#  Video: Psychedelics and the Future of Religion: Race and Exoticism in Global Psychedelic Spirituality 

 





November 07, 2023

 

 

 As part of the Psychedelics and the Future of Religion series, the Center for the Study of World Religions hosted scholars Dr. Amanda Lucia, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California-Riverside and Dr. Arun Saldanha, Professor in the Department of Geography, Environment, and Society at the University of Minnesota for a discussion on "**Race and Exoticism in Global Psychedelic Spirituality**". Drawing from their respective perspectives and scholarship, Professors Lucia and Saldanha discussed the racialized politics/ethics of the hallucinogenic experience (or discourses thereof) within the context of modern spiritualities.



 

 **Psychedelics and the Future of Religion: Race and Exoticism in Global Psychedelic Spirituality**

 SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

 SPEAKER 2: Psychedelics and the Future of Religion, Race and Exoticism in Global Psychedelic Spirituality-- October 26, 2023.

 CHARLES STANG: My name is Charles Stang. And I have the pleasure of serving as the Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions here at Harvard Divinity School. Welcome to this evening's event, which is part of our very popular series on psychedelics and the future of religion. Now in its third year.

 This series is part of the Center's larger ongoing and evolving initiative called Transcendence and Transformation, or TNT for short. If you're interested in TNT, we'll put a link to that page in the chat function. As always, the best way to stay abreast of what we're doing here at the Center and its programming is to sign up for our weekly newsletter, which you can do on the Center's landing page.

 We're delighted to have with have with us this evening Professors Amanda Lucia and Arun Saldanha for a panel discussion on race and exoticism in global psychedelic spirituality. Before introducing our guests, I want to thank the CSWR staff for their help in arranging for this event.

 And I want to thank Jeff Bro and Paul Gillis Smith two HDS students who are leading a reading group called Psychedelics, Sacred and subversive, where they have read some of the work of professors Lucia and Saldanha, and so they come very well prepared for this panel discussion. So thank you Paul, Jeff, and the other members of that group.

 So let me say a brief word about the aim and scope of this panel and its theme-- race and exoticism in global psychedelic spirituality. Modern spirituality doesn't always conform to stereotypical or even typical notions of religion, and this is especially true when psychedelics are involved.

 Today's panelists have both done groundbreaking research into the development of new religious and new spiritual movements in the so-called psychedelic underground, be it in the Goa rave scene or transformational festivals like Burning Man.

 Today's panel will focus on race, religious, exoticisation, and the desire for transformation among so-called Spiritual, But Not Religious Practitioners or SBNRs in the burgeoning psychedelic underground.

 With the help of Professor Lucia and Saldanha, we hope today to think critically about the psychedelic underground as a site of new religious formation. We want to ask questions such as, what do we gain from considering the rave scene as a spiritual gathering?

 In what ways are psychonauts incorporating religious concepts and iconography into their worldviews, and when do such borrowings become appropriative or harmful? And most critically, whose welcome into these psychedelic and transformational settings, and who is excluded? And how are these norms perpetuated?

 Our two guest speakers are uniquely and perfectly qualified to help us ask and address such questions. Without further ado then, let me introduce them. Dr. Amanda Lucia is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California Riverside, where her work focuses especially on the religious exportation, appropriation, and circulation of Hinduism.

 Her 2014 book entitled, Reflections of Amma: Devotees in a Global Embrace is an ethnographic study of Amma devotees in the United States and interpretations of the so-called hugging Saint through the American politics of multiculturalism.

 And expanding from followers of Amma to attendees of yogic and transformational festivals, Professor Lucia published, White Utopias: The Religious Exoticism of Transformational Festivals in 2020. It's a powerfully argued and nuanced ethnography of transformational festivals ranging from the yoga-centered Shakti and Bhakti fests to the annual Burning Man festival in Nevada.

 The book takes seriously the transformational potential of these gatherings while interrogating the predominant whiteness of participants. Professor Lucia's talk today is entitled, Awakening the Third Eye: Hierarchies of Consciousness in the New Age.

 Dr. Arun, is Professor of Geography, Environment, and Society at the University of Minnesota. His theoretical work is inspired primarily by continental philosophy-- specifically, the work of Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou. His 2007 book, Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race is an ethnographic study of rave, tourism, and the global trance scene in Goa, India.

 The book centers on the racial dynamics permeating psychedelic rave culture and Saldanha argues that race should be considered a material process of the viscosity or stickiness of certain racialized bodies.

 His theory of racial viscosity illuminates the invisible barriers that make homogeneous racial spaces difficult for people of other races to penetrate. Psychedelic white remains an essential text for understanding the global psychedelic underground and its racializing tendencies.

 Professor Saldanha's talk today is entitled, Inner Space, Outer Space: Psychedelics Under Catastrophe. So here's how this evening will unfold. I will soon disappear from the screen and Professors Lucia and Saldanha will speak in turn for about 20-25 five minutes.

 Then I will reappear and moderate the discussion. First offering them an opportunity to engage each other and then opening to questions from the audience. So Amanda, the floor is yours.

 AMANDA J. LUCIA: I've got it. Hello, everyone. Thank you very much for being here. Thank you for coming. And I'm going to share my screen. But before I start that, I'd just like to mention this is a difficult time for a lot of people who are probably in the audience today.

 And it is a time also that I'm coming to you from unceded Tongva lands. There's so much to say about injustice today. And instead of belaboring preambles that don't result in action, I'm just going to jump into the paper and hopefully spark some ideas that will turn into action for others and myself.

 So over the course of what has somehow become 30 years of field work in the New age and spiritual and yogic scenes with which I'm familiar, I've been struck by and often put off by its hierarchical and exclusionary ideals.

 In the past, I've been relatively charitable showing how it draws on the evolutionary development of the self that was expressed in mystical and ascetical traditions across time. Others have been less so and have concluded that it's rather an expression of neoliberalism's demand for the perfection of the self.

 However, as I will argue today, the spiritual evolutionary models originate much earlier than neoliberalism and can be traced to 19th century race science. So if you don't know what I'm talking about, I'm going to show just a little quick parody that was made viral by Charlotte Donachie in 2017, and hopefully that will help.

 It's a self-parody of her own scene as she writes on her website as a sound healer and astrologer, quote, "There is nothing so beautiful, so brave, so bold as to enter this world and to dare to evolve." There we go. There's a bit of a preamble \[INAUDIBLE\].

 \[VIDEO PLAYBACK\]

\- Hi. If --

 \[MUSIC PLAYING\]

 (SINGING) I'm more spiritual than you. How do I know? My feathers are longer and I've drank more ayahausca. I'm more spiritual than you. It's simply true. My eyes are brighter. My sheepy's bigger and my clothes are whiter.

 I'm more spiritual than you. And it's a fact, I've been to Bali and changed my name to Metta Hari. I'm more spiritual than you. I don't drink booze, I do frog venom. And I don't take drugs, I take medicine. I'm more spiritual than you.

 \[END PLAYBACK\]

 AMANDA J. LUCIA: All right. Hopefully I gave you a bit of a laugh to start off on what is a rather difficult topic. These are the lyrics and note that Ayahausca is referenced in the very first verse, and it only takes until verse three for her to outline explicitly the hierarchy of drugs and the claiming of the Indigenous term medicine.

 The song parodies how the evolutionary schema of spiritual growth and development and Transformation has given rise to egoism and hierarchy, based in an economy of esoteric knowledge and practice.

 So today I want to investigate some of this common sense of the contemporary new age yoga and spiritual scenes. I begin with the hypothesis that these evolutionary paradigms are, in fact, quite old. And in searching for a starting point, I began with my growing concern that scholars have overlooked the radiating influence of the Theosophical Society on modern esoteric metaphysical scenes.

 So I begin there and to find a toehold in the morass of information that is the theosophical society writings, I focused on the third eye. So like other ideas in the esoteric spiritual scene, the notion of the third eye has become commonplace and common sensical and it connects yogic, metaphysical, and psychedelic aspirations.

 In each arena, awakening the third eye is a goal that depends on bodily practices. That is including yoga, meditation, ritual or drug ingestion and promises, consciousness expansion and potentially paranormal or even supernatural abilities.

 And what follows, I trace its popularity to 19th century theosophical materials on the third eye, which aim to show how it became important, how one can awaken it, and importantly, who can awaken it. This latter reveals the rude source of contemporary evolutionary thinking in metaphysical communities.

 So in preface as well as the title of this webinar suggests, I'll be presenting some stomach churning racist and ableist ideas that weigh heavily with exoticism, anti-Blackness, anti-Semitism, and fascism. And I'll try to allow the text to speak for themselves and to give warnings throughout as the grossest forms arise.

 But please do take care of yourself in any way that you need to. And I'm very much aware viscerally that these are violent and emotionally exhausting topics. So part one-- secrecy, hierarchy, and the circulation of esoteric knowledge.

 Unfortunately, with the truncated time frame today, one of the things that I have to forego is an in-depth preface to 19th century esotericism for those who may be unfamiliar. In short, here's a few brief points to keep in mind before proceeding into the heart of the Theosophical Society materials.

 So number one, alternative and exoticized spiritualities became entertainment for upper classes, particularly women. And the quest for metaphysical experience, including paranormal or supernatural abilities, became a preoccupation and an entertainment for Anglo-Europeans in the 19th century.

 Particularly educated and elite classes, particularly women. And this occurred all at the height of empire and in the Victorian age. If you want to read more on this, Simone Natale's book, Supernatural Entertainments is excellent.

 Two, science. So this preoccupation was deeply informed by newfound interest in science, including the possibility for self-experimentation and the questioning of the boundaries of the known that had been challenged by new technological developments.

 Three, as mentioned, empire. So this period saw the height of European and British colonial empires, and it was informed by that confrontation both in its attraction to radical others. And in its arrogant assumptions of Anglo-European superiority.

 Four, the book. And this is very important, it often gets overlooked. But the book became a valued resource among the esoteric curious. And there was a widespread publication of guidebooks that charted the possibilities of metaphysical experience and non-Western worldviews.

 And then five-- self-experimentation. So combining these factors suggested that literate individuals could explore their inner constitutions and expand their consciousness, and even cultivate supernatural abilities through that self-experimentation.

 OK. So next section. Planes of existence and human diversity. In colonial and Orientalist accounts, India and Egypt loomed large as deep resources of ancient wisdom presumed to have gone degenerate in the modern period and in need of European salvaging.

 "Theosophy and the Theosophical Society was one of the most famous Orientalist projects of the 19th century that sought to revive this ancient wisdom of the East," quote-unquote.

 Helena Blavatsky, its famed Russian occultist, co-founder, wrote ISIS Unveiled, a master key to the mysteries of ancient and modern science and theology in 1877. Her account of esoteric knowledge, which she claimed was transmitted automatically as she channeled the words of Tibetan masters-- some of whom she supposedly had met in her travels in the high Himalayan regions.

 Both of these claims are highly contested. But her writing and paranormal skills garnered fame for the Theosophical Society. And as her books circulated, news centers and their accompanying libraries proliferated around the globe.

 At its height the Theosophical Society boasted 40,000 members. And importantly, one of its key features was that it splintered into hundreds of different societies and organizations. Some yogic, some occultic, some metaphysical.

 And this is one of the reasons that the influence on the contemporary has not been properly accounted for in the scholarly literature. Because some of these ideas and lineages are quite hard to trace.

 So Theosophical writings were engaged in an empirical project-- that of channeling, describing, and mapping the nature of metaphysical worlds. Not only in the cosmos, but also in the subtle body. And in what follows, I argue that it's from Theosophical Society publications that much of the hierarchical and evolutionary common sense that informs spiritual scenes today derives.

 So in the Secret Doctrine, which was published in 1888, Blavatsky sets out explicitly to quote, "deal with the history of occultism as contained in the lives of the great adepts of the Aryan race."

 The 1,575-page tome blends wisdom drawn from Brahmanical, Buddhist, Egyptian, and Kabbalistic sources into an unwieldy amalgam of the cosmos and metaphysics, intended to educate the quote, "student of the occult."

 In Blavatsky's reading, race emerges as a feature of humanity in general-- divorced from pigmentation or nationality that defines existence across time. In her complex cosmology, she draws in part from the Hindu cycles of time in the Yugas. Humankind emerges only in the fifth root race.

 When humanity separates from nature and the sexes separate from each other, and creation quote, "evolves from the natural to the feminine and ultimately to the current phallic age."

 Keeping with other 19th century race theorists, such as Arthur de Gobineau and Isaac Taylor, Blavatsky imagined an Aryan race based in part on Max Mueller's linguistic theories that was connected in this contemporary phallic age. So you can see from this map how Caucasian goes through Europe, but then also into India and North Africa.

 Given her interest in Indic symbology, she also denoted this historical moment pictorially with the swastika-- an ancient Indian symbol of \[? su-asti ?\] or good health. A symbol that is also found in many cultures globally.

 But it was her student and friend a dedicated Theosophist, Yuliana Glinka, who developed a proprietary relationship with and perhaps even published the first edition of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and just a warning for anti-Semitism here.

 The infamous anti-Semitic propaganda text imagined Jews as Satan's army on Earth. Like her friend and mentor, Blavatsky, Glinka's claims to be in, quote, "direct contact with the world beyond the grave, which gave her authority to induct others into the mysteries of Theosophy." And in Glinka's case, to unveil the, quote-unquote, "truth about the Jews."

 This example reveals the controversy surrounding Blavatsky and her cadre of occultists, which debates even today, whether the Theosophical Society was intentionally fascist or whether their ideas were co-opted by Nazis and collaborators in the second generation like Glinka to terrible ends in the 20th century.

 Religion scholar, James Santucci differentiates between the commonplace understanding of race as defined by physical characteristics and Blavatsky's assertion that there are, quote, "spiritual psychic, intellectual, and physical differences among the seven root races-- or major temporary divisions of humanity in a global round." End quote.

 He argues instead that Blavatsky's cosmology or quote, "the physical aspect of race is but a minor characteristic in relation to the larger issue of the place of the Monad-- that's a technical term meaning the self-born or Swayambhuva-- is the Sanskrit she's drawing on-- "within a vast system of spiritual and physical cycles in which monads are progressing toward ever higher forms of existence." End quote.

 In contrast, Peter Levenda argues-- and I think convincingly, that there are substantive through lines from Theosophy to Nazism. Particularly in the writings of some of the Theosophically inclined members of the SS.

 For example, there is parallels in the assertion of caste systems of races, the importance of ancient alphabets or runes, the superiority of the Aryans, cosmic truths encoded in pagan myths, and concentration on initiated astrology and astronomy. And of course, the supreme occult significance of the swastika.

 Even if it wasn't the intent of Blavatsky's writings, the second generation of Theosophists relied on her ideas to germinate their own conclusions to Aryan supremacy, which develops over the course of the 20th century to signify Caucasian supremacy.

 Certainly, whether one agrees with Santucci's apologetics or not, there's an evolutionary schema in Theosophy's cosmology that some persons are more equipped or better suited to ascend to higher astral planes than others.

 Although Blavatsky critiques British, quote, "arrogance" in their condemnation of the, quote, "dark Indians." Her very next chapter in the secret doctrine is entitled, quote, "The races with the third eye." Therein, she explains that the inner senses were first innate in the human races, but then they were atrophied during racial growth and material development.

 The goal then for the student of the occult is to reawaken the dormant third eye, which she tells readers is now quote, "witnessed only by the pineal gland." Blavatsky may have been one of the first \[INAUDIBLE\]. And in the next passage she argues that the third eye is connected to the Hindu god Shiva, the yogic practice of celibacy, the amphibian third eye in lizards, the pineal gland and descartes's seat of the soul.

 Blavatsky's notion of race encompasses the whole of humanity and all life forms, which she argues is on a singular path of evolution. She uses Hindu cosmology as evidence for this path of racial evolution, deploying and elaborating on karma theory, and the incarnation of Manu-- the primordial man presented in the Dharmashastras over eons of time.

 Parsing Blavatsky's voluminous writings carefully, Santucci correctly identifies that Blavatsky's notion of race is not our commonplace understanding of race. And that according to her, humanity and other life forms move together through stages of time.

 However, she also identifies sub races that exist within the seven root races. And she uses this idea of races to explain why there are different levels of evolution among humans who exist coterminously.

 So on the third eye, she explains that the third eye was once part of humans physical form, but disappeared into only a mental and spiritual form because of the depravity of mankind. And you can see the longer quote here it's a bit jumbled. So I summarized it.

 Blavatsky's ideas of race and subrace both adhere to an evolutionist Fibonacci-like sequence, wherein all life progresses on a trajectory of development. But within each race, there are differentiation between cultures that exist on an evolutionary model.

 So see, for example, the next passage that I'm going to quote, where Blavatsky divides between A, patriarchal nomads. B, savages who had barely learned fire. And C, karmically favored urbanites who, quote, "built cities and cultivated arts and the sciences.

 She then transitions into a different register where she creates a mythology supposedly expounding on the Uttarakaanda and the Padma Purana, two Hindu texts of the last survivors of the quote, "Fair child of the White Island" who had separated themselves from the accursed races, who lived in the jungles and underground and were different too from the quote, "Golden yellow race" which quote, "became in its turn, black with sin."

 So in these passages, it's clearly visible that the romantic turn to the savage and his psychedelic and spiritual wisdom is based in the conviction that as an uncivilized human, he has not been corrupted by civilization. And, sorry. I'm quoting the term savage and I'm going to continue to use it and I apologize. It's a difficult and offensive term.

 Although the ideal rightly confronts the terrors and tragedies of modernity, it's the other hand of the civilizational narrative that claims that modernity and civilization only for Anglo-Europeans. So this is the deeply problematic foundation of the turn toward Indigenous wisdom that we hear so popularly in contemporary spiritual and psychedelic scenes.

 For example, in the notion of Indigenous futures, which proliferates wherever plant medicines like peyote or mescaline or ayahuasca have become fashionable. These passages also reveal ample evidence, contra Santucci that for pigment and nation-oriented racialized hierarchies also operate in Blavatsky's evolutionary schema, as well as her singular notion of human race.

 The fact that Blavatsky bases her conclusions in such large part, though not exclusively, of course, on Hindu notions of karma and primordial man cosmology or Manu also invites the question as to whether Hindu theories of caste impacted her thinking despite her critique of contemporary Brahmins elsewhere as quote, "debauched and arrogant."

 So I'll have to leave that idea, which is quite provocative for another day and move on to the second generation of theosophy and beyond. So as we saw with the linkages between theosophy and the SS, in the second generation, race hierarchies and racist symbology become even more direct.

 And here I'm going to turn to one of her contemporaries and juniors Charles Leadbeater and his account of the subtle body and clairvoyance as illustrated, particularly in Man: Visible and Invisible rather, published in 1903.

 In his account, it's only the, quote, "developed man who can serve as a channel for higher force. And humans are understood to be on a path of evolution from the savage to the unselfish man." End quote. Leadbeater's optimism that mankind can learn the skills of clairvoyance is predicated upon the advances of the higher races.

 He writes, quote, "any fairly advanced and cultured man among the higher races of mankind has already consciousness fully developed in the astral body and is perfectly capable of employing it as a vehicle if only he were in the habit of doing so." End quote.

 After a long explanation of the different colors of the astral body, he writes of the spiritual evolution of mankind with the dual authority of theosophical doctrine and race science as he describes the different astral bodies of different races.

 He identifies, quote-unquote, "savage lower races" with colors and their astral bodies that reveal their deceit, treachery, and avarice. Their propensity to sudden violence, their selfishness and pride, greed, fear, and propensity to fetish worship.

 Yet even-- and I'm not going to read out this quote because it's violent and you can read it yourself. Yet even with this overt anti-Blackness, Leadbeater affirms Blavatsky's position that Anglo-European civilization developed physical and intellectual achievements to the detriment of psychic and spiritual ones.

 Thus, one must look at the-- this is the developed man. Thus one must look at the ancient mystics of the East for the future of astral and clairvoyant technologies.

 He outlines this in his 1927 book on the chakras, where he connects Aryans and Indians through biology. Suggesting that, quote, "some Indians might succeed in doing so-- that is awakening their Kundalini energy-- "as their bodies are by heredity more adaptable than most others." End quote.

 And you can see here this is his chart of the different astral body colors and the qualities to which they are related. It's hard to overstate the importance of theosophical ideas in shaping the esoteric spiritual scenes of the 20th and 21st centuries. Building on their precedent of bricolage, meaning pick and mix is a quality inherent to the metaphysical scene.

 Theosophical ideas were adopted by innumerable spiritual entrepreneurs and repackaged as original thought and practice throughout the 20th century. Their diffusion resulted in some of the most foundational building blocks of new age discourse today, that appears as common sense.

 For example, ideas like manifesting, vibrations, energy work, chakra healing, astral travel, spiritual work or evolution, and third eye awakening. For example, to pull one example from 1970, Vera Stanley Adler-- who to my knowledge had no overt ties to Theosophy at all, reiterated their ideas nearly verbatim in her book, The Finding of the Third Eye.

 Therein, she presents the third eye as a common place trait known to the ancient mystics of Egypt, India and China. And tells her audience of quote-unquote, "civilized" Anglo-European readers that they must develop and reawaken what these ancients already knew.

 In her view, becoming in tune with the vibrations of the universe becomes a central theme in this evolutionary cycle of spiritual development. She writes that thought vibrations can now be measured with science and that intelligent person's register high vibrations, while imbeciles register vibrations that are feeble and slow.

 And note here the reference to manifesting, which now has become so popular, primarily as a result of the 2006 book, The Secret by Rhonda Byrne, now a film and a global movement based in quote, "The law of attraction."

 Note that the underlying racism here also is accompanied by ableism. And it's not difficult to draw a through line from Adler's understanding of the developed man and his capacity to transmit vibrations to the more nefarious applications and policy of racialized eugenics in the late 19th and 20th centuries. There's also a confluence in these images and those of early 20th century muscular Christianity.

 OK. So to conclude with just a few thoughts. It's important to put this 19th century history of esotericism together with the ways in which awakening the third eye became intertwined with explorations of the inner landscape with psychedelics, yoga, meditation, and all kinds of new age related practices.

 We are, of course uncomfortably familiar with the racist hierarchies that informed the disciplines of neuroscience and psychiatry in the 19th century. But likely not as familiar with the realizations that substantiated hierarchies of spiritual evolution, development and transformation, to which psychedelics were put to use.

 Further in science, there's been a directed recalibration. But there's not really been a substantive interrogation of how Indigenous Indic, meaning-- Hindu-Buddhist tantric traditions that originated in India-- became the mascots and the spirit guides for the psychedelic counterculture, which of course, was predominantly led by white men.

 Even today-- Here's another example. Even today, as I wrote in White Utopias, many spiritual utopias reinforce white heteronormativity, Indigenous and Indic fetishism and anti-Black racism. But it's not only that the scene is racially stagnant, but that it actually may be regressing.

 So in many ways, in 1960s and the 1970s, there was a foregrounding of Black metaphysicals and psychedelia much more so than today. For example, we might think about Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis, and Sun Ra as leaders in metaphysical culture as historian Matthew Harris has shown.

 But is there space for radical Black futurity in psychedelic spiritual communities today? And as we sit with this question, I suggest that a renewed interrogation of the common sense of evolutionism in the scene. Thanks very much, and some blotter paper to end.

 ARUN SALDANHA: Thanks, Amanda. Hi, everyone. I'm coming to you from Minneapolis from my very messy office. Thanks very much to Charles Stang for inviting me. Thanks to all of you who have been engaging my work. I'm really looking forward to the questions you might have later on.

 And thanks Amanda. We actually spoke for a while, a couple of weeks ago. I knew of her book. And I was really enthusiastic about someone else working on white utopianism and looking at psychedelic countercultures through a Critical Race lens.

 Because that doesn't often happen. And so I felt immediate affinity with someone who was doing a similar critique of the psychedelic tendencies of modern capitalism and neoliberalism and looking that through a longer historical lens.

 And so a lot of my comments today will be will be complementing what Amanda has written about and what she talked about today. There's a few things that I will immediately add to what she was just talking about.

 I want to bring in the dimension of apocalypticism, the end of the world and so on. Because that is, of course, something that in theosophy would have been part of the cosmic imagination. You have new worlds and new races emerging because older ones are sort of not competing strongly enough.

 And this is the evolutionary paradigm that they were sort of adopting. And then also this whole idea of the eclecticism and the \[? bricolage ?\] that Amanda talked about-- this borrowing from so many traditions, that happens from a particular center from a particular subjectivity. And that is the subjectivity of white men.

 And so in this extremely eclectic amalgamation of traditions and of spiritual systems that happens in theosophy and going all the way into the 1960s counterculture, and that is being revived today, my basic argument is there is a center there even though it is a very sort of unstable center. And that is a white subjectivity. That is my critical complementary argument there.

 OK. I'm going to share the screen. I'm going to look carefully at the time so that I don't use up too much of our very precious time these days. And yes, I appreciate Amanda's comments about the tough world that we're in. And I do have something to say about that.

 So these are tentative thoughts. Bear with me. They might be a little bit chaotic. I'm returning to this on your invitation, but it's not actual research that I'm doing right now.

 To start off with, what I'm really interested in is a deeper question about where does the interest in psychedelic drugs come from? How to think about this historically and geographically? And in terms of how this propensity to change brains radically and insert them into new imaginations. Why is that so prevalent in white modernity and how to think about that in a more structural framework.

 And then I very quickly come to the idea of that this is an extension by other means of coloniality. And there is what I would call a structure of feeling of exploration that goes back all the way to the Renaissance, where you have a courting of lethal conditions-- an interest in the unknown, an interest in the weird, an interest in the exotic that is really stamped with the way that white people have looked beyond the shores of their own culture.

 Exploration, as you know, from the beginning, from the times that the Portuguese and the Spanish were island hopping and trying to find new places for a conquest and making profits was very capital intensive.

 And it was a vanguard for what we would call commodification-- sort of commodifying human beings in slavery. You're commodifying lands. You're commodifying resources. You're commodifying trade routes. You're commodifying cities and you're making money off it.

 And so what I would like to add to Amanda's framework is this basic Marxist idea that coloniality and colonialism and the interest in other cultures was also a drive to commodify and to make money.

 You all know about this tragedy that happened with the five millionaires who were killed in this implosion of this submersible called the Titan, which was a very elite form of tourism looking at the Titanic wreck in the Atlantic Ocean.

 And so this is one example of what I'm talking about. Like why are people drawn to this? Why does it tend to be men who want to climb the highest mountain? What is this extreme \[? Ophelia ?\] that is built into a very European way of traveling, which is capital intensive.

 And which is, again, extremely risky and goes all the way into outer space as I will very quickly say. And so I'm just obsessed myself with this maniacal, this obsessive, this compulsive way in which traveling has been at the fringes of colonial modernity.

 This way of expanding and ever widening circles, white modernity has been enclosing the planet and beyond. Every inch of the Earth has been explored. And I'm interested in that desire and how that fits into-- not just coloniality, but also in capitalism.

 It's fair to say that drugs were part and parcel of this deterritorialization of white desire. And, of course, many people have written about the fact that it was overwhelmingly men who were engaged with this.

 And so the white man subject from the times of exploration and the Scientific Revolution in the 17th century, all the way to romanticism, this white man subject has been interested in mind expansion just like it was or he was in geographical expansion.

 There's a fascinating 1563 book that I've looked at a little bit by a Portuguese doctor in what was then the capital of the Portuguese empire-- the Indian Ocean-- Garcia de Orta. And it's called Symbols of Drugs of India.

 And so, as you know, the spice trade was what the Portuguese and then the Dutch and the English were really interested in usurping in the Indian Ocean world. And so part of the argument is that drugs were from the beginnings of global capitalism, not just a source of immense profit, but also a vehicle for the expansion of the mind just like there was an expansion of companies and of states.

 I'm skipping a number of things here and in the interest of time. There is a way as Charles said, I do work a lot with the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and I can talk about that more in the Q&A if necessary. But since this panel is about race, I do want to say just a few words about how I approach race.

 Race is very often thought of as a grid in which you have a dichotomy between self and other-- white and Black and Brown, and other kinds of races so-called, which are othered. And Deleuze and Guattari have a different kind of ontology of the social in which it's much more sort of degrees of deviation and a sort of a spectrum of differences still with white men in the middle, which is looking at this array of differences from a fairly secure standpoint.

 But it's really about the dynamism of race and the fact that you have-- just like in theosophy, sometimes extremely complicated ways in which the white identity appropriates and even gobbles up these other kinds of differences. And so it's a much more dynamic way of thinking about white identity that I would say is really important here.

 And so when we're talking about how psychedelics fits in and how an interest in other cultures-- non-Western cultures fits in, I think that's really relevant. I'm going to skip this quote, but it's a great place in 1,000 plateaus where Deleuze and Guattari provide this kind of more dynamic and I think, more accurate way of looking at race as a system, which is incredibly versatile.

 And so white man as a subject in anthropology, in travel writing, in the imagination of the species is always going to be in the center. In these pictures it's literally so. But I want to emphasize that it's very dynamic and that there's this kind of gradual appropriation of exoticism, which also changes the way that white people look at themselves.

 And so white people can criticize whiteness themselves, but by that very process actually underline their very whiteness. And so this is one of the arguments that I offer in psychedelic white in that ethnography.

 OK. There's-- catastrophe is in the title of my talk. So I want to say a few things here. I don't need to remind anyone here, but I think it's worth repeating that capitalism is a very destructive system by mainstream economists.

 This is fully acknowledged and even embraced. Schumpeter talks about creative destruction. And so investments have to be made continuously, and there's a cutthroat competition which lead capital or firms or individuals with money to always invest more.

 And then the returns have to be reinvested. And so capital as a process a sort of an inhuman, uncontrollable process, which no individual capitalist or state can actually contain self-augments and spreads.

 And so the whole idea in the Deleuze and Guattari is that capital is intrinsically globalizing. It's an intrinsically sort of spreading across the planet. And then of course, as I will shortly argue, it also has to leave the planet. Capital is like almost inhuman agency that wants to get into outer space.

 Crises and Marxist theory are, of course, necessarily the case. And will produce more areas for profit. So the whole climate crisis of the whole transition to green energy, as you all know, is producing new propensities for capital accumulation.

 Anything can be commodified from our genetic code to the wind to any kinds of sexuality, to anything to do with our brain states and so on. And of course, all of these things are being racialized. As we see the Black Lives Matter protests, for example, coming together with the climate justice movement, that is one area of concern that I've been following.

 These are just some of the books that will be relevant to looking at capitalism as this very creative and productive process, which intrinsically differentiates populations and puts them into hierarchical positions. So this is in a more material way in which populations are pitted against each other, through a division of labor through things like slavery, environmental injustices, and technology.

 So very quickly, the most famous geographer is probably David Harvey. So for those of you who know his idea of the spatial fix-- I mentioned this in the abstract for my talk. It's a very useful concept.

 It basically means that in urban space, in material space like gentrification, like bridges, like internet, infrastructure, airports, hotels, theme parks, there is this fixing of the flow of capital. So money has to fix itself somewhere. It's restlessly going around the globe trying to find a place to sink itself into so that there can be profits mainly for shareholders.

 And so this fixity of capital-- of the spatial fix is what Harvey wants to talk about. And so capital is flowing and then it fixes itself literally on spots on the planet or beyond the planet.

 It's a fix also in the sense of a fix to a problem. So like you're familiar with the term the technological fix. And so it's a play on that sense of fixed. But it's also getting a fix like you would of addictive drugs. And so there's a temporary satisfaction of this ceaseless and proliferating desire of capital to find new places and new sites for profits.

 Capitalism, we might say is addicted to geographic expansion, much as it is addicted to technological change and endless expansion through economic growth. Globalization is a contemporary version of capitalism's long-standing and never ending search for a spatial fix to its crisis tendencies.

 There is a long-- I'm sorry, I can't read. There is a long history to these spatial fixes. There is a deep continuity in the production of space under capitalist-social relations and imperatives. There is-- from this perspective, nothing particularly new or surprising about globalization since it has been going on since at least 1492 if not before.

 This brings us to this guy. And again, you might be saying at this point, OK, why is everyone talking about Elon Musk? Like I thought that this was a talk on psychedelics. My argument is precisely that at least some of the interest in the potentialities of psychedelics might actually fit into-- there's no coincidence that this resurgence of interest in outer space is happening exactly at the same time as there is an interest in psychedelia again.

 Just like in the 1960s, I don't think there's a coincidence that there was an interest in LSD and other hallucinogens together with the space race. And of course I can give you a lot of empirical examples, where these two things come together.

 And so two people have written actually in one of the big science journals, Nature Palgrave Communications. As Earth's empty spaces are filled, our planet comes to be shown of blank spaces. Capitalist emerges to rescue capitalism from a terrestrial limitations, launching space rockets, placing satellites into orbit, appropriating extraterrestrial resources, and perhaps one day, building colonies on distant planets like Mars.

 So they call it actually the ultimate spatial fix. This whole new space race, which is perpetrated mainly by billionaires even though they still rely on states. And there's new players on the field like India, like Dubai, and so on-- and China.

 This brings us to the propensities of psychedelics to become a kind of a fix in them as well. And they would become spatial fix in the more narrow Harvey way. If you would have dispensaries, which are sort of bigger conglomerates where you would have in every city.

 You might have automatic dispensers or machines where you could get these things. And so the whole space industry is inextricable from, of course, the military industrial complex. I don't need to remind anyone of that. But there's also ways of getting beyond fossil fuels supposedly.

 All of these very cutting-edge industries are fixes in a way that Harvey describes-- I think and I'm just interested in seeing how the healthcare industry and big pharma and artificial intelligence, perhaps will come together and adopt psychedelics as one more way of making money.

 Very interestingly, there's at least one paper I found, which argues that psychedelics might be too long a duration space travel in the 21st century, what citrus fruits were to long distance sea travel in the 18th breakthrough-- and facilitatory.

 The human intergalactic experience is just beginning and it would be wise to consider the benefits of ensuring that astronauts undertaking potentially perilous space voyages benefit from our planet's rich psychedelic heritage. There is also some justification for considering the application of psychedelics in the processing and integration of the profound and spiritual experience of deep space travel.

 So I absolutely adore this quote because it just shows us I think that the appropriation of whatever subversive potentialities of drug culture there might be is already under way by the people who are imagining intergalactic travel.

 OK. So I will skip the most important part of my paper would have been this, looking at the contradictions which come together in what we could call the psychedelic subject. The figure of a particular kind of modern individual who is interested in changing their brain for reasons-- well, the reasons are up for debate.

 Is it hedonism? Is it mysticism? I think in the context of the Center for the Study of World Religions, it is really important to look at the spiritual aspect of this. But my argument is that there's always this consumerist and these potentially racializing dimensions that are at the inception entwined with psychedelic subjectivity.

 I was looking at Victor Turner again. And I do want to mention him briefly. He is excellent, of course, when it comes to looking at the sociality of any kind of intense liminal experiences. And he writes at some point in his famous book.

 "It is curious how often in history notions of catastrophe and crisis are connected with what one might call instant communitas. Perhaps it is not really so curious, for clearly if one anticipates the swift coming of the world's end, there is no point in legislating into existence an elaborate system of social institutions designed to resist incursions of time. One is tempted to speculate about the relationship between the hippies and the hydrogen bomb.

 Often what was once seen as a literal and universal imminence of catastrophe becomes interpreted allegorically or mystically as the drama of the individual soul or as the spiritual faith of the true Church on Earth or as postponed to the remotest future.

 This concept of threat or danger to the group is importantly present. And this danger is one of the chief ingredients in the production of existential communitas, like the possibility of a bad trip for the narcotic communities of certain inhabitants of a modern city that bears St. Francis's name."

 So he's talking about the Haight Aushbury. He is talking about the Franciscans and the way that they adopted certain forms of bodily discipline in a mystical way at a time in Europe when there was a lot of talk about apocalypse.

 And so what I want to point at here is this speculation that I'm making between the anthropocenes catastrophic nature, as we all know, precipitated mainly by a capitalist system. And this interest not just in escaping the world by certain billionaires, but in publics across the world-- millions and millions of people.

 I think mainly men, but we can talk about that. I think there's a lot of geeks here involved-- a certain kind of masculine subjectivity, which we could call the nerd-- the technoscience nerd.

 Exactly at the same time, perhaps in superficially speaking, different cultures where you have people interested in liminal experiences and supposedly more mystical or less interested in rigor and science and sort of accuracy and prediction.

 But nevertheless, very intense experiences of changing the brain as a different response to these crises, to these catastrophes. And my question is, what if they are connected? And what does that say about the whiteness of \[INAUDIBLE\] sort of universal sense predicament?

 I was going to say something about the attack on the psychedelic rave party by Hamas. I had a slide about that. I'm not going to talk about that. I had a quote from Rolling Stone Magazine about this attack.

 I will simply say that, yes, that I did do research on psychedelic trance music in India. And one of the main nationalities involved were Israelis for reasons specifically to do with that country. But I could talk about that if you want, over email or something.

 But there is this connection here, which is personal. But just the intensity of that moment, I just wanted to flag up. As Amanda said, there are very important imaginations of cosmology, of the use of hallucinogens, especially in the '60s and 1970s that need to be mentioned here.

 And I do find that really important. And so I can be criticized for overstating my case. For saying, well, the whiteness of psychedelia doesn't get at the whole gamut of ways that you can have subversions of white racism and all of the oppressive regimes that we might have.

 But I will end with talking about the whole idea of molecular revolution. And I will simply provoke you to think about the kinds of truths that are involved in taking drugs in religious experience. And I tend to follow philosopher Alain Badiou here.

 He's a Marxist philosopher who makes very stringent distinctions between four kinds of truth procedure as he calls them. So there is science. There are truths produced in science. There is politics and so the kinds of truths produced in politics would be more of the revolutionary kinds. Certain events as he calls them.

 There is the truth of love between two people. And then there's the truth of art. But when it comes to futurisms and sort of finding a way out of catastrophe, I do think that there are limitations of even Afro-futurism-- and I might not make myself popular here.

 I think Afro-futurism and all kinds of other futurisms, Indigenous futurism, et cetera, also through psychedelic means are absolutely essential. But to me, they don't get at the actual coming together of people on the streets organizing for a different world that are really needed.

 And so I'm not really developing this very much here. But I just wanted to end on that because I'm required to from a moral point of view, I think. Just to understand what the limitations are. And this is where I find there are limitations to Deleuze and Guattari.

 When Guattari talks about molecular revolution-- he's not in the same vein as Timothy Leary. But I do find that works better for artistic experimentation rather than for actual street politics or actual sort of concerted efforts of people coming together to really make changes in society. So Thanks for bearing with my chaotic approach to talks and I'm looking forward to your questions.

 CHARLES STANG: Thank you. Wonderful. OK. Well, those were very rich and dense presentations. I myself am feeling as if what we need to do is draw out the threads that are specifically around psychedelic spirituality.

 Because Amanda, you gave quite a bit of attention to theosophical notions of race, which is a contested topic and the third eye. But less attention to how that bears directly on contemporary psychedelic spirituality. So similarly, Arun, quite a bit on the sort of capitalist background.

 But I want to ask you both if you could speak to how the use of psychedelics, especially in pursuit of transcendent or mystical experiences is replicating these racial hierarchies? And what evidence you want to marshal in favor of that?

 And/or do use of psychedelics have the potential to undo those racial hierarchies or multiply white racial identities? That's something that might be closer to a runes language there. And if so, do we need to learn how to use psychedelics differently? So Amanda, do you want try? Can we pass it up?

 AMANDA J. LUCIA: Yeah, sure. I see it as kind of all in the same mix of what I was trying to present. In that I think third eye expansion is a part of the psychedelic narrative as it's been put forward in the certainly 1960s counterculture, even today's counterculture-- or if it's even a counterculture-- today's subculture of psychedelic use is to open consciousness through that.

 And I think that's what the visual imagery that I was trying to make that link with. It really proliferates. And so the question is then how is that connected to who has the capacity to explore those other states of consciousness?

 Who has the access to explore those other states of consciousness? What are the frameworks and understandings and the kind of meta structures of that journey positioned within? How did those even become ideals?

 And I think that maybe a question that links this with what Arun is saying is that is there a space for psychedelic exploration outside of the frame of whiteness? That's what I was thinking as Arun was speaking.

 Certainly that's what people are looking for when they're looking toward Indigenous futures. I see the way it's co-opted and reproducing whiteness in the contemporary scene. But certainly that wasn't created with people in the West looking toward it. It was there much beforehand. So I see that we did address it, but maybe I'm not giving you what you are asking for.

 CHARLES STANG: Arun, you want to respond?

 ARUN SALDANHA: Yes. No, thanks for that. And I realized that I didn't talk about spirituality or the actual ingestion of chemicals directly and sort of took a step back and asked quite a foucauldian question of like how is this framed or why is there an interest in the first place?

 But if you're forcing me to talk about it, then I really think that there's two ways of thinking about this. One is sociological, and that would be along the lines of Amanda and my sort of ethnographies of, yes, who is ingesting? Why are they ingesting it? What kinds of stickiness of particular norms are instantiated. So that there are these invisible barriers for non-white people, for example, to participate.

 And so then the question is, are there empirical examples of drug practices which are explicitly anti-racist? And I do think the answer to that is yes, I think there's more and more. And I'm really happy to see that, for example, in chacruna and their work.

 There is more and more an understanding that the racelizations of drug practices in the past should not be replicated. But then there's the sort of less sociological and more philosophical question. And that is about what is transcendence? What does it mean that some people are interested in a kind of universality?

 And that's where I'm like, well, let us see-- there is a universality in Buddhism. There is a universality in-- it's not just a sort of Western thing. But there's a huge amount of literature on this drive for universalization being part and parcel of capitalism and of white modernity. And so yeah. So it depends on which level that we're talking about Yeah. There's--

 CHARLES STANG: If I heard you right, you were equating transcendence and universality.

 ARUN SALDANHA: Mm-Hmm.

 CHARLES STANG: Why? Those words do not mean the same thing.

 \[INTERPOSING VOICES\]

 CHARLES STANG: Explain to me-- how are you equating those? Or--

 ARUN SALDANHA: They're not the same. You're right. But you were saying about because of the whiteness factor and then you use the word transcending-- but yes, you can have transcendence in a different modality. But if instead of looking at this within a sort of system of race, then I was thinking in terms of universality. Yeah.

 CHARLES STANG: OK.

 ARUN SALDANHA: Yeah,

 CHARLES STANG: I have a question for each of you. So this first one is for Amanda. Then I have another one for you, Arun. So in White Utopia, Amanda, there's an interlude after the second chapter. You're interviewing a man named Nico, who's an African-American DJ at lightning in a bottle.

 I mean, I know you know this very well. So I'm just saying it for the purpose of the people who haven't-- \[CHUCKLES\] who haven't read the book. But your perspective seems to flip from being quite skeptical of festival goers to more open to their seeking and their desire for transformation.

 And you write that, from this point on, you bring Nico's notion to the fore. n His notion quote, "that white people are on the journey of evolution." In order to-- and these are your words, to highlight the spiritual work that participants are doing in transformational festivals.

 I'm wondering if you could share more about how this shift happened for you? I know it was many years ago-- and the ways it changed or seemed to change your analytical approach in the book. Could you discuss how your work has come to both appreciate and critique the spiritual work, quote-unquote, "spiritual work" that seekers in these psychedelic cultures are pursuing?

 AMANDA J. LUCIA: Yeah, sure. I mean, I think it comes from an uncomfortable anthropological perspective. On the one hand, with any informant or community that I'm working with, I want to have empathy and understand how the logics of their community make sense as they present it and live it in their daily life.

 And on the other hand, when working with violence and atrocity, it's very difficult. It's very difficult to have that kind of empathy when a community is enacting what I would see as violence. It raises what, Arun was talking about. It was like the moral question at the end.

 And so it's a kind of hard line that the book walks between empathy and concern, or empathy and at some points disgust. And I think that at first, I was concerned with-- what Arun ended with was kind of desire for street politics and viewing this as escapism, as frivolity, as white leisure, as violence.

 And then I have another part of my view that kind of says, well, maybe there is change that's happening through these experiences. And the hard part, I think, is that change is very hard to track. People go back to their home lives after events like this. And sometimes they re-engage in all of the same stuff that they did before and it was just kind of a whimsy, a fantasy, a dream that they've awoken from and nothing changes.

 But then when I was interviewing people I found so many people who had actually had pretty radical change in their lives. People who quit their jobs. They always say like at Burning Man, for example, when you go home for three days, don't do anything.

 Don't break up with your spouse. Don't break up with your boyfriend. Don't move out of your house. Don't change your country. Don't quit your job. Because people do. And I think that is interesting as to-- it's kind of a ethereal change that is happening in people's minds, even if they've gone to something that is leisurely , fanciful white-centered, problematically political. But it's still \[INAUDIBLE\] change.

 CHARLES STANG: Thank you. Arun, so the discourse and awareness around race and racial injustice has changed considerably since you published Psychedelic White in 2007. I mean, you mentioned this in your talk, it's changed especially in here in the United States, but I think globally.

 Do you feel like your understanding of racial viscosity has changed in light of events of recent years? And are there ways you see this material view of race playing out in the United States differently?

 ARUN SALDANHA: I think on a theoretical level, I think I did change and became more of-- I never call myself a Marxist, but I did after. The book is from 2007-2008. We had obviously a huge change-- or a huge crisis, 2008-2009. And so theoretically-- yeah. This whole idea of racial capitalism I've been working on a lot more and Black Marxism and so on.

 I think also-- so when it comes to understanding racism, I think that would be a change in Minneapolis. So George Floyd was murdered in my neighborhood, just a few minutes from where I live. And so I have been affected a lot thinking about structural racism in the United States.

 I don't think my politics have changed enormously since the book, but I do want to affirm what Amanda was saying about the difficulty of such ethnography. So I'm being very critical today. I don't know why. Maybe it's because I'm seeing the first snow in Minnesota and it's making me a bit grumpy.

 But on other days, I will be a little bit more gentle in my critique of the whiteness of psychedelia. I do agree that it is possible to have-- I wouldn't call it transcendence. And to be very honest, I also wouldn't call it maybe spiritual for myself.

 But there is definitely a sense that these are age-old powerful means of thinking differently, feeling differently, socializing differently, imagining differently. And so I'm not going to just come out against this whole arena of human processes.

 But what I do want to say on a political level is that it is not politics for me. And so when I read Timothy Leary, when I read-- if I may just very, very quickly-- I'll just read one quote that I found in Tikkun Magazine, if I may. And it goes as follows. He's writing right after 9/11. And he writes in Tikkun Magazine-- as you know, a progressive Jewish spiritual magazine. "On a more massive scale, I can envision devoting a single day in the near future in which, say, 5 million people worldwide took a healthful dose of MDMA or hashish or psilocybin, and opened up their hearts and minds to each other and to the universe.

 Such a rite of pure Dionysian grace, involving communal song, dance, and invocations of prayer, would strum the invisible wires of the emergent global c consciousness network, striking a harmonious chord from Chicago to Bangkok, Sydney to Sao Paulo, London to Delhi, Durban to Tehran."

 And so this is where-- I'm not going to ridicule that. But this is where I'm emphatically say, OK, that is not a solution. I don't think any conflict in the world or any of the catastrophes that I was briefly hinting at is going to be solved by taking psychedelics.

 It can be fun. It can sort of be useful in therapeutic settings, but I don't have the same sort of evangelical-- and I think that I'm just pointing out that danger of the Timothy Leary's and so on, sort of that coming back. And I think we should read Leary very seriously.

 But there is just this sort of eclecticism and this evangelical drive, which I would say repeats some of the troubling racial tropes on some level, as Amanda was talking about. So yeah.

 CHARLES STANG: OK. Thank you. This is a question for both of you and then I'll open it up to any questions you have for each other. A number of the comments I think prompted by both your papers have raised the question of aren't there interesting sites and instances of say, Black psychedelic culture or psychedelic culture of people of color?

 The question I take you to be posing or maybe that you're not, but I'll pose to you is-- you're saying there's a kind of implicit whiteness to global psychedelic spirituality. And on the one hand that it means that it's being undertaken by white people, but I also take it to mean almost that the assumptions-- the framework of global psychedelic spirituality is white.

 It's not just that it's white people doing it. It's that the entire framework for it is pervaded by whiteness. So then the question becomes, when people of color pursue psychedelic spirituality, are they trapped in a framework of whiteness?

 Or is there a way for white people pursuing psychedelic spirituality to deconstruct or escape or at least problematize the white frame of psychedelic spirituality, which I take you to be exposing?

 And what about people of color in pursuing psychedelic spirituality? Do they too need to work to escape the implicit whiteness of the entire enterprise? So I hope that question makes sense. And if you wish to bend it to your own purposes or tell me that it doesn't make sense and that it's ill conceived completely, I'm open to that too.

 AMANDA J. LUCIA: I'll say something since I tend to be the person put in the first position, and Arun will comment.

 ARUN SALDANHA: Thanks, Amanda, for going first.

 AMANDA J. LUCIA: Yeah, no problem. I'll take one for the team. I think I'm a little concerned with the ways in which we're talking about psychedelic culture as a singular thing. Because I'm consciously aware that there's a lot of psychedelic cultures that have operated separately until the 19th-20th century. There's a long history of psychedelics in different parts of the world.

 CHARLES STANG: Sorry. I mean, the contemporary global psychedelic spirituality. And that may also not be a singular but--

 AMANDA J. LUCIA: I'm getting hooked up. Because I think that we have in Mexico peyote. And in Latin America, ayahuasca that existed before white tourists went to go participate in those cultures.

 And the concern that I have is that the ways in which I think-- even outside of psychedelics, the ways in which beauty, clarity, spirituality is a bit of a nebulous signifier. But intuneness, high vibration, all of these ideals of new age spiritual, yogic, psychedelic circuits being in tune.

 I think those commonsensical ideas that we don't trace to whiteness are actually deeply informed by white normativity that were developed as these discourses came into popularity in the modern West. So that's kind of what I am targeting. Not necessarily that whiteness pervades all of psychedelic activity globally. I think that's false.

 But also even in places where whiteness maybe didn't shape the conversation in 1,500 1,300 800, whenever in the history of humanity. I think today it is increasingly doing so as we look at ayahuasca tourism or ganja tourism in India or peyote tourism in New Mexico.

 ARUN SALDANHA: Yes. No, I agree that-- and I would go further. So not only is psychedelic maybe a white European term in itself, but also there are different ways of obtaining altered states of consciousness. Let's say with other kinds of drugs that we might not immediately say are psychedelic or without drugs at all.

 There's all sorts of techniques of getting into a different kinds of state, whether it's for pleasure or whether it is for spiritual means. And so first of all, I sort of trouble the distinction between hedonism and spirituality.

 Second of all, I trouble the distinction between psychedelic and other drugs. And then third of all, I trouble the distinction between taking drugs and other kinds of practices. But your question is completely legitimate, Charlie, from an ethical point of view. Like where do we go from here?

 And then I will simply say, well, the more awareness that people taking hallucinogens have about the racialized history and the very inception of drug culture-- and from that 1943 moment, that LSD was first ingested and how it traveled from there.

 Just knowing the history, just like anything to do with structural racism and structural violence-- what Black Lives Matter and what the American Indian Movement and what all the feminist movement and LGBTQ+ movement has always been saying it's not to stop with sexuality or stop with listening to Black music or stop with taking drugs or stop with traveling.

 But it's just-- first of all, being informed of one's own privilege and why one comes to a certain practice. That is the first step. And then seeing that it's possible to engage. But there's still a lot of unknowing about these structural features.

 CHARLES STANG: OK. Thank you for entertaining that question, however ill conceived. Would you like to ask a question to each other?

 ARUN SALDANHA: Many. But--

 AMANDA J. LUCIA: I have one that comes from my own. I'll go first, again. It comes from my own desire and optimism that-- I've heard a lot in-- its popular in Indigenous Studies and ethnic studies, this concern with travel and tourism and science as inherently violent, inherently abusive, inherently consumptive.

 And I agree. And I also love to travel, and I also love knowledge and the pursuit of knowledge. We're all in academia and some of that desire and drive to know. And I want to be more optimistic about that it can be positive like polio vaccines and such-- comes from a desire to know.

 So I just wanted to ask you Arun, is there any room for that? Or where does that fit? Where does that optimism fit in to a totalizing violence?

 ARUN SALDANHA: Yeah. And this is where I lean on Lambert \[INAUDIBLE\] again. He does have this sense of science being able to have breakthroughs. He's not a positivist and he's also not a naive science can be good for the people kind of thing.

 He's a mathematician. So he traffics mainly in very high set theory and so on, and mathematical logic. But loosely based on him and sort of a Marxist tradition, but there's a lot of feminist scientists who would say a similar thing.

 Obviously science has to be part of the solution to things like climate change and pandemics and so on. It's just that, again, there needs to be this vigilance from the get-go about it's being diverted to profit-making and to surveillance and to-- within academia, a lot of ego mania and so on. And a lot of competitiveness.

 And so sometimes, I think we need like a new Hippocratic oath, just like doctors are. Like there's no question about it. They're always going to be trying to save people's lives. Like it's happening right now in Gaza. We're sort of impartial. In that same, way I think in science one would hope.

 And then going to fucking Mars is not part of the scheme as far as I'm concerned. That doesn't help anyone. So any kind of Hippocratic oath would say, well, obviously that is not a project that we should pursue. So yeah.

 So when it comes to science-- technoscience, leaning on people like Donna Haraway, there is definitely a place for optimism. But it's just not this sort of starry-eyed optimism, which just believes that science with a big S is always going to save people.

 Because what it has done historically, since the Renaissance has been very good for colonialism and very good for capitalism. And yes, there are vaccines and so on. And I'm using my iPhone every day. But on the whole, it's been-- yeah, full of externalities, which were now having to deal with and the next generations.

 So just some ethics from the get-go that it should be for everyone. And science for the people, not for profit, I guess. Including pharmaceutical science and any kind of new drugs. Like why on Earth was fentanyl made?

 It was a Belgian chemist apparently, and don't know much of the history. But that is an example of-- just like Atomic Energy that you think, OK, why-- if they knew what the consequences were, then the pursuit itself was not right. And so yeah.

 So I see these parallels between a lot of the stuff that we're talking about in psychedelic spirituality and sort of elsewhere in society.

 CHARLES STANG: Thank you, both so much. We're over the hour. And this has been really, really rich-- very challenging. I have host of other questions that I want to pose to you that we don't have time for.

 There's questions in the Q&A queue. We'll forward those to you both. So you see what people posted. But I want to thank you both, once again for your time and for your insight and the seriousness with which you are pursuing this research.

 I think it's fair to say that, the field of research into psychedelics, especially humanistic research into psychedelics is going through a maturation. And you both are a real big part of that maturation, and I'm grateful to you both.

 I want to announce for those of you who are still with us, the next event in our series will be on psychedelics and philosophy, metaphysics and meaning in psychedelia. That's on Monday, November 6. So upcoming. It's at an odd time 1:30 to 3:00 PM Eastern time. It's an odd time for us, but it's meant to accommodate our two guests who'll be joining us from Europe.

 So middle of the afternoon on Monday the 6th. And there's a link to it in the chat. So Arun, Amanda, thank you both so much and have a wonderful night.

 ARUN SALDANHA: Thank you, Charlie. Thank you, Amanda. Thanks for the audience. And also thank you to Laurie for organizing everything behind the scenes. I think I didn't mention her.

 CHARLES STANG: Laurie is still on dropping some links in the chat so.

 ARUN SALDANHA: Yeah.

 CHARLES STANG: Thanks, Laurie. Yes. \[CHUCKLE\] OK. Good night, everyone. Take care.

 ARUN SALDANHA: Good night. Thank you.

 SPEAKER 1: Sponsor-- Center for the Study of World Religions.

 SPEAKER 2: Copyright 2023. President and Fellows of Harvard College.



 

 

 



 

 See also:- [ psychedelics ](/topic-tags/psychedelics)
- [ Race identity ](/topic-tags/race-identity)
- [ Video ](/news-classification/video)
- [ Psychedelics and the Future of Religion ](/programming-threads/psychedelics-and-future-religion)