Psychedelic Perspectives - Africa

27 Feb 2024

“The world we have created is a product of our thinking; it cannot be changed without changing our thinking.”

— Albert Einstein

I’m currently in exotic Ghana in West Africa at a traditional 3-day wedding ceremony. The groom is a young Englishman, obviously quite besotted with his beautiful young Ghanian bride who comes from an influential and very welcoming family. They met in the UK where she is an academic at the London School of Economics and he is an aspiring jazz musician. The food, the dancing, the ambience, the marvellous hospitality, are all combining to create a truly memorable experience.

In particular, the music that I’ve been enthusiastically listening to throughout the complex wedding ceremonies has so much rhythm and flair that it forces me (as a lover of spontaneous dance) to gyrate, pulsate and hyperventilate all at the same time, eventually throwing me into paroxysm of pleasure and, I’m prepared to admit, rather fabulous non-ordinary states of consciousness.

Of course, to make the most out of rhythmic African music you have to move in a way that allows your limbic system and sensory and motor centres to completely overpower any control that your pre-frontal lobes may want to exert. It’s an instinctual experience where any self- consciousness or embarrassment are eliminated allowing you to be a whirling dervish, a Mick Jagger, and a recently beheaded chicken, all at the same time.

West Africa is traditionally known as the white man’s grave because of its extreme heat and constant 100% humidity which means that energetic dancing guarantees a very damp experience, but who cares when you can lose yourself in the movements of your body driven on by pumping olfactory pulsations.

Not long ago in Melbourne my good friend Jake introduced me to ecstatic dancing where tribal rhythms abound, and I enjoyed it so much that when I awoke next morning, I could hardly move my left shoulder. It took me a while to work out that holding your arms above your head constantly for 90 minutes is not a good idea.

But getting back to Ghana, another way that the locals let themselves go, with or without music, is through their very obvious, ever present, religious faith. I’m no expert on religion in this country but in Accra, the country’s hectic and dusty capital, every road is plastered with huge signs advocating religious affiliations and meetings involving pastors, prophets, and priests, all of whom are in the service of Christianity, the most popular religion in the country.

We know for a fact that religious followers are healthier and happier than non-believers, and in a country like Ghana where life is tough for most of the population, religious faith, if you excuse the pun, is a godsend. I saw at the wedding ceremony how the name of Jesus and the obvious sustaining comfort that he brought to my fellow guests, made such an obvious enduring difference to their lives.

Now of course a recent Prime Minister of Australia showed us without any hesitation that such sustaining ecclesiastical behaviour occurs all over the planet and not just in third world countries. But in a largely secular country like Australia, faith in a superior being is in obvious short supply, leaving me to ponder whether this is a good or bad thing, or whether it matters at all.

And this is where psychedelics have the potential to highlight an interesting conundrum.

I have known of life-long atheists who return after a psychedelic experience firmly convinced, they have met, seen or spoken with God or a metaphysical entity from another reality, that has caused them to change their long-held views.

My colleague, philosopher Chris Letheby, well known for his erudition on matters psychedelic, has always attempted to naturalise the mystical elements of psychedelic usage. He specifically downplays the suggestion that psychedelics are capable of revealing a higher order, a divine reality, or “Ground of Being” that approximates the metaphysical belief systems of my fellow guests at the wonderful wedding party I am attending in Ghana.

Chris argues that psychedelics can manifest profound healing outcomes, not necessarily by introducing us to a divine presence (which nonetheless for those facing imminent death may be of significant comfort), but rather because psychedelics, which undoubtedly have the potential to instil profound feelings of connectedness, acceptance, emotional catharsis and psychological insight, facilitate changes to what he calls the narrative self.

Chris defines the narrative self as the complex set of beliefs and representations a person has of their own identity, personality and autobiography. When the narrative self is damaged as in depression, this can lead to negative and harmful core beliefs about oneself. Or in other words counterproductive thoughts and feelings which compromise or overwhelm the narrative self.

Psychedelics then, according to Chris and his naturalistic viewpoint, are therapeutic and healing, not because they change people’s core beliefs about the nature of reality, but because they enable people to revise their self-conceptions in healthy ways, changing how they see themselves and how they relate to their own minds and lives.

Now I have no difficulty in accepting Chris’s naturalistic viewpoint. It erases the necessity of worrying about whether God or gods actually exist, and it fits nicely into a neuro-scientific approach to the study of psychedelics.  

But even so, when I think about this theory and its neat conclusions, I have to admit, that in the back of my mind something, and I’m not sure exactly what, still rankles and is left unsatisfied.

Perhaps it is this – science with all the incredible advances and contributions it has made to our world is also full of dry mechanical metaphors that leave us empty when it comes to the why and how come questions.

As Chris postulates, when it comes to consciousness, science tells us that consciousness is nothing more than the product of brain activity. That minds are what brains do.

Science also leaves us believing that the universe itself and all living organisms within it are nothing more than machines. That everything we know has evolved automatically and unconsciously, with no creator, no creative intelligence and no purpose. A tale told by an idiot!

What I try to keep in mind when I hear such uninspiring explanations is that science has always been dynamic, that what was accepted yesterday is no longer true today.  That the beauty of science is its eventual preparedness to accept new evidence and move on to new conclusions which in themselves may eventually be subject to change. Now as we all know paradigm change within science is an often-hard fought phenomenon. Scientism is ever present and can take on religious proportions. But despite these drawbacks and handicaps, I remain optimistic that in the end scientific truth always wins out. From the discoveries of Galileo and Copernicus to the evidence for global warming, science pushes ahead.

And it is always with science in mind that good contemporary research with psychedelics must proceed. I’m not talking about gurus, shamans and life coaches here, but rather evidenced based studies, be they quantitative or qualitative in nature.

And what we are often seeing with contemporary psychedelic research are results that suggest that what the mystics from all religious traditions have been telling us for aeons maybe true. That we live in a massively interconnected world where a higher order consciousness is rudimentary, infinite and at the basis of all existence. And that glimpses of this phenomena are potentially available to many of us. And furthermore, encountering such a reality maybe a marvellous, life affirming, and soul enhancing experience.

Now Chris has ruled out the possibility of all that with his naturalistic explanations. I myself am not sure if what the mystics tell us is poppycock or not. But what I do recognise is this.

First, the problem of consciousness is still a problem for science and Chris’s theory is just that, a theory. Science cannot as yet prove that mind comes only from brain.

Second, as someone who needs inspiration, aesthetics, beauty and meaning in my life, dry mechanical explanations for consciousness and existence leave me floundering and disconnected in my quotidian pursuits. I much favour the mystical explanation which also cannot be scientifically proven as yet, despite the many claims of the mystics of multiple backgrounds. And with respect to my African friends, this has nothing to do with faith which I greatly respect and admire, or with the existence or non-existence of God or gods. 

So I fall back on my intuition which tells me that there is something in all this mystical stuff that we need to explore further, diligently and with rigour, and that psychedelic research is a good way to go.

Not scientific research in relation to psychiatric illness, but research into the nature of being and consciousness: to explore whether Chris is right, or whether there is something more out there that we may be able to positively identify with the help of psychedelics.

William James, the American philosopher and psychologist, emphasized the noetic quality of mystical states - that mystical experiences involve a deep sense of understanding and wisdom unknown in ordinary states of consciousness, and because of their depth they also provide a supportive framework of guiding authority in the inner life of the individual. 

Is life a nihilistic tale told by an idiot or is there a teleological explanation for our existence where life has inherent meaning which encapsulates not necessarily God or gods, but aesthetics, ethics and in particular a profound sense of universal connection.

I may never know the answers, but as a psychiatrist and a seeker, I’m curious and determined enough to keep trying to find out. Or as the great but humble Spinoza once declared:

“I have striven not to laugh at human behaviours, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.”

By Dr Nigel Strauss