Two weekends ago Dr K visited London for
’s one day event in London—aptly named “Here and Now - Between the History and Future of Psychedelics.” The main conference is biennial, exploring multidisciplinary approaches to psychedelics and consciousness. This year’s event, falling in the off year to the main conference, was focused on trying to connect sometimes disparate psychedelic perspectives, such as the clinical, the recreational or the spiritual.The conference was held in Conway Hall, Holborn, a venue not unfamiliar with gaggles of radical psychedelic practitioners (there really should be a collective noun for us—a fractal?) flooding its auditorium. The venue held what was likely to have been the UK’s first anarchist acid symposium back in 1971, aimed at promoting communal living, cooperatives, and the ‘enlightenment of public opinion on the subject of psychedelic drugs’. It’s also where in 1999 writer Alan Moore and his group The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels performed Snakes and Ladders—an exploration of the magical associations of the local area.
The conference itself began with a retrospective on Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception, then moved to a session on present-day psychedelic clinical practice, followed by a historical look at the role of psychedelics in countercultural movements and festivals. Next came an examination of how festivals and psychedelics can be used in the future to promote communitas, then a panel considered what future psychedelic education and training might look like. Amanda Feilding and her son Cosmo Feilding-Mellen dropped in to talk about the future of The Beckley Foundation, and the day was brought to a close with
’s examination of how psychedelics can help us navigate an increasingly uncertain and digitised future.Trying to distil an intense day of talks down into a single Substack post would be near impossible, so here’s a rundown of some of the more interesting aspects, ideas and speakers of the day. Just because someone’s ideas didn’t make this particular cut, doesn’t mean they’re not worth checking out, so we’ve included links to everyone’s work throughout this article for those interested to take a more thorough deep dive.
70th Anniversary of Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception - Andy Letcher, Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes, Leor Roseman (moderated by Naina Gupta)
The Doors of Perception was released in 1954, and documents Huxley’s experience with mescaline while under the supervision of psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond (Osmond would later go on to coin the term “psychedelic” in 1956). The essay is widely cited by many psychonauts as one of the foundational texts that introduced them to psychedelics, and is also where rock band The Doors got their name. One of the essay’s more famous themes explores how psychedelics can open the brain’s “reducing valve”, allowing us become aware of a wider, less filtered form of human consciousness—called “Mind at Large”.
Andy Letcher kicked off the discussion noting how this essay offers a range of perspectives on topics such as theories of mind, linking psychedelics to mystical experiences and Huxley’s somewhat elitist ideas of how to integrate psychedelics into society. Recommending repeated readings, Letcher pointed to Huxley’s multiple instances of laughter and merriment in the face of humanity’s absurdity, and urged us all to not forget the importance of humour and play as psychedelics become ever more serious and mainstream.
Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes continued by investigating how Huxley showed some appreciation of Bergsonian philosophy and how memory may always exist in the Mind at Large, and is only filtered out impermanently through the brain’s reducing valve. He also urged us to read Huxley’s letters, something he called “little essays to his friends” and deemed them just as insightful as his books.
Leor Roseman rounded of the session by considering the different varieties of reducing valves, namely:
Neuroscientific - the brain as a flawed prediction machine and psychedelics ability to relax the rigidity of unhelpful predictions.
Therapeutic - psychedelics’ ability to recontextualise a range of mental disorders, and their ability to “wash away” negative thought patterns.
Societal - the debated potential for psychedelics to collapse social order and hierarchy, instead promoting comunitas, oneness and recognition.
Political - psychedelics potential to decondition existing cultural values and norms (citing Terrence McKenna’s Culture and Ideology are not your Friends), and how the reducing valve helps us shut out the pain of global injustice in order to function.
Roseman asked us to consider whether the Mind at Large was real or merely a hallucination, and gently pushed back on perspectives that moralise the reducing valve as “bad” when it may be necessary for social functioning. He closed out by asking a provocative question—is Huxley’s particular theory of mind just another oversimplified reducing valve?
Psychedelic Clinical Practice - Ashleigh Murphy-Beiner, Carolina Maggio, Rosalind MacAlpine (moderated by
)This session considered a wide range of topics, each of which could have been sessions in their own right. Topics included the role of therapy in psychedelic clinical practice compared to the role of the substance, the differences between clinical and retreat settings, the ethics of dosing with minimal psychological support, high costs of treatment, potential for serious adverse effects and instances of abuses of power, and the value of vetting/regulation.
Of particular interest in this session was Rosalind McAlpine’s research into 5-MeO-DMT in retreat settings, where healthy people came to participate. In Rosalind’s own words “they came in well, and left weller”, which called into question the current mainstream medical view of psychedelics being only of use to those suffering from mental illness. It was also clear that the panel had seriously considered some of the heavy questions around psychedelic therapy, from their own roles in the process, to how to avoid excluding certain groups from treatment, and how to prevent abuse.
Countercultural Festivals - Chiara Baldini
This lively presentation took us on a historical tour of western countercultural movements, beginning with the hippies in the 1960s, moving through the punks of the 1970s, techno and trance free party movements of the 1980s and 1990s, into psychedelically informed, culturally-transformational festivals like Boom and Fusion that still persist today.
Baldini questioned the utility of movements where participants were encouraged to be too individualistic and asked us to always be conscious of who might be left out. She encouraged us to be self-aware enough to identify mainstream biases (sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, etc) which may inadvertently reproduce themselves if a countercultural movement becomes too inwardly focussed.
Baldini also argued that festivals, ravers and hippies play as important a role as scientists, academics and businesses, in the promotion of the so-called psychedelic renaissance. As an example of this, she pointed to the contribution of psychedelic care areas (such as those run by PsyCare in the UK) that help those in crisis at festivals, and how these care providers have informed modern day psychedelic clinical practice.
She highlighted the limitations of the labelling of psychedelics experiences as “recreational”, especially at festivals where group experiences play an important role in building community and aiding in integration. aldini closed off the session by asking us whether we want our festivals to be a passive escape from the status quo, or a space for active countercultural experimentation whose results can inform our politics and daily lives upon our return.
Psychedelic Communitas - Chiara Baldini, Iryana Mosina, Darren-Paul Kley (moderated by Aimee Tollan)
Building on some of the ideas of Chiara’s earlier presentation, this session explored how we build authentic, deep and inclusive community through festivals and psychedelics. In today’s climate of political co-option, Baldini warned against building festivals and parties that attempt to take an apolitical stance, as such events may be hijacked by those wishing to promote exclusionary politics. Darren-Paul Kley talked of his experiences running free parties and Shindig Festival, and how his son is continuing his legacy. Questions from the audience spurred on further discussion around promoting inclusive spaces at festivals, the dance that drug-use sympathetic organisers have to play around neither outwardly condemning nor condoning drug use and how the growth of a festival to a wider audience places a greater responsibility on organisers to maintain its original ethos in the face of legal, bureaucratic and festival site-specific challenges.
Psychedelic Education and Training - Julian Vayne, Celia Morgan, Kurt Stocker, Maria Papaspyrou (moderated by David Luke)
This session followed launch of the UK’s first academically certified course in psychedelics at the University of Exeter, announced at Breaking Convention 2023, where Celia Morgan is the course co-lead. While the discussion was focused on the mainstreaming of psychedelic treatment, Julian Vayne passionately challenged the perspective of modern western psychedelic therapy as the only way to heal people. With his background in philosophy and occultism, Vayne drew attention to the long tradition of underground psychedelic guides practicing systems of knowledge that differ drastically to the current medical paradigm, and who practice despite considerable legal risk to help those in need.
When the issue of abuses of power (both in mainstream and underground contexts) was inevitably raised, both regulation and imbedded community practice were raised as options to help mitigate this. While regulation offers one top-down approach to protecting vulnerable people undergoing treatment, both practitioners and those seeking help were encouraged to embed themselves in a considerate community of peers who can quickly offer feedback or warn against the transgression of boundaries.
The Q&A through these sessions was equally lively, with participants willing to directly challenge ideas raised by speakers. One rather pointed question of how to talk about psychedelics, Gaza and global conflict in the same breath “without sounding like a privileged wanker” was met with with a response of how such ideas should only be raised if followed by action, and how psychedelically induced “oneness” should not be merely empty words and exclusionary practices.
The whole conference was a breath of fresh air to the modern mainstream notion that the current medicalisation of psychedelics is the only way to integrate them safely into society. Having seen this myopic idea spread rapidly rather uncritically over the last few years, it was great to see Breaking Convention adding a great deal of considered and passionate nuance—though maybe we should have guessed that from the name. Of the themes that partcularly stood out, one was woven tightly through almost all of the sessions—the importance of embodied connectedness to other human beings in a psychedelic context. As our personal lives become increasingly individualised and disembodied into digital spaces, especially in a world living with the aftershocks of the pandemic, the opportunity for comunitas (psychedelic or otherwise) was something that was both felt and vocalised throughout the day.
In this spirit—while you might be reading this by yourself on your smartphone or computer, pause and take a moment to look around and appreciate those sharing their Here and Now with you.