Jungian psychology is highly popular in New Age culture, and this is for several reasons, some perhaps quite obvious, and others less so. I would like to detail these connections between New Age spirituality and Jungian psychology mainly as an effort to show how particular models of reality and mind lead to an embrace of…
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While one of the main recognised benefits of psychedelics is a lessening or elimination of the fear of death (particularly in those with a terminal illness), this effect is not universal. Indeed, a 2025 study published in the journal Death Studies found that many people experience an increase in death anxiety after psychedelics. This possible…
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Parallels are often made between animism (the belief that spirits are everywhere) and panpsychism (the belief that consciousness/mind is everywhere). Indeed, under an animistic belief system, it is possible to think of the term ‘spirit’ as equivalent to ‘mind’, although for the sake of clarity, we can treat the belief in discrete spirits existing in…
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I’ve found it curious that many of the pioneers of Western Buddhism – those who brought Buddhism to the West and helped popularise it – are Jewish. Frank Descher details this phenomenon in his 2017 essay ‘Jewish Converts to Buddhism and the Phenomenon of “Jewish Buddhists” (“JuBus”) in the United States, Germany and Israel’. Rodger Kamenetz,…
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Time distortion is one of the classic effects of psychedelics (although I rarely see this mentioned as an expected effect of psychedelics on educational, retreat, and therapy sites). I think that time distortion needs to be discussed more from a harm reduction point of view: many challenging experiences are related to alterations to one’s perception…
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