The scope of my interests has always affected both – psychology, psychotherapy, and various religious and spiritual practices that allow you to experience alternative states of consciousness. I have always tried to find a middle ground somewhere and not to fly away completely from the material base of our psyche, but at the same time not to get stuck in exclusively materialistic concepts.
I often use one metaphor for people who are looking for a transcendental experience. Imagine that your psyche is a house. In it, the first floor represent the basic states, emotions, contact with the body, a structure that helps to live in the material and social world. The second floor represent spiritual development, connection with the “higher”, here it is possible to experience transpersonal experience, spiritual revelation, existential experience…
If we devalue what is happening on the first floor of the house, are too lazy to clean it up, study how it works and jump immediately to the second floor, will happened an expansion of consciousness to an unprepared psyche that does not know itself. In a moments of revelation it seems to us, that we have comprehended all the laws of the World, but sometimes we become more than ever further from ourselves, from those parts that seem simple and mundane. Then I hear at integration sessions this kind of expressions: “I am not my body”, “it’s all a game of the mind”, “everything is meaningless”, “we are all one, it means that I don’t exist like a person” , “I want such a life, but it’s pointless to want this”, “why be angry? I understand everything, therefore I must / must accept” … When we continue to analyze all these ideas and gradually I try to return a person to the first floor, it turns out that there are elementary gaps in contact skills with their feelings, devaluing a lot, criticizing and controlling important vital impulses. It turns out that traumas have been living there all this time, which make themselves felt despite the fact that several ayahuasca ceremonies or sessions with mushrooms or other psychedelics have been completed. All these missed or repressed moments in the long run leading to depression, apathy, anxiety disorders and psychotic episodes, in the worst case, the debut of schizophrenia.
I say all this because any approach to the psyche must be thorough and holistic. Since we live in this material world, where we have a body, emotions, social connections, this basis must also be taken into account. The skill of working with oneself makes it possible to integrate the psychedelic and spiritual experience at the deepest level, while maintaining the joy of life, interest in it and the adequate functioning of the psyche. Yes, personality is the result of adaptation, but if a person decides to renounce the world, “dissolve” personality, then this is the path of a monk, which, as a rule, very few people choose.
For you and me, the practices of an expanded state of consciousness can be a huge breakthrough, change our lives, expand our perception, help resolve long-standing traumas, and free us from many illusions. But it should lie on a solid foundation of basic self-knowledge.