Converting the Psychedelic Experience into Enduring Real-World Change: From Insights to Operating System
Over the last decade I’ve had the privilege of supporting high-impact leaders move toward inner purpose and subsequently positive impact endeavors. In that time, the occurrence of the“Holy shit. What now?” session, in which these leaders confess to recently emerging from a psychedelic/plant-medicine experience, is exponentially increasing. Given their motivation toward positive impact, they arrive desperately wanting to know what to do with the insights and epiphanies they’ve gained in service to that.
This is the very tip of a vast iceberg of an exponentially growing engagement. I would say there is currently a large-scale migration (thousands) of high-impact leaders, C-level executives, founders, etc. — predominantly tech, but quickly growing less so in proportion — seeking out these experiences, ceremonies, sittings, journeys, etc. Their motivation expectantly to accelerate personal growth, gain epiphanies and insight into self, find deeper purpose, gain general enlightenment, even touch the face of God — predominantly all in service to finding a way for their personal transformation to manifest in endeavors that in turn transform their world.
Overall, my experience is this is probably a positive evolutionary impulse in the potential elevation and change it can spark in the world given the combination of intentions and capabilities of these people. Yet, contrary to the expectation of many of these participants, it seems these experiences are, when done in isolation of sustaining mechanisms, consistently incomplete as it pertains to the creation of an enduring shift in self, in new behavior, in generating new world-positive endeavors.
To do so, these experiences will require what I call a partner experience — a learning and adoption of an inner technology for subsequent use in the everyday non-altered miracle of this dimensional plane, that can be active 24/7 in converting these epiphanies and everyday human experience into real and enduring change.
My awareness of the need for this additional mechanism does not emerge from an oblivious inexperienced vantage point — of only observing my clients from this side as they are being birthed back into this world looking around wide-eyed and eager to play a new game. My perspective comes from a couple decades, early on, probably instigated by a terminal prognosis of metastatic sarcoma (I’m still here 40 years later) of first-hand, deep, comprehensive, and of what many rightly accused me, of obsessive psychedelic exploration. Bordering on a Captain Ahab and Moby Dick odyssey intent on finding my white whale of the precisely right molecule or combination thereof that would generate an experience and an intimacy with the divine that would change everything, forever. From months of immersive MDMA dialogues, countless LSD solos from deep in the Mojave to the dark outer Playa of the Burn, guided peyote sittings on Apache land in Salt River Canyon, wooden-floor-plastic-tub ayahuasca ceremonies, psilocybin experimentation of all sizes, hybrid-molecule journeys with names like “candy-flipping”, to whipping through the telltale fractal tunnels right into the godhead with 5MeO-DMT/“Toad”— the designated “Mount Everest” of psychedelic experiences.
I ran this paradigm to the ground in the mistaken sense that… it would be the next journey, the next combo of molecules, that would fundamentally enlighten and change me forever. What I found though, is that while I indeed had countless reality-altering epiphanies about myself, my self-limiting beliefs, my universe, and what I was here to create, when my inevitable descent, perhaps days or weeks later, back from the pink cloud was complete, truly enduring shifts of life, behavior change, and commitment to that positive impact calling, did not seem to stick for long.
At that point I followed the path of many that made similar conclusions, like Ram Dass and others, to the last house on the block — to seek a more lasting and every-moment-accessible inner technology capable of converting the insights had in those experiences into everyday 3D reality, while also capable of generating entirely new insights independent of any imbibed catalysts. A new inner Operating System. I discovered those inner technologies (and continue to), and they remain highly successful for me and the leaders I work with in shedding of what was, to make room and create what can be. Only my personal pilgrimage was not a monastery in Nepal or ashram in Goa, but as then a president/cco of a large company, and father with two children, it was instead, Topanga, CA, and dropping out of the mainstream for a while to enter a grad program in spiritual psychology and then subsequent deep immersive training in many other similar inner technologies in service of guiding others.
I am quite grateful for everything held in both those tandem experiences. I get to bring it all to bear as it becomes more and more evident in my work with leaders that the height of the psychedelic experience does not necessarily translate proportionally into the height of actual change in the actions, choices, behavior, life, or endeavors. Despite what had been hoped for, perhaps ever since the promising days of Aldous and Albert, while producing potentially critical seminal sparks, these experiences will not alone generate the Great Fire we need in humanity’s day-to-day consciousness that subsequently blazes a new world at a time we so need it.
It is true that these experiences can be catalyzing and useful in the temporary decapitation of the ego-mind, and the resulting higher altitude of perspective of one’s life, one’s expanded aperture of possibility and purpose, and can be of potential great benefit therefore to the impact these particular leaders can have on society. They have been lifted temporarily above the maze, finally see that it was indeed only ever a maze, most importantly one of their own construction, and therefore susceptible to them knocking down the walls, leaping its trap-floors, and potentially able to build something entirely new and positive from a mixture of the same raw material that built the maze, and the new ether gotten from higher up.
But the word “potential”, used many times above, is the key and fulcrum word here.
If the journeyers are to move the pure epiphany of a new truth into a transformation that has observable real-world mass, sustains that mass, and has the enduring neural, emotional, and spiritual integration to generate real change on this dimensional plane, the plane we actually spend the duration of our lives and create on, they will need accessible and powerful inner tools in the here-and-now for that.
Jamie Wheal, co-author of “Stealing Fire” (a book postulating the power of the psychedelic experience and other ecstatic states to change our world), and a far more famous and informed authority on these matters than I, has also been evangelizing an evolution of that original thesis to include sustaining real-world mechanisms. In this talk, I love his example of the good-intentioned student cutting the monarch free from its “struggle” of breaking out of the chrysalis only to have taken away its ability to fly by removing the necessary process that must come after the miracle of becoming a butterfly in the chrysalis.
We can liken it to seeking to attain a mountain summit. In the psychedelic experience, one gets in a helicopter at the base of the mountain, gets whipped up skyward, pops through the clouds, excitedly glimpses the glorious summit, hovers around it for a bit, sees the epic reality of it, and then inevitably has to return to the base we call “our life”. We can mistake having simply seen the summit so vividly, with having actually summited. We can mistake it as actually having made the ascent, felt the rare earth underfoot, and breathed the rare air. When in fact we have not actually done that. We have not done the true ascent on the terra firma of the world where enduring transformation actually gets embedded — where it needs to happen if that world and our selves are to be truly transformed.
It is the difference between achieving “the peek” and “the peak”.
Despite what is witnessed in the helicopter ride, we may have not truly learned the on-the-ground actions, inner technique, moment-to-moment interventions, integrated practices, the emptying of our backpack of what’s been holding us down and impeding our ascendance to truly higher altitude (the helicopter can bring all our baggage with us, up and down, no forcing-function called “real life” requiring the need to truly let go).
Recently a client, a CEO/Founder of a DEI related social enterprise, came into a session wide-eyed. I asked her what her intention for the session was. She replied, “I did a guided psilocybin journey yesterday and saw that one of my core issues holding me back is a non-willingness to create and enforce boundaries. But I don’t know what to do with that. My intention for this session is growth on that.” We then brought this intention into the session and using established inner-technologies we’d used before, helped her identify where in her business this issue was actually emerging, what were the core limiting beliefs she actually held preventing her from action, releasing those and replacing them with the greater truths about the positive impact boundaries can serve toward her calling, and then fortified her to go back in and courageously take new real-world actions and choices (from standing by her directives of what she does and others do, to actually finally replacing people for the overall good) that in turn created a new reality for her and her business.
This is what I mean by the “partner experience.”
I have another client, a director of engineering seeking to move from a major tech brand to create a L&D transformation-oriented platform start-up, who in our very first session expressed that she felt it was also time for an “ayahuasca reset”. I asked her what she meant by that. She explained, “You know — you do ceremony, everything feels so abundantly clear for a bit, and then gradually the haze of triggers, anxiety, and mundane daily life makes its way back in, I’m off track, it’s slowing me down, and it’s time for a reset.” I asked how often her “resets” were. She replied, “Oh, about once a month”. I asked what proportion between resets was spent in uplifting clarity versus the haze. She answered that it varied but that it was probably a 50/50 split. I asked if she felt that was greatest success she was willing to go for given what she wanted to create. I asked what impact it might have on her calling if it could become more a 90/10 experience with the 90 being in uplifted clarity. She looked at me as if she had never considered such a thing possible on this plane. But being the high-achiever she is, she chose willingness. The true ascent then began in applying real-world inner and outer practices, here on the plane we truly operate from, to permanently defang the triggers, roots of anxiety, and see the miraculous, instead of mundane, actually naturally inherent and abundant in daily life. All in instantly accessible, inner, moment-to-moment interventions and actions. The resets began to be replaced by the energy and excitement of seeing an accelerated trajectory of her creation take form, and her not wanting anything to impede that.
It is so important to be very clear at this point that this is not about a “right” and “wrong” way toward personal transformation, and subsequently, world transformation. It’s about transcending any polarity the mind or society may make in this case, and seeing a tandem and unified way forward.
Like a great teacher of these inner technologies once told me in one of my frequent moments of stubborn resistance, “The only thing about fighting reality, Kirk, is that you always lose.” The reality is that the universe has given us both the psychedelic experience and the independent inner technologies, both in service, somehow, to our evolution as beings and the world as a whole (if the master OS, our intention, chooses to use them as such). The wisdom of natural systems and the indigenous cultures that grew aligned with those systems demonstrate it is not a matter of “this or that”, but a symbiotic ritualization of both into human life. Some plants we imbibe will magically spark insights and imagination, while others will equally magically grow us, our bodies, minds, and being, that we can convert those insights into our living reality while also nourishing an innate system that can generate these epiphanies independently as well. Like everything in the natural universe, it’s the partnership and harmony between the sudden outer-induced event, and the masterful inner sustaining designs of evolution in all life, that yields the most successful and magnificent systems.
It is critical at this point in human history, and human future, that we accelerate and amplify the upward trajectory of human consciousness as this is ultimately causal to the quantum leaps in positive innovation and impact we need to generate the new world we will survive and thrive in. I know from my work, and sitting across from them daily, that we have an indescribable abundance of leaders with just the kind of scary smarts, heart, talent, and callings to achieve this. It will be critical to the strength and resilience of this trajectory that the helicopter ride to the “peek” is not mistaken by them for a totally available, life-changing and world-changing real-world ascent to the “peak”, and that the former ideally inspires the exploration and integration of the latter to be concert with it.
What if we convert the expansion of consciousness, whether gotten through tools applied to ecstatic states or to our everyday experience, into the expansion of the kind of world it’s been our birthright to create and experience?
What if our life itself became the ceremony?
What if that was always the point of it all?
