Psychedelics : Appendix

Modes of Psychedelic Use

When talking about pharmaceuticals it is widely agreed that if person A takes drug B in X amount and outcome C happens, then outcome C will be the same every time person A takes drug B in X amount. This is essence of clinical drug therapy; we expect drugs to give us the same results in every instance. But this is not always true with psychedelics; psychedelics are multi-functional drugs. The notion that psychedelic effect is dependent on the ingestion context was best summarized by Timothy Leary in the nomenclature of “Dose, Set, and Setting”, what I refer to as psychedelic approach vector or ingestion context. Ingestion is the first spark of psychedelic information genesis, and the precise order of events leading up to the moment a psychedelic trip begins are all parameters of the ingestion context.

Since ingestion context frames the totality of psychedelic experience and outcome, we must first examine the typical contexts and settings in which people choose to ingest psychedelics in order to evaluate the quality of information taken away from each individual session.

Shamanic Context

The earliest known context for the use of psychedelics is the Shamanic context. The classic image of a shaman is a painted healer waving a bone rattle over a fire while wailing an ancient atonal drone. This is not far from the truth, nor is it the entire truth. Traditionally the shaman is a healer, but he is also a priest, a psychologist, a fortune teller, a sorcerer, and a warrior all rolled into one. In tribal communities the shaman is responsible for learning and passing down plant lore and plant technology; for acting as doctor, chemist, and spiritual leader for the entire tribe; and for waging magical battles with shaman in rival tribes. It is a very important, complex, and tricky position, and the shaman must take his or her role seriously or the sanity of the entire tribe suffers as consequence.

The metaphysical role of the shaman is to make contact with the spirit world to diagnose and heal sickness, find supernatural strength and wisdom, and right wrongs in physical world. Not only must the shaman seek supernatural wisdom, the shaman must be careful about how that wisdom is applied, for it is well understood that the spirits often play tricks on humans. Above all the shaman must be alert, astute, and constantly analyzing the results of his or her technique to further improve results, preferably without making any deadly mistakes.

While it is easy to romanticize the power and image of the shaman it must be remembered that the shaman is only human and shamanic power comes from a heady mix of science, superstition, theatrics, and a little help from the plant allies. In addition to using psychedelics as a therapeutic agent, the shaman also uses the psychedelic as a performance enhancing drug. In the shamanic context the psychedelic is an aide to a wide spectrum of shamanic work; it is a tool. The psychedelic enhances shamanic vision, it aides in shamanic diagnosis, it enlivens the shaman’s theatrical performance, and allows for greater influence over the tribe at large. In short, the shamanic context is a use in which the psychedelic is ingested towards some utilitarian goal, typically diagnosis and healing, and the shaman uses ritual, craft, and technique to channel the power of the psychedelic towards achieving that goal.

Sacramental or Entheogenic Context

Often confused with the shamanic context, the sacramental context is more one-dimensional than the shamanic context, and is actually closer to recreational use in terms of desire and outcome. In the sacramental context there is typically only one immediate goal, and that is to seek communion with some form of higher mind to achieve mystical awakening or spiritual enlightenment. In crude terms the psychedelic is ingested with the hope that the immortal spirit or soul will be lifted from the body; that grace will imbue the physical form; that godlike wisdom will suffuse the mind; that a merging with unity will overcome the smallness of the self; and that the mind of god will become manifest for the humble servant to behold. This sacramental context may certainly be overseen by a shaman, but the context of the spiritual seeker taking a communion is much different than that of the shaman attempting to diagnose or heal.

The sacramental context involves the individual supplicating themselves to the power of the psychedelic and letting the medicine work its magic. Being a participant in a ritual, even a self-led ritual, takes no special skills or training, and having a mystical communion with God under the influence of a psychedelic is something anyone can do regardless of faith or lack thereof. The modern sacramental use of psychedelics has led to the coining of the modern word entheogen, a generic term for any plant or chemical taken in a ritual context to awaken the divine within. People who use psychedelics in a sacramental context, or who want psychedelics to be viewed in a sacramental context, use the term entheogen instead of psychedelic or hallucinogen when referring to visionary plants and chemicals for political reasons. The term entheogen implies that the sacramental context of psychedelics is the only context worth exploring.

Academic or Research Context

While the shaman usually gets all the historic glory, the academic or exploratory context is certainly the first context under which psychedelics were tested. The original academic explorers were the first shamen, those who dared eat and chew and boil and brew all the bitter plants, roots, and fungi they could find; plants that would kill or cure depending on how they were applied. This knowledge did not come fast nor did it come easy. Countless bodies have fallen due to accidental ingestion and overdose along the way, but because of these tragedies knowledge has been retained and plant lore has been passed down from generation to generation with the hopes that deadly mistakes are not repeated. Although the scientific method was only properly defined a few centuries ago, humans have been experimenting with eating plants on a trial-and-error basis since the beginning of time. Folklore is most often passed down through oral tradition, song, legend, and ritual; it is not hard science, but it works. Methods are tested, knowledge is compressed into ceremony and narrative, and the crude science of transcendence eventually emerges in the full shamanic mode. The shaman is the primordial scientist and the archetype for all the scientific disciplines which splinter out of the simple task of exploring our world in a methodical basis and figuring out how to accurately pass new information along to others.

Rite of Passage or Social Bonding Context

The rite of passage context of psychedelic use is often overlooked and/or poorly understood in modern society. To most people the act of intoxicating oneself to near oblivion amongst a social peer group is possibly one of the most deviant and decadent acts imaginable. The rite of passage or social bonding context is commonly mistaken for recreational use, and the deeper significance of social bonding is commonly dismissed as youthful experimentation. But it should be pointed out that the use of psychoactive substances in social rite of passage or cultural bonding contexts is well documented in both tribal and modern cultures. In traditional tribal cultures psychedelic rites involve passage from childhood to manhood and greater trust and acceptance among adult members of the tribe. In the modern West psychedelic rites of passage usually involve loud music, dancing, heavy consumption of intoxicants, and fearless sexual experimentation. Psychedelics will always be an essential part of this social bonding and experimentation.

When examining rites of passage it is important to understand that behavior under the influence of intoxicants is an ad-hoc behavioral test that spans many thousands of years. The consumption of intoxicants in coming-of-age rituals is a common thread throughout the world, and each culture has its own intoxicants and methods it applies amongst its own. The ability to cope with a derangement of the senses is an emotional challenge and a test of the will; and of all the intoxicants psychedelics are the most challenging and thus present the most intense of emotional bonding tests. This is no small statement, and psychedelics take their casualties like any other difficult test of the will. Psychedelics can break fragile psyches; can cause extreme derangement of the senses; can stimulate repressed desires; can promote delusional ideation; can lead to spontaneous inappropriate behavior; and so on; and thus they represent the extreme of social bonding-rite intoxicants.

Therapeutic Context

The therapeutic model is a Western adaptation of the shamanic model and one that is focused on a very narrow range of uses. Due to prohibition this model has not had much opportunity to evolve, though some early protocols have been established and exploratory clinical work has begun. When we think of the therapeutic model we tend to think of a patient and a specialist (a psychotherapist or M.D., for example) having an emotionally raw psychedelic session in which repressed issues are washed clean through analysis or catharsis, giving the patient new hope on the path towards healing, or conversely, peacefully accepting their impending mortality.

In the therapeutic model the specialist is substituted for the shaman, and instead of songs and chants the specialist has protocols, session notes, and sometimes sensitive monitoring equipment. The therapeutic model overlaps with the shamanic model in many ways, but the specialist is generally not concerned with augury or sorcery or any of the other traditional tribal shamanic applications other than healing. It should be stressed that the primary goal of the therapeutic context is to return an abnormal patient to a state of normalcy, so there are distinct cultural biases about normalcy and acceptable baseline states of consciousness inherent in the therapeutic context that may not be explicitly defined in other contexts.

Creative or Visionary Context

All artists must get their inspiration from somewhere, and as artistic muses go psychedelics rank somewhere near love, god, and death at the top of the list. I include the creative and visionary context as separate from the shamanic or entheogenic context because it seeks its own specific goal -- the spark of something fresh within the creative imagination. There is no art form that hasn’t been influenced in some way by the psychedelic aesthetic. Beyond being a drug or a state of mind, psychedelic has now become its own meme. Entire genres of art and music, such as Surrealism, Op, Gonzo, Techno, House, and Trance, would not exist today without the influence of psychedelics, and even these fringe psychedelic trends eventually become co-opted by the mainstream.

Some might say that the artist is driven more by secular narcissism and the unique personal vision than transpersonal mysticism, or the shared universal vision, even though the two different motivators are closely related. The mystic seeks unity and harmony, peace and wisdom; the artist may seek harmony, but also desires a creative catalyst that will lead to a finished piece of artwork. The creative visionary context is possibly the purest example of Psychedelic Information Theory expressing itself through time: The psychedelic interacts with a human brain, and through psychedelic interaction with the neural network a piece of artwork spontaneously organizes in the mind of the artisan, emerging over time through craft into the physical world. Unlike the vague notions of transcendence or transformation to gauge the success of a psychedelic session, the artist instead creates a piece of artwork that can be easily transmitted. Art is the primary media through which novel information emerges into culture through time.

Ego Escapist or Self Destructive Context

Some people take high doses of psychedelics literally to obliterate their ego. Ego obliteration may be done under spiritual guise but the motivation for high-dose ego-escapist use is arguably quite different than someone seeking a mystical experience. Ego escapist behaviors include doing higher and higher doses of drugs in different combinations to stay in hallucinatory states for longer and longer periods of time. This may be perceived by the user as astral travel, a spiritual journey, a test of human will, or something equally heroic. Over a period of time psychedelics and the psychedelic journey becomes centrally integrated into the user’s identity, often overtaking the user’s interest in all other things. The user becomes consumed with the psychedelic experience to the point that other parts of their life take lower priority. At a certain point the user’s former ego is obliterated and a new personality takes its place, perhaps with a new name and a new manner of dress, perhaps viewed by others as more eccentric and weird. While the user may describe this ego destruction as spiritual growth, what they are accomplishing is an extreme form of neural identity rewiring, or brainwashing. Motivations for this kind of extended ego destruction go beyond mere spirituality and begin to mirror compulsion, addiction, or self-medication. For these people the psychedelic is a means to escaping their former selves and maintaining control over their own uniquely brewed brand of insanity. What they are escaping from or to is not the issue, the issue is that psychedelics are sometimes viewed as a secret doorway into another world, and some people take that metaphor very seriously.

Pathological ego destruction is symptomatic of someone attempting to erase human anxieties or emotional trauma in favor of idealized personality structures. Taking high doses of psychedelics allows for full hallucinatory immersion in a dream world, complete with sensations of magic powers, astral travel, precognition, and so on. But this extended dream sorcery is problematic in many ways. First, there is real neural deprogramming going on in these sessions, and chronic tinkering with personality by amateurs is likely to produce mixed results and at least a few critical failures. Secondly, high dose psychedelic sessions can create blank spots in memory where the user is awake and active but has no control or memory of their behaviors. When people lose control in a psychedelic trip it is typically because they have taken too large a dose. Higher doses allow emotionally repressed subjects to act out inappropriately and use the cover of their intoxication to dismiss their negative actions. Contra-indicated psychedelic users will have consistently negative, inappropriate, or confrontational episodes under the influence of high doses yet will continue to take them in high doses with expectations of resolving some crucial block in their next session. Most of the negative side effects of psychedelics are dose dependent, so the practice of taking extremely high doses for no particular reason -- sometimes called “macho ingestion syndrome” -- should be carefully addressed.

Antisocial or Megalomaniacal Context

This category is either its own extreme version of the self-destructive context or else it is the polar opposite, but the antisocial or sociopathic context is perhaps the most dangerous form of psychedelic use. In this context the user is typically already delusional or sociopathic and uses psychedelics to further his or her manipulative ends. The messianic or megalomaniacal user will attempt to adapt shamanic techniques to exert mind control over others. Since psychedelics routinely offer voices from gods and visions of transcendence, they can very easily lead to messianic ideation and brainwashing cults, both secular and spiritual.

Using the transformative power of the psychedelic to bend others to your will is perhaps the darkest and most deviant form of shamanism, but sorcery and mind control is real. The pliability of the human psyche under the influence of psychedelics is something that can be leveraged for good or evil, and psychedelic brainwashing will work on a high percentage of subjects. The US and many other military industrialized countries have had or continue to have chemical brainwashing programs which explore the use of psychedelics for information warfare. The utility of psychedelics in brainwashing and mind control cannot be understated, and their potential for abuse in this capacity cannot be ignored by choosing the term entheogen as opposed to mind-control when describing psychedelic potential.

Recreational Context

There is much to be said about psychedelics, but one thing that cannot be said with enough emphasis is that they are fun. Humans like having fun, psychedelics can be immense fun. Recreational psychedelic use for purely hedonistic purposes can be transformative in many ways. If the user does have fun they may find the peace of mind that comes from living a happy and rewarding life. Psychedelics can energize the body, making it feel light and recharged. A recreational trip can be like a celebration of life, something that makes the user feel young again, even childlike. The joy that psychedelics can bring is a tonic that refreshes the mind and body in its own unique way; some might call this effect spiritual.

Recreational use of psychedelics, entheogenic use, and self-medicating use are likely linked to similar behavioral motivators, though the context and outcome of each make them all quite different. But in each case there is a sense that the user needs to recharge or reconnect to something to feel whole or sane and at peace again. The motivations for psychedelic use are not always this easy to define, but in these cases they may very well be linked to simple pharmacological cause and effect: Person A takes drug B in amount C because it fills X function. X function makes them happy, so person A does drug B in X amount again. Sometimes it is that simple, but sometimes casual recreational use exposes a deeper ritual purpose.

Psychedelic Expectations

Any single psychedelic session may have one or more of the described contexts at its core. An exploratory trip could turn into an entheogenic trip; a social bonding trip could turn into a self-destructive trip; a recreational trip could turn into a spontaneous healing session; etc. In reality the psychedelic state is unstable and fleeting, and an unstructured session may cross all these boundaries within an hour or two. The human motivations for ingesting psychedelics are complex, and the things we expect from psychedelics are equally as complex. Each person has a different expectation and need to be filled when they ingest a psychedelic, and each person will react to the experience from their own perspective. In this sense psychedelics are catalysts to a wide range of personally crafted potential outcomes. The unique ability for psychedelics to meet or exceed the promise of user expectations should not be underestimated.

Citation: Kent, James L. Psychedelic Information Theory: Shamanism in the Age of Reason, Appendix, 'Modes of Psychedelic Use'. PIT Press, Seattle, 2010.

Keywords: psychedelics, culture, usage

Copyright: © James L. Kent, 2010. Some Rights Reserved. Please read copyright information before reproducing.