This past fall 2015, ERIE interviewed University of Pennsylvania Professor Richard Doyle, author of Darwin’s Pharmacy. In this book, Doyle coins the term ecodelic as an additional option for psychedelic or entheogen; referring to psychoactive earth medicines that help individuals connect deeply with their ecosystems. During our interview, we spoke on the topic of entheogens, direct experience, Phillip K. Dick, and integration. The following excerpt is part one taken from this interview:

ERIE: How did you come to understand integration?

Doyle: It is funny; I somehow intuited this was necessary. Because even after my first ayahuasca experience, I approached my second ayahuasca experience with a question amongst others: How can I integrate this into my life in North America.

I think integration comes up organically because there are insights that cannot be unseen. Once one has had an insight that cannot be unseen, it can feel difficult to live in a world that is operating on the basis of different insights. It can be very difficult to return to a consensus reality that says, ‘What is real is material. Human beings are bags of flesh that are born and die, and that is all there is.’

Integration, in my experience, was simply the caring dialogue with others about the experience, and learning to let go of the attempt to interpret the experience. Because what we want to do as we return to consensus reality is figure it out, and figuring it out causes suffering. We can’t figure it out with this form of knowledge about the material world, precisely because it is a different form of inquiry and investigation. Integration is learning to accept and release the knowledge that has been given to us in some kind of extraordinary experience. If we don’t accept and release these forms of knowledge, the cognitive part of our brain will try and figure it out until we are exhausted.

Let me give you an example of the long way around to integration. The science-fiction author, Phillip K. Dick, had an experience in February or March of 1974, probably not with the use of any medicine. He experienced the total opening of his consciousness towards his continuity with all things and the entirety of the cosmos. Now probably many of us have had this experience, like a blink of an eye. But Dick, being a science fiction author, had this experience and then wanted to figure it out. He wanted to figure it out using all the tools of a self-taught scholar, and a science-fiction author. So he took 9,000 pages to try to integrate the experiences of February and March of 1974. For the first 8,800 pages or so, what integrate really meant was figure it out. However, it was only by exhausting every possible explanation for what had occurred that he was able to do the simple work of accepting it. I think that a similar principle applies to integration at this point in time in our history. Saying, “Look, I have been there in some form. I’m not going to try and tell you what to think, but I am going to suggest to you that the kind of experience you have had is not the kind of thing that can be figured out in an ordinary way. Begin to release the idea that you are going to figure it out and maybe just accept it.” Paradoxically, those two poles of acceptance and then of release can lead to figuring it out.

Why is integration important?

Without integration, without the practice to engage this inner journey, psilocybin, for example, is just a chemical. Without the work that it takes to integrate an ayahuasca experience, ayahuasca is just a plant brew. Without the effort to inquire into the nature of one’s own mind, cannabis is just a drug. Integration is actually the forgotten reality of the psychedelic and cannabis experience. Without it, these things are just like an app on your phone, they won’t be any more useful than the user that is using them. With integration a mushroom, for example, can open an entire worldview, and heal, as I’ve experienced, heal us of our impression that we are separate selves. And that is the type of healing we require right now.

What types of techniques do you utilize to integrate?

I saw a wonderful title for a book the other day, I don’t know if the book is any good — maybe it is, maybe it isn’t — but the wonderful title was, There is No Correct Way to Meditate. And I think that meditation is the single greatest adjunct to a psychedelic experience that can be imagined. Learning to calm the mind of its story-telling function is absolutely necessary towards allowing this knowledge to percolate through our consciousness and release any attachment to any particular interpretation of that experience.

Dialogue added to meditation is kind of a beautiful dynamic duo, because meditation allows us to clear away surface level thoughts that attempt to explain what is occurring and then they allow very real questioning. Questions that are not really in the search for an answer, just allowing questioning to occur. Dialoguing with another human being with whom one has mutual respect, that is informed by the various different traditions, that have grappled with these expanded modes of consciousness, is incredible. I think those two things would probably be both necessary and sufficient. But in order to do either of those things, meditation, and dialogue, physical practice is necessary.

I use language and say things like ayahuasca healed me of my asthma, and it did. But one of the ways that ayahuasca healed me of my asthma was teaching me how to engage with physical practice, and to really care for myself. Ayahuasca showed me how to activate that mode of my awareness, my observing mode of awareness, to notice what I was doing to myself. And to stop dong the things that I was doing that was causing me to be sick, and to do new things that emerged kind of miraculously that helped increase my strength and my fitness and so on. So physical practice coupled with meditation and dialogue is the necessary and sufficient holy-trinity of integration in my experience.

I think it is very tempting to look to other people to tell us how to integrate our experience, but that is something to be steered clear of because it can be very calming to feel like somebody else has the answer. But a) the answer is only as good as the person that is offering it to you, and b) that is their answer. What this healing is about, is investigating endlessly what your answer is, and so those three things in a context that does not fall into group consensus, and values difference, and values even disputation in a good humored way. And not to think anyone owns a true description of what a psychedelic experience is, is fundamental.

I will use an analogy, I teach a course in my university called Bible as Literature. The class almost immediately fills up with people from very strong religious backgrounds. And even my administration was like, “Oh-oh, what is going to happen when Doyle teaches this class?” But what leads everybody into the class, and leads me into the class is what absolutely none of us have had, is the opportunity to interpret scripture in a context where somebody is not telling us what it means. And if we can do a similar thing with psychedelic experiences, to help us learn how to interpret and process the experience for ourselves, without seeking to tell us what it means, then the power of the scripture, or that experience respectively is, I’ve witnessed, released. It’s incredible that we find what is powerful in the experience, and we are able to imbibe what is powerful in that experience. So meditation, dialogue, physical practice, a healthy sense of skepticism of other people’s answers are some strategies for integration.

This was part one of Integration as Dialogue: Interview with Richard Doyle. Thank you to Richard Doyle for participating in this interview and offering your insights about integration. Part two of this interview will be out soon, on entheogenic education, pitfalls of this work, and considerations for guides.