How to Navigate the Psychedelic Renaissance

The name of this publication is not ‘The Post-Truth Post’ by accident; our world has entered an era of widespread factual distortion, aggressive arbitration in the court of public opinion, and party lines that grow deeper and more entrenched on a daily basis. This is a general temperature reading of the status quo of our world in general, as far as I can tell, but it also extends to the state of the emergent psychedelics space.

The journey of the ‘psychedelic renaissance’ into mainstream medical and cultural recognition has dredged up a nearly inexhaustible supply of societal issues and differences of opinion with it to the forefront of public consciousness - as any potentially transformative technology or agent of social change should.

I laid out a list of competing ideologies here at first, but have scrapped it because I’m not 100% clear who is arguing for what anymore or what the stakeholders’ positions are. I just clearly see that a lot of people don’t see eye to eye on a lot of issues, and social media frequently exacerbates a communications breakdown between divergent perspectives.

What I find most baffling about the current situation of the psychedelic space is how little air time actually gets devoted to talking about the psychedelic experience itself. It’s almost as if a majority of the stakeholders, business leaders, journalists, and fuck bois curating their public identity around the fashionable topic of psychedelics are completely oblivious to the dynamics and depth of the experience itself.

Sure, we might get occasional first person narratives from celebrities like Aaron Rodgers or Will Smith about a particular insight they had while under the influence of an entheogen - and we definitely get a lot of perspectives about the ethics of how we should be integrating psychedelics into our society - we even hear about Silicon Valley VC’s using AI to map DMTa hyperspace, and how insurance providers are working to make ketamine therapy available to employees of certain companies.

But why is the dialogue itself largely focused on these aspects of the ‘psychedelic renaissance’, as far as I can tell, and not on the experience itself? There are definitely people talking about it - many of my podcast guests, for a start - but in the mainstream conversation, it’s almost as if the psychedelic experience has been diluted into a simalacrum of itself and massaged into acceptable brand messaging while the messy parts and the truly ecstatic ‘holy shit’ scenarios are sidelined in favor of window dressing.

I caught the psychedelic wave very, very far ahead of the current hype bubble: in 2007 I was the first person in my network to solo macrodose fungi, called to do so for a number of reasons. It took me two years of study and trepidation to work up the nerve to do it, and I did so very intentionally and with great reverence for the potential of the experience. I could not contain my excitement after achieving an ecstatic visionary state on that first 7 gram solo macrodose of golden teachers in silent darkness, which was so transformative and profound that aliens landing in my backyard and handing over the secrets of jet propulsion technology is about the only meaningful comparison I can make right now.

Less than 6 months later, I was enrolled as a freshman at the University of San Francisco as a Media Studies student - and the course of the next 4 years were largely devoted to learning how to harness and ride the wave of psychedelic consciousness into the new digital age as a content creator and artist.

I remember walking through Golden Gate Park on 3.5 grams of mushrooms and hearing a loud oscilating frequency coming from the bushes off of the path I was on deep in the park near the frisbee golf course. The frequency felt oddly targeted at me and unusual, and I followed it off the path and into tufts of tall grass to find a family of mushrooms. This is the type of experience that somehow gets omitted from a lot of the current dialogue around psychedelics in our society.

How the fuck can anyone explain that?

Or another time during an intensely concentrated period of high dose psilocybin mushroom use when I had a vivid dream of raining hieroglyphs and letters pouring down vertically in front of me, then suddenly opening like a curtain to reveal a perfectly arranged name in English letters - a high profile music producer no less - only for me to meet this person several years later via a completely unexpected introduction.

Or the time after a mushroom trip that I had a dream where I encoutnered someone I hadn’t talked to in several months, only to wake up to a text message from them the following morning?

The stories go on and on, as many psychonauts can attest to - and I could care less who dismisses these experiences or tries to rationalize them - they’re certainly more interesting to me personally than the constant state of bickering and surface level conversation that populates much of the mainstream cultural dialogue around psychedelics.

In my early days pursuing the psychedelic experience, I always found it so baffling that so many brilliant and capable peers seemed entirely uninterested in the phenomenon of high dose psychedelic experience - I was often outcast and ignored by the same types who are now parading around like they hold some sense of authority on the subject of psychedelics. What’s even more baffling is that the same thing is happening today in the psychedelic community.

Isn’t it a little it strange that many of the people starting companies, running conferences, launching platforms, and generally planting their flag in the ‘psychedelic renaissance’ conveniently ignored the existence of these molecules and experiences for decades of their own life before suddenly rushing in for a piece of the pie?

Here’s my take: The Whole Pie Is Yours.

For those who know how to achieve an ecstatic state via the psychedelic experience, what more could you even want?

So here’s how I’ll navigate the unfolding ‘psychedelic mainstreaming’ - I’ll continue to investigate my own consciousness, and to look for truth and beauty internally.

I’ll continue to learn how to navigate high dose realms and find magic in the minutiae and trivia of life - because one of my biggest takeaways from nearly two decades of psychedelic ecstasy is that life is happening here and now, and no one else is responsible for my happiness or how I respond to things.

Let the master debaters debate, and let the chorus of bird song and spontaneous joy be your compass to navigating this increasingly bewildering shared group experience we’re all having. Build with the people you want to build with, and invest your attention wisely. The cream always rises to the top.