Alexander Beiner – The bigger picture

Page 8: The idea from Richard Doyle’s book on Darwin’s Pharmacy, that psychedelics are ecodelics, which is, the most common theme from an ecodelic insight is “the sudden and absolute conviction that the psychonaut is involved in a densely interconnected ecosystem”

Page 49: Psychedelics open us up to complexity. This may be one of the most significant ways they can help us make sense of the times

Page 56: Anti-isms … “whether that’s a neat political ideology, conspiracy theory or sociological theory, unless it brings us into a lived experience of contradiction, complexity and emergence, it’s a comforting fantasy and will only ever be partially true in very limited situations”

Page 57: Many people call this systems change, but Nora Bateson, a renowned systems theorist and philosopher, often encourages people to move away from the idea of systems change and towards systems learning. Complex systems, as Holland and others have pointed out, don’t just change, they learn. They evolve based on past patterns with a kind of intelligence and adaptability

Page 78: In the way I use it, sovereignty means your capacity to be connected to yourself while also recognizing you’re deeply interconnected to everything and everyone else. It’s a kind of fluid, open sense of your unique you-ness embedded in the rest of reality. When we’re in our sovereignty, we are connected to our agency, which is our ability to move through the world intentionally. When we aren’t, we’re at the whims of the crashing waves of other people’s narratives and concepts about what the world is.

Page 127 and 128: Greg Thomas is an integral theorist and jazz critic. One of my favorite aspects of Thomas’s model is that it highlights antagonistic cooperation, a phrase coined by black American scholar Ralph Ellison. This is the idea that we don’t have to be in agreement to be creating something beautiful together. The trumpet player might be trying to outdo the saxophonist with his solo and the bass player might be trying to outdo both of them. But everyone’s in on the game and working toward a greater unity in the process

Page 132: As I lay on the bed while my second dose wore off, I reflected on the spider queen and my other entity encounters. What I was left with was not a metaphysical curiosity, but a burning conviction that it’s the bonds between us that really matter. I wanted to change how I showed up in my relationship and to try to work through my own intimacy issues. That wasn’t something the DMT could do for me. Shifting would require work, patience and compassion.

Page 186: As Eric Davis explained when we spoke, psychedelics sit at the nexus between science and spirituality because they are a molecule brackets matter brackets that changes our minds brackets consciousness

Page 188: This has been called the explanatory gap between subjective experience and objective data. It’s a gap I’ve wrestled with endlessly as I’ve practiced Eastern meditations, meditation traditions and psychedelic exploration. But it wasn’t until my final dosing on the trial that I began to consider different ways in which the gap can be closed and that if we can do that, we may unlock a completely new way to make sense of the world and radically change our behavior

Page 196: What if instead of the dead machine we have been told it is, the world is actually alive? What if it isn’t just things that are real, but the consciousness that perceives those things as well? The theory that reality is fundamentally a mental process rather than the physical thing is known as philosophical idealism.

Page 204: So why does it matter how we view matter? Because it could fundamentally change how we think and act. For the rest of this chapter, I make the case as to why the capacity for psychedelics to change our view on consciousness is their single most important contribution to improving how we make sense of the world

Page 210: If game B is an analogy for trying to change the social game we’re playing, then game C would be a change that involves the recognition that any significant systems change must come from a reconception of the role of consciousness in reality, a shift in how we view ourselves at the deepest level, an orientation toward the sacredness of our conscious experience that can be the soil from which we draw our values, ideas, and possibilities

Page 205: Widening the frame of what we understand ourselves to be at the very deepest level of our existence is a process not just of changing our own personal or even cultural cognition, but of changing how we relate. How we relate to one another as individuals, as well as how our whole species relates to the wider ecosystem of the planet and the cosmos.