The Entheogenic Research, Integration, and Education student group at the California Institute of Integral Studies has invited me to speak again about the philosophical, cosmological, and psychological significance of psychedelics. In case you missed it, here is my first talk for ERIE back in September called “The Psychedelic Eucharist–toward a pharmacological philosophy of religion”:
I attempted to link Plato and Socrates’ invention of philosophy to the psychedelic mystery cult at Eleusis, and interpreted Plato’s Allegory of the Cave as the mythic expression, not of a dualistic idealism that separates appearance from reality (what is usually called “Platonism”), but of a non-dual ontology of creative aesthesis.
My second talk for ERIE this Sunday (Jan. 25, 2015 at CIIS) will begin with a reflection upon the relationship between the work of speculative science writer of Richard Doyle on the co-evolution of psychedelic plants and human brains (see Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Nöosphere) and cognitive scientist Andy Clark (originator of the “Extended Mind Thesis” with philosopher David Chalmers) on the way computer technology augments and alters human consciousness.
Clark wrote a piece back in 2010 for the NYT philosophy column “The Stone” called “Out of Our Brains” that is well worth a read. It is easy to become so transfixed by the way our consciousness is embedded within and potentially enhanced by an increasingly ego-pandering (and potentially self-destructive) technological media environment that we entirely forget about all the psychophysiological contributions made by the far more ancient biological and astrological environments from out of which we and our toys emerged. “It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious,” as Whitehead says. What is obvious is that the technoindustrial economy is situated within the dymanics of the Earth system as a whole, that all of our machines and media are ultimately subject to the cosmological energy flows coursing through our planet as it wanders around the Sun.
As Clark says, the novelties of late capitalism, like smartphones and laptops, do certainly extend and augment our our cognition. But ecological and cosmological modes of mind extension pre-date and override these more recent cognitive constructs. Our late modern consciousness may have become largely technologized, but to the extent that we remain grounded on this Earth beneath that Sky, our cognitive bills must still be paid not simply in the currency of skull-bound neurons or handheld smartphones, but in that of the ecodelic chemicals and archetypal energies we share with the other organisms in our local, planetary, and interplanetary ecologies.
Footnotes2Plato 
What do you think?