Tuning into Meaning and Dropping Out of Crisis—Meaning What Exactly? Psychedelics and the Meaning Crisis
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.Global heating, brazen breakages of the Geneva convention, and what cognitive scientist and cultural philosopher John Vervaeke refers to as an “meaning crisis” haunt our global village. This meaning crisis is the personal-collective felt incongruence of fact and value. This paper argues that psychedelic experience and research responds to, emerges from, and provides practical solutions to the meaning crisis. While psychedelics are celebrated as addressing personal and social issues spanning from prison recidivism rate reduction, experience in religion, death fear reduction in hospices, adjuncts to therapy for treatment-resistant mental health issues, and problem solving, psychedelic experience and research also suffers the same incongruences which the meaning-crisis diagnoses on these levels: self-articulation, functionalisations of religious experience, and the economics of chemical mysticism. I argue further that when psychedelics are used in particular contexts with specific intentions they can provide solutions to the meaning crisis, with three examples: ‘Moral Enhancement’ and the discourse’s limits, and two case studies from peace-building in Israel-Palestine, and ecological connectedness and animism.
Source: Zygon®
DOI: 10.16995/zygon.17611
Author: Mark Juhan Schunemann
Institution: University of Exeter
Language: English
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,630
OpenAlex ID: W4409196966