Psychedelics and our Bipolar Culture

In my last post, I addressed some of my concerns about how our cultural sickness impacts how we use psychedelics. In this post, I want to talk about a related issue.

It revolves around the bipolar nature of our culture. Before I describe what I mean by that, let me just say it is related to but not specifically about what is known as bipolar disorder in modern psychiatry. In psychiatry, bipolar disorder is a diagnosis applied to people with severe mood swings that oscillate between intense mania and depression. There's a whole set of diagnostic criteria that trained psychiatrists use to diagnose someone with that disorder, and it's not my goal to discuss the specifics of that here.

Our culture tends to view people with psychiatric disorders as experiencing their illness solely within the confines of their own individual bodies. This reflects the modern Western notion that individuals exist independently as distinct and autonomous "selves." However, many indigenous cultures view the self in a more expansive way. In such worldviews, there are many layers of the "self", ranging from the purely personal self (as we see ourselves in Western culture) to extended "selves" that connects us to the wider human community, the earth, and even to the spirit world and ancestral world. In this way, the interior, personal "self" reflects and reveals structures from the outer "selves". If we view sickness in this holistic context, an emotionally or spiritually sick person is also manifesting a cultural or societal illness.

When I say that we live in a bipolar culture, I'm referring to the "sickness" that manifests as a lack of nuanced understanding and hence compassion for ourselves. Most people have a "good" side of the self that they want to reveal to the world-- this is the side they fervently hope represents the truth of who they are at their deepest level. But the effort of maintaining and projecting this "good" side necessarily walls off their "bad" side. This "bad" side is the part of us that most of us learned at an early age to repress and cut off. This bad side eventually "acts out" and then becomes suppressed again in a cycle of shame. This process creates the foundation for many types of emotional, spiritual and physical diseases. The basis of tracking work in Kundalini Mediumship is therefore to uncover and embody the bad self, and then to integrate it with the "good self".

This "bipolar sickness" is a form of rigid fundamentalism. In the fundamentalist church I grew up in, they taught us a clear set of rules based on this kind of bipolarity. A favorite saying in my church was "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak". They taught us to strive for a type of unattainable spiritual perfection. To be like Jesus meant to deny and even hate the body, as its sinful desires would lead us to hell. I see the same thing playing out in our culture right now, but instead of trying to be like the unattainable Jesus, the emphasis is on always doing or saying the right thing according to one's cultural group, or socio/political identity. This entails suppressing the "bad" self that has thoughts or ideas that run counter to the feelings of the "good" self.

So how does all this relate to our current relationship to psychedelics? Right now, there is a lot of corporate money flowing into psychedelics as "the next big thing". These interests have a financial incentive to create a narrative around these substances as incredible miracle drugs-- to prop up their "good side". And of course they have a "good side", like we all do.

But psychedelics are nuanced and complicated beings, just like us. They have the potential to do harm as well as to do good, especially in the hands of well-meaning but untrained facilitators. The darker side of these substances will eventually reveal themselves and here's my take on how it will go:

At some point the media machine will take notice of the harm, and realize there is money to be made selling the narrative of the "bad side" of psychedelics. The media loves to use fear to sell itself.

There is a pretty predictable way these news stories are written...

Jane was an intelligent, mature 30-something woman who had read about using psychedelics to treat her periodic anxiety [Jane of course is the real life everywoman that the news reader can identify with and project themselves onto]. She signed up for a session with her psychedelic therapist and began taking regular doses of psilocybin. After a few psilocybin "trips" Jane went through a psychotic break, hearing voices telling her that life was not worth living. She had never experienced something like that before. She was in and out of psychiatric hospitals for 6 months and she appeared to become stable, eventually returning to normal family life. Then one day, out of the blue, she killed herself.

There will of course be more nuance and detail in the story, so that the everywoman reader can emotionally connect herself even more deeply with Jane.

But the point is this: the media/cultural message currently surrounding psychedelics will change. It will be "discovered" that psychedelics are not the wonder drugs that solve all our problems. They will once again be associated with dark forces that threaten our sanity. But the truth is somewhere in the middle of these extremes, and sometimes encompasses both ends. And until we acknowledge the complicated truths of our human experience, we will not be ready to understand the depths of what psychedelics can teach us.