Nondual Ontologies and the Training of Psychedelics Guides~ Transcript from "Forms of Psychedelic Life"
The following essay is a transcript of a talk I gave in Berkeley, CA in April of 2023 at Forms of Psychedelic Life, an interdisciplinary conference exploring the intersection of aesthetics, ethics, religion, and altered states.
So, hi. My name is Valeria McCarroll, and while you’ve already heard a bit about me from my bio, before I launch I’d like to situate myself a bit further. I’m in this cis-gendered body with a nonbinary soul – I identify as queer, I’m white, semi-abled who navigates chronic pain, upper-middle class, highly sensitive/neurodiverse, survivor of sexual trauma.
Why is situating oneself important? In part, to name my lenses and biases overtly- so you have a sense of how my view of the world is colored- what I’m naming isn’t the be-all end-all perspective on nondualism, psychedelics, or guiding – it’s just one. And because when we’re talking about something like “nondualism” or “nondual ontologies” we’re inherently limited. We can never actually touch with language the reality we’re attempting to grasp, and we also have to understand that our attempts at grasping are situated within a specific cultural context.
My intention in offering this lecture is to offer a perspective, some insight into the nature of a nondual ontology and why that orientation, that view might be helpful to those of us interested and involved in the field of psychedelic healing. This insight comes from the knowledge and practices that have been passed down to me from my own teachers (human and nonhuman) & the embodied wisdom I have cultivated as part of my own practice. Which is to say, this is a synthesis of ideas and concepts that has roots in a variety of different traditions.
My invitation to you is to take what I’m saying as an offering. You can choose how deeply you step forward to engage with it, or not. I’m oriented from a ground of being based in consent as we explore these concepts. Everything here is an invitation, not a proclamation of truth or expectation of belief.
So, in service of us all being on relatively the same page, I want to briefly define these three key terms: nondual, psychedelic, and guide. Let’s start with psychedelic.
Psychedelic. Thanks to Michael Pollan we seem to have really culturally anchored the idea that psychedelics are about manifesting the contents of one’s mind. The term “psychedelic” was coined in conversation between Humphrey Osmond and Aldous Huxley, from “psyche” meaning soul or mind, and “-delic”, meaning to reveal or make manifest. And here, already, we’ve run into the materialistic, reductionist orientation to reality that pervades most of Western culture. And I’d ask you: are psychedelics really about manifesting the contents of your mind? Or is it possible that what is made visible in a psychedelic experience might transcend the limitations of our small-mindedness and show us glimpses of a reality beyond what we believe possible?
Psychedelics are “non-specific amplifiers”. They act by widening the aperture of consciousness available to us, affected by both the set and the setting – the circumstances of a psychedelic experience that include both the physical setting as well as the intention and attention of the voyager. Now, part of any given setting would be the presence of others: other voyagers, a sitter, or a guide. So let’s talk a bit about this term “guide”.
Guide. There are a bunch of different terms for this role, and the terms we use help to define the roll. Variably the guide is called a psychedelic-assisted therapist. Shaman. Sitter. Space-holder. I’m personally trying on “Cosmic Aesthetician”.
Now, much like the word “psychedelic”, we can get kind of tripped up in our Western orientations around hierarchy and power dynamics and start to think that a guide is a guru. That to be a guide is to be an all-knowing, all-seeing teacher who exists on some plane beyond suffering and never causes harm or gets caught in the manifestations of their own shadow material. We orient to psychedelic guides as though they are all of our projections around what it means to be enlightened.
This is problematic on a bunch of levels, first in that shadow material is unavoidable. To be in a human body is to have a shadow. No one is beyond their human experience. When we project onto the idea of a guide that they are “perfect”, we move them out of the realm of humanity and onto a pedestal of perfection that disempowers us as clients, guides, consumers, and critics of psychedelic work.
We might orient to a guide as THE authority on our experience. We might hit override on our own knowing because if a guide is a guru or a spiritual teacher as seen through the western lens, they must never fail. They must always be right. Moreover, part of the point (at least to me) of psychedelic work is that it serves to deeply awaken and empower our own sense of inner authority, our own sovereignty. And when our guide is our guru, we’re entrenched in the dynamics of bowing down.
On the receiving end, to be perceived as a spiritual authority is an incredibly ego-inflating experience. So much so that a guide might become addicted to the high of being the one who “knows”. Or invested in a self-image of oneself as a teacher. Or avoid mirrors of oneself that would hold one accountable to one’s shadow material. And the thing is, when you’re on a pedestal that high, reifying dynamics of power over and power under, it’s a long way to fall.
So then what is a guide? To me, a guide is a living intervention – and basically, everything I say from here on out is related to this core concept. The guide is a living intervention. A wounded healer, not in the sense of identified perpetually with a victim state of being forever wounded or beyond healing, but in the sense of having a deep sense of humility in relationship to their own shadow material, wounds, and places in which systems of oppression continue to play out inside and outside themselves. A guide is one who has done and continues to do their own work and situates themselves within a network of accountability such that the inevitable manifestations of their shadow can be seen, addressed, and hopefully transmuted. A guide understands that psychedelic work, that healing work is situated within a social justice context, that the work that can happen within a psychedelic journey is the work of liberation and that integration is a fundamentally politicized act.
To be a guide is to know that that word “guide” is an archetype, an energetic blueprint that as one claims it, is laid claim to by the forces and forms that exist beyond materiality who flow in and through that archetype. A guide is an alchemist of trauma, one who has walked in and through their own dark nights and knows the value of the struggle through the birth canal of individuation. A guide cultivates their seat as a practice and a living process, an on-going integration of their own commitment to wholeness, to the awakening of the wholeness of all beings. A guide is well guided, a soul midwife, grounded in the principles of abolitionism, restoration and repair.
At least, that’s how I’m orienting to it.
And then there’s this word nondual. It’s one of my favorites, as words go. It comes from two roots: the prefix “non”, meaning “not”, and dual, from the Latin dualis meaning two. Nondual. Not two. Which, to be clear, isn’t just a reductive singularity. Not two can mean One, or it can mean more than two. Many. I like to think of this as a both/and situation. The One in the Many and the Many in the One.
Nondualism, or nondual ontology, is an orientation to the world that posits that at its base, everything is fundamentally interconnected. Part and parcel of the same substrate, so to speak. That we live as part of an interconnected, interwoven cosmos, of which we are an integral and integrated part.
Nondualism asserts itself in contrast to orientations like dualism, which posit that reality, at its base, is composed of two fundamentally separate components, like mind and body or matter and spirit.
What is the value of a nondual ontology as a guide? To understand the value, we start where we are: which is that we’re living in a time of global cataclysm. The white supremacist, capitalist, misogynist, heteronormative, able-bodied patriarchal mindset that pervades most of the West is absolutely and without question failing to support global well-being. And the thing about the patriarchy is that at its base it’s a system of dualistic logic, one that privileges and values men over women, white bodies over brown and black bodies, and humanity over nature. It’s a system based on separation that thrives on oppression and exploitation.
No one is living outside the patriarchy, so far as I can tell. Even those folks who have worked to situate themselves in places and spaces that are self-supported or off grid have systems of patriarchy internalized. The patriarchy doesn’t just exist outside of us: we internalize it in our relationships to our bodies, our minds, our hearts, and our spirits. Many, many people come to therapeutic and healing work to begin with because their internalized patriarchal mindset is toxic to their overall wellbeing. Just think about that term “Inner critic”. Sounds like an internalized voice of an oppressor or oppression to me.
Now one of the many problems of the patriarchy is that it’s a system that would like to deny the necessity of cataclysm- and as I say that, I want to make clear that I in no way am glorifying the process of cataclysm or the pain and suffering of the loss and trauma that often surrounds it, but rather am simply saying that breaking down is a necessary part of a nondual cycle of wholeness. The patriarchy, by contrast, understands death as a permanent ending, rather than the natural composting process necessary to support new forms of life emergent.
The patriarchy is a closed system. It’s got no room for evolution in it. It separates noun from verb and denies the reality that matter is, as quantum physicist Karen Barad calls it, an “intra-active process of becoming”. By orienting to death as a permanent ending, or to cataclysm as a problem or psychological symptoms as pathological issues to be medicated, we reinforce the boundaries of patriarchy.
Everyone, including those folks coming to psychedelic work and those folks offering psychedelic work at this time are grappling with the reality of global cataclysm, and the limitations of the current system in visioning a way forward.
So here’s one place a nondual view can be of service: what if this time of global cataclysm was understood as the threshold to initiation, a necessary death and rebirth process that served to renew and reinvigorate and reimagine our systems at individual, cultural, and global levels such that they might operate with a sensitivity and attunement to the well-being of all beings?
Or another way of putting it: if I’m operating in the current Western medical system as a guide, and a client shows up who has a trauma history, that trauma history is their diagnosis. Their story becomes reduced to a series of axis I and II limitations that bind the energy of their history into a neat financial agreement with insurance institutions. I’m focused on the curing of disease, rather than the alleviation of suffering.
In a nondual view, however, their symptoms aren’t limited to pathological problems. And in fact, we could consider suffering information about what within a system needs to change. What if the unresolved symptoms of trauma were held and framed as an unpotentiated initiation, the possibility of change waiting to happen, a sacred process of rebirth and renewal? How might that empower not only the person walking through a dark night of the soul, but the guide who walks alongside them? What resource might it bring to them both?
To offer that kind of framing as a guide, I’d have to be grounded in, not just have a working understanding of, but be grounded in my own initiatory processes, the shadows of my own wounding and how those shadows may have served to catalyze a kind of shamanic transformation. And what if I held that my body was not merely a husk of stagnant materiality but that intra-active process of becoming being refracted as light? And what if I thought about those wounds, my own experiences of cataclysm as initiations into the ways in which apocalypse rends the veils of separation and illusion, cutting through the belief that I am materiality without spirit to illuminate the light within?
And what if, understanding that from a nondual perspective everyone suffers from systems of oppression, what if that initiation was well-integrated as part of my commitment to not perpetuating systems of oppression, harm, or violence? I would therefore likely be a deeply cultivated relationship with the interplay between my shadows and my inner light. How my shadow is what refracts my light in a particular way. Might I then be aware of how deeply my state at any given moment might affect the field? Might I step away from historical messaging that a therapist should be opaque to their clients and into the reality that the field that surrounds a client is absolutely, intimately affected by me not only by the realities of my body but also the living process by which I carry myself when I am with another? That what I carry in my own field – in terms of my history, my personal work, my training and even my moment-to-moment intention and attention - might affect another’s healing and liberation?
In closing, I’d like to tell you one of my favorite creation myths. The roots come from my study of nondual Shakta-Shaiva Tantra. To even say that word tantra, I have to clarify that this system (and it is a system, not a contemporary neo-Tantric school of orgiastic multi-orgasmic sexuality) is one that understands desire as a vehicle. It creates a boundary, holding a salvific function in that it can be ridden, so to speak, back to what Tantra would say is the “ultimate” desire, that of self-recognition.
According to the Tantrics, everything is consciousness. It’s a nondual ontology, right? So the substrate of everything is consciousness, which before the dawn of creation is the blissful effulgence of the nondual void. We might call this the zero-point field, the limitlessness of absolute “space”, which isn’t empty, but rather effulgent with the possibility of all being. Fundamental emptiness, defined only by the limits of imagination. And this field of consciousness expresses as light.
In Sanskrit this is called prakāśa, or “The Light of Consciousness”. And it is said that prakāśa experiences a desire – the desire to grok the fullness of its being, the enormity of its wholeness. In order to know itself, it folds back on itself in an act of self-recognition, called vimarśa. It bifurcates, divides in partiality in an attempt to gaze upon itself, and in doing so electrifies the cosmos through the creation of polarity. And centrates a nodal point of consciousness, self-reflecting upon its own being, within the field of emptiness.
Now, we could say that you are a nodal point, or I am a nodal point. Or the co-created field of a client and guide is a nodal point that we can, if we so choose, organize around interdependence and interconnectedness. In this way, when the inevitable ruptures that are bound to emerge within a healing field happen, when the shadow manifestations of guide or client distort the clarity of the connection, they can be held, understood, and worked with within a liberative roadmap that empowers both guide and client, a pathless path to the transmutation of the beliefs of separation as they manifest across our bodies, our hearts, our minds, and our spirits.
And one last thought: it is said that the folding back of the light upon itself creates a kind of sin curve, a wave within the field. In Sanskrit this is called spanda. Sounds a lot like the electromagnetic spectrum, no? And that wave is the fundamental vibration that underlies all that is, the living heartbeat of consciousness itself. When we attune ourselves to our own hearts and the pulsation within, we connect to that innate heartbeat. By listening to the pulsations of vibration that emerge from the space of the heart- we might call these the callings of our soul, we touch the Soul of the Cosmos. The singular Heart of Consciousness that we share.
Thank you for your time.