One possible explanation for the empathic insights typical of psychedelic journeys is that we are saturated with positive psychic energy (whatever that is) so that the imaginative surveys of our life and the people in our life is refracted through the prism of love.
Many surprising insights arise as a consequence simply because thinking lovingly is thinking differently. We realise the error or our judgmental and dismissive ways and are painfully reminded that the people we habitually think about as jobs to be done or boxes to be ticked are actually complex sentient beings of flesh and blood just like us.
Psychedelic integration often focuses on ways to retain the messages we receive and apply them in our everyday life in a sensible and considered manner, whether it be to change jobs or call our mother more often. Not all insights, messages and visions are that practical and straightforward though. They can be pretty abstract, philosophical and downright cosmic, and it’s not always obvious what to do with them.
Although “love is blind” in ordinary states of consciousness, it actually makes us see clearer (most of the time) on psychedelics. Visions illumined by the light of love glow with noetic power. They reveal truths, especially uncomfortable truths, in ways we wouldn’t ordinarily perceive or appreciate.
Personally I love visions. Most psychonauts do. When the tide of love has receded, however, what I am left with often looks like tiddlers and baby crabs in a rock pool. But the vision of love remains. Plus the suspicion that it’s not really the insights from love, or gifts of the spirit, but the possibility of love itself that matters.
The vision of love is a glimpse of another way of being in the world. Not fantasy and not hippy idealism, but real and really attainable. With the vision comes the aim and eventually the method, which for me turned out to be the “way, the truth and the life” of Christ and Christianity.
bread of life 