When we perceive the Earth as an organism—as an interconnected, holistic, evolving system—entheogens, the natural psychedelics, or ecodelics, can be seen as emergent properties arising from the relationships between the plants, fungi, and animal kingdoms, the three big domains of life on Earth. The degree that entheogenic compounds effect subjective experience, with almost zero biological toxicity, and that these chemicals presented by plants and fungi produce experiences of an organized, creative, complex, heightened-order in humans, shows that there is an interplay of consciousness occurring between plants, fungi, and animals. It would be difficult to over-estimate the importance of the physical relationships between plants, fungi, and animals here on Earth: through the plants relationship with the sun, they ultimately create food and oxygen for fungi and animals; fungi decompose biological material into plant nutrients and create underground mycelial networks that connect plants together, enabling plants to pass nutrients to each other. These capacities are expressions of the physical interrelations of the biosphere—but consciousness is also an integral part of the biosphere. All the consciousness entities living here on Earth evolved in symbiosis with one another—their experiences are also enmeshed.

When we see the Earth as an evolving system—which seems hard to dispute given that humans and the entire sophisticated complex unfolding of the Earth’s ecology were produced from distinct molecules of the periodic table, under the right relational conditions to the sun—it might make sense why something so enchanted as psychedelics enter the picture: the Earth is evolving in consciousness as well as physical complexity. Whether we define growth in consciousness as the development in psychological faculties from individual birth to maturation, or the collective growth of human society over the last four million years of evolution, or correlated with the unfolding anatomy of species through time from fish to humans, we see an expansion of consciousness taking place. When we integrate the information that individual consciousness learns and matures, and then see the Earth as a holistic system in which these individual consciousnesses are interrelated components, we can also recognize the maturing consciousness of our planet.

Just as evolution took a quantum leap forward when humans become self-aware, enabling us to change the face of the biosphere, so too will it take a giant leap forward when humans become both conscious that we are both evolving and ecologically aware—that is to say, when we deeply grasp that we exist as part of a larger evolving whole. Such an insight reorients one’s relationship to the whole, changing the identity of oneself and how one perceives others, and will ultimately also change the face of the biosphere into one of sustainability—and psychedelics can quickly usher in this awareness. Professor of English and science technology at Pennsylvania State University, Richard Doyle, whom appears to hold a love affair with rhetoric, coined the term ecodelic to refer to these boundary dissolving entheogens. In his book “Darwins Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noosphere” he writes, “In the research for this book I have reviewed thousands of reports about psychedelic experience… and suggest that a signature of these varied and incessantly ineffable experiences has been what I call the “ecodelic” insight: the sudden and absolute conviction that the psychonaut is involved in a densely interconnected ecosystem…”. From the perspective of a whole that evolves through us as her parts, the relationship between humans and entheogens are not only benefiting us as humans, but this synergistic connection is part of a feedback loop in a larger system that is growing—the Earth.

Jahan Khamsehzadeh is a PhD candidate in the Philosophy, Cosmology, Consciousness program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. His dissertation has to do with outlining the emerging paradigm, evolutionary psychology, and the impact psychedelics have played in past and can play in the future evolution of humanity. He received his Masters in Consciousness and Transformative Studies from JFK University, and his Bachelors in Philosophy, with minors in both Psychology and Physics, from the University of Arizona.