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Today, there is often the question – are psychedelic experiences simply hallucinations happening in the brain, or can you access another dimension during a plant medicine journey?
Typically, we are told by popular media and scientific researchers that the brain produces the trip. In other words, it is a delusion.
However, this would not be a foregone conclusion if we lived in ancient Greece or today in Peru and other places.
It is the materialist worldview — that nothing exists beyond the physical dimension — that has us interpret the psychedelic experience as a hallucination.
This limited view of the world can be problematic when we are trying to integrate a psychedelic experience.
Take a story recently shared with me.
Jack (not the real name), an investment banker living in NYC, travels to South America and discovers plant medicine for the first time. While under the influence of DMT, he encounters a realm that he didn’t know existed. Once the trip ended, he was grateful to return to ‘reality.’ He chalked up the bizarre visions to some trick his brain had played on him.
However, on the plane back home and for the next couple of weeks, he noticed his perception had not returned to normal. Ever since the DMT trip, he saw a faint aura around everyone he met.
Worried he was losing touch with reality, he booked an appointment with a psychiatrist, who confirmed his fears and gave him a script for antipsychotic medication. The psychiatrist, trained in Western medicine rooted in a materialist worldview, interpreted Jack’s experiences as a sign of mental illness.
If Jack lived at another time in history or even in another culture today that incorporates a supernatural perspective, his story could have turned out differently. He likely would not have ended up as a psychiatric patient.
While psychedelics don’t often send people down such a path, it’s worth considering that the secular context in which many people are using these sacred medicines today is not preparing them to cope with the aftermath of these experiences.
Cynicism trumps a belief in the metaphysical these days.
We’ve lost a sense of wonder and awe about the world. And therefore, there is no place to hold reverence for the sacred journey that plant medicine can take us on. Not only does materialism place no value on the mystical, but these perspectives are supposedly in opposition.
It’s popular these days to think that a supernatural worldview is in direct competition with a scientific approach.
But this is a short-sighted perspective, especially considering the individual who began the scientific revolution.
After all, the scientific revolution began with someone who didn’t feel the need to have to trade religion for science or vice versa.
Isaac Newton (1642–1727), the founder of modern science who played a key role in the scientific revolution, was also religious. He didn’t dispense with God to work on math and physics.
Instead, his belief in the supernatural propelled his intellectual curiosity. Newton had a brilliant mind, loved rational inquiry and it was his pursuit of science that strengthened his belief in a Higher Power, rather than detracting from it.
What is often overlooked is that Newton, the same person who brought us calculus, optics, built the first telescope and explained the force of gravity, spent more time writing about alchemy than on any other topic.
He was obsessed with alchemy because he believed it represented a bridge between science and spirituality.
To Newton, physics and math bolstered his belief in God. And his faith in intelligent design fueled his scientific inquiry.
The alchemy that Newton was investigating was not based on materialistic methodology. It was about far more than turning base metals into gold. It was a system of inquiry incorporating non-material reality, a vital force linking the visible and invisible worlds.
Professor Betty Jo Teeter of Northwestern University, who spent decades studying Newton’s interest in alchemy, writes: “It was Newton’s conviction that the passive particles of matter could not organize themselves into living forms. Their organization required divine guidance, the latent spirit that he said was present in all things…”
It was this vital spirit linking the worlds of mysticism and matter that alchemy was concerned with. And Newton contended that alchemy represented the original religion, where science and spirit were not separate.
We’ve come a long way from this version of alchemy. The word today often conjures up images of Hogwarts and Harry Potter.
Meanwhile, believing in science often means rejecting religious and spiritual beliefs.
But to the founder of the scientific revolution, these trade-offs were not only unnecessary but unthinkable. For Isaac Newton, the most natural companions were God and science.
Today, there is growing acceptance in psychotherapy of psychedelics as a therapeutic tool. Researchers have shown that it is access to a mystical state of awareness that is profoundly healing to the human psyche. However, in our secular interpretation of these experiences today, we dilute their healing potential by suggesting that these are mere hallucinations. Today, we can benefit from adopting Newton’s holistic perspective and realize there is much more to reality than we might think. Glimpses ‘beyond the veil’ that plant medicines can offer can restore us if we understand them as such.
Jenny Martin is a psychologist and psychedelic integration coach who helps clients process their experiences from plant medicine journeys for personal growth. She regularly contributes to Madison Park Times and writes on Substack @drjennymartin.