Talk: To Hell With Psychedelics
Talking metaphysics with Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes and Adam Knowles
On Tue 30 July 2024, I co-presented the following talk online, for the Society of Existential Analysis.
Resources below. Peter’s slides to follow.
Recording
Event information
How do you know you are not in hell, right now? What even is “hell”? As in, what type of thing is “hell”: an actual place, a state of mind, a metaphor? That depends, our speakers suggest, on your metaphysics. This upcoming talk aims to illuminate, expand and question your sense of what exists, where you are, and how you know. Dr Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes will outline a menu of metaphysical delights, while Adam Knowles will discuss psychedelics and psychotherapy with reference to his current ayahuasca research.
It’s nearly 70 years since Huxley wrote, “To fall in Hell or soar Angelic, you'll need a pinch of psychedelic”, and psychedelics will be central to this discussion. Psychedelics, previously understood as “psychotomimetics”, include magic mushrooms (psilocybin), the South American ayahuasca brew, Mexican peyote (mescaline) cactus “buttons”, and modern pharmaceuticals like MDMA, LSD and Ketamine. A common experience with such psychedelics is metaphysical questioning or “ontological shock”.
A surging “psychedelic renaissance” shows itself everywhere from Netflix (”Midnight Gospel”, “Fantastic Fungi”, “My Octopus Teacher”) to Waterstones (Michael Pollan’s “How to Change Your Mind”). Use of psychedelics is expanding worldwide, scientific research is trying to keep up, and more people come bemused and confused into therapists’ consulting rooms.
Adam is an ayahuasca researcher and existential psychotherapist. Peter is a philosopher of mind and psychedelic academic. In dialogue, with each other and with you, the invitation is to think creatively about your relationship with reality, consider what else may be, and what affect that might have on your client work.
Dr Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes
Dr Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes is a Philosopher of Mind and Metaphysics who specializes in the thought of Whitehead, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bergson – and in fields pertaining to panpsychism, pantheism, mental causation, and altered states of consciousness. He is a lecturer at The University of Exeter where he is a lead on the new postgraduate courses in Psychedelics: Mind, Medicine, and Culture. Peter is co-director of Europe’s largest psychedelics conference, Breaking Convention, and is on the board of breathwork charity Dreamshadow.
Peter is the author of Noumenautics (2015), Modes of Sentience (2021), co-editor and contributor of Bloomsbury’s Philosophy and Psychedelics (2022), the TEDx Talker on ‘psychedelics and consciousness‘, and he is inspiration to the recreation of inhuman philosopher Marvel Superhero, Karnak.
Adam Knowles
Adam Knowles is researching experiences of ayahuasca with qualitative methods for a PhD at Birkbeck, University of London, alongside collaborators from King’s College London, the Ayahuasca Foundation (Peru) and Onaya. Adam is an existential psychotherapist in private practice and a lecturer in psychotherapy & counselling at Regent’s University London. Adam’s ayahuasca research won the prize for Social Sciences at Breaking Convention 2019 and he has presented at conferences including the SEA, at psychedelic societies in the UK and Estonia, and on YouTube. In response to the recent BACP ban on therapists describing their work as “psychedelic” (as in “psychedelic integration”), Adam submitted an open letter of critique, signed by hundreds of therapists and others.
Adam is a past volunteer at PsyCare (drug harm reduction) and the Chacruna Institute (decolonisation and social justice), and a current member of both the Institute of Psychedelic Therapy (IPT) and the International Psychedelic Action Network (IPAN).
“Psychedelics break the skin on the pool of the self… A psychedelic trip should not mean but be… We are more verbs than nouns, a process more than an operation.”
