Psychedelics, Yoga and Consciousness

Dissolving boundaries – what could possibly go wrong...?! #yogaproblempage

Returning to the “problem page” theme, here’s another dilemma. To be honest, it’s really unanswerable, but these sorts of questions come up when I teach, so when this one arrived, I thought I’d share a few thoughts.

Q: Do psychedelics and yoga lead to similar states? Which is more effective at waking us up?

First things first, please don’t try this at home – or if you do, don’t forget I said don’t. It’s not that kind of advice column. 🙃

Secondly, there’s clearly some overlap between the two fields. Poets who wrote India’s oldest sacred texts describe drinking soma, which “inspires good thoughts and joyous expansiveness to the extreme”.¹ High on this mysterious substance, which the scholar Matthew Clark has compared to ayahuasca, Vedic seers declare: “We have gone to the light; we have found the gods.”²

In other early verses, a long-haired ascetic drinks an unnamed potion, “sharing the drug with Rudra,” a precursor of the deity Śiva. He also “sails through the air”, riding the wind as if controlling his breath and “reveals everything, so that everyone can see the sun.”³ A couple of thousand years later, Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra says plant elixirs produce yogic powers, and a medieval text – the Khecarī Vidyā – goes even further, saying: “Without herbal medicines a yogi can never attain perfection.”⁴

There are also modern parallels. Before producing the hippie bestseller Be Here Now, inspired by his guru Neem Karoli Baba, the spiritual teacher Ram Dass was a Harvard academic called Richard Alpert. Together with a fellow psychologist, Timothy Leary, he conducted research on the liberating power of psilocybin mushrooms and LSD.

Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary in High Times

To cut their story short, both were fired on technicalities before LSD was outlawed. Scholars quibbled with their methods, which sought to prove that psychedelics could rehabilitate criminals and alcoholics (as one of the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous said they did, having tried LSD). So they abandoned academia and started a commune in upstate New York, before Alpert went to India and came back Ram Dass.

Without dwelling too long on the countercultural fusion of psychoactive substances and Eastern ideas, there was a crescendo from the “Dharma Bum” Beats of the 1950s to Leary and Alpert’s acid evangelism, ultimately peaking in the Summer of Love. Yet by 1971 – when Be Here Now was published – the gonzo reporter Hunter S. Thompson was already writing the movement’s obituary.

“There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning,” Thompson reflects in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. But “that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil” proved no less illusory than some of his visions on psychedelics. As his epitaph concludes:

“We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

Of course, it’s not quite that bleak. Leary dubbed his first trip “the deepest religious experience of my life”. But for all the revolutionary talk, people mainly dropped out to find personal freedom. “You can’t do anything about America politically,” Leary said. His West Coast counterpart Ken Kesey agreed. “Do you want to know how to stop the war?” Kesey told a peace rally. “Just turn your backs on it, fuck it!” Meanwhile, many blamed Leary’s “antics” for torpedoing research for another generation.

Half a century later, a “psychedelic renaissance” is in full swing. At this year’s SXSW festival in Austin, a talk on “How Psilocybin Mushrooms Can Help Save the World” sounded quaintly idealistic compared to the zeal of corporate converts. “For evidence of how profound the psychedelic experience can be,” scoffs the Financial Times, “look no further than the epiphany achieved by billionaire financier Christian Angermayer.”

The latter’s psychedelic start-up, Atai Life Sciences, calls itself “a biopharmaceutical company that leverages a decentralized platform approach to incubate and accelerate the development of highly effective mental health treatments that address the unmet needs of patients.” As the FT notes, its backers include “tech billionaire Peter Thiel and crypto investor Mike Novogratz” and its founder sounds wide-eyed:

“Taking magic mushrooms, Angermayer says he experienced a quieting of the ego that led to a breakthrough: finally he understood the world-changing potential of bitcoin and the blockchain. Ain’t that a trip. Like the crypto and cannabis industries before it — both of which Angermayer and Thiel also invest in — psychedelics attract a certain breed of libertarian, hype-driven investor keen to prove their edgy and subversive credentials.”

Some fall flat on their faces, however. The recent collapse of the psychedelic retreat provider Synthesis (reported here by Jules Evans) suggests claims of a “shroom boom” might be overstated. Responsible therapy is difficult to scale, and corporate promises can be misleading. “There was a lot of talk from the three leaders about the quadruple bottom line, not just profits but planet, purpose and people,” says a former Synthesis employee. “But if you ignore their words and focus on their actions, it’s nonsense.”

This is not to suggest that psychedelics have no merit – just that people are people, and life-changing insights don’t always translate to enlightened conduct. The same applies to yoga teachers, whose persistent abuses inspire lots of soul-searching and headlines like “Yoga Reconsiders the Role of the Guru in the Age of #MeToo.”

In the caustic view of Agehananda Bharati, a sādhu–turned–scholar: “You don’t learn ethical behavior through yoga and meditation any more than you learn loving your neighbors by playing poker or cello.” Instead, he writes, “I have witnessed, with much initial dismay, that some of the best mystics were the greatest stinkers among men. Self-righteous, smug, anti-women, anti-men, politically fascist, stubborn, irrational.”

Mental spirals (Adobe Stock)

Some might imagine psychedelics are different, just as others might say that a truly transformative religious experience removes self-centredness. Combining both views at the SXSW festival in March, the campaigner Paul Stamets presented this paean to magic mushrooms: “Psilocybin teaches you that we are all one. We are all one people, and we need to share this precious information to protect this precious planet.”

However tempting it is to think otherwise, there’s no automatic causal link between insight and action. To live in accordance with particular values, one has to prioritise them day after day – they don’t just manifest magically. As Alpert learned after leaving Harvard, no amount of acid was enough to cut through all of his mental conditioning, let alone to stop colleagues who ingested large doses from indulging in mind games.

To quote Huston Smith, a religious studies professor who had his first trip on Leary’s couch: “Drugs appear able to induce religious experiences; it is less evident that they can produce religious lives.” While flashes of awe can inspire us, what happens next is more important. “Except in the tragic case of psychotics,” Smith laments, “this world eventually reasserts itself.”

Lasting change thus depends on how one integrates what one has seen. “Psychedelics opened me up,” recalls Jack Kornfield, an influential teacher of Buddhist meditation, “to an enormous range of archetypal experiences, shamanic experiences, visionary experiences – even genuine experiences of transcendence and enlightenment”. But “the tricky part was embodying these realizations after the experiences were over”. When they’ve been challenging, it gets even harder – as this essay explores:

Does the medicine always give you what we need?

In Be Here Now, Alpert lists several drawbacks to consuming psychedelics, including anxiety, the potential for destabilisation, reinforced egomania, and dependence on an external substance, which leads to chasing an experience that inevitably fades.

“The goal of the path is to BE high, not GET high,” Alpert writes. He also quotes an anonymous Indian, who says LSD may have helped “to arouse that spiritual longing” that led Alpert to his guru, “but once that purpose is served further ingestion would not only be harmful but have no point.”

Nonetheless, it’s still a powerful catalyst – as Bill Hicks observed in a stand-up rant from the 1990s. “How about a positive LSD story? Wouldn’t that be newsworthy, just once?” Hicks mused onstage, before spoofing a newscast:

“Today a young man on acid realised that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration; that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively; there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we’re the imagination of ourselves. Here’s Tom with the weather.”

Does that sound like Vedānta or Tantra? Answers on a mushroom to the ghost of Allen Ginsberg… Either way, life keeps unfolding and what really matters is how one relates to each passing moment. To do so more skilfully, it helps to have a practice that develops concentration, which isn’t my experience of a psychedelic journey.

So, as Ram Dass and others concluded, yoga seems more sustainable.

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1. Ṛg Veda 8.48.1, translated by Wendy Doniger.

2. Ṛg Veda 8.48.3, translated by Wendy Doniger.

3. Ṛg Veda 10.136.1-7, translated by Wendy Doniger.

4. Yoga Sūtra 4.1; Khecarī Vidyā 4.1, translated by James Mallinson.