When God Presses Reset

Perhaps critical to the psychedelic paradigm shift is death and rebirth. Not only at the level of the individual, but at a more global level.

Seasoned psychedelic adventurers are no stranger to experiences of death and rebirth that are innate to this work. Indeed, the spiritual significance of death-rebirth cycles dates back perhaps as far as time itself.

Death in psychedelic sessions often is what opens a door to even deeper layers of the work. Christopher Bache writes, “Far from something to be feared, death became something I sought out, repeatedly plunging myself into its purifying fire. This is a strange thing to say, I know, but other psychedelic journeyers will understand. I was not a glutton for pain; rather, I was a glutton for what lies on the other side of pain.” (Bache, 2019, p. 241).

Further than the death on the individual level, is a collective dying. It is tempting to say that we can experience mass global consciousness change without any pain or suffering, but I am not entirely sure that is the case. Why?

There is an emergent awareness in consciousness that our old systems need to go. Companies often hold on, without any regard for ethics, to keep themselves alive. We see this in the Netflix series Painkiller, where the Sackler family knew their drug was addictive and they wouldn’t get FDA approval, but, instead of accepting that, they held on and convinced (bribed) the FDA reviewer to accept their application. They were concerned about their company not dying off.

But what if they, instead, chose to be honest, reporting the addictive potential, leading the addictive potential to be disclosed to potential patients of their drug? Their company would not have lived to be a financial success. Perhaps they would have died off - perhaps they needed to. Perhaps we wouldn’t have the opioid crisis without them.

What of other companies? Does Pepsi Co. need to survive? I think soda companies are doing nothing but harming citizens.

How much of our systems are problematic, but too deeply entrenched in our mode of operating that we don’t know what life would look like without them?

Society could be set up so much better than it is, without harmful and manipulative corporations sucking the souls out of the people to feed greedy CEOs.

How do we get there?

I have often criticized those who adopt a ‘burn it all down!’ mentality. With good reason - there is much to be grateful for. We live in a system that affords a life relatively free of violence and starvation. That was no guarantee even a mere 200 years ago.

However, a lot of what is here does need to go. With the growing climate crisis, I believe we are inching closer to the destruction of our planet. Wars are sparking up, and humans have ever-more potential to kill each other in mass numbers.

It is certainly possible that we are moving toward a global death and rebirth. Is the reset button getting pushed?

Graham Hancock shows in his series Ancient Apocalypse evidence of advanced civilizations that lived before the ice age, challenging the predominate archaeological paradigm that humans were hunter-gatherer species up until 8,000 years ago - about 4,000 years after the ice age. Myths tell stories of global flooding and apocalypse, where mysterious figures like Quetzalcoatl emerged to bring civilization to the people.

A mass climate event brought on mass extinction and rebirth to the people before. Could it happen again?

Christopher Bache (2019) also writes, in pages 222-223 of his book “LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven” about a mass death and rebirth of the ‘future human’ that he experienced in one of his 73 high-dose LSD sessions.

“In a field of relative calm, a small anxiety began to grow. Slowly, people were looking up and becoming alarmed. Like people living on an island who gradually became aware that a hurricane is overtaking them, humanity was gradually waking up in alarm to events that had overtaken them. Conditions got worse and worse. People became more and more frightened as the danger increased, forcing them to let go of their assumptions at deeper levels. There was less and less for people to hold on to, fewer givens that they could assume—how they would live, what they would do for a living, how society was organized, what could be possessed. The world as they knew it was falling apart.

Decades were compressed into minutes, and I felt the people’s fear deepen as they lost more and more of what they considered the normal and necessary structures of their world. Step-by-step, events were forcing a rapid reassessment of everything in their lives. The events that had overtaken Earth were of such scope that no one could insulate themselves from them. The level of alarm grew in the species field until eventually everyone was forced into the melting pot of mere survival. We were all in this together. Families were torn apart—parents from their children and children from each other. Life as we had known it was shattered at the core. We were reduced to simply trying to survive.

For a time, it looked as though we would all be killed, but just when the storm was at its peak, the worst of it passed and the danger slowly subsided. Though many had died, many were still alive. As the survivors began to find each other, new social units began to form. Parents and children from different families joined to form new types of families. Everywhere new social institutions sprang into being that reflected our new reality—new ways of thinking, new values that we had discovered within ourselves during the crisis. Every aspect of our lives was marked by new priorities, new perceptions of the good, new truths. These new social forms reflected new states of awareness that seemed to spread through the survivors like a positive contagion. These new social forms then fed back into the system to elicit still newer states of awareness in people, and the cycle of creativity between the individual and the group spiraled.

The whole system was becoming alive at new levels, and this aliveness was expressing itself in previously impossible ways. It was as if the eco-crisis had triggered the myelination of nerve cells in our species-brain, allowing new and deeper levels of self-awareness to spring into being. Repeatedly, there was the message: ‘These things will happen faster than anyone can anticipate because of the hyper-arousal of the species-mind.’ Thousands of fractal images drove this lesson home again and again. ‘Faster than anyone can anticipate.’ The pace of the past was irrelevant to the pace of the future.”

I am reminded of how crazy things got when COVID came. Quickly, toilet paper became almost totally unavailable. People ran to the stores in fear, stocking up quickly, and then isolated themselves in their homes. Handshakes and hugs became a thing of the past, as peoples’ faces were cloaked behind all types of masks.

I think this opened up our awareness to the fact that we have not totally gotten a grip over life. We felt a sense of superiority and pride in having overcome nature, but nature spread through us like a plague, leaving us defenseless. It could have been much worse.

And how are we destroying nature now, mindlessly tearing apart our natural ecosystems, while totally aware of the damage that we are causing? Yet, we carry on.

I think that thinking about climate change on a global scale is too abstract to comprehend sensibly. I think about climate change on a local scale. I think about walking down the streets of Denver, or Washington, DC, or any major city for that matter, and observing how little green space exists, how many cars are on the road, how much anger and desperation there is in peoples’ faces. There is so little wildlife and biodiversity because everything is blanketed in concrete and asphalt.

Compare that to entering a national forest, where the wildlife roams about freely, where you find wild berries and mushrooms, and all types of plants. The soil is rich, and the water flows clear. So many of our natural spaces have been ran over for ‘economic growth’.

Truth be told, I have no idea what the future holds. I am concerned by our general disdain for the health of our environments (not to mention our own health), and where that may lead us as a species. I don’t see us all enacting global change and doing better and preventing the destruction that climate change will bring on, but I hope we are sensible enough to do things better.

Reference:

Bache, C. M. (2019). LSD and the mind of the universe: Diamonds from heaven. Inner Traditions.