A Philosopher’s Psychedelic Practice Guide: Holism in Healing and Learning
A Philosopher’s Psychedelic Practice Guide: Holism in Healing and Learning
Note: This is a rough transcript. Since the Dangerous Wisdom podcast uses many names and terms that transcription software fails to recognize, a more accurate transcript is not possible at this time. But this version is as close as we can manage.
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Welcome to Dangerous Wisdom, a journey into mystery and a gateway to the mind of nature and the nature of mind. This is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor. I’m happy to be here with you so that together we can create a culture of wisdom, love, and beauty.
We’re doing the work we need to do to heal self and world at the same time.
In our last contemplation, we asked the question: What is the most important thing for working with the medicines of our World—whatever medicines we work with (horse medicine, mushroom medicine, cactus medicine, the medicine of leaf and vine, the medicine of music, or anything else).
We acknowledged that the wisdom traditions in general agree that we can’t be told the most important thing. So we asked, What’s the most important thing for finding out the most important thing.
And we suggested that a holistic philosophy of life is the most important thing.
And then we considered this suggestion in the larger context of the dominant culture, and we considered why a contemporary philosopher of the dominant culture might take a special interest in psychedelics and other medicines.
Philosophy or LoveWisdom had a therapeutic intent in the history of the dominant culture. LoveWisdom was therapeia, or therapy for the soul. The great philosopher Epicurus said, “Vain is the word of the philosopher that heals no suffering.” So philosophers must concern themselves with the medicines of the World, including the medicine of instruction.
Socrates and Plato followed that sacred imperative, but philosophy today no longer does, generally speaking.
That’s odd. Because we could very loosely agree with Whitehead that the history of philosophy in the dominant culture is a series of footnotes to Plato. And what seems to have happened is, everyone got caught up in the footnotes, and they missed the main text.
And we considered Plato and Socrates in relation to psychedelics because they might have lived in a culture with extensive psychedelic usage. And yet they found that psychedelic usage incapable of keeping the culture sane and helping people become truly wise, loving, and liberated.
The renaissance period marked as attempt for the dominant culture to become reborn. It didn’t work out. And now we find ourselves facing the very same challenges Plato and Socrates tried to help us face. Can we listen to them now, so that we might have a planetary renaissance?
On a planetary scale it would be a rebirth in sacredness together with a reindigenizing of the human population. For many in the dominant culture in particular, it will mean a rebirth of philosophy as a way of life. That’s the key. We want to ask how philosophy as a way of life could help us to work with any of the medicines of our World in such a way as to heal self and World at the same time, to heal Nature and Culture at the same time.
And we have a lot riding on us. The situation has become quite intense. Let’s send greetings and gratitude again to everyone out there trying their best to work with the medicines of our World, to help heal the situation. And let’s keep in mind that all sentient beings depend on us. Human insanity affects the whole community of life, and the suffering of non-human beings is vast. We’re all in this together.
In order to allow the wisdom traditions to help us, we have to begin to understand the holism they can teach us. We can’t just follow any old philosophy we fancy.
Because the situation we find ourselves in—with all the injustice, degradation, and so on—that only happened because of bad philosophy. Because philosophy is how we do things. And if we don’t do things in accord with a skillful and holistic philosophy of life, we will end up fragmenting ourselves and our World, and we can see the consequences of that.
But, if we want to talk about a holistic philosophy of life, we have to let go of what we think the word “holism” might mean. Because a lot of people like the sound of holism, and a lot of people advertise their approach to this or that version of the self-help catastrophe as holistic.
And so, we either abandon the word holism, or we try to rehabilitate it, and recover a healthy, vitalizing, and skillful sense of it.
Because of the pervasiveness of holistic and so-called systems approaches, if someone says we need a holistic philosophy of life, it may sound boring or silly or obvious.
But we could explore the possibility that we don’t know what holism means anymore, mainly because we don’t really know what philosophy means either.
This foundational confusion makes holism something that will require study and practice to understand, and that goes altogether with the very idea of a holistic philosophy of life.
In that phrase, “a holistic philosophy of life,” we can begin to sense that holism means not fragmented and fragmenting, and philosophy means wisdom, love, and beauty.
We need a holistic love, a holistic wisdom, and a holistic sense of beauty and grace.
We can’t unfold all the meaning of holism or a holistic philosophy of life in 1 or even a dozen contemplations.
We mentioned the Avatamsaka Sutra, the Flower Garland Sutra, and that Sutra unpacks holism over 1500 pages—the true, deep ecological and spiritual holism of the Cosmos.
We’re not going to do that here.
So, we just have to try to touch some of the core issues, keeping in mind the culture does everything it can to prevent us from arriving a holistic philosophy of life. That’s central to the way education functions in the dominant culture.
When we go to work with the medicines of our world, we sometimes do so with a feeling of wanting to go beyond the limitations of the dominant culture. And out of rebellion, or on some other basis, we may think we have a holistic approach.
But we have many reasons to become more skeptical of ourselves. That doesn’t mean we stop trusting ourselves. Rather it means deepening our trust in ourselves and our World.
When we look with a lot of care and affectionate awareness, we usually find considerable fragmentation in our approaches to life. We can see examples of this all over the culture, and a big one is mindfulness and meditation.
Mindfulness and meditation created a significant impact in domains like therapy, education, leadership, and so on—the whole self-help catastrophe embraced it. It offered us a way to take a novel practice and do what conquest consciousness does, which is to manipulate and control it.
Now we feel really good, because we have a new tool in our toolbox. It’s a tool in the therapist’s toolbox. It’s a tool in the teacher’s toolbox. It’s a tool in our personal toolbox. We love tools.
But this already shows a style of thinking and a degree of confusion. For one thing, we ourselves are ultimately the only tool we can use, and no one teaches us how to use that tool.
Then again, we aren’t really tools, not of tools are objects we use to gain leverage on the World, usually for some human agenda. Mindfulness isn’t a tool either.
Mindfulness arises as an aspect of a larger ecology of practice oriented toward revealing the nature of reality.
So, when we speak about mindfulness outside of that ecology, we have to put it in quotes. It’s not the same thing anymore.
We yanked a fragment out of a larger ecology of mind, and we called it “mindfulness”. But mindfulness doesn’t have any meaning outside of an ecology.
The ecology mindfulness came from is sophisticated, nuanced, detailed, and deadly serious. And it’s genius. Buddha was a genius and a truly great psychologist.
Because of that, in some sense, if we have a basic understanding of mindfulness, we could understand that it applies to our mind, that it has to do with awareness. So it does carry a universal aspect.
At the same time, as a concept and a practice, it still belongs to a larger ecology, a larger context.
And Buddha foresaw the problem here. He was that visionary.
He specifically said, “Handle my teachings the way you would handle a poisonous snake.”
I repeat this all the time about all teachings of the wisdom traditions because we need to have this Spiritual Surgeon General’s warning on all the teachings we receive.
Buddha said, “Handle this medicine as if it were poison,” —and we’re talking about working with medicine.
Do we handle psychedelics or any other medicines like they’re poison? Or do we run to them like they are medicine, without thinking about this Spiritual Surgeon General’s warning?
Of course we can relate to the medicines of our World with reverence, with respect, and with a sense that the medicine can facilitate healing. We can have an attitude that, if we can relate with the medicine skillfully, this can bring about healing and transformative insight.
Buddha just wanted to make our spiritual materialism clear. He said, “This is poison, but if you work with it skillfully and ethically, then it’s medicine.”
In one sense, this has to do with erring on the side of wisdom when we’re not yet wise enough to understand a larger perspective.
As a profound philosopher, Buddha knew that people would run and grab at his philosophy. He knew people would get all excited, and at the same time the culture and the ego would find ways to make the medicine into a poison.
It’s like he was ready for the 21st century. He was post-post-modern. He knew people would grasp at things like mindfulness and meditation, and that they would try to keep the ego’s agendas and the culture’s agendas going with them.
But we can dissolve this problem by listening to the wisdom traditions, actually listening to the teachings they offer and putting them into practice.
And part of dissolving and transcending the problem involves understanding that, as with any holistic philosophy, Buddhist philosophy’s words, and the practices they refer to, arise as integral to a much larger ecology of mind—
and we shortchange ourselves, each other, the World, and these traditions if we don’t understand that we cannot rip out fragments and fancy that it won’t cause problems.
This doesn’t mean Christians or atheists can’t practice mindfulness or meditation, but that everyone has an ethical responsibility to practice them as part of a holistic ecology.
We’ll try to get to some of the details of what that means, but when we look at our smash and grab version of meditation and mindfulness, we see a lot gets left out. Considering some of that can also help us understand wholeness, if we think carefully enough.
First of all, love and compassion got left out in many versions of meditation and mindfulness, even though that was central to Buddhists philosophy and practice. Isn’t that already funny? If we had to guess what was left out of a powerful stream in the wisdom traditions of the World when it went mainstream in the dominant culture, does it surprise us that love and compassion got left out?
Equally unsurprising, a lot of wisdom got left out too. We actually left out much of the wisdom from a wisdom traditions when it went mainstream.
Part of that wisdom aspect included things like a basic cosmogram or view of ourselves and reality, and also the deeper meaning of intention. That got left out too. Really, more got left out than got included, and so we ended up with an anemic version of a holistic philosophy of life, which inevitably leads to problems.
The hope seems to have been that, since wisdom, love, and beauty are totally interwoven, then, if we focus on the beauty dimension, the wisdom and love would naturally arise. And to some extent they did.
What I mean by that is meditation and mindfulness are integral to the beauty aspect. Meditation refers to the mind of beauty—but also the mind of wisdom and love. And since the dominant culture has become virulently infected with fragmentation, we have to actively practice the unity of wisdom, love, and beauty. In other words, we need a very deliberate holism.
But instead, we fragmented the tradition that gave us mindfulness, and this naturally led to negative side-effects.
Now we find the story that certain people can’t meditate. Someone may say, “Well, my therapist told me meditation is contraindicated for people like me.” Or they may say, “I’ve tried meditation, and you know, it doesn’t work for me,” or, “it traumatized me,” or any number of things.
There’s legitimate suffering arising. That’s for sure. But let’s respect the fact that exactly what Buddha said would happen happened: The medicine became a poison for people. It’s not the fault of meditation or mindfulness, but rather the way we worked with them.
The bigger danger might not seem obvious. The bigger danger goes beyond taking a fragment from the wisdom traditions, and finding out we don’t feel so good as a result. At least we have the feedback that tells us we did something wrong. The negative side-effects let us know we got the practice wrong. So, at least we have the proper feedback, which helps mitigate some of the danger in at least some cases.
But in some ways the even bigger danger appears when we fragment these traditions and think we feel great. We effectively use fragments of these traditions to medicate ourselves while we perpetuate the pattern of insanity.
This happens when hedge fund managers practice meditation, or when Amazon employees work with equine assisted learning experiences, or when Silicon Valley employees work with micro-dosing.
As psychedelic researcher James Fadiman so often tells us, when people micro-dose, they say, “Well, it was just a really good day.” They didn’t have any big, trippy experience, but they felt like it was a really good day.
And that’s wonderful.
At the same time, if we have a really good day, maybe that means we didn’t register how the work we did that day shouldn’t have been done by anybody. Or that maybe it was important to do that work, but it, nevertheless it degraded ecologies. We could go on and on. The point is, under the right circumstances, we can feel really good while doing things we shouldn’t do, and feeling good can cover over largescale structures of ignorance.
I don’t want to take a good day away from anyone. I don’t want people to suffer. But if we medicate over larger issues, then we run the risk of moving the suffering around, both into the future and onto other beings.
When we suffer, when we feel unhappy or unwell, our suffering may arise because of largescale issues that we cannot fix by locating the problem inside of ourselves.
We might medicate a bleeding sore, and it might feel better. It might even stop bleeding and seem to heal. But it won’t really help us if the bleeding sore appeared there because of a systemic infection.
When we medicate, sometimes we have obvious negative side-effects, and sometimes we create far more subtle negative side-effects.
The first issue of holism then amounts to taking a fragment from a larger ecology, and trying to work with it, but perpetuating problems or even creating more problems as a result.
When we work with any medicine, we might do so in a way that pulls the medicine out of nowhere. We treat the medicine without enough sensitivity to holism.
If we consider a medicine like ayahuasca, we can recognize that most of the people from the dominant culture who work with that medicine have no intention of becoming a member of an Amazonian tribe—and thank goodness for that.
Maybe some rare people will get adopted by one of the indigenous tribes, and they’ll be embraced. That’s wonderful. And they may even have some important role to play in helping the beings and the ecologies in the Amazon. That’s quite possible.
But, for the most part, most of us will not have that kind of transition. Therefore, we end up using these medicines here in the ecologies where we live, or we go to these other ecologies and then we have to come back to the ecologies where we live.
And so, when everything shakes out, no matter what our intentions might be, we may end up turning the medicine into a tool in our toolbox, and that goes with a fragmented approach.
This fragmented approach then has two aspects, because it comes from a dualistic style of mind. If we fragment the medicine, we will also fragment ourselves.
We may want to work with a certain medicine because we have PTSD, anxiety, depression, or whatever it might be.
And this thinking also arises from our fragmentation. Because our PTSD, our anxiety, our depression, or whatever it might be—that belongs to a larger whole. A holistic philosophy tells us there’s no such thing as some randomly floating symptom. It belongs to an ecology.
What we refer to as “my depression,” “my cancer,” or whatever arises as part of a larger ecology that reliably gives rise to the same symptoms in other beings. The dominant culture produces cancer in millions of us . . . it produces depression, loneliness, and suffering of all kinds—and other beings also experience it.
The PTSD, trauma, depression, and so on are not accidents—and they’re not necessities.
We could live in a culture where depression was extraordinarily rare. There would be grief, of course. But we could live in a culture where depress didn’t exist—not just that we would still have the experience, but call it something else, like demonic possession or something. No, we could live in a culture where these symptoms wouldn’t arise.
We could live in a culture where we never encountered anybody with PTSD. It’s possible.
In order to have PTSD, we have to get traumatized. We need the conditions to create this. We also need the conditions to reliably create trauma, and also to reliably not know how to heal it, so that it becomes a persistent or chronic form of suffering.
Gregory Bateson talked about this as well, as part of trying to get us to ask the question of how can we move both from and toward wholeness.
And one of his examples is one I always love, which is when he points out that we have set up the so-called justice system to punish people for what we refer to as criminal acts. But Bateson realized that this amounts to insanity. It fragments everything and locates the problem inside of some person we call a criminal.
We effectively use the word “crime” to refer to an action or part of an action. But crime doesn’t have to do with this or that action. Crime needs to refer to a whole way of organizing our activity. In a sense, it refers to a whole way of organizing our experience and our lives.
The existence of crime—the existence of these ways of organizing experience and activity—indicates that our lives have gotten way out of kilter, because of the larger ecology of mind. The larger ecology of mind produces these patterns. The larger ecology of mind gives rise to either skillful or unskillful ways of organizing our experience.
The larger ecology of mind thus helps to constitute a way of life that we define as criminal, and it produces people with a predilection to give into, or even to feel forced into, things they would otherwise reject as unethical.
A so-called criminal is both a symptom of a larger ecology with unhealthy elements, and also a tragic loss of potential, because, in a different ecology, the person we refer to as a criminal might have developed into someone we would naturally think of as a hero, or at least as a wise, loving, and graceful being who eventually became a true elder in their community.
We constantly encounter symptoms, and try dealing with them, in a manner that ignores underlying causes—because underlying causes tend to involve larger ecologies of mind that we have little skill sensing and working with. Those symptoms point to interwovenness, and that means that to solve those problems, we tend to need to renounce something, to let go of something the ego wants to cling to—that means things we don’t need, but that the ego wants to cling to.
It also feels overwhelming to have to challenge the larger culture, because it seems like so much effort. When suffering appears in the form of depression, trauma, cancer, or anything like that, it feels like enough trouble already to deal with it in an isolated way.
With some forms of suffering, it can feel so hard just to get through the day. We put so much energy into treading water, trying not to drown.
We need to address our suffering. And as part of that, as part of healing, we could begin to ask, “How did this happen? What are the ecologies that produced this?”
And we can see how well the pattern of insanity holds together. It takes so much energy to deal with our PTSD, our ADHD, our MS, and all the other things, and we may still have to keep our full-time job while going to therapy or chemo or whatever treatment, and we may have to take care of our children and deal with a hundred other things.
So we don’t feel that we have time to sit together and engage in good dialogue—healing dialogue—about all these deeper issues, and to practice compassion for each other’s suffering and all our illnesses, and to become committed to helping each other heal.
It might look like we’re getting better at treating cancer. In some sense we are. But because of the fragmented approach of the dominant culture, we also keep shifting the suffering around in space and time.
After all, inequality keeps growing, ecologies keep degrading, pollution keeps increasing. We cannot practice fragmentation and ignorance in general without creating consequences.
Maybe totally new consequences will appear. Or the current ones will become amplified to a point at which they destabilize Nature and Culture as we know it.
And so we need wholeness in every aspect of what we think healing means. We need to move from and toward wholeness as we practice the art of healing.
A holistic approach leads us to ask, with a lot of sensitivity and depth, “What is the nature of my unwellness, and what is the nature of the healing that I need?” Because maybe it’s not that I as an individual need this healing, but the World needs healing, and some of the symptoms appeared in my body and mind, because the World is asking me to pay attention to it.
That’s not so easy to navigate.
Sometimes people say they take a holistic approach to healing, and they use words like mind, body, and spirit. Maybe they say, “We take a holistic approach that looks at the whole person, integrating the heart, mind, body, and soul,” or something along those lines.
It can sound nice, and yet, in many cases, it amounts to the same style of thinking that got us into the mess. All we’ve done is put more parts inside the same bag of skin. We still become something fragmented away from the rest of reality, and the wisdom traditions teach us that we won’t find our true nature inside that bag of skin—not in any of the parts, and not in the parts taken together.
Holism invites us to see that, strictly speaking, we don’t know where the borders of us are—and that, in fact, we might not have any absolute borders.
And so a holistic approach demands that we talk about the ecologies that we depend on, and the stupid jobs that we feel trapped in, and the car exhaust, and social media, and the mission to Mars, and countless other things. If we localize the wholeness and we say, “Well, I’m treating all the parts of this person,” we may have left the person still in parts and we’ve put the integration inside of a bag of skin.
As we everything we have discussed, we can find inspiring counterexamples. We may also find further confusions.
For instance, some people will say, “I definitely take a holistic approach, and I don’t just treat parts inside of a bag of skin.” And it might not be what you personally do, but it might be what far too many other people do.
And for every person who says, they take a holistic approach, we have to ask what that really means. Because, if we live in this larger pattern of insanity, our thinking has already gotten co-opted, in a way we cannot easily detect. We don’t realize that the ideas we have, and the patterns of thought and action we have, are not, strictly speaking, our possession. Rather. They arise from a larger ecology of mind.
And so a person might take a seemingly holistic approach in their relationship with a patient or client or friend, but in most of the rest of their life they live in accord with the fragmentation of the dominant culture. Our lives might scream fragmentation overall, and in one domain we manage to arrive at some measure of holism. We all need to look into that aspect as well.
In the dominant culture, since certain experiences have become endangered or even extinct, for all practical purposes. And therefore, when it comes to holism, we lack a general framework for even knowing what we’re talking about.
This presents questions on the largest scales, because scholars have recognized that we may have lost 90% of the art and literature the dominant culture has ever produced, from the fire at the library of Alexandria and all the way up into today.
We should keep in mind the goal of the library of Alexandria was to have every text ever produced. And, for a long time, many texts survived in few copies, because copying takes labor. Moreover, texts are vulnerable to fire, flood, and infestation. And many precious works may never have been written down, let alone all the ones written and then lost to time.
Many of those texts got lost for the same basic reason the library at Alexandria burned: Conquest consciousness.
Conquest consciousness has affected all of us, and it has weakened the dominant culture, other cultures, and Nature too, in so many ways. We in the dominant culture have lost huge amounts of wisdom, so that we don’t necessarily even know what our own culture is, because we don’t fully wonderstand what it could have been.
As part of that, we effectively lost philosophy in this culture. That’s the reason we are where we are, and the reason we’re talking about a philosopher’s guide to psychedelics, because the wisdom traditions are the storehouse of insight, understanding, love, and grace, and we’ve lost touch with them.
So then how do we think we’re going to work optimally with the medicines of our World?
We have to go beyond merely asserting that our approach is holistic, and we have to inquire more deeply into how to reactivate and calibrate our sensitivity to wholeness.
Sometimes this appears so inconvenient that the ego feels threatened. We have to practice compassion, and learn how to help each other.
For instance, I often mention a delightful friend who has a naturopathic health care practice. And my friend told me about a patient who came in because of a severe allergic reaction to their car. The naturopath worked with the patient, and soon enough the patient could drive again. The patient very much needed to drive. They had a whole life that depended on that.
Nevertheless, I pointed out to my friend that, in a more enlightened culture, that patient might have been the equivalent of a shaman, a person of exceptional sensitivity and insight. And in that culture, they may have encountered a car for the first time, and they might have announced, “This thing is no good. This thing is a big problem, and we shouldn’t have it around.”
But the ego doesn’t want to even have to consider organizing human life with radically fewer cars—or even no cars at all. We just don’t want to hear it. But what if that’s the message the soul wants to get through to us?
Another aspect of this appeared in a film I recently saw. It’s called Embrace of the Serpent. The film offers a lot to ponder for anyone affected by the dominant culture, and it has some lovely cinematography to boot.
At one point in the film, we see a person from the dominant culture exploring in the Amazon, and he gets incredibly upset that an indigenous person has taken his compass. He isn’t concerned about a personal possession. Rather, he worries that the indigenous people will lose their knowledge of how to navigate their own land. He recognizes the wholeness of their way of knowing.
It’s a nuanced issue—and even the shaman he’s with has to wrestle with it—because we have to find a way of knowing that facilitates mutual illumination, mutual nourishment, mutual liberation. The ways of knowing of the dominant culture move from and toward fragmentation.
Because of this, we don’t understand wholeness, and we need to ask how we can move from and toward wholeness—as if a central question we all need to ask is, “What, really, is wholeness, and how do we arrive at it and move in accord with it?”
And mindfulness and meditation are a good example of that. As a general trend, we learn them in a degraded ecology.
In some sense maybe it should strike us as absurd to suggest we can perform a mindfulness body scan and this will somehow lead to real transformation and healing, and, on the other hand, given our ecology, we can experience it this way. When we start with such a deficit of wisdom in our culture, and such an abundance of ignorance, then we can become astonished by relatively superficial practices and insights. They can dazzle us—even the most fragmented practices . . .
If they are fragments of wisdom, then people can have huge experiences with them.
It can become a profound revelation for someone to do body scans every day.
That doesn’t mean we should encourage them to practice in such a fragmented way. The fact that people have nice experiences doesn’t make it ethically responsible to teach fragmented practices.
One of the ways we see indigenous traditions demonstrate responsiveness to this issue, one of the places they show their understanding, comes in the way a shaman may embrace the use of antibiotics and medications like aspirin.
The shaman may see a member of their community and say, “Well, I think you have an infection. Let’s go to the nearest doctor.” And they go see a doctor who prescribes antibiotics.
And in some cases, the shaman will hold the medicine and the patient will have to visit the shaman every day, maybe even three times a day, to get that medicine, perhaps along with other treatments.
That’s a noble attempt to practice holism. It helps to prevent us from detaching healing from the larger ecologies.
Contrast that to the way the dominant culture uses antibiotics. Our use of them has created superbugs, antibiotic-resistant strains.
This begins to helps us see that fragmentation always creates negative side-effects, negative consequences. An antibiotic might save our life, but if we detach their use from larger ecologies, if we fail to practice from and toward holism, we just move the suffering around.
Ten years later, we ourselves may get that superbug, or maybe someone else will. Either way, we participated in moving the problem around.
And the case of an antibiotic might seem so different from psychedelic medicines, or horse medicine, or dance or music as medicine. But it all goes together.
Why would we think we can use the antibiotic to heal our body, but we will use the Ayahuasca to heal our soul? And if we use the Ayahuasca to heal our depression, where will that leave the World?
In a wisdom culture, our doctor might know about antibiotics and prescribe them in some cases. And they might also say to us, “Well, you know, you’ve got strep throat. So take this time to be silent and really appreciate that. You shouldn’t talk. Your throat is sore. And this might be an important time for you to be quiet, to appreciate silence, to increase meditation. And here are some meditations you can work with, and some visualizations you can work with.” And so on.
The whole experience of the arising of illness would get turned toward liberation, training the mind and heart, and so on. That very infection, and treating it with an antibiotic, could be oriented toward our liberation—our mutual liberation—with all beings, and our mutual relationship with all beings.
We have had philosophers in the dominant culture try to point this out. Hildegard was a more holistic philosopher. And Nietzsche wrote about how convalescence can bring forth spiritual insight.
We could always work with illness that way, but in the dominant culture we get encouraged to get rid of the symptoms as quickly as possible, and to find a cure, even if we don’t heal. We separate medication from medicine, and we separate cures from healing.
Medicines that seem to us to more obviously have to do with the soul, they almost come with a more obvious burden to establish a holistic ecology for ourselves to work with these medicines.
And of course, many, many people are trying to do that right now. We just seem to need to acknowledge that our version of holism is anemic. That means we need critical thinking and a lot more education so that we can arrive at a holistic philosophy of life that we can practice, moment to moment, both in the more overt healing contexts and the more subtle healing contexts.
And what does a holistic philosophy mean? We will try to outline some core elements.
Generally speaking, a holistic philosophy of life means a tradition, a lineage of realized elders. Not everyone in the tradition may be fully enlightened, but the tradition has to have some advanced beings in it, and a long history of verification and innovation. We want to know the teachings have gotten extensive experimental and thus empirical verification.
An important point here is that we need to value education, and understand education as basically about experience and wisdom, rather than mere intellect and knowledge. We can only ever educate for experience, and we have to ask what kinds of experience are really worth having, not merely for our own personal enjoyment, but for our spiritual fulfillment and for the benefit of all beings. We have to educate for experiences that cultivate the whole of life onward.
But, we tend to forsake education in the dominant culture, because the pattern of insanity of the culture cannot withstand real education. So we forsake it, in a variety of ways.
This touches on one aspect of the terrible school shootings we have witnessed. The U.S. is the leading edge of the dominant culture, and the crisis in this culture is a philosophical crisis. That fundamentally implicates education.
In other words, we may naturally see acute symptoms at places where an infection has become most intense.
So many children find school a place disconnected from meaning. They find it a place of suffering, boredom, confusion, and embarrassment. They get picked on. They get stressed.
No one tells them how to use their mind. No one tells them what the nature of mind even is. No one teaches them the skills of love and compassion. No one teaches them the meaning of meditation. No one teaches them how to realize the meaning of life and how to realize a purpose in life that the soul longs for, rather than some purpose the deluded economy demands. No one wants to become another cog in the economic machine.
And we seem to have forgotten that all of life depends on education—not just an economy, but real life, the ecologies we depend on to survive. Education and culture go together, in the most profound sense.
We mistakenly think culture means something exclusive to humans. In fact, everywhere we look, we find culture. But Nature and Culture arise in nonduality, just as Nature and Mind arise in nonduality.
When we look around the natural World, we may at first ignore all the culture going on. Then we may perceive it in bits, and it may look pretty thin to us, because culture, to us, means Shakespeare and the ballet, rock concerts and football games, museums and Marvel movies.
And so, when we look at the natural World, rather full of ourselves about human culture, we can’t even perceive, let alone understand, the culture woven all throughout Nature.
We know, for instance, that bacteria have communal activity. We have heard about quorum sensing in bacteria, the fascinating behavior of bee hives, and the way a slime mold works.
From the single-celled slime mold to the complex behavior of groups, we can see that our notions of intelligence, mind, and culture may need revision.
Many of us don’t yet find it natural to think of evolution as a mental process, or to see deeply into the ways all beings educate their young, because of the total interwovenness of life and learning.
When we think for instance of the spider wasp, we encounter a being who has learned how to sting a spider in such a way that the spider gets paralyzed, but not killed. This takes extraordinary precision, with no textbooks on spider anatomy to go by. When it succeeds, it keeps the spider’s body alive and fresh, ready to be consumed by the wasp’s little babies.
The wasp doesn’t want to abandon that learning. She doesn’t want to throw it away. That lineage, that education has passed down through generations upon generations. What we refer to as instinct involves education that comes already in the organism’s embodiment.
We humans have a lot of education built into us too. For instance, we know how to heal a cut without having to look it up in a book. No one has to teach us how to heal a cut.
These days, we do have to learn how to prevent infection. But the actual putting back together of our tissue, we don’t have to learn. And we don’t have to learn a lot of things essential to our lives.
On the other hand, we and other beings have to learn a great deal from our elders. Wolves have to learn the coup de Gras, or kill bite, that they use to bring down an elk. It appears to require more than instinct, and young wolves seem to learn how to do it by watching the adults hunt.
Similarly, orcas who use beaching to catch seals teach their young how to beach themselves, and they do it in a stepwise fashion:
First, they go to beaches without seals and they nudge their pups onto a beach that’s easy to get off of. It’s the beaching equivalent of skiing the bunny slope. Then they go and practice with seals, and the mothers forgo getting as much food as they normally would so they can focus on teaching and helping if their pups get stuck. The mothers can, for instance, create a big wave with their bodies to help free a stuck pup.
This indicates whale culture understands a learning curve, and understands the importance of making an investment in the education of the young. Maybe orcas understand that better than some humans in the dominant culture.
And so we can appreciate the profound role learning plays in our World, in the whole community of life. And when we understand and appreciate learning deeply enough, we will then value good teachers and good teachings all the more.
That means going against a current in the U.S. of hating experts, and pretending as if every single thing that every single person wants to say has equal value and deserves to go viral. The popularity of a book, or an idea, or a meme does not have any necessary connection with its level of wisdom, love, and beauty. Nor does the wealth or position of the person speaking.
It seems important for us to recognize that knowing the most important things in life requires us to become the kinds of people capable of knowing those things. That makes ethics and our style of consciousness and thinking totally interwoven with knowledge. We can easily miss this fact, and we tend to treat knowledge as if it exists independently of knowers.
This interwovenness of knower and knowns means a teacher has to become someone worthy of being listened to, so that we don’t listen merely out of politeness or because they have a position of authority. And that bothers people, in part because it can seem like a daunting standard.
And so we can get confused. Because we have no holistic philosophy organizing the dominant culture, people can rise to the rank of teacher, judge, CEO, Senator, or even President, and we might not find them meeting the standards the soul comes built with. The soul has its spiritual instincts. We may ignore them, but only at our peril.
When we ignore them, the ego might eventually project those standards onto something else, so that we decide a certain politician really is a great person, a hero, a savior. We truly believe this person will save America, even if they went bankrupt running a casino and seem to have continual ethical and even moral failings.
We fall for these sorts of things because the soul demands so passionately that we find the real deal. The soul wants us to find virtuous and good people, people who have become wise, compassionate, and graceful. Not finding them, we may settle for demagogues. We project on top of those demagogues, so the ego can feel like it has found what the soul wanted us to seek.
In a healthy culture, what the soul seeks would be present for us. We could find it, and we wouldn’t have to project it onto someone unfitting.
We can think here of certain indigenous cultures. In some indigenous cultures, children are doted on, but they’re not necessarily expected to speak much. In many cultures, children are expected to listen and observe. Why all that listening and observing?
I can’t speak for indigenous people, but we know that indigenous cultures arrived at sophisticated practices for many things, including education. And they may have understood that a child must learn to observe, and that indeed children have a natural capacity for this.
And the biggest issue there comes to making sure children spend time with people very much worthy of their attention, people worthy of the attention of all of us, people who know how to live virtuously, how to move, how to relate, how to listen to the land, and so on.
Such people give us a whole body and mind education that gets passed from generation to generation, on the basis of the level of wisdom, love, and beauty in the culture as a whole, and among varied individuals.
This isn’t the norm in the dominant culture, where adults and children alike get barraged by tweets from Elon Musk and diatribes from Tucker Carlson. Even if we like the politics of these people, that doesn’t make them or what they say particularly skillful and wise. In general, we get overloaded by exposure to things that don’t make us more susceptible to sacred inspiration, and which may in fact make us resistant to wisdom, compassion, and grace.
In the more ideal case, as children we would spend time around true elders, and even our parents would at least have become stable and skillful adults, with social, spiritual, and ecological skills sadly uncommon in the dominant culture. We would naturally observe what they do, how they move, and everything about them. We would do this frequently or even mainly in natural settings, where an organic richness and complexity offers us a great deal to attend to. We would observe all of this as children, and then it would become a wellspring in our lives, one that we would deepen by means of our own continuous practice and experience.
We want to surround our children with virtuous people who are very much worth listening to, studying, observing. If we lacked true elders in our lives as children, if we never encountered people with a profound spiritual practice of life, then we will in one way or another have to grapple with that lack so that we can become proper elders for the children of our time, and so that we can do a better job of working with the medicines of our World, and also supporting others in their work with those medicines.
So then, one way to put the most important thing for our work to find out the most important thing is to say that we need to find a lineage of people worth listening to. And it will help if we can find living teachers in that tradition who also seem very much worth listening to.
With a living teacher we can study and observe with our whole body and mind, how they move, how they relate.
And it’s a nice thing that we live in a time where traditions can talk to each other and share practices in a respectful way. We can do that in a way that avoids turning it all into a spiritual buffet in which we grab all the sweets. We can arrive at a holistic approach.
And we’re going to talk about a little bit of spiritual superfood that actually tastes good too. The ego hates to admit this, but the spiritual kale starts to taste like cake after we have a few bites. Meanwhile, the spiritual chocolate can start to rot our teeth out.
All of this means the soul hungers for real teachings and real teachers, and when it doesn’t find them, or when the ego feels intimidated in any way by those teachers and teachings, then we will seek something else, something the ego approves of. And we will rationalize it so well that it just makes sense.
We face this problem everywhere in the dominant culture. The soul says one thing, and the ego substitutes something that sort of sounds similar.
For instance, as I often say, the soul tells us to take the great leap into the unknown—and we go skydiving. The soul tells us to take the inward journey, and we hop on a plane.
Lately we see this played out on such a massive and ignorant scale, because the soul asks us to transcend our worldly concerns, and we decided the correct way to do that is in a rocket ship. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk hear the soul calling us to ascend, to expand our perspective, to enter into the vastness of the great mystery—and they built rocket ships. It’s a whole lot of effort to avoid the spiritual truths, and the spiritual demands, that frighten the ego.
And so the soul asks us to seek teachings and to seek healing, and we get pulled into the self-help catastrophe. We get teachings that sound exciting to the ego, in part because the ego knows how to control them. And the healing we seek ends up largely as an extractive affair—we become takers.
We’re not bad people. It’s that the World arises as magical living ecologies, overlapping ecologies. The World arises as a profound interwovenness. The dominant culture doesn’t educate us to sense and skillfully participate in this profound interwovenness, so we trample it, and thus we break down ecologies. We don’t see it. We don’t see how our actions in one part of the vast World affect other parts.
The parts are relative. There aren’t really parts, not ones that exist all by themselves. And we don’t perceive the interwovenness sufficiently. Wisdom is skillful interwovenness, and a healthy culture would educate us for skillful interwovenness.
This whole appreciation of education relates to our need to get oriented in a holistic philosophy of life. We have to learn this holism. In a healthy culture, we would encounter adults, elders, and sages who move from and toward wholeness, from and toward sacredness.
And from an early age, everything around us would orient us to that. And, since Nature and Culture wouldn’t get separated in such a community, we would learn how to learn directly from Nature. We would live with wildness, in a participatory engagement with life. We would experience the mutuality of Nature, and that would mean the mutual illumination, mutual nourishment, and mutual liberation so essential to our being.
Most of us didn’t grow up in that kind of culture. So we benefit from rigorous study. And in any case, we can only have a healthy culture on the basis of a healthy philosophy of life.
A holistic philosophy of life has to address the structure of all our experience. In our next contemplation we will look at how that relates to what we can refer to as the ethics of consciousness, and how that in turn relates to working with the medicines of our World.
A quick summary of our philosophical guide to working with the medicines of our World:
First, we can make this a true renaissance. We could become reborn in wisdom, love, and beauty. But only if we realize that we’ve been here before, and missed the opportunity.
Secondly, even the dominant culture has wisdom traditions that can help us today. We considered Plato in particular as offering a path of initiation into the mysteries of life, in a way that faces up to the challenges of spiritual materialism. If we don’t take care, spiritual materialism will limit all the medicines we have, and we will miss a crucial opportunity to help heal ourselves, each other, and our World at the same time.
Third, because of our degraded context, we need to seek initiation into a holistic philosophy of life. The dominant culture traded away wisdom, including holism, and we exchanged it for the fragmentation we see today. If we begin to deeply value education again—while more deeply valuing ourselves, each other, and our World—then we can awaken the passion to pursue demanding forms of education and practice that may frighten the ego, but which will ultimately leave us feeling joyful, peaceful, and in attunement with sacredness and wonder, walking a path of wisdom, love, and beauty.
If you have questions, reflections, or stories to share about the medicines of our World and your experiences with them, get in touch through dangerouswisdom.org We might be able to bring some of them into a future contemplation.
Until next time, this is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, reminding you that your soul and the soul of the World are not two things—take good care of them.