Sacred Beyond Symptoms

Integrating the part into the whole
and the whole into the part

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Part one

Integrating the Whole

Let’s step back and look at the macro picture:

  • Where we are in history?
  • What have we come from, and what exactly are we inheriting when we talk about psychedelics and spirituality?
  • What are the world’s cosmologies and how do they shape the individual?

Toggle the maps to see a world perspective.

Eagle · north

  • Analysis, industry, the measurable
  • Mind over heart; the written record
  • Expansion, and the capacity to build

Condor · south

  • Intuition, relationship, the felt
  • Heart over mind; the carried record
  • Reciprocity, and the capacity to stay
Attested — a documented, citable source Reported — circulates widely, no primary source identified Contested — the attribution is disputed

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What it is actually like

Seven sacraments, in the first person

In order of earliest known use, oldest first. The tables above say what these are and where they come from. They do not say what happens. Choose one, watch it taken, and read what people have actually reported — marked for whether those are their words, their account in someone else’s words, or a composite with no verified quotation behind it.

verbatim · named sourcethese are the words, and the source is named verbatim · anonymousthe words are exact; nobody signed them attributed · summariseda named person’s account, in someone else’s words summarya composite of published reports, no quotation

Linked wherever the source could be verified. Where it could not, the card says so rather than borrowing the authority of a citation it does not have.

Underneath it all — one axis

Dominator drugs, partnership plants

Drag along the line. Seventeen substances, each sitting where McKenna put it — not where a measurement put it. Two of them appear at both ends, because they are the same plant handled two different ways.

Where the weight falls

Physical, emotional, spiritual

Not three rulers — three shares of one whole. Each substance sits where its action concentrates. Dot size is duration, on a log scale from DMT’s five minutes to iboga’s thirty-six hours. Colour is its place on the axis above, red for dominator through gold to green for partnership — so you can see whether McKenna’s distinction tracks anything, rather than taking it on faith.

The three shares are a judgement from the reported-effects literature, not a measurement. Nobody has quantified the spiritual fraction of a molecule and nobody can. Duration and the axis position are the two things here that are not interpretive.

Two — Integrating the Self

Which cosmology are you?

Nine cosmologies, each answering the same six questions in its own terms. Below is the whole table. Read across and mark every answer you actually hold — not the ones you admire, and not the ones you think you ought to give. Take answers from as many traditions as are true for you.

The traditions are hidden while you choose, and the rows are shuffled, because people who can see the labels pick the label they like rather than the answer they hold. You can show them at any point, and they are revealed when you read your card.

Three — Integrating the Self into the Whole

and the whole into the self

Thirteen circles, and every line that can be drawn between their centres. Take the dot — Whole Individual — and trace it out along the lines. It cannot leave the figure. Wherever it comes to rest, something is said about where it has arrived.

Each node is marked for what kind of claim it is making. Some of these are arithmetic you can check on paper. Some are interpretation, offered as interpretation. The two are not the same thing, and the difference is the point.

The expanded construction — a pentagon inscribed in the outer circle of what he calls Metatron’s Time Tesseract, from which golden-ratio proportions are drawn for the Platonic solids — is Robert Edward Grant’s, and goes beyond the thirteen-circle diagram here. His connections between the figure and consciousness are, by his own framing, philosophical interpretation rather than established scientific findings. They are marked that way above.
An orientation device, not a taxonomy

Western clinical and Indigenous or ancestral orientations

Deliberately simplified. It exists so you can locate yourself and ask what your own views actually are — not to sort anyone into a column. Most people working today sit somewhere across both, and many of these are held at once.
Behind the line

Where this axis comes from

The axis is Terence McKenna’s, from Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge (Bantam, 1992). The dominator / partnership distinction it rests on is Riane Eisler’s, from The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (Harper & Row, 1987) — McKenna takes the model from her and applies it to plants and drugs.

Treat the framework as a thesis, because that is what it is. Eisler’s reconstruction of peaceful partnership societies in Old Europe leans heavily on Marija Gimbutas, whose reading archaeologists still dispute. McKenna’s Stoned Ape hypothesis — that psilocybin drove the emergence of human cognition — has no accepted evidence behind it. The individual histories on each card are separately graded; the placements on the line are argument.

The groupings come from the book: cannabis, sugar, alcohol, opium and its derivatives, the stimulants of trade, the synthetics, and the “true hallucinogens” he treats in a category of their own. Coca leaf, mapacho, kava, San Pedro and iboga are added here — partly to fill out the partnership end, and partly because coca and mapacho put the same plant at both ends of the line, which is the sharpest test the axis faces.