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.”

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 great minds have come out of India. Like countless spelling bee champions, Mahatma Gandhi, and Aurobindo Ghose who later took on the name of Sri Aurobindo. Sri Aurobindo became a highly regarded spiritual teacher and author in the twentieth century. His main insight was that what many humans experience during altered or higher states of consciousness are glimpses of the future of evolution. And, he contended, one day these states of expansion will be normal for the whole human race. Countless numbers of people are seeking the unity consciousness that MDMA can offer. It can make them feel bigger. And more deeply connected and powerful. Like many billions of tiny ants inching a fourteen-wheeler up a hill, every tiny bit of effort pulls the big rig along. Similarly, each one of the eight billion or so people residing on our planet today may, via a combined assemblage of singular efforts, raise their individual consciousness, while tugging the entire race forward.

In this time of homogenized living and spiritual bankruptcy, there is also a hankering to come alive and connect to something bigger than what is found in day-to-day life. That yearning coming from inside us often leads to psychedelic searching, hoping that with enough jangling of the brain something new, deeper, and more satisfying will emerge. I call this sought after altered state of consciousness (ASC) a vivification. It can be approached with or without drugs. Natural vivification can be defined as the awakening of our innate spiritual core. We’re naturally wired for it, but often we can’t seem to access this spirit while living a mundane secular life. Vivification often arises after years of living a dull, unsatisfying, and torpid existence. Like a flower awaiting springtime and the opportunity to bud, our contemporary human way of existing longs for a bright awakening.

Sharon Salzberg in her 2023 book, Real Life, wrote about the inner constrictiveness and the lack of openness many people feel, particularly after an abusive or neglectful childhood, or following a hurtful experience at any age. She opens with a story of how she went to a Houston restaurant with an acquaintance to order takeout. Her friend, Joseph Goldstein, struck up a conversation with a young man behind the counter as they waited for their food to be prepared. The employee told Joseph, somewhat passionately, how his dream was to one day move to Wyoming. When asked what he thought he would find there, the young man expounded: “Open, expansive space, a feeling of being unconfined, with peacefulness and freedom, and room to breathe.” Joseph responded, “There’s an Inner Wyoming too, you know.” The restaurant worker’s retort was, “That’s freaky,” and abruptly walked away.

I have heard people say, “Since my first session, something has been stirring deep inside me that I can’t find words to describe. I feel it, I know it is important, and I think it is changing me, but for the life of me, I find in unspeakable. Words don’t do it justice.” Something sneaks up on us, perhaps a force for clarity and change. The word surreptitious comes close, meaning furtive, stealthy, sneaky, or secretive. These moments of knowing can be very private, our own concealed truth. We are the only ones who can access and intuitively comprehend this type of ineffable experience.

Jimmy Stewart played the temporarily confounded George Bailey in the Christmas movie classic It’s a Wonderful Life. As a somewhat strange version of an after-death story unfolds, George is granted an opportunity to observe a life review, his own. It included the secret factors that drive our common existence, which is quite different than how he had long imagined this earthly existence to be, but rather as it really is. He was propelled by what many would label a spiritual emergency. It was only after George was given a complete panoramic summary of how his life patterns coalesced, from beginning to end, that his life journey was made sense and was righted. All the isolated acts, when considered together, offered cohesive insights, meaning, and deep appreciation to George. In the end, all the pain and suffering was not without value; the tapestry he examined came to be seen as the chronicle of a rewarding, warm, and wonderful life.

Mystical experiences are states of grace when the bodymind system tunes its usual frequency to the primary field of Being, what the Pueblo mystic, Beautiful Painted Arrow, calls the Vast Self. In that bigger field there is a vast accumulation of stored knowledge (knowings) which previously had been difficult to detect. In this morphogenetic field, as Robert Sheldrake calls it, all the past experiences of the human race are contained. To enter this expansive library of practical relationship wisdom, MDMA, sometimes, can be a gatekeeper.

Often patients find their third session as being more otherworldly or cosmic in nature. While the first two are heavy on intrapersonal and interpersonal relationships, the final treatment can strengthen or restore relationships with the earth, other animal relatives, and supportive energy fields in the universe. In October of 2022 the Nobel Peace Prize for Physics was awarded to three scientists who discovered and confirmed what has long been a contention of quantum physics, namely entanglement. Once we have an emotionally or energetically charged connection with any life form, molecules begin to vibrate in unison and they reach a high level of coherence. It is like two become one no matter how far apart they are, which is nonlocality. The connections cause what was once a singular unit to now operate in tandem with their “dance partner.” And the unbroken union allows for communication instantaneously, faster than the speed of sound or light.