There’s a big question emerging in the world of plant medicine. And the pharma industry is all over it:
If you remove the “trip” – the mind-altering experience – from the medicine, would the benefits for depression, anxiety, and trauma still remain?
Pharmaceutical researchers are now developing compounds trying to preserve the biological benefits of psychedelics – neuroplasticity and antidepressant effects – while eliminating the trip entirely.
No ego dissolution. No cosmic revelation. No encounter with the infinite.
Just clean, reliable biology.
It sounds like progress. But in practice, it might be missing the point.
What if the “trip” isn’t a side effect? What if the mind-altering experience is an essential part of the mechanism for change and growth?
Take Bryan Johnson – the biohacker focused on extending the human lifespan, with a personal plan to live indefinitely.
He recently livestreamed his experience with 5-MeO-DMT, a powerful psychedelic that I’ve experienced several times myself. Bryan was armed with medical sensors and the intention to measure all inputs and outputs with advanced technology. If anyone could reduce the psychedelic experience to data, it would be Bryan.
But that’s not what happened. Even the most obsessive quantifier couldn’t turn it into “just biology.”
What he’s been describing since isn’t biomarkers. It’s the experience – “the most profound of my life,” something that left him “stunned beyond comprehension.”
Then there’s Michael Pollan, who has also been drawn not just to the science, but to the experience itself.
Pollan’s new book, The World Appears, is a culmination of his study of psychedelics, consciousness, and neuroscience for more than five years, alongside the leading thinkers in the field. His conclusion is a … well … non-conclusion: consciousness remains fundamentally mysterious.
But a byproduct of Pollan’s extensive research is that mind-altering experiences are not distractions from understanding consciousness. Rather, psychedelics are among the few tools we have for encountering consciousness directly through experience.
Strip away the psychedelic experience, and you may strip away the very thing that changes people.
Having gone through many different plant medicine experiences myself, my view is simple: Biology matters. And so does the experience.
Removing the psychedelic experience may produce a safer, more marketable medicine. It could drive meaningful physiological change. But pharma may be engineering out the very thing that makes these substances matter.
The psychedelic experience itself is embedded with life-changing learning.
The journey is about seeing new things actively. And seeing old things differently. It’s about an enlightening encounter with self, others, the planet, and beyond.
And – even more important – what we choose to do with the learning may matter more than the profound experience itself.
How we integrate the learning after the journey is where the real magic begins.
That won’t happen with a passive pill.
