The Role of Psychedelics in Expanding Consciousness and Overcoming Death Anxiety

I have written before here about the use of psychedelics and entheogenic plants and what their potential benefits are.  There is currently a lot of work being done around these plant substances, and after a long uphill battle, there is now clear evidence that these plants may offer us remediation of some of our more severe mental obstacles:  ibogaine, for instance, is useful in addiction therapy, LSD is potentially useful in alleviating severe obsessive compulsive disorder.  These are just a few examples.   With the relaxing of restrictions on the experimentation needed with these plant-based substances and their synthesized compounds, we are likely just at the beginning of our understanding of what these plants can do for us.    While I believe their exploration is necessary for us for a host of reasons, the main point I want to focus on here is their potential application for reducing death anxiety in patients whose conditions are terminal. 

But let's be honest here:  aren't we all terminal?  The woman dying from cancer is no different from me, is she?  I, too, am dying.   While her process my occur more swiftly than my own, we are both subject to biomechanical decay, and we both we will experience biomechanical death.    So while I'm exploring the possibilities of human consciousness expansion here for the sake of reducing death anxiety, let the reader know in advance that I'm highlighting this because if has an impact on us all.  

In my previous post from last week, I mentioned that our binary thinking - which has served us historically well from a survival and fitness standpoint - can no longer help us define our experiences with uncertainty and the unknown.   But uncertainty is part of our journey through the cosmos, and while we have tried to overcome it by quantifying data to the minutia, we cannot overcome the fact that there are just some things we won't know yet.   Our acceptance of this has everything to do with how we process biomechanical death, and how we view what comes after it.   Our DNA, however, may very well be innately wired to view choices in terms of good and bad.  If it is, then we made need help expanding our efforts to horizons that remain currently unreachable to us. 

Psychedelics may help us initiate brain chemistry changes that will faciliate a deeper understanding
of our environment and even our death. 

Enter psychedelics. 

There is still much debate within my own borders about whether or not these substances should be legalized.  I won't go into that here.    For the purposes of my points here, these holotropic plants (entheogenic plants) are not to be considered as drugs.   They are to be considered therapies instead. 

In recent years, Johns Hopkins University has undertaken what may be the largest (or at least most recently) study of its kind on the use of psilocybes to alleviate various types of mental illness and even neurodegenerative disorders:  ALS, Alzheimer's, PTSD and much more.  You can take a look at the studies themselves here.    There is certainly enough data to argue that many of our culture's more serious diseases (e.g. addictions, PTSD, etc.) can at least be brought into some modicum of mediate control via the use of this plant technology.  While none of these outcomes produce what might be called a cure, the research isn't finished yet, and who knows what doors may yet be unlocked?   For now, it's clear to see that these entheogenic plant-based substances have much to teach us. 

Plants, teaching us?  Yes.  Yes, they can.  And shamans the world over have long demonstrated that plants are teachers. In fact, shamanism itself is dependent upon the practice of seeking the "spirits" for intervention in matters of health and wellness, and oftentimes entheogenic plants are used in the pursuit of this endeavor (though there are other techniques utilized, as well).   In fact, Tiago Forte addressed the issue of entheogenic plants as "information technology" in a 2024 post about an ayahuasca ceremony.   It is likely that these plants as teachers/technology is nothing at all new - it is just that western culture has so deprived of us beauty in favor of commodification that we no longer understand the nature of our life or our planet.   Thus, our binary thinking - which serves a mechanized, compartmentalized worldview very well, but which fails in its attempts to commodify the uncertain or unknown - leads us to a dead end: where will we go from here?

Psychedelics may offer us a in-road to a deeper understand.  They may offer us a unique but natural way to circumvent our binary thinking, and bridge the gap between our current (limited) understanding of biomechanical death processes toward a better relationship with not knowing.  Through the controlled use of psychedelics, we may eventually alleviate alttogether our fear of this perceived ending.   And we may even come to view it as not an ending at all, but rather as an event no more significant than changing one's clothes after a day of work!