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, Big Mind, Big Time, Big Identity
Geral T. Blanchard • June 25, 2022
Who am I?
Little self or Big Self? Am I something bigger than I have been able to imagine up to this point in life?
Many mystics and spiritual seekers express interest in mind expansion – seeing themselves and the world from a wider and more meaningful perspective. Some people find introspection through meditation and contemplation to be helpful in this regard. Another avenue to understanding how and where we fit in can include entheogens (like psilocybin) and empathogens (like MDMA).
With a strong connection to Mother Earth, Pachamama, or the world surrounding us, many indigenous tribes see an interconnectedness that many of us miss, or can’t comprehend on a deep level. I am reminded of Yiokasin Ghosthorse, a Lakota radio broadcaster. He has defined soil as “who we used to be.” Soil is also what we will go back to being after our extraordinarily brief sojourn on this planet. The Mother’s umbilical cord is never broken. What Ghosthorse’s words do for me is to invoke a much longer time frame than many of us Westerners routinely consider or can practically comprehend. It is our temptation to think in supernatural terms rather than the super natural.
In the grand scheme of things, it is mighty difficult, at least from Ghosthorse’s soil perspective, to think of ourselves as very important individuals, “king of the hill” so to speak. Yet, following indigenous-inspired MDMA treatment(s) our stature and concern with personal eminence seems to diminish. A humility, versus hubris, enters into everyday consciousness. Buddhists might refer to this phenomenon as “dying unto ego” – a subjective loss of self-identity, no longer being in the left-brain’s tight grip of how I want or think I need to be seen. Shedding this addiction -- an attachment to the incessant desire for an outsized planetary significance – often occurs following a spiritual awakening induced by psilocybin or MDMA. It is a sobering and enlightening event, similar to what Bill W., co-founder of AA, experienced after ingesting LSD.
Native cultures emphasize our relationship to “all the relatives.” And the enhanced consciousness derived from the medicines can be regarded as a relational intelligence. With it comes an enhanced sense of obligation, or responsibility, to each living being on Earth.
And reciprocity too; it’s no longer all about me. It is as if our culturally programmed narcissism shrinks and we shed our separating skin, merging with the greater humanity, a greater animism, the eternal Big Soul.
When a person “awakens” from a four to six-hour treatment, they often have a pressing desire to connect with other people, to rejoin a larger social world. A generosity is felt, a mutuality, the desire to offer care to others who have been forgotten for too long, like the downtrodden or even persons who once harmed them. Like a Lakota who commits to the Sun Dance on behalf of his people, any previous aversion to sacrifice fades away. The power of connection is so strong. The desire to serve is so compelling. Values shift in the direction of big-heartedness. And it seems to get a “neuronal foothold” and persists.
Buddhists talk about the Eightfold Path. One of those paths is right understanding or what I would like to call right relationship. This entails a shift from emphasis on accumulating “likes” to mapping relationships, from quantity to quality, from goal orientation to the process of intimate relating -- a communal orientation. The poet, W. H. Auden put it succinctly when referring to our connection to all that is when he advised, “Love your crooked neighbor with all your crooked heart.” We are, after all, very similar and to deny this basic tenet, is to live a life of separation which leads to suffering and ultimately to loneliness. So if we are to look out for ourselves, we must consistently look out for everyone.
Similar to the tightly intertwined underground mycelium root network of mushrooms, a change in our neuronal networking can nudge us in the direction of greater connectivity, and along with it, greater wisdom of who we are and all the places where we live…and flourish. At the root of life, like-minded people includes everyone.
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“It is my belief that entheogenic agents unleash a form of consciousness better able to grapple with the ultimate questions about the reality process than our normal frames of awareness, that they truly offer us a glimpse of some great meaning hitherto the sole domain of the shaman and the mystic, a meaning only alluded to in the conventional religions of the world.”
- Simon Powell in
The Psilocybin Solution: The Role of Sacred Mushrooms in the Quest for Meaning
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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.