Ruminations on “Intelligent Healing”
and the Role of Psychedelics
by Stephen Gray
Intelligent healing? An odd pairing perhaps. It begs the question of what needs to be healed and what would make that healing intelligent? I’ll start with the question of healing and circle back to the idea of intelligent healing later.
There are a lot of ways to talk about this. I have a long history of the study and practice of Tibetan Buddhism. Among other things, that experience has given me a language to address issues like this. With more than a millennium isolated up on that icy high plateau with no television or Safeway, Tibetan Buddhists had a lot of time to explore questions about the nature existence, of what needs healing, and how one might go about doing that healing work. Much of that investigation was done by simply sitting still and looking deeply into the mechanics and machinations of the mind and what lies beyond and around the individual “mind.”—in other words, direct empirical investigation as opposed to speculative philosophical enquiry. An anecdote attributed to the Buddha has it that after he landed on enlightenment, someone asked him how he knew he was enlightened. He put his hand on the ground and said, “This solid earth is my witness.”
One result of that investigation was the core insight that almost all humans are living through the filter of an illusion. In English you could call that illusion ego. The Sanskrit word that encompasses the nature of ego is samsara—the endless cycle of dissatisfaction and struggle that arises from this illusion.
Pretty much from the time we’re born, and very likely carried over from past incarnations, we begin to form our own idiosyncratic picture of what is real and not real, true and false, right and wrong, safe and unsafe, achievable (especially for ourselves) and impossible. We gradually put together a package, a configuration of concepts—stories we build our existence on.
That package becomes our identity. We all do it. It’s understandable. We needed to survive and cope. But this identity package is like clouds or vapor. It only exists in the mind, in thought, (although the programming gets imprinted in the whole-body system, but that’s a huge topic for another discussion.) Psychologists, like Otto Rank, a protégé of Sigmund Freud, have called it the lie of personality. It’s also been called the false or provisional personality. The problem with living through the ego illusion is that while it might have been a necessary crutch to get us through the night so to speak, it’s ultimately an extremely unsatisfying and diminished version of who we actually are.
The central insight of Buddhism, as well as of anyone anywhere who has been able to penetrate to the core of unconditional reality, is that there is indeed such a “thing” as unconditional reality. It’s not a belief or a position of any kind. Its only credential is direct experience. And the message is that when we’re able to release ourselves from the limiting cocoon we’ve built around ourselves, there is a way to live in this world that is free from confusion, free from struggle. It is possible to land on what is. Jesus is said to have called it the peace that passes all understanding. The word Buddha just means awake, or one who is awakened. The Buddha taught that Buddha nature is the true nature of us all, the ground of being.
It’s a long journey, maybe one of multiple lifetimes let alone a lifelong path in this particular incarnational go-around. Lord knows it ain’t easy to let ourselves ease down out of that identity. For the great majority of us, it’s our lifesaver. We don’t know what we don’t know and we don’t trust that we’ll be safe, that we’ll survive, without that lifesaver. One way of describing the path or journey of awakening from the illusion of the separate self goes like this. Imagine a line drawn across a page. The line represents the journey over time. At one end of the line is the state of mind that is completely beholden to the self-story, trusting only the contents and parameters of that story as the manual for living. In its extreme version, there is no trust whatsoever in the Tao—the Watercourse Way of the natural, unforced flow and patterns of energy and intelligence.
The path—the healing path—is one of gradually learning that it’s safe to trust the awakened state, and an immense relief to have given up the struggle. I have a lovely little book in the bookshelf behind me here called The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment, by Thaddeus Golas. (The book was first published in 1972 so I think we can forgive him for the use of the word “man’s.” And as a kind of sidebar, Mr. Golas’ insights into the unconditional nature of reality came from his deep exploration of psychonautic realms with the assistance of LSD.) One of the key insights in the book was “Go beyond reason to love: it is safe. It is the only safety.”
So, how can one heal? There are of course a plethora of paths and modalities—meditation, yoga, a range of somatic body therapies, schools of psychotherapy, conventional and mystical religious traditions, and again, the potent psychedelics. I’ll offer two related elemental approaches or modalities. The first is what you might call the gradual path. A spiritual teacher named Vernon Howard (Mystic Path to Cosmic Power) claimed that he knew what he was talking about from experience and that his realization is corroborated by all the world’s great mystics. It’s simply this: self-observation, watching everything within and outside with no judgment. As he says, “Without attitude and without comment, you simply look.”1
Simple in concept, but if you’ve made much effort to undertake this practice of non-judgmental observation, you know it’s really difficult. There’s a Sufi saying, “You’re not as good a person as you think you are.” That’s because acknowledging that shadow side of ourselves can destroy our meticulously constructed self-image as blameless good people just doing our best. I can say from experience it can be humbling. I’d like to see myself as a wise and good person. I’d like to think I’ve outgrown or transcended pettiness of various shades. But ruthless honesty compels us to acknowledge what lies hidden in the shadows. The good news, say those who have traveled far on that path, is that the shadows bind us and shining a light on them frees us.
Two important things about that work. First, it’s not self-absorbed navel-gazing. It’s not about circling back to oneself and thinking thinking thinking. It actually demands allowing space in the busy mind to just observe. That by the way, is the core practice of at least the lineage of Tibetan Buddhism I was involved with. The ultimate practice is what Buddhist teachings call bare attention or emptiness meditation, allowing the restless speed of mind to settle down and then, as Howard says, just observing. Peace might ensue—eventually.
For some of us, it’s also important to note that such honest self-observation isn’t about blaming ourselves. That can be tricky. I have at least one friend who struggles with that. She had worked for years on developing a positive self-image after a history of low self-esteem. The idea of acknowledging “faults” feels like knocking herself back down again. The best advice for that concern is to include such thoughts in the practice. You might say to yourself, “Ah, there it is again, the self-sabotaging thought. Just another thought to be observed non-judgmentally.”
Then there is the fast path, which perhaps ironically, is also a gradual path because the knots of samsaric existence and the intense clinging to the self-story still take a long time to ease out of. That path is the path of working with psychedelics. When understood correctly and encountered in optimal circumstances—a book-worthy subject in itself—psychedelics are not drugs, they’re reality medicines. They can pull back the curtain and expose the fiction of the egoic self. They can do that on the spot. That’s the meaning of the term ego dissolution or ego death that is often used in work with psychedelics.
That curtain pulling has two interrelated and overlapping functions. One is as a truth serum. Psychedelics can hold up a mirror. There’s an assumption underlying that capability, as well as the other related function I’ll get to in a moment. The assumption, or hypothesis is that we already know unconditional truth both about ourselves and about the ultimate nature of reality. It’s encoded, just obscured by the fog of ego’s fear-based tapestry of limiting concepts.
Psychedelics, like peyote, psilocybin, ayahuasca, huachuma, LSD, and others, even cannabis, are highly compatible with human brain chemistry. They can pry open encrusted, unused pathways and release what was dormant. It’s well understood in psychotherapy that bringing hidden material into the light is healing.
The other, interwoven capability of skillful use of psychedelics is that they can also open the channel to the nature of reality altogether. It turns out that the “hippies” of the 1960s and 70s weren’t just blowing (cannabis) smoke and pipe dreaming of a fairyland when they proclaimed the primacy of peace and love. For anyone who wasn’t just parroting the insights of others, that declaration arose from their psychedelic experiences. They’re “only” glimpses for almost all of us, but when they happen, you know they’re real. Psychonauts talk about coming home, the ah-ha moment. That, for example, is often the central insight of people who have breakthrough experiences with 5-meO-DMT—an immediate and irrefutable recognition of non-duality.
These powerful, sometimes shockingly ego-dissolving substances are clearly not for everyone. Thaddeus Golas counselled his readers thusly: “You need only open your awareness at the pace you find safe and comfortable. If LSD is too fast, go slower. This is home. We all belong in the universe.”2
I mentioned earlier that the psychedelic path is also a gradual path because of our intense and long-standing reliance on the stories that form our identity. Old patterns die hard. Not all explorers of psychedelics understand that—a misunderstanding that can have unfortunate consequences in the realm of spiritual materialism and spiritual bypassing. It’s well known in worlds I travel in that some people have had, for example, many dozens of ayahuasca journeys without ever getting to the root of their longstanding egoic patterns. The above-mentioned humble and patient practice of non-judgmental self-observation is the essential foundation of the ongoing journey. These days that is commonly called integration.
So what about the term “intelligent healing,” Jesus is said to have taught that the entry into the Kingdom is akin to passing through the eye of a needle. Can’t take no excess baggage with you. Buddhists call it the narrow path. I like the “feet to the fire” metaphor. As I’ve suggested above, psychedelics dramatically up the ante on the narrow path. The wonderful Buddhist teacher and writer Pema Chödrön titled one of her books The Wisdom of No Escape. It might be the hardest thing we can do.
I’ve learned this for myself in psychedelic journeys. You want to get away from the uncompromising demand. It requires trust, surrender, letting go. In one ayahuasca journey, the effects of the sacrament were really powerful. It scared me. I wanted to look away. I wanted to run. But the medicine had just settled in at full effect and I realized there was no escape. Just keep breathing and tough it out. If you can ride the turbulence and surrender, maybe, like I did that day, you relax into the now and think, “Why on earth would I want to be anywhere else at this moment? This is rich beyond words. This is reality.”
In other words, the wisdom of no escape is intelligent healing. If you eventually manage to peel away all the layers of encrustation to reveal the indestructible diamond within, I’m pretty sure you’ll look back, and say, “Yup, that was it, diligent and persistent neutral observation and continued relaxation and surrender—learning to trust the flow of reality* and not tying yourself up in knots of secondhand head-sourced apperception of life.”
*The title of an old (1970) book comes to mind: Don’t Push the River, It Flows by Itself, by Barry Stevens. Another way to express that advice could be, “Relax and align rather than contract and control.”
Finally, there’s another layer to the principle of intelligent healing. If the healing is real and durable, at a certain stage you begin to realize that your personal healing was just the starting point. It’s like repairing a car. The point is to take the car on the road, not spend the rest of your life tinkering with it in the garage. Wisdom carriers tell us that the healed heart becomes our guide. We’re naturally drawn to think, feel, and act for the benefit of others.
Although it’s a topic for another essay, I’ll say briefly that it appears the planet is in dangerous circumstances on multiple levels. (The term “polycrisis” is gaining currency these days.) You might say that the jig is up. As the great mystic bard of song and poetry Leonard Cohen put it, “It ain’t going any further.” The insights of mystics and deep explorers of psychonautic realms concur with multiple indigenous prophecies from around the world that we have reached a nexus point. The world needs us. It needs our love and our creative action. It’s time to get real, to manifest. God(dess) speed.
Notes:
- Howard, Vernon, Mystic Path to Cosmic Power, 33
- Golas, Thaddeus, The Lazy Man’s Guide to Enlightenment, 62 (in 1995 edition with new author foreword)
Stephen Gray is an educator, speaker, conference organizer, ceremony leader, and author/editor of two books: Cannabis and Spirituality: An Explorer’s Guide to an Ancient Plant Spirit Ally (2017), and How Psychedelics Can Help Save the World: Vsionary and Indigenous Voices Speak Out (2022). He lives in Vancouver, BC, Canada with his wife and female cat Henry.
