Psychedelics, Spiritual Narcissism, And Vaccine Resistance Gone Insane (Part One)
The psychedelic community is in a state of deep crisis as conspiracy theories run amok, and vaccine resistance reaches new levels of crazy.
by Ben Cohen
Back in 2015, I travelled to the Amazon rainforest in Peru to take part in four ‘Ayahuasca’ ceremonies with indigenous healers. Ayahuasca is an extremely powerful psychedelic brew that has extraordinary healing potential for both physical and psychological ailments.
In stark contrast to my experience of Western spirituality and religion, Amazonian Shamanism was frighteningly real, and beyond my comprehension. There were no prayers, no religious texts, no cosmology to understand, just a direct experience with an ancient medicine that tore apart almost everything I thought about reality.
Why I went is a story for another time (you can read a bit more about it here), but I found the experience to be both terrifying and immensely beneficial. Thousands of others have found similar healing with psychedelics, and communities have now sprung up all over the world as part of a giant psychedelic renaissance. Substances like magic mushrooms, MDMA and Ayahuasca are currently being taken very seriously by Western scientists, and due to relaxing drug laws we are now able to study them properly. Ayahuasca, for example, has enormous medicinal potential for conditions like depression and PTSD via mechanisms we are now only beginning to understand.
The dark side of psychedelics
As exciting as the new research on psychedelics is, there are many risks that need to be addressed, particularly by those advocating them. There is a darker side to Ayahuasca and the broader psychedelic community, and it is one that has exploded in recent times. Psychedelic tourism in places like Peru has created significant problems for many indigenous peoples. The industry is completely unregulated, and there are many unscrupulous actors taking advantage of vulnerable people for profit (and sometimes worse). Psychedelic experiences can also be extremely destabilizing, and without proper care before, during, and after, psychological problems can be amplified greatly.
New Age spiritualism in psychedelic communities is often a byproduct of these experiences. Those raised in Western societies have little understanding of indigenous cultures, but try to approximate it with a hodgepodge of unrelated spiritual traditions after experiencing psychedelics. They create new practices and belief systems that are totally removed from the ancient traditions psychedelic medicines come from. I have seen this first hand in Western run Ayahuasca retreats, and have seen many friends turn to New Age spirituality after powerful psychedelic experiences.
This phenomenon isn’t necessarily all bad, but many people use psychedelics to heal serious psychological issues and they often come away with only half the puzzle solved. Ayahuasca experiences for example can be extremely confusing and hard to make sense of. Without proper after care and integration, many adopt new belief systems and begin projecting their unresolved issues onto them. I have seen many people have powerful experiences and come away believing that they alone have special insight into the nature of reality and the divine. Spirituality then becomes a form of escapism that can lead to narcissistic behavior, God complexes, belief in conspiracy theories and the participation in cult-like organizations.
This problem has exploded during the Coronavirus pandemic, leading many in the psychedelic community to go completely off the rails. The community is now in a state of deep crisis as conspiracy theories run amok and many engage in extremely harmful acts of disinformation.
New Age narcissism meets Covid-19
I had naively hoped that many of the people I knew in psychedelic circles would be helpful when the Coronavirus pandemic hit. The initial feeling conjured up by the rapidly spreading virus was, at least for me, akin to a very powerful psychedelic experience — particularly Ayahuasca.
It is hard to describe just how forceful Ayahuasca is, and early experiences are generally very, very frightening. I had a sensation of confronting an inconceivably powerful force (“the other” as philosopher Terence McKenna calls it) that could do with me what it wanted. With experience, you learn not to fight the effects of the medicine and let it do its thing — a sort of Daoist lesson in letting go and accepting what you cannot control. As the pandemic hit, I remembered those lessons from Ayahuasca; accept the power of this thing and do not panic. We do not control Mother Nature, she controls us and we must learn to live with this. The Coronavirus was a brutal reminder from the biosphere that we are at her mercy.
At first, there were some positives from the pandemic. It seemed like a genuine wake up call from the planet to stop our destructive ways — we marveled at the blue skies emerging over our cities, breathed clean air for the first time in years, watched wildlife populations explode, and wondered out loud about our 24/7 work culture. Covid-19 was a horror show, but there were powerful reminders about the intrinsic beauty of our natural world, its power, and our place in it.
I felt like I was able to help ease the anxiety of many people I knew who were having an extremely hard time during the pandemic. My Ayahuasca experiences taught me how to remain calm during extraordinarily difficult moments, to face harsh realities, and sit with them. The pandemic, I thought, was a once in a lifetime opportunity for humans to do just that. We had to face up to our destruction of the biosphere, the insanity of modern capitalism, and the culture that dictates we work every moment of every day. Covid-19 felt like the mother of all bad psychedelic trips, and it would take a lot of hand holding to see ourselves out of it.
As the pandemic dragged on, I watched in horror as many people I knew in Ayahuasca circles began to go down extremely dark rabbit holes. Coronavirus wasn’t real according to many in New Age and psychedelic community — it was really our fear representing itself as a virus. This fear was being manipulated by technocratic elites who wanted to “divide and conquer” us in order to enact their agenda of forced mask wearing and vaccination. The elites apparently want an obedient population they could strip of their spirituality (or “divine sovereignty”). They do this by pumping the masses full of untested pharmaceuticals and keeping them in a state of fear. This shadowy group of evil doers consists of people like Bill Gates, Hillary Clinton, public health officials, and anyone involved with Big Pharma. They control ‘The Matrix’ and we live in it.
The bad trip gets worse
I fell out with several people I know in Ayahuasca circles because of this mind bendingly stupid nonsense. One former friend messaged me this after reading one of my posts denouncing the New Age nonsense ripping through social media:
“I’m going to have to leave Canada because they are making vacation mandatory to do anything in public this fall. You’ve been totally fooled by the socialist left my friend. We are in the middle of a dark divide & conquer/ control agenda….I was just back in Peru early this year in February \ March. I did 5 solo aya ceremonies. Trust me bro, I’m on a cutting edge line of consciousness. You’ve been suffocating under the matrix of the establishment….This is a wake up call that you need to come up and take a breath of oxygen.”
Having had several family members get Covid and nearly die, I had little patience for this type of egoic fantasy, so I blocked him from contacting me.
Unfortunately, these fantasies have now become the dominant narrative in psychedelic communities, and it is about to get a lot worse.
This is part one of our two part series on psychedelics, spirituality and vaccine resistance. The second part will be released next week. You can read it for free here.
Read an excerpt from the latest for Banter Members:
Smug Liberals Empower The Far Right? F**k You
There is no liberal plot to kill Republicans. There is a Republican plot to kill Republicans; a cruel and inhuman sacrifice to regain power.
by Justin Rosario
Last week on The Banter Roundtable (go listen to it now!) Ben, Bob, and I discussed how the press has an incredibly irritating habit of laying all of the blame for the current wave of Covid deaths at the feet of Democrats. Or the left in general, really.
While we are living through a pandemic of the unvaccinated, somehow, the unvaccinated have been stripped of all agency. They can be assigned no responsibility for their actions and lack thereof. Instead, they are the victims of, and I kid you not, liberal smugness. Therefore, all of the death and suffering is my fault. And yours. And, naturally, Joe Biden’s.
Since I am not allowed to write a page full of colorful and extremely vivid profanity to share my feelings about this narrative, I will do the next best thing: Explain what is behind this bullshit and what you can do about it.
The liberal plot to kill Republicans
The spectrum of “blame the left” is pretty wide. It starts from liberals are smug so the right has no choice but to commit suicide by the thousands to a deliberate plot by the left to trick the right into committing suicide by the thousands. Do not be confused, though. It is all the same argument.
Consider the really insane version: Liberals are tricking the right into killing themselves in droves. This idiocy flows from the open sewer pit that is Breitbart so expect it to be a mainstream Republican talking point in the near future. I am not going to link to the article any more than I would hose you down with toxic sludge, but I will give you a tiny peek inside the mind of a deranged monster:
“The left’s morality is guided only by that which furthers their fascist agenda.” Please repeat after me: Every Republican accusation is a confession. There are vanishingly few times this is not true.
Putting that massive amount of projection aside, notice how MAGAs are the victims? There is not a single mention throughout the entire Breitbart screed of Republicans and their ongoing efforts to stifle vaccinations. They are simply erased from the equation. All of the fault lies with the “organized left”.
That was the hysterical conspiracy lunacy version from the far right. The “rational” version of, quite literally, this same narrative is even worse. Instead of histrionics, Simon Copland at The Atlantic casually absolves the right of any role in the spread of Covid and vaccine disinformation. It’s not even really the fault of the far-right for taking advantage of the situation because if the left hadn’t been such assholes, the far-right would have been impotent.
No, seriously, this is a real argument being made:…
Who needs psychedelics when you have MAGA-Jesus Kool-aid?