Psychedelic Philosophy: Plato, Divine Imagination, and the Ecodelic Extension of Consciousness

A couple of talks I gave as a graduate student a decade ago for the Entheogenic Research, Integration, and Education student group at CIIS

The Psychedelic Eucharist: Toward a Pharmacological Philosophy of Religion

Introduction by Natalie Metz:

“Matt is an amazing human being on so many levels, and he’s truly brilliant. I genuinely mean it when I say that I don’t know anyone else in the PCC program who can weave together the brilliance of philosophy across all ages the way Matt can. Those of you nodding your heads know it’s true—‘footnotes to Plato,’ that’s all I can say. Check out his blog; it’s pretty amazing.

Matt is a doctoral student in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program here, and his dissertation focuses on the role of imagination in the philosophical integration of scientific theory and religious myth. He’s the author of several articles and books—there’s quite a list—and, as I mentioned, check out footnotes2plato.com for his blog. Please welcome Matt.”

Matt’s Talk—The Psychedelic Eucharist: Toward a Pharmacological Philosophy of Religion

Good evening, everyone. Thanks, Natalie, for that warm introduction. Thanks to Jeff Krone for initially proposing the idea of having a night like this, where we could all share some ideas and learn from each other. Thanks to Larry and the whole ERIE crew for creating this space for us to be able to come together.

Also, thank you to Jeff and to Chad Harris for letting me go last, because it really helps me to be able to absorb the insights that you were sharing and incorporate them into what I have to say. We wanted to meet over the course of the last week several times and just couldn’t make it happen with our busy schedules, to make sure that our talks were coherent and able to hang together in a way that would synergize. And it turns out, even without us having met, a lot of what I have to say was already touched on in your presentations, as we’ll see as I go along here.

The title of my talk is The Psychedelic Eucharist, with the subtitle Toward a Pharmacological Philosophy of Religion. So that’s a mouthful—I’ll unpack all of that in a minute.

History and Context

History is—it’s always a story that we tell in the present in order to serve the needs of the present. And part of what I’m attempting to do here is offer an alternative version of the origins of Western philosophy and Western culture—Western consciousness, really—in ancient Greece. Because the typical story we are told, I think, serves the dominant paradigm, which—you know—we all learn in school. That democracy and science and rational thought and logic were all born in ancient Greece. And we value that heritage because of all of those things that we’ve gained from them. And it’s true that those great things—all things that we would associate with daytime consciousness, to be symbolic about it—did indeed come from Greece.

But what we are not taught in school—what we don’t learn as part of our origin story as Westerners—is that all of that stuff emerged in the context of a vibrant psychedelic religion. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle—all of the major thinkers and politicians. In fact, every Greek person, just about, living for about two or three thousand years was initiated into the Eleusinian Mystery Rites. And, you know, it’s pretty obvious why this more lunar or nighttime form of consciousness that would have been fostered by these experiences—it’s pretty clear why that would be suppressed, why we would erase that from our history, because it certainly doesn’t serve the dominant narratives of our industrial, capitalist world.

So I’m going to try to tell an alternative version of this history and do that by giving a sort of alternative reading of Plato—of his philosophy, of Platonism. So, rather than Plato the rationalist, I’m going to offer a vision of Plato as the psychedelic initiate, so that we can, as Westerners, reclaim our psychedelic roots.

What Are Psychedelics?

Just to sort of kick things off here in a simple way: What are psychedelics? It’s such a fun question to ask. I’m sure everyone here has their own exciting, unique answer to that question.

You know, I choose the word “psychedelic” only because, I don’t know, it rolls off my tongue nicely. And it was coined, of course, by Humphrey Osmond in a letter that he wrote to Aldous Huxley in the ’50s, I believe. It means mind-manifesting or soul-manifesting—or soul-making, you might even say. And I chose this term as opposed to “entheogen,” which I—you know—I agree with the need to resituate these chemical substances in a more sacramental context. I think that’s important. “Psychedelic” doesn’t necessarily convey that as well as “entheogen.” But this idea of manifesting the divine within, I think, leaves out something important about the psychedelic experience, which is that it also allows us to become aware of and sensitive to the divine without—outside of us.

So it’s not just about the inner experience. I think that tends to lend support to those who would want to describe these substances as hallucinogens—as though when you take these chemicals, it’s only your inner experience that’s being altered, and that has nothing to do with the nature of reality itself outside you. I think it does have something to do with that. These experiences are revelatory of the nature of reality. So we shouldn’t just think of them as changing our inner experience. They’re also changing what we think of as the outside environment.

Psychedelics as Access to Divine Imagination

So, what are psychedelics? I think psychedelics are substances that, when smoked, snorted, chewed, injected, or transdermally absorbed through our skin, they allow us to participate in and make us aware of what you might call the Divine Imagination.

We’re probably all students of Terence McKenna here, so I’m going to allow him to unpack this notion of the Divine Imagination for us a little bit. He says—and this is from the trilogues that he did with Rupert Sheldrake and Ralph Abraham at Esalen—McKenna says:

“I think of the Divine Imagination as the class of all things, both possible and beautiful, in a kind of reverse Platonism.”

This notion of reversed or inverted Platonism will come up again in a minute. So McKenna goes on to equate Divine Imagination with chaos—and he’s speaking mythically there, in terms of the Divine presence of chaos as invoked by Hesiod. And McKenna wants to make sure that we understand that chaos is not the enemy of order, but the birthplace of order.

McKenna also says psychedelics somehow change our channel from the evolutionary important channel—giving traffic, weather, and stock market reports—to the one playing the classical music of an alien civilization. In other words, we tend to tune into the channel that has a big payback in the immediate world, or normal consciousness is tuned to that channel. It seems obvious to me that there are channels of the imagination that are not so tailored for human consumption.

The Divine Imagination, then, is the reality behind the appearances of our everyday consciousness. The appearances of our everyday consciousness are simply our local slice of the Divine Imagination. He goes on to say that what psychedelics reveal is so intense and extreme an example that it argues strongly that the imagination is not the human imagination at all. Psychedelic experience at its most intense levels goes beyond the terms of human imagination. It seems rather to enter an ontological reality of its own—one that the human being is privileged to observe briefly.

To my mind, the Divine Imagination is the source of all creativity—in our dreams, in our psychedelic experiences, in the jungles, in the currents of the ocean, and in the organization of protozoan and microbial life. So the Divine Imagination is this sort of plenum or substratum of potentials that haven’t yet actualized, but that could actualize. It’s a realm of possibilities. And when we ingest the substances that we call psychedelic, or entheogenic, or—Richard Doyle has a great term—ecodelics, emphasizing the way in which they open us to the environment and not just to our inner experience, what we’re doing is, as Jeff said, we’re opening the sensory gates of the thalamus and allowing all of this information to pour in that we wouldn’t otherwise be conscious of.

And with the right dosage, that information reaches such a pitch that we could describe it as participating in the Divine Imagination. And what McKenna is saying is that the human imagination actually opens out into this wider, Divine—or you could say cosmic—imagination or creative principle.

The Eucharist: Why the Psychedelic Eucharist?

Of course, the Eucharist is another name for communion. It’s a ritual that is still practiced by Christianity to this day, but it has very, very ancient roots. In fact, it could be the most ancient—at least in terms of the rituals that survive—one of the most ancient rituals that we still know about. The Christians appropriated it from the Eleusinian Mystery Rites, who appropriated it from Crete and other civilizations, which practiced these goddess-worshiping fertility rites.

When they were practiced on the island of Crete, up until around 1500 BCE, they were public—they were celebrated out in the open, in the streets. When the Mycenaeans came in and conquered them and brought their patriarchal culture, these goddess celebrations, these fertility rites, had to go underground. And that’s what became the Eleusinian Mystery Rites. They were an attempt to preserve the experience, the transcendence, and also the immanent—or “inscendent,” to use one of Thomas Berry’s words that kind of blends the transcendent and the imminent—to try to preserve those powerful experiences in a secret context so that the watchful eyes of the patriarchs couldn’t see them, couldn’t find them, couldn’t destroy them.

In invoking the Eucharist, and ritual in general, I’m trying to re-situate psychedelics in the context of these ritual practices—these communal experiences, very intentionally designed experiences that help human beings confront their fear of death, ultimately.

Socrates and the Birth of Philosophy

Let’s move back to philosophy for a second. This is a painting of Socrates about to drink a heroic dose of hemlock. He knows it’s going to be an intense trip—so intense that he will never, in fact, return to be the ego known as Socrates in that body. But he’s ready for it. You notice all of his students around him—they’re crying. They must not have been initiated into the Eleusinian Mystery Rites, because part of that experience, as Socrates understood it, really allowed you to relinquish your fear of death. It gives you a glimpse of the other side; it allows you to die before—it’s a death before death, so to speak. It allows you to die before your body dies. The soul experiences death before the body dies, such that one relinquishes that existential fear of death.

Socrates is actually quite excited to drink that. He’s lived his life already here on Earth, and he’s ready to experience the next great adventure. What we’re witnessing here, in this event as it was depicted by Plato in one of his dialogues, is really, I think, the birth of philosophy. The birth of philosophy is the death of Socrates. Socrates famously said that philosophizing is learning to die.

So it’s very clear, then, the links between the origins of philosophy, Socrates’ teaching, and the main insights that are gained through the experience of the Eleusinian Mystery Rites.

Psychedelics, Groundlessness, and the Divine Imagination

One of the things that I think the psychedelic experience reveals to us is the lack of any solid foundation or ground upon which our experience rests. We come to see that the ego is actually—not really what we think it is. It’s not an enduring, substantial entity that we have in an unchanging way throughout our lives. In many ways, the ego is a reflection of other people’s experience of us. And what we think of as the physical world is really far more energetic and vibrant and active than our normal, everyday waking consciousness allows us to perceive.

So I think one of the main insights of psychedelics is it reveals the groundlessness of reality. Again, in allowing us to participate in the Divine Imagination, we’re no longer so focused on what’s already actual, but on what’s possible. And in our positive experiences on psychedelics, we really do begin to realize how easily we could transform the world overnight, because we’re able to see those possibilities and see how easily they could be manifested. And then we come down, of course, and realize how much hard work it’s going to take to do that. But nonetheless, we glimpsed those ideas, those possibilities. Without glimpsing them, we wouldn’t even start trying to manifest them.

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave Revisited

Everyone, I hope, knows about Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. I’m going to talk a little bit about this and then offer an alternative reading of it compared to the one we normally think Plato was trying to offer us.

In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, found in his dialogue The Republic, he uses a metaphor to illustrate his ontology—his theory of reality. He asks us to imagine people chained up in a cave. They were born in this cave and have never seen the outside. In front of them, there is a wall, and they are forced to look at shadows on the wall created by an elite caste of rulers. These rulers cast shadows by holding objects in front of a fire that burns behind the chained prisoners.

The prisoners, never having known anything else, invent a language to describe these shadows, thinking of them as real. They hear the voices of the people behind them reflecting off the wall, reinforcing their belief that this shadow world is the totality of reality.

Now Socrates, speaking in the dialogue, asks us to imagine if one of these prisoners were to break free. If they turned around to face the fire, at first, their eyes would hurt—it would be painful to adjust to the brightness. Over time, however, they might make their way up and out of the cave. When they finally emerged into the outside world, they would be disoriented at first. But as they adjusted, they would see the sun in the sky, the stars at night, and experience a revelatory awakening—a noetic illumination.

The traditional interpretation of the Allegory of the Cave is that it illustrates Plato’s theory of the forms. In this reading, the physical, sensory world that we experience through our bodies is an illusion—an illusion of an illusion. There is a double distance between our experience of the physical world and the actual, true forms or ideas that exist in heaven, which inform this physical world.

Plato suggests that when we see things with our physical senses and reflect on them, we develop abstract ways of thinking about the physical world—laws of physics, mathematics, and so on. But these abstractions aren’t the ultimate reality either. There is an even higher reality behind these laws, manifesting them. This is why, in the traditional reading, what we perceive with our senses is considered to be twice removed from ultimate reality.

An Alternative Reading: Aesthetic Ontology

Now, if we invert Plato—as McKenna invites us to—we can see how the Allegory of the Cave might articulate not a dualistic theory of reality, where there is a realm of eternal, divine forms separated from a corrupt sensory world, but rather an aesthetic ontology. This would be an ontology that celebrates the sensory world, the appearances, as an expression of a deeper creative play.

One of the first insights I had on psychedelics was this recognition that reality is not built on a solid ground but is a series of veils. You pull back one veil, and you find another. Pull back that one, and another appears. And you don’t ever arrive at some ultimate ground. But what becomes clear is that the nature of the source—of whatever we might call the divine—is such that it loves to veil itself. It loves to be concealed so that it can be unveiled. Because isn’t that fun?

What this aesthetic ontology suggests, I think, is a way of understanding reality not as some fixed, ultimate truth to be uncovered, but as an endless process of unveiling and creating. It’s appearances all the way down. And that’s not a failure of reality; it’s part of its beauty. The truth, then, isn’t in escaping these appearances but in engaging with them, celebrating them, and participating in the divine play.

Play, Ritual, and the Role of the Psychedelic Eucharist

This brings me to the importance of play. Plato himself took play very seriously. He said that human beings are the playthings of the gods, and to connect with the gods, we need to take play seriously. What is play? It’s entering into a space where the normal rules of everyday life no longer apply—a space where our actions are an end in themselves, rather than a means to some utilitarian goal.

Rituals, at their best, are forms of serious play. They create a space outside of ordinary time and ordinary life, where we can step into the eternal. Traditionally, rituals allowed us to celebrate life, to confront death, and to engage with the divine on a deep level. But today, rituals—particularly in contexts like the Christian church—have lost much of their transformative power. Communion, for example, no longer includes the potent, mind-altering substances that once made these rituals so powerful.

As McKenna said, “Psychedelics are not metaphors for sacraments; they are real sacraments.” Their ability to transform consciousness can have profound personal and even political consequences. The Eleusinian Mysteries, for instance, were a nine-day festival that drew people from across Greece. The rituals involved multiple levels of initiation, culminating in a transformative, entheogenic experience that allowed participants to confront their fear of death and emerge reborn.

The Myth of Demeter and Persephone

Central to the Eleusinian Mysteries was the myth of Demeter and Persephone. Persephone, while wandering in a field of flowers, is lured into Hades and becomes trapped in the underworld. Her mother, Demeter, searches for her for nine days, pleading with Zeus to intervene. When Zeus finally agrees, Hermes is sent to retrieve Persephone. But because Persephone ate a few pomegranate seeds in Hades, she is bound to spend one-third of the year in the underworld and only two-thirds above with the gods.

This myth symbolized the seasonal cycles of growth, decay, and regeneration. It illustrated the parallel between the cycles of plant life and human life, teaching initiates to see death not as an end but as part of a continuous process of rebirth. By confronting death symbolically in the mysteries, participants were able to relinquish their fear of it and engage more fully in life as a playful, creative celebration.

Audience Q&A

Question 1: How did Greek culture shift so rapidly from shamanism and animism to rationality? Was the Mycenaeans invasion critical to this process?

Answer: The Mycenaeans invasion likely played a role in this transition, but I think the adoption of the alphabet was even more transformative. Plato, living during this transitional period, recognized the effects the alphabet was having on society. Writing externalized memory, shifting consciousness away from oral traditions. In Homeric Greece, for example, poets performed epic myths entirely from memory—an astonishing feat of embodied cognition. Plato himself, despite being a brilliant writer, expressed concerns about writing, suggesting it weakened memory and could never capture true teachings. His dialogues were public-facing; his deepest teachings, he insisted, could only be transmitted face-to-face. David Abram’s book The Spell of the Sensuous is an excellent resource on this topic.

Question 2: What are your thoughts on creativity and co-creation in the field of play?

Answer: Play absolutely enhances creativity. When we step into a relaxed, playful space, we access a field of possibilities that are unavailable in our normal problem-solving mindset. This applies not only to human creativity but to life itself. Evolutionary biologists struggle to explain play because it doesn’t seem to have an immediate survival function. But play allows life to explore potentialities, fostering creativity and evolution.

Question 3: Why does existence exist?

Answer: I think your comment earlier gives a good answer: If the divine were simply all one, without difference or separation, it would be uninteresting—there’d be no one to play with. The appearance of separation allows for engagement and relationship, and even if we realize it’s ultimately an appearance, that recognition deepens our play rather than canceling it. The purpose of existence, then, is to celebrate and participate in this creative play.

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Psychedelics and the Extended Mind Thesis: The Ecology of Consciousness

Introduction by Natalie Metz:

“Next up, we have Matt Segall. He’s going to be talking about psychedelics and the extended mind thesis: the ecology of consciousness. Matt is a doctoral student here in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program, and he also works here at CIIS, wearing many hats. Both Matt and Chad have been incredibly pivotal in organizing a camp at Burning Man called Cosmicopia, which many of us in this room have had the opportunity to experience together. At this camp, we offer astrology and healing arts to the Burning Man community, so they wear lots of hats and do lots of things.

Matt’s undergraduate work was in cognitive science at the University of Central Florida, and he is the author of several articles. One he asked me to highlight—because he thinks you might find it particularly interesting—is ‘Participatory Psychedelia: Transpersonal Theory, Religious Studies, and Chemically Altered (a.k.a. Alchemical) Consciousness,’ published in the Journal of Transpersonal Research in 2014. I also highly recommend checking out his blog, footnotes2plato.com. Now, without further ado, here’s our wizard.”

Matt’s talk—Psychedelics and the Extended Mind Thesis: The Ecology of Consciousness

Good evening, everyone. Thanks for coming out tonight. I know Chad already asked, but I was sitting over there and didn’t get a good look—how many of you were at the last PCC event in September?

[Audience reaction: Very few raise their hands.]

Hello? Almost nobody? Well, good thing I’m not trying to build on that talk.

So tonight, I’m going to talk about psychedelics and the extended mind thesis. My aim is to articulate how human consciousness can be ecologized, particularly in light of the ecological crisis we face. This crisis is forcing us to reimagine the way we inhabit the Earth and the way we think of ourselves. I believe psychedelics play a crucial role in this process of reimagination.

I’ll also try to build on some of what Chad discussed earlier by offering a perspective on archetypal astrology that’s grounded in cognitive science—specifically, in a paradigm that has emerged over the last 20 years or so. For the modern and postmodern mind, astrology often seems implausible; as Rick Tarnas frequently points out, it’s considered the gold standard of superstition in our culture. My goal is to propose an alternative angle that could help make sense of the relationship between the human psyche and our wider interplanetary ecology.

Building on Two Thinkers

To explore this, I’ll be building on the work of two thinkers: Richard Doyle and Andy Clark.

Richard Doyle is the author of Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noosphere. He builds on Terence McKenna’s idea that humans have been in a symbiotic, co-evolutionary relationship with psychedelics for hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of years.

Andy Clark, a cognitive scientist and philosopher, has developed the extended mind thesis. I’ll start with Clark’s ideas and then connect them to Richard Doyle’s.

The Extended Mind Thesis

The extended mind thesis challenges the traditional view of cognition. Standard cognitive science has long attempted to understand how humans think by focusing on neural activity—essentially treating the brain as a kind of computer. In this framework, the brain is viewed as an isolated processor that creates internal representations or models of an external world. This perspective has driven research in artificial intelligence, which aimed to replicate human cognition by building computers capable of symbolically representing the world internally.

But this approach largely failed. Why? Because the computational power required to represent the world accurately inside a system is immense—too immense, in fact. Further research into how humans actually think and navigate the world revealed that cognition isn’t confined to the brain. Instead, it relies heavily on embodiment and skillful adaptation to the environment. Human cognition also depends on artifacts and technologies in the environment to augment its processes.

For example, consider how we do long division. With a pen and paper, we can divide any number by another if given a few minutes. Without those tools, the task becomes almost impossible. Similarly, think about smartphones. I don’t know about you, but I don’t remember phone numbers anymore—my phone does that for me. I don’t remember my calendar either; my phone handles that as well. These external memory devices now carry tasks that our minds once had to perform internally.

Clark highlights how technological developments have shaped our cognitive capacities. For instance, Chad earlier showed us a mandala of human evolution, which you can trace alongside shifts in media technologies:

• In primal cultures, speech, song, and drums were the primary tools of communication—these were oral cultures.

• In the archaic period (think ancient Egypt and the Pharaohs), hieroglyphic scripts emerged. These character-based languages maintained some relationship of similarity between the written pictures and the objects they represented.

• In the axial age, alphabets emerged, marking a greater abstraction. Words in alphabetic languages bear no direct resemblance to what they represent. This abstraction enabled linear thought and history but also alienated us further from the living world.

• In the modern era, the printing press empowered individuality. People could sit alone, read political pamphlets, and spark revolutions. Ideas spread more quickly than ever, breaking the monopoly of oral tradition.

• Finally, in the postmodern era, electronic media—radio, then television—drastically transformed consciousness. Radio gave rise to mass movements like fascism by enabling demagogues to address entire nations at once. Television during the Vietnam War broadcast images of carnage, igniting widespread protest movements.

And now? We live in the internet age. It’s difficult to predict how this new technology is reshaping consciousness, but the changes are undeniable.

Beyond Technology: The Ecological Mind

Andy Clark tends to focus on how technology extends the mind, but in all the material I’ve read from him, he seems to overlook a more primary form of mind extension: the ecological. Terence McKenna, as Richard Doyle builds on, points out that human beings have been in a co-evolutionary relationship with various plants and fungi—psychedelic ones in particular—for hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions. These relationships have played a significant role in the development of our symbolic capacities, our neurochemical structures, and even our very sense of self.

Doyle offers his own take on the extended mind thesis, emphasizing these ecological relationships. He writes:

“Consciousness is a nonlinear and highly distributed system, not ownable by a self and navigable only through its practice, but always irreducible. Dissolution—the sometimes shattering detachment from distinctness—precedes the state in which a sense of interior and exterior dissolves in awareness and awe. This awareness of interconnection occurs in and with what Vernadsky [Vladimir Vernadsky, a Russian scientist] dubbed the noosphere—the aware and conscious layer of the Earth’s ecosystem—and perhaps feeds back onto our ecosystems as we become conscious of our interconnections with them.”

Doyle suggests that psychedelics can function as a cognitive prosthetic, much like Andy Clark’s technologies, but with a critical difference. Psychedelics don’t act as external add-ons. Instead, they tap into an ancient, intrinsic relationship between humans and their ecological environment.

Psychedelics: An Ancient Cognitive Prosthetic

You could call psychedelics a form of cognitive prosthetic, using Andy Clark’s terminology. They extend our mind beyond the usual limits of perception and cognition. But, unlike smartphones or written language, psychedelics aren’t just tools we developed recently. They’ve been integral to our evolutionary history, shaping the very structures of our neurochemistry. The neurotransmitters produced by many psychedelic plants and fungi are nearly identical to those endogenous to the human brain. This biochemical mirroring suggests a profound co-evolutionary relationship.

When we ingest psychedelics, they dissolve the boundaries of the ego. Alan Watts describes this as breaking down the “skin-encapsulated ego.” This dissolution reveals the often terrifying extent of our interconnectedness with the environment around us. These experiences aren’t simply metaphors—they’re direct, visceral encounters with the truth of our ecological embeddedness.

The Role of Psychedelics in the Ecological Crisis

In the context of the current ecological crisis, this recognition of interconnectedness is vital. The denial and repression of our interdependence with the natural world have fueled mass extinction, climate change, and widespread environmental destruction. Psychedelics can help us confront what we’ve been unconscious of—what we’ve actively avoided acknowledging.

This isn’t to suggest that psychedelics are a simple or easy cure-all. But they can be a powerful intervention, one that forces us to reckon with the reality of our situation and to begin the process of transformation.

As Chad mentioned earlier, part of what we need to overcome is the anthropocentric worldview that places humans at the center of creation. This idea—that we are special, separate, and superior to other life forms—has led us into our current crisis. Historically, we’ve seen ourselves as just a rung below angels, and one above the animals. We’ve imagined that we came from heaven and ended up on Earth as part of some divine test, as though this planet were just a stage or background scenery. That worldview must be relinquished if we’re to survive. Humanity and the Earth Community are not two.

Ritual Contexts and Cultural Containers

Of course, taking psychedelics alone isn’t enough. These substances need to be used within ritual contexts, spiritual containers, and cultural frameworks that help us interpret and integrate the experiences. Many of us—including myself—are suspicious of institutions, especially institutionalized religion. But institutions are how cultures endure. Without them, it’s difficult to preserve, refine, and share collective wisdom. Our challenge is to create new forms of institutions that honor this ecological consciousness while avoiding the pitfalls of dogmatism and rigidity.

The work that CIIS and organizations like it are doing—creating spaces for dialogue, exploration, and innovation—represents one way forward.

Ernst Jünger and the Non-Human Spirit

Richard Doyle quotes Ernst Jünger in Darwin’s Pharmacy:

“If we recognize the plant—or any non-human organism—as an autonomous power which enters in order to put roots and flowers in us, then we distance ourselves by several degrees from the skewed perspective which imagines that spirit (or mind) is the monopoly of human beings and doesn’t exist outside of them. A new world picture has to follow the planetary leveling—that is the task which the next century will take up.”

This recognition challenges the anthropocentric assumption that only humans possess mind or consciousness. Instead, it calls for a new worldview—one that situates human beings as part of a larger, planetary ecosystem of intelligence and agency.

Anthropocentrism and Anthropodecentrism

I’ve coined a term for this shift: anthropodecentrism. It’s the opposite of anthropocentrism. Rather than placing humans at the center of the cosmos, anthropodecentrism foregrounds the wider community of life on Earth—and even the cosmos itself. This doesn’t mean dismissing the unique role of humans. We are, undeniably, a planetary force. If humans disappeared tomorrow, the planetary ecosystem might suffer unpredictable consequences because of the complex feedback loops we’ve created. We’ve so thoroughly transformed the Earth that even our absence would cause chaos.

So, while we need to recognize our interconnectedness and take a step back from human exceptionalism, we must also take responsibility for our unique power and impact.

Extending Consciousness to the Cosmos

Now, here’s the next step, which may feel like a bit of a leap for some of you. If we accept that consciousness is ecological—if it extends beyond the human skull to include our environment—then perhaps we can entertain the idea that this extension goes even further. The ecological extension of human consciousness might reach beyond the surface of the Earth to encompass the entire solar system.

If Gaia—planet Earth—is a conscious being, as many ancient cultures believed, then perhaps other planets are as well. This is the theory I’m proposing for your consideration.