Contents:
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The Psychedelics Integration Handbook
Ryan Westrum, Jay Dufrechou
January 2019
http://amzn.com/173387660X
Look inside
Skimming the Integration handbook made me want to reread Metzner’s book The Unfolding Self: Varieties of Transformative Experience. https://egodeaththeory.wordpress.com/2020/11/08/varieties-of-transformative-experience-metzner/
Some Table of Contents entries and commentary. The ToC entries are for you to project onto them what you’d ideally expect them to cover; imagine high, keep expectations low.
Psychedelics Come to Western Culture 57 — the first time psychedelics arrived in Western culture was 1943. Never mind 800 B.C.-1942 A.D. Bow down in worship to mythmakers Hofmann, Huxley, & Wasson; ignore Jan Irvin’s article series “The Secret History of Magic Mushrooms” https://logosmedia.com/SecretHistoryMagicMushroomsProject.
Surrendering Mindset 118
Maps of Consciousness: World Mythologies 211 – Campbell, Star Wars, the Matrix, Heroic Journey – Jan Irvin wrote skeptically against that Heroic Journey mythmaking as social engineering. Irvin is cynical & skeptical about the pushing, the motivation for promoting this “hero’s journey propaganda”. Scorched-earth rejecting the entire ‘entheogen’ concept & narrative implies rejecting the hero’s journey narrative.
“The facilitator [trip guide] shared teachings about [Norse Mythology] before the medicine journey. During the meditation experience, she offered guided imagery as a prompt and map for a journey of awareness and insight. [& battle of demonic mythic terror & panic? gotta get your money’s worth, like in Philip K. Dick’s Total Recall.] Norse mythology envisions a world tree (the Ash tree, Yggdrasill) on which the gods … travel. The image of a tree with limbs branching above … seems to resonate deeply within many of us.”
Bottom of p. 211: “Jason and the Argonauts, and Lord of the Rings. In The Rebirth of the Hero: Mythology as a Guide to Spiritual Transformation, Keiron LeGrice uses many popular films…”
p. 212: list of films’ heroic journey features:
- “A call to adventure.
- Refusing the call – the hero at first does not want to face what they must do.
- Circumstances of fate pulling the hero into the journey.
- Meeting strange characters, some trustworthy, some betraying, and often some animal familiars.
- A time of confusion of illness (setbacks).
- The need to surrender (face failure) in order to “cross the final threshold”.
- Finding the treasure and bringing it home, not just for you but also for everyone.”
I could force my October 1985-January 1988 high adventure into this mold, for a strict scientific modern version of transcendence.
I could by force, map the Hero’s Journey to my 1985-1996 journey. Although I formulated the Cybernetic Theory of Ego Transcendence in 1988, around 1996, I mentally profoundly relaxed and then remembered and re-saw the threat and bowed trembling ecstatic, recognizing the freewill power still haunting and bedevilling my thinking, formally recognizing fully that freewill-thinking habit, and thus being able finally to fully renounce that mental pollution, with vision of control-loss vulnerability, and of vicarious salvific crucifixion sacrifice of Mr. Historical Jesus, in a present, Christoform mental space, met up in the air.
Or I could by force, map the Hero’s Journey to my 1985-2013, to attain proper full understanding of archaic mythemes (tree vs. snake), rediscovered in the late-modern era from within a culture that largely lost and forgot its mythology language tradition.
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How to Distinguish Between Spiritual Emergence and Psychosis – This section cites Grof again. And Agosin’s article “Mysticism and Psychosis”: see p. 221, a list of key cognitive phenomenology. See bottom of p. 222-223, list of differences between the two. Ken Wilber similarly writes about failure of transcendence vs. “preserve and transcend” a mental structure. “Integration” book continues, p. 225: “The distinction between mysticism and psychosis is definitely not either/or.”
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Chapter 9: The Shadow Side
Why Do We Talk About Shadow with Psychedelics?
Collective Shadow
The History of Psychedelics and Shadow – 800 B.C.? No, History begins in 1943.
Now Your Turn – “The little doll is you, yeah, And when it’s your time, I wonder how you’ll do, Your kind of trouble’s running deeper than the sea“
Cultural Shadow and the Psychedelic Renaissance – the entire chapter appears to attribute “the shadow” to external, societal fears, not that there’s something lurking hidden in the mind, some hidden dragon destined to disempower the core of personal control. author is so far off-base, he is groping in the dark. Fails to leverage thousands of years of religious mythology describing the threat and resolving it. Mentions chapter 4: Bad trips.
What Underlies the Negative Cultural Projections into Psychedelics?
The Other Side of Shadow
Encountering Manifestations of Archetypal Shadow
The Egodeath theory 