“The point is to meet the Daime,” Jonathan Goldman said to me right before the ceremony started, with a firm hand on my shoulder and a deep, baritone voice. Goldman is a co-founder of the Church of the Holy Light of the Queen in Ashland, Oregon, which practices the Brazilian Santo Daime religion. Daime, their sacrament, is a ceremonially prepared psychedelic tea popularly known as ayahuasca. They liken drinking Daime to drinking the blood of Christ.

I wasn’t completely unfamiliar with what to expect. Adolescence is always a weird time, but mine had a particular quirk: There was an ayahuasca church operating out of my dad’s attic. Starting in my late teens, I’d join the ceremonies in what used to be my playroom once-or-so a year. We’d all wear white and sit circled around an altar. Musicians and singers kept up an unwavering current of Portuguese healing songs for up to 12 hours. We’d all try to stay upright and engaged with the music, a process known as “the work.” The psychedelic experience was shaped by a community of practice operating in an explicitly spiritual framework. 

Over the past few years covering what’s sometimes called the “psychedelic renaissance,” I’ve watched a completely different way of thinking about psychedelics spread across the West.

Since the cautious revival of clinical research in the early aughts, psychedelic science has become part of the frontier of mental health treatment. Neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers are integrating psychedelics — both the science and their own experience — into research on how the mind works. Humanities scholars are getting serious funding to study the relationship between psychedelics and culture. Psychedelic therapy is already legal in Australia. In the U.S., Oregon, Colorado, and New Mexico have each legalized state-supervised trips. 

As psychedelics grow increasingly normalized across society, the approach that early clinicians took to studying them is shaping the way we structure access for everyone. The slate of legal modalities for psychedelic use all have us tripping in basically the same way: alone (save for a guide), inside a licensed facility, and under “non-directive” supervision, which aims to support people in making their own meaning out of psychedelic experiences via reflection and elaboration — rather than receiving direct interpretation from guides, or being exposed to pre-existing interpretive frameworks. These are pillars of what I’ll call the “Western Model.” 

By promoting solo trips under non-directive supervision as the default approach, the Western Model structures psychedelic experience around a core set of values: individualism and autonomy. There’s nothing unusual about containers for the psychedelic experience being made to reflect or even instill pre-existing cultural values. But what makes the Western Model unique is its pretense of value neutrality.

In 2023, anthropologists Nicholas Langlitz and Alex Gearin interviewed psychedelic therapists participating in clinical trials to understand how they thought their treatment methods biased the meaning that patients made out of their experiences. “The big surprise was that everybody told us they were totally non-directive,” Langlitz said. “They say they’re just ‘midwives’ helping the patient figure out their own life, not imposing any ethical values on them.”

Much of the Western Model’s structure is meant to uphold this ethic of non-direction. Guides are taught to avoid all manner of suggestion. Treatment rooms are comfortably lit and decorated, equipped with a couch or recliner and eye shades to steer patients inwards. But even if therapists aren’t explicitly pushing a worldview, tripping alone and under non-directive supervision can.

“Western clinical settings are often presented as neutral,” said anthropologist and clinical psychologist David Dupuis, “but they’re just as socially and culturally constructed as Indigenous rituals. The difference is that they align with dominant values in Western medicine and psychotherapy, which gives them an aura of objectivity.” The Western Model doesn’t recognize its bias towards experiences which reaffirm autonomy and individualism, because these values align with our cultural norms. And because legalized settings for psychedelic use follow the same model, it precludes consideration of legal alternatives. 

Is that really a problem? Autonomy seems like an unproblematic bias, even an important guardrail to protect against manipulation. Consider that France outlawed ayahuasca back in 2005 out of concern that cults could use it to induce “chemical submission.” Dupuis himself has written about psychedelics as tools for “belief transmission.” Drawing on fieldwork from a Peruvian ayahuasca center, he describes how combining states of psychedelic suggestibility with ritualized belief systems can guide people towards socially prescribed visions and beliefs.   

While safety and informed consent are paramount, efforts to avoid all manners of suggestion in psychedelic experience are fraught with contradiction. In practice, prioritizing individual autonomy translates into a therapist or guide withholding interpretation and avoiding established frameworks of collective meaning-making — precisely the schemas that many cultures have used psychedelics in conjunction with for centuries. To be clear, in the early days of psychedelic RCTs, trying to control every variable was necessary to study the isolated effects of the drug. It may have been impossible to reboot academic trials otherwise. But just as important is to understand what is lost when upholding autonomy means carving out the possible impacts of community — and even suggestion. 

None of this is to say the Western Model is a bad way to trip. It offers an excellent model designed to minimize harm. For many people, it is probably the preferred approach. But as the sole approach, and the implicit frame for all research, it’s a narrow context that affords only a partial view of the psychedelic experience. Even in our current, controlled clinical contexts, researchers are made to grapple with experiences outside the typical medical model. Consider that the quality of psychedelic mystical experiences predicts therapeutic outcomes, which is to say — the varieties of subjective experience matter. We don’t know how interpersonal experiences (say tripping with friends) or containers that leverage explicit belief systems (like the Santo Daime practice) impact psychedelic experience because the Western Model precludes the question.  

Beyond the research, issues arise if the Western Model continues shaping the only containers legally offered to the public, generating a sort of moral tunnel vision that our present trajectory seems to be leaning towards. 

Psychedelic experience inevitably kicks up existential questions. A survey of 2,561 DMT users found that over half of those who identified as atheist before their experiences no longer identified as atheist afterwards. Metaphysical beliefs change after psychedelics. These are ethical realms where people should be free to structure their experiences around values of their choosing or use explicitly spiritual frameworks to scaffold their experiences, whether alone or in groups. Values like autonomy and individualism should be available but not prescribed.

This is all, admittedly, hazy terrain. How, exactly, does the Western Model reproduce these values? Clinical psychedelic science doesn’t offer much data on the question since it operates within the paradigm in question. One good way to see a paradigm is to step outside of it. That’s how I wound up flying out to Oregon to join the CHLQ ceremony. In 2010, they were one of the first U.S.-based religious organizations to receive an exemption from the Supreme Court allowing them to legally import and consume ayahuasca as part of their religious services. 

Their services depart from the Western Model in all major ways. They drink ayahuasca in large groups. There’s an explicit spiritual framework through which members interpret just about everything they experience. The space is designed by the community rather than a regulatory or licensing body.

My hope was that the contrast might help me see how the Western Model, now on the cusp of being rolled out across the country, is biasing these transformative experiences. My hope, in other words, was to try and understand whether we might want the freedom to trip differently.

The idea that psychedelic experience depends on context is already conventional wisdom, usually wrapped up in the phrase “set and setting.” Set (short for mindset) refers to things like mood and personality. Setting points to the local environment of the trip — lighting, music, social dynamics, and so on.

But neither category covers what we do before, during, and after a trip. That’s where ritual comes in. 

Ritual, the ethnobotanist Glenn Shepard writes in his foreword to The World Ayahuasca Diaspora, has “structuring powers.” Ritual can “impose order, provide meaning, and even extract advantage from the boiling foam of ecstasy.” In the context of psychedelics, rituals are practices that deliberately alter set and setting in line with particular values or goals. 

“Anthropology used to operate under a clear divide: non-Western societies had rituals; Western societies had science,” explained Dupuis. But “many anthropologists now recognize that Western clinical and scientific practices are also ritualized forms of meaning-making — just operating under different assumptions.” 

The clinicians I spoke with — both white coat and holistic — described a tension between thinking about the Western Model as our own set of rituals and the paradigm of psychedelic science and medicine it operates within.

“The eye shades, the playlist, and the ritual around serving the medicine in a little dish — of course it’s ritualized,” said naturopath Diana Quinn, who served as Director of Clinical Education at Naropa University’s Center for Psychedelic Studies. And psychiatrist Kyle Greenway, who runs the ketamine clinic at Jewish General Hospital in Montreal, said: “I would strongly argue that biomedical psychiatry has its own rituals, language, and norms, but we’re caught in the paradigm of writing off everything that’s not pure biology as a placebo.”

The Western Model has developed around the idea that set, setting, and ritual are important but not primary. Like the preparatory sequence of pushing all the right buttons before a rocket launch, they ultimately serve to release the innate therapeutic power of psychedelic experiences. “In the psychedelic crowd,” Greenway said, “there’s an implicit idea that it’s not so much that these drugs amplify set and setting. It’s that you need a satisfactory set and setting to unleash the properties of the drug.”

During my ceremony at CHLQ, I got the opposite sense. The ritual was not just scaffolding to let the drug do the work. The ritual was the point. Members of CHLQ all stayed remarkably engaged with the music, despite just how strange and attention-grabbing ayahuasca experiences can get.

After some opening prayers, we lined up and took turns downing small disposable cups of the viscous, chocolate-brown liquid. It tasted even worse than I remembered. We sat back down, opened our songbooks, and prepared to sing in Portuguese for the next six hours.

The come up was familiar. The letters in my songbook began squirming. My thoughts grew a bit more interesting. And then, as a more psychedelic disorientation set in, I started seeing the insects.

Eyes closed, red and black twirling rectangles appeared, fading into receding horizons. As if a door popped open in their spiraling middle, what looked like a large black ant head stuck out. I recoiled; my body jolted, and I opened my eyes. Everyone in the room was still singing. Somehow, two guys were still playing guitar.

Cautiously, I closed my eyes again. The rectangles resumed swirling. The insects were still there, staring. The strangest part was the visceral sense that they were other beings with interiorities separate from my own. It felt more like an encounter than a hallucination. I was spooked because I had the feeling that paying attention to them was akin to inviting them into my mind, and I wasn’t sure that’d be a good thing. (I was aware that some ayahuasca traditions recognize spiritual “infestations” by demonic entities as causes of disease.) So I opened my eyes again.

Looking around, I considered that everyone was probably dealing with something of roughly equivalent intensity as seemingly autonomous insects poking their bulbous black heads into their minds. Yet, just about everyone I could see was still holding their books up, singing aloud. I took the cue and tried singing the words even as they skated around the page. 

I quickly recognized that singing prompted a different kind of trip. Although there is some research suggesting that closing your eyes can lead to more intense trips, at least in terms of brain activity, for me, it didn’t seem to  dial down the intensity so much as redirect it.

“Hymns” are the backbone of the Santo Daime ritual. Researcher Ido Hartogsohn describes their “arrangement of ritual music as a programming for individual and collective visions,” citing anthropologists Marlene Dobkin De Rios and Fred Katz’s idea of music during trips as a “jungle gym” for consciousness, providing “a series of pathways and banisters through which the drug user negotiates his way.” I wouldn’t say I followed the Santo Daime in experiencing  the hymns as divine messages from some astral plane. But the songs did create a sort of scaffolding that pulled my experience out of my own weird visuals and into a more communal space. There, my sense of self took on a different kind of porosity. Potentially demonic entities weren’t popping open holes on the verge of barging in. Instead, I found myself aerated, floating up on a spiraling wind alongside the voices next to me, which felt about as pleasant as it sounds. 

On a phone call with one of the church members a few days later, I asked him what he made of my insect sightings. He told me that the Santo Daime understand that sort of thing as a form of mediumship. You don’t see anything that isn’t actually there, in one dimension or another.

I’m not sure I believe that those insects were, in fact, anything other than strange flickers of my own subconscious processing. Though to be honest, these days, I’m not as closed off to the possibility as I once was. Who knows? But in a psychedelic therapy session, that conversation would have gone differently. During an integration meeting, my therapist would have turned the question of the insects back around to me. “How did it feel to see them? What stood out to you about them?” And so on, until I generated some association that stuck.

The emphasis on making our own meaning out of psychedelic visions is a subtle but powerful cue. “This valorization of autonomy is a very Western, individualist framework,” said Langlitz. And it’s a key bias of the Western Model.

The blueprint for the Western Model was largely developed at Spring Grove Hospital Center, a clinic outside of Baltimore. From 1955 to 1976, while hippies were riding in rainbow-painted buses dishing out LSD-spiked Kool-Aid, and the CIA was attempting to use LSD for mind control, Spring Grove kept up a relatively uncontroversial stream of psychedelic studies, mostly focusing on LSD as a treatment for addiction, end-of-life anxiety, and mystical or “peak experiences.”

From the outset, Spring Grove approached psychedelics as adjuncts to psychotherapy, establishing the now-common practices of preparation sessions beforehand and integration work afterwards. But their focus was on the healing potential of peak experiences, which led them to an important departure from psychotherapeutic norms: avoiding any interpretive work during the sessions, instead offering emotional support and quiet companionship. 

This protocol stuck. Though harshening political tides eventually shuttered psychedelic research at Spring Grove, two alumni — psychiatrist Stanislav Grof and psychologist Bill Richards — went on to spread its method to two of the largest containers for legal psychedelic use today.

Grof, who served as Spring Grove’s Chief of Psychiatric Research for five years, developed a therapeutic method that became the cornerstone of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) model of psychedelic therapy. Their treatment manual formalizes a similarly “non-directive method,” one that relies on Grof’s idea that psychedelics can facilitate our “inner healing intelligence.”

Meanwhile, in 1998, Richards joined neuroscientist Roland Griffiths in launching the psychedelic research program at Johns Hopkins, which seeded the contemporary wave of psychedelic science. Yet while the early Hopkins research endeavored to follow the Spring Grove approach of non-direction, it began running into controversy over alleged failures of adequately upholding patient autonomy. 

Hopkins researchers have more recently come under fire for things like providing psilocybin capsules in ceremonial chalices, placing Buddha statues in the treatment room, and sharing overtly spiritual reading materials with participants before their sessions. 

Psychologist Matthew Johnson, who served as assistant director for the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research, has grown outspoken about the spiritual influences his colleagues introduced into psychedelic medicine. “The goal of the clinician,” he wrote in a 2020 paper, “should be to create an open and supportive environment where the patient can make her or his own meaning, if any, from such experiences.”

But Langlitz is skeptical that, even without overt measures of alleged “psychedelic evangelism,” clinical environments can really offer neutral settings that don’t bias meaning-making. “It’s not like just because you took out the Buddha statue, suddenly your clinical space becomes neutral,” he told me.

Langlitz and Gearin point out a deeper problem: By leaving subjects to make their own meaning out of psychedelic experiences, the non-directive stance implicitly guides them “towards a form of life that is built around the valorization of autonomy.” Non-direction, in other words, is its own form of direction. All the while, psychedelics induce states of hypersuggestibility, which undermine the very conditions for autonomy, or freedom from external influences, in the first place.

This doesn’t mean that this approach is bad, but it precludes us from asking whether it’s best. That answer seems likely to depend on what people seek from psychedelic therapy. Consider that end-of-life anxiety — the focus of one of the earliest psilocybin trials — is a very different thing than social anxiety disorder. It’s easy to imagine the latter might be better addressed in a different sort of setting.

Dupuis told me that, in his work as a clinical psychologist, “we often see participants emerging from psychedelic experiences and craving interpretation. But we can’t give it to them.”  

Across many cultures of long-running psychedelic use, balancing the inescapable fact of suggestion with explicitly interpretative frameworks is the norm. Langlitz and Gearin describe the term quiqui in the Peruvian Shipibo ayahuasca tradition, or “the abilities of a healer to shape the psychedelic-augmented senses with song and performance, thus conflating the moral and the aesthetic.” For the Shipibo, “the healer’s use of suggestion during psychedelic sessions is a culturally accepted skillset, even a responsibility.”

Shortly before the CHLQ ceremony began, I was standing out on the ceremonial yurt’s porch, gazing at the crumpling, paper-like bark of the Pacific madrone trees and meeting some of the churchgoers milling about. One friendly guy — white hair, 50s — was jazzed to hear that I’d come all the way from New York to visit their church. “This guy’s on a real faith journey!” he said to others who joined us. I explained that I had a little ayahuasca experience, though none had been completely above-ground like this. He nodded, reminiscing on his own underground experiences. You get all kinds of people attracted to those ceremonies, people searching for all manner of things, he said. Then, he added with a chuckle: “Doing this work here is great, because we all already believe in God!”

We are the first culture to explain the psychedelic experience by way of things like 5-HT2A receptors and scrambled brain activity. Psychedelic neuroscience isn’t wrong, but it orients us towards a particular cultural framework for both interpreting and structuring psychedelic experiences. The experience happens in your brain; you trip alone. 

Like non-direction, tripping alone can subliminally orient experience towards a Westernized value of individualism. There are plenty of contexts where solo trips may be the best approach for whatever reason someone wants to use psychedelics. But group settings for psychedelic use are a norm across many cultures of practice, and lend themselves to forms of experience that people may have good reason to value.

From tropes (“it’s all connected, man”) to neuroscience (“tripping brains form novel connections”), connectedness has long been a cornerstone of the psychedelic experience, and more broadly, a key mediator of well-being. Tripping alone still invokes particular modes of connection (within brain connectivity patterns or by loosening the boundaries of how we experience selfhood). But tripping in groups can unlock different forms of connectedness by dovetailing social context with the neurological and phenomenological action of psychedelics. 

But so far, Western focus has remained largely on the tripping individual. A 2019 systematic review of psychedelic group therapy research found a total of 12 studies from 1900 to 2018 that included a group element across any of the preparation, administration, or integration phases. They couldn’t conclude much about the impact of group settings from the small sample and iffy methodologies. But they did come away with the conviction that doing psychedelics in a group is a fundamentally different experience, and “may reveal new pathways toward understanding the extent to which the human response to psychedelics is shaped by ‘drug, set, and setting.’”

Since 2019, research on group psychedelic therapy has started picking up. The main driver, though, hasn’t been morality or ethics, but economics.

Tripping alone in current regulatory frameworks is expensive for both consumer and provider, largely driven by personnel costs. An analysis of MAPS’ MDMA therapy protocol during phase 3 trials found an average cost of $11,537 per patient, with 90.7% of the cost chalked up to personnel (mostly all the hours that therapists spend with patients in their prep, administration, and integration sessions). By allowing for more patients per clinician at once, group therapy could help cut costs. As anthropologist Tehseen Noorani told me: “For economic reasons, it’s become a more salient conversation to think about collective modalities. That does, potentially, explode the biomedical container.” 

Ketamine therapy is already offered in groups, and state supervised programs like Oregon’s and Colorado’s leave the door open for groups, too. A few days after my ceremony at CHLQ, I visited Omnia Group Ashland, one of Oregon’s legal psilocybin centers. Brian Lindley, the owner, explained that they offer group programs as multi-day retreats, complete with a house in the woods, private chef, and transportation to and from the center for the group trips in a shared room. These are more like luxury retreats than affordable options. And the idea is still for everyone to “go inside,” but next to each other, rather than actively doing anything as a group, like sitting around an altar and singing. But group trips of any variety do suggest a break in the singularity of the Western Model beginning to form.

Plenty of people working with psychedelics worry that “exploding the container,” as Noorani put it, would be a nightmare.

Lindley feels that measures like decriminalization go too far. He praised the guardrails of Oregon’s supported adult-use model as “difficult and stifling,” but ultimately, necessary. The 78-page rulebook from the Oregon Health Authority governs things like having a preparation session at least one day before, facilitating with a non-directive approach, facilitator-to-client ratios for group sessions, what passes as safe administration areas, and maximum dosage (50 mg). “That’s what protects the reputation of Oregon rolling this out legally. It’s important that we have a standardized set of rules that all service centers have to operate within, so we can do this safely. Because the world is watching. And if this program falls apart, it could ruin it for everyone else.”

But service centers don’t offer much of an alternative to the Western Model, for the same reason that religious exemptions for groups like CHLQ don’t either. In both cases, particular settings are what get legally approved, which limits the degree to which people can adapt rituals to their own values. In both cases, values come already baked into the psychedelic experience.

Still, we’re already seeing new churches emerge that offer differently ritualized approaches. Should anyone who wants to trip in a way other than what the Western Model offers just start a church? In brief: no. “I don’t want to see everyone running to become a church just because it’s the only doorway,” said Allison Hoots, an attorney who advises churches on legal compliance for the ceremonial use of psychedelic sacraments. In her view, using religious exemption as a backdoor to accommodate all forms of psychedelic use outside of the Western Model would dilute the sanctity of religion itself. “We want to decriminalize and legalize so that religious use can fit in, instead of being the only exemption around.”      

Decriminalization does allow for some diversity, but it doesn’t solve the problem of how to safely and legally supply people who don’t happen to have a friend who grows mushrooms. “That’s why I started work on the New York model,” said Hoots. “People need the freedom to experience these substances in their own ways. Could we create a system where individuals are permitted, instead of service centers?”

Hoots wrote a bill that was introduced into the New York legislature in 2024 proposing a permitting program for psilocybin mushrooms. Adults who pass a basic health screening and educational course — similar, at least in spirit, to the permit test we take to get driver’s licenses — would receive a permit that lets them legally purchase psilocybin from licensed cultivators or grow it themselves, share with other licensed adults, and trip as they like.  

Permitting people rather than places would, in a significant way, break the hold that the Western Model has over legal psychedelia. Permitted adults could devise whatever settings they like: running the spectrum from non-directive to enmeshed in explicit interpretive frameworks, from solo to groups. The same dynamic is what makes this approach worrisome to some while exciting to others: The array of ways permitted adults might use psychedelics cannot be known ahead of time. It’s open-ended. 

Public education, support services, and more research on the risks would be necessary complements to any big liberalization of psychedelic access. But letting people adapt psychedelics to their own contexts and choose what kinds of rituals they want to structure their trips could spark a wave of innovation that makes the Western Model what it should be: just one among a variety of options.

“I like the idea,” said Langlitz when I put Hoots’ New York model to him. “But will it work in practice? My intuition would be to try this experimentally before introducing it to the entire population of New York State.”

After the second round of Daime wore off, and some closing prayers concluded the CHLQ ceremony, we all got up and mingled. Bags of chips were passed around. A couple, maybe in their 40s, drove me home afterwards. While they chatted up front, I sat in the back, behind that sound barrier that forms between front and back seats, staring out the window.

What stuck with me was not the insects or any of the other weird stuff that came up later in the ceremony. It was that the psychedelics felt secondary — to both the community and the ritual. The Daime was just an enabling factor that amplified the values already inscribed into both. Some members of the church told me they’ve been attending ceremonies every few weeks for over a decade. These were not people here for the drugs; they came, and continue to show up, for the community and the practice. 

I think Grof was right about classical psychedelics when he described LSD as a “non-specific” mental amplifier. The specificity of a psychedelic experience comes down to set, setting, and ritual. And so far, the Western Model has specified a social focus on the drugs themselves. By holding rituals constant, substance is the only independent variable. We wind up with a rush to invent new and patentable drugs, holding the hope that, maybe, taking these psychedelics can heal us, fix us, save us from the growing list of ways that our forms of life harm us. I have little doubt that our current trajectory will lead to all kinds of new therapies, drug discoveries, and individual revelations. But all the clinical research trying to isolate the drug effects is plagued by the same fact: in the end, the benefits always fade.

For a psychedelic renaissance that opens up to the expanse of potential experiences psychedelics can support and has a better chance of delivering lasting benefits, we need to experiment with exactly what the Western Model excludes: communities and practices connected to the values, experiences, and transformations we choose to care about. A real commitment to autonomy would entail the freedom to tinker with these practices ourselves, within social contexts of support, education, and experience. 

It’s unsurprising, but still ironic, that a culture struggling with atomization and loneliness has spread an approach to psychedelics that fractures what has traditionally been a collective experience into an individual one. It’s unsurprising that a culture with a deteriorating sense of meaning, purpose, and shared aspirational commitments would elevate non-direction above shared frameworks for meaning-making. It’s unsurprising that we focus more on the drugs than the practices surrounding them. It is, after all, easier to take a drug than to change the practices that structure our lives. 

Still, we should acknowledge the triumphs of the Western Model. It has already delivered a raft of promising therapies, honed safety procedures, and advanced some pretty interesting neuroscience, all in relatively tame, non-moral-panic-inducing fashion. But if we want to make the most out of what psychedelic experience has to offer, we should open it up. In some clinics, states, and communities, that’s already happening.

Greenway, the psychiatrist, is working to foreground more of the rituals that shape psychedelic experiences in the lab. He’s part of a team that just published the first international consensus on how to report different aspects of setting in clinical trials. They include 30 items ranging from ambiance, study location, music, and lighting, to participant autonomy over what happens during the dosing session, narrative framing of the potential effects by the study team, and the therapeutic protocol used. Pulling these factors into the scope of research will help us learn more about all the different non-drug levers we can pull to steer towards particular outcomes.

Opening up the scientific approach is important for reasons beyond more effective therapy, too. Results obtained from  psychedelic studies are being integrated with theories of consciousness, helping to paint a broader, more universal picture of how the mind works. Are these efforts limited, or our theories of consciousness biased, by drawing on only a narrow range of psychedelic experience constrained by the Western Model? Philosophers of mind are opening up to ideas like panpsychism, which holds that consciousness is a fundamental quality of all matter. Physicists are proposing that reality, on the whole, is made of a relational fabric rather than static and discrete entities. Things are getting weird, and there's likely more to the mind than what we can see by studying people lying motionless and alone in fMRI scanners.

In Colorado, the second state to pass a supported adult-use program after Oregon, non-direction is no longer the sole legal facilitation method. Facilitators still learn non-directive methods as part of the curriculum, but clients are free to give informed consent and work with guides who incorporate explicitly spiritual practices and frameworks. Sessions can also be held in groups, and at clients’ homes, rather than only at licensed facilities. These steps don’t go as far as a permitting model would, but they do begin opening the doorway.

A doorway to what? Fundamentally, the Western Model tries to create a predictable, and therefore repeatable answer. Something like healing. The impulse is reasonable; psychedelic chaos is a mixed bag. Sometimes, you might encounter large and unwelcoming insects — or worse. Designing our institutionalized practices to tip the scales towards reliably therapeutic experiences, with guardrails to protect people from coercion, is a worthy project. But it’s not the only one. If we get too hung up on trying to manufacture replicable (and insurable) psychedelic experiences, then we’ll miss out on the very unpredictability, the open-endedness that drives so much of what brings people to psychedelics in the first place. It’s usually what we expect the least that winds up changing our lives the most.