My first intellectual hero was Carl Sagan. And like many young minds of the early 80s, mine was lit up with a beautiful fire by Cosmos, both the show and the book. I even resolved at an early age to attend Cornell and study astrophysics with the master himself. Life had other plans for me, but I never lost my appreciation for Sagan’s ability to communicate the wonder of science and a fascination with what lies “out there.” Unfortunately, the man himself was not destined for longevity and after a battle with cancer, he died in 1996. Before his death, he and his third wife, Ann Druyan, penned one last book, a warning to generations to come. It was titled The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Darkness.

This book was the last effort from a great defender of science to strike a blow against the forces of ignorance and cultural regression that continue to tear and pull at the hard-won gains of the last several hundred years of modernity. Sagan and Druyan reminded us of the remarkable advance of science, objectivity, and factual inquiry and their role in raising us out of a pre-scientific world filled with ancient superstitions and the many fallacies and confusions that flow from religious or even pre-religious worldviews. They explored and deconstructed many of the conspiracies and pseudo-scientific fantasies that still flourish in culture today, decrying their influence and staying power. Sagan’s laudable efforts from several decades ago are today mirrored in the words of a new generation of skeptics and scientists who like nothing better than to remind us to stick to the straight and narrow confines of the scientific method, to reject any “extra-normal” or extraordinary claims generated by the non-anointed, outside-the-mainstream theorists that would seem to undermine the basic narratives of physics and biology as we have recently come to understand them. In field after field after field, they ask, encourage, and even demand that we embrace the hard search for the more conventional whys and wherefores, and reject the invocations of hard-to-prove conspiracies, unconventional forms of science, and every form of so-called “woo.”

It’s a demanding and Herculean task. Even Sisyphean. Unfortunately, Sagan was nothing if not prescient, and one can only imagine his horror at what passes for cultural dialogue today. In our age of social media, we are literally overwhelmed by a flood of pseudo-scientific nonsense, pooling around those once-powerful pillars of modernity, little by little eroding its foundations. As Sagan and Druyan warned us almost three decades ago, “The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.”

We should all spare some appreciation for the role science and modernity have played in dragging us, kicking and screaming out of a certain kind of cultural darkness. From medicine to technology to politics to economics, the results of the last several hundred years of cultural evolution largely speak for themselves. Yes, there have been negative side effects and unintended consequences. But please, show me any form of real cultural progress in which those are absent.  Every day, more and more of us bask in the incredible glow of modernity’s health, wealth, prosperity, progress, and pragmatism. As Steve McIntosh, my colleague at the Institute for Cultural Evolution likes to say, modernity is like the Cambrian Explosion of cultural evolution. It’s changed the world completely and is still doing so, and it will set the stage for everything that comes after for centuries and centuries. I couldn’t agree more. And when I hear people want to dismiss modernity, decry it, or try to happily dance on its grave, with whatever justification, I feel for a moment like Sagan must have felt as he penned his final work with Druyan. Do you really understand what you’re doing? How can you not see the progress we’ve made? Don’t let us fall back behind the veils of ideology, ignorance, and darkness. We must press forward. Don’t let the demons ride again on the tides of history.

There is just one problem with this sentiment, authentic though it may be. It’s only part of the story of our cultural moment. There is another storm brewing on the horizon, and its powerful, swirling, rising winds are indifferent to the historical guardrails of modernity’s staid and structured role. Its spiritual intensity, its powerful voice, and its expanding influence threaten to overwhelm and break open those established cultural constraints that the Western Enlightenment and the subsequent rise of science and technology set in place. It is simultaneously progressive and regressive; and highly disruptive; making way for a cultural flood of new and old ideas. Most notably, it is opening the door to the return of mystical, indigenous, and pre-modern perspectives with all their attendant wonder, weirdness, and wildness (or high strangeness, as the kids like to say). Its great promise is spiritual redemption, a higher quality of life, and a more harmonious coexistence with the inner and outer world. Its great danger is ideological blindness and cultural regression. Naturally, a question arises as the newly empowered daimons of this worldview compete for our cultural attention: should we resist this blustery new addition to the cultural firmament, or dance merrily in the whirlwind? Answering this question, I would suggest, requires more than picking a side; it requires an appreciation for how we got here.

Indeed, the last decades have seen the rise of a series of broad “postmodern” cultural movements, a series of correctives to modernity’s excesses, inadequacies, and troubles. I use that term understanding that “postmodern” is itself both an inadequate description of this cultural structure and an ongoing battleground of meaning. Some associate the word with leftist social and academic movements like civil rights, deconstruction, feminism, women’s studies, critical race theory, liberation theology, gay rights, and the various tenets of the “woke” movement. Others might point to the series of ecological movements that have emerged in the last decades that have been highly influential, from the environmental movements of the 70s and 80s to the climate movements of the 2000s. If you follow Spiral Dynamics or Integral Philosophy, you might understand that the “green” or “progressive” or “postmodern” cultural wave, in those systems, is composed of many such micro-movements, which together constitute a larger macro worldview whose tenets are loosely, and sometimes tightly, related. While each micro-movement may be a specific response to a cultural moment or event, each of these varied and discrete trends simultaneously project the values of this larger, underlying worldview. In other words, the implicit DNA of the postmodern worldview is distributed through these movements, even if their explicit concerns are highly distinct and specific.

I have mentioned two of the main broad pathways through which a postmodern worldview has been propagated—the social justice movement and the environmental movement. There is a third. And in my opinion, it is the most influential, most important, and least appreciated (at least in mainstream circles). This is the so-called consciousness movement, the seeds of which we can trace all of the way back to the European Romantics, eventually flowering in contemporary movements with names such as “human potential”, “East meets West spirituality”, “spiritual but not religious”, “The New Age”, and most recently, “the psychedelic renaissance.”

Which brings us, somewhat circuitously, back to Sagan. Some might see the name of his book, and be excused for imagining that he was largely fighting a rear-guard action against the “demon-haunted world” of religious superstition. Not so. If you read the book, it’s clear it represented a cultural battle on two fronts, taking aim at religious superstition on one hand and postmodern or progressive spirituality on the other. And while in Sagan’s time, both fronts were active, today, it is that latter enemy that looms larger for the defenders of science.

Welcome to the new culture war. It’s not just the priests vs. the scientists. It’s the spiritualists vs. the skeptics, the environmentalists vs. the techno-optimists, the social justice warriors vs. the capitalists. And all of these are subsets of an underlying battle of worldviews: modern vs. postmodern.

In Defense of Consciousness

For all of modernity’s beauty, it is not, and was never meant to be, the end of history (with apologies to the brilliant Mr. Fukuyama). How could we possibly imagine that the dead, blind, empty existentialism of scientific materialism (not to be confused with the broader field of science) could possibly have the final say in the human experiment? Who could think that a worldview that banished the most important element of the human being, consciousness, to an almost non-existent role, could ever hold the complete answers to a full, thriving, meaning-rich future? From the moment culture abandoned its conviction in a mystical transcendence that thrived in a more traditional, religious world, surely it was ordained that we would eventually end up reclaiming, in some way or another, a less spiritually denuded view of the universe. Science, despite its mastery in the physical world, has had less to say about the worlds that lie beyond, or within, physical, sentient beings—other than to occasionally argue for their ontological non-existence. And whether we invoke the internal universe of our deep psychology; the intersubjective, collective consciousness often associated with our indigenous past; or the mystical transcendence of our religious heritage; there is a lot more to what makes us human than the material forces of our physical universe, however powerful they may be.

Yes, I do understand that the cosmic vision of science, as explicated by Sagan and others, is rich and beautiful, in its own way. I have certainly drunk deep from that well and agree that future attempts at meaning-making must build on, not reject, those magnificent truths. But the best scientifically informed and inspired evolutionary visions of the cosmos that I and many others have written about for several decades—the kind articulated by philosophical giants like Alfred North Whitehead, scientist-theologians like Teilhard de Chardin, or spiritual visionaries like Sri Aurobindo—are usually composed of a consciousness-forward view of existence. And such a meaning-rich worldview is still a far-off pipe dream in the halls of the academy. Yes, science is finally dipping its toes into the notion of “consciousness.” More power to it. But those of us who are looking to do more than tiptoe our way through the detritus of a disenchanted universe must inevitably look beyond modernism for our nourishment.

To me, that is maybe the most important role of postmodern values—to reach underneath the bedrock of our deepest assumptions and help us to recognize, “It’s alive!” To re-animate our once-dead, rocky, indifferent, material universe with the richness of life, the magic of consciousness, and the fullness of deep meaning. To revive the unwritten covenants of an ancient relationship with existence and to saturate the universe with sentience. And then, we have to make sure the best of science comes along for the ride. As above, so below. As before, so again.

The question is not: does this need to happen? It does. The question: what will be lost in the transition? Indeed, the great, usually overlooked, question of any truly significant cultural evolution is always: Can we make things better without making them much worse at the same time? If we take the values of modernity out to the woodshed en masse, the result will not be pretty. If we attempt only to transcend and fail to include, we will regress. We don’t want to reject the positive values of modernity the same way modernity once rejected wholesale the values of traditional religious culture, which notably, did the same to indigenous communities. Finding that delicate balance between moving forward and reaching back is always the essential dance of cultural evolution. For example, many like to celebrate indigenous spiritualities as being more intimately connected to nature and spirit, and perhaps there is truth in those convictions. For an age seeking a better accommodation with nature and spirit, such an idea can be immensely attractive, and indeed, reclamation can be a critical part of cultural evolution. But that does not mean that we can simply embrace another era’s worldview, or pretend that rejecting modernity in favor of something prior is any type of solution to modernism’s complex legacy. Getting lost in the past is no way to move forward either. We need a scalpel not a hammer, if we are to open the doorway to consciousness-rich, soulful perspectives that resonant with previous eras without simultaneously falling prey to their hitchhiking superstitions and misconceptions. It is never simple to pick and choose only the treats we prefer from the historical cultural buffet.

The Psychedelic Renaissance

Whither the consciousness movement in our own time? In addition to the ongoing propagation of the usual suspects—meditation, mystical and contemplative practices, Buddhism, nondual traditions, various forms of yoga, and transformational modalities of every type—we are also in the middle of a grand revival of psychedelics. This wholesale embrace of plant medicines and other consciousness-altering substances hasn’t been seen at this scale since the shamans of the Earth guarded the gateways to the inner universe. It is both the expression, and the driver, of a massive cultural sea change in how we see the nature of reality, the impact of which has barely yet been felt by the culture-at-large.

I believe the current psychedelic renaissance will be the next forward surge in the “spiritual but not religious” wave that Boomers set in motion five decades ago, though it already has its own flavor, tenets, and generational tone. (Yes, I know, the hippies had psychedelics too. But today’s movement has several important differences. More on that in a moment.) It is perhaps natural that we have had a temporary break from the cultural surge of spirituality that was so prevalent in the 90s and early 2000s. The 2008 financial crisis, along with the aging of the Boomer generation out of their cultural prime, provided a temporary diminishment of interest, or focus, on these aspects of the human experiment, though they rarely retreat for long. But now, a new generation is taking up the banner. And if you haven’t noticed, the flag features an ayahuasca ceremony, there are mushrooms printed on its cloth, and the sweet, smiling flag-bearer is rolling on MDMA.

Yes, world events could turn sideways and temporarily derail today’s cultural embrace of psychedelics, but for the moment, green lights abound in the psychological inner spaces of millions of souls as they return in force to the psychic realms that once-upon-a-time nurtured the dreams and visions of our ancient ancestors. It is easy to forget that some form of plant medicine usage is practically ubiquitous in deep human history. It is only in the last millennia or two that so many have forgotten this truth.

In fact, as I write these words, around the world, hundreds of thousands of individuals are using these substances to engage with deep mystical experience; to work with individual and cultural trauma; to research novel forms, dimensions, and states of consciousness; and to dive deep into cognitive and emotional realms generally reserved for rare and special contexts like near-death experiences or practiced primarily within the purview of highly cultivated religious and spiritual contexts. Such are the strange, exciting, and exotic dimensions of reality that present themselves under the influence of entheogens.

I know, I know, it all happened before, five decades ago. But did it? Like this? For a culture that is only used to such experiments being conducted underground and largely confined to California and certain parts of the East Coast (and perhaps near and around Austin, Boulder, Portland, Asheville, etc.), the pervasiveness of this movement and its impact may come as a surprise. Last time around, LSD’s radical effect was a form of shock and awe in a more conformist, religious culture. This time, the sheer breadth of influence of psychedelic usage may ultimately change culture more permanently and profoundly. It will unlock extraordinary revisions in our relationship to reality, and dramatically alter our understanding of consciousness. It may also invoke a storm of inner psychic turmoil as we connect to forms and states of consciousness that have largely stayed outside of our collective awareness.

Are we ready? There is genuine psychological healing on offer here. Transformation potentials that extend beyond our current maps. There is a new appreciation of the beauty and immensity of the universe, in all its forms and dimensions, that we might gain. There is deep spiritual awareness and remarkable knowledge. But it’s not all love and light, as any good psychonaut can reliably relay. In fact, I would suggest that the complexity of the interior, collective, or intersubjective realms accessed by psychedelics (and other practices) far transcends even the immense complexity of the individual psyche. Contained in these dimensions may be novel energies, archetypes, forces, and non-human intelligences (novel to us, that is) that utilize these non-physical planes of existence. Many of these energies and intelligences have only marginally interacted with human beings for much of our historical journey. What if that were to change? How might that engagement help, or hinder, our development? How will such esoteric interactions seep into and change the cultural water that we swim in? How might such psychic engagement impact our evolution? Can we invoke the powerful and beneficent medicine teachers of a new era without simultaneously opening a door to the more strange and shadowy forces—real or imagined—that haunt the highways of these inner landscapes? How should we relate to ancient-now-modern experiences of djinns, faeries, devas, jesters, angels, aliens, machine elves, demons, mantids, and who-knows-what other denizens of these subtle and shamanic realms? Should we ignore them?  Be wary of them? Engage them? Study them? Or cling to the notion that they are merely a temporary projection of our wayward psyches?

Whatever we individually and collectively decide, I suspect that it’s all coming along for the ride—the good, the wonderful, and the very weird. Are we ready for our reality maps to be updated? There is no panacea in our engagement with psychedelics, but rather a cultural upheaval, opening the doors to forms and expressions of consciousness not truly grappled with or integrated into our worldviews for millennia. Hopefully, the outcomes of these pursuits will more closely resemble the hopeful ontological shock of Close Encounters than the existential terror of Stranger Things. And we do well to not abandon the investigative spirit of Sagan’s scientific vision, even as we encounter new forms and possibilities of consciousness in our exploration of his “demon-haunted world.”

Once again, it’s easy to underestimate the cultural shift underway. I sometimes wonder if the revolutions of the 1960s would have happened without the unique cultural “push” provided by the dissemination of LSD into the counterculture. We have no way of knowing, of course, but even the legitimacy of the question speaks to the seminal importance of this substance in driving forward the massive changes of those years. In her recent book I Feel Love, author Rachel Nuyer asks the same question, on a smaller scale, of the late-twentieth-century spread of MDMA, the pro-social “love drug” that fueled rave culture. How responsible was the substance once known as Ecstasy for the subtle shift of British culture in the late 80s toward a kinder, gentler mood, and the decline of that once-favored pastime of wayward English youth, soccer hooliganism? Again, cultural changes are always muti-factorial, but one can reasonably imagine that when hundreds of thousands of young people replaced going to pubs and nights of heavy alcohol use with the dance-all-night, love-everyone, social and emotional highs characteristics of MDMA, it just might have had a significant influence.

A Discovery and a Return

Today’s rise of psychedelics and our conscious engagement with them is both a discovery and a return. It is a discovery in the sense that it opens up a dimension that many in our time give little attention or even credence. And it is a return in the sense that historical cultures that utilized such medicines likely embraced this dimension as a given, even as we dismiss it without a second thought. What dimension am I speaking about? Intersubjectivity.

Among the many truths that become more starkly obvious under the influence of psychedelics is that there is an ontological category of human existence that is neither you nor me, but the expansive space in-between. It’s neither the subjective world of individuality or the objective world “out there.” It’s the intersubjective inner world of the “we.” We struggle in contemporary intellectual discourse to give credence to anything in consciousness that exists beyond the edges of subjectivity, of our own psychology. There can be a tremendous temptation to interpret the content of our experience such that we imperceptibly shave off anything that points beyond the personal self-structure, anything that implies a connection to a deeper, broader reality.

Intersubjectivity is another way of expressing the essential idea contained in Carl Jung’s “collective unconscious” or Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s “noosphere” (a term that originates from Russian theorist Vladimir Vernadsky). This is where the vast structured ecosystems of evolving values and worldviews so dear to Integral Philosophy reside, powerfully but imperceptibly influencing human affairs. Our ability to engage those worldviews fruitfully in the service of our own development is highly limited if we are unable to even acknowledge the ontological category in which they exert their influence.

Psychedelics help push us through that barrier. They remind us that, as our ancestors knew, consciousness is not simply “I”; it is also “we”. And as we become more conscious of that truth, new possibilities will emerge, and new knowledge will become available. A host of more subtle dimensions of reality will become accessible and available, like turning over the soil and finding a previously unseen universe of micro-organisms. It was a pivotal moment in human history when we consciously and philosophically separated the “objective” world from the subjective world, the physical from the mental. This so-called Cartesian split gave us a new freedom to explore the material world of science and technology. In the same way, explicitly cleaving the intersubjective out of the subjective will reveal incredible new frontiers. It will unlock an ability to explore subtleties, qualities, and dimensions of consciousness using methods and approaches that were simply not available to our pre-scientific ancestors.

Who knows what other potentials await as we explore these heretofore hidden realms of existence? It’s remarkable to consider the grand journey from the beginning of the scientific method all the way to the discovery of the quantum realm centuries later. I can hardly imagine what discoveries await us, far, far on the other side of the recognition that inside of our own awareness is a connection to an entire internal, subtle, non-physical universe. But none of this will be possible on this side of the modernist valley of meaning.

After the psychedelic renaissance will come, well, something else in the long line of micro-movements that are re-integrating consciousness and spirituality into mainstream sensibilities. But whatever form future movements might take, the Postmodern worldview will have its way, in some form or other. We cannot change that, you and I. We cannot alter its core values or restructure its DNA. Those are battles long since fought. For better or worse, it will sing its song, bellowing its beautiful, sometimes discordant notes over the melody of history. We cannot simply stand in its path. No invocation of Buckley or Burke will be sufficient to halt, or say “no” to its historical advance.

For those well-versed in the dangers of the virulent anti-modernism that can flourish in postmodern culture’s triune movements, such declarations may seem concerning, endangering long-established cornerstones of civilization. I’m sympathetic to those concerns. But no worldview is simply good or bad. And such concerns should focus our attention on better shaping postmodernism’s development, or at least its expression, for the better. Let’s improve it on the margins. Encourage its better angels. Protect modernity from its rage. Keep its values from getting hijacked by fundamentalists of all shapes. Appreciate its richness and gifts. Indeed, perhaps we can mitigate its cultural damage, accentuate its significant upsides, and accelerate its movement through the cultural body politic.

But it’s still coming, in wave after wave. And it must come, because to get to the other side, we need it. We need to learn, deep in our bones, that consciousness is real, that it is not only subjective but also intersubjective, and that there is so much more to what it means to be human (or anything else for that matter) than the narrow slice that is given to our immediate senses, or to modernism’s peculiar predilections. Religion can only go so far on that journey, given its cultural baggage. And science, bless its beautiful, materialistic heart, is failing us. For now, at least. One day, I believe, it will break out of its philosophical straitjacket and serve again.

So with all due respect to my childhood hero and the wondrous science he championed, a return, in part, to the “demon-haunted world” may already be baked into the cultural cake. I don’t claim it will be simply good or simply bad, only that it may be necessary, and that it will contain extremely important lessons. As often happens in cultural evolution, going forward often entails an element of going back. There will be no significant integral awakening, no true answer to the meaning-crisis, no higher synthesis of our painfully polarized populace without a wholesale change in our understanding of the “within” of things.

Modernism is not the end of history. Neither is postmodernism. Nor does the war between them always have to be “to the death.” There will come a day, we can hope, when we will better appreciate the beautiful contributions of both and build a world that is rich and bountiful on the inside as well as the outside, a world that aspires to serve more evolving ecosystems of sentient beings than have been dreamt of in the best laid plans of our wisdom teachers. On that day, human history will hit an inflection point, and our underappreciated birthright as a multi-dimensional species that can traverse both the inner and outer cosmos will finally be realized.