As the festival season gets properly under way, we republish this 2016 piece on drugs and consciousness by Mark Vernon. If you’re yearning for communion with the divine, says Mark, ditch the ayahuasca and pick up Plato

I feel as if this summer [2016] is a summer of drugs – though not of legal highs or familiar recreationals. It’s more interesting than that. The drugs many seem drawn to are substances of a particular kind. They are psychedelics: chemicals with meaning. And even entheogens, generators of the divine within. It feels like the doors of perception are opening once more.

Articles in newspapers are charting a new growth industry: ayahuasca tourism. A mesmerizing, award-winning movie, Embrace of the Serpent, was released in June: it followed two white men and a shaman as they travelled along the Amazon in search of caapi. Then, there was the friend who told me of a new craze: ecstasy evensong – folk who have a smoke and then head for a gothic cathedral to hear the angels sing alongside the choir chanting the service. Even the BBC is running a documentary on psychedelics, one called Getting High for God. It’s almost mainstream.

What makes psychedelics different, the research suggests, is that the effects of the experience last – not the trip or high, but the meaning of it. People report meeting love head on, or fear, and it is such a vision, with such an impact, that it subsequently reconfigures their life. Relationships are healed; addictions dropped; God comes alongside.

The trend is a rediscovery. As any advocate of entheogens will tell you, they are tools in an ancient spiritual science, and the antique status is part of the appeal. The modern world is too constrained by its horizontal imagination. It has forgotten that experience goes deeper than logic; transcendence is immanent and all around. Wisdom is something discoverable and knowable, and it’s prior to evidence-based facts that can be googled.

I’ve a lot of sympathy with the view. A man who survived the siege of Sarajevo speaks of his neighbours risking their lives to walk miles to a theatre or church. He imagines the same for those currently trapped in Aleppo. In extremis, we humans don’t just seek water or safety. Meaning is a basic need.

But I also wonder whether the summer of drugs is missing something. Put it like this. It’s as if the concrete desert of the shopping mall and office leaves many yearning not for a drink but for a flood of mystical experience. They want to be submerged, drowned. They want to be frightened by angelic beings; shocked by the massiveness of reality, break through to the other side.

Plato was a shaman as well as a philosopher (in fact, there was then little difference). He learnt the art of ascending to the heavens, and of dying the little death to know of life. Scholars debate whether he received the knowledge from the Arians of Asia, or the priests in pharaonic Egypt. But it’s also clear he developed and transformed the tradition.

He lived during a period in which human consciousness was shifting. In particular, it had become more awake. His contemporaries had a sense of “I” that was absent for Homer’s first listeners. The gods were still present in fifth century BC Athens, but human beings were no longer merely their playthings. As Socrates realised, he could chose to follow Apollo’s daemon or not.

This meant that communing with the gods became more conscious too. The Pharaohs are often depicted lying asleep as their spirits ascend in the form of Horus, presumably after ingesting a narcotic. Socrates had discovered he could maintain contact with other realms whilst standing upright, during the middle of the day. The evolving powers of the human psyche meant that spiritual insight needn’t require comatose or dramatically altered states of mind. There was a more subtle path to follow, which could be traversed by embarking upon a training that was simultaneously therapeutic, moral and enlightening. I suspect the Buddha discovered something similar at about the same time.

There were distinctive advantages to what Plato called the Apollonian way, when contrasted with the wilder ecstasies of the Dionysian. The spiritual was no longer so blinding, but more intelligible; it could be conveyed not only in myths but discussed via images and even reason. Socrates emerged from the cave, he ascended the ladder of love, he spoke not of belief but transmitted gnosis.

In other words, he could discern the meaning of the experience, which in turn nurtured the virtuous spiral of return and deification. In the Symposium, Plato sees Socrates as Eros, the go-between who at first seems only to disrupt and disturb, like Dionysus; but shows himself more fully as Apollonian – meaning unified – as good, beautiful and true.

This path is not about being out-of-it, or even touchingly dazed. Its entheogenic power is gentle, and legal. It’s felt in the delicate shifts of consciousness that accompany poetry, music, movement, an “Aha!” moment. These can be known all day, every day. The Stoics made a virtue out of discerning the divine pulse even whilst buying cabbages in the marketplace.

But it’s a longer route. It asks for more discipline. It’s a practice rather than a trip. The investment, though, pays back in a life experienced intensely not via fading peaks but a steady presence. It has moments of riotous flight, but values more the inner light, the still voice.

And it’ll be available in September, as the days lengthen, as worldly demands stop the freedom of festivals; after this summer of drugs.

First published in 2016.

Mark Vernon is appearing with Robert Rowland Smith at the Idler Festival today (Sunday 12 July, 2026) with their popular Philosophy Slam – a free flow of improvisation with Mark and Robert riffing on anything you want to ask about, from aardvarks to zeitgeist.

TODAY AT THE IDLER FESTIVAL

Today’s highlights include:
Dexys Midnight Runners frontman Kevin Rowland in conversation with Will Hodgkinson
Author Irvine Welsh in conversation with Will Hodgkinson
Actor Nigel Planer in conversation with Suzi Feay
Squeeze singer and songwriter Chris Difford in conversation with Miranda Sawyer
Comedy from standup Amy Matthews
Writer and actor Ben Moor‘s show Not Everything Is Significant

Today (Sunday 12 July) is the last day of this year’s Idler Festival, which is at Fenton House and Gardens in Hampstead, London.

See who else is performing and buy tickets with our festival poster here. Click on the performer’s name for details.

Click here for the festival timetables.

See you there!

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