Tripping for the Real: Breaking the Mechanical Trance

For nearly 2,000 years, the most prominent figures of the ancient world made a 14-mile pilgrimage out of Athens to a sanctuary at Eleusis. They walked the Sacred Way, fasted for days, and stood together in a dark, stone hall. At the height of the ceremony, they drank a mysterious brew called kykeon—a mix of barley, water, and pennyroyal. Every person who drank from that cup came out radically changed, claiming to have lost their fear of death and learned to live with joy.

Recent research suggests the secret to this profound transformation was remarkably mundane. By boiling ergot-infected barley in wood ash lye—a completely ordinary household substance found in any ancient kitchen—the toxic elements of the fungus were broken apart. What remained was LSA, a powerful psychedelic compound. An ordinary kitchen act produced an extraordinary, paradigm-shattering rupture.

Today, as a Regenerative and Dharma practitioner, I am constantly battling my own mechanical trance—the relentless, monotonous grind of an extractive existence. To do this work, to actually tune into the living capacity of my local ecology, I have needed a reminder of my own ruptures.

I have sought these breaks in various forms. Three-month solitary meditation retreats offers a necessary silence that briefly shatters the noise of my formatory mind. Occasionally acid tripping with friends has served as a temporary, vital mechanism to break my mind free from the daily grind. A friend of mine often points to how his Ayahuasca journeys alongside shamans have fundamentally dismantled and reshaped how he perceives the living world. These catalysts tear the veil, forcing me to experience a reality far larger than my daily habits.

Over decades of exploring meditation, mindfulness, and lucid dreaming, the tangible reality of these altered states has only deepened in me. While dropping acid was my first undeniable spiritual experience, I found that learning to sit in meditation and navigate lucid dreams eventually unlocked even stronger, more sustained encounters with 'the Real.' I noticed missing a daily sit allowed the mechanical trance to creep back in. This realisation is currently stirring a fierce will within me—not just to anchor these states more rigorously into my own daily and weekly rhythms, but to eventually introduce these specific capacities to others in this field or to simply listen to what others have been discovering. I believe intense creative pursuits, challenging adventures like walking NZ’s Te Araroa Trail, profound grief and getting your hands deep in the soil of your local ecology can also break the mechanical trance.

However, there is a heavy friction here. In our professional, public spaces, these profound catalysts are often treated as taboo. We sanitise our spoken words, politely discuss systems change, and leave our most paradigm-shattering visions at the door.

I think it is time I changed the temperature of the room and provided space for a campfire.

Let’s share what is usually forbidden in public discourse, the raw, unedited dirt of our altered states:

• The profound visions that completely rewired understanding of living systems.
• The terrifying "bad trips" that burned away illusions of control and forced surrender.
• The slow, tectonic shifts that regular meditation or other committed practices have carved into daily experience over time.

If we are truly committed to generating systemic wealth and living capacity, we cannot afford to ignore the very tools that break us out of the machine. What was the specific catalyst or vision that first shattered the mechanical trance for you, and how has it continued to shape your first-line work in the dirt of your local ecology?

See you at a campfire,

Ākāśadāka