The Bigger Picture: How Psychedelics Can Help Us Make Sense of the World - Softcover

Beiner, Alexander

 
9781401971892: The Bigger Picture: How Psychedelics Can Help Us Make Sense of the World
Softcover
ISBN 10: 140197189X ISBN 13: 9781401971892
Verlag: Hay House UK Ltd, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

Can psychedelic drugs help us tackle the biggest problems we face globally? Can they heal the cultural, spiritual, and political wounds we’re wrestling with?

Psychedelics have hit the mainstream as powerful new mental health treatments. But as clinicians explore what these molecules can do for our individual minds, The Bigger Picture goes further to illuminate how psychedelics can help us find new ways to make sense of and come through the crises we face around the world.

Drawing on the latest research, as well as his unique experience as a participant in a ground-breaking clinical trial investigating the potent psychedelic DMT, Alexander Beiner reveals:

  • the role of psychedelics in addressing global issues such as global warming, geopolitical instability, and political polarization
  • the dark side of the ‘psychedelic renaissance’ and ‘psychedelic capitalism’
  • what it takes to elicit huge personal and cultural transformation through psychedelics

Embark on a journey into The Bigger Picture – a new era of science and spirituality with the potential to radically transform our perceptions of ourselves, one another, and our life on this planet.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alexander Beiner is a writer, cultural commentator, and podcaster. He's one of the founders of Rebel Wisdom, a media and events organization with a quarter of a million subscribers and a focus on making sense of culture and complexity. He's also an executive director of Breaking Convention, Europe's longest-running conference on psychedelic science and culture. He is a leading critical and countercultural voice in the "psychedelic renaissance" and has produced a number of films, articles, and events at the leading edge of the conversation about the potential of psychedelics. www.breakingconvention.co.uk

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The Psychedelic Renaissance

If you haven't heard the term before, the word 'psychedelic' might conjure images of the late 1960s. The Summer of Love. Tie-dye. Timothy Leary telling people to 'turn on, tune in, and drop out' of society. Or perhaps your mind travels further back, to the dawn of civilization, when shamans communed with teaching plants to navigate the spirit world. Maybe it conjures images of the people around the world who are still using psychedelics as sacraments – from the use of iboga by the Bwiti of Gabon, or of the fly agaric by the Tungusic shamans of Siberia, to the ayahuasca ceremonies of the Shipibo-Conibo of Peru or the Santo Daime church in Brazil.

If you've clicked on an article about psychedelics in the last five years, chances are it wasn't about counterculture or indigenous use, but about psychedelics' potential to treat mental-health disorders. A new wave of research, investment, and changing cultural perceptions has sparked what's been called 'the psychedelic renaissance,' with billions of dollars now being poured into psychedelics in the hope that they may offer us a way out of a growing health crisis that sees close to a billion people struggling with some form of mental illness. Someone takes their own life every 40 seconds. A sense of dislocation, anxiety, and loneliness pervades modern life, and everyone's looking for a solution.

The Imperial College Psychedelic Research Group, who were running the study I participated in, have been the source of many of these headlines; they have overseen multiple studies investigating the therapeutic and neuroscientific effects of psychedelic drugs. Over the last decade, labs like this have been reexamining how psychedelic molecules like psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) can treat some of the most widespread mental-health conditions, including depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). The results have been so promising that psilocybin has been given 'breakthrough therapy' status for treating depression by the FDA in the USA, while 'the love drug' MDMA is on the cusp of becoming a legal medicine for treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The study I participated in was different to the ones that normally make the headlines. It was non-therapeutic, designed to investigate what exactly is going on in the brain and the mind when we take DMT. Of all the psychedelic compounds, DMT has a particularly metaphysical mystique. That's partly due to the weird things that happen when human beings ingest DMT. Normally, the drug is vaporized in a small pipe and the experience lasts under 10 minutes. Despite the short duration, many people describe it as one of the strangest, most profound, and sometimes most terrifying experiences of their lives.

Some report traveling out of their bodies, visiting other intricate worlds populated by seemingly intelligent and independent entities. Sometimes these entities are friendly, sometimes aggressive, and always inexplicably weird. Many people report life-changing personal and metaphysical insights. DMT can bring us into a deep sense of connection with wider reality, and many say their experience felt 'realer than real.'

The study in which I took part was the first to investigate what happens when you extend that experience by a factor of four, and due to its highly experimental nature, only psychologically healthy (or healthy enough) volunteers with previous psychedelic experience were recruited. Even so, by the time I signed up, the researchers had decided to change the study to include four rather than five doses, as a few people had already dropped out because of the intensity of the trial.

That uncomfortable fact was one of the many fears going through my mind on that bed. I have a lot of experience with psychedelics, and as a podcaster and writer in the space, I'm up to speed on the latest research. Physically, I knew the experience was safe. But I was anxious about what I was going to encounter.

A wary caution is a common attitude among people experienced with psychedelics. However, it's often missing from all the media hype, which sometimes presents them as wonder drugs that can cure depression; this ignores just how complex these medicines are, and how little we really know about them.

What is certain is that psychedelics work very differently to normal psychiatric medicines. Psychiatrist Stanislav Grof, a pioneer in the field, has called them 'non-specific amplifiers.' His theory is that they amplify what's already in our hearts and minds. They bring up memories, insights, and behavior patterns we aren't normally aware of, and often elicit a deep sense of meaning and connectedness.

However, you can't just take a psychedelic and hope you'll go through a profound healing process. In fact, they can be just as dangerous as they are healing. For psychedelics to be healing and effective, we need to experience them in a safe setting, within a strong therapeutic or ceremonial container that can hold us through the experience and help us make sense of our insights. When these conditions are met, psychedelics can do more than help us navigate our minds; they can elicit profound spiritual experiences.

In 2006, a Johns Hopkins study conducted by Roland Griffiths reported that more than half of participants ranked their psilocybin experience as one of the five most spiritually meaningful of their lives – right up there with marriage or the birth of a child. This 'mystical' encounter reported by so many is believed to be a key component of what makes psychedelic experiences so healing.

My Story

A major impetus for this book is the fact that the mystical experiences I've had on psychedelics have forever changed my life and how I see reality. But during the study, I wasn't lying on that bed looking for a mystical experience, or at least I didn't think I was. I had a specific goal in mind – a personal experiment I'd be conducting throughout the four months of the trial, and a question that forms the main inquiry of the book you're reading: How can psychedelics help us find new solutions to the existential crises we're facing as a species?

This is a question I've been interested in since my first psychedelic experience at the age of 18, when I was with a group of friends at a park in the Dutch city of Maastricht. I grew up about a two-hour drive away, near Frankfurt, Germany. My father is German and my mother is from Northern Ireland. My father worked in the printing industry and my mother was a teacher at Frankfurt International School, which I attended from the ages of five to 18.

Many of us who've grown up in very multicultural environments, or with two nationalities, often have a strange relationship with the idea of 'home.' However, as I sat in that park in Holland experiencing mushrooms for the first time, I felt more at home than I'd ever felt. I had a calm and abiding feeling that I had reconnected to reality in a way that would change me forever.

Over the next few years, I devoured everything I could find on psychedelics. I became fascinated with the anthropology of shamanism, neuroscience, ethnobotany, and psychedelic philosophy. I spent hours listening to recordings of psychedelic pioneers like Terence McKenna, Ram Dass, Ann Shulgin, and countless others. I began to relate to psychedelics as sacred medicines and took them infrequently, carefully, and with great respect. I spent much of my time at university writing a novel about psychedelic culture and shamanism, Beyond the Basin, which I published just after I graduated. At around the same time, I began a daily meditation practice.

In 2009, as Occupy Wall Street was at its peak, I moved to London. I met my now-wife, Ashleigh Murphy-Beiner, who would go on to become a...

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Verlag
Hay House UK Ltd
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
140197189X
ISBN 13 
9781401971892
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
259
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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