Psychedelic Consciousness: Plant Intelligence for Healing Ourselves and Our Fragmented World

By Daniel Grauer

An examination of the use of psychedelics for understanding ourselves, connecting with the world around us, and enacting outer change through inner transformation

• Explores sacred tools and technologies to help us reestablish a lost ideology of unity, with a specific focus on natural plant/fungi psychedelics

• Looks at the history of psychedelics and their role in facilitating natural intelligence’s ability to increase itself through ongoing analysis of its own experience

• Provides guidelines for safely using natural plant/fungi psychedelics and integrating them into society to access unified consciousness and restore balance to our world

Our ecological, social, and political issues all stem from the ideologies that drive our collective actions. In contrast to our innate humanity, which is rooted in unity, these ideologies have led us to believe that we are separate from each other, separate from nature, and separate from the results of our actions. Such a worldview encourages individuals to maximize self-interest, which then causes fragmentation, conflict, pollution, and the depletion of natural resources. Offering practical steps that we can take to heal ourselves and our fragmented world, author Daniel Grauer explores the use of sacred tools and technologies, such as natural psychedelics, meditation, and yoga, in order to reestablish an ideology of unity, work in symbiotic harmony with the Earth, and restore our world as a sustainable and prosperous whole.

Grauer explains how individuals--and by extension societies--benefit from safely accessing transcendent states of consciousness, such as those provided by psychedelics. He explores how psychoactive substances have been used throughout history all over the world for healing, personal growth, spiritual development, and revealing hidden truths, such as in the Eleusinian Mysteries, Soma practices in Vedic India, and rituals in several South American indigenous cultures. Drawing on the plant intelligence work of Paul Stamets and Stephen Buhner, Grauer shows that the growth of individual and collective intelligence is hindered by the prohibition of psychedelics, which naturally foster humanity’s capacity for analysis, innovation, and cooperation. In addition to creating a sense of unity with all things, psychedelics offer the mind a new perspective from which to analyze its experience and heighten its awareness. Drawing on his own experience and research, Grauer provides guidelines for how to safely use natural plant/fungi psychedelics in order to access the unified consciousness of our ancestors and induce the states of awareness we need to restore natural harmony to our world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
• Release date: Jul 7, 2020
• ISBN: 9781644110317

Daniel Grauer

Daniel Grauer is a writer, speaker, and organizer whose work focuses on individual and collective transformation. He is the author of Psychedelic Consciousness and the executive director and cofounder of the Hudson Valley Psychedelic Society. He lives in a homesteading community in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains of New York.

Book preview

Part 1

THE ROAD WE’RE ON

1

Offness

We seem to be involved in a dramatic race for time that has no precedent in the entire history of humanity. What is at stake is nothing less than the future of life on this planet. If we continue the old strategies which in their consequences are clearly extremely destructive and self-destructive, it is unlikely that the human species will survive. However, if a sufficient number of people undergo a process of deep inner transformation, we might reach a level of consciousness evolution when we deserve the proud name we have given to our species: homo sapiens.

STANISLAV GROF, PSYCHOLOGY OF THE FUTURE

Ican hear a faint voice rising from within, something calling to me, and if I listen carefully, it’s telling me to go.

This can take the form of unbounded travel, building an off-the-grid mountain home, or even just foraging for my sustenance. It is not the activity or physical location that matters, but the ideals they represent—a life unencumbered by money, stuff, infrastructural reliance, and societal restriction.

Joy overcomes me in this regular meditation of mine until I realize that I’ve attempted this before. I’ve spent months on the road, backpacked through various mountain ranges, and traveled with no set plans of return. But no matter where I go, the desire still remains.

What is the source of this unquenchable urge? When I look within and directly around me, I find little else but happiness and gratitude: I cherish my family and friends; I feel fortunate to have cofounded a company that imports beer, wine, and cider; and I now have the honor of writing these words to you.

It would thus be naïve of me to say that I don’t owe much of my happiness to the society that I contribute to and benefit from. Yet it is here, in the pursuit and consequences of those benefits, that the source begins to reveal itself.

I become unnerved and filled with guilt when I think about our reckless dedication toward progress and the toll it takes. Inauthenticity defines my thoughts on the overuse of technology and the incessant marketing of consumer products. And finally, as I tune in to the constant bombardment of petrifying news about polarized politics, global conflict and inequality, and the deteriorating ecological state of our planet, I am overwhelmed by a deafening sense of offness and an unrelenting suspicion that we are on the verge of collapse.

I know I am not alone in these thoughts. While they come to the surface with varying audibility in each of us, they have become impossible to ignore. Even if we can’t identify what is wrong or how to fix it, we all sense that something is off. These aren’t just idiosyncratic fears or personal paranoia; they are the alarms of our collective gut instinct warning us of impending danger. By conducting even the quickest overview, we can begin to understand why.

Our once natural waterways are becoming toxic. Pollution is filling the earth and air. Global warming is disrupting ecosystems. Species are becoming extinct at alarming rates. The nutrients and depth of our soil is diminishing. Miles of forests and jungles are vanishing by the day. Our social environment is filled with distrust and disparity. Our government has been invaded by corporate interest. Mass shootings occur for no apparent reason. And despite being the most advanced society that has ever been, technology has not solved any of our major problems.

Such a diagnosis validates the offness in our collective gut and provides a new conundrum. What is the cause of this impending danger? And where is it located? Our natural instinct in such situations is to look outside ourselves, but here we only find a mirror. In it, we see that underneath this mirage of composite crises is a singular force—us. Assuming it is easier to change our collective actions than fight a multifront battle against a nebulous enemy, this should be great news. Unfortunately, this has turned out to be nothing more than an assumption.

Despite our increasing awareness of human causation, we still attempt to change the world around us rather than change ourselves. Perhaps this is out of instinct, stubbornness, or laziness, but it hasn’t yielded us any substantial results. For example, we’ve been talking about the damaging effects human activity has had on Earth since as early as the 1960s, and while there have been many hopeful developments in renewable energy, environmental policy, corporate and consumer responsibility, regenerative agriculture, and governmental commitments to carbon neutrality, ecological destruction and greenhouse gas emissions are still on the rise.

Until our habits and systems change, the development of these partial solutions will continue to be outpaced by the increasingly complex web of issues caused by our actions. Our only option then—if we wish to solve all of these issues at once—is to address the unconscious decision-making processes or hidden ideologies that drive our collective actions.

The most direct way to do so is by looking at our priorities and goals as a society. On the collective or governmental level, they include increasing security and GDP. On an individual level—once survival necessities are met—they include increasing security and comfort, achieving success, and accumulating wealth to achieve all those ends. While these are all logical and important goals to strive for, they effectively place happiness, meaning, and community as secondary goals—or ones that will only be achieved as a result of completing the first.

When our primary goals are rooted in the insatiable quest to control our individual and collective environments, achieve unlimited economic growth, and accumulate material wealth, the secondary goals often never have a chance to make it to the surface—creating a disconnect between what we truly desire out of life and what we currently strive for. Such an ideological system pushes us away from our innate humanity, glorifies self-interest, allows us to unconsciously harm one another and the world around us, and results in isolation and fragmentation. In response, we pacify our collective gut and outsource responsibility for our actions.

All of us can agree that this feels wrong. It is not a sustainable path, and somewhere within, we sense another way. The real question then becomes, Can we actualize this new way and shift our ideologies before it’s too late? This book is going to argue that the answer is yes and discuss how to transform from a fragmented society on the verge of a collapse to a unified and prosperous whole—propelling an evolutionary leap as a species and ushering in an era of symbiotic cooperation so far unknown to humankind.

2

Innate Humanity

Sapiens are relatively weak animals, whose advantage rests in their ability to cooperate in large numbers.

YUVAL NOAH HARARI, SAPIENS

From a historical and evolutionary perspective, prioritizing selfinterest and isolation within a society is neither natural nor successful. On the contrary, humans only survived—and eventually thrived—due to our complex social skills and ability to cooperate as units or tribes. Strong tribes made both hunting and mating more successful, which means we have always been at our best when working symbiotically together. Our innate humanity is thus rooted in unity and is only obscured by the façades—personal narratives or collective ideologies—we build around ourselves. For example, I am an author and an American, but in moments of crisis or survival, I become primarily human or simply a being.

The first time I ever caught a glimpse of this relationship was in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. New York City was completely shut down—businesses closed, institutions and streets flooded, cars crushed by trees and stray scaffolding, and the power out for all of southern Manhattan—and yet, it felt more alive than ever before. Everyone was either out on the streets communicating, helping where they could, and caring for complete strangers, or opening doors to those without running water or electricity. Overnight, we transformed from millions of isolated individuals into a compassionate community.

I remember experiencing a conflicting sense of elation about this. While it was terrible to see businesses and homes destroyed by the storm, it was also inspiring to witness the transcendence of typical human self-centeredness, revealing a depth of altruism underneath. For a moment, the façades came down, and we were not defined by our ethnicity, profession, or political affiliation but as human.

This did not last. Once most of the city was up and running again, we returned to our old ways of isolation and avoided eye contact on the streets and subways. It was as if we experienced a collective dream. Upon waking up, we remembered that it happened but simply brushed off its meaning and continued with our day.

We witness this same effect after every natural disaster, mass shooting, or act of terrorism. In each circumstance, the sense of community comes in as quickly as it flows back out. This recurring phenomenon provides a quantifiable metric for how far we have deviated from our true nature and certainly our potential. The greater the disparity between our day-to-day fragmented reality and the temporary experience of human unity, the stronger those hidden ideologies—and façades that separate us—are.

Our challenge is to shrink this disparity and sustain our innate humanity without the need for crisis. There are specific tools and methods for this exact job, but before we start haphazardly tearing down façades, it will be safest to gain a better understanding of how they were built and what they’re made of.

3

Fragmentation

The simple fact is that we live in a world of conflict and opposites because we live in a world of boundaries. Since every boundary line is also a battle line, here is the human predicament; the firmer one’s boundaries, the more entrenched are one’s battles.

KEN WILBER, NO BOUNDARY

Façades are resilient structures. Our narratives or personal façades are built up through upbringing, education, vocation, and the millions of unique experiences we have throughout our lives. Our ideologies or collective façades are built through history, circumstance, culture, and current events. The foundations of both are composed of the ultimate human questions: What is truly happening? Why are we here? How should we live in the world?

Over the years, we have constructed an astonishing cornucopia of philosophies, mythologies, legal systems, infrastructures, sciences, and religions, but it has not come without consequence. While these attempted answers have provided values for individuals and unified given groups or civilizations, our inability to respect them as equally true has always led to conflict.

We can validate this dichotomy by the simple fact that war exists. Akin to our tribal hunting days, war shows us that we are willing to risk our lives to assure the survival of the whole—or even just an idea of the whole. This powerful point highlights how valuable our sense of belonging is, how strong our façades are, and how easily they can cause us to be divided. Although we could establish unity for the entire human species through a mutual recognition and shared awe of life’s mysteries, we tend to see our version of reality as superior and make enemies of those who disagree. You can find the scars of this perennial error in every civilization—ranging from the blood of the Crusades to the frustration felt in modern political arguments.

Yet, we currently find ourselves in a predicament that is much more extreme and dangerous than a division between opposing sides. Despite being globally connected through technology, economy, and politics, we have become progressively isolated and fragmented as individuals. So what happened that resulted in such a drastic shift?

Considering that our society has been built off ideas of the past, answering this question requires us to trace the origins and lineage of Western philosophy. To do so, I take a bird’s-eye perspective of roughly the past ten thousand years and highlight events and thinkers that have shaped our current perception of reality.

The seed of fragmentation—perhaps noncoincidentally—began with a seed. According to historian Yuval Noah Harari, the idea that we are separate from one another took root at the beginning of the Agricultural Revolution. In our hunter-gatherer days, humans lived in small tribes or bands and occupied much larger territories; agriculture forced people to live as individuals on small plots of land and in houses. In Harari’s words, Henceforth, attachment to ‘my house’ and separation from the neighbors became the psychological hallmark of a much more self-centered creature.¹

From this point forth—continuing our metaphor—we were not wild plants connected to other organisms and our tribe through the soil but placed inside individual pots to grow. Since then, we have increasingly associated as separate beings rather than connected ones.

About nine thousand years after the start of the Agricultural Revolution, the word philosophy appears for the first time in Greece. We can trace the progression of Western ideology from exactly this point. Both Socrates and Plato prioritized rationality and reason as the ultimate way to find truth and, thus, the best way to live. This placed supreme value on the mind and positioned the body as a disturbing element, hindering the soul from the acquisition of knowledge, or an entity that needs to be ruled and brought into harmony with the mind.²

Such ideas appear noble and innocuous, until we acknowledge the body’s association with sense, intuition, and heart—the connecting forces among one another and with nature. While prioritizing the mind can lead to brilliance, it can also lead to alienation by disrupting this connection. This possibility solidified roughly two thousand years later in the writings of René Descartes.

The famous I think, therefore I am principle sought to prove our personal existence through deductive reasoning, but it inherently questioned the existence of everything else in the process. In the Descartes mind, we are simply thinking things, our body a concatenation of members, and our senses are only for immediately discerning what is the essence of bodies located outside us . . . except quite obscurely and confusedly.³ This rendered our mind as the ruler of a biological machine and voids the value of our senses, consecrating the individual as separate and further fraying its natural ability to connect.

Descartes’s influence did not stop here. He also applied deductive reasoning to natural philosophy (the study of nature and the physical world) and believed truth could be found through mathematics. Based off this principle, he would create analytical geometry as well as laws of nature and motion. Very shortly thereafter, Isaac Newton transformed the potential of these ideas by creating his own laws of motion and a compendium of numerical theorems about the physical world. This marked a major turning point in history.

Instead of approaching the philosophy of nature through observation, reason, and certain principles, it could now be approached through mathematics and proven through this same discipline. From this point forth, natural philosophy developed into our modern iteration of science, and we began measuring our entire existence—turning our once interconnected and mysterious world into a calculable machine.

Throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, philosophers and scientists would build upon Newton’s vision, seeking to define, categorize, and reduce everything into measurable and linear terminology. This laid the foundation for physics, biology, chemistry, geology, and all the sciences we study to this day. While such a time period yielded incredible advances in knowledge, technology, comfort, and medicine, it also came with the following ideological side effects.

Adopting a reductionist perspective that does not reflect the reality of the whole. By breaking the world up into isolated parts or areas of study, we blinded ourselves from the complexity of the bigger picture (studying the biology of individual organisms cannot provide a complete understanding of dynamics within an ecosystem).

Viewing nature as a machine. By creating deterministic models of living systems that have absolute, predicted outcomes, we turned nature into a collection of lifeless parts and forces. This holds true when nature is studied as a static and linear model, but nature is not linear or static; it is highly complex, dynamic, and often nonlinear, which is why the weatherman has never been, and will never be, completely accurate.

Mistaking measurements for meaning. Our intricate characterizations of the physical world led us to believe that how implies a why: just because we can measure the distance of the cosmos and map out areas of the brain does not mean we’re any bit closer to understanding the reason behind their existence or cause behind their actions.

Turning intellects into skeptics who cannot be associated with spiritual, metaphysical, or religious pursuits. We accepted the fallacy that the world must be void of spirit, God, a transcendent source, or an unidentifiable permeating energy because we can’t find this source in our calculations. A physical understanding of the world does not negate the possibility of a nonphysical aspect of that same world: this would be like looking through a blue-colored lens and assuming that no other colors exist because you cannot see them.

Externalizing the internal. Explaining our thought processes and drives through strictly biological and evolutionary terms established humans as biological machines simply out for survival and reproduction. This does not accurately portray what it means to be alive, let alone selfless acts, platonic love, and experiences of self-transcendence.

Severing our innate interconnectivity. The belief that each of us is nothing more than a machine acting within a physical, deterministic, meaningless, and mechanical universe turned every individual into an isolated unit. We then began to perceive all other humans as potential threats, and nature became a lifeless resource for us to exploit until we completely depleted it or created an environment inhospitable to us—because we forgot that we are