I explore science, spirituality, consciousness, the transpersonal, and more weird stuff in my upcoming book: pre-order here, sold wherever books are sold 9/6/22
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Next week – on Tues 9.6.22 to be exact – the book I didn’t want to write (I’ll explain below) will be released. And since I’m slightly overwhelmed with the book release, work, and trying to enjoy the last remnants of summer, this issue will be slightly briefer. I will be sending the next issue of the newsletter a bit later in September.
However, I can’t leave you without commenting on the big psychedelic news from last week. New research found that just two doses of psilocybin + psychotherapy reduced heavy drinking by 83% in individuals with alcohol use disorder (AUD). Placebo reduced alcohol consumption by 51%.
This new research supports a previous meta-analysis of trials from the 1950s to 1970s that investigated LSD as a treatment for AUD. In a previous issue of this newsletter, I’ve written about how clinical research from the 1950s to 1970s on psychedelics demonstrated these substances to be effective in the treatment of a wide variety of disorders, including AUD. And that’s surprising! This is what I wrote about LSD + AUD:
Alcohol Use Disorder. Just a single dose of LSD in the context of alcohol misuse treatment programs can significantly decrease how much alcohol is consumed for up to 6 months post-treatment – an extremely uncommon thing for a psychiatric drug. One dose of LSD is just as effective as the typically prescribed pharmacotherapies (e.g. naltrexone, acamprosate, disulfiram) that require daily consumption.
Traditionally, psychiatry views disorders such as depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, alcohol use disorder, and opioid use disorder as completely separate and unrelated. And yet, as researchers scramble and struggle to find the unique mechanistic underpinnings of each of these disorders, it seems that a single or double dose of a psychedelic (with the proper therapeutic support) can alleviate symptoms – and sometimes cure – all of them.
But how? By rewiring a higher-order brain network? By providing meaningful and spiritual experiences that are somehow curative? By allowing access to unconscious, sometimes traumatic, material to be released and resolved?
We’re not entirely sure yet. (It’s probably all of the above)
And that’s why I like psychedelics as a tool to look at the connections between our minds + bodies + spirit.
In my book that comes out next week, I tell the story of how I was forced to think through these issues because of a series of personal life events. It started with encountering transpersonal phenomena (or, unexplained phenomena, as I refer to them in the book). Well, actually, it started with a personal existential crisis. But that led to the encounter with the transpersonal.
When I encountered experiences that shouldn’t have been possible according to my Western worldview of scientific materialism (i.e. believing the Universe is made only of matter), my initial instinct was to dismiss them as meaningless, because that’s what the Western worldview tells us to do. They are dubbed, as Dr. Jeff Kripal says, ‘impossible’ experiences.
But they’re not impossible. They happen all the time. They’re actually typical human experiences. And if you simply flip your worldview (lol), you can easily accommodate them.
After I came face-to-face with the transpersonal, I decided to suspend disbelief and let curiosity lead – because that’s what science is all about, right? Then, I was forced to think about spirituality (which had previously been anathema to me), since it was somehow entwined. I came to find that you can more clearly see (intellectually, not experientially) the intersection of our everyday experiences, the transpersonal, and spirituality through altered states of consciousness, whether it is psychedelics, meditation, breathwork, hypnotic regression, ultra-relaxed states, or something else.
And before you dismiss this as uninteresting (as ‘old me’ would’ve done), let me tell you that I also found these states to be extremely healing, informative, and indicative of how interconnected we all actually are. Like, actually connected. Not metaphorically.
The work I drew on was not written by fringe researchers (although some of it is fringe topics), but rather by established scholars of many fields (e.g. psychiatry, neuroscience, philosophy, comparative religion, etc) who examined the enormous literature on mind, brain, consciousness, the transpersonal, and the spiritual to show us how they are all related.
I didn’t want to write the book initially because… well, who wants to write about fringe topics when your entire life’s identity is built around being a serious scientist? But statistics tell us that we cannot ignore outlier data. So, I explored and included the weird fringe stuff. And you know what? I was reminded that the most interesting scientific research often comes from anecdotes and case studies, which are often outliers.
I was also reminded that there are many, many mysteries of the Universe left to solve. We can’t solve them, though, if we keep ignoring half of the normal human experience.
***Don’t judge the title! I initially titled it Illumined because that’s how I felt after updating my worldview, but publishers have the final say on book titles. In the end, though, I guess I was searching for proof of spiritual phenomena.***
If you’re interested in learning more, you can pre-order my book wherever books are sold. Published by Park City Press/Inner Tradition. Distributed by Simon & Schuster. U.S. Release 9.6.22.
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