The Illness of Isolation and Rites of Passage

    In the US, the emphasis on carving your own path and making a name for yourself has left people feeling lost and alienated. If they do not ascribe to American values, they may feel they have no lifeline, for no broader system of meaning supports them. If you think about it, rugged individualism could not have been the ethos of our archaic ancestors. To try and survive in the wild on your own would have been foolish. Early Homo Sapiens recognized the evolutionary advantage of community, where responsibilities were shared, and members worked together to ward off threats and gather necessary materials and sustenance.

    Communities keep us accountable. If someone veers from the value system, the community can work together to help that individual reorient.

    Such supportive rehabilitation stands in stark community; the penal system. Instead of promoting buy-in to a greater community, the penal system threatens the mental torture of imprisonment to keep people in line. It’s a behaviorist, consequentialist model, eschewing consideration of causes apart from a generalizable “free will”. This neither works – unless the unspoken goal is to fill up prisons, of course – nor does it align with contemporary models of the psyche that recognize the influence of trauma, environment, and relationships on behaviors like violence and addiction.

    A helpful demonstration came through the famous Rat Park studies on drug addiction at Simon Fraser University in the 1970s. These arose in response to previous addiction research that gave morphine drips to caged rats, resulting in every rat consuming morphine until their bodies withered and their hearts stopped. The seemingly clear conclusion was that opiates were inherently addicting.

    A new group of late-1970s research wondered, “Was the opiate inherently addicting, or was the addiction fueled by the rats’ solitary confinement, which was so shitty that morphine was the only possible source of relief? Did the morphine meet a primordial need that the terrible environmental conditions obstructed?” These researchers focused on two apparatuses; one had rats in isolation, and the other arranged them in communities of fifteen to twenty. The results supported the researchers’ hypothesis: while the communal rats still consumed morphine, they did so to a significantly lesser extent than the rats living in isolation. The researchers concluded addiction was less of a disease than a byproduct of “the cage you live in”.

    The studies’ influence remains strong today, when intellectual movements like critical race theory emphasize how social, political, and environmental factors influence behavior and worldview. Still, the US justice system doesn’t take such factors into account. It reduces all human behavior to “personal choice”, eliminating environment, trauma history, and interpersonal connection from consideration.

    When we spoke, Deb Dana explained that “a traumatized nervous system gets pulled out of regulation into a survival state, gets struck there, and can’t find the way back to regulation.” If disconnection is a key variable in conditions like trauma and addiction (which is often a trauma-based coping mechanism), it’s intriguing to note that connection is a fundamental element of the mystical experience that the researchers at Johns Hopkins have argued to be the prime mover in psychedelic healing. The long-term smokers participating in Matt Johnson’s study may not have connected directly with a community under psilocybin’s influence, but they often reported connection to something beyond themselves. Ketamine seems uniquely helpful in restoring one’s connection to something beyond one’s ego, given its capacity to separate consciousness from the body.

    I’m not surprised by conclusions demonstrating community and connection as important elements of well-being. What is surprising is these conclusions weren’t obvious from the start. Suffering in the Western world runs so deep that symptom-reducing pills like SSRIs and benzodiazepines’ rarely feel like enough. To heal our wounds, something must shift, and whether this manifests in one’s daily habits, relationship, career path or anything that keeps hammering down depressive brain structures, the shift must endure. Otherwise, the pseudo-transformation will prove nothing more than another quick fix.

    I’m optimistic that the grip of rugged individualism is loosening. As it does, the healing value of authentic connection will move to the center of Western healing models. The kinds of connections psychedelics like ketamine can facilitate could be instrumental in speeding up this cultural shift, especially if attention is paid to the group experience.

Rites of Passage

    Perhaps group psychedelic therapy could motivate this cultural shift by reawakening a broader healing process whose archetypal nature is suggested through its recurrence across cultures and time: the rite of passage.

    Depth psychologist Bill Plotkin understands rite of passage to indicate movement from one state of being into another. A rite of passage is an initiation, often into a more integrated role in society. Without rites of passage, numerous social structures throughout history would have ceased to function. Given the importance of the Eleusinian Mysteries, for instance, I imagine Greece would not have maintained its broad influence and power for so long without their central initiatory rites.

    If your history is similar to mine, your rite of passage into adulthood consisted of getting told you were an adult on your eighteenth birthday, and your initiation into the workforce involve receiving a college diploma and getting told to find a job. Predominant Western religions have rites of passage – the Jewish bar and bat mitzvah, the Catholic confirmation – but how often do you hear folks describe these experiences as deeply transformational? The description I’ve heard usually go something like, “I did it because everyone at my school did, and I got some pretty lame presents.”

    These are different than, say, a teenage male consuming sacred plant medicine while community leaders conduct a traditional ritual to signify passage from one life stage to the next. Take, for instance, the huskanaw ritual of the Powhatan people – known also as the Virginia Algonquians of Tsenacomoco, who occupied the land surrounding what the British called Jamestown.

    After two days of ceremonial dancing, the Weroance – the community leader – guided young boys, who were painted white, into remote parts of the woods to lie as if dead beside a tree. As their mothers grieved, the Kwiokos – whom the West would regard as “the shaman” – carried the boys through a gauntler of whips and clubs, protecting them from the blows, and laid them beside another tree. After the community feasted around the motionless boys, they were then carried into the depths of the woods to be confined, nearly naked, in a wooden cage. The boys would remain in the cages for nine months, enduring changing weather and imbibing little food or drink apart from wysoccan, a “mad potion” that induced vivid dysphoria, violent spams, and horrifying hallucinations. The key ingredient of wysoccan was Datura Stramonium, better known as Jimsonweed, whose reputation as one of the most terrifying plant medicines in existence earned it a nickname of “devil’s snare.”

    The Wysoccan wiped out the boys’ memories of childhood. If they returned to the village and so much as recognized a childhood friend, they were sent back to undergo the huskanaw again. Boys sometimes died on the second huskanaw, but those who emerged were “reborn” as social and military leaders in the community. Some of them became kwiocosuk, for wysoccan led them to meet the wrathful god Okee, who called them to service on the outskirts of the village.

    The Kuskanaw wouldn’t meet ethical standards of Western medicine. But for the Powhatan, the ritual served the higher good of the community and the land. If the goal of a rite of passage is to catalyze a shift in the initiate, many prevailing Western rites fall short, whereas the initiates in plant medicine cultures undergo a transformation of consciousness to become an adult prepared to serve the community.

    To enter a higher plane of development, the former self must die. This process can take countless forms, the most extreme of which brings the actual possibility of physical death, forcing the initiate to make peace with their inescapable mortality. But the primary transformational power comes through the facilitation of ego death, opening space for a new, more powerful self to be born.

    Psychedelic writer and ceremonial magician Julian Vayne wrote about a wild ketamine-assisted rite in his book, Getting Higher: The Manual of Psychedelic Ceremony, called the “Temple K Initiation Rite.” I’m uncertain if this rite has historical precedent or if Vayne and his friends invented it, but it involves a participant voluntarily mummifying their body in black cling film, snorting ketamine, and wrapping their face in the film, leaving only a hole for breathing. The mummified individual enters the depths of a “K-hole”, a dissociated emptiness void of sight and sound. When bodily control returns, they find their body constricted until the guide cuts the cling wrap, and the individual emerges as if reborn. Such death-rebirth rites are psychological corollaries of the mythical Greek phoenix, the bird that erupts into flames before resurrecting from its own ashes.

    Rites of passage are ancient technologies of human development which ceremonially facilitate personal evolution. Admitting this is speculative, I’m of the belief that preponderance of the “immature masculine” in Western society has to do with an absence of rites of passage of initiate boys into manhood. When does that happen? At the first legal shot ordered at the dive bar? At first wallop of the wooden paddle just before the beer bong tube is jammed through the quivering lips of the teenager desperate to avoid further ridicule? At the first successful stifling of tears?

    I wonder if psychedelics could structure novel Western rites of passage geared toward the facilitation of meaning, belonging, and maturity. Perhaps a structured, therapeutic psychedelic group process could encourage sufficient intention for people to undergo psychological and spiritual rebirth, encouraging release of immature patterns through initiation into higher stages of development and service.

    Michael Pollan has pointed out that in the 1960s, LSD created a unique rite of passage for the youth. “Rites of passage are typically organized by community elders for the adolescents to make the transition from the world of children to the world of adulthood,” Pollan told me. “They go through a series of ordeals – it might be a vision quest, a hunting ritual, or a drug experience and then they’re welcomed into adult society, having passed through the gauntler. With Psychedelics in the sixties, the adults didn’t organize the rite of passage. The kids did themselves, and where they ended up was not the adult world, but a place of alienation from the adult world with a desire to create a new culture, characterized by different ways of dress, different ways of speaking, different manners. I think that the rite of passage they’d been through – the acid trip – had a lot to do with it.”

    Huxley contemplated similar questions. Brave New World may be his most famous novel, but his final novel, Island, focuses more on rites of passage. Huxley’s first psychedelic trip took place between the two books, and its influence on his hopes for civilization shows in Island. In contrast to the pleasure-driven dystopia of Brave New World, Island presents an imagined utopia through the fictional island of Pala. A central element of Pala’s culture is a coming-of-age ritual with the “moksha-medicine”, a psychedelic fungus that grants its users temporary clarity on “what it’s like to be what in fact you are, what in fact you always have been.” In case any ambiguity surrounds Huxley’s point of reference, Hofmann received a letter from the author in 1962 addressing the chemist as “the original discoverer of the moksha-medicine.”

    In Pollan’s eyes, there’s an indelible relationship between psychedelics and rites of passage. “I see the high-dose psychedelic trip as rite of passage in that it’s transformative,” he said. “You start in one place and you end up in another. You’re passing through a liminal state, where consciousness is changed, and that facilitates the growth experience that you’re supposed to have.” How to create conditions sufficient to facilitate group-based transformative rites in the West remains to be discovered. One controversial individual who explored the terrain, however, was Mexican psychiatrist Salvador Roquet.

(This excerpt is published by the Centre for Indic Studies purely for the sake of educational purposes. We aim not to violate the copyright in anyway and actively promote the author and his book. You may learn more about Sean P Lawlor and his book clicking the hyperlinks.)

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