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 Different Levels of Consciousness
Geral T. Blanchard • December 30, 2022
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.
Balancing this perspective on knowledge, Evelyn Underhill, a Catholic writer and pacifist, had this to say about human enlightenment: “True illumination, like all real and vital experience, consists [more] in the breathing of a certain atmosphere, living at certain levels of consciousness, than in the acquirement of specific information.”
Meister Eckhart, the medieval German mystic, spoke of us as being planted with “godseeds” and from us grow gods. We are loaded with latency, ready to spring ahead by first going back to a more complete understanding of our origins and of ourselves. That is what is symbolized by the Hopi “casting of seeds” ritual that is so important before taking the medicine. With that in mind, Jean Houston, author of The Search for the Beloved, has outlined three major perspectives of the human experience: THIS IS ME, WE ARE, and I AM.
This Is Me is our persona, ego, or the masks we wear. It is a small, confining, constricting view, kind of like living in a cul-de-sac. It really doesn’t take us anywhere. Contrast it with We Are where symbols, guiding archetypes, and origin myths originate. We Are is like a more solid contact or reference point, the social or cultural container in which we can live. This realm penetrates the thin veil of the This Is Me through fantasy, dreams, or just about any time when we let down our guard, as MDMA can help us so. You don’t have to go looking for it; you may, quite simply, open the door when it knocks. Finally, when we are connected with the Vast Self, our higher Unity Being, the solidifying and strengthening I Am floods in.
This
I Am may feel like alien territory at first, but it doesn’t take very long to recognize it is more real, and far less fleeting, than this
middle world existence. MDMA offers an enhanced sensibility in this dimension. From watching patients enter this realm I am left with the impression that a visit to the I Am is like visiting your personal god(s).
In this field state of personal extension, there is a great concentration of familiar and reminiscent energies that can propel “individuals” to fulfill their deep evolutionary process of life – becoming their best and happiest selves, or should I say Selves – the bigger version of us.
This is what happens when you reach The Source of your being. It certainly isn’t the hospital you were born in -- perhaps some Midwestern hospital a few decades ago. This is a much more grand cosmic story awaiting our discovery.
Please don’t think of what I’m about to suggest as an unreasonable stretch. But after difficult, if not traumatic days, in this middle world of the 21st century, you may recognize a level of natural creative exuberance arising within you. Now I am reminded of Mozart (don’t know if he tried entheogens) who said of his stupendous creativity, that he didn’t know whence it came, but thanked his version of God that at least it felt very “Mozartish.”
Not only can the creative spirit of Creation arise, but I have sensed that many persons who have mindfully used MDMA in ceremony have become a stronger moral force for good because of it. As Houston posits, humans can be seen as sacred “fetuses of the future,” currently in a redesign process. A “calling” may have been hidden in your trauma. It’s like the chronic nausea and despair of life had a message: “Enough already! It’s time to grow, big time.”
The sacred indigeneity of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy helps to build bridges from our ancient “past” to the ongoing now. For some, it can literally reorchestrate their brains and accelerate neurogenesis while altering the nervous system to a calmer and more centered existence. It may be the equivalent of altering the course of your personal evolution while also speeding it up, much like the theory of epigenetics suggests. What often arises in a series of MDMA treatments – ritualized rebirths – is an awareness of the unskilled and ineffective behaviors and choices of your prior local self. Out of the once limiting dark moments, travel on to the destiny of I Am.
**********
Oh night that guided me,
Oh, night more lovely than the dawn,
Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover,
Lover transformed in the Beloved!
Upon my flowery breast,
Kept wholly for himself alone,
There he stayed sleeping,
And I caressed him,
And the fumes of the cedars made a breeze.
The breeze blew from the turret
As I parted his locks.
With his gentle hand he wounded my neck
And caused all my senses to be suspended.
I remained, lost in oblivion,
My face I reclined on the Beloved.
All ceased and I abandoned myself,
Leaving my cares forgotten among the lilies.
St. John of the Cross
The Dark Nights of the Soul
*********
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
More Articles
In recent years psychotherapists have become increasingly aware of the risk of transmitting trauma intergenerationally. By examining the impact of the Holocaust, or the experiences of Native Americans who were systematically abused by colonizers including the Catholic Church, it becomes obvious that indirect passage of depression, despair, anxiety, and damaged self-regard are but a few of the ancestral legacies of uninterrupted abuse. If, however, trauma can be passed from generation to generation without direct experience, could it also be possible for the reverse to happen?
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:
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.
“Where did all the time go?” That is the ubiquitous question every patient asks after a treatment. They ingest the medicine at 9 a.m. and, after what seems like perhaps an hour or so but was actually five or six, and once the eye mask comes off there is bewilderment as to just how much time has passed. Of course, this is all built on the bedrock notion in Western culture that time is a straight line and linear manifestation. And that there is such a thing as time! Stepping out of existing paradigms, even if for a brief “time” can be eye opening while your eyes are closed.
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.
Dark nights of the soul as Saint John of the Cross called those long, despairing periods of our life, are never easy, in fact they are usually dreadful. They are so necessarily awful and so damn long because some of us don’t do subtlety very well. If we are open to these moments, even a tiny bit, they can serve as an internally calculated and blaring wakeup call that will guide us to solace.
John Nelson, in Healing the Split, refers to a fleeting or ephemeral sense of a higher purpose, not fully conceptualized, but compellingly near the heart. It holds answers to life’s pain but isn’t quite within our grasp…at least until the dark clouds engulf us. Then, with great staying power and inexperience matched with trust, a spiritual emergence nears surface awareness. And it always happens, as psychiatrist Stan Groff defined it, around the time of a blurry spiritual emergency.