Many people are encountering frightening things through psychedelics, even in therapeutic contexts — “entities” as they’re called. Indeed, as psychedelics have become common in treating an explosion of mental illness and emotional and spiritual suffering in the west, a therapist in Melbourne offers “Eight-week Bad Trip Integration training for therapists.”
“An ‘entity,’ in “psychedelic phenomenology,” the author of “What About ‘Entities?’” says, “refers to something that appears to exist outside the person’s individual psyche” — something they encounter during their experience with psychedelics.
Unwittingly and rather ironically, given the apparent need for two months of “Bad Trip Integration training,” his essay makes a case for eschewing psychedelics, even in a therapeutic context.
But the question of whether ayahuasca, psilocybin, ketamine, or a plethora of other substances are helpful or harmful in achieving psychological health is not my concern here. My concern is with the very ontological questions the author dismisses and derides, even as he engages in them implicitly and explicitly throughout his essay.
It’s half true that being personally “brave enough to meet everything that arises in our wild mind without fear is all that matters.” But it is not true at all that “everything else is just philosophy.”
The very fact that he delves into the question of ‘entities’ and their reality attests that philosophy is foundational. And though he offers some good insights and addresses the core issue (fear), his insights fall short of what is urgently needed for people, whether in therapy or not, to deal with what is happening in and to human consciousness.
Since even the most “practical” psychologists these days can’t escape questions about their clients meeting up with seemingly independent agents (even as they decry and deny “metaphysical philosophizing”), one is compelled to ask, WTF is going on?
There are many layers and levels in addressing that question. But to start with, given that reputable therapists are discussing the question of whether “entities” in human consciousness are independent of the individual’s consciousness or not, you know the western paradigm is past its use-by date.
Incongruously, the therapist declares, “Despite my extensive exploration, I’ve never indulged the fantasy that I can wholesale abandon my Western psychological paradigm in my work as a therapist – to do so would be to depart from the consensus reality of my clients and colleagues.” [Italics mine.]
“Consensus reality?” At best, that’s trying to have things both ways. At worst, it’s upholding the very paradigm that is making his clients and so many others sick.
Besides, it’s not a matter of “wholesale abandoning” the western paradigm, but honestly questioning it, which is inherently a philosophical endeavor.
The author exaggerates the task and minimizes the challenge at the same time by setting up the straw man of “armchair philosophizing with metaphysical and theological conjectures about the nature of reality.” He then proceeds to do exactly that with regard to the nature of consciousness and whether the “entities” are independent of the individual’s consciousness, or a subconscious projection of it.
“Our task is not to settle the ontological debate,” he intones; “our task is to help our client.”
That stance is reasonable in dealing with dark entities after the fact, when they’ve scared the bejesus out of a client following a bad trip, but it ineluctably entails taking a metaphysical stance, if not making metaphysical claims.
More importantly, it does nothing to address the raging elephants outside the therapy room. Why are so many people using psychedelics in the first place? And why are so many having bad trips and encountering malevolent things, necessitating training courses for therapists to learn how to help their freaked out clients?
And for the rest of us, must the locus of dealing with the distress of encountering dark entities be “through the intervention of therapists who know the territory?” What territory is that, if not hubristically (and metaphysically) defined?
Delving into the very metaphysical territory he decries, the author makes a startling claim: “I believe that a significant portion of our clients’ distress stems from a question they may never explicitly ask, namely, “Was it real?” Because if it was real — if the thing that entered them, haunts them, and speaks to them has any kind of objective existence — then the world they knew is gone.”
He immediately dismisses his own and his clients’ unstated question by stating, “Asking ‘are entities real? Is like asking if love is real while someone bleeds from a broken heart. The philosophy can wait. The suffering cannot.”
That’s simply false, since human consciousness has become saturated with man-made darkness in direct proportion to the decimation of the Earth and the mass extinction of our fellow creatures. (For which, with respect to therapy, innumerable people are feeling profound and paralyzing grief.
To be sure, feeling the fact of human destructiveness and darkness, and moving through it by questioning and remaining with it alone and together, is more important than any philosophical explanation of what is happening in and to consciousness as we’ve known it for tens of thousands of years.
But philosophical questions and insights underlie and support the individual and collective transformation that’s so urgently required if the living generations are to leave a habitable, much less flourishing planet and civilization for future generations.
I don’t blame the Melbourne therapist for giving priority to his clients in distress after having their worldviews shattered and their doors of perception blown open following psychedelic encounters with entities, malevolent or benign.
But given the exponential increasing evil in the world and human consciousness, the question is: Beyond the therapy that hopefully helps acutely suffering people deal with encounters with “entities,” can we create a new paradigm that helps ordinary folks deal with man’s overwhelming darkness in their day-to-day lives?
As a non-academic philosopher who has encountered darkness for decades, I make no apology for asking philosophical questions about the phenomenon. Evil exists, and man-made entities that aren’t simply projections of the individual’s unconscious trauma.
Many western Buddhists psychologically comfort themselves by insisting that collective darkness has no intentionality. But I would remind them that at the moment of his enlightenment, Mara came to Siddhartha, and after offering all the riches and pleasures of the world to him, challenged him by asking, “Who do you think you are?”
Siddhartha simply touched the Earth as he sat under the bodhi tree, and Mara disappeared. It was not a projection of his consciousness, and didn’t cease to exist, except in his illumined consciousness.
In my experience, encounters with darkness have been through what I call conduits of collective darkness. Many people in America, having adapted to this dead culture by deadening their hearts and minds, have become conduits. The Trump Administration is manifestation, not an anomaly.
So things are not so simple as our therapist maintains in putting forth dualistic paradigms — the “Shamanic Paradigm,” in which “the self is porous and permeable, and the world is full of spirits, ancestors and forces that exist independently of human consciousness.” And the “Psychological Paradigm,” in which “the self is dynamic but contained, and all of its content is ours.”
Western civilization, with its Enlightenment cornerstone of reason, has broken down, and the viability of the Earth and human consciousness has become acute. We have to go deeper and wider than saying; “I don’t think settling the metaphysical question [of a new paradigm] is necessary or even helpful for therapeutic work.”
In any case, nothing is going to be “settled.” It’s a matter of questioning and awakening insight, which is always new.
It’s true “that fear gives these experiences and encounters their traumatic charge and power.” But it’s not true that when people “find their ground, their center, their own authority, they are never in danger or harmed by encounters” with dark entities — or the conduits through which they often assail even the most self-knowing.
And it’s simply false to claim, “Embedded in a Western culture, the psychological paradigm is a far more empowering approach.” It’s empowering and lucrative for psychedelic-based therapists perhaps, but not for the rest of us. And certainly not for the human prospect.
Questioning and bringing insight into “the problem of evil” is a very different thing than “armchair theological speculation and metaphysical philosophizing.” Honest and sustained inquiry, along with self-knowing attentiveness, generates humility, healing and stillness. And secondarily, it provides a provisional paradigm for understanding the human condition and prospect.
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