The Unfolding Mystery

Reflections on the day of my book launch

‘The Bigger Picture: How psychedelics can help us make sense of the world’ is now available globally! You can find it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones, Audible and Booktopia. Join my online launch event with John Vervaeke, Lucy Walker, Jamie Wheal, Chris Timmermann and Lisa Luan on June 29th here.

I woke up before dawn today. I stared up at the ceiling feeling excited, nervous, and alive. My new book, The Bigger Picture, has now been published. I’ve been waiting for this moment since I started writing it eighteen months ago. As I lay there, I realised that this wait actually began far earlier.

When I was six, I went into school insisting that my teacher let me write an essay, and then grade it. I was an odd child, but it’s worth pointing out that this request didn’t come from nowhere. My brother and sister are eight and seven years older than me, and they had started writing essays in junior high school. I’ve always looked up to them, and as a child I felt a lot of FOMO about the fun they had without me. But it wasn’t their ripped jeans or CD collections that really pulled at me.

I wanted in on those essays. My teacher kindly obliged me, and the single sheet I handed in revolved around, like many things in my life then, raccoons and how wonderful they are. 

Thirty years later, that yearning to write has defined my life. Today, I’ve been reflecting on it just how much, and what happens next. Now that my book is in the world, it will take on a life of its own in other people’s minds. It’s a day of celebration and of letting go, I imagine a bit like dropping a child off at their first day of school. It’s complicated, magical and bittersweet, and I’m walking uncharted territory. 

I’ve also been thinking about this piece for a few days, wondering what to write. Wondering might be too soft a word. Fretting. Hearing an ever-present voice in the back of my mind, and the salty tingle of anxiety in my lungs. 

You have to convince people buy it. Share some new reviews. Lots of links. Sell! Sell! Sell!

The longer these thoughts have gnawed at me, the more I’ve felt their emptiness. One of the deepest lessons I’ve learned from psychedelics is that true freedom often arises when I stop striving. They have also taught me that there are times to strive. This may be one of them. So I’ve felt pulled between pushing and letting go. Stop striving: allow the book to be free. No! Burn the candle on both ends and do everything I can to give it the best chance in the world. 

Psychedelics have also taught me to be wary of either/or binaries like this, so I’ve been trying to hold a perspective that includes both. I absolutely want to sell as many books as I can, because I’m very proud of what I’ve written and I believe in the message of my book.

And so for the last month, I’ve been performing constantly. Recording podcast after podcast to promote The Bigger Picture, going on the radio here in the UK, writing an article for a national newspaper. All of it, while important to me and meaningful in its own way, has left me feeling as though I’m constantly missing out something important. Not vital information about the book, but some vital part of myself. 

Inquiring into that discomfort gave me some clarity on what I want to share with you in this piece. Instead of telling you why I think you should read the book I’ve written, I want to share why I wrote it.

The Why

In psychedelic therapy, many clinicians and researchers believe that what truly heals us from our mental health struggles is what’s known as ‘the mystical experience’. It can’t really be described in words, because it’s an experience that transcends language; a profound connection to a greater reality that can forever change our outlook on life.  

It is this aspect of the psychedelic experience that drives me. It’s what has convinced me that these molecules and medicines have the capacity to transform culture as well as individuals. They allow us to touch the edges of what we’re missing in modern, high tech societies; what we’ve lost in the meaning crisis, what has become commodified beyond recognition, what we’re yearning for in a million different ways. Something greater than ourselves. 

It’s how they open us up to that which really matters. They do it with love. They remind us that we are deeply held and cared for by existence. That each of us matters. That, if we can truly be here right now, we will see that the kingdom of heaven is all around us. For me, that experience is defined not just by overwhelming gratitude, but by a sense that there is a cosmic smile at the heart of things, that the world is forever an unfurling mystery.

The reason this is so healing, for individuals or whole societies, is that it’s only when we are truly held by something greater than ourselves that we can feel safe enough to be human. To feel everything we need to feel. To say what we need to say. To sacrifice what we thought we couldn’t live without, and make real the dreams we thought were unimaginable.

This is the sacred. It’s what is missing from our cultural landscape, and its absence lies at the heart of the Big Crisis we’re facing collectively. In a post-truth world, in which the dominant cultural impulse is to deconstruct and commodify, we lose touch with the simple knowledge that reality is real. Instead, we’re left with endless repetition and simulation. Bereft of a sense of wholeness at the deepest level, and stuck with a cultural story that tells us the universe is dead matter and all of our lived experience a simple illusion, it is no wonder we careen between cultural nihilism and narcissism, searching for a way out through consumerism and ideological fixations.

What psychedelics have the potential to do, if used well, is to pull us out of this pointless circularity. They can break the narrow story that tells us we are the center of things, and that the world exists for us to try and extract our clumsy salvation from. No. The sacred is not there to act as a band-aid to a culture that too often refuses to look at why it’s bleeding to begin with. It’s there to tear us open. To force us to face that which we won’t face, to give us no choice but to transform because compared to the wretched stuckness of a life without meaning, the hope it offers is inescapably beautiful.

For indigenous cultures and modern societies alike, the psychedelic experience is often experienced as a teacher of sacred lessons. A teacher that asks us to learn with reverence and discernment. To be courageous, and travel to the darkest places within ourselves to find in the cloying emptiness the flame of hope and healing. To open ourselves up to one another, to move beyond our certainties and ideologies and embrace the raw complexity of the world as it is, holding hands all the while.

I wrote The Bigger Picture because I am convinced that if we can truly listen to the lessons it has to teach, and apply them with wisdom, we can open up new doors to make it through the crisis of the times.

I don’t want to sell anyone on trying psychedelics as a panacea, or add to the hype machine that has sprung up around them. I want to share what they have taught me. To present a psychedelic way of thinking and being that can enhance our sensemaking. To stand on the shoulders of the countercultural giants through history who’ve shaped my perspective, and try to update their thoughts for the age we live in. 

But ultimately, no matter how many real reasons I find burning away inside me, the deepest answer is achingly simple. I wrote The Bigger Picture because I’m deeply grateful for what psychedelics continue to teach me. How to forgive, and how to laugh at my own foolishness. How to think integrally and embrace complexity. How to feel paradox in my bones, to embrace that we are both human and divine, healed and broken, lost and supported. 

If we start to listen to lessons like this collectively, we can gain the tools we need to tell new cultural stories that re-enchant the world. Stories complex and mature enough to hold the tragedy and hope of modern life. As my wife Ashleigh (a brilliant psychedelic researcher) told me while I was writing, “Psychedelics make the implausible plausible.”

What we need today, more than anything, is to make plausible our most daring ideas. 

What’s To Come

As best as I can describe it right now, that’s why I wrote The Bigger Picture. Having written it, I’m eager for you to read or listen to it. I hope I’ve created something that gives you an experience that inspires you in some small way. I also want to know what you think of it, to hear your questions and comments so I can expand my own perspective on the topics I’ve explored.

With that in mind, on June 29th at 3pm, I’m hosting an online event to explore the key themes of the book from different angles. I have some pretty spectacular guests lined up. Cognitive scientist Prof. John Vervaeke, who’s work on wisdom and the meaning crisis has been hugely influential on my thinking. Two-time Oscar nominated film maker Lucy Walker, who directed Netflix’s How to Change Your Mind. Lucy was a fellow participant on the DMTx trial and understands more than anyone the complexity of bringing these ideas into the mainstream.

Jamie Wheal, author of Recapture the Rapture and the Pulitzer-prize nominated Stealing Fire, and one of the sharpest minds in cultural sensemaking and psychedelics. And last but not least, Dr. Chris Timmermann and Lisa Luan, who ran the DMTx study I participated in, will be joining to share what’s coming out of the cutting edge of psychedelic science. You can sign up here to be part of the online audience and Q&A with proof of purchase of the book.

---

The Bigger Picture is now available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones, Audible and Booktopia. Here’s what people have said about it already:

"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

​"If Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind was a guide for the curious, The Bigger Picture is a guide for the newly initiated... a balanced and insightful passage through the current psychedelic zeitgeist, a multi-perspectival journey that is critical, compassionate, and mind-expanding in equal measure." - Erik Davis

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

“Thoughtful, fiercely critical, incredibly wise, and full of ideas that we desperately need. Read it!” - Rob Faure Walker (my first reader review via Twitter - his copy arrived early because of a retailer glitch)

---

Thank you for reading to the end, and for considering buying The Bigger Picture. There was only one way I could end this piece.