A Confession and an Announcement

They stand over my bed. I’m blindfolded, flat on my back. My heart is pounding. An electrode helmet on my scalp measures my brain waves and spacey music fills my ears. My mind is focused on the ache in my left arm, where a tube connects me to a dose of the world’s most powerful psychedelic molecule. 

Any moment now, a scientist will press the button on that pump. The drug will shoot into my blood and reality will flip upside down. I’ll plunge into an experience so strange and profound that nobody, scientist or mystic, understands it. They’ll keep me there for 40 minutes as I embark on a voyage I’ve spent months preparing for. 

Knowing all this, I do my best to stay calm as I wait for the injection. I focus on my breathing. It’s hard. My throat is dry and my mind is racing. I try to distract myself, thinking of mountains and calm streams – but now, with a cold sting, the drug comes in, and I gasp and have a final thought.

Why did I sign up for this?

It took me a long time to answer that question. To begin, it’s easier to explain what I’d signed up for. It was autumn 2021 and I was participating in a research trial at Imperial College London, investigating the effects of the powerful psychedelic drug dimethyltryptamine (DMT) on healthy volunteers. The experience usually lasts 10 minutes. This trial explored what happened in our brains and our inner worlds when we were dosed continuously for 40 minutes. 

Lying on that bed surrounded by scientists, I was about to embark on a voyage that would change me forever. And while what I discovered is woven through the book you’re reading, it isn’t ultimately about my personal experiences. It’s about the collective voyage we’re all on in this period of history.

It’s a time when our old certainties have collapsed and we face the very real threat of extinction; a time brimming with hope, danger, sorrow, and transformation. This book is about how what we’re learning from psychedelic science and spirituality can help us find new ways to make sense of and come through the crisis of civilization.

---

This is the opening of my book The Bigger Picture: How psychedelics can help us make sense of the world. It also serves as an introduction to my confession.

For the last six months, almost every piece I’ve released has been a section of the book turned into an essay. Sometimes, I’ve taken the ideas I explore in the book and expanded on them. Other times, I’ve repurposed my research and applied it to a recent event. Often, I’ve transposed pages and even whole sections verbatim and built an essay around them.

If you’ve enjoyed my writing over the last six months, then you’ve enjoyed some of the book already. As of today, it’s available to pre-order.

---

---

Early praise for The Bigger Picture:

“Although they will perhaps always remain mysterious, psychedelics have also always invited us – and our ancestors – to heed the teachings they have to offer, to reconsider our place in the universe, and to recognize the enigma of our own existence. The Bigger Picture adds substantial new information to our understanding of psychedelics and their potentially momentous significance to the world today. I highly recommend this carefully and convincingly argued, deeply thought-provoking and beautifully written book."

- Graham Hancock

"The Bigger Picture is an entertaining, insightful, and timely book. Beiner draws on the latest psychedelic science to explain how what we’re learning about these molecules can help us make sense of our social and political challenges in new ways, and he ties together research from a variety of different fields to present a compelling and nuanced argument as to why psychedelic science could change the world for the better."

- Professor Robin Carhart-Harris

“Beiner is a wise and entertaining guide through the jungle of contemporary psychedelics, bringing much-needed critical thinking to the field.”

- Jules Evans

---

If you pre-order, you’ll get access to an online launch event in June (with special guests to be announced soon). The first 15 pre-orders will receive a ticket to the in-person launch on Friday 16 June at The October Gallery in London (reply to this with order info if you’re UK-based or going to be here, and I’ll add you to the guest list).

You can get your copy on Amazon or Audible (narrated by me), or from Booktopia, Barnes & Noble and Waterstones.

Why Psychedelics?

I know that not everyone who reads my writing is interested in psychedelic research, which is partly why I wanted to use this Substack to frame some of the content of the book against (seemingly) non-psychedelic topics like AI and cultural polarisation. My intention is to demonstrate, without the baggage of the molecules, why the science and psychology inspired by the psychedelic experience can transform how we make sense of this moment in history and find a way forward.

Psychedelics are going mainstream around the world, and I believe that the cultural implications of that are fundamentally relevant to anyone who’s concerned about the culture wars, systems change, existential risk and many other topics I’ve explored through Rebel Wisdom, and here on this Substack.

Many of us who’ve been in the psychedelic community since before mainstreaming understand both the huge promise and significant dangers a wide-spread adoption of psychedelics poses. This book is, among other things, an exploration of what it will take to get that mainstreaming right, and why it matters. 

A piece by the wonderful Mark Henson - markhenson.com. Here I’m using it as a subtle metaphor.

Instead of asking ‘how to change your mind’, The Bigger Picture asks ‘how to change society’ - a question I believe most people reading this are concerned with. To meet the many overlapping crises we’re facing, from runaway technology to environmental degradation to the meaning crisis, we urgently need new ways of seeing and being.

New approaches to designing systems, new incentive structures, new ways to relate, new perspectives on the nature of reality, and new ways to reconnect to the sacred in its many forms. 

It’s a tall order. However, a key argument I make in the book is that we can take the cognitive and emotional capacities that help us navigate a psychedelic experience, along with the insights we’re learning from psychedelic science, and apply them directly to how we make sense of the world today.

We know from a mounting body of clinical research that psychedelic experiences have a tremendous potential to unlock our deepest creativity, empathy and connectedness to our environment when used intentionally, and integrated properly. In combination with the right practices and frameworks, they can help us unlock our innate capacity to imagine new futures, both for ourselves and society, better than anything I know of.

So while it may seem far-fetched that you can take the same skills you use to converse with a hyper-dimensional space chinchilla on an ungodly dose of DMT and apply them to making sense of AI and Twitter arguments, if you read the book I’m confident you’ll see how. You’ll also see why it isn’t necessary to take psychedelics, or even be interested in them, to experiment with the techniques and perspectives they reveal and apply them to your day to day life.

Layers of Inquiry

My intention was to write a book that invites the reader into a process of inquiry, because that’s how I approached writing it. I began with the pithy question ‘can psychedelics save the world?’, which is something I’ve been wondering for my whole adult life, and which I’ve always felt torn around.

When I was staring at the blank page when I started, that uncertainty made me feel fairly anxious. I knew that any answer would involve a lot of caveats, complexity and nuance, but what I didn’t expect is that through my research, and my dosings on the DMT trial, I would actually land on some answers I found convincing. 

And as with psychedelic experiences, the writing process was one that forced me to embrace darkness and light in equal measure. I devote a chapter to delving into the shadows of psychedelic capitalism and all the delusion, bypassing and madness the experience can bring if it’s used with the wrong framework, or captured by market forces. I devote another chapter to The Big Crisis (my term for the ‘metacrisis’), another to the Internet and AI, and another to systems change. Thoughout, I draw on the latest psychology and anthropology research to explore the phenomenal transformative potential psychedelics hold; the sense of wonder and potential they can infuse into whole societies.

I ended up interviewing more than 40 experts in a variety of fields; psychedelic luminaries like Michael Pollan and David Luke, cultural critics like Alex Kaschuta and Peter Limberg, philosophers like Bernardo Kastrup and Iain McGilchrist, and many more. The more the book evolved, the more it turned into a process of weaving together many threads into something I felt was there but couldn’t quite touch… until I had an experience that tied it all together.

Postmodernism, Gnosticism, Furbies and rave culture. Identity politics, indigenous knowledge systems, and neuroscience. AI, misinformation campaigns, anthropology and chemistry. Psychology, spirituality, spider entities and the meaning crisis. And that’s just Chapters 2 and 3. The book contains hundreds of references, dozens of conversations, and reflections from my own experiences on one of the weirdest, most cutting edge psychedelic trials in history. 

Nothing to do with the DMT trial, just a hat I enjoy wearing for social occasions

I hope you’ll experience it as a wild and exciting ride through the cutting-edge of psychedelic science, sociology and the nature of reality. Most of all, I hope you’ll enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.