Non-Toxic Cults, Part III

Making a case for church camp and (some) psychedelic communities

This is the third and last post in a series on whether or not good cults exist, starting with how I found myself adjacent to a Christian cult in high school, and continuing with how the apocalyptic death cult of Trump/Musk/MAGA may do us all in. You can read the first two posts here and here.

Today I want to explore the idea of good cults. Is there such a thing? And if so, could good cults be the antivenom for bad cults? Or better yet, the vaccine–a weakened form of a virus that can protect someone from contracting a ravaging, even fatal illness?

More specifically: could the psychedelic movement be an antidote to the Trump death cult? Can it offer more and better meaning without the fascism hangover? Evolve us to higher consciousness?

Spoiler: maybe, but I’m not holding my breath. Primarily because psychedelics are still pretty fringe (in spite of how much mushroom swag you can buy from Target these days). Also because the high net worth individuals funding a lot of the groundswell tend to grandiosity.

Psychedelics are non-specific amplifiers. If you are a nepo baby or a self-made billionaire, the culture has likely convinced you that you are a God, and psychedelics will not disabuse you of that. How many high-wealth psychedelic aficionados do you see emptying chamber pots in hippie communes? Unless it’s part of a novel role they are taking on during a 6-day Direct-Lineage-Assured ™ indigenous retreat in Peru? Jules Evans just wrote an interesting Substack touching on these issues, on high net worth spirituality and elite shamanification.

Now to play devil’s advocate to myself: while Elon Musk’s ketamine use may not save us as a society, I still think there’s a role for plant medicine and healthy psychedelic communities to play in all we are facing. For many of the hoi polloi stuck in the current reality, these molecules can provide relief and remission from pain and trauma, help us shed the fear that arises when we’re stuck in black & white thinking, deepen our understanding of nondual consciousness, and give us a wider and gentler lens on the great “revealing” (which is all that the word apocalypse means, after all).

I want to emphasize that these medicines do their best for us when we use them with a synergistic second medicine: community. Don’t do them alone, but with a trained and trusted guide or a small-to-medium group of people you can process with. These medicines work when we work them together.

If you know me IRL or have read How to Begin, you know what a huge fan I am of the kind of healing community that arises (usually without benefit of substances…) at church camp. You know that church camp changed, and probably even saved, my life. My church camp was nothing like Jesus Camp, although we did sing praise music at the top of our lungs, trauma-bond through intense exercises in vulnerability, and sob when it was time to leave, convinced that we were getting kicked out of heaven and sent straight back to middle-school hell (we weren’t wrong).

Me and my cool asymmetrical hairdo *and straw fedora* with 40 new besties at church camp in the 80s, bottom right.

I recently described my experience getting trained in Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy through Polaris Insight Center (SF) and Rainfall Medicine (PDX) as “the best week of church camp EVAR.” For 5 full days we worshipped and ate and learned and took turns taking ketamine in supportive dyads, and having mind-blasting experiences of beauty and terror. By the end, we were singing kumbaya and braiding each others’ hair (just kidding. But we did share a lot of safe hugs, wept and ROFL’d together, and danced our asses off together without drugs for an hour on a Sunday morning so now I know that’s totally a thing humans can do! Get ready First Church Berkeley!).

I left with boundless agape-love for the therapists, doctors, nurses and clergy who were my cohort, even the people who had annoyed me at the beginning (just like church camp!).

The experience fostered an unbelievable amount of intimacy and depth. You can’t be on high-dose ketamine in a small room with 30 other people, getting squeezed through a sieve into another dimension, your ego shattered into a million pieces, drifting into a terrifying but ultimately liberating mauve-orange void where You no longer exist, and then go back to small talk when it’s time for the mid-afternoon snack break.

These people became my soul siblings in the course of a few days, but there’s a weirdness to that kind of fast-tracked intimacy. I still don’t, for the most part, know basic details about a lot of them. Whether they’re dog people or cat people, have peanut allergies, even whether or not they have kids or spouses.

But I know their hearts. I know a lot of their trauma. I know their intentions for this work, and for the world.

Me saying goodbye to two of my new BFFs, Jaime Clark-Soles (seminary prof and my favorite enneagram 8) and Harvey Schwartz (ubermensch and cofounder of Polaris).

Some of these peeps I might never see again. Which is crazy, considering what we went through together, the hells and heavens we carried one another through. Some of them will continue to become dear friends and active colleagues. But even if the exact permutation of community we built is but a vanishing chimera now, what we shared was REAL. And it changed us for good.

I’d characterize both my church camp and the Polaris training as “good cults.” The boundaries are soft. Rather than segregate, indoctrinate or isolate us: they WANT to send us back into the world, strengthened and matured. Better-loved and more loving toward all.

A good cult is a bad cult without the toxic benchmarks: open to critique from within and without (because no person, or community, gets it right all the time). Leader-full, instead of hierarchical, with no single unimpeachable charismatic head.

A good cult doesn’t demonize. I was talking to my hubby Peter about this. “Except that even here on the religious left we do demonize people and groups. And that makes us no different from the Them we’re condemning. Aren’t demons in the eye of the beholder?” Peter pushed back, “But what if there are actual demons?”

He has a point. So much of what is happening in US domestic and foreign policy and tech culture is designed to destroy body and soul. Don’t we have a prophetic obligation to name the harm?

Then again: even Jesus, dealing with demons, wasn’t hateful toward them. He recognized they occupied some kind of place in the cosmic order. He just forbade them from occupying individuals. He cast them out, so they couldn’t use people to carry out their dastardly deeds. But I digress. Someday I will come back here and talk about powers and principalities, cosmic forces of good and evil. Because it’s an important part of the conversation about all that we’re facing—and what cults we take up with.

But for now, let’s just do a lil systematic review of what might make for a good cult. Remember, the features of a bad cult are:

• Authoritarianism

• Isolation

• Manipulation

• Unquestioning faith

• Abuse

• Hostility

• Unreasonable fear

• Rituals

And now I’m going to use this list to peer into the psychedelic movement with both praise and criticism–because if you can’t critique an institution or community, it’s a bad cult.

My training and networking to become a psychedelic-assisted chaplain over the past 2 years has immersed me in a whole new world of people, language, and activities. Yes, some of it involves using medicine myself, both plant medicine like psilocybin and legal drugs like ketamine. If I’m going to be a skilled, credible and ethical guide, I have to do my own internal psychological and spiritual work. I also need to become personally familiar with these molecules, how they work on the brain and body, heart and soul. It would be dangerous for me to accompany a vulnerable person somewhere I’ve not yet been myself.

Ironically, I’m not a big drug person. I hate narcotics, which generally make me feel insane. Steroids turn me into a trembling rage machine. Once, when I was having an extremely painful miscarriage, the ER doc administered morphine and I swooned into a medical haze mumbling “now thisshh is why I don’t do drugs.” My drug of choice is 2 glasses of a nice buttery chardonnay with friends. Enough to get me really dancing, not enough to get me stumbling.

So when it’s time to do mind-altering drugs, drugs contraindicated for people with a history of psychosis for example, I am suitably alarmed. It is scary every time I willingly decide to take my default mode network offline and see what happens!

I hate to give up control as much as the next Enneagram 3/ENFJ. But I keep going, because the results are amazing. Even if the journey itself is challenging, I experience wild growth as a result. Fast-tracked healing. Immense boluses of grief moving through me and on. A shower of profound insights that hold up even when I’m back in the material world. Wisdom I can carry in my pocket that makes life sweeter and richer. Exfoliation of all the senses, to experience the world anew, with childlike wonder and deep gratitude.

If you don’t believe me, if it sounds too good to be true, ask my family: over the last 2 years, I’ve become less judgmental. Sweeter. Slower. More patient with myself and others. And the intermittent depressive episodes I’ve suffered due to vocational burnout are less intense and far fewer.

I’m also more deeply in touch with my spiritual gifts–and more aware of my propensity for spiritual arrogance. Just because my hands temporarily became defibrillator paddles shooting out white-light-healing-energy during a (nondrug!) breathwork session doesn’t mean I am Jesus!

In spite of all of the benefits that have personally accrued since I’ve entered this chapter, and how many people I’ve met who have told me similar stories of their growth and transformation, I’m not a pusher. I’ll be the first one to say that these medicines are not for everyone.

People can have psychedelic experiences go sideways, with longterm adverse effects. Naive, overzealous practitioners and straight-up narcissistic bad actors do palpable harm to vulnerable people seeking help.

[It’s worth stating here that the “psychedelic community” is not one big group but many miasmic, continually shifting, overlapping and sometimes opposing communities, some of which are marked by distinct poles or corners: medical/pharmaceutical/therapeutic/spiritual, legal & underground, indigenous & colonized/colonizing, capitalist &. pro bono, etc]

And: people have been experimenting with these substances for hundreds (MDMA was invented in 1913) to thousands of years (there are signs of psilocybin use in medieval Europe and ancient Aztec society). We well understand the harms. And now we also know the calculable good for people with treatment-resistant depression, or PTSD, or generalized anxiety disorder. We also know the good for people who just want to feel more juicy, present, alive and connected to God, nature, each other. Something much larger than themselves.

Here’s where the risk of cultiness comes in

As grateful and excited as I am to be part of the psychedelic movement, there are definitely hallmarks of cultiness.

Language. Not just idioms (like “journey” for a trip, “medicine” for the molecule or drug)--there is a literal code for people working underground, even in places where getting fined or jailed for using psychedelics is unlikely, like the Bay Area.

Charismatic leaders. They abound! A quick google search will introduce you to a whole cast of psychedelic gurus gone wrong (and gone away to Europe or South America where they keep going wrong). But I’ve met a whole lot of truly good, gifted and Christ-hearted teachers in this space.

Insiders/outsiders, beginning with the phrase “psychedelically naive” and ending with the spiritual arrogance I (rarely, but do) encounter sometimes in psychedelic peers who seem a trifle condescending to the uninitiated/unawakened.

Extraordinary claims, like OG movement founder Rick Doblin’s elevator pitch that if we widely adopt psychedelics for healing, we will have “Net Zero Trauma by 2070.”

Isolation. This is a big one for me. What if your journey work ends up separating you from family and friends? Because you feel like you’ve gone someplace where they can’t or won’t follow–a place all your new psychedelically-supportive friends understand, but your uninitiated peeps might be wary of?

One of the features of a good journey is that it can give you a sense of deep connectedness to all beings and all Creation. But how that feeling translates into action after you’ve “come down from the mountain” is a different story. Think “after the ecstasy, the dishes,” except more like “after the ecstasy, the fight over whose turn it is to do the dishes.”

A journey might inspire someone to leave a marriage or friendship that’s already functionally over, or end an abusive relationship. When I talk about isolation from former friends/family, I’m not talking about necessary ruptures that psychedelic work can spur. But every time I come back from a journey, I take great care to reconnect intentionally with my husband, kids, friends, and colleagues who aren’t part of this world, and to share what I can of what I’ve experienced in language that makes sense to them.

Sometimes a part of my brain wonders: are we (meaning me and my new friends/peers/teachers) all just a bunch of mostly white people who have some means and privilege doing drugs and calling it a religion, a utopia, an answer to the world’s ills? I’m not talking about the elite techbro set that is selling psychedelics to each other as a way of optimizing their creative output as part of a larger eugenics scheme–I’m definitely NOT part of that scene. But I’d ask them the same question, along with a few others, if I had an opportunity to talk to them.

Including this question: What if this movement is not moving us toward Net Zero Trauma, but just making us all a bit more solipsistic? Peak experiences leading to more peak experiences, new and novel journeys, more and more inner work and relationship-building internal to the movement that somehow doesn’t ever translate into more healing, more beauty, more kindness, more love and justice in the wider world?

As I move through these spaces with a lot of different people, and a variety of medicines in a variety of settings, there are a couple of phrases that keep me tethered:

The tree will be known by its fruit. Jesus said it. What fruit is this path/that retreat or that medicine producing? Has it made you more generous with money or time? Braver and more committed in doing the work of justice? Are you chasing a high, or taking your mountaintop experience into the valleys? Is it making you more impulsive and convinced of your own righteousness and skillz (people who hang out a shingle and call themselves guides though they have no training in therapy or ethics) or is it slowing you down, making you more humble? How is it affecting how you treat not just family, friends and colleagues, but how you treat strangers, and in particular: the most powerless and invisible people you encounter?

Don’t believe everything you think. Some of the insights when I’m in a nonordinary state of consciousness can lead to spiritual arrogance. Or grim apocalypticsm. I had a journey on Halloween, right before Election Day. My stated intention: I wanted to be prepared for whatever the outcome would be, and become more spiritually grounded so I would be in a better position to support others in the aftermath. And I got what I asked for. Without getting into the details of my journey, I saw the carnage ahead. And when I came back, I more or less kept an even keel as it has all been unfolding. But I still need to ask myself: is this just spiritual bypassing because the stakes are so high—and frankly, I have less to lose than many folks? Or is this a real spiritual groundeding in what is eternal, durable and Good, from which flows a capacity to comfort and lead suffering people?

Yes, And. Are we a bunch of people doing drugs in cozy spaces? Yes. And: we are also doing it with intention and attention to set and setting, not recreationally. In the communities I am blessed to be in, we have a lot of life experience, as well as training in ethics and boundaries. We build containers of trust where it’s safe to be vulnerable, and safe to call each other out and in (including our teachers!), often with humor. One of the best things I learned in my program last year was that clients/participants who are invited to criticize their therapists/guides, even (or especially) about small things, do better. This makes sense as a feature of good cults, and it rubs against culty-cult culture, where criticism of the Leader/leadership is absolutely taboo.

Promise to come back. This is a new-to-me personal mantra. At the KAP training I did a couple weeks ago, we covered the usual agreements. Therapist (guide) and client (participant) mutually assented:

• There will be no sexual touch. Not you to me, not me to you, and not you to yourself. We will agree on the type and degree of safety & therapeutic touch you are comfortable with ahead of time, e.g. holding your hand, holding your feet, hand on your head, accompanying you to but not *into* the bathroom when you are wobbly.

• You will not physically harm me or destroy property, and I of course will not physically harm you.

• You will not leave this physical space until the medicine is out of your system, for your own safety.

Our Polaris/Rainfall teachers added an additional agreement: “You agree to come back from this medicine experience.”

It was oddly comforting. One of my (and many people’s) chief concerns about psychedelics and associated medicines is that they will make us go crazy and we’ll never be ourselves again. Of course, making a promise ahead of time to “come back” doesn’t guarantee you won’t have symptoms or issues that persist past your journey. But it seems to me that making a solemn promise out loud ahead of time is a kind of psychological bookmark. A trail of bread crumbs, or better, sturdy stone cairns, that allows you to come back. In every sense of the word.

~

Like I said, I don’t think psychedelics are going mainstream anytime soon. Perhaps ketamine will, since it’s already legal and therefore people are less scared of it, and because there is a medical model for it, with shiny clean well-lit clinics bedecked with inspirational TJ Maxx decor.

But whether or not the FDA (and our new Health and Human Services secretary, RFK Jr, who is pro-psychedelics) legalize, I do think they are here to stay. And I hope people who want to explore them as a medicine and a spiritual adjunct will find safe and reputable communities and practitioners. Good cults, in other words.

Because we need all the good cults we can get in these demoralizing days. Good cults e-x-p-a-n-d. They take up positive space and take over. Not in order to franchise, colonize, claim new territory. But to tend, teach, provide aid, succor, support. And great love.

Last digression: the nuclear family is a kind of cult, and not necessarily a good one. I’ve seen in some of my leftie Democrat friends and family (and in myself!) the impulse to hoard time/attention/money/resources for “our own.” To batten the hatches. Hide from the storm. Some of us have the privilege to do this–but where will it lead us? Alone in our bunkers with our kids, and maybe our parents. Hello Sartre!

Choosing to be responsible to a larger group of people–neighborhood, church/temple, school, workplace, mutual aid society–is a lot of work, and also a lot of reward. We literally won’t survive the current assaults without a bigger We.

Shizz is starting to get real here, loves. Let’s propagate and prosper our non-toxic cults, or create them if they don’t yet exist.

Love!
Molly