David Luke, senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Greenwich, co-founder of the Breaking Convention conference and author of Otherworlds: Psychedelics and Exceptional Human Experience, speaks in an excerpt from Pinchbeck's online course The Future of Consciousness. Luke recounts the biologist Merlin Sheldrake, who spent three years in Panama studying a plant that does not photosynthesize and its fungal partner, taking LSD in Luke's lab and experiencing himself as the fungus, which reframed how he understood the relationship and how he thought science might be done. Luke connects this to what Eduardo Viveiros de Castro calls perspectivism, knowing something by becoming it, and sets it against the reductive method that isolates and deadens what it studies. He then reports survey findings on nature connectedness and shifts in metaphysical belief.
Guest: David Luke
In brief
- Luke reports that in a survey of around 150 psychedelic users, every respondent said psychedelics had made them feel more connected to the natural world, a unanimity he says is otherwise unheard of in psychological research.
- Luke states that roughly a quarter of Western ayahuasca users and about ten percent of LSD users report experiencing themselves transformed into another species.
- Luke argues that indigenous epistemologies of knowing by becoming can yield scientific insight that detached objectivity misses, citing Sheldrake's shift in perspective on his own fungal research.
- Luke claims that psychedelic-induced changes in metaphysical belief are unidirectional, always moving away from materialist reductionism, and that they also increase animistic attribution of sentience.
- Luke contends that the reductive objectivity of mainstream science helped produce the ecological crisis, invoking Einstein's point that the thinking that created a problem cannot solve it.
- Luke says psychedelic and parapsychology research is forcing respectable academic institutions to entertain ontological questions about consciousness, entities and out-of-body experience.
Full text
perhaps the most interesting of those for me was um a biologist by the name of Merlin sheldrake uh who been three years of Cambridge University and in the Panama jungle studying the relationship between this fungus and a plant the plant being quite unique a VOA uh in that it doesn't photosynthesize it has no chlorophyll and um it seemingly gets all of its energy directly from the Fungus so it's always assumed to be parasitic Merlin wasn't entirely sure about this spent three years studying it came to our lab we gave him LSD and his experience was that he turned into the fungus and and have this kind of uh New Perspective which gave him some new thoughts and ideas about what the nature of this relationship might actually be but above and beyond that it it it changed its perspective about um how to do biology and in fact how we might do better science as well in that for the first time he didn't see his problem as a human M and sheld rate but as or from the perspective of the fungus uh and you know it's only then after three years he had these kind of insights um so there's like a an invitation and a room room here to bring in some kind of indigenous kinds of epistemologies into the the academy because it turns out this is the kind of epistemology we see throughout the Americas particularly where the use of psychedelics are used in in ritual practices um in that if you want to obtain information from something you want to know something about something the best way to do that is to become that thing you know so knowing by becoming what the Anthropologist Eduardo goo de Castro calls perspectivism uh and it's something that we see kind of broadly used particularly you you use of iasa and um learning from Doctor trees and and understanding the medicinal properties of plants and so on and so forth uh and so it kind of invites in this curious intersection between uh different ways of obtaining knowledge which may or may not include some kind of uh direct communication or becoming with other species uh or some kind of transcendence of time or Clairvoyance um but nevertheless can lead to better creative problem solving insights around very difficult scientific problems and I think this could especially apply to ecological situations uh and our ecological crises in that you know thinking like in this traditional objective materialist reductive scientific way has got us into all kinds of problems you know it's it's it's seen everything as kind of dead and inert and there to be exploited um you know and and the objective scientific agenda is to distance yourself as far as possible from the thing you're trying to study you take it out of its natural environment you atom ize it you desiccate it you you know you you chop it up you put it under a microscope and we get as far away from it as we can and we call that objective science we attempt to understand it in this kind of dead and inert way whereas the kind of more indigenous epistemologies are about you know becoming that thing uh communicating with it recognizing yourself in it and it in yourself um and it's it's a more engaged and connected kind of epistemology and I think you know the way we are going currently like uh our science has brought us to the brink of ecological disaster this kind of traditional objective approach and as Einstein said you know the same thinking that got you into the problem is not the same kind of thinking you need to use to get out of that problem so I'm think you know I think there's an opportunity here to uh kind of sneak in kind of under the radar some of these kind of indigenous shamanic perspectives uh quite literally about how we can come to understand and interact with the natural world that we are we know we are the natural world and that's one of the other things we see in this research that I've been doing coming through is that the psychedelics in particular have this massive capacity for changing people's ecological Compass right so we see these kind of huge changes in how people relate to the Natural World following their psychedelic experiences like we see these big increases in what called nature connectedness or nature relatedness um you know one of the Serv I did about a decade ago we we asked you know 150 psychedelic users has taking psychedelics changed in any way how you relate to the natural world and 100% of them which is something you never see in psychological research every one of them 100% of the psychic users said taking psychedelics have made them feel more connected to Nature um so we see these big kind of uh attitudinal shifts or kind of worldview shifts through use of psychedelics and aled States they have a tendency to urge people more in a in a in a kind of uh an indigenous kind of wellview in many ways and we see that both within these kind of experiences of perspectivism which turn out to be very common a quarter of iosa users westerners had taken iasa reported having the experience of being transformed into another species right um this is something has every day in common to indigenous people but something completely alien to to westerners and it's not something you see necessarily advertised on your iosca retreat brochures you know people are going for Spiritual Enlightenment or dealing with their mental health issues or whatever you know it doesn't say you chances are you might get the experience of being transformed into another species um and we see this also occurring with good old common or garden European lab created psychedelics like LSD you know 10% of LSD users have also had this experience so there's something inherent uh about these Journeys into alter states which which can lead people into these kind of more indigenous ways of epistemology like perspectivism uh but also we see increases in kind of animistic worldviews as well um there is a really increasing how psychedelics you know once people take psychedelics they're more likely to apply senss to non self things including you know other other humans other other primates other animals uh other kind of biological life forms and even an in inanimate objects man-made or otherwise um so people increase their kind of animistic perspectives after these transformative psychedelic experiences and also their metaphysical well viws uh and there seem to be an interesting Trend in that the direction of change of metaphysical beliefs is always unidirectional and that direction is away from materialist reductionism okay away from the idea that everything is just inert and dead matter uh and that you know Consciousness is some kind of calamitous side effect of of just having a brain um and and in the direction of pretty much any other kind of metaphysics uh such as dualism the idea of Mind and Body separate entities or even um you know idealism kind of ideas that Bernardo castra puts forward or uh favored seems to be an increase in belief in in pans psychism that everything is inherently conscious so we see these big metaphysical shifts and also big spiritual shifts as well following psychedelic experiences uh for instance in one study which surveyed thousand people had taken DMT and at high doses had had an encounter with an entity when they looked at their prior and post spiritual beliefs those people had said that they were atheist beforehand less than half of them remained atheist after their DMT entity encounters so we're seeing these kind of profound shifts always in the direction of these more kind of indigenous worldviews and that's probably a really good thing in our current ecological situation and kind of psychological cultural political situation we are as a species um in that you know indigenous perspectives generally incorporate this kind of idea of reciprocity you know that you you there there is a a kind of relationship everything is relational between yourself and other other beings in in the natural world because we are all nature um and that you never take without first asking that you never take more than you need and you also always give something in return and along if we followed those principles we wouldn't have rapacious extractivism and you know the kind of the the the overuse of of kind of resources and habitat destruction and ecological collapse and all the rest of it so I think it's a probably a good thing that we're seeing these kind of uh Altered States like driving these these kind of huge kind of uh psychological metap physical spiritual ontological epistemological shifts in people's relationship with uh with with themselves and the universe and planet and other species um and I think it needs to go further um you know when we see these changes in people's uh connection to Nature it's it's it's great that the the people shifts that that are having with psychedelics is is seemingly far bigger than like even like uh like a nature connectedness intervention programs where people go and spend a couple of weeks in the wilderness you know doses of psilocybin are seemingly more reliable in in making people feel connected after those kind of interventions and yet in the Western World you know if you were to take to kind of like make a Bend diagram of like nature and self like uh and and ask people well you know how much do they overlap yeah uh you know a lot of people in the in the in the developed world will kind of like just have this kind of little bit of overlap um those people are more ecologically over oriented obviously have an even bigger overlap and also ons have taken psychedelics but you ask kind of indigenous people particularly and like well that's what they say it's a ridiculous question but you know effectively they have a one-to-one relationship of self and nature and in fact you know like the work of Nai again and in in other cultures too uh you know like he worked with the Asin Ina and he was trying to understand and from them what is their name for nature um you know they had a word for their kind of culture you know their kind of cultural things and elements uh but that there was no word for nature and that was because there was no difference between culture and nature and like you know one is the the the the the absence of the other in by our definition you know in the western concept what is cultural is that which is not natural is that which is produced by humans right uh and what is what is natural is not cultural uh and yet and these indigenous perspectives they're Inseparable you're right there is no difference between nature and culture so that's just some of the fun stuff I've been doing and and I think you know a lot of this work and and the research in in transpersonal Psychology and parapsychology and the kind of growing really booming interest in in psychedelics is uh inevitably driving some really interesting shifts and it it's kind of popped the cork on the genus's bottle within the academy and it's kind of forcing even very you know mainstream uh highly respectable academic institutions to begin to ask questions of these kind of like ontologically challenging questions about the nature of Consciousness and the nature of reality and you know whether or not entities may actually be real or whether or not people genuinely have out of body when they leave their body when they have out of body EXP experiences and around near-death experiences and mystical experiences and so on and so um yeah I'm I'm feeling quite hopeful that we're kind of moving in a more positive direction but time is short and uh I think psychedelics have an important role in being that kind of more turbocharged catalysts in in this transformation
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.