Psychedelics and Ecological Empathy

An earlier version of this essay appeared in Plant Healer Quarterly

Gary Snyder wrote that “failure of charity and compassion are failures of imagination.”   (2008) There is, perhaps., no greater failure of moral imagination than the human failure to show respect and compassion to the rest of the living world.

In our culture, ideology places the greatest limits on our ability to empathize with plants, animals, fungi, mountains, and rivers.  Most Christians believe that their God created other-than-human life for the benefit of humans, and gave reason to humans alone.    Secular capitalism removes God from the equation,  but retains Christianity’s view that other forms of life exist for our benefit.   Contemporary progressive ideologies, from “Woke” capitalism to the blend of identity politics and socialism that passes for leftist discourse in America today, do acknowledge the importance of plants and animals and places that are sacred to Indigenous cultures – but their value is still predicated on their relationship to particular groups of humans, a valuation that ultimately fails to take seriously the underpinnings and implications of the animist worldviews of the cultures people claim to be protecting.   These same ideologies tend to be suspicious of those who defend wild creatures and wild places outside the context of Indigenous struggles, treating compassion and concern as limited resources that must be redistributed in ways that balance pa erns of human injustice, often implying that one cannot simultaneously care deeply about mercury in the blood of Loons and lead in the blood of children.

This is not inherent to the human condition.   Throughout most of the history of our species, most humans have experienced plants, animals, and fungi as conscious beings and as members of their extended communities to whom they owe compassion and respect.    Many cultures speak of these beings as our elder relatives.

This reflects an instinctual and intuitive knowledge of the origins of our consciousness. Consciousness is widely distributed in nature.   Our current biological model of consciousness recognizes it as an emergent phenomenon of complex living systems on scales ranging from communities of bacteria to individual multicellular organisms to the local mycorrhizal networks of ecosystems (Buhner 2014) to entire planets. (Frank, Grinspoon, and Walker 2022)    Our neural networks are variations on the rhizomes of plants and the mycelia of fungi.   The neurotransmitters that regulate signaling across these networks are a molecular inheritance from ancient bacteria.   They are the very same compounds that promote the growth of and regulate signaling across the mycorrhizal networks that form the biological structure of the minds of forests and fields.  (Buhner 2014)

So it should come as no surprise that the compounds of plants and fungi that are most closely related to the neurotransmitter that allows us to feel what other beings are feeling, serotonin, have the capacity to increase increase our capacity to feel empathy for and connection with other-than-human life.    In a study of people who had “belief changing” experiences while working with Ayahuasca, Psilocybe spp. mushrooms, LSD (a semi-synthetic derivative of the Claviceps purpurea fungus), DMT, and 5-MeO-DMT (natural or semi-synthetic derivatives of a variety of plants and animals), all classic serotonergic psychedelics, researchers found that:

“From before the experience to after, there were large increases in a ribution of consciousness to various entities including non-human primates (63–83%), quadrupeds (59–79%), insects (33–57%), fungi (21–56%), plants (26–61%), inanimate natural objects (8–26%), and inanimate manmade objects (3–15%). Higher ratings of mystical experience were associated with greater increases in the a ribution of consciousness. Moreover, the increased a ributions of consciousness did not decrease in those who completed the survey years after the psychedelic experience. In contrast to a ributions of consciousness, beliefs in freewill and superstitions did not change. Notably, all findings were similar when restricted to individuals reporting on their first psychedelic experience.”  (Nayak and Griffiths 2022)

This is supported by an earlier finding that patients being given psilocybin to mitigate treatment-resistant depression experienced “increased nature relatedness.”  (Lyons and Carhart-Harris 2018)

Such medicines change belief by taking us outside the structure of belief, expanding the sensory and emotional information available to us in ways that our previous fixed stories of the world cannot contain.    Rigid belief is an odd fixation of our modern culture, one that arose in its current form with the institutionalization of Christianity and the formalization of its creed.  For most of human history, lived, embodied experiences of encountering the living world, and fluid cultural memory that lived through stories and songs created a more fluid mindset less likely to confuse the map for the terrain.  People did not “believe” or “disbelieve” in listening to the teachings of an Oak, conversing with Blackbirds, or receiving a message in a dream from the spirit of the river – they simply engaged in these experience, and made meaning from them in the context of their own experiences and the experiences of the members of their communities, living and dead.   Ritual use of psychedelic medicines, together with music and dance and spontaneous poetic expression prevented ideas about the world from becoming too ossified. They can do the same for us now, when engaged in the right way.

The ability of these medicines to increase empathy for other-than-human life is rooted in the neurobiology of our oldest form of empathy, that which reflects the modern word’s etymology, the ability to “feel with” other beings, a capacity which does not honor the limits ideology places on our compassion.    It is also, not incidentally, related to their role in facilitating communication and promoting creativity in ecosystems when released by the fungi and plants that have been producing, releasing, and ingesting these compounds for far, far longer than humans have been on this planet.

 The Neurobiology of Empathy

Contemporary neurobiology understands empathy as coming in two forms, which balance each other:  cognitive empathy, which involves correctly surmising the thoughts, emotions, and wishes of others based on facial expressions and verbal cues, and emotional or affective empathy which involves sensory and emotional responses to other people’s feelings.   Our culture tends to favor cognitive empathy over emotional empathy.

As its name suggests, cognitive empathy involves the cognitive process of forming a hypothesis about someone else’s mental state based on observations and past experiences.  It is a function of the part of our being that operates in realms of abstraction.  It really has very li le to do with “feeling with” other beings at all.  As such, it is closely associated with a person’s “Theory of Mind.”   Those whose cognitive empathy is considered strong by conventional assessments tend to have a model of others’ mental and emotional that tracks with the cognitive processes of the majority of humans.    Conventional assessments of cognitive empathy do not take into account the ability to correctly assess the feelings, wants, and needs of neurodivergent people, because neurodivergent expressions of emotion are considered aberrant, nor do they take into account the ability to correctly assess the feelings, wants, and needs of other-than-human beings.   As such, cognitive empathy will always appear high in neurotypical people (and psychopaths, whose high cognitive empathy and low emotional empathy makes them capable of manipulating people by perceiving the workings of their minds and more willing to do so because they do not strongly feel the suffering of others,) and low in Autistic and other neurodivergent people whose hypotheses about neurotypical people’s internal experiences are less likely to be true than those of the general population.

An aspect of cognitive empathy that I have not seen addressed elsewhere is the fact that as a cognitive process, cognitive empathy is influenced deeply by ideology.   Our beliefs shape not only our interpretation of other’s experiences, but our assessment of whose experiences are worth interpreting.    Here I look to the work of the Italian Marxist philosopher, Antonio Gramsci, who died in one of Mussolini’s prisons, in no small part because of his tendency to empathize with the “wrong” people.    As Valeriano Ramos, Jr., wrote, Gramsci “describ[ed] ideology as a ‘terrain’ of practices, principles, and dogmas having a material and institutional nature constituting individual subjects once these were ‘inserted’ into such a terrain [ . . .] ideology constituted individuals as subjects and social agents in society.”  Thus, ideology defines who is and is not a person, and thus whose experiences are and are not with our a ention.    Corporations, states, armies, and gangs maintain internal cohesiveness by defining their members as people worthy of care while defining their targets as less-than-human.

Anthropocentric cultures engage in a similar process of limiting personhood to humans. Animist cultures recognize the personhood of all beings, and thus consider all beings worth of empathy.

Emotional empathy, being rooted in feeling rather than in abstraction, is less shaped by ideology.   In some ways, I find emotional empathy to be a misleading term, because in this culture that has dissociated the mind from the body, we have a tendency to treat emotions as inconveniently irrational valences of thought.   In reality, emotions are a kind of sensory information rather like an electromagnetic form of the sense of touch.  (See Buhner 2004)   Just as touch is experienced by the sensory nerves along our skin (and scent and taste are variations on touch, experienced by specialized epithelial tissues sensitive to the presence of certain kinds of molecules,)  emotion is a an experience felt throughout the entire body in response to our nervous system’s experiences of the presence of living beings – including our own presence, and the presences conjured by our memories and our imaginations.   So, in many ways emotional memory might be be er called somatic empathy.   As such, it is a wilder form of empathy, one more rooted in our animal selves.   It is, to quote a phrase Victor Anderson used to describe the faerie realm, “kinder and less civilized.”   And our stories of the banishing of the denizens of that realm from this world to the Otherworld is, on one level, a story of our attempting to cage and tame emotional empathty.

As I write in Courting the Wild Queen (2022), from the standpoint of our civilization:

“The trouble with such empathy is that it refuses to honor the rules of etique e that guide civilization’s preferred form of cognitive empathy, which is marked and tested by the ability to correctly guess the internal experience and the desired response of another person by thinking about the situation and running it through the rubric of the normative experiences and responses of the majority population. More subversively, this wild type of empathy refuses to honor the rules set for whom or what we may empathize with and whose experiences should ma er to us most.  You are supposed to care more about the wellbeing of your family members than about the wellbeing of the man sleeping in the doorway of the bank, more about the death of an American soldier in a helicopter crash than about the deaths of twenty Yemeni civilians in a drone strike on a wedding party. And you are not supposed to empathize at all with trees or stones or rivers or stars. All those rules and categories break down when we bypass abstraction and go to a place of directly experiencing the presence of other beings.”

There are strong indications that emotional empathy is related to the neurotransmitter serotonin, part of our inheritance from ancient bacteria, which tended to operate as collectives. Psilocybin, produced by mushrooms of the Psilocybe genus, and LSD, related to compounds from the ergot fungus, are chemically similar to serotonin.    The fungal realm is a realm of beings who The fungal realm is a realm of beings whose mode of consciousness is marked by connection – and by curiosity, branching out in new directions in response to sensory stimuli, seeking to experience the world by embedding its structures of consciousness in soil, rock, and the bodies of other living and once-living things.  (See Sheldrake 2021).

Serotonin, psilocybin, and their molecular kin are compounds that facilitate the flow of sensory information across structures of consciousness, and encourage the fractal branching of those networks to facilitate new ways of making connections.     As such, they are molecules of embodied connection – molecules of empathy.

The Pharmacology of Empathy

The relationship between serotonin and emotional empathy shows up in research into the chemical compound MDMA, dubbed an “empathogen” by the intrepid psychonaut and psychotherapist, Ralph Metzner.   MDMA is chemically similar to the neurotransmitter phenylethylamine, which, among other things, acts strongly on serotonin and dopamine receptors in a way similar to those two neurotransmitters themselves, and to mescaline, the primary psychedelic alkaloid in Peyote (Lophophora williamsii), San Pedro (Trichocereus pachanoi), and Peruvian Torch ( Echinopsis peruviana) cacti.     One study found that  “MDMA increased ‘empathogenic’ feelings, but it reduced accurate identification of threat-related facial emotional signals in others” (Bedi et al. 2010) – a finding which would be consistent with an increase in emotional empathy and a decrease in cognitive empathy, though the researchers in this particular study don’t make that connection.   A pair of Bedi’s colleagues, Lawrence Scahill and George Anderson, did, however reach this conclusion, observing that “On balance, the findings presented in the Bedi et al. study indicate that although MDMA might enhance the emotional component of empathy, it appears to cause impairment in cognitive component.” (2010)   All of the aforementioned researchers a ribute the increase in emotional empathy brought on by MDMA at least in part to serotonin.

A 2019 also paper found that the tendency to increase feelings of empathy that is associated with MDMA is shared by LSD. (Holze et al.)   At high doses, however, LSD and other serotonergic psychedelics like psilocybin, also have the effect of bringing on experiences o “ego-death” which permanently alter the ways people understand their own subjectivity, and of“oceanic boundlessness,” bringing identification with all of life.   (See my “Psilocybin, Shapeshifting, and the Sidhe” in the Summer 2021 issue of Plant Healer Quarterly  as well as Tagliazucchi, E.,et al. 2016, Carhart-Harris et al 2016, Carhart-Harris et al. 2017)   The degree of openness to this kind of experience of “oceanic boundlessness” is associated with the degree of success people have with using psilocybin to treat depression (Roseman and Carhart-Harris 2018.)   Such states also involve transcendence of the limits ideology and prior belief place on imagination, moral and otherwise.

Those who do find relief from depression with psilocybin report both a decreased tendency toward authoritarian attitudes and an increased affinity for nature. (Lyons and Carhar-Harris 2019)     This suggests a loosening of rigid belief structures, and a possible increase in emotional empathy for other-than-human life.   I would posit that these are both essential elements of the kind of “belief-changing” psychedelic experiences that Nayak and Griffiths associate with an increased willingness to view plants and animals as conscious beings.   Viewing other beings as conscious is a necessary prerequisite to showing them compassion and respect.

An additional link between serotonin and empathy for other-than-human beings is also worth noting.   Autistic people tend to have elevated levels of serotonin (Aaron et al. 2019) and to have weak cognitive empathy (at least compared with neurotypical people, in regard to the internal experiences of neurotypical people) but strong emotional empathy. (Shalev and Uzefovsky 2020.)    We also often tend to have strong affinities for and identification with plants, animals, sentient machines, and other entities not typically treated as people within the dominant culture.    Ralph Savarese, a literary scholar who has studied writing by a wide range of both speaking and non-speaking Autistic people, notes that many Autistic narratives reflect deep empathy for beings and objects not commonly considered to possess subjectivity in the same way society assumes that humans do. (2014)   He attributes this to the strong emotional empathy of Autistic people, which I in turn associate with our elevated serotonin levels, which make our day to day experience rather psychedelic at times.

Long periods of time in the wilderness also seem to elevate serotonin levels – in ways that tend to make one experience the world in ways much more similar to an Autistic person.

Elevated levels of serotonin or serotonergic alkaloids are likely necessary factors in bringing about ecological empathy in someone raised in a non-animist culture, but they are not likely to be sufficient.    When a mind is being repatterned, what that mind is focused on is essential. For most of the history of our species, ecosystems, human communities, and the living world itself were the only sufficiently complex systems for a human mind to imprint on when working with psychedelics. Now, however, global markets and global technological systems have gained sufficient complexity to pull a mind in a malleable state into attunement and a certain kind of empathy with the flows of information within them. Set and setting become ever more important — and the potential impacts of putting control of set and setting into the hands of corporations and medical institutions becomes ever more concerning. See Keep Psychedelics Wild.)

It is no small miracle that people receiving psilocybin treatment in clinical settings have still experienced an increase in “nature connectedness.”   How much more connected would these people have felt to the living world if they had been given their medicine in a forest instead of in a clinic?   How much more connected could they have felt if instead of being told they were given a pharmacological substance to treat their depression, they were told that they were going to be taking in the fruiting body of a living being that arose as an expression of the mind of a field in order to help them overcome their sense of isolation?     And how much more connection yet would they had witnessed the life cycle of those mushrooms?

The great gifts of such a medicine can only truly be received when accompanied by an invitation to understand that they are elder kin who we are meeting with to remember who we are, to be reminded of the nature of our consciousness.

The Nature and Future of Human Consciousness

Consciousness is the fruiting body of a vast mycelial organism whose tendrils entwine with the roots of ancient trees and ephemeral wildflowers, songs and poems are spores on the wind, carrying all we have known and felt and been to new soil where life might begin its wild fractal branching again.     We are part of the Earth become individually conscious. We can heal ourselves by weaving back into the living web of consciousness from which we evolved and emerged.   The medicines of connection and communication play an essential role in that reweaving.

We are water and stone and lightning and starlight that has danced through a thousand forms. Biology emerged from infinity so that the world could experience itself. Our individual neural networks evolved from mycorrhizal networks of consciousness that the world might view itself from outside itself and discover itself anew.   Our languages follow patterns derived from the syntax of fungal communication – but carried through the air as sound vibrations, the traces of which we symbolically represent in writing.   When we remember to embody the curiosity we evolved to experience, we remember, in the words of the Zen poet Dogen, that the beings surround us are "others none other than ourselves." If I have faith in anything, it is that such curiosity is our nature, and that in the presence of curiosity, cruelty becomes impossible.  The ability of the psychedelic compounds produced by our plant and fungal kin to enhance that curiosity makes them potent allies in the revival of animism.

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