Picking up the thread of compassion training, as part of A Philosopher's Guide to Working with the Medicines of Our World, we contrast compassion with empathy distress. We also introduce the notion of the tonglen attitude, a special mindset that can empower and liberate our practice with any of the medicines of our World. Finally, we look at one way to understand one aspect of how compassion and tonglen function: a kind of magic mind synchrony in which self-regulation and co-regulation become integrated.

The Most Important Training for Working with the Medicines of Our World: A Philosopher’s Psychedelic Practice Guide

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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.

Today we will wrap up our overview of compassion, and that will include some reflections on tonglen, which comes from a powerful ecology of practice that can transform our lives and the work we do with any of the medicines of the World. Tonglen is in some sense a variety of compassion training, and integrating the standard compassion training with tonglen makes for an incredible medicine that benefits each of us as well as all beings.

Today we continue from our last contemplation, so that means this is part 2 of the most important training we can have to empower our work with the medicines of our World. We emphasized that we need a holistic approach, but we focused on a common ground that can allow us to begin to cultivate that holism, and that’s compassion training.

Since compassion is a skill, and since compassion goes totally together with wisdom and beauty, we need practice and insight in order to properly understand and eventually wonderstand the meaning of compassion. To the extent that we lack wisdom, we lack love, compassion, and beauty. And to the extent that we lack love, compassion, or beauty, we also lack wisdom.

We have to become wise in order to become fully compassionate, and thus truly understand compassion. Compassion cannot exist without wisdom and discernment.

We tried to begin cultivating some level of discernment in our last contemplation by contrasting compassion with empathy. Now, we can deepen our discernment by contrasting compassion with empathic distress or empathy distress.

As we noted, empathy distress presents challenges for all of us. We encounter suffering on a fairly regular basis, even if it’s just from news of climate catastrophe, gun violence, war, and other symptoms of conquest consciousness.

Some of us may have family members, friends, or life partners struggling with a chronic form of suffering. And that too can produce empathy distress in us.

And we also recognized how much this matters for care workers in particular. When our professional work involves exposure to significant suffering on a regular basis, it can create burnout and other symptoms of suffering.

So, especially for care workers of all kinds—therapists, teachers, veterinarians, parents, nurses, and anyone working with the medicines of our World—we want to try to give a sense of how compassion differs from empathy in terms of the distress we can experience with empathy.

As a reminder, we can’t cover every aspect of compassion that would benefit us. It’s important to emphasize that compassion is an important medicine for us all, but it doesn’t stand alone. Our practice of compassion should arise as an aspect of a holistic philosophy of life, and it can work wonders if we engage with it.

As for empathy distress or empathic distress, we can define that as an aversive, depleting, and ultimately self-centered reaction to the suffering of another being. This experience gives rise to a desire to withdraw, to escape, as a way to protect ourselves. It’s a self-protective reaction.

Compassion, on the other hand, is an empowering, nourishing, nurturing, and self-transcending response to suffering. It features a benevolent feeling of love and care, arises in a basic space of positivity, and gives rise to natural and immediate desire to help. There’s an energy of engagement.

Let’s consider some of those contrasting elements appearing in the way we tried to define these two experiences of empathic distress or empathy distress on the one hand, and compassion on the other:

Empathy distress is aversive and depleting. Compassion is empowering, nourishing, and nurturing—both for ourselves and for the one for whom we experience compassion. And it arises with in a space of positivity. It has a never-give-up quality.

Empathy distress is ultimately self-centered. Compassion is self-transcending.

Empathy distress is reactive. Compassion is responsive.

Empathy distress provokes a desire to escape. Compassion evokes in us a willingness to stay, a willingness to engage, and a sincere wish to help. It’s a passionate engagement.

The capacity to stay on the razor’s edge of our lives and to engage with whatever arises is an integral part of a holistic philosophy of life. We don’t have a spiritual life without the cultivated capacity to go to the places that scare us, to let go of what we cling to, and to help even those we think we cannot help—and that includes ourselves.

Often, we find ourselves the biggest lost cause, the one too screwed up to help. Compassion teaches us how to cut through that delusion about ourselves.

A holistic philosophy of life teaches us how to walk the razor’s edge—which might be precarious and uncertain—but to stay at that edge and engage, participate in the whole of life, in the whole of the great mystery.

Because Wisdom is no escape. We’re not going to escape her. Sophia, Wisdom, is everywhere. We’re not separate from her. And she can take the form of a medicine or a poison. She can take the form of a wave or a shark.

This learning to stay that compassion helps us to practice and make real, this opening of our capacity for engagement, comes with a surprising consequence, something counterintuitive to our own ignorance, and that is:

As we practice, we find out that our perception and our discernment can increase while our suffering decreases at the same time.

Our habitual reaction is to withdraw from pain, and to try and distract ourselves. But one of the most important sets of findings in our neuroscience is that a person with training from a holistic philosophical tradition doesn’t have to react like that.

We can take a totally untrained subject, and we take a person with even relatively fragmented training that derives from a holistic philosophy of life, and we can inflict pain on both of them. And what we tend to find is that,

—in the untrained person, when they experience pain, their perceptual centers may effectively close down, and at the same time, their suffering increases

—but in the person with some training—maybe meditation training or compassion training—their perceptual centers open up, and yet they are far less bothered by the experience.

With proper training, we become far more aware, but far less bothered. And in the ideal case, we simply stop suffering, even though we may still experience pain.

We see this in the natural world too. Many beings there demonstrate this.

We’re going over all of this, because of the fact that compassion training is about harm reduction, and even beyond harm reduction, it’s about mutual liberation—the mutual illumination, mutual nourishment, and mutual liberation of all beings.

And all of this has the most practical dimensions, on a personal, interpersonal, and global scale.

Empathy distress could be one source of what people refer to as toxic positivity. If we don’t know our capacity to turn toward and work with our own suffering or the suffering we encounter in the World, then we may pretend we have no suffering in us at all, and also pretend there’s none in the World—

and we may also try and keep away anyone else who doesn’t similarly deny their own suffering and the suffering of others. We don’t want to hear it.

The reason we don’t want to hear it is that we don’t know how to handle it. The ego says, “I don’t know how to handle one more negative thing, so I’d rather hear something superficial but seemingly positive than engage with anything substantial that comes with a challenge, I don’t want to engage with any aspect of the World that comes with something difficult to face.”

In our relationships, if our friends and loved ones don’t know how to take good care of their suffering or even our suffering, then we can begin to engage in various forms of avoidance and even subtle or overt kinds of dishonesty—because we don’t want to trigger them.

If we know a friend or loved one can’t handle discomfort—if they’ve taught us that—then we will try to keep all discomfort at bay. We’ll try to keep it away from them, but then we end up living some kind of delusion.

Think about how all of this relates to an ethics of consciousness. What is our ethical obligation to show up for our loved ones in a way that helps them? What states of being help our friends and loved ones? What states of being help strangers, non-human beings, and the Earth.

Many of us have had friends or partners who regularly showed us that they couldn’t deal with challenges. Every challenge was like a nervous breakdown.

Some of us know that we too have behaved like people our partners or friends couldn’t rely on. We didn’t know how to work with a challenging situation, and so we made things miserable for ourselves and for those we supposedly love.

Non-human beings know this about us too. They know we can be so unreliable. We lose our temper, we live out of fear and craving, and in general our way of being conscious degrades the ecologies we all depend on.

Why does our culture not teach us how our own heart, mind, body, and World actually function?

And we just spoke about the irony of all of this: It turns out that, if we were trained, we could turn toward the difficulty and not suffer so much.

It’s the not looking at it that hurts worse. Not turning toward the pain hurts worse than turning toward it. But our ingrained reactivity is to pull away from pain, and begin to shut down our perception while ramping up our suffering.

And this happens not just with our own experience and in our relationships with friends and partners. It happens in relation to the World on larger scales and as a whole.

Globally, empathy distress has serious consequences in relation to injustice, inequality, and climate collapse.

When I taught in the university, it seemed to me that I couldn’t ethically teach a course in today’s context without some acknowledgement of climate catastrophe and various other forms of ignorance and injustice.

But how could I possibly talk to young people about these issues without preparing them, without showing them their capacity to look at reality, and to work with whatever is arising—however scary or overwhelming it may appear to the ego?

Everyone on the planet carries the consequences of human ignorance in their body. We all have the toxicity in us, and some of us have a lot more of it than others. And we sense the degradation.

And we miss our friends, the wild animals of our distant past. We miss them. We miss the vast forests, the clean rivers, lakes, and oceans—ah . . . once upon a time, we could just go to the river and drink the wild water—we miss the wolves and wild horses roaming vast areas, the incredible populations of birds that once blocked out the sun as they migrated.

We even miss the night sky, that so few of us experience the way our ancestors did, because of all the light pollution.

And we’ve lost meaning and magic. We’ve lost intimate participation in life.

So much absence, loss, and disconnection that we can sense. The soul knows it.

Something in us grieves. And we carry a real burden of suffering. That’s in addition to whatever terrible things happened to us altogether with that catastrophe: Childhood abuse, addiction, having to go to war, struggling in countless ways.

We carry a double burden. There are things we are doing to the World, and there are things that have been done to us.

And some of our suffering also comes from the fact that the soul senses how we all participate in this—or we could say the vast majority of us participate in it.

No one wants to think of themselves as responsible for the situation we see. It’s too painful.

And we also have widespread addiction to the dominant culture itself. We have lots of addiction within the pattern of insanity, such as with alcohol and opioid use. But we’re also addicted TO the dominant culture.

We have become stuck in this pattern of insanity, and we know—we know—that we will have to give something up to heal the world. No one wants to hear that—especially in the U.S.

There’s a part of us that doesn’t want to give anything up at all. Yet there’s no wisdom tradition that tells us we can become wise without giving up ignorance.

Every tradition talks about renunciation in some form, and that process of becoming the phoenix in the fire.

Not anything encumbered. It’s not about becoming a naked ascetic. It’s about that archetypal image of the phoenix, letting burn away what isn’t real so we can be reborn.

We have to let go of things the ego clings to , but the ego—at an individual and cultural level—clings to the patterns of ignorance that perpetuate the dominant culture.

And for many of us, there’s a fear about what we may have to let go of: our laptops, our cell phones, our trips to far-flung places. We don’t want to let go. So we decide we still get to have cars, but they’ll be electric, and that’ll be fine—magic of Disney, and electric cars will be free from having any negative impact on the World at all.

Compassion teaches us how to face all of this—all of these things we’re talking about at a personal, interpersonal, and global level.

It teaches us to see our kinship with all beings, including people who might be on the other side of our political or economic aisle. We start to directly sense how we’re all in this together.

And compassion of necessity includes the cultivation of wisdom too, so that we get more and more skillful and creative about how to dissolve these challenges and cultivate the whole of life onward in a good way, a vitalizing way.

One final bit about compassion before we work our way into tonglen.

As part of a holistic philosophy of life, the cultivation of compassion goes completely together with the cultivation of other profound spiritual attitudes called immeasurables. Those immeasurables are peace, love, healing, joy—traditionally, and we could respectfully add deep trust and great wonder. If we cultivate compassion cut off from these other attitudes, we have a fragmented practice.

These attitudes have the name immeasurable because both their extent and their benefits have no bounds. It’s like saying compassion and the related attitudes and skills are immeasurably good, and that they know no bounds.

They themselves are immeasurably good, and they reveal our own immeasurable goodness.

We need our attitudes to accord with reality. This is part of the ethics of consciousness, that certain attitudes sing in harmony with the great mystery, and certain other attitudes create dissonance in us because they lack attunement with spiritual and ecological realities.

It’s as if the Cosmos is a symphony, and the immeasurables are the feeling of its music. When we train in the immeasurables, we allow our being to sing in harmony with the Cosmos. We become a sacred songline in the mystery, and we resonate with the whole.

As we begin to sense this, we begin to realize that we need a practice of attunement, a training for heart, mind, body, and World that attunes us to this music, attunes us to the peace, love, healing, joy, deep trust, and great wonder that we ourselves are because reality itself is.

These attitudes, and the practices that cultivate them, then become integral to our approach to the whole of life, including work with any of the medicines of our World.

We speak of them as a practice because they involve simple yet precise training and experience that unleash these powerful attitudes of mind, these Cosmic attunements of the soul.

When we practice them, these attitudes prove essential to working skillfully with our lives and any of the medicines of our World—

perhaps especially so when it comes to psychedelic medicines, which have so much to do with our mental, emotional, and spiritual attitude. This kind of goes along with set and setting.

What is the set? We can train it. It’s not just a narrow intention, but it’s the set of mind, the style of mind.

As we touched on at the start of this contemplation, these medicines can bring up some challenging experiences, and compassion, along with equanimity, joy, love, deep trust, and great wonder can help us to work with challenging experiences in ever more skillful and creative ways.

They can even head off the feeling of challenge before it arises, so that we find ourselves increasingly capable of maintaining a space of joy and peace even as we turn toward difficult things.

We can cultivate these states knowing that these states are ethically good and vitalizing, and part of our healing. These states are themselves a powerful medicine.

We thereby bring medicine to the medicine work. If we want to work with horse medicine, then we can bring our mind and heart medicine to that work. Bring love and compassion medicine to the horse medicine, or whatever kind of medicine we work with.

All of this is the ethics of consciousness.

Okay, as we make our way to discussing the basics of tonglen, let’s spiral back to the aspect of compassion that has to do with how the states of others affect us. Whether working with medicine or not, the states of other people can affect us, sometimes significantly.

When it comes to the states of others, some people want to try to protect themselves, to use protective herbs, stones, talismans, and so on. And if we feel the need to do that, we should do it.

And at the same time, in addition to those sorts of measures—or even, when we feel ready, in place of such measures—we can use the power of compassion to transmute the states of others from negativity to positivity. We don’t have to just bounce that energy off, as if using a shield against it. Rather, we can actively transform the negativity into positivity—in our own experience as well.

So, when we feel angry, we can see that anger clearly, and liberate that energy. The way anger habitually arises, it’s encumbered and unskillful. We can liberate that energy.

The spiritual traditions teach us that we can do that.

We need that kind of approach for our everyday life as well as in our work with medicines.

We don’t want to have to relate with our child or our spouse as someone we can’t be with unless we wear a protective talisman. But their experiences can affect us, and we don’t want to simply take on their stress, their anxiety, their fear, their toxic positivity, or any of their suffering. If we take on any of their confusion or suffering, we become far less capable of loving and supporting them in the best ways possible.

It would be great if we could just become totally liberated right in this moment. Right now. Because a person at the level of a sage or an enlightened being becomes immune to negative states in others, and even immune to attempts to use psychic energies against them.

We can see this in the archetype of the Buddha, which gives us a beautiful image of the transformational capacity of wisdom, love, and beauty. When Buddha sat under the tree and began to wake up, Mara launched a violent assault. He didn’t want anyone to escape from the matrix.

So Mara launches this vast army of demon warriors—fierce, horrifying beings—and these demon warriors launch thousands of spears, arrows, knives, and so on directly at Buddha. But as all those weapons approach Buddha, they become transformed into flowers.

We see that same image in a different form in the movie, The Matrix, when the bullets can no longer reach Neo. He doesn’t need to protect himself anymore, he doesn’t even have to dodge the bullets, because he has seen into the nature of the delusion, and he’s transcended the whole thing. So he doesn’t need a shield. He has changed everything.

But most of us still have that awakened nature buried. And on this side of enlightenment, we may feel that we want to use our protection protective objects and processes.

And the wisdom traditions have a place for that too. They sometimes modify it a bit, to more directly connect it to the magic of our awakened nature. It’s holistic, and it’s a teaching and an opportunity for liberation.

For instance, the Buddhist tradition turns the protective imagery into a vision of our awakened nature. So, as we use the image for protection, it also teaches us what we are. It integrates wisdom, love, and beauty.

It’s not like holding a stone that does the work of protecting us. We can do that if we need to.

But this other kind of protective practice liberates those very protective energies in us, so that we begin to see that we ourselves are the protective energy, we ourselves are the energy of compassion, wisdom, love, beauty.

Maybe I can record one of these meditations someday. One of them involves creating a magical shield around us, but we do this in a way that we can see our own enlightened energy and awareness. Our own enlightened intelligence does the work of transmuting the negative energies into positivity.

We learn how to make the shield that Buddha used when Mara attacked him—which was not a physical barrier, but the energy of awareness, with its infinite wisdom, love, and beauty that transforms negativity into positivity. Or we could say that we learn to be like Neo, and we run the Matrix ourselves. And we do this in a way that helps us to see that we already have Buddha’s same capacity or Neo’s same capacity.

Perhaps the most important thing at the beginning with practices like this is to get crystal clear that we’re not taking in any of this negative energy into our personal self—into our body, mind, or soul—and we can learn that when any negative energy arises, we can immediately direct it into a transcendent wisdom, love and beauty.

It’s like an infinite wellspring of wisdom, love, and beauty, and we send any negativity from ourselves, or from others, into that infinite wellspring, and it becomes transmuted it into the very antidote we need, or that they need, for healing and transformative insight.

Some again, this is described further Dangerous Wisdom resources page. What we’re talking about now in terms of transmuting or liberating negative energies is more in the section with the tonglen practices. And that practice goes altogether with compassion practice.

Tonglen is an element in a holistic mind training practice, and we can learn the basics for the benefit of our own spiritual development, as well as for the sake of helping others.

We need to approach it with a holistic spirit—we keep saying that, but we need to engage with something equivalent to the mind training that it belongs to, but we can begin to learn the practice if we approach it with care and reverence.

We’ve spoken about how compassion practice can help us understand our capacity to turn toward pain, suffering, and even our fear. And we should touch on that last one a little more clearly in relation to tonglen.

When we work with tonglen, ideally we have entered into an organized training of the heart, mind, body, World, and Cosmos. Tonglen relates to a series of crystalizations of wisdom that we would learn and experiment with, and we would work with tonglen as part of that learning, experimentation, and experience.

The practice of tonglen depends on a special attitude. That attitude sees every moment as a gateway to love and liberation, and that attitude helps us to welcome states with a great deal of energy in them.

Sometimes, when we experience something intense, especially if it feels negative, the ego feels overwhelmed and just wants out.

The tonglen attitude says, “Wow. This is a lot of energy. If all of this energy could get channeled into liberation right now, that would be a potentially huge satori or huge awakening. Let’s put all this energy to good use, and turn it into freedom.”

And the basic idea is that suffering anywhere can become liberation everywhere.

Tonglen also applies to positive experiences too. We can work with positive experiences with as much skill as we can with challenging experiences. A holistic practice is integrated like that.

This attitude can give us a lot of support when we work with the medicines of our World, not least because some of these medicines engage with people in a way that feels like they put a kind of pressure on the psyche, so that things come to the fore, thus allowing us to face them.

With ayahuasca, for instance, the vine is often thought of as the principle teacher, because the vine often brings a person’s issues to the fore via discomfort and a purgative energy.

Similarly, when the Psychedologist, Leia Freedwoman, appeared on Dangerous Wisdom, she spoke about helping people work with cannabis this way—allowing the plant to evoke from the psyche.

In a way, we could say some of these medicines can overwhelm the ego’s defenses enough for a certain level of healing and insight to arise—they break up the habitual patterning that constitutes the ego’s defenses, and those defenses include keeping certain things repressed or suppressed.

And the ego can respond to the situation in a variety of ways. It won’t just go away. Rather the ego will reassert manipulation and control in the most subtle ways—because the ego is partly unconscious, so it can control things without our awareness of it. We just don’t see it.

That includes when it blinks out for awhile. It’s another form of controlling the experience. The ego blinks out for a moment, and we may think we experienced enlightenment or some other profound state.

In any case, the states and the experiences that arise when we work with the medicines of the World can be quite intense. And it’s an ethical obligation to begin to learn together how to work with them ever more skillfully, including going to real teachers who can teach us how to work with our lives in general—our whole lives, including the intense experiences working with medicines and also intense experience and ordinary experiences living our daily lives.

How do we work with our suffering, and with the intense things that can come up in our daily lives, as well as things that come up in more extreme situations, such as working with medicines? How can all of this become the gateway to liberation? A holistic philosophy of life can give us the most helpful answers to such questions.

If we don’t enter into a holistic path of life, then we can end up just undergoing our life, white knuckling our way through everything—going through an ordeal with no education around it, no training on how we can get better at working with it,

not just better for ourselves, but get better at working with it in ways that benefit the whole community of life.

And we need to begin to sense things on that scale, to participate in the whole of life, and not just follow our personal agendas.

Following our personal agendas, we can figure out lots of things, but it tends to be in pieces or fragments of wisdom.

We can figure out things like working with our breathing, or beginning to experience the dialogue of the soul . . . people may talk about feeling into their body, or checking in with an inner knowing, and many other things. A lot of fragments can emerge, and it can feel like we have a nice big collection. But life isn’t a collection of fragments.

People speak about these fragments in different ways—sometimes because they don’t realize how much work has been done on these things in other traditions. We can stumble into some of these things for ourselves and discover, for instance, that we don’t have to remain stuck in our habitual patterns of thought. And that’s wonderful.

At the same time, we need a more holistic and comprehensive view, so we can all get better and better at unfolding the mystery, and so that we can cultivate the whole of life onward in the most vitalizing ways.

So much depends on us now, and we can enjoy incredible benefits if we turn to the thousands of years of experimentation and experience we find in the wisdom traditions.

Why try and reinvent the wheel, when we can find not only many wheels, but excellent vehicles for carrying us along pathways that are well-known and yet still depend on our uniqueness to bring them to life in the present context?

As we learn and study, we become more skillful, and we can begin to notice the subtle ways that the ego remains in control, and we can become more aware of the larger pattern of insanity of the culture. We can also become more insightful and visionary about how to dispel that larger pattern of insanity, and thus how to help the whole community of life.

We have to become sensitive to all of this, because spiritual materialism means we will take spiritual principles and practices—even ones we think saved our life . . . we’ll think, “Oh, this made such a big shift, this was so important to me . . .”—nevertheless, the ego and the culture begin to manipulate everything so that it doesn’t go too far.

The ego can manipulate these experiences to the extreme of getting us to think we don’t need any more teachings. We touched on that when we spoke about two of the ego’s favorite ways to avoid LoveWisdom: to claim LoveWisdom is too much for us, and to claim we are too much for it.

We need compassion for both aspects, and that includes cultivating an awareness of and compassion for our fear. Because we sometimes fail to understand the extent to which conscious and unconscious fear keeps us away from our own liberation.

For some people working with psychedelics and other medicines, it may prove helpful to listen to the first series of contemplations in the Dangerous Wisdom podcast. They focus on facing our fear of reality. We need a lot of compassion for ourselves and for each other in relation to the sheer terror that can seize us in the face of reality and its profound mysteries.

This terror arises even in the most sincere people who want to know the nature of reality, and have sought it out—and they nevertheless can get seized by terror.

In light of this terror, it seems comical how gung-ho some people can get about psychedelics. And that gung-ho attitude allows them to present themselves—both to others and to themselves—as someone who wants to know the nature of reality.

And of course something in us all does want us to realize the true nature of self and reality.

But when we don’t understand and won’t admit the unconscious dynamics involved, we don’t have any clue how the ego can take our hunger for reality and manipulate it into further delusions.

Sometimes in our gung-ho attitude, we can do something that seems very big—like taking a massive dose of psychedelics. People even refer to this as a “heroic” dose, which apparently signifies that we must be very heroic to take so much medicine. So we get to label ourselves a hero. And yet we don’t see that the ego will not relinquish control so easily. Sure, we might get flooded,

But the ego wants credit for heroism, so it engineers this heroic dose scenario, knowing full well that it may experience beautiful visions that will fascinate it, and knowing that if anything gets too intense, it can simply blink out—leaving people with the sense that something very spiritual has happened.

Sometimes that happens, and we kind of go unconscious. Other times this happens, and we have mistaken the temporary stopping of our default patterns of thought for some kind of ego death or enlightenment.

People may think they have discovered the great secrets of the Cosmos. Sometimes they got glimpses of things too vast to fully metabolize. So, in some sense they may have seen a lot, and in another sense they also saw only a little.

Sometimes, as we said, we might experience a pause in habitual noise, and we may become enchanted by the silence and spaciousness that the wisdom traditions teach, not as the final aim, but as the proper beginning.

So, the experience we have with the medicines of our World can be very much the possible beginning of our practice—and it’s not always the most stable beginning. But we can mistake for some kind of end, rather than a beginning, as if we understand a great deal, when in fact we just approached the starting point.

And this can feel deflating. If we think we know a lot or have achieved a lot, and then what the wisdom traditions tell us can feel uncomfortably humbling and distinctly un-heroic, especially as they point out that we don’t know how to enter some of these more subtle and exceptional states without something we relate to as external to ourselves.

But we have tried to take a much more optimistic attitude. We can recall the words of David Dunning here: “people tend to do what they know and fail to do that which they have no conception of . . . People fail to reach their potential as professionals, lovers, parents and people simply because they are not aware of the possible.”

Once we let go of what we think we know, we can open ourselves up more fully to what we are not yet aware of as a real possibility for us. There is much more potential in ourselves and our World than the dominant culture will allow. We can break free from this pattern of insanity, and realize possibilities we currently do not understand.

And all of this relates with compassion, because that’s the proper place for our training to begin. We can’t leap into intense states and potentials without training. As we said before, we can’t go to teachers in a holistic lineage and demand entrance into wild states of mind.

They’re going to say, “We need to talk about ethics, and you need to learn some practices of the heart.”

We need compassion for others and also for ourselves, and the dominant culture has made that extra challenging for many of us. We need compassion for our egoic manipulations, our fear, our desire to be heroic, our desire to know ourselves, the grief and trauma we carry, our need to heal . . . we need compassion for all of that.

We need equanimity too, so that we neither crave nor cling to big medicine experiences, and so that we touch a profound sense of peace that we can allow to infuse more and more of our lives.

We need all of the holistic practices related to peace, love, healing, joy, deep trust, and great wonder.

And let us emphasize again that anyone working in a support role with psychedelics—

as a therapist, a sitter, someone helping to hold a circle, someone working with integration, someone who pour medicine, or any other capacity—

if we support people working with the medicines of our World, and maybe especially psychedelics,

the practice of compassion, which includes both what we can call the immeasurables and the related practice of tonglen and its holistic mind training—

these practices can make a powerful and empowering impact on you and those you seek to support.

So, whether we work with these medicines as one seeking healing and insight, or we work with them as one seeking to facilitate for others, this common ground can support us all. And in the end, we need to break down all the dualities here, and sense our mutuality.

In some situations in our lives, a practice like tonglen or the practice of compassion and the other immeasurables become the only thing we can offer someone. If someone is going through an intense experience while working with a medicine, sometimes the best thing we can offer is the practice of compassion for them, and we might not have anything better to offer.

We don’t have to say a word to them. And our practice can be so healing for them and for us. And we don’t get caught in empathy distress. Instead, we deepen our own insight.

As we said before: Suffering anywhere can become liberation everywhere, if we know how to work with it.

Another situation like this arises when we go to someone’s sickbed or even their deathbed. When my mother was dying, there was nothing I could do to stop her death, but I could practice compassion for her, and this kind of practice has concrete effects. It affected everyone in that hospital room, and it was a blessing to give my own mother the gift of that kind of presence in her final moments of this life.

I have seen the powerful effects of these practices in so many situations. I have sometimes seen such astonishing things that I found myself a born-again philosopher. We can practice deeply, and think we understand the practice, but then we witness something that seems so wondrous that we become a born-again child of Sophia.

Because the dominant culture trains us all to ignore, marginalize, repress, and suppress the magic of the World, and these kinds of teachings—compassion, tonglen, mind training—these kinds of teachings and practices presence the magic of the World. That’s why Buddha said this is the supreme miracle: Instruction.

Among other things, we should note the nonduality of self-regulation and co-regulation. Some aspects of this seem less magical than others. But they definitely bring to light the interwovenness of all things.

One of the first dominant culture scientific studies I remember seeing about this was done by Ulman Lindenberger and colleagues. It’s an open access publication, so you can find it on the web. It’s called, “Brains swinging in concert: cortical phase synchronization while playing guitar.”

That’s a lovely title. It’s funny, because the dominant culture tries to locate everything in the brain. It’s brains swinging in concert, not minds or souls. And obviously they tried to take measurements from brains, by putting electrodes on people’s heads.

Synchrony happens spontaneously in a variety of systems. In our brains, different regions can coordinate if they start to operate in the same frequency. So, rather than sending some kind of message from one area to another, different areas coordinate just by synchronizing their activity.

This also seems to happen between the brain and our muscles when we perform certain kinds of engaged tasks.

Lindenberger and colleagues showed that it happens between two different people as well.

The study used pairs of musicians playing a jazz melody together. The researchers found the brains of the musicians synchronized as they prepared to play and also as they initiated the melody together.

That ruptures the barriers between us. The brain inside your skull is right now synchronizing with the brain in my skull at the time of this recording. As you picture people playing music, and you think about their heads with little electrodes stuck to them, you and I synch up.

That’s in general how LoveWisdom goes. Our minds have to synch up with the minds of our ancestors, the minds of the saints, sages, shamans, and enlightened beings who have taught these powerful practices and invited us to share in their insights, their wisdom, compassion, and grace. As we contemplate these things together, we all synchronize with each other, and with our wisest ancestors.

Since the study by Lindenberger, others have begun to explore the varieties of coherence between what we refer to as individuals. But mind is ecological. Working with the medicines of our World involves practicing with larger ecologies of mind.

Joy Hirsch has done some interesting work here too, including a demonstration of synchrony triggered through eye contact. When we gaze into each other’s eyes in the right way, we can create synchrony between us.

In certain wisdom traditions of the world, teachers teach in part by silently gazing into the eyes of their students. Sadly, we find new-agey versions of this, in which somewhat confused people try gazing meaningfully into other people’s eyes to show off how enlightened they think they are. And at one level, they will succeed in creating synchrony just because it’s a natural phenomenon. We don’t want to mistake the synchrony for spiritual power, but under the right circumstances, gazing into the eyes of a friend, our life partner, or a deeply cultivated teacher can facilitate healing and insight.

The point here is that we have access to the magic of the World right where we stand. It’s a participatory Cosmos, and when we begin to radiate the luminosity of our Nature, and when our soul sings out the music of peace, love, compassion, joy, deep trust, and great wonder, it affects others. When we work with the medicines of our World, including when we facilitate others in their encounters with these medicines, it makes a difference when we can bring the energy of the immeasurables and the insight and skills from tonglen and a holistic training of mind, heart, body, World, and Cosmos.

Anyone working with the medicines of our World, and that includes anyone supporting a psychedelic medicine process, and anyone working with psychedelic medicines, can benefit from compassion training.

And perhaps we will come to consider it an ethical obligation to teach people how to work skillfully with states of consciousness, how to work skillfully with their suffering and with their joy—because compassion practice is not just about working with our suffering, but getting in touch with the basic space of joy that belongs to everyone. It should be part of basic education.

It makes so much more sense to teach people as much as possible about their own mind and its capacities as part of education, and especially as part of preparation for working with any medicine that can manifest mind.

Horse medicine can manifest mind. Music can manifest mind. Dance can manifest mind.

Whatever medicine we work with, shouldn’t we know about how our mind works, what its capacities are, what it can do, how it becomes most skillful, and how we become most susceptible to insight?

And, as we have considered, psychedelic medicines like psilocybin, DMT, LSD, and so on, don’t seem to produce any experience that a person cannot produce without them.

Knowing as much as we can about our mind, heart, body, world, and Cosmos before we work with the medicines of our World allows us to realize far deeper realizations, and open up more of the potentials of these medicines to heal self and World at the same time.

Tonglen and compassion practice come as part of a holistic and skillfully elaborated and tested program of mind training. We repeat that so much because in some ways it’s unheard of in the dominant culture, where we barely have any organizing images at all of a healthy mind and a healthy culture.

Nowadays we sit around waiting for positive psychologists, social workers, and neuroscientists to wave around some fragment of the wisdom traditions, as if they had discovered it themselves or purely by means of modern science, and then they’ll tell us how we can live well and be happy.

But we’ve got thousands of years of tradition around the world that already know these things, and in key ways know them better, more holistically, than our social workers and positive psychologists.

We’re not trying to make fun of these people. There are people working in psychology, neuroscience, and social work who sincerely and passionately try to help the World, and we’re not trying to take anything away from them.

We’re saying, let’s get more rigorous and more integrated. If we want to help, we have some work to do. Holism is hard for us because we live in a context of fragementation.

We can turn to a holistic philosophy of life to start developing a holistic and skillful mind and culture. We can enter a program of training heart, mind, body, and World. And a skillful mind, heart, and body will consistently do better than an unskillful one, including in the sometimes intense contexts of working with the medicines of our World.

We owe it to ourselves, to each other, to the medicines we value, and to the ecologies we all depend on to enter into a holistic philosophy of life, a holistic practice that nourishes the World.

If you do nothing else with this contemplation, please learn the basics of compassion practice, which includes the other immeasurables, and tonglen as well.

In conclusion on this topic, we should note here that Buddha taught compassion practice to students of his who were afflicted by demons.

In Buddhist philosophy, a demon is ultimately anything that obstructs liberation. That makes it a psychological, metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical term.

The tradition accepts non-human entities, and we saw that in our first contemplation of The Buddha Molecule. But the tradition also invites us to see demons as something like a symptom of suffering in our own soul and in our World.

Today, with our contemporary psychology, when we see someone with a certain kind of experience or set of experiences, we might refer to it as trauma, or as PTSD, or Complex PTSD.

But we didn’t invent trauma. The dominant culture has elaborated trauma in unprecedented ways. Nevertheless, some of Buddha’s students would have experienced trauma, and he prescribed compassion practice to help heal it.

And today, we find this verified by our own science. That’s part of the medicine we inherit from the wisdom traditions. Even mindfulness offers us medicine for trauma.

We will return to that later.

For now, let’s close with a final acknowledgement of the common ground we tried to enter into and cultivate together. That common ground supports the whole of life, and it allows us to dissolve the barriers between us, to sense our mutuality, and liberate its creative potential.

We will bring to a close for now our philosopher’s guide to working with the medicines of our World. We need to look further. It’s not just that we only scratched the surface, but we long ago noted that a holistic philosophy of life has to address the three major dimensions of all our experience: What we do, How we do it, and Why.

We have focused a lot on the What. That’s where we begin, because the What includes ethics.

Since the What, Why, and How come totally interwoven, we inevitably touched on all three. But we should take a little break, since we have reflected a lot on this subject. We can return to it after we let it germinate, and we’ll support that germination with some other things to contemplate together.

I did say I would mention some extra resources if you’d like to learn more about compassion and tonglen:

Shantideva, "The Way of the Bodhisattva"

Thupten Jinpa, "A Fearless Heart: How the Courage to Be Compassionate Can Transform Our Lives"

Pema Chodron, "Start Where You Are"

Chogyam Trungpa, "Training the Mind"

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.