Tripping Into Your Identity - Part 2

Chapter 4: The Misconceptions of Self-Help, and the Importance of Truth

Advice – Zooming in on the Steps

Here’s a truth: Every piece of advice you’ve ever heard in your life is the result of someone discovering a specific level of magnification used to look at oneself and/or the world with, then sharing that observation. Remember the steps and the space between them? Advice is simply the identification of one or more potential steps along your path, but it still can’t tell you exactly how to get there, or if you even need to. Advice is useful because it encourages us to zoom in on identifiable elements of our own lives, which gives us a much better chance at observing the space between them, and learning how to cross it in order to reach that next step and, ultimately, achieve our goals.

Some of the best advice is the kind that gets the largest number of people as close as possible to being able to observe and determine their own space between their steps with relative ease. The closer they can zoom in, and the less they have to search for where to zoom in, the easier it becomes for them to discover how they can traverse that space in their own way.

In my experience, the vast majority of self-care advice focuses heavily on the steps, and almost entirely ignores the unique space between them. The advice often says, “Try this and you should feel better!”, but it doesn’t tell us how to try as our unique selves, or even how to approach trying – mostly because it can’t. Suggestions can be offered, but the advice can’t illuminate exactly what’s missing for the individual that wants to get there – it can only help us zoom in on the steps.

Without the influence, wisdom, and inspiration of others, navigating ourselves out of depression can be an extraordinarily arduous and lonely endeavor. On the other hand, these things can just as easily leave us trapped in a place with no sense of direction, especially when they fail to work for us in the ways we allowed ourselves to be convinced they would. We need our own compass to continue moving forward, not someone else’s.

As I stated earlier, one of the crucial missing pieces in most self-care programs is the idea that no one can teach you how to live as yourself. There’s this unspoken belief that some person, somewhere, has already figured out the best way to present and engage in a given endeavor in pursuit of one or more goals, regardless of what those goals may be, so that they have the best chance of success. On top of priming us to feel like unique failures when these things fail to work for us in the ways we were told they would, this often leaves us feeling that whatever we may have to offer in pursuit of our own goal must automatically take a backseat to whatever standards already exists for pursuing that goal. Essentially, we seek to avoid the risk of trying things our own way and, in doing so, we potentially skip over the very thing which may have had the best chance of working for us.

Here’s a radical idea: what if we imagined that whatever we have to offer may just work better for us than the standards set by others which we have so readily and thoroughly come to trust? That idea you have that gets suppressed by thoughts of, “There are smarter and more qualified people out there who have already figured this out, so why not just do what they did?” could just be exactly the idea you need to embrace in some way to move forward. At the very least, it’s probably a step in the right direction.

I don’t care how many years of experience the previous “standard-setters” have, how smart they are, or how many people agree with them – none of that has any bearing on whether or not your idea has value, especially when it comes to your own life. Your idea could just be exactly what you need for your path, regardless of how crazy it might seem to you or others. Maybe it’s incomplete and needs some work, but how could you ever know if you don’t give it a shot? Perhaps your idea, once released into the world, will even end up surpassing the previous standards in efficacy for pursuing a certain goal, and be adopted for use in others who stand to benefit from what your idea brings to the table. After all, these “established standards” are far from useless, I would simply recommend against clinging to them too strongly.

Try thinking of this concept of personal creative value like this: What route should you take while driving home from work? The commonly accepted answer would be to follow your GPS, as that will almost certainly get you to where you want to go in the shortest amount of time. This route also happens to be the route that most people would take, for exactly the same reason – it’s the “established standard” I mentioned earlier. But what if you followed a slightly different route home just because it appealed to you in some way? What if that new route ends up feeling right for you, and ends up teaching you something valuable about yourself? What if, in some sense, it ends up being part of your unique space between the steps? Would you have ever known about this new and better way home if you didn’t avoid following the standard and, instead, choose to follow your own path?

One thing is certain: we all need to stop assuming other people have access to feelings, knowledge, and insight that discounts what we believe can work for us. Truth is a never-ending process we all must contribute to and participate in, and a commitment to truth is vitally important in achieving happiness, purpose, and fulfillment.

The Critical Importance of Truth

Why are human beings so naturally averse to deception and lies? Because we evolved alongside reality, and nature has determined that both accepting reality, as well as learning to use it to our advantage, are necessary for living fulfilling and purposeful lives.

Our relationship with reality is ever-present and unavoidable, and every single action we take in our lives bounces off reality and provides us with a critically important response. When a true belief bounces off reality, we experience order and success – our expectations and predictions are met, and our ability to successfully navigate the world is strengthened. When our falsities bounce off reality, we experience something unexpected – a disruption, or chaos. Bouncing truths off reality results in order and success, and bouncing falsities off reality results in chaos and failure, even if we might not notice or understand how, in the moment.

Reality always provides us with feedback, the difficulty lies in looking for, listening to, understanding, and accepting the response. For instance, say you wake up one morning to find that several inches of snow have covered the ground. For any number of potential reasons, this upsets you, and so you decide to believe that, in fact, it has not snowed at all, and that it’s a warm, summer day. Every single action taken which demonstrates that belief will bounce off reality and provide you with negative feedback – feedback that produces failed expectations, chaos, helplessness, and a disconnection from reality and yourself. Remember what helplessness and disconnecting from ourselves causes? Wear shorts and flip flops, reality will check you. Drive your car as if there is no snow on the roads, reality will check you. Start a temperature-sensitive project outdoors, reality will check you. Put simply, things will not go the way you expected, and you will experience negativity and disorder as a result.

Now say you accept the truth that it has, in fact, snowed. Well, reality is going to agree with you and bounce back validation and order, resulting in a drastically increased ability to successfully navigate the day and, ultimately, the world and your own life. This example may seem overly simplistic or even ridiculous, but human beings have a tremendous ability to impose their desires onto reality and ignore, avoid, or deliberately misinterpret reality in order to see those desires realized and/or avoid the pain of having them invalidated. It happens constantly, and to degrees much more severe and ridiculous than the example I gave. I promise you that absolutely nothing could be more antithetical to living a fulfilling and authentic life. Truth is, by far, the most important value we have. Without it, we find ourselves waging war with reality itself. There has never been, nor will there ever be, a war against reality in which reality comes away the loser.

The Pillars of Truth System

Since truth has always been my highest value, it became important to me to develop a system for myself that can accurately and reliably work to strengthen my relationship with reality – one that, so long as I honestly adhere to it with openness and integrity, would never fail to develop and improve my understanding of truth. For many reasons, it’s not perfect, and it never can be, but honest adherence to it has never failed to develop my understanding of reality, over time. I call this system the Pillars of Truth.

This system, or a similar system of truth-finding, is critical to living a happy and fulfilling life, regardless of your current mental health status. Such a system is critical because introducing untruth into any path towards self-improvement will result in chaos, missed expectations and goals, misunderstanding of vital information about ourselves and the world, and an eventual fracturing of our relationship with ourselves and reality.

Truth is about establishing order out of chaos; giving us the ability to make sense of reality, and to trust in it and ourselves. Any set of beliefs built on a foundation of untruth will catch up with us eventually, as the checks of reality never end, and cannot be avoided indefinitely. Of course, we could choose to ignore it forever, as many do, but I promise you this will lead to nothing but tremendous suffering and an eventual collapse, sooner or later.

The truth does not care what we think or feel, it simply is, and we can choose to acknowledge and understand it, or we can choose to ignore it at our own peril. This isn’t to say that our minds and bodies are incapable of influencing our existence or certain outcomes in reality – this is not only possible, but necessary to healing. I will cover this in greater detail later in a section called, “The Pancake Rule”. For now, it’s important to understand that the truths of our shared reality will not bend to our desires simply because we want them to. If we want to change our reality, we must take action to change the way we both interact with and perceive it. To do that, we must develop a healthy relationship with and understanding of reality, as well as accept the truths we cannot change.

I don’t claim to have invented this system, as it is essentially just a tool of reason, logic, honest observation, critical thinking, objectivity, epistemic adequacy, causality, and acceptance of information and results (among other things). It shares similarities with other systems of truth-finding, including natural philosophy, the scientific method, objectivism, rationalism, empiricism, and too many others to name - though in a more simplified form. Ultimately, the system seeks to avoid over-investment of belief into that which cannot be proven or disproven, and to encourage investment of belief into that which can, through a variety of means. The system leaves room for beliefs that can be conceived of or proven in theory, or other abstract means, but attempts to direct the majority of focus toward concrete, observable, and testable methods. In other words, the system leaves room for what might be described as “unknowable”, but makes every effort to “know” first.

So, what exactly is this Pillars of Truth system?

In order to navigate the difficulties of life and come to understand reality as best I could, I needed a system which was proven to work, and was subject to the rules of the system itself – a system that, like all of us, is ultimately beholden to reality, and must be able to coexist alongside it without returning errors. If the system failed even once to coexist with reality, then it was of no use to me. Luckily, we are all born to use systems like this by default, whether we realize it or not. We may not all be equally adept at using these systems but, make no mistake, we are all using them to some degree, all of the time. Making sense of reality is simply one of the many programs baked into us, as surviving without these programs would not be possible.

So how does it work? It’s simple: Since we can’t possibly know the truth at all times, we must “ping” reality for information that can help us determine whether something is true or false.

For this particular system, we must first identify our beliefs and understanding of reality as “Pillars of Truth”. These are mental structures we erect that serve as reality checks against our experiences; the flow of reality through our perceptions. As the data of reality (our experiences) flows into our minds, it comes into contact with our Pillars (our beliefs), and provides us with an opportunity to determine the truth of our experiences. When one of our Pillars fails to objectively make sense of the data reality is sending us, it must change or collapse, and a new Pillar must be erected in its place – one that attempts to accurately make sense of the experience which toppled the previous pillar. The only exception to this rule is when we have insufficient data to make a change in either direction, though, even in those cases, it is likely that another, less obvious Pillar needs to be changed instead.

For example: Say my experience with reality has caused me to erect a Pillar that contains the following truth: All cars run on gasoline. If I have only ever encountered and heard about cars running on gasoline, then it makes sense to erect this Pillar to invest in and confirm that belief and, in return, gain a better understanding of reality. However, as soon as I encounter evidence that a car can run on something other than gasoline, I must destroy or alter that pillar and erect a new one in its place. Failing to do so would be an exercise in ignorance and/or cognitive dissonance, and my understanding of reality would be corrupted as a result, as well as all possible implications of holding onto that belief (all other Pillars affected by the corrupt one). We must allow our beliefs to die when confronted with information that disproves them, or else we become slaves to them.

Again, we are all doing this constantly, by default – literally every single person. In fact, I can practically guarantee you’ve already felt some of the assertions in this book come into contact with your own Pillars of Truth, and that you will continue to feel them as you progress through the remaining chapters. The problem lies both in our ability to allow our Pillars to crumble when appropriate, as well as erecting new Pillars that accurately explain and account for our new experiences and the information of reality.

As I mentioned earlier, it is often the case that a reliable Pillar of Truth simply cannot be erected or destroyed, as we sometimes don’t even know what it is we don’t know; we have incomplete or insufficient data, and that’s okay! I believe it is better to occasionally leave some plots of mental land “Pillarless” until we come across information that would allow us to construct a Pillar and invest belief into it. This is essentially the same as saying, “I don’t know”, because sometimes we just don’t know! Having said that, we do not want to end up with a mind devoid of Pillars simply because we have convinced ourselves that the information we have is never sufficient to build a Pillar with. Again, balance is key, and that balance will look different for each of us. Pillars are not perfect, and so they need to remain open to changes, but we should still attempt to erect them whenever possible, otherwise we have no means of pinging reality for feedback, and nothing to construct our beliefs and navigate the world with. I’m a big fan of skepticism, but not at the expense of refusing to ever construct beliefs.

So, let’s break down the steps of using this system in a simple and concise way.

Step 1: Construct a Pillar of Truth (a belief) that can accurately account for the information of reality you have experienced.

Step 2: Observe what happens to this Pillar as it continues to encounter the information of reality. Does it stand strong and make sense of our experiences? Is the Pillar being repeatedly validated and fortified, or is reality telling us this Pillar fails to identify truth and needs to fall or change?

Step 3: Make an honest effort to listen to, understand, and accept the reaction your Pillar has with the information of reality. If reality bounces off a pillar and returns an error (like with the belief that all cars run on gasoline), we must accept that something has disrupted our system, and that one or more of our Pillars need correcting. When one of my Pillars have been disrupted and return some kind of error, my body never fails to alert me that something has happened. I may not immediately understand what it means or even what direction it is pointing in, but a feeling of, “something is wrong” is always present – there is a disturbance in the force... It turns out that our bodies are pretty good at alerting us of important events and experiences regarding our relationships with reality, even if we don’t always know what they are communicating to us in the moment.

Step 4: Use the information to disassemble or fortify existing Pillars (depending on how the Pillars respond to reality) or erect a new one entirely. If you are confident the data is insufficient, then admit you don’t know, and come back to it another time.

Step 5: Repeat endlessly.

As we practice this five-step process, we develop our skill in utilizing it effectively. Adherence to the system improves our intuition, critical thinking skills, and ability to identify truth and make sense of the world. Non-adherence strengthens our own ignorance and cognitive dissonance, corrupting our ability to recognize, accept, and coexist with reality and ourselves. If we continue down the path of non-adherence, we eventually become zealots and slaves to our perceptions, beliefs, and emotions, as we grow emotionally inseparable from our Pillars, and are unwilling to destroy them when necessary. Meanwhile, our intuitions – a crucial component to listening to, understanding, and accepting ourselves – become frequently untrustworthy and confused, as the information they are being fed is not based on reality. Eventually, our faulty perceptions will rule us, instead of what is true.

So, what are some of the things that can corrupt our Pillars and turn them against us – destroying our ability to accurately perceive reality? Ignorance is arguably the most difficult factor of this system, as we only have so much information available to us that can be used to construct our Pillars and ping reality with. It is simply not possible to account for everything perfectly, all the time, so we do the best with the information available to us. Regardless of how good we are at using this or any system of truth, we will encounter many moments in which we simply cannot know something with the kind of absolute certainty we may desire.

Destroyer of Reality: Cognitive Dissonance

The other culprit in corrupting this system is far more complex, and has become widespread to a terrifying degree in recent years: Cognitive Dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is a rejection of information that threatens one or more of our beliefs.

Cognitive dissonance can occur for many reasons but, ultimately, it’s the result of our inability to allow one or more of our Pillars to fall when reality dictates they must. We become emotionally attached to our beliefs, and our minds attempt to protect us from the shame, fear, anxiety, and pain of invalidating what we feel, believe, and value. This is especially the case when we have invested a great deal of time, energy, and emotion into a belief that is in danger of being invalidated. Ultimately, anything we think, feel, or do that discourages us from accepting the truth is an act of cognitive dissonance.

Shame, fear, and anxiety are powerful motivators, and our minds will often prefer the rejection of reality to the terrifying experience of these emotions. When this occurs, we are retreating back into survival mode, as our minds have convinced us that we may be severely damaged by the experience of these emotions if we are to accept reality. Anyone who has experienced severe trauma can likely attest to this, as it is often the case that, in an effort to protect ourselves, our bodies will automatically dissociate from, deny, or change certain elements of the reality we experience.

Unfortunately, people suffering from depression and anxiety are among the most likely to engage in frequent and severe cognitive dissonance, as they are accustomed to existing in survival mode, as well as unprepared to tolerate additional pain of any kind. Fanatical adherence to ideology (a system of ideas, ideals, and beliefs) is also guaranteed to produce alarming amounts of cognitive dissonance, but we’ll cover that more in a later chapter.

People who become accustomed to overly investing in the truth and validity of their feelings are also at high risk of engaging in constant and severe cognitive dissonance. The more emotion invested into a belief, and the more someone values the “truth” of their own emotions, the more difficult it becomes to let the belief die in the face of disproving evidence, no matter how undeniable the evidence may be. The more often this kind of behavior is engaged in, the better a person will become at it, as they are effectively developing the skill of confirming truth through their feelings alone, and avoiding the skill of confirming truth with the help of reason and critical thinking.

People like this tend to engage in a kind of performative and incompetent mockery of logic and reason for the sake of convincing themselves and others that their beliefs have, in fact, been vetted by these effective tools of truth-finding. These tools, after all, cannot be avoided entirely, as they are ineradicable parts of ourselves which every person has an intuitive sense of. Far more often than not though, these people will deliberately refrain from putting themselves in positions in which they are confronted with evidence that may threaten their feelings and beliefs, as the act of dismissing or ignoring the evidence will likely become all-too-obvious to them and others who may be observing. In other words, they purposefully avoid any scenario which might threaten the validity of their feelings and beliefs. They intuitively understand that they are entering a potentially invalidating experience, and so they simply choose not to.

Using the example from earlier, say I encounter a car that runs on something other than gasoline and, instead of allowing my Pillar to fall, I refuse to accept that this new information disproves anything about my belief. Holding onto that false belief would corrupt countless aspects of my perceptions of reality, and not just my understanding of what fuel a car can run on. Cognitive dissonance can poison our entire system of Pillars, and leave us with such a massive and complex mess that we don’t even know where to begin cleaning it up.

There is a plethora of ways a person could circumvent allowing their beliefs to die, whether through mental gymnastics, arguments of semantics, a purposeful misunderstanding of the new information, intellectual dishonesty, avoidance of people, knowledge, and experiences which are likely to force them to question themselves, etc. The importance typically lies not in how a person engages in cognitive dissonance, but why.

Perhaps I’m a highly skilled auto mechanic, and it causes me too much stress, pain, and anxiety to accept that a car could run on something other than what I’ve dedicated my life to learning how to build and repair (gasoline-powered engines). Maybe I have what turns out to be a limited understanding of how engines work, and the prospect of learning how one could use a fuel other than gasoline is overwhelming, undesirable, threatening, or simply uninteresting to me. Maybe my friends and family share my belief, and I don’t want to become an outsider in that regard. Maybe I simply want to avoid the pain of relinquishing the highly valued foothold I have in my professional industry and environment. The possibilities are endless, but the point is cognitive dissonance will always result in a corruption of our ability to perceive the truth of reality. When our perception of reality is corrupted, we stand little or no chance of achieving self-honesty, personal responsibility, and the necessary authorship of our lives.

This is exactly why I’ve chosen to elaborate so much on the importance of truth. By lying to ourselves and others we construct a new “reality” our minds are convinced we must adhere to in order to maintain the illusions and avoid the pain of being invalidated. We become convinced by our own lies, and the illusions seem as real to us as anything else. The more we fail to observe reality, the more corrupted and complex this illusion becomes – eventually reaching a point in which identifying and accepting actual truth becomes all but impossible. We effectively lose our ability to accurately account for anything we do, good or bad, and we increasingly seek out only the people and environments which pose no threat to our overly-cherished beliefs. We surround ourselves with people who validate our false reality, and we avoid or attack those who won’t.

How can we expect to heal when our path is clouded by lies and untruths; when we cannot make sense of reality? We can’t know when something is truly working for us, and we can’t know when something isn’t, as our tools of observation have been developed to suit lies, not reality. We learn to excel at surviving in our delusions, and we learn to fail at living in reality.

Many people incorrectly assume they gain power over themselves and others when they successfully convince themselves or others of a lie, almost as if they are rising above reality to bend it to their will. What these people don’t realize is that lying grants power to others over the one who has lied; it is an act of self-abdication. When we lie, we willingly surrender our realities to whomever it is we lie to (including ourselves), for as long as we decide to keep the lie going. We aren’t gaining power - we are giving it to those we lie to by agreeing to perform and preserve our false reality for them for as long as the lie is asserted.

The ultimate result of this charade is total subservience to others (helplessness), as our realities have come to depend on their validation, as well as the avoidance or destruction of all those who seek to “erase” our false realities by invalidating our delusions. If you find yourself feeling that your very existence depends on the validation of others, then I urge you to reassess what it means to exist. If you want to escape your mental suffering, then it is crucial you understand that your self-worth and existence cannot depend on the validation of others. This is a guaranteed route to further helplessness and suffering.

I’ve chosen to elaborate on the “space between steps” and truth because I believe these two components are necessary for effective self-care, and they seem to be absent from most of the self-help programs I’ve encountered. The space between the steps must be discovered if we are to reach the steps, and it cannot be discovered if we cannot identify truth and be honest with ourselves regarding what we experience during our journey.

Psychedelics will unfailingly present valuable information to us regarding the space between our steps, as well as the truth of who we are and how we can get to where we want to go. So long as we are properly prepared to listen to and accept what we learn, we will get there.

Chapter 5: How and Why Psychedelic Therapy Works

The Essence of Psychedelic Therapy

It took me several years, dozens of trips, and countless hours of research to reduce the benefit of psychedelics to its simplest form. What form is that?

Psychedelics help to reveal and grant trust in your path towards healing and wellbeing. They force us to confront our naked identities and, in doing so, provide us with reliable insight on how to move forward. With our paths revealed, and our trust in them secured, we remove the restraints of helplessness and can begin reclaiming our agency.

It’s really that simple. Every psychedelic I have experienced accomplishes this, though each one does so just a bit differently.

The path towards a meaningful, fulfilling, and authentic life is there, whether you can see it or not, but you cannot hope to stay on it if you don’t trust it. Distortion of and disconnection from the path are wounds. Your body knows how to close a wound on its own, and the same holds true for your mind. However, just like any other kind of wound, your body can’t heal if you keep on injuring yourself in the same spot; if you keep getting in your own way. Remember, the human pathway to success is internally automatic until obstacles are introduced, be it from yourself or others. It must necessarily find success and happiness; homeostasis, and it will if you allow and encourage it.

Psychedelics make it easier for you to allow your mind to both decide and inform you how it needs to heal, as it’s the only one who instinctually knows how. Psychedelics can clear the fog of unhelpful, external influence and internal self-doubt, and give you an opportunity to see your own path with clarity and purpose.

Rather than get in your mind’s way – commit to assisting, loving, and trusting it. Like any new skill, you won’t succeed right away, but you must be persistent. Do not rigidly commit to controlling or directing your mind towards solely where you think it should go or, as can sometimes be the case, where you want it to go. It is precisely this over-exertion of control that prevents the mind from doing what it knows how to do on its own. This doesn’t mean that the thinking self plays no role here, instead, it means that the feeling self needs to be allowed to communicate freely without being stifled or criticized (controlled) by the thinking self.

The psychedelic experience is the time to quiet your thinking self a bit, and listen to what your feeling self is communicating. There will be plenty of times in which we use our thinking brains to prepare for, help direct, and evaluate a psychedelic experience, but if our feeling selves want to take us in a particular direction, then we would do well to entertain them with kindness and understanding and see what it is they want us to feel and understand; where they want us to go.

Your emotional self cannot communicate to you with perfect accuracy all on its own. You need to learn how to listen to what it is saying; to understand the often-confusing language it appears to be using. You cannot heal into a perfectly designed version of yourself in exactly the way you want to, just like you can’t decide exactly how a wound heals. You can influence and help your body, but you need to listen to, develop an understanding of, and cooperate with it. You need to show it respect, kindness, compassion, and patience.

So, what are some of the specific ways in which psychedelics work to help us achieve healing? This list is far from comprehensive, but it should serve to help you understand some of what is occurring during and after a psychedelic experience.

The Psychedelic Experience

Ego death and loss of control: The freedom we feel when letting go of the weight of our well-established perceptions and defense mechanisms.

During almost any psychedelic experience, a process called, “ego death” will occur so long as the dose is sufficient. Essentially, the part of you that automatically filters and interprets data in alignment with how you have come to perceive yourself and the world, is outright removed, or at least heavily stifled. In many ways, you are effectively clearing the path of communication between reality and your identity; removing things that would typically get in the way and possibly corrupt that line of communication and understanding.

For inexperienced users, this part of the experience is typically felt as a rush of “raw” and confusing data from reality. It’s important to remember that you aren’t necessarily receiving more data than normal, instead, you are receiving it without the filters, defenses, and sense-making elements that you have developed and come to rely on during your lifetime. You are receiving it without many of your habits of perception and sense-making in place; without your ineffective and potentially damaging tools of feeling a sense of control over your life. As a result, much of this data will present itself to you in ways you have never experienced before (or in a very long time), often appearing to feel more true and “real” than it would outside of a psychedelic experience.

This death of filtering and perception is one of the primary reasons why psychedelics can be so beneficial. They give your brain a chance to experience things exactly as they are; preventing you from perceiving them as you’d like to, or have come to through habit, and forcing you to perceive them in their largely unadulterated form. For some, this experience can be frightening and unsettling, as many of us feel a profoundly deep need to control the ways we perceive and experience the world, especially when faced with the potential consequence of emotional and/or physical pain and helplessness. Again, this is why truth is so vitally important to this process.

People who are suffering from trauma, depression, and anxiety are far more likely to attempt to exert some form of control over their experiences, as any form of control feels like their best defense for avoiding additional helplessness and pain. We are all grasping for whatever agency we can when we experience helplessness, including things which don’t actually grant us agency, but further helplessness, instead. Even with a talented therapist, it can take years to break down these defenses and release the control we hold onto so dearly.

Psychedelics are particularly beneficial for these people, as they essentially throw us into the deep end of the pool and force us to figure out how to swim without our hoarded collection of flotation devices (the ways we typically exert control). Luckily, we can’t actually drown, though we may experience some of the fear of doing so. It is important to keep this fact in mind during any psychedelic experience. We are not drowning, we are just learning to swim, and the more unfamiliar we are with it when we’re thrown into the deep end, the scarier it can be to learn.

Remember, being happy is a skill, as are the things we need to do to achieve happiness and fulfillment. Learning to let go of our misplaced control is one of the most important skills we will work on, and psychedelics excel at allowing us to do so with incredible efficiency and speed. While this process can be scary, it can also be incredibly life-affirming, fulfilling, fun, exciting, liberating, and wonderous. I like to think of it as an immense challenge that I can’t possibly fail at, because it’s all inside my own head, and I get as many chances to succeed as I need! I’m basically just learning to read my own instruction manual. When I inevitably conquer it, I feel powerful and awesome, just as you will.

Emotional resonance

Because we tend to lose so much of the control we typically exert over our lives while undergoing a psychedelic experience, we can often feel an almost otherworldly kind of emotional resonance during our “trips”. Psychedelics make it much easier to hear what our feeling selves are communicating to us, which means the feelings we experience during a trip can often be powerful, loud, and meaningful in ways which we don’t typically tend to experience.

Whatever emotions are screaming to be heard and felt will absolutely be heard and felt during a psychedelic trip, whether we want to or not. Sometimes they are overwhelmingly pleasant, and sometimes they aren’t. Either way, our bodies are informing us about what we need to feel and consider, and it is important that we acknowledge, listen to, feel, and attempt to understand those feelings.

The more often we work on this skill, the better we will get at it, and it will become easier and easier to lean into the fear of experiencing these loud emotions, whether pleasurable or not, and allow them to resonate within our deepest selves. With enough practice, our thinking selves become better and better at understanding the language of our feeling selves, making effective communication between the two significantly stronger, and drastically improving our relationship with ourselves, allowing us to move closer to understanding, embracing, and developing our authentic identities. This is simply a process of developing our agency against the helplessness that has infected our lives.

Everyone requires emotional resonance to live whole and fulfilling lives, but some of us struggle to experience this resonance for a variety of reasons. Emotional resonance is like an agreement of acknowledgement and acceptance between your thinking and feeling self; it’s the result of healthy cooperation and agreement between the two. Every single thing you do and experience in your life will elicit a reaction from the feeling self. Our emotional selves try to inform us of their positions on whatever it is we are experiencing, though it can sometimes be difficult to know exactly which position is taken, or if a position was taken at all, particularly when our traumatized nervous systems have left us in a place of numbness or chaos. This is a skill that closely resembles learning a new language, as what your feeling self is communicating to your thinking self is often difficult to understand, especially if you have been ignoring it for a long time, or if it has been numbed by trauma/depression in an attempt to protect you.

Say you go to your favorite coffee shop to find that the cost of your routine order has doubled. Immediately, your feeling self is going to send you a message, which can either resonate with you (be felt, acknowledged, and accepted) or be ignored/avoided. If we allow it to resonate, then it can help us to confirm how we feel about the experience. When this is accomplished, we strengthen our relationship with ourselves, and provide our thinking self with insight on how to proceed.

“I feel conflicted by the drastic price increase… Do I want to pay the increased cost? Should I speak my mind? Should I change my order, or go to a different coffee shop?”

If we ignore the message our feeling selves send us, we place the burden purely on our thinking selves, and we get better at ignoring or rationalizing away what we are feeling; damaging our relationship with and understanding of ourselves, as well as our intuition. “I feel put off by the drastic price increase, but I don’t want to start a conflict, so I’ll just pretend I have no issue with this, and ignore the feeling.” It is important to remember that we do not always need to agree with and pursue what we feel, as doing so would be to ignore our thinking selves, instead. What’s important is that we acknowledge and accept that which we are feeling, then consider it fairly - not that we follow it blindly each and every time.

The skill of embracing and accepting emotional resonance is one of many skills we will learn to develop during our psychedelic experiences, as psychedelics tend to make ignoring our emotions incredibly difficult and unpleasant. Fortunately, the feeling of strengthening our relationship between our thinking and feeling selves is always a euphoric one, so it may help to remember that the light at the end of the tunnel awaits all of us. If your body needs to go through a painful experience, and you allow it to, you will be powerfully rewarded for it.

Planned Catharsis

This is one of my personal favorite aspects of the psychedelic experience. Traditionally, it can be extremely difficult to actually “plan” out a moment of catharsis… Not so on psychedelics. In fact, I make it a point to do this during the vast majority of my trips. It is closely tied to emotional resonance, with the outlying factor being that we have the capability to reliably produce a particular and powerful emotional experience and release, and even direct ourselves towards it without exerting the kind of control that is typically impossible and undesirable during a psychedelic experience.

I tend to have to have the most success achieving this with music, but there are practically an infinite number of ways to achieve it, which means that many of you will need to figure out how to best do it for yourselves. This is one of those “space between the steps” moments that, unfortunately, I cannot explicitly tell you how to do, as it will differ from person to person.

While searching for a method to try, remember that the point is to open yourself up to a feeling you are intent on exploring, acknowledging, accepting, and releasing. It doesn’t necessarily matter what that feeling is, it just matters that you embrace it and feel it to the best of your ability. This is something that typically comes with experience in using psychedelics, as we need to develop our skills of feeling before we can reliably anticipate what we will feel during a trip, as well as come to learn when it is appropriate and beneficial to purposefully engage in this process.

Once we have developed these skills, we can actually prime ourselves to feel a particular thing with incredible power and clarity – producing an emotional experience that stays with us for long after the trip is over, and can integrate within our deepest selves (our nervous system). It is exactly this kind of emotional resonance that continues to guide us along our path of healing, and instills the trust, confidence, and agency we need to rid ourselves of helplessness. Remember, we need our emotions to help confirm or negate our experiences, otherwise we are essentially navigating without our compass, and without the entirety of ourselves. Without some sort of confirmation, negation, or approval from our feeling selves, following our path can become very difficult, if not impossible.

Anchoring of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors – Fortifying Pillars of Truth

Have you ever experienced a moment in your life in which your feelings toward something or someone were concretely solidified in that single moment? This is what I like to refer to as an anchor of both the mind and body. It’s a moment of emotional resonance that thoroughly penetrates your soul and resonates with you so powerfully that it almost feels as if that feeling has become “complete” in a sense. This feeling tends to correspond perfectly with your thoughts, resulting in harmony between the thinking and feeling self, and making an unforgettable “mark” on your path which you can reference and utilize whenever you need to.

The great thing about psychedelics is that they can be used to intentionally produce these exceptionally powerful emotional resonance anchoring moments. The method of accomplishing this will likely look different for each person, but I believe the prerequisites for reliably achieving it will be similar, in many cases. For myself, I typically require that both my mind and body thoroughly inform me that they are ready to “anchor” something before the psychedelic experience takes place, though this is absolutely not a strict requirement.

I also like to think of it as a sort of “pure” confirmation of what I already think and feel. For instance, say I recently discovered that part of the reason I’m so fatigued all the time is because I’m constantly giving my energy to others when I have little or none to give. This discovery resonates with me powerfully, so I take some time to think on it, journal it, feel it, discuss it with others, explore it during a trip, etc. After doing so, I find that nothing about this discovery conflicts with the Pillars of Truth I have erected to test its validity, and that my feeling self has also confirmed its importance and validity. So, what now?

Well, now it’s time to run it through a psychedelic therapy session for confirmation and anchoring. I know that what I think and feel about this discovery is true, but I still must leave other possibilities open, and perform my due diligence in running over it without my filters and defenses in place. It’s not that I don’t trust myself – the opposite, in fact. The reason I’m bringing it into the psychedelic experience for anchoring is because of the confidence I’ve established in the belief, not because I expect the trip to disprove it. I simply leave that option open for the sake of preserving my own self-honesty and continuing to make progress.

It’s sort of like practicing a song on an instrument to the point where you are as confident as you can be that you will perform it well when the time comes to do it for real, like at a show in front of a live audience. I bring my confidence and skill to the show (the psychedelic experience) with the intent of “marking” that moment with what I have come to learn. If I don’t perform as expected, then I take that as an opportunity to figure out why, and improve for next time. If I do perform as expected, then I have successfully anchored my efforts, knowledge, experience, etc. – I have confirmed something important, met my expectations, and taken a full step along my path; I have achieved meaningful success, fulfillment, and agency over my helplessness.

The psychedelic session, in regards to anchoring, is simply an opportunity to play the song you’ve learned, prove to yourself that you are ready for it, and celebrate it in a powerful emotional moment. Once I have done this, I feel ready to move on to the next step. I should mention that, while I don’t believe all “songs”(discoveries, feelings, beliefs, etc.) need to make an appearance at the big show (the psychedelic trip), the show is still a powerful tool for amplifying the positive emotionality of a person who may be used to suppressing their feelings. Like many other things we will attempt to use psychedelics for, the show is an opportunity to build upon your agency and eliminate your helplessness.

The transparency and communication between the thinking and feeling self.

This has already been discussed to some degree, but I think it deserves a little reiterating.

When you undergo a psychedelic experience, the line of communication between the thinking and feeling selves opens up in ways that many people will rarely, if ever, experience. It is often the case that you can actually observe the conversation between your thinking and feeling selves, almost like a scientist observing an experiment for the sake of testing a hypothesis.

We don’t want to get in the way of this discussion, but we absolutely want to observe and attempt to understand it. The communication will often appear strange, and can even make us wonder what the hell we’re actually witnessing, or if it could possibly be useful to us, as it’s quite possible we’ve never been able to successfully observe this in our lives before.

For people who do not have a good relationship with themselves and struggle to listen to and communicate with their feeling selves, this conversation may not make any sense at all, as it may appear as if we are communicating with an actual stranger. Just remember that this is okay, and even expected. We are developing the skill of communicating with ourselves, and we cannot be expected to do it well right away – it takes time and patience.

Rewiring and reviving of old or underused neural pathways

This one is a bit more complicated, but the evidence for it is very strong. First, a quick description of what neural pathways are:

Neural pathways are essentially just series of connected neurons that send singles between different parts of the brain – affecting the ways we learn, perceive things, interact with information and emotions, recall memories, etc. Typically, the more often we use a given neural pathway, the stronger it becomes and, the less we use it, the weaker it becomes. Unfortunately, this applies to both desirable and undesirable neural pathways.

A desirable neural pathway may be one that allows you to recall your favorite memories with a close friend, while an undesirable neural pathway may be one that facilitates a fear response every time you try to pee in public. Whether desirable or undesirable, the point is that neural pathways are essential in constructing our experiences.

When we undergo a psychedelic experience, many of our long-dormant neural pathways become reactivated due to the forced removal of our self-defenses and perception filters (our ego). This can produce intense feelings of déjà vu, distant memories (particularly from before we were depressed or traumatized), strange emotions, and perceptions of information that feel familiar, yet brand new at the same time.

This is at least partially because psychedelics can increase the density of something called dendritic spines. A dendritic spine is a small protrusion, which is found on nerve cells in the brain, that aid in the transmission of information between neurons. It is also the case that chronic depression has been shown to reduce the number of these connections between neurons. Considering what we understand regarding what happens to the body and nervous system while surviving in a state of low-energy helplessness, it makes sense that the neural connections our bodies consider to be unnecessary for survival would be limited in their number and activity. In a very real sense, if we don’t use it, we lose it.

Interestingly, when we experience a psychedelic trip, our brains can actually resemble a state that looks something like they did before depression and anxiety ran rampant, even if both are still present. We get to bypass our go-to neural pathways that have over-developed as a result of depression and anxiety, and reignite and test some of our older, pre-depression ones, or even establish new ones entirely. This is going to look vastly different for each person, but it’s important to keep in mind as we use the psychedelic experience to better understand ourselves, and navigate towards happiness.

Re-living old experiences in new ways, with new perceptions and emotional energy

The benefits of experiencing the world via neural pathways other than the ones produced and overworked by our depressed minds cannot be overstated. In fact, it is quite possible to “re-live” some of our experiences through these alternative neural pathways, essentially granting us the ability to produce a different emotional and physiological outcome than what we previously experienced.

This is one of the reasons why psychedelic treatment has been so promising in people with severe trauma, in particular. They get a chance to reexperience and evaluate the trauma until they land on an emotional state that doesn’t resemble trauma; one that allows for agency instead of helplessness.

Imagine that you are competing in Ninja Warrior after years of arduous training, and you’re in the last few seconds of the final obstacle when, suddenly, you collapse from exhaustion, fall to the floor, and break both legs upon landing. For many, an experience like this might be traumatic, and even discourage them from ever doing anything that reminds them of this moment.

What if you could re-do that moment over and over again until your final emotional and physiological response wasn’t one of trauma, but one of acceptance, or even triumph? Well, psychedelics won’t let you relive the actual moment in reality, but they will let you re-live and even change the way you responded to it; how you and your nervous system feel about it. They will allow you to construct a new feeling to associate with your experience; a feeling which eliminates the helplessness responsible for your trauma, and grants you agency over the experience. Essentially, you can replace the trauma of that moment with whatever you want. Powerful stuff.

Getting a “taste” of your life outside depression, control, fear, etc.

What would it feel like to not be depressed, to not feel the need to be in control all the time, and to not survive in fear instead of live in joy? For many, this concept is so alien that it’s like trying to imagine living as an entirely different person. Psychedelics to the rescue, again! While certain psychedelics are better at reliably producing this experience than others (MDMA, for one), I can personally confirm that all of the psychedelics discussed in this book are capable of it to some degree, and each of them seem to produce it in different ways.

For many, a taste of what could be is exactly what we need to motivate us and restore our hope and confidence in achieving a life without depression. Once again, this is a tool of replacing our helplessness with agency. We get a chance to glimpse something about ourselves that, had we not glimpsed it, we may not have thought it to be possible. It is possible, and psychedelics can offer us the “proof” that many of us need, and they can do it in a way that resonates with us powerfully; a way we know and feel is not some sort of trick, but carries undeniable truth.

Do you ever wonder what your version of happiness looks and feels like? I know I did, as it had been so long since I experienced it that I almost completely forgot. Fortunately, I’m far from alone in having this experience, as it seems to be one of the most common elements of any psychedelic experience, even if it’s only brief. There are many reasons for this, some of which I’ve described in the last several pages, but the important thing to remember is that it will happen if you both allow it to and keep your eyes open for it.

Experience and skill development of living in a partial psychedelic state, post-experience

Because of the many altered states of consciousness we can reliably and consistently experience during a psychedelic trip, we can actually use our experiences to practice living in those states outside of the experience! Once they become familiar to us, and our neural pathways are both revealed and strengthened, it becomes much easier to re-engage in those thoughts, feelings, behaviors, etc.

In a sense, psychedelics can teach us how our bodies and minds want us to live, instead of how we have convinced ourselves, or allowed others to convince us of how we should live. We can take note of the things that occur during our trips, and try applying them to our lives. With enough practice, we become increasingly adept at doing this on command, and in ways which both our thinking and feeling selves approve of and enjoy.