Psychedelics, the Spiritual and Consciousness—an Evolving Confluence in the Cultural Stream

In this time of ever ascendant materialism, greed, and pathological narcissism, when the delusion of the disconnected dominant individual grows stronger, the contrary life-affirming stream of connection and respect is gaining strength even as it is suppressed, vilified, and criminalized. This stream, which we can call 'awakening consciousness,' is the motor of civilization. It moves in the direction of the ultimate recognition of interdependency and the need for cooperation. Some think of this stream as the altruism of the individual and recognize it as a successful evolutionary survival strategy—the group versus the individual. The truth is more complex: the stream is the necessity of balance, cooperation and sharing as inherent principles, behind which are the complex deep pleasures of love, validation, respect, and nurture.

The stream of awakening consciousness is the essential mammalian evolutionary lineage, moving historically into ever larger, more interrelated, and integrated social formations. All basically sane humans (those not bludgeoned into revenge seeking, suffering from complex PTSD, aggressive reactions, or seeking dominance because of their individualistic delusion) all wish for a healthy and equitable distribution of civilization's prospects for good lives. The cultural transcends biological evolution and morphs it in its own selections of who survives. Ever burrowing—enlarging and faltering—threatened with obliteration by bomb and ecocide, this stream amplifies as the tools for liberating consciousness spread, as freedom of mind and association erupts.

We often hear of disruptive technologies that claim to manifest, support, and often lead this awakening process. "Disruptive technology" is a recent term for new entries that foster powerful changes in how we function, in opportunities for transcendence of older technologies, and consequent changes in how we think and relate: the Internet and the atomic bomb are obvious examples. "Disruption" is similar to Kuhn's notion of paradigm shifts—except disruptive technologies are more material and practical while Kuhn's framework focuses more on worldview and conceptual schema.

New technologies can support the process of awakening when appropriately distributed, used, and accessed; but they threaten that process when they are used for dominance, control and territory. The uncontrolled profit motive fosters this negative tendency. In our past century, its destructive-ness has taught us that there needs to be some form of balance between the individual and the larger community, between the private and the cooperative, and that this is best obtained by full participation in educated discussion and the deliberate resort to persuasion by reason and dialogue. We have learned that this remains a difficult process—with successes, failures, changing social formations, distortions and consequences. Yet the continuation and development of our skills in this process is essential.

We understand "disruptive technology" on terms that are overly mechanical because we often neglect two important points: (1) Consciousness (and its amplification over time) is the engine behind all disruptive technologies; and (2) Consciousness grows in earlier times within the complexity of the Darwinian process, and then is exceeded in pace and morphed by the motor of cultural evolution. Like the Darwinian, there is no endpoint, endless possibility, dead ends, constraints, regressions and advances.

Technical innovation is a sprout growing from a soil rich with biological and social capacities that comprise the fundamental framework of being human. This soil contains the stunning interrelated integration of the prehensile thumb, bipedalism, the enlarged cortex, the hidden estrus, and the functional social capacities of tool and weapon making, nest building around the campfire, communication leading to language, group formation with cooperation, sharing, coordination and joint operations for food (foraging, hunting and later agriculture) and role differentiation within the group. Technology has an important role in the awakening process, but it must come second to an understanding of the stream that makes fertile the soil in which it grows.

There are two strata to this stream of awakening consciousness: the collective conscious and its deep and often determinative unconscious. Conceived in this way, it appears metaphorically as an oscillating widening stream, dark periods of history contracting its flow and width—and bright and innovative periods expanding its breadth, complexity, and civil nature. Integration of units of people...