Psychedelics Make Death Less Foreign
Welcome to the Psychedelic Blog. I write about the Impact of Psychedelics on Grieving, Relationships, Culture & Death.
This week: How Psychedelics reshaped my relationship to death.
“You evoke light out of the universe.” — Alan Watts
Two years ago, my brother died. The impact has been seismic. Grief cracks open everything you believe is solid. I’ve spent the last two years living inside that fracture.
Psychedelics didn’t “heal” the loss. They didn’t erase the empty chair at the table or the silence on his birthday. But they did something far stranger, something I never expected: they reshaped my relationship to death itself.
Psychedelic journeys showed me that what I thought of as “the end” was more like a doorway…one that connects to something vast, strange & alive.
How Psychedelics Reframe Death
“If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.” — Nikola Tesla
Whether it’s a hero dose of Psilocybin, communing with Peyote in the Mexican jungle, or getting catapulted to the source of creation on Bufo, these experiences reveal something most of us spend our lives denying: the boundary between life & death isn’t absolute.
Tesla’s words make sense once you’ve been there. Under these medicines, the rigid Western framework of life & death dissolves into something deeper. You don’t just think about energy, frequency, and vibration — you feel them…forever altering our understanding of reality.
These journeys reframe death not by making it less tragic, but by making it less foreign. They bring us close enough to see that what we fear most is not the end…but the unknown.
The Difference Between Fear & Intimacy
“Rehearse death: to say this is to tell a person to rehearse his freedom.” — Seneca
Fear makes death abstract & monstrous. The thing we run from, deny, or endlessly avoid. Intimacy makes it personal…it forces us to confront the inevitable.
To fear death is to live in resistance. To be intimate with death is to let it shape us…to sharpen our attention, soften our relationships, and strip away the illusion that we have forever.
Intimacy doesn’t mean liking death or welcoming it early. It’s sitting with the fact that everything we love will vanish & letting that dictate our priorities. Suddenly we stop wasting time on the trivial, stop numbing ourselves, stop pretending we have endless tomorrows.
Cultural Blind Spots
“Death has replaced sex as Western society's greatest taboo.” — Philippe Ariès
Next time you are at a dinner party, your kid’s little league game, or a work gathering, start talking about death. Go off. Explore every angle of how life ends, what you think will happen, share your level of fear or ways you don’t want to go. See what happens. Spoiler: it will be met with the same bemusement as if you’d brought up your sex life.
Other cultures have placed death at the center of life:
Eleusinian Mysteries (Ancient Greece): staged death as the ultimate initiation rite—an underworld descent followed by symbolic rebirth.
Tibetan Buddhism: meditates on the corpse and studies The Book of the Dead so that death becomes not a terror but a teacher.
Stoics: from Marcus Aurelius to Epictetus, the practice of Memento Mori (“remember you must die”) was a daily reminder that life’s brevity should sharpen presence, not fuel denial.
Western society hides death. Psychedelics force us to confront it.
One of my favorite movies is This Boy’s Life. There’s a scene when Toby begs his mother to leave his abusive stepfather. She says:
“I don’t have another get-up-and-go in me.”
That’s how I felt after he passed. Not again. I can’t possibly do this again. Why does life keep delivering these fucking hits?
But the night after a Samadhi journey I did a month after he passed, I had a dream in which he called me on the phone. I was elated, and responded with, “We can still talk!” The medicine delivered what I so desperately needed at that moment.
After the dream, I woke with the unmistakable sense that my brother was still here, just in a different realm. I don’t carry him as absence anymore…I carry him as light.
Alan Watts once said, “You evoke light out of the universe.” That’s what I’m learning to do…even with death.
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We treat death like it's the enemy whereas it's just a part of life. I wish we had more open / honest conversations about what it should look like and how folks want to be treated as they approach that stage vs. fighting it desperately with everything modern medicine has to offer.
My ayahuasca journey two years ago included a vision of my Dad's death (in the future) and my own. It was sad but beautiful. I thanked my body and my hands for everything they'd done for me as I prepared to shift into another form.
Thank you for writing this personal piece. I know that my ex who died end of May 2022 is around and I can call on him anytime. I know he always loved me.