The Hard Work of Psychedelic Therapy – part 2
“It is characteristic that dreams never express themselves in a logical, abstract way but always in the language of parable or simile.” -Carl Jung
When writing, it’s generally considered bad form to indicate that something can’t be described in words. Yet this is precisely the challenge when writing about this work- finding words that convey the utter indescribability of the world inside us. So much of the work of psychedelic-assisted therapy, and mainstream therapy as well, takes place in realms where language simply does not exist to describe the very subjective experience.
Describe to me what ‘warm’ feels like without referencing other sensations or feelings. What is the objective description of warm? There isn’t one; it’s an impossible task. There isn’t even a temperature that is objectively warm…coming out of a freezer into a room at 50F/10C would likely feel warm whilst the same room after just having been sunbathing on a beach would feel cold. Even if I could accurately use words to put into language what a feeling actually feels like it would still only represent how I feel that sensation. Your experience might be, and perhaps is, wholly different.
We can agree that a certain environmental condition in a specific context meets the criteria to be described with the word ‘warm’, a word we were mutually trained to associate with certain contexts, but we can never know what the feeling of warm is like for anyone but ourselves.
We have only the most rudimentary knowledge of what anyone else’s existence is like. Sensation, emotion, the totality of our inner lives, are entirely personal and not able to be described to another person without the use of subjective and relative comparisons.
I felt the need to bring up this point because I want to be clear: nothing I write about concerning the experience of psychedelic-assisted therapy is meant to set a standard or give expectations. Nothing I say should be considered a ‘how-to’ or road map for any aspect of your personal road to healing and insight. It is merely one man’s view, a view that has been shaped by a lifetime of unique circumstances into an individual outlook that is completely unlike anything else.
The same is true for you; the universe you inhabit is uniquely yours.
Much in the way we use ‘warm’ to describe something that may be experientially very different for each of us, take my words and interpret them into your own meaning and your own way of being.
Sigmund Freud deserves credit for being the father of psychotherapy, a monumentally important contribution to the treatment of mental health.1 Unfortunately, he also injected a plethora of inaccurate and misleading concepts into the popular understanding of psychology and its every day applications.2 One of his many blunders was his belief that he could interpret the dreams of his clients using a universal set of concepts and imagery.3
This entirely foolhardy idea has persisted in popular culture. There are even websites that offer to interpret your dreams and tell you what they mean. Dream imagery is an intensely personal concept that can not be standardised from one person to another. A flying dream may signify something entirely different to you than it would to me. Your dream about a father figure might engender tender feelings for a parent whereas mine might come with feelings of impotent rage and victimisation. And a dream with a cigar? Well, even Freud said that sometimes it’s just a cigar.
The same is true when interpreting your psychedelic journey. We don’t fully understand the biological and psychological mechanics of dreaming or psychedelic experiences but they are similar in that they allow aspects of the unconscious to rise up through the layers of the psyche to be noticed by our awareness. The imagery that appears will be particular to your psychological make up and history.
It’s common to speak about the ‘imagery’ of a psychedelic journey despite it being a vastly multi-dimensional experience. In fact, if you were to limit your interpretation of your journey to the parts that emulate physical senses you would likely be missing out on the truly important parts of the message. When I speak of imagery in a psychedelic context I mean everything involved in the experience- the thoughts, the complex or simple understandings, physical sensations, sight, sound; whatever there may be.
In a psychedelic journey emotion may have shape and texture or music may be comprised of pure feeling. The appearance of a person you know may include all of your impressions and history with them, your expectations and disappointments with them, the projections of your own wounds you’ve laid at their feet. This ‘image’ may have dozens of dimensions.
When we encounter anything from within during a psychedelic journey, we are speaking to ourselves in ways the ego does not fully understand. These are ancient languages from parts of ourselves that predate our humanity, the tongues of our evolutionary ancestors and animal cousins. Our task is to understand what is being said, to interpret a message proffered in a language without words.
The ego has a hard time with this; it works with language and logic, patterns of cause and effect, and may have difficulty understanding the abstract languages of our deeper selves. The uninitiated ego tends to project its views and values onto everything it encounters in order to re-make the world into its own image. It can be a tyrannical creator-god, constructing a universe built on a self-serving and self-referential paradigm.
This causes what is called “motivated reasoning.”4 It is a type of confirmation bias combined with internal projection- we interpret our visions and dreams in ways, sometimes predetermined, that fulfill a wish or need of the ego. It is an entirely normal and common thing, we all do it.
The challenge is to listen to the ancient languages of the non-ego parts of ourselves, to understand what the pre-lingual aspects of the psyche are trying to say on their own terms, without the forced interpretations of the ego. It may want to make the easy connection that the flying vision is about freedom, slipping the surly bonds of Earth as it were, when our unconscious may be saying something entirely different. Pay attention to the emotions and thoughts that accompanied the flying; your truth lies between in the lines, in all the details and deeper dimensions of the journey. Everything in a journey is partially or entirely symbolic; not to be taken literally…unless, of course, it is.
Our social training and habits are obstacles to the distillation of the truth. It may be instinct to ask, “what does this mean to me,” but the real question is more akin to “what does this want me to know?”
It is one of the many seeming contradictions of self-exploration and awareness that, in our quest to know more about ourselves, we must separate meaning from our sense of individuality before we can fully understand ourselves.
The modern world is ego-driven. We are trained from a very young age to live in the ego-mind and taught to ignore, even disparage, the ancient layers of the Self that hold up the ego and give it form and shape. It’s like living on the 20th floor of a building and denying that floors 1-19 exist.
In “The Gift of Fear” the author begins his book with a very disturbing retelling of the story of a woman who, failing to listen to her instincts that clearly saw danger, allowed her ego to override her instinct.5 She paid a terrible price for it. There is no guarantee the woman could have avoided harm had she listened to her gut but listening to her logic and rationality reduced her chances to zero. Her Western training to be rational at all costs failed her. It told her to be polite when her instinct told her to run. She nearly lost her life because of that choice.
Learning to listen to our non-verbal selves is extremely difficult. For most of humanity’s history it was the normal and natural way. For the past several thousand years, however, the various societies men have created have consistently driven our experience of ourselves towards the external and away from our more connected and natural selves. The woman in the story experienced a primal, survival response, reading the situation below her conscious awareness.
Technology has accelerated the process of ignoring our inner selves, of course. We have a myriad of options for banal distraction so that we never have to be alone with ourselves. Look around you in any public place and see how many people have their faces turned towards some sort of electronic screen. I’m currently sitting in public as I write this; I’m just as caught up in this trend as anyone.
The increasing challenge that we face as denizens of a modern, ego-identity focused, materialistic society is how to connect with the ancient, the spiritual, the human. It sounds far easier than it is. The modern world can make us terrified and unprepared to know who we truly are.
As I’ve progressed on my journey from the ultimate denier of anything not explicitly explainable by science to a more connected, open-minded, and accepting person I have found it possible, in many ways, to straddle the worlds of empirical and the ineffable.
There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
I did not eagerly adopt a new way of seeing, it came upon me despite my resistance and frequent refusals. I love science and for most of my adult life refused to believe anything not proven empirically by proper, peer reviewed scientific methodologies. Yet the more I explored myself with psychedelic-assisted therapy the more my way of thinking was unwillingly pried open to encompass a more fundamental understanding of what it is to be human. I now can hear the many languages and layers of human existence far more clearly than I ever have before, though I still have quite a long way to go.
Through many experiences, a handful of which I have written about, I was shown a deeper truth, one in which the ego is only a part of the whole- important but not all-important. It is a player in an ensemble cast, each as vital to the production as the next.
Not only does the well-intentioned, but often spiritually immature, ego have a tendency to get in the way, so do the wounds we are trying to heal. Trauma can work at almost any level of the mind, making its impact quite difficult to notice. My trauma was so fundamental to the structure of my world that it took many deep journeys before I was able to see it in any real way. I am still uncovering layers underneath layers of its impact on my soul.
This is the hard work of psychedelic-assisted therapy- seeing the truth within you that some other part doesn’t want to see. Our culture that seeks value in the external, our modern world full of one-dimensional distractions, and our wounds all combine to work against us seeing ourselves honestly and openly.
So how do we listen to the message when there are so many obstacles?
to be continued…
References
1 Ryckman, R. (2013). Theories of Personality. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
2 Quinodoz, J. (2017). Sigmund Freud: An Introduction. London: Routledge.
3 ibid.
4 Morewedge, C. & Norton, M. (2009). When dreaming is believing: The (motivated) interpretation of dreams. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 96(2): 249–264.
5 De Becker, G. (1997). The Gift of Fear. New York, NY: Random House.
