Geral Blanchard, LPC, is a psychotherapist who is university trained in psychology and anthropology. Formerly of Wyoming and currently residing in Iowa, Geral travels the world in search of ancient secrets that can augment the art and science of healing. From Western neuroscience to Amazonian shamanism, he has developed an understanding of how to combine old and new healing strategies to optimize recovery, whether from psychological or physical maladies.
MDMA and the Default State of Compassion
Geral T. Blanchard • Sep 03, 2022
“Compassion should be our default attitude toward relationship,” writes Christopher Andre’ in the book, In Search of Wisdom.
It is a starting point from which to make genuine choices as a genuine human being. The book argues that compassion is a fundamental human duty, even with people we don’t seem to think deserve it, primarily because they have hurt us.
MDMA offers us a gift, the spirit of compassion following betrayals, hurt, and suffering. The Buddha once asked, “If someone gives you a gift and you refuse it, who in the end is the owner of the gift?” The person trying to give it? The medicine itself? But in contrast, the Buddha went on, “Even your insults – I don’t accept them, thus they remain yours.” How then can we refuse the spirit of love, empathy, and concern after a fear reducing and heart opening MDMA experience that is presented at our feet?
Many MDMA-assisted psychotherapy patients are moved into a state of harmony arising from within their deepest inner selves. Feelings of compassion, kindness, and happiness develop out of a synchronization within themselves. Plato said, “The happiest man is he who has no trace of evil in his soul.” So when the gift of compassion comes our way, we must grab it and nourish it with our every decision in relationship to others, including our abusers, oppressors, and our opponents.
If we fight hate with hate, as Martin Luther King, Jr. posited, will the problem ever end? Then there was one of the Dalai Lama’s doctors, Dr. Tenzin Chodrak, who spent twenty-five years in Chinese forced labor camps. He had no sympathy for his torturers, but he succeeded in not giving in to hate. After torture sessions, he almost always, was able to regain his compassion. He argued in his mind that his torturers were mentally deranged as they had been subjected to brainwashing, and, therefore, they deserved his compassion more than his hate. That’s what saved him. Above all else, he feared losing his compassion, which is what gave meaning to his life.
What happens after a medicinal treatment may be similar to what Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk, has said:
“We do not keep the sufferings in ourselves, but we add our love to them, we illuminate and soften them with our love, then we let them [and ourselves] move on.”
We are no longer attached to our suffering or addicted to previous pain and resentment.
As one graduate of the medicine, a thirty-nine year old woman said, “One thing is certain: I’d like to be able to access these feelings of compassion and deep caring in a selfless manner at other times. So I am working on remembering this feeling and staying connected with it.”
The late Ralph Metzner, a pioneering psychologist in the MDMA field wrote, “Under favorable circumstances and with a supportive set and setting [sacramental], people feel that the MDMA experience elicits true compassion, forgiveness, and understanding for those with whom they have important relationships; and most importantly, for themselves, for their ordinary, neurotic, childish, struggling persona or ego.”
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“When our focus is on others, on our wish to free them from their misery – this is compassion. However, only once we have acknowledged our own state of suffering and developed the wish to free ourselves from it can we have a truly meaningful wish to free others from their misery.”
- His Holiness, The Dalai Lama
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Additional Reading:
An Open Heart: Practicing Compassion in Everyday Life by the Dalai Lama
Other Topics
Basics of MDMA
Rituals and Ceremony
Brain and MDMA
Trauma
Heart
Energy Movement
Quantum Physics
Native Cosmologies
Nature
Spirituality/Enlightenment
Kogi Tribe
Books written by Geral T. Blanchard
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Just as we have started to witness the reality of individual post-traumatic growth (PTG) – not just bouncing back after trauma but bouncing forward – could we entertain the concept of intergenerational growth (IG) – in other words, thriving from generation to generation?
There can be two levels at which trauma is processed. The first tier may be a time of quiet denial or the dissociation of nearly all thoughts of how painful the past was. The body feels it, but the mind does not speak it. On the second level a person awakens to the entirety of it, often an unpredicted and sudden onslaught of previously suppressed details with extensive associated pain. When trauma is reconstituted at the second level it often happens unwillingly. A person may be swept away by an awakening that seems very ugly. It feels like too much to absorb in its entirety. The result is often to feel afraid, even shattered – at first. Now with everything out in the open, what must be done with it?
At the second level of awareness, it is almost impossible to go on pretending that everything is fine. No longer can the visuals and emotions be kept submerged. One wonders, “Damn it, will I ever get better?”
Traumatized persons, with their pervasive pain, typically seek mood altering experiences. This can include ascetic restrictions, hedonistic over-eating, chemical dependency, sexual dependency, sexual anorexia or celibacy, romance addiction, relationship dependency, compulsive gambling, TV or movie binging, rock climbing, auto racing, reliance on antidepressants and/or antianxiety medications, religious addiction, and so much more that can serve to pacify, distract, and avoid unpleasant thoughts and feelings. By thrill-seeking, the higher the risks being engaged, the greater mood alteration one can experience. It’s a big dopamine splash and more.
These are the adult versions of childhood thumb sucking, according to Dr. Harvey Milkman, the author of Craving for Ecstasy (the feeling of ecstasy, not the drug). Harvey pointedly said, “Growing up consists of finding the right substitute for your thumb.”
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It is one thing to imagine how another person feels. Psychopaths, despite what the general public believes, are very good at empathy on an intellectual level. Even criminal psychopaths can put themselves in another person’s position and understand their perspective. It is bigger, better, and far healthier when empathy, in its deepest sense, allows us to “feel with” other people by recognizing a sense of oneness with them, what’s called unity consciousness. To hurt others would be to hurt ourselves.
It’s impossible to talk about projection without incorporating a discussion about Sigmund Freud and Donald Trump. In this article I will skip Donald but throw in a little Carl Jung. Freud, of course, named several distinctive defense measures – reality distorting strategies to keep us safe. Two of the big ones are displacement and projection.
First, a definition of projection: This is evident when an individual attributes their own unacceptable impulses onto others. For example, a person might accuse others of engaging in thievery when, in fact, they are swindling money from their employer. Some of the behaviors and thoughts we are most ashamed of could be called shadows. We can see them first in other people before we can “call them out” in ourselves. We are defending against humiliation and mortification lest we be exposed.
Does this empathogen work in a similar manner as psychedelics, blasting us off to a sudden and dramatic awakening of the mind and soul? Not necessarily. Much like massive stress, psychedelics and MDMA can knock people off an unhealthy path and offer them an entirely different trajectory, but there is a lot of arduous individual work that must follow the use of these propellants.
So, could it be concluded that MDMA is a transcendent spiritual event -- a chemical event, or perhaps a neurological experience? By themselves, both seem unlikely. They can change activity in the brain, but enlightenment comes from hard work before and after their use. Entheogens and empathogens likely have a catalytic but not a primary casual effect in awakening.
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