Love, Psychedelics and…BEEF?!
How do we create a language and framework to navigate expanded states of consciousness that is not overly mystical and unrelatable or too clinical and lacking soul? William (Bill) Richards identifies the six elements of a "mystical" experiences in his book Sacred Knowledge as:
1) Unity, 2) transcendence of time and space, 3) intuitive knowledge, 4) sacredness, 5) deeply- felt positive mood, and 6) ineffability.
Wouldn’t that make love the ultimate expanded state of consciousness? Love, then, is both the language and the framework. The roadmap and the experience that could help us process and integrate our trauma. It could illuminate the paths towards self-actualization, relationship with others, and help us understand our place amid infinite time and space. But, what is love?
How do we begin to define love? How do you define love?
Could you, if I asked you? Would any combinations of letters, words, and sentences be adequate to define a feeling, a process, a force? Do you understand the nuances and complexities of love by arranging four letters into one monosyllabic word, L-O-V-E? Does it get clearer when we string multiple words together, forming sentences, and thereby “defining” love? Would it be enough if I told you the dictionary tells us love is “an intense feeling of deep affection”? Could I read to you “On Love” by Kahlil Gibran or The Love Poems of Rumi and know I’d captured the very essence of this four-letter word? Would that be enough to shape your thoughts, reframe perspectives, guide your actions, and captivate the senses? Are letters, words, and sentences enough to encapsulate and embody the sheer magnitude of love? I don’t know for certain, but I don’t think so. Words feel grossly inadequate when tapping into the inherent knowing we feel with love.
Stuck in our heads, pontificating and ruminating on this enigmatic word, do we proceed as though love is an adjective, noun, or verb? Does it matter? Is it a process, like grief, that cannot be defined simplistically or with one singular emotion? Does the very nature of love defy traditional composition and require us to buck conventional rules? Do we dare try to contain love with tenses, imprisoning it in the past, present or future? I don’t believe that love can be contained, found both internally and externally, expanding and contracting, refusing to be neatly boxed and labeled by the constricting limits of the thinking mind, keeping us all interconnected to all parts of time and space simultaneously. And isn’t love also nothing – absent of our stories, agendas, conditions, wounding, narratives, or survival coping strategies. Naked and truly seen. Nothingness. Love.
Could love be the medicine that salves wounds and mends broken hearts? Is it not the absence or withdrawal of love that creates wounds or breaks hearts to begin with? Would you agree that the giving and receiving of love provides the conditions for the heart to heal? When we hurt, love is the beacon that signals others to bring empathy and compassion in the form of nurturing support. It is the wellspring that provides the vitality to help us heal our wounds. It is the glue that binds our broken parts, like the golden bonds found between broken fragments of pottery in the Japanese art of kintsugi. It is not time; it is love that heals all wounds.
Could you find love in how we cope? When we feel that love has forsaken us, we can turn away from ourselves and stay in unhealthy conditions – relationships, environments, dynamics, belief systems, perspective. It is the presence or seeking of love that allows us to attune to the self, amplifying the motivation and discipline to embark on the journey of self-love. Seeking love can be the current that sweeps us into maladaptive coping strategies and the tide that crashes on the shores of our lives, breaking generational patterns passed on from nature and nurture. Being internally or externally motivated by love differentiates our coping, and our searching for love. When required externally, love fuels us like a gas station, sometimes getting us to our destination, and other times leaving us stranded, lost and desperate. When internally created, love radiates like the sun, giving life and energy to everything that bears witness, warming those in its light, and burning those who dare try to confine it.
Could you find love in how you acknowledge and resolve your conflicts? Love requires introspection, accountability, and humility to grow. Denial, blame, and arrogance are the rejection of love’s wisdom. Conflicts occur, and they can be viewed as burdens or opportunities. Love see’s opportunity when our mind or perspective betrays us. Many belief tensions or conflicts are required to grow, to develop resiliency, and to overcome the repetition of our learned and inherited patterns. Great leaders, philosophers, and brilliant minds have shared similar thoughts, “through every adversity, there is an opportunity.” Yes, there is. But the underpinnings of this belief deceive us that conflict is required to grow, to shape our identity. What if we could reframe that belief? Love is the antidote to the belief that we only grow through adversity. Wouldn’t it be lovely to trust that we can grow through grace?
The answer is simple and complicated, yes and no. Love is a paradox. Love is a process, an opportunity, and an invitation. Love connects us throughout time and experience, through lifetimes past, present, and future.
Love cannot be defined by a series of words because words cannot encompass the range of lived human experience we feel and know. To me, love is the container that holds the entirety of your lived experiences; an energy that guides our life force and connection to ourselves and others. It is a gift; one that requires we both give as well as receive.
With love & light,
Soul Surgeon
BEEF, & the Psychedelic Resolve in the hit Netflix Series
If you aren’t up to date yet on this series - this might be the time to look away as it does have some mild spoilers.
This limited TV series is another example that pop culture’s perception of psychedelics seem to be shifting further away from party culture and Alice in Wonderland acid trips to a more realistic point of view of what embarking on a psychedelic journey actually entails.
If you haven’t seen the show yet, it starts off with two people whose lives disastrously intertwine after a road rage triggered car chase through the suburbs. The series follows the two “drivers” whose lives look nothing alike apart from the most important element - they seem to have everything in common when it comes to their unresolved and suppressed intergenerational trauma inflicting on their day-to-day lives, relationships, careers and mental fitness. It all comes to a head when they literally and metaphorically drive off a cliff, find themselves stranded in the desert, and eat what they think are edible plants, which turn out to be psychoactive substances.
In the process of their journey, they each experience visions and what could be perceived as an ego death. They accept their fate of dying in the middle of nowhere lying beside their “soul mate.” When they wake up the next day, they find compassion, forgiveness, closure, and new appreciation and love for the other and most importantly - themselves.
Sound familiar? It is a grand character arc that comes to a close at an astounding pace, not usually found in the span of one episode. The writer’s exposition of a mystical experience implies they understand that psychedelics accelerate our potential for healing and they use this knowledge to create a kind of magical realism that [if you know about psychedelic medicine] is actually incredibly realistic.
Compared to most displays of psychedelics in pop culture, we’re finally seeing a more nuanced interpretation wielded for one hell of a finale.
