In recent years there has been such an enormous surge of interest and research into psychedelics, that it is hard to know where to start in a 500 word blog! First of all let me just put a definition in place. I am largely referring to what are known as classic psychedelics, including psilocybin, DMT, 5-Meo-DMT, LSD, Mescaline and ibogaine. These are all tryptamines which physiologically are partial or full agonists on 5-HT2A serotonin receptors in the frontal and claustrum of the visual cortex, the limbic system, and basal ganglia.

There is much evidence that humans have used psychedelics, also known as entheogens or hallucinogens, for thousands of years. For instance, see Graham Hancock’s book, Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind, or The Immortality Key by Brian C Muraresku. The latter lays out strong and well researched evidence that at least from the time of the Greek ceremonies honouring Dionysus at the Eleusinian mysteries, mystics have experienced God through entheogens. Between the death of Jesus and Emperor Theodosius in the fourth century AD, when the illegal cult of Christianity suddenly became the official religion of the Roman Empire, Dionysus, Bacchus and Christ were the Gods of Drugs – any of the plants, herbs or fungi spiking the wine that Euripedes called a pharmakon in 405 BC. Jesus was the healer whose flesh and blood became the pharmakon athanasias, the Drug of Immortality, although over time the entheogens were dropped from the Eucharist, leaving only the wine - reserving access to God for the priests, rather than to any of those partaking of the Eucharist.

From the 1950s onwards, there were hundreds of extremely positive results from clinical trials pointing to the potential of hallucinogens to improve the lives of millions of people as well as massive breakthroughs reported through the use of psychedelic psychotherapy. Despite all this, in 1970 the US Congress passed a law making psychedelics illegal. This so-called War on Drugs was really a war on consciousness and those that have kept the faith with psychedelics in the intervening years until now, have generally been clear that their goal is the transformation of human consciousness and a spiritualised humanity, giving people peak, nondual experiences which change their relationships with themselves, others and the rest of the planet that we live on as well as Consciousness beyond the local.

As Graham Hancock writes, There can be no more intimate and elemental part of the individual than his or her own consciousness. At the deepest level, our consciousness is what we are - to the extent that if we are not sovereign over our own consciousness, then we cannot in any meaningful sense be sovereign over anything else either. So it has to be highly significant that, far from encouraging freedom of consciousness, our societies in fact violently deny our right to sovereignty in this intensely personal area and have effectively outlawed all states of consciousness other than those on a very narrowly defined and officially approved list.

In my next blog I will talk about set and setting and the role of intention when accessing altered states of consciousness, as well as the distinction between using psychedelics for therapy and for mystical experiences.

I will follow up with a piece on some of the risks and in particular the distinction between spiritual emergence vs spiritual emergency. My page on psychedelic preparation and integration includes a much wider list of references and websites going well beyond what I can cover here.