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 Three-Dimensional Thinking
Geral T. Blanchard • Dec 05, 2021
All of us have been indoctrinated into the theory of a three-dimensional reality – the length, breadth, and height of things – extensions into space.
Hyperspace, meaning going beyond three dimensions, was introduced in science fiction literature and movies suggesting we have always toyed with ideas of something bigger and more complex existing “out there.”
Our interest in astronomy, or even astrology, suggests we have long wanted to imagine looking beyond current sensory and cognitive limitations. Since humankind invented religion, many cultures held the cherished and comforting belief that there is a sought after destination called heaven, a place outside our current understanding of space. Heaven, almost uniformly, was regarded as an extension of height – something way up there beyond sight. Maybe that is what the term higher consciousness or Higher Power allude to.
All spatial dimensions beyond the traditional three are thought to be mental or psychic, something subjectively experienced as an inner voice or hallucination, an interior phenomenon. A four-dimensional creature, perhaps like a shaman, may tell you that they can see perfectly well inside and outside. For instance, shamans often intuitively tour their own bodies, or those of persons they are healing, to locate the source of an illness. It is construed by Westerners as something resembling a form of x-ray vision. Some folks, especially psychologists, blow off this remarkable ability as delusional thinking or as psychosis. If it can’t be documented and classified as normal human behavior, it follows that it must be abnormal, or even pathological. Perhaps a medicine could put a stop to such crazy thinking, stop the brain from what it naturally has done and can do.
Then there are modern day psychonauts who are without shamanic training but desire to go into previously unchartered territory via drug experimentation. They often desire an easy way to get there, perhaps using psychedelic medicines. But for a more disciplined person, these fleeting breakaway moments are just brief instances of consciousness tourism, not a destination to permanently land on and stay with.
Could it be that when under the guidance (vs. influence) of MDMA, some folks measure the world beyond the usual conceptualizations of length, breadth, and height? The
fourth dimension may be
time. Time is inseparable from consciousness and that may be why shamanic cosmologies question its very existence apart from our minds. Scientifically, we can never be sure it exists independent of our thinking, yet scientists measure the world in accordance with manmade time-keeping devices.
Native peoples tend to relate to “time” as something circular; the “future” and the “past” all occur in the “now.” Go “Native” and wrap your head around that for a while.
Perhaps there is a fifth-dimension. Beyond the previous four, maybe an inside construct can be considered. Maybe “normal” space-time thinking is an outer projection of an inner infinity. So when a shaman journeys into his body and even into his cells, it is so unfamiliar to us that we discount his experience. During an MDMA journey, when you watch your upper cranial brain sparking, or navigate into your middle brain (the heart) and watch it pumping, will you be introduced to a new way of seeing and experiencing reality? So is this phenomenon subjective or objective – or both?
What about those MDMA experiences of expanded consciousness when we stand apart from ourselves watching as the ego shrinks? When we find ourselves observing ourselves -- maybe even observing the observer observing us. Sort of a “backstage” view of what is going on. Is this a sixth dimension? After all, to be objective wouldn’t we have to stand back, and seemingly apart, to more accurately understand something bigger than us? Otherwise wouldn’t it all be too subjective to be accurate?
This is where Mayan cosmology helps out, when the micro perspective is expanded to the macro. The macro is the big view of things, getting past the meager abilities of the cranial brains of humans. In a way, everything outside us may be inside us; everything may be us. So this bigness resides in our smallness. To understand this better we must break free of the normal cognitive constraints of human consciousness and see the big picture, sixth dimensional unity consciousness.
No wonder after a treatment, when people reenter the three dimensional world, they find it so difficult to explain in precise words what was experienced. While being largely indescribable, or ineffable, it is often paradoxically referred to as being “realer than real.” We may be tapping into something bigger and quite comforting, a “coming home” of sorts. For a shaman, this is existence transmitting itself through him/her, a very familiar and sacred happening. Experiencing “many worlds” is experiencing the One World of us.
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Johanna Macy in A Wild Love for the World, wrote: “We strap our faith and love and destiny to the puny burros of our separate selves which are certain to stumble and give out…prizing our egos, coddling them, we lock ourselves inside.”
She went on: “One day I found I was no longer inside my own body. I wasn’t outside it either. My body seemed to be silently exploding, expanding to the point where everything else was inside it too. Everything out there – each gesticulating, chewing, sleeping form; each crying baby and coughing heap of rags; and flickering, swaying carriage itself – was as intimately my body as I was. I had turned inside out, like a kernel of popcorn shaken over the fire. My interior was now on the outside, inextricably mixed up with the rest of the world, and what I had tried to exclude was now at its core.”
Macy concluded: “The self was neither to be vaunted or overcome, neither to be punished or improved. It only needed to be seen through, like a bubble that would eventually pop.”
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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.”
There are many emotional reactions to a drug-free spiritual awakening experience and a ceremonial MDMA journey. While this article focuses on empathy – both the feeling and the cognitive component – it is obvious to those who have awakened from a spiritual emergency that a variety of related emotions arise.
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.
Many events in life can change us, some in profound ways, others somewhat superficially. Some positively, some negatively. Some temporarily, some permanently. Let’s break it down.
With the “help” of psychology and the diagnoses of PTSD and C-PTSD, an entire trauma industry has developed. Much help has been delivered and, unfortunately, in many instances the assigned labels stick like glue and there can be difficulty relinquishing the newly imposed identity of “breakage.”
Many life events are transformative:
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Traditional Native American cultures have long believed that time is a circular phenomenon. Remotely like the movie Groundhog Day suggests, every day is very similar and reoccurring like the last. In indigenous worldviews, the sun rises and the sun sets, routinely; we always have a predictable reset of sorts, the start of what we call a “new day,” or what Arapahos called “sleeps,” both reflecting measurements of time.
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