Psychedelics have long been associated with questioning authority and even demolishing our beliefs about the world, where we can find a new sense of meaning and purpose. But does this demolishing of beliefs leave us open to potential manipulation by communities with strong viewpoints or charismatic teachers, gurus, or influencers? Psychedelics have often appeared alongside these groups or individuals, often with vulnerable people being attracted to a certain sense of togetherness and belonging, which could then make them more susceptible to figures in the space who have an air of authority.
Could a profound psychedelic experience provide something of a double-edged sword? The extent to which these kinds of experiences leave us open might need a lot of care and attention, where emphasis might need to be placed on discernment, rather than just simply being open to whatever we encounter. We see the benefit of psychedelics in dissolving boundaries when it comes to psychotherapeutic applications, and this, of course, has a lot of benefit – we can potentially open ourselves up to new pathways and move away from rigid patterns of thinking which might keep us stuck in our lives. But is there a danger with dissolving boundaries with such powerful substances?
Psychedelics have the potential to amplify pre-existing vulnerability, which unfortunately can attract the wrong kind of people to this space, resulting in incidents of abuse within guided settings. Perhaps we should also be asking whether areas such as psychedelic therapy or facilitation in general have problems of abuse, rather than just exploring how these substances impact our vulnerability. It seems quite obvious that people would look for new frameworks after deconstructing existing ones, and this can lead to positive instances of healing – but it could also naturally create a gap waiting to be filled by charismatic figures seeking to manipulate others for their own identity and purpose.
The Need for Meaning
Although there are no souls or nonphysical minds, no immutable selves, although there is no such thing as free will, there are still, at the end of the day, persons. What is a person? A conscious social animal that deliberates, reasons, and chooses, that is possessed of an evolving or continuous—but not a permanent or immutable—identity, and that seeks to live morally and meaningfully. - Owen Flanagan
If humans are naturally predisposed to live a life that is full of meaning, what happens when you throw psychedelics into the mix? The desire to engage in experiences that might soften or dissolve the ego can open up an opportunity to break down old beliefs and find new meaning in the world. Psychedelics can increase our sense of personal meaning through powerful subjective experiences, which seems to correlate with a sense of mental well-being. The search for meaning could be fundamental to our experience as humans, and psychedelics can provide experiences of a mystical nature or a sense of oneness, which can fundamentally support this aspect of our lives.
But is this sense of meaning something brand new or possibly a return to a more harmonious way of life? Perhaps it’s just those of us in certain societies who lack a sense of meaning, and maybe this isn’t such a big area of concern or exploration in other parts of the world. Is the whole idea of a sense of meaning tied to our conception of individuality within the Western world? There are different aspects between the worldview of someone in the West and an indigenous society, such as those from Eurocentric backgrounds compared to someone from an Australian Aboriginal society, for example. One major aspect is the concept of relatedness, where our own individual story is not separate from others in our community; in the West, however, this is something that can be much harder to understand.
I don’t even have a shared story or sense of meaning with my immediate family members, let alone a cohesive feeling of relatedness within my wider community. My psychedelic experiences, however, have provided me with an opportunity to co-create a shared sense of meaning with others who’ve had similar experiences. The opportunity to share and explore, where we can make sense of these experiences within the wider context integration is a valuable thing, and it can allow us to maintain a sense of meaning in a modern world that often might feel meaningless.
The power of psychedelics to provide meaning and purpose can often be surprising, where we might see our experiences as a sign to follow a certain path. I’ve personally encountered this kind of refinement when it comes to my relationship with music and LSD in particular. I’ve played saxophone for nearly 30 years, but during school and in my early years at uni I really enjoyed singing, and effectively ignored saxophone. When I was in school, I basically had the option of joining woodwind bands, and I didn’t really see it as cool. I was really into rock music and liked singing in cover bands, and my saxophone was mostly left in a case. When I had my first experiences with LSD at 19, I felt angry at myself for having left this amazing instrument alone in its case, just not being played.
This feeling totally shifted my relationship with the saxophone, where LSD provided me with the opportunity to respect the work I had put into learning it, as well as opening me up to the possibilities for creation. I owe so much to these experiences, and I’ve never been as sure about anything as I have been with music – LSD has allowed my sense of meaning to be intimately tied to the creation of music, and the world of music in general, where it’s become something of an obsession.
This has all been very positive and given me so much in terms of connection, as well as allowing me space to provide joy to others and really feel a sense of shared meaning. This is where I find my community, and there is often a lot of support, where the individual is championed simultaneously with the wider collective. The way in which certain substances are consumed within these environments might have more of a collective sense of co-creation, aided by altered states, rather than necessarily being primarily concerned with psychedelics in the context of healing. The concept of self-actualisation within a psychedelic-assisted psychotherapeutic context can of course be beneficial in a transformational sense.
The opportunity to fulfill our unique potential is one of the appealing things about psychedelics, but the power of group settings can also allow us to recognise the power of a shared sense of meaning, which could protect us against vulnerability or susceptibility to charismatic authority. How we interpret our experiences, and how we engage with concepts of truth, might determine the level of our vulnerability or susceptibility to charisma taking over the situation.
Psychedelic Counterculture and the Search for Truth
The important thing here, I believe, is that truth isn’t outside power or lacking in power: contrary to a myth whose history and functions would repay further study, truth isn’t the reward of free spirits, the child of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth—that is, the types of discourse it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances that enable one to distinguish true and false statements; the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true. –Michel Foucault
This quote from French philosopher Michel Foucault, from an interview in 1976, was from a period when there had been major social disruption in the world, along with distrust in the institutions that governed society. Opposition to the Vietnam War had reached its peak over a decade earlier, and people were looking to other ways of existence which focused more on ideals of peace rather than war. This desire to respond to a world that had been quite harsh and destructive left people relatively open to new ways of thinking, particularly with countercultural ideas and music at this time being influenced by Eastern traditions such as Hinduism.
Other philosophies such as Abraham Maslow’s ‘Hierarchy of Needs’, put forward in his 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation, provided space for concepts such as self-actualisation to be seen as the highest personal aspirational need. The idea of realising our potential and becoming more of what we are laid the foundation for the Human Potential Movement, which arose out of 1960s counterculture. This movement believed that there was an untapped potential within all human beings, and development of this potential could lead to greater increases in fulfillment, happiness, and creativity. Advocates of this movement promoted the idea of cultivating their own potential and assisting others with theirs as being key to greater positive change in society.
This kind of philosophy would go hand in hand with a substance such as LSD, which has the potential to make us more creative, as well as more insightful from a scientific perspective, where there could be more freedom for innovative thought. Many advocates of LSD at this time, such as Timothy Leary, often spoke about the drug being used in an intelligent way rather than recreationally. He became something of a ‘reluctant guru’ with the promotion of his philosophy of “Turn on, tune in and drop out”, where “dropping” out meant a renunciation of the world and its shallow puppetry. Despite being suspicious of the hippies who flocked to him, Leary’s work laid the foundation for the League for Spiritual Discovery, which was set up in the 1960s and strove for legal use of LSD for the purpose of meditation, insight, and spiritual understanding.
All of this sounds positive, but was this sense of voyage of psychedelic discovery all merely centred on the individual, under the guise of impacting society on a wider level? When we speak about meaning within this context, does it circle back to individual purpose? Perhaps the consumption of psychedelics at this time not only left individuals open to the charisma of authority, but also to the philosophical ideas put forward by individuals which were advertised as being universal antidotes to the ills of the world.
Perhaps this is the point when it comes down to it – there is no one universal truth which can apply to all humans on a global level, but where people are open to the idea of truth or feel a desperate need for it, there will ultimately be something or someone to fill that gap.
One of these charismatic figures in the late 60s was James Edward Baker (also known as Father Yod), who founded the group The Source Family and the subsequent psychedelic rock band Ya Ho Wa 13, which were the subjects of a 2012 Netflix documentary. Heavily influenced by the teachings of Yogi Bahjan and Age of Aquarius philosophy, the group generally adopted a way of life that promoted health, organic vegetarian diets, communal living, free love, and utopian ideals. Father Yod had a communal group of around 150 people, along with a “harem” of 14 women and three children.
These utopian ideals of communal living and free love certainly played into the need for something more harmonious to emerge, where people could see how such a society would ultimately be beneficial for the wider population. But do these kinds of ideals work in reality for everyone, or are they simply the manifestations of the ideas of a charismatic leader? What is it that leads people from the path of psychedelic exploration, either from a spiritual or creative sense, to then giving oneself over to a group?
This isn’t intended to be an article specifically focusing on psychedelic cults. But it’s interesting to see how these kinds of groups emerge at a similar time to when our own sense of agency might be diminished through the consumption of psychedelics.
Another major figure who emerged during this time was Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, more commonly referred to as Osho. In the 1960s, Osho travelled around his native India after resigning as a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Jabalpur, where he criticised the orthodoxy of mainstream religions as well as the philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi. He gained prominence as the founder of a new religious group known as the Rajneesh movement. He spent time in Mumbai in 1970 initiating followers before founding an ashram in Pune in 1974. The ashram incorporated teachings from the Human Potential Movement, as well as religious traditions, mystics, bhakti poets, and philosophers from around the world.
Tension grew in the early 80s between the movement and the Indian government, where the development of the ashram was curbed, and a back tax claim of nearly $5 million was made, resulting in the movement shifting its focus to the USA. In 1981, Osho established the commune of Rajneeshpuram in Wasco County, Oregon, which became a source of conflict between the movement and residents. Several legal battles eventually curtailed its success, and in 1985 Osho had asked local authorities to investigate his personal secretary, Ma Anand Sheela, after a suspected food poisoning outbreak in the local area, which was deemed intentional.
While Osho was not necessarily a full-on advocate of psychedelics, he believed that certain substances could open a door to meditative practices, and it seemed that the types of individuals who were susceptible to this authority were those feeling disillusioned at the state of American politics and society. Most individuals who joined this movement weren’t vulnerable individuals, however, and most of them, in fact, had university degrees. But the influence of the countercultural movement on the desire to think and live in different ways left room for this kind of charisma.
The point here is that these kinds of communities and movements have offered the promise of genuine support, and while there are some which manage to do that, often these communities are centred around authority that becomes difficult to question. Does the common thread of charisma become something which people find hard to escape? We might find it hard to trust the kinds of insights we experience under the influence of psychedelics, and instead defer authority to an external source.
Charisma in the Modern Psychedelic Age
What is it about charisma that becomes so convincing? German sociologist Max Weber explored the concept of charismatic authority in contrast with other authorities in society – one relating to the legal/rational arm of the state, and the other being handed down from traditional authority such as patriarchy or feudalism. Charismatic authority was characterised by Weber as a:
certain quality of an individual personality, by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a leader. . . . How the quality in question would be ultimately judged from an ethical, aesthetic, or other such point of view is naturally indifferent for the purpose of definition.
I’m sure many people in psychedelic spaces have encountered these types of figures, many of whom are attracted to these communities, which often contain vulnerable individuals who they can target. This isn’t just a one-way street, and it’s important to recognise that we shouldn’t feel any shame for being drawn in by charismatic authority, especially while under the influence of psychedelics. These substances have the power to provide ego-dissolving experiences, but they can also increase narcissistic tendencies in people. There is now even guidance on how to protect yourself against spiritual narcissism within the psychedelic space as more people start to engage in ceremonial settings, often with facilitators who carry a certain charisma.
Is there something about certainty when it comes to charisma within the context of psychedelics? I imagine it’s hard to be charismatic if you’re unsure about something, so perhaps what is being offered is a degree of certainty against the backdrop of a world which can often be uncertain. Psychedelic-induced mystical experiences can often be characterised by revelatory knowledge, either from God or another source, where we might see these revelations as markers of ‘true’ or ‘authentic’ mystical experiences.
What would then happen if we engaged with an authority or movement which reinforced these mystical revelations? We might find ourselves stuck with a group identity, where confirmation bias and sacred knowledge form a foundation of deferring to the charismatic authority who is interpreting our psychedelic revelations. We might just think of this in terms of psychedelic facilitators or self-appointed gurus running retreat centres or ceremonies. But our vulnerability to charismatic authority could also be under threat from less obvious spaces.
While not necessarily operating like cults, individuals who’ve encountered psychedelics might be susceptible to communities known as ‘High-Control Groups’, which often rely on parasocial relationships, paid memberships, and reinforced identity, and usually tend to operate online. Groups like these are often found through social media algorithms or influencers essentially telling us similar things to the Human Potential Movement, but often repackaged in a way that leans into entrepreneurial spirit and new systems of thinking. In these situations, the charismatic authority isn’t necessarily related to a singular individual, as it is more about the charisma of the group to reinforce the ideals which uphold it.
Some individuals might have come to psychedelics relatively late in their lives, and may have lived in a way that has ignored potential wisdom which might come from insights or revelations within our experiences. So there could be a feeling of having encountered these ideas for the first time, and maybe almost too late, to the point where we need to drastically shift things around and possibly exit a life that doesn’t serve us.
But is it possible to experience psychedelics in a way where we can protect our curiosity without losing discernment? This was one of the early conversations I had with a good friend in the psychedelic space – I was reminded of the power of discernment, that I shouldn’t just have too open a mind, that anything (or anyone) can simply enter whenever the energy decides to. Healthy psychedelic integration has the power to encourage critical thinking, as well as openness to the various disciplines which engage with the topic of psychedelic consciousness.
If we can find communities which promote autonomy rather than dependence, we might encounter teachers and guides who ultimately become unnecessary once the path is cleared for us.