Tag: Trailer

Impeccable you

In te gr at io n

It’s not enough to simply do good as psychedelic therapist. Better look good on the CCTV too

This is jazz musician Sun Ra, definitely don’t turn up for a client’s first session dressed like this. Unless it’s your thing and they totally expect it.

“The whole field of psychedelic therapy is at stake,” says Ethics of Caring author Kylea Taylor.

Taylor graduated in marriage and family counselling, started on addiction services in 1970s, and worked in the transpersonal sector since the mid-1980s. I should think she’s seen it all.

“We have to be impeccable, like supreme court justices – not just what we are doing but what it looks like we are doing.” An attitude bordering on the priestly seems to be required of the would-be 21st century shaman.

Back at the ancient initiation, everybody in the village was in attendance and could keep vigil on one another: “Likewise in a holotropic breath work session where there are several sitters, and the issue of substance use is void,” says Taylor. The very modern trend for online ceremonies, with huddles, couples and individuals on a video call, offers a robust container of sorts, if a slightly dystopian one.

“The role requires impeccable preparation for the client’s work in an extraordinary state”

I pointed out during the Q&A session after a Vital webinar on harm prevention at dance festivals, etiquette between ravers developed organically and quickly in the heady early days of underground, intentional, ceremonial, group sacramental MDMA usage, during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

That seems like very long ago. In the psychedelic therapy rooms, a new code of behaviour must be established during an age when there are few universal codes; and this in itself has become so confusing that it’s tempting just to assume everyone is following ours. Plus get terribly upset when we find out they aren’t.

No wonder ‘trust’ has become the professional buzzword of choice. Fortune magazine just launched a newsletter dedicated entirely to the topic of trust earlier this summer, offered to subscribers every Sunday so the 1% can enjoy a hit of piety via smartphone. Companies where the staff trust leadership work quicker and make more money.

“Trauma comes up for healing when people feel safe and the time is right”

But reputation marketing firm Edelman’s latest Global Trust Barometer is titled ‘World in Trauma’ and declares ‘double digit trust inequality in 13 out of 14 countries’ meaning the mass population distrusts institutions significantly more than the ‘informed population’. The latter is not defined, but we all get the idea. This gap has reached record levels in the UK and France.

With even daytime UK TV fitness coach Joe Wicks threatening to “do ayahuasca” the mass population of a world in trauma are likely to turn up at your informed psychedelic clinic. And they probably won’t trust you, but they do want to, and it’s downright key that they do. Because “the extraordinary state makes clients feel even less safe,” reminds Taylor.

“Trauma comes up for healing when people feel safe and the time is right,” says Taylor, a highly qualified transpersonal psychologist, kundalini energy expert, and holotropic breath work coach.

“The role requires impeccable preparation for the client’s work in an extraordinary state,” adds Taylor, “If we’re aware of ourselves and behave in an impeccable way then we’re in the best place.”

Attention to both detail and the bigger picture, following through on all assurances including paperwork, accepting how challenging processes unfold and their use to the inner healer, are all tips from the psychedelic ethicist who helped sculpt the MAPS Code of Ethics and more.

“You don’t have to be perfect, because no-one is, but you should be compatible and do whatever comes to mind to protect the space. Wish the client truly well on their journey, through your actions as well as words.” Generating and expressing goodwill is apparently one of the three pillars of trust, alongside competency and reliability – and that goes back to Aristotle. If you need to pull out someone more on-brand, there’s always Huxley: “Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced.”

June 27, 2022
Kool-Aid Corner #10

To finish: trippy clippings, merry pranks, and psychedelic student life

Graph of the Week

“There are many other ways of acheiving altered states,” says Kylea Taylor, Grof Foundation therapist and psychedelic ethics expert. Here’s trip playlist maetsro, Guided Imagery and Music therapy inventor Helen Bonny’s handy guide to them:

From: The Use of Music in Psychedelic (LSD) Psychotherapy, Helen L. Bonny, Walter N. Pahnke, Journal of Music Therapy, Volume 9, Issue 2, Summer 1972

My bookshelf weighs a ton

Notable new purchases for the occult library. Strictly second hand snap-ups only. This week: Slaine: The Horned God by Pat Mills and Simon Bisley

Got it from America for £25 plus slow P&P here’s some 2011 editions for £300+

Celtic myth reinterpreted by one of UK comics’ greatest minds, illustrated by future fanboy favourite Simon Bisley.

This has just been re-released. But don’t be fooled, the new one’s got crappy matt pages. The 2011 original dust jacket edition and the 2014 second printing have gloss pages. It’s chock-full of inspiration for young fellows growing up, like this one direct from the lips of the Goddess herself: “The Horned God is nor afraid of death, of losing control… he sees the ridiculousness of taking the wheel of life seriously. The humour of death is his.” A bit much to take in aged 16 during the late 80s but it put a generation on the right track.

Next issue: Core module two Psychedelic Therapies continues with ethics training on the edge of reality

June 26, 2022
More mushroom tea, vicar?

Approach

Savvy brits in the space are sussed to self-care. But the vulnerable are left behind

Contemporary graffiti in east London

Here’s a ray of optimism, before I start even attempting to unravel the respective messes that are Britain’s drug laws and mental health provision.

A judge in Cumbria, northern England just said she hoped ’the law will catch up with science’ when pardoning an accused man for growing his own magic mushrooms to benefit his mental health.

Britain has the highest depression rate among children in Europe, along with one-third of the continent’s drug overdose deaths and its worst alcohol problem. Mental health problems cost the British economy £118 billion annually. The situation is apparently more dismal than we even think. Lockdown saw a 47% increase in young people seeking help and I need hardly quote again my recent article elsewhere detailing the stigma that still exists in the workplace around stress and burnout.

It’s characteristic of the British legislature to turn a benign blind eye to self-medication while dragging its feet on psilocybin prescriptions. Former prime minister (PM) Boris Johnson and his pantomime villain advisor Dominic Cummings supposedly had psychedelic therapy as a political cause celébre partly because Brexit meant chances to the law could be actioned quicker. Now they’re out of the game, things are even worse in the corridors of power.

Unlikely Men in Tights of this particular pantomime are the Conservative Drug Policy Reform Group

UK home secretary Priti Patel says she’ll ban ‘middle class’ cannabis smokers from nightclubs and take away their passports to derision from even Daily Mail readers. Front runner for new PM Liz Truss has turned Judas on her 420-friendly past.

The centre left is no better with its leader Keir Starmer, a former head of public prosecutions, saying he’s “seen too much damage” in his former role. Dude, the unremittingly grim extraction economy lifestyle is the problem across all classes especially the estate-condemned non-working class. Not the weed itself.

While kids opting for dank oblivion above all else is a problem, it is hardly caused by marijuana alone and previous alternatives like booze and heroin are frankly worse. My entirely subjective opinion from the ground is that the approach reeks of not upsetting near-senile, control-freak baby-boomers.

Unlikely Men in Tights of this particular pantomime are the Conservative Drug Policy Reform Group that are actually part of the UK’s centre-right Conservative [Tory] Party. Its campaign to legalise cannabis and psychedelic therapies has the blessing of former prime minister John Major, ex-Tory leader William Hague, current Northamptonshire police, fire and crime commissioner Stephen Mold, plus ex-MI5 (it’s like Homeland Security) chiefs Lord Evans and Baroness Eliza Manningham-Butler.

Over half of voters from even right-wing parties believe in the legalisation of psychedelic therapy, according to a YouGov poll quoted by broadcaster and former advisor to PM Theresa May Tom Swarbrick. Thought leaders like the redoubtable Zoe Cormier of good eggs Guerrilla Science are also in the media front lines doing the mushroom god’s work.

Meanwhile the country’s largest NHS trust are opening a new dedicated facility in the grounds of the former ‘Bedlam’ hospital alongside Compass Pathways which you can read about elsewhere in this issue.

The naturally British reaction is to quietly do what it seems the justice system, NHS and general public are already doing. Which is plough on regardless leaving the government apparatus and armchair windbags to their own ineffectual posturing.

June 26, 2022
Hymn of the Big Wheel

Therapy

My home town of Bristol boasts a psychedelic ‘amazement’ park and therapy clinics. How did that happen?

Jeremy Deller, ‘Wiltshire Before Christ’ photo by David Sims for Aires Arise

“Bristol is the San Francisco of Britain” declares Dr Ben Sessa of my home town where Awakn Life Sciences is based.

How? Not only with Britain’s first psychedelic clinic – accessible without a referral – but also the world’s first immersive psychedelic ‘amazement park’. Bristol is making up ground, perhaps, for its heritage in tobacco and slavery.

The clinic is the first branch of Awakn Life Sciences, opening also in London (opposite Euston Station) fronted by Psychedelic Renaissance author Dr Ben Sessa and addiction treatment icon Dr Celia Morgan. As of earlier in 2022, AWAKN’s main investor is the UK government.

Wake the Tiger is the name of the day trip destination. A lockdown brainstorm from festival innovators Boomtown, it is actually named after Peter Levine’s trauma tome Waking the Tiger. Creative director Lak Mitchell’s wife is a shadow-specialising psychotherapist, and suggested it. Wake the Tiger’s backdrop narrative offers a journey to an alternative dimension where all the unwanted clutter of consumer culture ends up; the sequence begins with a luxury living development where the only thing really living is a tree in the lobby.

Wake the Tiger in Bristol, the world’s first psychedelic ‘amazement park’

Stu Tallis who sorted the branding at Taxi Studio, told the website Business Leader, “It pushes the boundaries of imagination and represents the truly unique and fantastical experience that fuses ancient wisdom and creativity… it needed to be scalable to accommodate the possibility of replicating the experience across the country and becoming a multiverse. It is a category-defining moment representing a sea change in how immersive art experiences are created.”

Opening in late July 2022, Wake the Tiger received £1.85 million in crowdfunding. Reviews are gushing, from those microdosing or otherwise. Kids get in free. They don’t know they’re born. Dropping a Purple Ohm to watch Bristol City lose at home to Swindon (by four goals) was all that we had in my day.

“Wake the Tiger is a unique and fantastical experience that fuses ancient wisdom and creativity”

Bang in the middle of the upmarket Clifton district is AWAKN’s Bristol ketamine clinic. The Times dispatched its most simultaneously verbose and glib columnist, David ‘Fatty’ Arranovitch to check it out. Unlike more intrepid reporters (hem-hem), he did not try it out. Although he does end the piece by pointing out the potential for psychedelic treatment of obesity, after beginning by complaining about the walk up Constitution Hill that I and my chums made to school most mornings, while daydreaming of the next time we could obliterate the pain of a rigid, parentified upbringing in service to the slave morality. Sorry, flashbacked and regressed a bit there.

Professors David Nutt and Celia Morgan, who form the Awakn dream team with Dr Ben Sessa

Anyway, another AWAKN is planned for Manchester later this year while Oslo in Norway was the first AWAKN to open. AWAKN’s chief advisor is Professor David Nutt, a national treasure since he was sacked as the government’s drug policy advisor for saying LSD (and ecstasy, and cannabis) was less harmful an intoxicathan alcohol on daytime TV. Dr Sessa, who Vital students will hear from in Week 13, I believe is the most forthright and refreshing middle-aged man in the psychedelic space internationally right now.

AWAKN’s special sauce though is arguably provided by Celia Morgan. The fabulously clever redhead is also Exeter Uni’s head of psychopharmacology, and inspires fervent adoration from her Phd students. The National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) are funding two-thirds of the costs for her alcohol use disorder treatment programme with the very British name of ‘Project Kestrel’, although KARE was used instead once the bureaucrats got their hands on it.

Professor Morgan appeared in Business Insider’s list of the most important women in psychedelics earlier this year. Devising the first official cure for alcoholism, though would assure her a place in medical history. There are no flies on Morgan, who has discussed the dangers of chronic recreational ketamine use on BBC Woman’s Hour – “I’ve met teenagers who have to wear catheters,” is her conversation-stopper.

Professor Morgan has even adapted psychedelic therapy for both the addiction and ketamine aspects of Project K: “We designed it to go with the ketamine effects,” she told The Guardian newspaper in its own report, “We wanted something evidence based, a therapy that has been shown to help people avoid alcoholic relapse. But also something that would work with what we know about the brain in the ketamine state.”

Morgan embarked on Project Kestrel as a final year student at once-mighty University College London (which is about to open its own psychedelic mega-department headed up by the highly plausible Rosalind McAlpine). She pulled together strands of her friend’s experiences of recreational ketamine use with her family’s of addiction, and laid the foundations of an approach that could wrest thousands of sufferers and those close them from the living hell of alcoholism. Plus cut the £5.5 billion the UK loses to the condition every year. Morgan’s test subjects stayed clean 87% of the time after six months, compared to a measly 2% beforehand.

Many have pointed out that it could be the therapy itself that’s making the difference, provided at very high quality in the trials for free, just like in the depression trials. (That this is not your regular psychoanalytic therapy is a matter for another time, although props to Arranovitch for quoting a patient as saying “it was more about the boozing than my mother”).

Only 8% of addicts ever seek treatment as it is, due to stigma or the way they’re not guzzling miniature brandies on the commute like a TV stereotype. It’s this ‘not quite in crisis, yet’ group who suffer too and are arguably more motivated to seek treatment should it be available without a CV-staining, divorce-prompting diagnosis. Dr Sessa too stresses that childhood trauma isn’t usually born of what we know as ‘abuse’ – corporal and cruel punishments – and instead is a feature of many material-focussed western upbringings.

“We wanted evidence based therapy shown to help people avoid alcoholic relapse, plus work with the ketamine state”

Dr Sessa is a soundbite slinger, which I as a journalist appreciate. “Bristol is the San Francisco of Britain” is one of his best shots, and he’s done a lot to catalyse that.

‘There is only one good use for a small town. You hate it and you know you’ll have to leave,’ sings Lou Reed on the opening track of Songs for Drella, his and John Cage’s 1990 concept album dedicated to Andy Warhol.

I left my own home town of Bristol for university in 1992, aged 18. Since, it has realised its media image as a Mecca of skateboarding, street art and… intentional drug taking (plus plasticine animation, as local artist Banksy rarely misses the opportunity to point out). And in the past six months, Bristol has even superseded modern-era triumphs such as the aforementioned world’s favourite artist’s Dismaland exhibition, in the admittedly dismal Weston Super-Mare, a former holiday resort notorious for its quicksand beaches.

But I remember my home town for its repression, casual violence, and nihilistic ennui, caused mostly by traumas and addictions that while ‘low-level’, eat away at the soul and body nonetheless. And it’s partly because they will never be seen as a source of necessary concern; we change only when we have to. If the West of England is coming unstuck from those behaviours, then I shall never slag it off again. I might even go to Wake the Tiger.

June 26, 2022
UK leads new inner space race

Space

But there are not nearly enough healers to dish out the (desperately required) medicine. Why?

This is actually from new ‘psychedelic amazement park’ Wake the Tiger in Bristol

“Mental health workforces are shrinking at a time the demand for mental health services is increasing,” says the news blog for Europe’s first psychedelic research centre Clerkenwell Health, just down the road from me in London.

Dr Derek Tracy, medical director at West London NHS Trust, told Sky News earlier this month that he has never seen such a high demand for access to mental health treatment. “It’s as busy as I’ve ever seen in my career. Numbers are up across all age groups and in all types of presentations, in London and nationally.”

March 2021 figures claimed a quarter of adults reported ‘clinically significant psychological distress’ that month, up from just over a fifth before the C-19 pandemic.

So one in four of us are suffering from… ‘clinically significant psychological distress’. Suicides are up again since 2018. In May 2022 the number of under-18s referred to emergency mental health services went up 37% on the previous year, a record high. Depression and anxiety are the number one reason for taking time off work.

“There are not enough therapists to deliver these treatments”

This while corks pop on bottles of Nyetimber as the UK is declared “world leading” in the innovative treatment research field.

Back on Clerkenwell Health’s blog, “Developing new drugs has attracted significant commercial interest. But the delivery aspects of these treatments are yet to receive the same attention. There are more than 150 psychedelic drug developers in the market. Patients’ demand for psychedelics is also increasing.”

Clerkenwell Health’s stark conclusion? “There are not enough therapists to deliver these treatments.”

I’d respond: that’s because there are too many barriers to becoming qualified.

This week Vital students heard from lawyer Courtney Barnes, who detailled Oregon’s facilitator license training requirement that are not dissimilar to its own syllabus. Clerkenwell Health’s own psychedelic therapy program requires accredited health professional (AHP) status for entry. Which puts it beyond my means, for example. That requires a degree in occupational therapy at least, or better still being a clinical psychologist, which involves a decade or so of grind that I’ve been told by those who know for sure is not worth me trying in my mid-40s. Psychotherapist training is three to six years according to the UK Council for Psychotherapy.

I wonder how long the list would really be of qualified individuals, who have experience with psychedelics, and have long harboured a compulsion towards a very different psychological approach? How do they feel about the commute to central London?

Who otherwise has the time or the money to retrain? I’ve worked with graduates in £80K of debt who want to be superstar fashion stylists, not spend their days under fluorescent light talking to long-term alcoholics about their visuals. Experts from Stanislav Grof to Dr Rick Strassman implore upon prospects how demanding psychedelic therapy can be.

This is before we talk about the 28% of AHPs who quit due to burnout, the 16% who want to leave the sector entirely, the 43% actively looking for a new job, or the third who cite low pay and overwork as the main issues.

“Developing new drugs has attracted significant commercial interest. But the delivery aspects of these treatments are yet to receive the same attention”

100,000 vacancies in the NHS lie unfilled while expensive and life-consuming qualifications that were once unnecessary – my mother worked as a midwife, and the ward sister at Dick Whittington Hospital A&E here in London with no university education – stand right in the way of anyone compelled to join the sector. Anecdotally: a friend who’s worked at a high level in nursing for 12 years, including on the COVID-19 ward, has to undertake an MSc (in… nursing) before she can go up a pay grade and become a senior nurse. Granted there may be one or two useful things she picks up during it, but compared to 12 years on the job will it be worth the time and the debt? Especially given the demand for senior nurses?

Full psychopomp status via the Clerkenwell Health program lasts only three months and is free, incidentally. To accredited healthcare professionals.

Embers of hope burn, certainly with outspoken, heritage foundations like Beckley emerging into the C-suite conversation and the fast-tracking of the MAPS PTSD programme. Though no wonder unofficial psychedelic mental health services thrive. While these may cater well to the slightly-unhealthy normals, who Grof to David Nutt say can benefit immediately from psychedelic experience alone, they cannot expect to hold back the tide of trauma and addiction. And as almost everyone connected to the issues –except the gatekeepers – agrees, the current set-up certainly can’t either.

June 26, 2022
The New Bethlehem. Not like the Old Bedlam

Medical

The UK NHS, Compass Pathways and King’s College promise a ‘beacon for mental health treatment’ in South London

South London architecture collective Resolve

Compass Pathways are partnering with the UK’s National Health Service and King’s College London – at the once-notorious ‘Bedlam’ asylum in London.

Plants to treat over 650 NHS patients with Compass’ Comp360 psilocybin-based treatment plan include a new facility amongst 200-acre woodland.

Mired in scandal back in the 1700s for making a tourist attraction of inmates St Mary Bethlehem Hospital has actually moved site at least once and is now in un-psychedelic Croydon. It’s run by South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (SLaM), the largest mental health trust in the UK National Health Service (NHS). Research will be conducted by the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology at Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s, which was founded in the 12th Century and has partnered with Compass since 2007.

It’s the first of its kind for the UK state healthcare system that’s under siege from the demographic time bomb and mental health epidemic.

“It will be a centre of excellence for new therapies that don’t always involve psychedelic drugs but also the key therapy that goes along with it” says Professor Allan Young from IoPPN.

“The focus is on people who use mental health services day to day, developing effective new medicine for patients with depression, anxiety, addiction and other mental health issues,” says NHS exec David Bradley.

No news yet on who will be designing this New Esalen but South London’s Resolve must be high on the shortlist.

London-based Compass has come out swinging in 2022, taking on autism alongside the NHS with its, er PSILAUT program and fighting off off a challenge to Comp360 by Freedom to Operate, whose founding legal eagle Carey Turnbull said, “We are confident that the PTAB’s extremely narrow interpretation of Compass’s patent claims will provide generic manufacturers of psilocybin with wide latitude to produce and commercialise psilocybin without risk of violating the Compass patents.” So everybody’s happy… for now.

June 26, 2022
Once and future Albion

Integration

Is this actually it? Builded here? Amongst the mills?

Jeremy Deller’s 2022 cover for The New Statesman magazine’s ‘A Dream of Britain’ issue guest edited by actor Michael Sheen

“It’s a hopeful, optimistic interpretation… blended, dynamic, fantastical,” says British artist Jeremy Deller of his vivid cartographic A Dream of Britain pictured above.

The vibrant painting of the United Kingdom closed the British Museum’s smash Stonehenge show of spring/summer 2022. Deller is colourblind so sees it differently to you and I. This he says reflects a national identity that is forever intersubjective, and in flux.

In issue one of the Vital Student Zine I pulled out Albion Dreaming, Andy Roberts’ history of psychedelic Britain: “From the Sixties onwards sections of the counter culture used the term Albion to refer to their vision of a land, society and individual consciousness based on the insights offered by LSD,” writes Roberts of the romantic goal gathering pace in pop culture.

All the big gun historians from Pliny the Elder, through Marinus of Tyre, to Geoffrey of Monmouth cite Albion as the original name for these sceptred (in a non-dual way) isles. The legend is kick-ass (arse). First, the original King of Syria, or a King of somewhere in Greece maybe, had 43 (or possibly 33) illegitimate daughters who all got married on the same day, killed their husbands on the same night, and fled right here. Where there were no men. So they had it off with incubi – the male equivalent of a saucy ‘succubus’ sex demon – and produced a race of giants. The sisters named the place after their alpha female, Alba.

William Blake ’s ‘The Dance of Albion’

In the sequel, beleaguered Brutus of Troy is fleeing his eponymous horse fiasco when the freaking goddess Diana appears and tells him to voyage beyond Gaul to “raise a second Troy”. There were only 24 giants left by then including the fearsome Gogmagog, who got chucked off the white cliffs of Dover. That’s my GoT-style swashbuckling version with apols to Geoffrey of Monmouth and the crew.

“To the counter culture Albion refers to a land, society and individual consciousness based on the insights offered by LSD”

Any sort of ‘New Albion’ got off to an auspicious start after Sir Francis Drake used it as the first name for California upon landing in 1579. Since then it’s had further ups-and-downs. Esoteric saint, the poet and painter, William Blake named Albion ‘the primeval titan’ from which his four aspects of man sprang, and pictured it as a giant wearing nothing but a broad grin against a rural Utopian background featuring splashes of pastel colour… apropos of nothing.

Blake invokes Albion when in need of a term to idealise Britain: his Vision of the Daughters of Albion is a feminist protest poem influenced by his friend, and collaborator, Mary Wolstencraft Shelle. And he cries “does this thing happen on Albion’s shores?” in Little Boy Lost, an ode against child cruelty. The English cricket, rugby, and Commonwealth Games athletic teams all use Blake’s proto-socialist hymn Jerusalem instead of the official national anthem.

Pete Doherty’s Margate HQ The Albion Rooms

Shadow side ‘Perfidious Albion’ was a term invented by French bishops to bemoan England’s Dark Ages clerical set-up. Later, French Revolutionaries assumed support from the country that toppled its monarchy and installed a puppet aristocracy a century previous. When it didn’t come, the former miserables ran with the term propagandising an, erm, supposed track record of diplomatic betrayal, even bringing up the whole Joan of Arc thing again which everyone knows they were in on.

‘Two Roman Legionaries Discovering The God-King Albion Turned Into Stone’ by Mark Sheeky

Two Roman Legionaries Discovering The God-King Albion Turned Into Stone is a 2008 painting by Mark Sheeky. He says, “It’s inspired by Brief Encounter, a film from 1949 that showed a Britain which no longer exists, a country and time so alien to the Britain of 2008 that it is difficult to believe that a place like that ever existed. I wanted to represent the end of that old Britain, so I chose the end of another era as the setting. Two foreigners, Roman legionaries, walk towards the edge of Britain in the grey rain. Through mud, to the grassy limit of the country, the top of the great white cliffs. As they reach the edge they discover a giant stone man standing in the sea, the once king Albion, now dead and grey and cracked. A statue preserved like a memory. A reminder of an ancient time now gone forever.”

Or has it? Under re-story-ation rules fiction can be considered as powerful as the imagined past, right? And in terms of syncronicitous relevance, the phrase Albion cropping up like this must be some sort of sign?

“I’m not an activist, I’m a fantasist”

Here in C21 the Dionysus figure of our second Atlantis, musician Pete Doherty evokes Albion so strenuously that he’s opened a hotel in Margate (it’s like Portland crossed with Oakland, by the sea) called The Albion Rooms. “Reebok classics, and canons at dawn; terrible warlords, good warlords, and an English song” goes Doherty’s band Babyshambles’ gentle rabble-rouser Down in Albion. “I’m not an activist, I’m a fantasist. Inverted snobbery is just as dangerous as snobbery itself, you know – that pride in having nothing,” he says.

By Erwin Wurm at Albion Fields sculpture park

Over at the other end of the quantum funnel from this grass-roots desire for a new national identity lies Albion Fields sculpture park, open till end of October 2022. It’s an outdoor exhibition free to anyone but to which nonetheless ‘the glitterati are flocking’ according to Tatler magazine.

The woodland’s owner (in fact it was planted at his birth) is Michael Hue-Williams, an art dealer who first showed Ai Weiwei in the UK and represents generation-defining photographer Nick Knight. He says, ‘Walking through these beautiful grounds during lockdown, I realised I have a unique opportunity to share the experience.’ Perhaps reciprocity can exist at all levels. Once and future.

June 26, 2022
Kool-Aid Corner #9

To finish: trippy clippings, merry pranks, and psychedelic student life

Graph or Table of the Week

Self treatment with psychedelics:

From: Self-treatment of psychosis and complex post-traumatic stress disorder with LSD and DMT —A retrospective case study by Mika Turkia published in Psychiatry Research Case Reports Vol 1 Issue 2 (2022)

My bookshelf weighs a ton

Notable new purchases for the occult library. Strictly second hand snap-ups only. This week: Storm of Steel by Ernst Junger

Another score from the Brick Lane bookstore, £6.50

“No other writer has thus opened my eyes,” wrote Albert Hoffman of Junger’s sublime nature writing in LSD: My Problem Child. Although the psychedelic inventor who corresponded with Junger after WW2, was keen to point out that he was less into Junger’s ‘earlier books’ about ‘war and a new type of human being.’

Junger was Germany’s greatest military hero of WW1. Throughout his career he consistently refused to apologise for embracing conflict when necessary, perhaps in contrast to his proto-hippy views that influnced the 60s counter-culture. He did accept that the warrior was powerless against the march of tech. “In war you learn your lessons, and they stay learned, but the tuition fees are high” is just one of the gems from this terrifying and exhilarating account of trench warfare that’s often uncomfortably, but necessarily, voyueristic.

Next issue: Core module two Psychedelic Therapies continues with ethics training on the edge of reality

June 25, 2022
Healing of the Nation

Approach

Become a tree, mushroom, bee or flower with pollination models and mycelial economics

By Tabita Rezaire in Black Fantastic at the Southbank Heyward Gallery, London till September 18

Psychedelics have been totally colonised, of course. But mushrooms even have the answer for that.

Dr Zelner didn’t just quit the rat race. He found a way to disable the money trap.

‘The Pollination Approach’ that he originally outlined in a landmark article for MAPS is a new community based healthcare structure, inspired by the vastly successful Frome Model that you can read about in this issue’s Medical section.

He further acknowledges that if community, business, economics and health are interconnected, then it’d only truly work if systems other than healthcare change too. Especially if we’re to avoid a psychedystopia like that set out in illustrated story We Will Call it Pala, which my Reichian body work coach would call ‘evocative’.

Wielding his understanding of biomimetics, Dr Zelner says “Fungi control the allocation of resources to plants, and they don’t set it all up so one can get much bigger than the others,” he says, “The social shift is from a disconnected pattern to a connected pattern, where people in social organisations are linked in multiple ways – which is also nature’s pattern, the mycelial network, the root networks if you will, of mushrooms. Resources are circulated through the entire system, keeping money local and creating economic multipliers.”

It’s the kind of thing both Banksy and my dad would agree on.

Dr Zelner’s Transformative Capital Institute is allocating funds to those kind of projects.

“None of us needs to take on the responsibility to change the world. Incremental, emergent change is how life’s process works”

Regenerative economics, the ‘community and wellbeing first’ business strategy has also been completely colonised. You can do an MSc in it. Zenner says, “I’m not anti-capitalist, but in regenerative economics shareholders can’t be prioritised above all. I saw the phrase crop up in a traditional venture capital firm report, saying they like my pollination approach and it could help double their profits. Obviously there’s a conflict there.”

He continues, “Wellness has been colonised,” of course, “any change we can make through the policy process is incremental at best.” Ranting at your Twitter feed about the latest moral-political infraction is finally over.

“None of us needs to take on the responsibility to change the world, says Dr Zelner, “Incremental, emergent change is how life’s process works. Positive action at a micro level is regenerative. Individual behaviours quickly become a pattern shift. You are a pollinator.”

And yes, psychedelics could still be the healing of the nation as ‘The first lady of LSD history’ Dr Erika Dyck stated in this rallying Charcuna piece. “Psychedelics help people question their beliefs, and we are socially constructing this reality. They shift people from disconnection to connection. It’s an embodied experience of the regenerative pattern.”

We don’t need to get everyone on board immediately. “Tipping points happen only at 15-20% of a network,” advises Dr Zelner.

Switching to ‘steward ownership’ is one way socially-minded firms new and old can limit their exposure to extracting finance. The format allows a business to legally put purpose over shareholder returns, capping revenue-based financing returns after eight years. Late in 2021 Europe’s Synthesis Institute raised its Series A round of $7.25 million investment funding under a stewardship model becoming the first psychedelic company to do so.

Back around the neighbourhood, Dr Zelner’s local Brooklyn Psychedelic Society are drawing up a Frome-style health co-op to great excitement.

I grew up near Frome, and my parents remain active in community life: amateur dramatics, parish council, village hall management committee, ‘walking football’ for the boomers. The internecine clashes within village life have inspired endless hours of situation comedy over the years, plus recently a lockdown viral sensation.

Research from Imperial College, no less, says psilocybin treatment for depression increased nature awareness and softened any authoritarian politics amongst the test group. I ask Dr Zelner if psychedelics can even heal neighbourly squabbles.

“I don’t have as many funny stories as I’ll probably have this time next year,” he grins, “The Brooklyn project is very new and run by a guy called Colin Pugh. They’re still at the phase where they’re figuring out if to be a traditional co-op, versus a non-profit co-op, how to engage the existing membership of their traditional psychedelic society…”

Maybe a dose of non-dual thinking will still be required before life’s committee meetings.

Till then, we can but dream.

June 24, 2022
Re-Story-Ation

Therapy

Ancient principles for living encourage a wondrous view of the world. Is this the ‘re-enchantment’ with life we need?

From Modern Alchemy, photographs by Viviane Sassen, available from by JBE Books

Rainforests gave the West spectacular medicines for the body. Could their way of life provide healing for the mind too?

Half of all pharmacological medicines are derived from plants, including recent innovations, and 25% come from global rainforest. Curare, the muscle relaxant Amazonian tribes used to stun animals, prompted a revolution in anaesthetics and modern medicine. Quinine was the first cure for malaria. Vincristine and Vinblastine from Madagascar, used the treat cancers, have vastly extended the chance of surviving childhood leukemia.

Now, thousands flock to ayahuasca retreats to balm their souls. But passionate field researchers both young and old claim the lifestyle and ideology around the medicine is essential to redemption.

“Our profound alienation is a consequence of turning relationships into things”

Washington-based Joseph Mays, wields a master’s in ethnobotany from the University of Kent – a likely hotbed of radical thought – after observing responses to globalisation from the Yanesha in central Peru. He’s published a smart medicinal plant guide for the Jama-Coaque Ecological Reserve and works as the program director of Chacruna’s arse-kicking Indigenous Reciprocity Initiative (IRI).

From Modern Alchemy, photographs by Viviane Sassen, available from by JBE Books

Mays cracked his bonus Vital lecture off by quoting Karl Marx like a boss.

“Marx spoke about the ‘metabolic rift’, man’s alienation from nature,” says the scholar and activist, “We are now in ‘The Anthropocene Epoch’.”

That’s the conceptual geological era we’re living in now. The official one’s the Holocene. The Anthropocene represents a time man begins to have geological impact upon the Earth, roughly marked by the detonation of the first atomic bomb.

“We should think of our bodies with alchemy in mind”

Ernst Junger warily observed the march of technology throughout the 20th century. He wrote that it was best explained by the senseless, arbitrary nature of the First World War. Not only in the power new weapons had to slaughter hundreds in a moment, but the absence of any serious evaluation of why it was happening.

Junger considered the endemic, fatalistic nihilism he witnessed in the trenches, and in the commuter era that followed it, “a new, terrible practice” and spoke of “the loneliness of man in a new, unexplored world, whose steely law will be felt as meaningless.”

Vincent Blok, in his acclaimed Ernst Junger’s Philosophy of Technology writes that our enlightenment values of ‘“Reason and humanity, of morality and individual freedom” count for nothing now they are wedged within the indefatigable gears of… The Anthropocene.

“The resources of our inner and outer worlds are inseparable”

Mays quotes feted Brazilian anthropologist, Cambridge lecturer and writer of Cannibal Physics Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, who writes that our profound alienation is a consequence of “turning relationships into things” and “perceiving life as a collection of detached objects.”

The animistic view though is “inherently subjectifying” in contrast to the objectified modern era. It also stands alongside our own subjective spiritual beliefs, working as a system to integrate Earth and consciousness.

“We are now in The Anthropocene Epoch”

Breaking the dichotomies – mind-body, mankind-Earth, civilisation-environment – can also free us from our alienation. Our energy spent on tweaking existing problems could go into designing alternatives. “Maybe we should think of our bodies with alchemy in mind, and imagine many other compositions or assemblages,” says The Life of Plants writer Emanuele Coccia in his introduction to Modern Alchemy, a new series of photographs by Viviane Sassen published by JBE Books, photos from which you see here.

From Modern Alchemy, photographs by Viviane Sassen, available from JBE Books

Learning on the job develops a deeper relationship with the non-human elements of vocation and personal growth. Individual responsibility and local ‘bottom up’ development puts ownership for our immediate experience in our own hands, away from the distraction of political infighting.

Communities are marginalised in a similar manner to the environment. Energy is better spent providing a container for them to address their “own needs, and their own priorities in a self-directed manner from the ground up” as a forest would. Or like Somerset UK’s Frome Model of Compassionate Primary Care that has slashed hospital admissions by 40% over a decade, which you can read about in this issue’s Medical section.

“Biological and cultural diversity are inextricably linked,” says Mays, “And the culture of plants and communities are inter-dependent. The resources of our inner and outer worlds are inseparable.”

June 24, 2022