A man named Charlie who rode a pedicab in Austin and made electronic music once lent me a book called LSD and the Mind of the Universe. It was written by Christopher Brache, a professor of religious studies, documenting his journey through 73 strong doses of LSD. His wife assisted his odysseys, but when she eventually left him, he was puzzled why his LSD visions had never shown him that the divorce was coming. I think it might have helped if he had paid more attention to his wife instead.

Brache interpreted his psychedelic experiences in the framework of transpersonal psychology, developed by psychiatrist Stanislav Grof among others. This book is where I first learned of the idea. At moderate doses of psychedelics, Brache, like others, breached into the hidden aspects of his personal psychology. But at stronger doses, he would sometimes break through into inhabiting what seemed like a collective consciousness, with collective trauma. For example, he sometimes felt the consciousness and trauma of an entire population of people being killed and wounded in war.

Is there really such a thing as the consciousness of a collective of people, and a way for us to switch to it? We don’t know what consciousness is yet, but we generally assume that it has a fixed physical scale. The consciousness that you and I normally experience exists at the scale of our bodies. This makes sense, because its contents involve the functions and concerns of only our individual body and mind. Also, if the brain, that innervates our body, produces our consciousness (which we don’t know for sure), then there is no clear reason why it should exist at any other scale. Within this consciousness, we feel only our own physical and mental pain, so the way that we usually try to heal them is with treatment for our physical body, and our individual relationships.

But is it possible that different consciousnesses can inhabit different scales of the same system? Are there little consciousnesses in our different body parts and organelles that make up the whole organism that is us, but somehow partitioned off from this integrated consciousness that is reading this right now? And similarly, if we are individuated parts of a greater organism, such as society, or the planet, could there be a bigger consciousness at the scale of the greater organism, that our subjective experience is usually cut off from? And is it possible for a consciousness to switch across these scales, and carry memories from one to the other of what it felt like?

A while ago I was noticing yet again, that sometimes I feel crappy and low, even without any problem in my life. And the idea came to my mind: what if some of our pain is not our own, but the pain of others out of our sight, leaking into us? Could our universe be this way, such that under the surface of compartmentalized individuals, there is a substratum where invisible psychic energy leaks across permeable membranes, from one consciousness to another? Even if we are able to visibly and materially isolate ourselves from others, this energetic stream may be of such nature that it is not siloed within individuals. It spills out of one into many, and it is absorbed from many by one. Which seems unfair: why should we pay the price for others? But then, how thankful that it is so, for without this sloppy mixing, the best life strategy would be to ensure only our own well-being and isolate ourselves from the deprived. Morality discourages this of course, but that is widely viewed as a human construct. But what if the need for empathy is not merely a human construct, but the physical consequence that psychic energy is not so easily isolated? Then the decision to heal that trauma is not simply our duty to repair our individual problem, but the taking on of the healing of the whole ambient energy, of universal karma.

When I use the word energy here, I am not implying the physics meaning of kinetic or potential energy. I mean the more colloquial, woo-woo meaning, of the vibes of a person or a place, or the energy you may feel in your body when you are mindful of it. I know that the more rational of us would be annoyed by the use of the word energy in this context. As a physicist, I was among them. That’s a physics quantity with a specific meaning, so I have no idea what you mean that you feel someone’s energy, I used to think. But then I started being able to feel my own and others’ energies more. I also learned that physics itself appropriated that word from colloquial use into its stricter definition. And now I see too why the woo-woos call it energy. When I think of the contexts in which I have felt this substance I am talking about, no other word comes to mind that is more appropriate.

The question is, is that energy a real physical thing? Is it something that has properties and can flow, chemically interact with other energies and transmute through cause and effect, with definite properties and laws?

We have created devices to sense and transmit other kinds of energy, such as light, heat, electricity or magnetism, and that has helped us solidify them into objective science. What are the devices that sense or transmit this psycho-emotional vibe energy? Over the last few years, as I have felt such energy within myself and others, and even some strange energetic phenomena, I have realized that our body-minds are themselves such sensing and transmitting devices, if we become sensitive enough to notice. But since we are yet to develop a theory or external sensor devices for this energy, many in the scientific community could deny the existence of such a thing in itself, beyond the conceptual level of neural firings.

With this woo-woo energy, we are perhaps at the stage where we once were with electricity, say before the Renaissance: some people had experienced it in some natural phenomena or with their very bodies, even fatally, but these were still scattered subjective anecdotes of a phenomenon that we did not know the properties of, or how to objectively measure with a device. True, there exist non-living, purely material objects that respond to electric energy, with which we eventually built those objective devices. For the psycho-emotional energy on the other hand, so far the only responsive entities seem to be biological and conscious, i.e. able to have a subjective experience of it.

Nevertheless, I am more and more convinced that there exists this world of energy, superimposed on the physical world, following its own laws of cause-effect, transmutation and flow. This parallel energetic causal chain may not be entirely isolated from the material world though, but the two may interact and influence each other at some focal interface points. Physics can account for the material causal chain, but we do not as yet have a science describing the causal flow of this energy. Many believe that the properties and causal transmutation of these energetics is entirely contained in the material account, but I feel that that is not the case. There are some energetic properties and phenomena that are invisible to current objective measurement methods, and thus outside the grasp of current material theory.

Such energy flows from generation to generation as well, and is linked to intergenerational trauma. There have been studies to show that the children of holocaust survivors had greater tendencies for anxiety. Even though holocaust trauma did not alter genes, it caused epigenetic changes that were passed down to the children. This is the material part of the inheritance of trauma. If we had a language and map of psychic energy as well, perhaps even a way to visualize it, like infra-red heat, we might be able to see, perhaps quite literally, how psychic energy flows directly from person to person and from generation to generation, in an eternal karmic chain of being shaped by the previous, and shaping the next. Dr Gabor Mate in his book Scattered Minds emphasizes similarly that we have looked too much only at the material aspects of attention deficit disorder: its genetic inheritance and pharmaceutical cure. But there are ways in which it, like other psycho-spiritual energies, is inherited directly due to the influence from parent to offspring.

To me it seems in fact that we humans are nodal points in a causal chain or web of energetics. A large part of the impact we have through our lives on the fate of the universe is the way we transmute, or not, the sum of the energies we receive from others and our previous generation, before we send them forward to others and the next generation. And if our serious interest is to heal from the traumas in individuals, societies and the planet, we will find more answers when we expand our lens beyond the material, into the energetic causal flows around us that we are an inevitable part of, and take more accountability for it.

The healing that occurs through psychedelics is often attributed to conscious visions and insights that help us identify and work through trauma and behaviour patterns. Most of the patients going through psychedelic treatment at our Center for Psychedelic Research and Therapy at UT Austin, report that they have healed through such conscious visions and insights. But some of them report no such conscious experience, yet they feel better. I have myself had some experiences with ayahuasca and psilocybin that elicited no conscious visions or insights, yet felt mysteriously better afterwards. Entire long depressive seasons vanished without explanation. Some of these times, even when I had no visions, I intensely felt these medicines inhabiting my body, through my felt awareness of what I can only call, again, energy. It was unmistakable how strongly I was feeling the presence of this energy in my body, as if it was life energy itself being breathed into me. And it seemed that every minute that this energy simply inhabited my body, it intrinsically healed me, without needing to show me any insight that I needed to do anything about afterwards. It reminds me when my friend explained that in Christianity, salvation comes either through work or through grace. This mode of subconscious healing by the plant medicine seemed to be such an occasion of grace: a divine energy healing merely by its presence, even as the conscious mind habitually yearns to work, grasping for something to understand, do and claim about it.

We are developing now an explanation for how psychedelics work in terms of molecules and neurons. But without a science of the energetics I am talking about, I feel like we may leave a very important part out of the explanation of healing: the part outside the workings of the conscious concepts and in the workings of the non-verbal energy of the body.

Now my final thought about the climate. Lately I’ve been seeing small square flyers around Austin about a meeting to discuss climate anxiety: a growing psychological distress among many of us about the impact of climate change on the planet and our existence. At the American Psychological Association’s annual conference which I attended, there was a large panel dedicated to working with climate anxiety. For many people, this is sensitive liberal snowflake nonsense. For some in the middle, climate change is an intellectual and engineering issue. But for many, and I speak somewhat from experience, it may feel like they can feel the pain of the planet as their own. This is not conceptual in the same way that the death of a loved one is not conceptual, but an agony, an energy, felt in the body. If some can feel the trauma of a collective of humans when their edges have been melted by psychedelics, could it not be that others can feel the trauma of the living ecosystem beyond even that, of the planet organism, whether or not aided by psychedelics? So yes, it seems to me that climate anxiety is an extension of transpersonal psychology.

Science is not a stasis. It has shifted shape across the decades, sometimes despite itself thankfully, and brought ever greater phenomena into its domain. Here’s hoping that it will continue challenging its own bounds, and perhaps listen again to some forgotten or suppressed knowledges in this age of materialism and the rational-verbal, to take us closer to a coherent theory that integrates the transpersonal, the energetic, and the planetary.