Beyond the High: The Misdirection of Empathogens and Entheogens in Search for Enlivenment.
The word for my year has been "enliven." I chose this word after reading Andreas Weber’s book Enlivenment last autumn.
This term has its roots in Middle English and stems from the Old French word "enliver," meaning "to make lively" or "to animate."
Enlivenment is deeply connected to animism, which acknowledges that every element, being, and thing in the world carries essence, calling us forth into relationship—be it the stone, the tree, the crow, the river, or the cloud.
One of the greatest gifts of empathogens and entheogens is their capacity to evoke enlivenment. We live in a culture that feeds on, uses, or strips bare the aliveness of children. By the time most of us are teenagers, the wonderment we held dear as little ones has turned to ash. Unfortunately, we often become like our forefathers and foremothers, repeating the same patterns of dampening, disparaging, using, or exploiting the aliveness of others.
My first lived encounter with enlivenment was through a Wild Mind course with the Animas Valley Institute. My first conscious intellectual introduction to enlivenment came from Bill Plotkin’s book SoulCraft and a lecture he gave that I found online.
Plotkin depicts enlivenment as life-enhancing. He has spent nearly fifty years investigating what supports human flourishing and the development of life-enhancing cultures. He discovered that supporting individuals recover and remember their aliveness is essential to the wholeness of culture.
The Animas Valley Institute enlivened me in a substantial and sustainable way, far more than empathogens and entheogens ever did.
So much has happened since my involvement and tracking of the psychedelic renaissance. My former partner's closest friend died during a plant dieta. I was part of a psychedelic cult for six months. My former partner and I, overall, had a relationship founded more on harm than love, despite our best intentions. Back then, neither of us had dealt with our heartbreak, so we came to the relationship asking for things that neither of us could ever fill for the other.
There was tremendous promise in the media around psychedelics in 2018, 2019, 2020, and beyond—-we were going to save the world with these substances! We thought we were bringing back love one huge MDMA or Psilocybin dose at a time.
Now, I see that many of us were wounded children psychologically, finally tasting the true wonderment and intensity of life again after years of feeling hollow, empty, and merely rational—disconnected from our erotic bodily feelings. We believed the substances themselves were the medicine rather than the enlivenment they could temporarily evoke.
The medicine our world needs is not merely more empathogens and entheogens, though they may play a small part in the repair process. Without leaders in the field of empathogens and entheogens who have deeply robust ethical and philosophical roots of wisdom on what supports human flourishing and what prevents it, we are doomed for more of the same violence we have seen for thousands of years.
What our world truly needs is to remember the gift and beauty of enlivenment— not merely in the non-ordinary state, but in everyday consciousness and the world we create around us.
I would describe enlivenment as a quality of consciousness that one beholds toward oneself and all of life in every moment and in relation to all things.
It calls from the depths and says, “May you live and be enlivened. May you die and be enlivened.”
When I hear stories of oncology units restraining patients to beds, administering twenty-plus medications until they have zero autonomy over their minds, resulting in deaths without freedom, I weep for the ways our world has destroyed enlivenment.
When I witness a young man who has been shamed, humiliated, and oppressed by his parents and then enters the military, becoming a number in the military-industrial complex to kill other young men and visit strip clubs to seek out beauty, I weep for the ways our world has destroyed enlivenment.
When I own my own interpersonal survival strategies and recognize how I have hidden away, not fully lived my life, used others to fill my wounds, not honed my musical, artistic, and intellectual talents—like so many of us—I weep for the ways our world has destroyed enlivenment.
We need not merely empathogens and entheogens, although they may be a small part of this deep repair process needed on planet Earth. What is needed is a reorientation to the ethics of enlivenment. What supports the aliveness of all of us? Every being, human and non-human, deserves the right to exist, is legitimate, and ought to be offered the gift of being able to flower into their fullest potential before falling back down to earth to die.
This is why living a life where you let yourself fully develop and flower is a political act. You are creating the seeds and possibilities for liberation to be possible for the individual, even in the face of such wretched collective systemic oppression. And hopefully, if we each begin to reclaim our true selves, we will naturally support the aliveness of others, which will support them in enlivening others ad infinitum….
Empathogens and entheogens merely open a door to enlivenment and aliveness. Without ethical, philosophical, mythological, and ontological shifts in our culture's relationship to self, others, and the more-than-human world, they will become a mere quick fix for enhancing vegging out and watching Netflix like marijuana has become for thousands while the rich keep getting richer. The poor, poorer. And our world continues to slide into the deeply engrooved habits of domination and submission, interpersonally and collectively.
What are some ways to enhance aliveness and enlivenment post-empathogenic or entheogenic experience?
Writing- Bringing language to your experience can land whatever unconscious material arose into the conscious self.
Community Involvement- Volunteer at a local farm, join a community garden, sing to the dying in hospice or at the hospital, etc.
Creativity- Join a poetry club, take a writing course, pick up the instrument you haven’t touched in years, sing songs, dance, draw, go to a jazz club, publish a book, join the theatre, learn to sew, etc.
Nature-Based Practices: Go on a vision quest, take an herbalism course, find a tree to sit on for twenty minutes every day without any technology, join the environmental activist groups in your local city, take a permaculture course, etc.
Neighborhood Gatherings- Host a neighborhood gathering. Say hi to your neighbors when they walk past your house (if you want too, don’t say hi to the people you have zero interest in connecting with… :))
Exercise- Join a gym, a running club, a climbing group, etc.
Let kids be kids- Stop controlling, shaming, humiliating children. Let them be alive. Do your own work with your own childhood so you stop needing to change the immense beautiful aliveness of the little ones.
Seek weekly or bi-weekly therapy from a licensed therapist or psychologist.
Books that I recommend reading related to this topic:
Matter & Desire by Andreas Weber
Enlivenment by Andreas Weber
Dismantled: How Love and Psychedelics Broke a Clergyman Apart by Bruce Sanguin
Credo by Andrew Feldmar
Landmarks by Robert MacFarlane
The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller
Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside her by Susan Griffin
The Heart of Trauma by Bonnie Badenoch
Don't go back to sleep by Rumi
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don't go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don't go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth
across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don't go back to sleep.