🍄 Earth Day 2023, the Beat Goes On

A visit with Ralph Metzner, an Ecopsychologist, plant teacher, shaman, pioneer.

Apr 21, 2023

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The Beat Generation of the 50s was the forefather of the counterculture movement in the 60s, the forefather of the Solarpunk movement of '00s, the forefather of the Earthcore movement today…and the beat goes on.

Hello, we’re Alice and we are always in a state of wander. For Earth Day 2023, we would like to reverse our spin 20 years and open the archives to our visit with counterculture legend, eco-psychologist, Dr. Ralph Metzner. 2003 was our year to dive into research on all things counterculture such as Fluxus, simulacra, the new environmental movement (Whole Earth Catalog), and the Situationists. Metzner who worked with Timothy Leary and Dr. Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) researched the effects of psychedelic substances at Harvard in the early 60s. Metzner's interests encompassed far more than hallucinogenic chemicals and mushrooms. In a subsequent 2015 interview with the New Mexico PBS program “Report From Santa Fe,” Metzner stated, “It’s not really limited to the field of psychoactive plants and drugs anymore. It’s more the general field of consciousness. You might say I’m a consciousness researcher, in all kinds of ways.” At the core of Metzner’s work is an attempt to understand our eco-psychology: how we as human beings relate to the natural world.

"Why Is It Taking So Long For Psychology To Go Green?”

This is a question posed by Linda Buzzell, M.A., LMFT, Psychotherapist, ecotherapist, co-editor of “Ecotherapy: Healing With Nature in Mind” (Counterpoint May 2009)

"Psychology also mostly ignores humanity's psychologically-dysfunctional relationship with nature that results in the ecodical behavior that is causing global catastrophe. In spite of abundant scientific information about the shocking effects of human actions on planetary ecosystems (our own life-support systems and the life-support systems of countless other life forms!), few psychologists concern themselves with the task of helping us understand or change that behavior.”

Teachers Open the Door, But You Must Enter by Yourself.

Metzner spent a lifetime exploring and writing about expanded consciousness in all sorts of cultures and settings. He died at the age of 82 on March 14, 2019, at his home in Sonoma, CA. But as Ralph Metzner reminded us in 2003, it is in the hearts and minds of human beings that cures for ecocatastrophes can be found. The term “beatnik” was coined by Herb Caen, a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, on April 2, 1958. The word is a combination of Sputnik and Beat generation, and is meant to imply that beatniks are “far out of the mainstream of society.” Today, the beat is alive and well and Earthcore's pragmatic optimists are mainstreaming ecospsychology. In 2022, Sputnik Futures changed its name to Alice in Futureland, in the spirit of mainstreaming ideas that can shape positive futures. Perhaps Ralph Metzner knew this change would happen 20 years ago…

Your Spirits brought you here. My Spirits Said Talk to These People.

The following is a transcript of our visit with Metzner:

This is a learning planet. We’re supposed to learn, and how do we learn? By trial and error, that’s how learning takes place. Spirits are working with us all the time, trying to impel us. Your spirits brought you here. My spirits said talk to these people. You’re acting like disseminating agents, disseminating all these ideas into culture so that people will think about them. Spirits will intervene if you ask them. They’ll give you guidance. If you don’t ask them, they can’t intervene. It may be a matter of permission, they choose not to, unless they have permission.The Buddhists say you develop your consciousness all the time. You develop your receptivity and perception and your openness to what may be coming through to you. And the more conscious you are, the more likely you are to pick up things that you’ve previously missed or previously misunderstood. I work a lot with processes of divination and teaching people divination, and divination means getting information about the future, future trends and possibilities, through non-ordinary means. Through going into altered states of consciousness or using non-rational means. In shamanism, which I’m very much involved in there’s a whole esoteric tradition of learning divination by going into an altered state of consciousness through a variety of means.

The basic process is one of asking questions of nature and of spirits. Shamans would say spirits. From a psychological point of view, people would want to say, well that’s intuition, or contacting the higher self or the intuitive self, because they don’t allow for the notion of spirits. And that’s a worldview assumption. It’s not based on any evidence. It’s not like people can say they have evidence of spirits, it’s a presumption. We don’t like to refer to things called spirits, because with the rise of the scientific worldview that was considered a no-no. Before that in all other parts of the world it was considered perfectly acceptable and natural and obvious.

With divining, or what some people would call intuition, you’re always looking at the future potentials, and it’s not determined, so it’s not prediction, people often say divination is impossible because you can’t predict the future. And that’s a misconception. You’re not predicting anything, you’re looking at probabilities. And the evidence suggests that it’s a built-in capability that we have. For example, anthropologists have studied stone age cultures like the Australian Aborigines or the Kalahari bushmen that have clairvoyant, what we’d call paranormal psychic abilities that they take for granted because they need it for their cultural survival. They don’t have cell phones or computers or any of these needs that we take for granted.

The biggest difference between the shamanistic, animistic world view and the materialist, modernistic world view, is that we live in many worlds, multiple levels of reality, multiple levels of consciousness. Whereas in the modern scientific worldview there’s only one level of reality and that’s this one time-space level that has material objects in it that you can weigh and if you drop them on your foot it hurts. Anything that’s qualitative or psychological, intuition, is not amenable to scientific investigation. So that whole area is not considered real; it’s merely subjective. Slight devaluation in that world. Shamans would never say that. I practice clinical psychology, but I really think the shamanic worldview is better because it’s more inclusive. It doesn’t say that, like the modern materialistic worldview says that dreams have no reality, who cares, it’s not even worth studying. The shamans say dreams do have reality, and they don’t deny that this world has a reality obviously, so it’s more inclusive. Human beings are embodiments of spirits, just as are trees. The shamans, the animists, they’re not projecting human qualities to rocks and trees, they’re perceiving the non-human conscious spiritual qualities of rocks and trees. The hidden assumption is that only humans have consciousness and only humans have spirit, there’s no evidence for that, and no one ever used to believe that. It’s a completely cultural limited view. People are interested in shamanism because it’s based on the understanding that we’re psychically and spiritually connected with the non-human world. And that can be experienced. So, it’s a very natural thing to do to regain that knowledge. To me, evolutionary remembering means remembering your evolution, your history. It’s like remembering your personal past and your family past and the past of human culture and the past of human history and life.

That’s the idea of The Universe Story, Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme, the universe is a developmental narrative and we’re part of it, and we can remember it. And then there’s people like Rupert Sheldrake who says everything is morphogenetic fields. So, forms learn to be the way they are because other forms like them have been that way in the past. They’re kind of like habits, they’re not laws of nature that have somehow imposed in the abstract. But human beings learn to be human beings, and even cells in an organism learn to be the way they are because others like them have been that way before. And then everything is consciousness. The fundamental assumption in the pre-modern worldview is that everything is consciousness. That would have to be so, even if they don’t use the word consciousness. They say we can speak, we can understand each other. And Indians say we used to speak the language of the birds and the animals and they would understand our language, and so we would get to know each other. We would communicate. And that means there’s consciousness. So that’s why Stan Grof and others report that people on psychedelics will have memories of being a dinosaur. Because there’s this whole evolutionary predecessor before we were human beings and primates and mammals and reptiles. We still have a reptilian brain. We’ve got these three brain systems, reptilian, mammalian. So, we can remember everything back to the single cell. Plus, we started every life as a single cell, so we can remember all of that.

I am interested in ecopsychology because it’s human beings that are causing the environmental destruction. My interest is, why? What kind of motivational patterns underlie that?

I am interested in ecopsychology, green psychology, because it’s human beings that are causing the environmental destruction. And, so, my interest is, why? How is that we do that? What kind of motivational patterns underlie that, what kinds of ways of thinking? So, I look at the concept of world view and what kind of worldview and values are we holding unconsciously that are leading us to indulgent behavior that’s obviously destructive to the entire environment. The biosphere and the whole web of life, of which we are a part, obviously. In my book, Green Psychology, I have one chapter where I looked at various metaphors from psychopathology, as a psychologist we study psychopathology, and then what insights can we learn from that, can we apply to the whole collective situation we’re in. So, you can say it’s collective psychology, or psychology of the mass, or the society. Part of the modernistic dominator world view is that everything valuable comes from humans. Like people say the rainforest has value because it might have the cure for cancer. Deep ecology and traditional societies say, you don’t use it, these are spiritual beings. If you have the idea that nature is animated by spirits, you don’t go around using it. That’s like using other people. It’s disrespectful. Instead, Native Americans pray to the creator and constantly give back, which is also an ecological principle, you have to give back. You take something, but you have to give back. You eat an animal and give thanks, always give back. That’s the ecological law of balance. There’s no free lunch in nature. We have a lot to learn. So, we’re going into a period where the world will be very different, I think impoverished in many ways. My hope is that we will find a way to bring back the riches in a latent form through our own activities and ways of being with the world and being with each other.

Books we love

📘 In “Green Psychology” Ralph Metzner explores the history of this global pathology and examines the ways that we can restore a healing relationship with nature. Metzner presents a solution, showing that disciplines such as deep ecology and ecofeminism are creating a worldview in which the mind of humanity and the health of the Earth are harmoniously intertwined.

📘 Leah Thomas coined the term ‘eco-communicator’ to describe her style of environmental activism, Leah uses her passion for writing and creativity to explore and advocate for the critical yet often overlooked relationship between social justice and environmentalism. Building on her work in the field, Leah penned “The Intersectional Environmentalist: How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression to Protect People + Planet.” The book serves as an introduction to the intersection between environmentalism, racism, and privilege, and as an acknowledgment of the fundamental truth that we cannot save the planet without protecting all of its people.

📘 Hopeful and forward-looking futuristic short stories that explore how the power of storytelling can help create the world we need. “Afterglow” is a stunning collection of original short stories in which writers from many different backgrounds envision a radically different climate future. Published in collaboration with Grist, a nonprofit media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions, these stirring tales expand our ability to imagine a better world.

What else we are wondering

🧠 Ecological Civilizations: The Vision
Humans are a choice making species with a common future faced with an epic choice. We can continue to seek marginal adjustments in the culture and institutions of the Imperial Civilization of violence, domination, and exploitation that put us on a path to self-extinction. Or we can transition to an Ecological Civilization dedicated to restoring the health of living Earth’s regenerative systems while securing material sufficiency and spiritual abundance for all people.

🧠 The Wonders of Gaia: Nature is Symbiotic | Lynn Margulis, Wade Davis & Paul Stamets
“Why plant a garden when you can put plants to work for you in your own body?” This is one of the mind bending questions Lynn Margulis, one of the greatest cross-disciplinary scientific thinkers and educators of our epoch, asks. Margulis, ethnobotanist Wade Davis and mycologist Paul Stamets weave tales of amazing plant intelligence like the “Hat Thrower Mushroom” and animals that eat light.

🧠 Masters of Reality
The trances and healing powers of shamans are so widespread that they can be counted a human universal. Why did they evolve? (Aeon on shamanism.)

🧠 Wade Davis: Life without wild things
We have forgotten the flocks of passenger pigeons that blotted out the sun, the herds of bison that shook the ground and the untamed places in which we destroyed them. This is ecological amnesia.

🧠 A Mountain Of Many Legends Draws Spiritual Seekers From Around The Globe
Mount Shasta, in Northern California, is an outdoor adventure destination. Some visitors, however, come not for wide-open spaces, but for healing and transcendence — the mountain has a global reputation as a gathering place for spiritual seekers. (NPR)

🧠 Time to Push
The human collective has in the last several years transitioned into a new stage of its birth process. (Charles Eisenstein/Substack)

Craving more?

👁‍🗨 Conditions for Life with Ralph Metzner

👁‍🗨 The Ethnosphere with Wade Davis

📘 Alice in Futureland books

Thanks for tuning in.