritual organisations to become high-control cults led by abusive gurus. My own work is quite involved in this effort towards greater ethics and safety in psychedelic and spiritual culture.
But is there not something paradoxical or even Quixotic about the idea of making Dionysian experiences ‘safe’. Dionysus is not safe. He is the god of transgression, of ecstasy, of going beyond limits. He’s also the god of madness. And while something might be gained from initiatives to professionalize, normalize and moralize transgressive subcultures like New Age psychedelia, is something lost as well?
The anthropologist Nicolas Langlitz suggested as much, in a recent talk at ICPR which I guess will be part of his upcoming book. Nick argued that the 60s psychedelic era was characterized by unbounded charismatic rebels like Timothy Leary, Hunter S Thompson, Ken Kesey or Carlos Castaneda, who were very creative but not very safe, reliable or trustworthy. The psychedelic renaissance by contrast is marked by more of an attempt to create better standards and norms, more reliable evidence, and to moralize, judge and discipline those who fail to meet the emerging standards.
If the first era is one of Dionysian chaotic recklessness, the second involves the creation of an iron cage of bureaucratic standards. Important and necessary, but also perhaps less creative than the earlier, wilder era.
I recently listened to a podcast on this theme, a conversation between meditation teacher Michael Taft and author Erik Davis (the two co-founded the Alembic centre in Berkeley). Davis and Taft talk about transgression and risk in spirituality. I’m going to quote some of their conversation and then offer my own thoughts, like one of those YouTube reaction videos.
Erik:
We're in a really strange time… there's been some like major almost-180-degree shifts around issues of power, abuse, danger, consent. And that's all happened for very good reasons, because a lot of really painful, disastrous things happened [in the wild 60s / 70s counterculture]. I look at someone like Chogyam Trungpa as this erratic genius - I cannot not acknowledge the power of his books, the role he played in the spiritual revolution of the time, the extraordinary effect he had on people I respect, really an amazing, wild, unexpected kind of character. And yet, from another perspective, he committed acts or was part of social situations that many people find reprehensible, which if I look at through that lens, I too find reprehensible. What would I do if I was there? I would like to think that I would say, ‘Hey, this is shitty. We have to stop this now’. I mean, there's all sorts of complexities. I don't want to get into the details about Trungpa or Rajneesh or a lot of these other experiments, but they featured a kind of openness and risk and quality of transgression that was clearly very powerful and attractive for many people at the time, but had real costs.
And I think one of the interesting, paradoxical situations that we're in now - you see this in psychedelics, and in other domains of wellness - is that people want the goods, but they want way more safety and ways of being assured, feeling safe, feeling acknowledged, having rules of consent, having ways of pushing back against power excesses, because of all of the suffering and excesses of the last 30, 40 years.
But there's this open question, can you get the goods from a situation where things are so controlled? I think you can get some goods, but there is a real role that risk plays in spirituality, and it's hard to talk about, because if you try to say anything positive about it, it sounds like you're saying, Oh, the suffering that these people went through is no big deal.
I would put it in a really simple question that everybody can think about for themselves. What is the role of risk in spiritual practice and spiritual development?
And phrasing it around the term risk, I think, actually helps us shift the dialog a little bit away from particular acts… and recognize that everybody is agreeing to enter into situations that aren't entirely under their control. Even a Vipassana retreat, it's pretty safe but you can still have incredibly difficult experiences. You might have a [psychotic] break. You might lose it. You might have to leave the retreat. They might even have to call a doctor. That's part of the risk profile. And if you are aware what the situation is, you're like, ‘Okay, I'm gonna run that risk’.
Michael Taft:
If you think about worldwide initiation rituals that young people, typically males, go through, it almost always includes a tremendous amount of pain and suffering, but also the very real risk of death. That's part of it. And I think it's so interesting that we want to have all the benefits of the initiation now without any of the risk. And of course, that's completely understandable. Imagine being the parents of someone who dies in an initiation ritual. That’s horrible. I don't want to put anyone through that. And as a society, we don't want to put people through that. And yet, what's the cost? And is there some kind of safe replacement? It might be the case that you can't get the initiatory power without some very real risk. And so you have to ask yourself, what risks are worth it in your own life, not in the life of somebody else.
And I wonder if this is not just some kind of balance or pendulum that swings back and forth. I think it's so interesting that our society became so permissive at a certain point. Growing up in the mid 70s, you know, in just like the ultimate ‘there are no rules’ kind of world, now we're swinging so hard back into incredibly structured, almost taboo-level stuff. So I wonder if in spirituality, it doesn't have a similar going back and forth between total permissivists and tons of risk-taking that leads to really bad outcomes for some people, and then swinging back to becoming so formulaic and safe that maybe it doesn't really do that much.
My two-cents worth
This is a useful critical reflection for me, as I’m quite engaged in trying to make psychedelic and New Age culture safer and more ethical, and I sometimes feel a sort of moral anger against those who transgress and harm others in this space, through malice or negligence.
But it’s useful to recognize people have different risk appetites, and what is unbounded and unsafe for some people is how other people like it. Some people like their spirituality wild, unbounded, rough, ‘all in’, even extreme. Others, especially those with histories of trauma or who score higher in neuroticism or conscientiousness, and lower in extraversion and openness, really don’t. So is there an argument for having different tents in the festival, different rooms in the orgy, depending on your risk appetite?
It brings to mind places like AWE and the whole tradition of ‘Dionysian Gestalt’ which I wrote about and castigated last year. Some people emerged from AWE’s psychedelic training course feeling it was unsafe and unethical – too much nudity, too many high dose experiences, too unbounded, too little integration and care and honesty and informed consent. But others love it. Maybe they yearn for the old Dionysiac days of 1960s spiritual experimental groups, and they are prepared to run the risk of going a bit culty and maybe stepping over some ethical lines to seek edge experiences. Good luck to them, don’t say I didn’t warn you!
I am fine with the idea of there being different tents in the festival, different rooms in the orgy, and some rooms being way more extreme than others. But as veterans of the BDSM scene will tell you, the more extreme you go, the more important informed consent is. Does everyone who goes into the room know what they are signing up for? Because if they don’t, things quickly get abusive.
Erik then makes an interesting analogy between psychedelics, spiritual practice and extreme sports, which I want to poke at a little. He says:
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