The Ethics of Consciousness: Part of a Philosopher’s Practice Guide for the Medicines of Our World

The Ethics of Consciousness: Part of a Philosopher’s Practice Guide for the Medicines of Our World

Note: This is a rough transcript. Since the Dangerous Wisdom podcast uses many names and terms that transcription software fails to recognize, a more accurate transcript is not possible at this time. But this version is as close as we can manage.

Listen here: https://dangerouswisdom.org/podcast

Or subscribe via your preferred podcast directory here: https://dangerous-wisdom.captivate.fm/listen

Welcome to Dangerous Wisdom, a journey into mystery and a gateway to the mind of nature and the nature of mind. This is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor. I’m happy to be here with you so that together we can create a culture of wisdom, love, and beauty.

We’re doing the work we need to do to heal self and world at the same time.

In our last contemplation we looked at our basic need for ethical reflection. We can find it easy to skip ethics if we think of ourselves as decent folk, but we considered ethics as something that demands training and insight. We can only become truly ethical by becoming thoroughly wise.

That doesn’t excuse or even imply doing bad things. We can keep ethical precepts even as we recognize our need to arrive at a fullness of wisdom that liberates us and others. That makes ethics much more than a matter of mere commandments.

Now we finally get to turn more directly to something we have touched on many times already, which is the ethics of consciousness.

When we work with the medicines of our World, including the medicine of philosophical teachings—and psychedelic medicines too—we begin to recognize that certain states of consciousness are very conducive to insight, inspiration, getting along well together, taking care of our World, and cultivating the whole of life onward. And certain other states are far less helpful, far less conducive to those good things.

And it’s not just that certain states are conducive to good things relative to our own experience, but that certain states bring benefit to the whole community of life.

And we may begin to feel an ethical obligation to cultivate states of consciousness that seem helpful to ourselves and the World we share, and likewise to refrain from cultivating states of consciousness that perpetuate and even elaborate suffering in ourselves and our World. This reveals a central aspect of an ethics of consciousness.

It’s like taking responsibility for what we radiate out. What state of being do we radiate out to all beings? How does it affect them? How do they feel? How do we ourselves feel?

We find that when we enter certain states of being, we feel good, and we become more effective in fulfilling our purpose. But we also find that others respond to us positively. They calm down. They laugh and smile. They feel inspired. Dogs seem to trust us more, birds seem less fearful. We feel more patient and trusting of ourselves and the world. And on and on.

These states of being have real impacts. Ethics is not just what we do for a living, but how we manifest our heart, mind, body, and World. And our ethical conscience begins to prompt us to want to take care of the World by taking care of the state of being we manifest. We sense the ethical obligation because we see the difference this makes to all beings. That’s all part of the ethics of consciousness.

If we said it in the most careful way, we could say that the ethics of consciousness asks, “How do we use our consciousness? How do we use awareness? How do we use the medicines of the World? And how do we use the medicine that we are?”

This set of questions carries great import for us. We ask those questions in order to find out the most important thing, and we have to relate with all of it in holistic terms.

We find that we have to grapple with this question of how properly function, how we attune our functioning to ecological and spiritual realities.

In the spirit of these questions, an ethics of consciousness also recognizes that consciousness itself can take a variety of developmental paths, partly dependent on culture. Consciousness here means something that tends to arise as a fragment of a larger whole.

We can discern a difference between consciousness as we habitually experience it on the one hand, and what we could refer to as a more primordial awareness on the other. When we say, “I’m conscious,” that “I” is a fragment of a larger whole of which it has limited awareness. But that consciousness nevertheless makes a difference, not only in our own lives but in the lives of all beings.

Consciousness could arise more intimately in touch with, in relation with, or even fully awake in, through, and as a larger whole. In other words, consciousness can begin to merge with a primordial awareness, and it can begin to relax into something that transcends the duality between unity and diversity, individual and collective, knower and known, self and world, and so on.

We don’t need to become fully enlightened for this to begin to happen in various ways. For instance, certain indigenous cultures seem to have reliably produced a different developmental path from the one we have become so used to in the dominant culture that we take it as reality.

We speak about “development” period—as if that were it. But it’s relative. There is an ontogeny of consciousness, developmental pathways consciousness can take.

And we have evidence that some of those styles of consciousness come with real benefits, including an absence of certain forms of suffering common in the dominant culture.

As one example, I recommend the work of the anthropologist Richard Sorenson. He wrote about his time in the Andaman Islands, and how the culture there produced a radically different style of consciousness from the one he was used to as a member of the dominant culture.

He reported exceptional states of resonance between the members of the community, and between humans and the natural world, including how the human community entered into the nonduality of the individual and the collective.

In our dualistic thinking, we have these diametrically opposed in some ways. We often put it economically: It’s either capitalism, which we associate with individualism, or it’s Stalin, which is apparently what we think of the community. The community is tyranny it seems.

But Sorenson was talking about transcending all of this nonsense, because of a much more sophisticated developmental realization of consciousness.

Sorenson admitted that he was not considered an adult by the standards of that culture, and he admitted that this made sense to him. We may have mentioned this before, this idea of ontogenetic interruption.

Ontogenesis means development. So if there’s an ontogenetic interruption, consciousness doesn’t reach maturity.

When Sorenson saw what the adults and even teens were capable of, he understood he was not an adult. It had nothing to do with being able to shoot a bow or start a fire. It had to do with a style of skillful relationality he couldn’t fathom at first, a style of consciousness.

In other words, the dominant culture may produce developmentally juvenile people who never reach the fuller capacities of adulthood that human beings have the potential to realize. We have aging juveniles, and those juveniles make decisions about how to live our lives and work with the medicines of the World, how to use the resources of the World, how the economy should operate, and so on.

It’s not a comfortable thought. And most of us find it easy to point at someone else. We point to President So-and-so and say, “Clearly he was a real juvenile.” But we don’t usually want to think of ourselves that way.

But the consciousness that we have is just how we see reality. Consciousness pretends it doesn’t affect reality. It reveals things as if that’s just how they are. And we can’t get around that by merely intellectual means. We need a deeper shift, and a holistic philosophy of life can provide that.

In terms of developmental pathways, we could say we all share the same basic nature of mind, we all arise from a primordial mind that allows a vast array of conscious states to appear, a vast array of developmental pathways to become realized.

So, our culture educates us into a certain style of consciousness. This is a crucial point in relation to an ethics of consciousness.

And so an ethics of consciousness has to do with how our consciousness develops, and where its center of gravity or its field of states ends up. Our consciousness begins to develop into a field of possible states. We find that in some states, the mind becomes more open to insight, joy, love, compassion, peace, trust, and wonder. They go together with consciousness. As we practice an attitude of compassion, that shapes the development of consciousness.

In other states of consciousness, the mind arises as more distracted, agitated, aggressive, reactive, clingy, and self-centered.

Some states go together with suffering, confusion, anxiety, and a kind of existential bondage. Other states go together with freedom—freedom from suffering, freedom from confusion, freedom from existential bondage.

And our development determines which states become more likely for us. If we were enlightened, we’d always be in the good states. Buddha means a person in an ongoing state of wisdom, love, beauty, joy, peace, responsiveness, openness to insight—free . . . he was free, a totally free and unstuck person.

The rest of us get stuck. But if we get on a good developmental path, we can begin falling more often into positive states. We may get stuck, we may fall off the razor’s edge, but as we practice, we keep tending toward positivity. As we continue doing that, we become more liberated. As we do that, we fall into more positive states.

And on and on it goes, it’s a great spiral—a positive spiral, or it could be a negative one. That’s what samsara or suffering is: We go round and round, “I’m back here at my anger,” or “I’m back here at my reactivity.”

The ethics of consciousness has to do with the interwovenness of Nature and Culture, and the interwovenness of the individual and the collective, unity and diversity.

We have to ask about the ethics of consciousness in terms of our own practice of life, and also in terms of the culture as a whole—including what the culture marginalizes or makes almost impossible or at least unlikely for most of us.

The great Turtle Island poet Gary Snyder gets at the ethics of consciousness in his magnum opus, Mountains and Rivers without End. It appears throughout his work, because he was a dep practitioner, an ethical practitioner. But I particularly like the way he touches it in Mountains and Rivers Without End. In that poem he writes:

Ghost bison, ghost bears, ghost bighorns, ghost lynx, ghost

pronghorns, ghost panthers, ghost marmots, ghost owls: swirling

and gathering, sweeping down,

Then the white man will be gone.

butterflies on slopes of grass and aspen —

thunderheads the deep blue of Krishna

rise on rainbows

and falling shining rain

each drop —

tiny people gliding slanting down:

a little buddha seated in each pearl —

and join the million waiving grass-seed-buddhas

on the ground. (80-1)

This passage has become one of the amulets or talismans I keep in my philosopher’s medicine bag. It’s good medicine.

And Snyder has a note on this passage. He writes, “‘White man’ here is not a racial designation, but a name for a certain set of mind. When we all become born-again natives of Turtle Island, then the ‘white man’ will be gone” (161).

That’s really on the nose. That’s the ethics of consciousness, and Snyder has thus pointed out that the dominant culture created a style of consciousness that we have come to associate with the term “white man”.

Many indigenous people seem to understand this. They had to learn about it in a traumatizing way, a horrific way. But as Snyder says, it’s got nothing to do with “race”.

The anthropologist Richard Sorenson refers to a liminal or pre-conquest consciousness that characterizes certain indigenous cultures—or, we could say, it characterizes any indigenous culture that had a primarily wise, loving, beautiful, healthy, participatory and mutually vitalizing relationship with Earth.

Not every culture we conventionally refer to as indigenous meets that ideal. But many did.

We can keep Sorenson’s discernment—he encountered examples of liminal consciousness, or pre-conquest consciousness, and as a contrast we can refer to the dominant culture’s mindset as conquest consciousness. That’s where I get that term, riffing off of Sorenson.

It has nothing to do with race or gender, and it has emerged in societies we couldn’t describe as white. In fact, to the extent that many discussions of race distract us from this deeper issue, they may serve to perpetuate our problems and intensify certain divisions.

The problem is a style of consciousness, and racism is a symptom. We can see how the way we talk about identity politics, race, and institutionalized racism has created increasing tension. Maybe it has created more trouble than it has healed.

We can see that we’re all victims of conquest consciousness, no matter our skin color or gender, or anything else. We’ve been affected by it and infected by it to some degree. We might be relatively freer in one way or another, and it may even be because of suffering that has given us perspective.

That doesn’t make us fully free of conquest consciousness, and it doesn’t mean the problem is race, or gender, or sexual orientation—at all. The problem is this deeper style of mind.

As part of the karma of those of us affected by or infected with the mindset called “white,” we must turn toward the ghosts Snyder honors in his poem, and we must take up the work of rejuvenation—together—take up the work of honoring what we have made extinct, healing the suffering we have created and that our ancestors created, in their ignorance.

Again, I’m in line with my ancestor Socrates here: Human beings are not our enemy; ignorance is the problem.

And so we must do the work of spreading the grass-seeds of wisdom, love, and beauty, in reverence to, in resonance with, the viriditas of the world—that’s Hildegard’s term—the soul of the World and our own soul are not two things.

t to the planet” (in Nelson: 2008

So, it’s all of us. He’s not the only indigenous person to say that we have all gotten so destabilized by conquest consciousness that we’re in this together.

We have to look at our karma, including our lineage. But we also have to find the common ground and be in this together.

And when we go on our big medicine trips, are we reindigenizing ourselves to the planet? Does globetrotting travel seem like an expression of indigenous wisdom? Maybe in some cases, and maybe not in others.

Can we open up more dialogue about this? Because we have to figure it out together. There’s no youtube video we can watch that will make us indigenous again.

se to live today” (Wildcat,: 2005

It is activity all the way down, interwoven activity rooted in a place, with a history, with an ancestry of good and bad ways of practicing.

All of us are originally indigenous—we have to repeat that again and again—we’ve just gotten cut off from this. Even if we follow the Old Testament, we see that the divine made a place for us. Even if we follow an atheistic scientism, we can come to some lived sense of sacredness.

And again, too, we should emphasize the inquiry part. We have to ask tough questions, and open up to answers that might mean we have to renounce something we currently find ourselves clinging to. That’s a scary part of inquiry and dialogue, because we don’t know where it’s going to go, and it may go somewhere the ego or the culture don’t like.

Another aspect of the ethics of consciousness relates to how we relate with our conscious states in the rest of our lives. We touched on this before. Certain medicines can kind of force us into particular state.

There’s the context of the medicine. First of all, someone might be holding initiatory space, and that affects us. Then the medicine might bring us, almost by the scruff, and we get held in a state of wonder—and that’s fine, because LoveWisdom begins in wonder.

But being held in such a state by a medicine doesn’t necessarily give us enough understanding of the state and how we got into it. We can start to feel that the medicine did it, and we have no idea how to manifest these states without that medicine.

Generally speaking, various states of consciousness in some sense happen by accident, even with training instructions, because the training instructions can’t force us to be in a vitalizing state.

Instead, we can think of instruction as a way of orienting us—a kind of map that essentially tells us not to go anywhere. It’s a map for nondoing our way into more skillful states, more ethically vitalizing states.

The map helps us relax and let go, and it gives us teachings to handle what’s coming, so we can recognize that the landscape is us already. And when the states appear, we don’t get freaked out. We have teachings for handling them. Otherwise, we could experience a lot of suffering. We could experience terror.

Or we could try to use the map and “go” someplace, which means we’ll create new fabrications, new versions of our delusions.

We still have to stumble into these states usually by accident, even with instruction. We just happen into it, because it involves nondoing.

Then we touch them again and again, and we get more and more used to it. And then our style of consciousness begins to shift, our thinking begins to shift more deeply, and we start to think with those more skillful states of being—or we could say we let those states produce thinking by themselves. We stop being the thinker, and we become the thinking of a larger ecology of mind and a more skillful style of consciousness. They begin to think through us.

We touch here, again, the shift into an awareness of the non-duality of the knower and the known. That too makes the ethics of consciousness profound and important.

Because the ethics of consciousness teaches us that our state of consciousness can either limit or it can liberate what we can know and also what the World can be. So we start to sense that it carries tremendous significance—our states of consciousness. And thus we really to think about the ethics and even the morality of certain states of consciousness.

We begin to see that a certain style of consciousness reliably creates inequality and injustice. And it has no investment in what they are or what they look like. It’s not invested in racial injustice in particular.

That may be how it looks or how it manifests in one context or another, but that’s an accident. If we get hooked on the accidental aspects, we might miss the underlying problem or disease.

And that underlying disease is a conquest style of consciousness, a conquest style of relating. In the conquest style of consciousness, somebody’s got to be under the thumb, under the boot of that conquest. Oppression, domination, aggression, injustice, and inequality of almost every kind comes from this style of consciousness first and foremost.

And all of the other things we talk about can serve to distract us from the root problem. It’s not that they don’t matter or that it’s not important. Because, for the people being oppressed and suffering, it matters a lot. There is real violence against women, violence against people of color, violence against all marginalized groups.

But if we want to help, we better look at the root of the problem, the underlying disease. It’s like a virus we’ve all been infected because we’re touched by or even deeply in the midst of the dominant culture. And that infection produces marginalized groups. That’s part of how it functions.

And it does much more than that. It produces and perpetuates ignorance. And we all fall victim to that, even the most marginalized among us. If we think Barack Obama didn’t participate in conquest consciousness, we have gotten very confused. From the time his campaign came together, he had already surrounded himself with soldiers of conquest consciousness. Hilary Clinton was the same.

They might have had less overt negative effects as Trump had. It does make a difference, but what we refer to as two main political parties in the U.S. are just two faces of the same conquest consciousness.

Some of us might be more sensitive, because we’ve suffered the effects more, and they might be more ethical people. They might have a greater sense of compassion. And they might have a lot of sensitivity and insight from having to deal with some of the more egregious aspects of conquest consciousness.

That doesn’t change the fact that the root cause is where the healing will happen best, otherwise we end up treating symptoms and leaving the disease.

For instance, maybe we need anti-racism in our education system. But maybe we don’t need it, and maybe it’s an error to pursue such an approach. Our conversations around race certainly bring up a lot of defensiveness and reactivity. And those conversations—and any interventions we attempt—address only a symptom or set of symptoms.

A holistic philosophy of life, on the other hand, would give us a way to heal the underlying disease. The structures of power will certainly react against our efforts. Let’s not delude ourselves about that. The entire education system currently functions to keep us away from a holistic philosophy of life.

But moving in the direction of philosophy in general moves us toward a common ground. It doesn’t make any particular group get defensive for superficial reasons. And it doesn’t have an anti-approach. We don’t have to be anti- anything. If we need an enemy, we can make ignorance and aggression the enemy, we can make conquest consciousness the enemy.

But we can also frame everything in very positive terms, and make everything in relation to our own highest values. In any case, we share a common ground of wisdom, love, and beauty, as well as a common ground of being affected by conquest consciousness and by ignorance in general.

Some of us have more intense symptoms than others, but we suffer the same basic ailment. We’re in it together. The wisdom traditions refer to this basic ailment as ignorance, and conquest consciousness is a variety of ignorance, a style of ignorance.

Our traditions teach us all that people don’t do evil things on the basis of wisdom. Rather, we do evil things on the basis of ignorance. There’s no venerable tradition that recommends ignorance. And no wisdom tradition that recommends cultivating a style of consciousness conducive to ignorance, fear, aggression, self-centeredness, craving, and jealousy. But the dominant culture doesn’t even fully recognize this central issue of the ethics of consciousness, and doesn’t yet understand in any deep way the harms of an unethical style of consciousness.

This goes to the very heart of the challenges we face today. The dominant culture cultivates a style of consciousness that reliably produces aggression, depression, confusion, ecological degradation, and a host of symptoms we should see as common set rather than fragmenting them as conquest consciousness teaches us.

We see PTSD over there, anxiety over here, cancer over there, and so on—and we see each of these as inside a person. Instead, we can see these as a single set of symptoms, arising as part of the unity of mind and Nature, the unity of Nature and culture, the nonduality of Self and World.

But, we can begin to bring the ethics of consciousness and ethics in general into Nature and Culture. We can join together in dialogue, and help each other find our way home.

As a way to bring this contemplation to a close, it seems like a nice idea to turn toward my own lineage for another facet of the ethics of consciousness.

As usual, we turn to Socrates because of his relevance to our life today. The essence of the wisdom traditions applies every bit as much today as thousands of years ago, in part because our ignorance has remained basically in the same style as in Socrates’s time.

Socrates stands out as an important figure here for a variety of reasons, not least of which that he serves as a wonderful example of an ethically skillful consciousness. We can think of any sage as someone who has cultivated the most ethically vitalizing styles of consciousness.

And Socrates is an ancestor to the group of traditions we can refer to as the dominant culture. At this point, we’ve mostly lost touch with the sacred imperatives of LoveWisdom Socrates sought to impart to his whole culture and thus ours.

But he’s our ancestor. And we can remember those sacred imperatives again, we can remember him as an example of a healthier developmental path, and as someone who calls to us to take care of our souls. That was in some ways his central message: Care . . . care of the soul, care of the World, care of the sacred.

In some sense, every philosopher in the dominant culture wrestles with Socrates, and all of us are philosophers. That’s why we’re talking about all of this. Philosophy is how we do things: How we live, how we work with the medicines of our World, how we organize our lives together.

So anyone in the dominant culture trying to think through how to do anything at all can benefit from looking to the figure of Socrates, because he introduced some of the core notions of a holistic philosophy of life in a good way, and tried to live it, tried to let his life be his argument.

And in Plato’s work, the one who most often speaks on behalf of Sophia, on behalf of wisdom, love, and beauty—that’s Socrates.

In one of the dialogues, Alcibiades tells us that, prior to Socrates, anyone we might meet, we could identify them in terms of some archetypal figure. We could say, “Well he’s a real Achilles,” or “She’s just like Penelope,” or whatever the case might be. We could find someone in myth or in mythical history whom anyone we know seemed to represent.

But, Alcibiades said we couldn’t do that with Socrates, because he was too unique. It was as if Socrates were the first true individual in the dominant culture.

And one of the things that was exceptional about Socrates was that his style of consciousness, his basic way of being, never changed. He was responsive to each given circumstance, each being he related with. But his style of consciousness remained the same.

Alcibiades had a few specific things in mind. For one thing, on the battlefield, when everyone else lost their minds in fear and panic, Socrates was clear, calm, fully present, and trying to take care of everyone else. He wouldn’t retreat into conquest consciousness, which has fear and aggression as two of its driving engines.

Alcibiades also had in mind that he thought, that if he got Socrates alone, Socrates would behave differently. But Socrates wouldn’t.

We can think here of the guru, teacher, or healer. Maybe a certain person works with psychedelics, maybe they teach yoga or meditation. And they talk a good and holy game in the ceremony space, or in the meditation hall or the yoga space. But when they find themselves alone with a student, they try to seduce that student, or allow that student to seduce them.

Socrates never did that, even though Alcibiades actively tried to get something to happen with Socrates. And he knew Socrates was in love with him. Socrates made no secret of that.

But when Alcibiades got Socrates alone, and tried to put the moves on, Socrates wouldn’t have it.

It’s a powerful lesson. Socrates wouldn’t allow his style of consciousness to shift like that.

He might have been perfectly fine if Alcibiades had been a very serious practitioner. If Alcibiades really wanted to change his life, if he could make the choice to relate with Socrates on the basis of wisdom, ethics, and a clear mind, then maybe Socrates might have accepted his advances.

But Socrates knew very well that this was all a game, and he wasn’t going to indulge it. Alcibiades functioned out of pride, craving, hope, fear, and other forms of ignorance and suffering. Socrates wouldn’t allow his mind to get pulled into that.

The more we think about these sorts of things, the more we can sense the revolution a holistic philosophy of life invites—and that includes an ethics of consciousness.

And the medicines of our World, including psychedelic medicines, can empower this kind of revolution, a revolution we very much need.

The revolution has to do with the fact that we habitually accept our consciousness as revealing things as they are.

We find out through psychedelics and other kinds of medicine that what we refer to as consciousness is actually not very conscious at all.

In a deep sense, what we refer to as consciousness is actually ignorance.

The medicines of our World can help reveal to us that the thing we have habitually thought of as consciousness is ignorance, and that somehow or other we have access to different states of being that prove themselves far more conducive to revealing the truth about the nature of our ignorance and the nature of reality. That’s their great potential.

But we can only realize the fullness of that benefit with a more holistic philosophy of life—including more awareness of the ethics of consciousness, which tells us that we don’t really understand everything from one or many overwhelming glimpses into other states.

And so we begin to realize that we have an ethical duty to cultivate—to actively cultivate—more skillful states of being—more skillful, more realistic, more creative, more peaceful, more joyful states of being in ourselves,

and that we also have an ethical duty to teach people how to work with these more skillful states of being for themselves. We have to learn to do that with our own mind—learn how to use our own mind, and learn our fuller capacities—not just have these states triggered in us. We have to learn how to work with our own experience, and learn how to spark back to life the development of our own consciousness.

That development has been interrupted by conquest consciousness, by the developmental patterning of the dominant culture. The medicines of our World can help us to spark back to life that development, and they can do this best if we work with them in the context of the medicine of instruction. The medicines of our World work best in wholeness, and the teachings of our wisdom traditions help us to move from and toward wholeness.

We have an ethical obligation to incorporate this into education, into teaching and learning at all levels, including the teaching and learning that of necessity must happen in relation to the medicines of our World—if those medicines can optimally heal us and the World at the same time.

This is a good place for a break.

Next time we’ll look at one of the most essential things I as a philosopher recommend for anyone working with the medicines of our World, including psychedelics.

If you have questions, reflections, or stories to share about the medicines of our World and your experiences with them, get in touch through dangerouswisdom.org We might be able to bring some of them into a future contemplation.

Until next time, this is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, reminding you that your soul and the soul of the World are not two things—take good care of them.