Are Psychedelics More Like Art or Spirituality?

I’ve done spirituality, art, and psychedelics in probably equal measure, but psychedelics have always expressed their “modality” to me — like, their formality — as more like Art™ than Spirituality™, and I don’t feel like contemporary psychedelic culture agrees.

This feels like one reason I’ve stopped expressing my affinity for these three modes in equal measure, which I definitely used to do. I fully believe in the Spiritual Transformation Power™ of psychedelics, but not as some kind of neo-religion. They have worked for me as Muses.

I’m much less inhibited in talking about psychedelics when I’m with artists, but these days I feel like I’m with 10% artists and 90% “spiritual aspirants,” by which I guess I mean people treating the quality of their own consciousness as a “medium”?

And that’s… not art.

It’s not NOT creative, but — as I’ve probably made clear by now — my patience for people’s descriptions of their ineffable inner state is quite limited, and I’d rather see intersubjective MANIFESTATIONS of it.

That can look like Art, or a Good Life, which is also kind of Art.

I feel like a “scene” needs to develop into a “curriculum” in order to have a lasting impact, even if that’s what destroys the scene (good).

And psychedelics are in my curriculum. Big time.

But not like THAT.

I guess this brings me to the internet, which is only a Spirituality medium in a subtle tantric sense that most people talking about jhanas or whatever do NOT mean, and it leads to a silly oxymoron where “posting about meditation” is the opposite of “meditation,” &c.

Whereas, EVERY post is art.

And that has something to do with why it’s fun to just fart around posting about posting, because it’s a kind of talking shop, like talking about brands of paint or guitar strings, which is part of Life As Medium for an artist.

Whereas, internet posts are manifestly not jhanas.

But I still haven’t said anything about the DIFFERENCE between psychedelics-for-Spirituality and psychedelics-for-Art vis-à-vis psychedelics THEMSELVES. And I think that’s because there’s a whole process here, and it’s all scrambled by the way the scene I’m in usually talks.

It’s something like this: Spiritual health is a PREREQUISITE for safe and productive psychedelic experiences, though they do provide SOME on-the-job training in the fundamentals.

But it’s here — at a very BASIC level — that spiritual and psychedelic training diverge.

Once you have stable and quiet attention figured out, the world opens up. You can work on purification of karma leading to transformation, you can work on visionary states that provide diagnosis, and so on. You probably WILL get a little of both either way, but results depend on HOW.

What I have found is, visionary states in spiritual practice are connected to artistic aptitudes, and their expression more so, but they come more readily AFTER deep purification and other kinds of long, awful slogging to become a better person, and the expressions reflect that.

You certainly CAN express intermediate visionary states that reflect the gnarly alchemical processes in the middle of the spiritual path, but that’s just subject to all the normal considerations of artistic talent. Spiritual practice doesn’t MAKE you an artist.

Whereas, psychedelics don’t MAKE you into a good person — like, even a little bit — but they can show you where you’re AT with that in ridiculously clear symbolic ways, and some compassion for those who coexist with you can result. In short, they CAN make you a better artist.

You can TRY to use psychedelics as a diagnostic tool for how you’re doing over time, but I’ve found that it tends to result in spiraling without some extrinsic work happening on relationships, material conditions, and other health factors. This shouldn’t be news to anyone.

Of course, psychedelics, spirituality, AND art can all be pursued for entirely useless escapism — as can any hobby, I guess — and if I’m AGAINST anything here, it’s that, so apply it across the board.

But my point, I think, is that I TRUST art scenes more, because they don’t rely SOLELY on interpersonal/social expressions — which can be faked — to establish trust.

They also rely on SINCERE, EXTERNAL MANIFESTATIONS of a person’s ongoing experience, which CAN’T be faked.

Which is not to say that art scenes can’t be full of monsters.

Lol.

But… any human scene can get confused. This is where those spiritual fundamentals come back in. Attention. Awareness. Discernment. Regulation. Recognition. Sympathy.

Nothing fancy.