The Story Behind My New Book: Desire, Failure and DMT

'The Bigger Picture: How psychedelics can help us make sense of the world' is published by Hay House in 2023

Somebody walks around my bed and stands over me. I’m blindfolded, flat on my back and my heart is racing.

My scalp is wrapped in an EEG helmet that looks like an alien squid. Two hundred suckers measure anxious brain waves. I wait. Spacey music fills my head but my mind is focused on the ache in my left arm where a tube connects my vein to a pump full of the world’s most powerful psychedelic drug. 

Any second now, the scientist standing over me will press a button on that pump. The drug will shoot into my bloodstream. Reality will flip upside down and I’ll plunge into an experience so strange and profound that nobody, scientist or mystic, understands it. They’ll keep me there for half an hour as I try to navigate another reality on my own strange quest.

Knowing all this, I do my best to stay calm as I wait for the injection. I focus on my breathing, but my throat is dry and my mind is racing. I try to relax, but soon realise I’m holding on too tight to letting go. I try to distract myself, thinking of peaceful mountains and trees but that doesn’t work either. The drug comes in with a cold sting, I gasp and have one last thought. 

Why did I sign up for this?

I’m still trying to answer that question. It’s easier to explain what I signed up for. Last year, I was a participant on a study run by the famous Imperial College Psychedelic Research Group, investigating a new delivery method for the psychedelic compound DMT, or Dimethyltryptamine. 

DMT is one of the most powerful psychedelics, and it has a particularly metaphysical mystique to it. That’s partly due to the weird things that happen when human beings ingest it. Normally, the pure form of the drug is vaporised in a pipe and the experience lasts under 10 minutes as our bodies rapidly metabolise it. Despite the short duration, many people describe it as one of the most profound, strange and sometimes terrifying experiences of their lives. 

Some report traveling out of their bodies, visiting intricate other worlds populated by seemingly independent entities. Sometimes the entities are friendly, sometimes aggressive, almost always inexplicably weird. A lot of people report life-changing personal and metaphysical insights. DMT can bring us into a deep sense of connection with reality, and many say their experience felt ‘more real than real’. 

The study I was on was the first to investigate what happens when you extend that experience by a factor of three, using a continuous-infusion pump to keep people in the state for around half an hour.

The Bigger Picture

The trial was life changing for me. Not just because it was such a profound process, but also because it was part of what led to my first book deal.

I’m delighted to announce that ‘The Bigger Picture: How psychedelics can help us make sense of the world’ is being published by Hay House in 2023.

The book isn’t primarily about the trial or what I experienced, though I’ll cover both in detail. It’s mainly an exploration of how psychedelics can help us make sense of the times, and find new ways to reframe our response to what I’m calling ‘The Three Crises’ of the age: The Meta Crisis, The Meaning Crisis and the Trust Crisis.

It draws on new conversations with people we’ve hosted on Rebel Wisdom, as well as new voices from different fields. I look at the science of psychedelics, the sociology of the internet, the philosophy of games, systems change, our cultural relationship to truth, ancient wisdom traditions and much more.

New Pioneers by Mark Henson, who will appear later in this piece

It’s a book about how experiences like the one I was about to have, often but not only facilitated by psychedelics, can help us find ways to reframe some of the most significant challenges we face collectively. It’s an exploration of what it takes to adapt and thrive at this moment in history, standing on the shores of a dying culture with the new just visible on the horizon.

I’m particularly interested in why we’re increasingly lost between the physical and virtual worlds we’ve built, and how we can co-ordinate even though we’re living in a millions of separate realities mediated by our social feeds.

I believe a skilful application of these peak experiences might have the power to connect us to what I feel we’re lacking most: a shared reality. Not by removing us from the messiness of human division through a metaphysical or technological escape, but by bringing us deep into our shared humanity and the essential wisdom hidden within it. To a profound and authentic relatedness. To ourselves, to one another, and to the rest of nature. 

The book is about the bigger picture, but the narrative thread is the diary entries I kept during the trial, which began as my own private journals to make sense of what was a transformative, confronting and occasionally terrifying process. At the end of this piece, I’ve included some information about how and when those will be coming out on Substack, the experiment I want to run with the writing process itself, and why I’d love your help with it.

My Journey with Writing

Before that, I’d like to share why signing a book deal is particularly meaningful to me. I haven’t really shared my history with book writing on Rebel Wisdom before, and the reason might become clearer below. 

When I was nine years old, I decided I was going to be an author. I sat at my dad’s computer and started writing a story about three men walking through a desert toward a tower. About two paragraphs in, I realised I didn’t know what they were going to do next and felt a bit overwhelmed, so I went and played Mario Cart instead.

Fast forward ten years. During one of my first mushroom experiences, that longing came back with booming certainty. I decided I was going to be an author, and spent the next three years working on a novel, 'Beyond the Basin', about psychedelic culture and shamanism which I self-published in 2009.

The cover of Beyond the Basin, using another Mark Henson piece

I spent the next seven years unsuccessfully writing novels. For three years I wrote a 150,000 word Gnostic sci-fi Western called ‘Lesser Gods’, a dual narrative set in Nevada in the 2050’s and Alexandria in the early fifth century. I sent it out to rejections, silence, and the agonising sound of crickets. Later, I joined a novel development course run by a top literary agency (Curtis Brown) and wrote ‘Heaven on Earth’ about a man suffering from a delusion that he’s dead, and the chaotic psychologist trying to help him piece his life together. Again, no agents were interested. A lot of the others on the course signed book deals.

That really stung. I’d poured a lot of hope and energy into writing novels for my whole adult life. Though I had the support of my amazing wife Ashleigh throughout, it was a very isolated (and isolating) process. It was also increasingly self-centred; a mission that took energy from my relationships and other parts of my life. During this whole period I was working 9-5 jobs and teaching meditation in the evenings, then writing in every spare moment. It was exhausting, and I'd sacrificed a lot because of the way I was approaching it.

That last rejection proved to be too much. After lots of painful soul-searching, I decided that writing books wasn’t for me. I admitted to myself that I’d failed to achieve my dream as I'd imagined it. That period was probably the saddest, most dislocating of my life. It made me question not just myself, but also my spirituality. At quite a deep level, I fell out of love with God and fell out of trust with my own intuition.

Those wounds healed as wounds do, we set up Rebel Wisdom and I’ve immensely enjoyed exploring the ideas that matter to me through writing, experiences and films over the last few years. Over time I came to accept that it might not be my destiny to be an author, and that was OK. I reflected on the mistakes I’d made; not just with the craft of writing, but also with how intensely I’d identified with being a writer. I got to a point where I was able to see the underlying dynamics of my personality driving that attachment more clearly, and was able to reflect on it calmly … eventually.

And then I was approached to write this book, and my deep love of the craft came rushing back as if it had never left. In many ways it’s felt like a lesson in letting go. Now that it’s actually happening and I’m in the writing process, I want to apply what I learned in the past and do things differently. Writing a book is always isolating to some degree, but I want to try something different with ‘The Bigger Picture’ and make it more collaborative.

The book is full of interviews with experts in different areas, but I also want to include the perspectives from people from the Rebel Wisdom community, friends and anyone interested around some key questions I’m exploring. It feels weird to write a book called ‘The Bigger Picture’ without crowd-sourced wisdom, as of course none of us can see that picture alone.

One theme that’s emerging as essential to the message of the book is the question of what it means to come back to a shared reality together. A sense of underlying coherence that can hold us through the madness of the meaning crisis and a post-truth world. That feels like something that can only be explored through a collective inquiry.

With that in mind, I’m going to use my personal Substack to post updates on the process of writing the book and invite people into it. If a particular idea or conversation feels aligned with what we cover on Rebel Wisdom, I’ll also put it out here too.

However, this particular process will be messier, more experimental and probably weirder than the content we normally put out. If you're interested in getting involved, please sign up to my Substack ‘Fractured Reality’ for free below or on beiner.substack.com

Over the next few months, I’ll be posting up sections from the book to get feedback, and setting up some calls for anyone interested to share their perspectives on some key ideas - from spirituality and metaphysics to internet culture and sensemaking. I'll include some of those insights and conversations (attributed where relevant) in a particular section of the book.

I will also post my diary entries from the actual dosings - in the original version of this article, I included an excerpt from my third dosing session, but I have removed it as I realised it could impact or prime the experience of others on the trial, which is still ongoing.

At the beginning of this piece, I referred to my journey on the trial as something I have already done, something that’s now over. That’s mostly true. Recently, we were invited for a surprise fifth dosing, about 5 months after what I thought was my final one in late December.

That fifth dosing is taking place the day after I post this (May 5th, 2022), which is why it felt right to announce the book today. And so this piece comes full circle, because the picture I painted in its first lines is what I’ll be experiencing tomorrow.

I feel nervous, excited and weirdly calm in the certainty that whatever happens, it won’t be what I expected.

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