What can Plato and Socrates teach us about working with the medicines of our World? In this first chapter of a philosopher's guide to working with psychedelics and other medicines, we look at what Plato and Socrates, and their relationship with psychedelics, initiation, and walking a path of healing, a path of wisdom, love, and beauty.

A Philosopher’s Psychedelic Practice Guide: Plato, the Mysteries, and the Possibility for Rebirth

Note: This is a rough transcript. Since the Dangerous Wisdom podcast uses many names and terms that transcription software fails to recognize, a more accurate transcript is not possible at this time. But this version is as close as we can manage.

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Welcome to Dangerous Wisdom, a journey into mystery and a gateway to the mind of nature and the nature of mind. This is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor. I’m happy to be here with you so that together we can create a culture of wisdom, love, and beauty.

We’re doing the work we need to do to heal self and world at the same time.

In this episode, we’ll talk about what the wisdom traditions might recommend as essential to working with the medicines of our World, including psychedelics.

I want to begin by acknowledging and thanking all the sincere people out there interested in working with the medicines of the World, including all the people already deeply engaged in this work. We have brought up a few of the concerns we all need to address in relation to working with any of the medicines of the World, and we will bring up a few more.

None of that comes as a specific criticism of anything a specific person is doing. We just want to end all self-deception, and begin to see how we can truly dispel the pattern of insanity that has the whole community of life at risk, and how we can maximize healing for self and World at the same time. I offer this in gratitude to everyone out there doing their best, and wanting to learn how we all can further develop.

It seems essential to recognize the level of trauma, grief, injustice, inequality, and toxicity in our current context. In a way, we all have to ask unprecedented questions as we work with the medicines of our World. Even with a traditional medicine, we now find an altered context, and ethical as well as metaphysical, ontological, epistemological, and aesthetic questions arise that may never have arisen in an indigenous context. Those are fancy words for saying we have to think a lot about ethics, the nature of reality, our obligations to the very being of the World, our obligations to sacredness, our standards of knowledge and our practices of knowing, and also our sense of beauty and grace.

We also have to see that this degraded context affects meaning and experience. The degradation of ecologies and the loss of species has gone together with the degradation of meaning and purpose, the loss of languages and cultures, and the possible extinction or endangerment of certain kinds of experience.

Like everything else in our Cosmos, psychedelic medicines come to us totally interwoven, and not existing in and of themselves. Their meaning, their purpose, their implications, and their teachings depend on us and on the larger ecologies of mind.

The need for meaning and purpose presents an immediate problem, because we can then try to use the medicines of the World to get ground under our feet, to give ourselves something to do, to give ourselves pleasant or even unpleasant experiences that flatter the ego or at least allow the ego to hold on.

All of that needs reflection, and we most certainly cannot provide a complete and comprehensive philosopher’s guide to psychedelic practice. But we can try and cover some of the key issues. We will need to begin with some broad strokes, so we’ll have to agree to stick with it until an image starts to come through. That way we can begin to talk about the ethics of consciousness. That might seem like an unfamiliar term, but the medicines of our World invite us to consider the ethics of consciousness for a variety of reasons that I think you’ll find as fascinating as I do.

In our last contemplation, we reflected on the ways in which Buddhist philosophy helps us to realize that we ourselves are the medicine we seek, and that we are medicine for the World as well. We can follow a path to becoming a medicine for all beings.

In order to do that, we have to find out the most important thing for medicine work.

Right away we can discover the relevance of the wisdom traditions of the World. After all, How could there be a most important thing for medicine work—which is not the same most important thing as the rest of our lives?

The most important thing for medicine work has to be the most important thing in life, and it has to be in attunement with the nature of self and reality. And the wisdom traditions have to do with the true nature of self and reality, and the most important thing in life.

The problem is that the wisdom traditions agree that no one can tell us the most important thing. And they agree that we first need to admit that we really don’t know the most important thing—not fully and deeply—or else we’d be free, and we’d have no problems.

If that most important thing could be told, we all would have heard it by now. Maybe we would hear it from birth, or maybe we would receive it inside a gold-leafed fortune cookie when we turned 16, and we would have let that most important thing guide us unerringly for the rest of our lives.

Not only can no one tell us the most important things, but we also have to face the fact that we are fallible beings, caught up in a good deal of delusion and suffering.

Since no one can tell us the most important thing about us, then we have to ask, “What is the most important thing for finding out the most important thing?” That’s a basic question for getting started with any medicine, and with our life too, seen from a spiritual perspective.

And we immediately find some difficulty because people differ. And, thus the spiritual traditions, the wisdom traditions around the world, they have different teachings for different people. They have a wide range of stories, concepts, practices, ceremonies, and so on, for the wide range of human experience—which includes different ecologies, different landscapes and languages, and also different temperaments within a particular ecology. So we see variety both across landscapes and cultures, and also within the microclimates of a particular culture.

In general we can say we very much need a full spectrum spirituality, something that includes the varied possibilities and potentials within each of us and amongst all of us.

That does NOT mean we can treat our tradition or the traditions of other cultures like a spiritual buffet. That’s part of our context, and it’s also an old problem. We could say it’s an old problem that now has modern technology to feed it.

Because, in the dominant culture, everything has become like amazon.com for us, and indeed, amazon.com merely followed the lead of the dominant culture. There was no major innovation in getting people to spend money by promising they can just sit at home, choose from a huge range of material objects, and merely by clicking a button we can have these things brought right to our door in a day or a few days.

Our spiritual life has become like this. We go online, we look at customer reviews, and we start ordering whatever we want, all kinds of different things: Books, audio, online courses, tropical retreats, Ayahuasca vacations, and more.

When we go to this kind of spiritual buffet, our ego grabs at all the spiritual ice cream, all the spiritual chocolate, all the spiritual cake and candy it can get its hands on. And it avoids all the spiritual kale, all the spiritual chard, spiritual grapefruit, and other nutrient-dense foods for the soul—most of which we can’t get our hands on at all.

Sometimes, when we come across a bunch of spiritual kale, we take the smallest leaf we can find, and then drown it in a sugary sauce, so that it actually becomes unhealthy to eat. And that won’t necessarily seem obvious to us.

Our spiritual consumption can become tremendously subtle, and it involves unconscious elements. If we had no unconscious, we would have fewer problems, but far fewer potentials.

Spiritual materialism means we will take the most powerful medicine in the world, and turn it into poison. Instead of healing, transformative, and liberating insight, we will just perpetuate the pattern of insanity.

We won’t know we’re doing it. The way this works is that we convince ourselves we are doing everything we can to heal and to become free. But in fact, something is still holding on.

So, the most important thing for finding out the most important thing is to work with a holistic philosophy of life that can help us cut through all that spiritual materialism, and can empower us to do the kind of work that will heal and nourish and liberate us and the World at the same time.

plato and psychedelics

One way to frame some of our contemplation would involve seeing a significant current in the history of dominant culture philosophy as a response to the limitations—including the spiritual materialisms—of culture-wide psychedelic use.

Let’s consider that again: If we look at the history of philosophy in the dominant culture, we can read a significant current of that history as a response to the limitations of culture-wise psychedelic use.

If that’s true, it means that our psychedelic renaissance might actually be a renaissance.

Many of us know that the meaning of renaissance is literally rebirth. But the period of dominant culture history we describe as the Renaissance meant a rebirth of something very particular: namely, the rebirth of the philosophical way of life of Ancient Greece.

When Constantinople fell, Greek scholars emigrated to Europe, initiating the Renaissance. Not only Byzantine Greeks, but also Arabic scholars had preserved Greek philosophy.

Renaissance thinkers felt inspired to both return to the genius of Ancient Greek culture, and also to try and surpass the Greeks.

But that hasn’t worked out so well. The dominant culture chose knowledge obtained by science and put to use for economics and politics, and the culture gave up on wisdom obtained by a holistic philosophy and put to use for the benefit of all beings. That was a terrible choice, and we now face the consequences of it.

Let’s get clear on one way of understanding how this relates to us today, and how it in particular touches on the psychedelic renaissance of today.

The undisputed icon of Ancient Greek philosophy is Socrates, with Plato coming in right behind him.

This seems quite appropriate. Socrates stood up to the structures of power of his time, and was killed for challenging his culture’s ignorance and injustice. He teaches us that we have to become willing to risk everything for the sake of wisdom, love, and beauty.

Plato learned from Socrates. Originally, Plato seems to have wanted to become an artist—perhaps a great playwright like Euripides or Sophocles. And he had the genius to have done so.

But Plato had an inclination for what we now refer to as spirituality or philosophy. Actually, Plato gives us the word philosophy, which literally means LoveWisdom. He gave us that term to remind us that the spiritual life involves a path of wisdom and love. Beauty is always implicated there as well, but that would have been a mouthful. So he called it LoveWisdom.

As he pursued the path of LoveWisdom, Plato seems to have agreed with Socrates that the artists of ancient Greece couldn’t save the culture. Nor could psychedelics.

That’s a funny thought. Can psychedelics save a culture? Can psychedelics heal a culture?

Plato could ask this on the basis of culture-wide use of psychedelics. This had an enormously important place in Ancient Greek culture, in the form of the Eleusinian Mysteries, which involved a psychedelic experience. The Eleusinian Mysteries was a Panhellenic ceremony, which meant that any Greek—free or slave, male or female, from any city-state at all—could participate in these mysteries. In fact, a person didn’t even have to BE Greek. They only had to speak Greek so they could understand the Mysteries, and they had to be innocent of murder. You couldn’t participate if you had that kind of karma. Other than that, anyone could enter these Mysteries.

We get the phrasing here from a Greek historian. And this historian tells us that even a Roman official understood that the Mysteries held a special place.

The phrasing should get our highest attention. He said that disrupting the Mysteries would make life unlivable for the Greek people, and that these Mysteries held the whole human race together.

Kind of staggering.

Based on this, we can appreciate that Plato and Socrates my both have participated in the Mysteries. he was interested in this and he would have experienced the Eleusinian mysteries.

Again, this was panhellenic. Every Greek could participate, and people experienced it as something profound.

Plato looked at this culture-wide engagement with psychedelic experience, and he began to wonder why everyone wasn’t wiser, why the culture wasn’t more just, peaceful, and whole.

We’re considering Plato because of how the wisdom traditions of the dominant culture can help us work with psychedelics today. This will turn out to offer some valuable lessons.

And to get at a potentially helpful way of looking at Plato so we can understand our present situation with psychedelics and also more generally, we need to begin to see Plato as a mystic.

That means he’s definitely not a professor of philosophy, but a philosopher. And if we take Plato himself seriously, we have to believe that he didn’t write his texts to be analyzed.

As a philosopher who has written texts to be analyzed, and also written texts not to be analyzed, I know the difference. And we can get some scholarly help on this point by turning to the excellent work of Pierre Hadot, the French scholar who really showed that we don’t read the ancient Greeks, the way the ancient Greeks intended to be read.

Hadot showed us that we don’t interact with the texts of the ancient philosophers of the dominant culture the way they intended. Among other things, Plato didn’t write his dialogues as texts for analysis as we currently do it. Rather, he wrote them as part of a curriculum to guide people through practicing philosophy as a way of life, a way of life for becoming truly wise people, walking a path of love, walking a path of wisdom, walking a path of grace and beauty. That’s what he intended.

We certainly know that we can read Plato as a genius, an incredible genius. And he seems to have been a mystic, very committed to a philosophy as a transformative and healing practice, a way to heal our soul and the soul of the culture.

And he looks around at his culture—and we can imagine here, someone who knows that his culture engages in these Mysteries. He knows large numbers of people have potentially significant mystical experiences. Those people might prepare for up to 18 months in order to experience initiation into these mysteries, which unfolded over the course of 9 days. That’s serious engagement.

Plato looks at this culture, both his own city-state of Athens and the larger Panhellenic culture, and he realizes that the culture and its people aren’t filled with peace and wellbeing.

He realizes that the culture isn’t run by wise elders. It’s not run by wise people at all. He probably realizes it’s not even run by adults, but by juveniles effectively accepted as adults when they aren’t.

He sees the way that youth get educated.

And that stands in tension with the incredible culture of his people. We still study this culture today. We still revere the literature, architecture, and other arts of Ancient Greece.

And we also have the same fascination with psychedelic mysteries. Our psychedelic renaissance has carried that forward into our context.

Plato looks at this psychedelic scene and this art scene, and he knows that this culture and the people it has educated killed his teacher. They killed the most unique person he had ever known—one of the most unique people Greek culture had ever known.

Socrates was passionately committed to truth, to serving sacredness, to walking a path of wisdom and love and beauty. And they killed him.

Socrates was dedicated to trying to help the culture, trying to help the youth, trying to heal this mess that he saw his culture in. And Plato has to accept that his fellow citizens killed this ethical and wise person.

If the Athenians had executed anyone unjustly, we should deplore it. But an extra kind of evil seemed to lurk here. It would be as if we killed the Dalai Lama. Even if we’re not Tibetan, he seems like a really nice guy, and we can tell he’s invested in the wellbeing of others. And we would just find it to terrible if someone killed him.

We could also compare it to the assassination of Dr. King, who looked up to Socrates as a model. That’s how profound an impact Socrates had on the dominant culture, that someone like Dr. King looked up to him.

Like Dr. King, Socrates stood up to power. He dedicated himself to helping his fellow humans and his culture. And he dedicated himself to truth, to wisdom, love, beauty, and justice.

So he stood up to wealthy and powerful individuals who thought they knew so much, and he showed them that they didn’t know.

It wasn’t just that he had an opinion that differed from theirs.

He was able to show them that they didn’t know what they were talking about.

And rather than say, “Well, geez, that’s very important, what you’ve shown me. You showed me that I don’t know what I’m talking about, and maybe I should stop what I’m doing and learn.” But instead, they killed him—and we’re in the same situation . . .

even those of us interested in working with the medicines of the world, we think we know.

How many people working with psychedelics think that they could sit across from Socrates and tell him what’s what about the nature of reality, and convince him that they knew what they were talking about?

And then how many of us are so sure that Socrates wouldn’t stop us in our tracks, ask us a question that left us replying, “Well, Socrates, I guess I don’t know”?

Of course, we might try to wave it off and hide behind the numinous, hide behind the ineffability of our psychedelic experience or whatever kind of experience we have.

But Socrates knew the difference between a wise or noble silence and somebody who just didn’t know what they were talking about.

And, so, when Plato studied all of this, inquired deeply into it, he realized something had to have gone wrong with the way human beings in the dominant culture make and relate with profound works of art. And something had to have gone wrong with the way we relate with initiatory experience, the way we relate with the mysteries.

Keep in mind, huge numbers of Greeks participated in these mysteries. Two or three thousand people might go through the initiation in any given year.

Whether the mysteries involved a psychedelic medicine or not, they had a psychedelic quality. And if it did involve a psychedelic drink, it seems reasonable to suggest that a greater proportion of the population back then took psychedelics than what we see today. Psychedelic experience may have been far more widespread in Ancient Greece than in 21st century Turtle Island.

In any case, the Mysteries created a powerful experience, and this made Plato stop. He learned that from Socrates. Socrates wanted us to stop, and become susceptible to divine inspiration, become susceptible to wisdom, love, and beauty.

Plato and Socrates probably both participated in the mysteries, but on top of that, Socrates was initiated into the miracle of instruction.

We can recall here our earlier contemplation, in which we talked about Buddha’s views on miracles. He recognized different kinds of miracles. and he said, well, there are different kinds of miracles. He said that psychic and telepathic miracles aren’t where it’s at.

Buddha said the real miracle is instruction in the practice of LoveWisdom, the practice of philosophy as a way of life.

And he said people in general won’t believe that the practice of philosophy can produce the miracles that it produces. They will want to attribute those miracles to some external agent.

Plato saw the same thing, because Socrates could experience altered states of consciousness.

He seemed immune to cold, immune to fear.

He was open to divine inspiration and being guided by mysteries, so that he knew the right thing to do.

Socrates always said, “I don’t know.” But he knew how to listen to the divine voice in him, and he never did anything unjust.

Plato knew that Socrates had achieved his uniqueness through the miracle of instruction.

Socrates was initiated by a priestess, into the mysteries of love. And he had the capacity to enter altered states of consciousness without psychedelics.

Plato thus understood that we need initiation. We need direct experience of the mystery.

A mystic means someone who’s initiated, someone who’s been given direct experience of reality.

And that reality is also mysterious, in the sense that it has an inconceivable quality, and it remains transcendent of ordinary or habitual ways of knowing. We wonderstand such mysteries, in a way that goes beyond ordinary understanding.

Plato seems to have understood that the mysteries had a good structure and that we do have to realize a certain state of mind in order to realize the nature of reality. In other words, for certain kinds of insights, we cannot arrive at them unless we become the kind of person who can do so. Knowledge depends on the knower, and we have to become an exceptional knower in order to know exceptional things.

Whatever process of the Eleusinian Mysteries engaged, whether facilitated by a psychedelic drink or not, it helped people become better knowers. But it didn’t help enough. By itself, these initiations couldn’t make people reliable and exceptional knowers.

This maps onto the central suggestion Rick Strassman makes in his book, DMT and the Soul of Prophecy.

Socrates believed that all the best things that human beings can accomplish are an act of grace. And at the same time, we can earn that grace. That’s what the wisdom traditions teach us—many of them . . . maybe not every single one of them, but many of them do, even the religious ones.

For instance, many Christian and Islamic mystics taught that, of course their prophetic capacities are bestowed by God, but they’re bestowed because of the practice of life that, that prophet engages. So we have to do our part.

And Rick Strassman seems to agree with that. The ancient Hebrew prophets had to live a way of life that was virtuous and holy.

Buddha certainly has this view that if we practice, the miracles will happen. It will still feel like an act of grace because of the holism of the Cosmos. So there’s a way in which it still is an act of grace.

Grace sort of indicates that it’s not up to our ego. Our ego doesn’t get to choose, our ego isn’t in control, but nevertheless, it’s just kind of, this is what’s going to happen. It’s like, if we let go of something and there’s no support under it, it’s going to fall. And that’s kind of what happens to us when we let go—we don’t have any support under there—and we really do let go, then the ego is going to drop out and inspiration’s going to come in.

Meister Eckhart has that view too. We evacuate the ego out of the Soul, so to speak, and that creates this vacuum, this empty space where the divine immediately appears.

Of these many varieties of mystical experience, Plato has his own image. He offers the Path of LoveWisdom as an alternative to deal with the limitations and the spiritual materialisms of the psychedelics, the arts, and the wider culture.

He sees the injustice, he sees the breakdown of democracy, he sees the art scene and all the suffering of individuals and the culture as a whole, and he offers this medicine: This is the medicine that will heal the individual and the culture at the same time.

Anyone can walk this path.

And Plato wanted to find someone in a position of power, because he shared the view that Confucius had, that, if we could find a leader who wants to wants to follow this path of LoveWisdom, they would change the whole society too. A person in the right social position could do a lot to help the culture to heal, and to help all the people in the culture to become what they are.

All of this gets at the vital importance of our contemplation together.

Socrates told the people of his culture that if they didn’t get themselves and their culture on a good path—a path of wisdom, love and beauty—then the culture would not long endure. That was his prophecy. And indeed the culture did not long endure.

That involves a lot of complex history. Many factors. And a just society doesn’t become immune to outside aggression. But at its zenith, an Athenian culture rooted in wisdom, love, and beauty might have gotten other Greek city-states to agree to a lasting peace. We don’t feel competitive with truly wise people, because they have transcended aggression.

Remarkably enough, we find ourselves in a powerfully resonant situation. We’re having a psychedelic Renaissance and an explosion of interest in the self-help-industrial complex. We want some kind of healing and transformation.

We know about some significant problems in this culture. We can’t pretend they don’t exist by talking about how great things are. Because the problems are in our blood, in our organs, in our minds and hearts.

We know we have plastic in our blood, in our lungs. We know we have lead in our bones. We have rocket fuel and other toxins in our water.

We know all these things affect our bodies and our minds. The toxins can lead to cancer and other physical ailments, and they also lead to disturbance in our emotions and our thought. They can incline us to violence and stupidity.

And we know about that violence—the hot violence of mass shootings, and the slow violence of toxicity and pollution.

We know about the injustice and inequality. We know about all the bullshit jobs, the crisis of meaning, the crisis of attention, the crisis of loneliness, the trauma and addiction, and all the rest.

We know about these things at least at a surface level or in an intellectual way, even though we also try to repress and suppress our knowing. And the prophecy I might offer, in line with my lineage and my ancestor Socrates, is that, if we don’t get ourselves on a path of wisdom, love and beauty, the dominant culture will not long endure.

That would come with even greater consequence and tragedy than the fall of Socrates’s culture. Because the dominant culture goes far beyond a few city-states.

The dominant culture has planetary impact. That’s unprecedented: Human ignorance at a grossly obvious planetary scale. Socrates would weep. He just wanted to help end human ignorance, and his cultural inheritors have mainly amplified human ignorance rather than healing it.

As a consequence, if the dominant culture falls apart, organized human life, as we’ve known it, will come undone. We don’t know what that will mean. We can safely suggest it will means mean millions, if not tens or hundreds of millions, of people—possibly more, possibly on the scale of billions—will suffer needlessly and possibly horrifically.

In fact, tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, possibly billions of lives are really at stake. This has nothing to do with doom and gloom. We don’t have to get reactive or panicky. We just want to look clearly and touch the fullness of our situation.

And we want to think through the situation with the benefit of the wisdom traditions of the World, including the wisdom traditions within the dominant culture.

Maybe Plato would say to us, “Go on and have your psychedelic renaissance, but this time don’t forsake LoveWisdom, don’t forsake a holistic philosophy of life.”

We have to remember.

Remembering is integral to a spiritual life. And we need to remember that the original Renaissance signified an awakening of passion for wisdom, love, and beauty. It meant a rebirth of philosophy as a way of life, which means living in attunement with the sacred, living in attunement with wisdom, love, and beauty—that we would walk a path of wisdom, love, and beauty.

That’s what Socrates and Plato wanted for us.

For us to have a psychedelic or any other kind of genuine and helpful Renaissance, that would have to come to the fore and not become suppressed and abandoned.

That made the first Renaissance a total disaster. We gave up on wisdom, and we traded it for knowledge.

We realized that knowledge in a narrow sense is easy to get.

Instead of the passion demanded by a holistic philosophy of life, we said, “Forget all that. Let’s just have science. That will guide us.”

But that was a grave error. Science as we practice it in the dominant culture cannot possibly guide us. It’s totally insufficient, anemic, and dangerous.

We know those dangers. They have come as painful lessons we still refuse to learn.

Science has contributed to the problems that we have. It’s not that the scientists are all innocent, and they’re simply reporting to us what some bad politicians and corporations have done to the world.

No: We couldn’t have the world we have right now—with all its mess, with all the degradation—without science.

And yet we find ourselves ready to make the same mistake the dominant culture has made both historically and in an ongoing way.

If we think we’re going to all take psychedelics and then science and technology will save the planet and the culture for us, it’s not going to happen. Neither psychedelics nor science can save us.

Looking deeply at the central error of the dominant culture—if we could speak metaphorically—we could say the first mistake we made was whatever mistake that led to there having to be a Plato and Socrates. By the time we get to Socrates, we already had a major problem.

Then Plato and Socrates warned us. They said, “Hey, this is not a good situation. We need to heal it.”

We ignored them. And then Greek culture gets lost.

People kept trying, of course. There were streams from the ancient Greek, into the Hellenic, and then into the Roman period. And eventually it gets kind of lost in the dominant.

Then comes the Renaissance. It becomes a chance for rebirth. We could be born again children of Sophia, children of wisdom, children of love, children of beauty. Sophia’s children born again.

But we missed that opportunity. We got seduced by a narrow version of science, and we found out that it’s so much easier to kill a bird and dissect it—it’s so much easier to do that than to find out how to listen to that bird and live well with her.

That’s what we did with everything. It’s so much easier to blow things up, cut them down, dissect them, employ them for instrumental human purpose . . .

So much easier to do all that than to become a wise, compassionate, and beautiful person who knows how to listen to these beings and live well in this World, a joyful person who knows how to participate in this World in a way that furthers the conditions of life, a person who feels thoroughly at home in the World and at peace with themselves and with others.

Becoming that kind of person takes passion and perseverance, and it’s just a lot easier to blow things up. Of course, it only seems easier on the surface. The conquest style of consciousness seems easy because it seems like we can just take whatever we want. But it turns out to create hard situations.

But the path of LoveWisdom bothers the ego. Socrates and Plato proposed an entire life path, and it demanded renouncing things the ego starts to crave and cling to.

In conquest consciousness, we focus on a path of accumulation. We grow our bank account, our social network, our title and position, our wealth and possessions.

Plato and Socrates emphasized the care of the soul. It’s a path of care, not a path of acquisition or accumulation.

Even that basic vision could transform our culture. We could get honest about our lives and realize that we need to embrace the care economy. So many people in our culture have the basic job of taking care of us and the fabricated human ecology.

I have one mug for tea and coffee. Naturally, it’s a horse mug. Someone made that one time, but most of the labor that goes into that mug comes from my daily care of it. We wash and dry our tea cups hundreds of times. So producing the mug arises as one facet of a much larger ecology, and ecology that depends on care.

The energy of care pervades our lives because it belongs so intimately to the nature of our World. The World allows creativity and care to arise in total interwovenness. Human beings separate them.

A wisdom culture functions on the basis of an economy of care. It places care in a central place. Think of all the work that involves care: Nursing and healthcare, teaching, agriculture. We could stop right there, because that’s practically everything essential.

Those professions don’t produce goods. The whole notion of production in the dominant culture expresses nothing so much as the insanity of the culture. And then we take that concept and try to make it the center of our activity.

Then we go down a rabbit hole of delusion and fancy that people on Wall Street produce wealth, and that people in universities produce knowledge. It’s nonsense. Those who teach take care of souls, and they take care of the World. When they fail to see that and also to practice it, the whole culture goes awry.

In any case, how astonishing is it that we have to rethink the economy in order to have an actual renaissance, whether psychedelic or otherwise?

What we call the economy has become so cut off from the soul that it mainly stands as an obstacle to the demands of wisdom, love, and beauty. And the economy becomes just another barrier to entering a holistic philosophy of life. That should stand out as a serious symptom.

Plato meant this path as something that would actually heal and transform individuals while also establishing a just society. Establishing a just society goes totally together with establishing just human beings, human beings expressing the nature of justice—the nature of peace, insight, wisdom, love, beauty.

The wisdom traditions offer us a path of the heart. In the dominant culture we call it LoveWisdom, and that signifies a holism. People can’t be chaotic thinkers and consider themselves on a path of love.

Love isn’t irrational. It might transcend ordinary rationality, but that’s a fragmented view of ourselves. Love doesn’t transcend our total intelligence, but rather it’s the realization of our total intelligence. We can’t realize our total intelligence if we don’t practice our total intelligence, right?

If we want to realize love, and love is the realization of our total intelligence, then we don’t get to realize love until we realize our total intelligence and integrate it.

That all sounds like a lot. And Plato, like so many others in the wisdom traditions, he tells us that this requires initiation, renunciation, extensive learning, and practice.

And all of this sounds like a drag compared to a path of conquest. With conquest consciousness, we have the sense that we can be any kind of crass person at all and still benefit from science, technology, knowledge, and data.

We see this all the time, from the most obvious to the most subtle cases. Clearly, surveillance capitalism operates in an unethical manner, and it benefits tremendously from science, technology, knowledge, and data.

Predators of all kinds benefit from these things, and as we look with care we can see how science, technology, knowledge, and data go completely together with injustice, aggression, inequality, and ecological degradation.

This is our situation. And the question is, Can we experience a renaissance? Can we experience not just a narrow psychedelic renaissance, but can we remember that the roots of the dominant culture go back to this can we do this? Can we re remember. That the roots of our culture go back to this call to return to our soul and to take care of our soul, and to take care of each other and the World we share?

That’s the Socratic call. That’s what this is about.

We need contemplation here, because a lot of people today will probably agree with the spirit of some of what we’re considering. But that doesn’t mean enough of us will put in the work to think through what Plato and Socrates and the other wisdom teachers of the World ask of us.

What these teachers need to tell us matters so much at this critical moment. And we can use all kinds of nice words that make it sound like we know all of this. We can use words like mindset, healing, transformation, revolution, compassion, mindfulness, justice, inclusiveness, and on and on.

We can use a lot of very nice words, and it won’t mean we’re doing the work the wisdom traditions say we need to do. And, some of it, we just don’t want to hear.

If it inconveniences our agenda, then we don’t want to hear about it.

The wisdom traditions in general want us to heal. They also want us to see the ways we can put our healing in tension with spiritual and ecological realities. We can cure all manner of ailment in violation of spiritual and ecological realities, but that won’t give us the healing we seek, the fullest possible healing for ourselves, our cultures, and the World we share.

This can sound scary, because we experience so much suffering, and if we think something can heal us, we don’t want anyone to tell us to take some time and think—not just to check in with some inner voice that we haven’t learned how to differentiate from the ego.

In order for us to heal we need to practice compassion for ourselves, other beings, and the World. We have to come together in genuine dialogue to find out the many ways we can discover and create a real renaissance, a real rebirth in wisdom, love, and beauty, something that would help to heal us and the world at the same time.

We need to come to a close, but it seems important to circle back to something, to at least touch one more aspect of all of this in a way that allows us to hold it in our hearts.

Recall that when Emperor Valentinian wanted to effectively ban the Eleusinian Mysteries, this felt like the end of life for the Greeks. The Mysteries held the whole human race together—and really, we should say, they held the whole of life together. That’s what they had to do with: What holds all of life together.

The mysteries were symbolic, but in a way that goes beyond our habitual sense of symbolism.

Jung once said something important about the symbolic life that bears on our contemplation. It’s a slightly longer passage, and I’ll let you know when we come to the end. Jung said,

You see, [human beings are] in need of a symbolic life—badly in need. We only live banal, ordinary, rational, or irrational things—which are naturally also within the scope of rationalism, otherwise you could not call them irrational. But we have no symbolic life. Where do we live symbolically? Nowhere, except where we participate in the ritual of life. But who, among the many, are really participating in the ritual of life? Very few. And when you look at the ritual life of the Protestant Church, it is almost nil. Even the Holy Communion has been rationalized . . . .

Have you got a corner somewhere in your house where you perform

the rites, as you can see in India? Even the very simple houses there have at least a curtained corner where the members of the household can lead the symbolic life, where they can make their new vows or meditation. We don’t have it; we have no such corner. We have our own room, of course—but there is a telephone which can ring us up at any time, and we always must be ready. We have no time, no place. Where have we got these dogmatic or these mysterious images? Nowhere! We have art galleries, yes—where we kill the gods by thousands. We have robbed the churches of their mysterious images, of their magical images, and we put them

into art galleries. That is worse than the killing of the three hundred children in Bethlehem; it is a blasphemy.

You see, we are in need of a symbolic life—badly in need. Only the symbolic life can express the need of the soul—the daily need of the soul, mind you! And because people have no such thing, they can never step out of this mill—this awful, grinding, banal life in which they are “nothing but.” In the ritual they are near the Godhead; they are even divine. Think of the priest in the Catholic Church, who is in the Godhead: he carries himself to the sacrifice on the altar; he offers himself as the sacrifice. Do we do it? Where do we know that we do it? Nowhere! Everything is banal, everything is “nothing but”; and that is the reason why people are neurotic. They are simply sick of the whole thing, sick of that banal life, and therefore they want sensation. They even want a war; they all want a war. They are all glad when there is a war: they say, “Thank heaven, now something is going to happen—something bigger than ourselves!”

These things go pretty deep, and no wonder people get neurotic. Life is too rational, there is no symbolic existence in which I am something else, in which I am fulfilling my role, my role as one of the actors in the divine drama of life.

I once had a talk with the master of ceremonies of a tribe of Pueblo Indians, and he told me something very interesting. He said, “Yes, we are a small tribe, and these Americans, they want to interfere with our religion. They should not do it,” he said, “because we are the sons of the Father, the Sun. He who goes there,” [and he pointed to the sun]—“that is our Father. We must help him daily to rise over the horizon and to walk over Heaven. And we don’t do it for ourselves only: we do it for America, we do it for the whole world. And if these Americans interfere with our religion through their missions, they will see something. In ten years, Father Sun won’t rise anymore, because we can’t help him anymore.”

Now [when we hear an indigenous person speaking like that, we] may say, that is just a sort of mild madness. Not at all! These people . . . get up in the morning with a feeling of their great and divine responsibility: they are the [children] of the Sun, the Father. And their daily duty is to help the Father over the horizon—not for themselves alone, but for the whole world. You should see these fellows: they have a natural fulfilled dignity. And I quite understood when he said to me, “Now look at these Americans: they are always seeking something. They are always full of unrest, always looking for something. What are they looking for? There is nothing to be looked for!” [And that] is perfectly true. You can see them, these travelling tourists, always looking for something, always in the vain hope of finding something. On my many travels I have found people who were on their third trip round the world-uninterruptedly. Just travelling, travelling; seeking, seeking. I met a woman in Central Africa who had come up alone in a car from Cape Town and wanted to go to Cairo. “What for?” I asked. “What are you trying to do that for?” And I was amazed when I looked into her eyes—the eyes of a hunted, a cornered animal—seeking, seeking, always in the hope of something. I said, “What in the world are you seeking? What are you waiting for, what are you hunting after?” She is nearly possessed; she is possessed by so many devils that chase her around. And why is she possessed? Because she does not live the life that makes sense. Hers is a life utterly, grotesquely banal, utterly poor, meaningless, with no point in it at all. If she is killed today, nothing has happened, nothing has vanished-because she was nothing! But if she could say, “I am the daughter of the Moon. Every night I must help the Moon, my Mother, over the horizon”—ah, that is something else! Then she lives, then her life makes sense, and makes sense in all continuity, and for the whole of humanity. That gives peace, when people feel that they are living the symbolic life, that they are actors in the divine drama. That gives the only meaning to human life; everything else is banal and you can dismiss it. A career, producing of children, are all maya compared with that one thing, that your life is meaningful.

. . . . Of course, what I say is just so many words, but to the [one] who really lives it, it means the whole world. It means more than the whole world, because it makes sense to [us when we live it]. It expresses the desire of the soul; it expresses the actual facts of our unconscious life. When the wise man said, “Nature demands death,” he meant just that. (CW 18, para. 625-31)

Okay. That’s the passage.

We can sense into it with an ecological vision, not constrained by either ordinary time or the literalness of pure rationality. Symbolically speaking, life would become unlivable for the Pueblo Indians Jung met—just as life became unlivable for the Greek people when the Mysteries finally did die out. The World became unlivable.

The Greek world died. Our world may die.

The Sun no longer comes up as it used to, because conquest consciousness did so much to interrupt the rites, rituals, ceremonies, celebrations, and sacraments of genuine wisdom culture, what we could refer to as Nature-Culture.

We can all ask what we think we’re seeking, and what the seeking really means. We can ask ourselves the meaning of our unwellness, and what the meaning of healing could be. We can ask what our culture makes it virtually impossible for us to see. And we can get together in the spirit of wisdom, love, and beauty to help each other see those invisible things.

In the next contemplation we will try to touch briefly on the other two aspects of experience that a holistic philosophy must address, and which we too must deal with in order to maximize the potential of the medicines of our World to bring healing and transformative insight to us and the World at the same time.

If you have questions, reflections, or stories to share about the medicines of our World and your experiences with them, get in touch through dangerouswisdom.org We might be able to bring some of them into a future contemplation.

Until next time, this is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, reminding you that your soul and the soul of the World are not two things—take good care of them.