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 Ineffable
Geral T. Blanchard • April 17, 2023
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, it is 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.
How can something so undefinable grab and hold our attention, even change us at a core level? Well, it’s hard to explain and philosophers, theologians, and mystics have been teasing out the concept for millennia. What we notice is that these salient moments seem to arise at pivotal and often life changing times.
Lakota shaman Black Elk tried to put it into words: “As I lay there thinking of my vision, I could see it all again and feel the meaning with a part of me, like a strange power glowing in my body; but when the part of me that talks would try to make words for the meaning, it would be life fog and get away from me.”
Simply because it so challenging to describe life shifting moments doesn’t take any of their power or meaning away. They can sneak up on us remaining under our conscious radar. Yet, they clearly are “a thing.” For some people this nebulous phenomenon becomes very special, profoundly personal and impactful. When MDMA patients embrace the sentiments, and when they unpredictably pop up again and again, they frequently refer to them as “feelbacks.” This gift embodies an internal splendor that can be reexperienced any time thereafter.
Spiritualists have long been intrigued by such moments. Usually they arrive during altered states, as was the case with Black Elk during a vision quest. Sometimes the wily mind plays tricks on us, often for our benefit.
This is because, at a conscious level, we may not always have easy access to life altering answers for our earthly conundrums. Yet millions of years of experience on earth has given humans concealed gifts of insightfulness that can show up when we most need them.
The answers arise out of an ostensibly forgotten past, vestiges from comparable dilemmas that remain embedded in our psyche – a treasure trove of collective knowledge.
It seems we need some kind of out-of-the-ordinary moment to awaken the healer within and shake insights loose. And when that occurs, the comforting intuitions that have been anchored in our ancient ancestral past – enduring, very real, and yet indescribable -- get revived. Still, we know they hold private and intimate truths for us. They are intended specifically for us and not necessarily meant to be shared, in fact, it doesn’t seem like we are even capable of doing so, spoken language can be so limiting. Being dumbfounded can be so wise.
One patient, trying to put words to her transformative moments said, “It was like receiving whispers from Spirit.” Faint but palpable messages offering enlightenment and solace. And while the event couldn’t be described accurately, one thing was clear, it was a treasure. Even though it was ineffable, there was faith distilled out of the mystery, substance derived from the ethereal. For some people it is as valuable as any religious teaching they had assimilated in times past.
Epiphanies of this kind are often validated without words. The “body electric,” as Walt Whitman called it, knows. Our mental life is embodied. Our most exalted thoughts that suddenly fill gaps in our knowledge of the world have their body correlates. And accurate intuitions can get our attention via tears, chills, goosebumps, shivers, tingles up the spine.
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“Our sensory systems shape inexplicable experiences into perceptible, supernatural forms. When we are in the dark, regions of our brain may lead us to perceive faces where they are not, and these we may take as images of God. Our deep-rooted tendency to hear the human voice may lead us to hear the Divine. When in an eerie or strange place, most likely in the dark, we may feel seen, or touched, or even embraced by God – reflecting the activation of our ancient attachment-related tactile system.”
- Dacher Keltner in
Awe: The New Science of Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life
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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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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.