This Cannot Be Done Alone
This week I want to share a draft chapter from the book I’m writing on what is Beyond Psychedelics. Let me know what you think! I am inviting paid subscribers to be part of the commenting and editing process. Consider upgrading your subscription.
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Chapter Four
Why This Cannot Be Done Alone
If people are called to the medicine path, and they keep returning to it, and they do so honestly, they eventually come to understand something important. They come to understand that insight is not enough to reorganize a life. Even a relentless parade of moments of awe, of “aha!” after “aha!” does not seem to be enough to unlock us from our suffering. Nor from the suffering we bring to others.
We come to understand that no experience, however profound, exempts us from the ongoing work of growing, repairing, and maturing.
At this stage, we may have more understanding. We may understand the importance of cultivating practices. There is a deepening of sincerity. But what is still missing is a relational and communal context capable of holding the kind of change that medicine reveals.
We live inside a culture that treats transformation as a private project. Most of us have absorbed this assumption so deeply that we no longer recognize it as an assumption. We evaluate growth, healing, and spirituality using “measures” that assume individual mastery and personal accomplishment as the core foundation. When change does not last, we tend to locate the problem inside the person, rather than noticing the absence of structures designed to support us.
We try to integrate extraordinary experiences inside ordinary social structures. Structures that are oriented towards isolated individuals. We return from ceremonies that dissolve the sense of separation, only to re-enter lives organized around individual achievement, personal optimization, and private struggle.
When clarity fades, old habits return, old patterns snap us back into familiar grooves, and we interpret this as personal failure. When it is in fact a predictable outcome of a system that privatizes transformation.
This is not a personal failure. It is a structural one.
When Growth Is Framed as a Solo Project
For most of human history, significant transformation did not happen in isolation. For most people, across most cultures, healing, initiation, and maturation were embedded in shared rituals, shared stories, and shared responsibilities.
Growth unfolded in relationship to elders, peers, land, and lineage. There were social containers that recognized change when it occurred, challenged change when it was premature, and reinforced change through engaged and ongoing participation in communal life. Wisdom was something to be lived into, not just something to be spoken. Meaning was sustained through practice. Because insight has never been enough to sustain it.
The psychedelic renaissance unfolding in the West is largely severed from the communal containers that once sustained transformation. We have access to powerful medicines, but we don’t have living structures that know what to do with people who emerge from them.
We talk a lot about “integration,” but we usually imagine it as something an individual accomplishes through reflection, discipline, or therapeutic effort. This is a frame that places an impossible burden on the person who is trying to change. It asks us to carry the weight and responsibility of something that we were never meant to carry alone.
While there is something profoundly internal that must be unlocked if we are going to have an unfolding experience of freedom, the places where this freedom is experienced and expressed are not primarily internal. Our unfreedom lives and is expressed in our relationships. It lives in our conflict patterns and our attachments, it lives in our fears of disappointing others or of being abandoned by them.
Our bondage is expressed in the ways we withdraw, appease, dominate, or disappear when we are called into integrity, when life demands something courageous, true and real. There is no amount of solitary clarity that can reliably reveal these patterns, because they do not exist in isolation. They are co-created, enacted, and reinforced between people. We are social animals. To be a human being is to be interconnected.
This is why so many individuals can feel spiritually awakened and be developmentally stalled at the same time.
They have touched something true, but they are still living inside an hyper-individuated paradigm that pulls them back into their old shapes. Without mirrors that can reflect these patterns in real time, and without commitments that require us to stay when we would rather leave, insight has very little chance of becoming embodied.
Belonging as Responsibility
Community, when it is real, does not exist to validate our experiences or affirm our self-concepts.