Taney Roniger, Aperture, 2023, charcoal and graphite on watercolor paper, 40″ x 94″.

There’s a story that an artist friend of mine likes to tell about an experience he had in Ghana. He had gone there to develop a body of work based on a feature of the natural landscape, and to assist in the project he had hired some local villagers. Shortly after arriving, he noticed that all of his assistants carried around a small artifact: a beautifully carved figurine of sorts, which, being pulled from the pocket periodically throughout the day, was held aloft and beheld with a curious reverence. After a week or so of bearing witness to this ritual, my friend asked the men about the significance of the little artworks. “Art?” they responded, clearly perplexed. My friend pointed to a pocket. “Oh no, that’s not art,” one man said. “That’s our medicine.”

To Western ears (and indeed these are the ears upon which the tale typically falls), it’s the word medicine that makes the story striking. Striking and moving, for my friend’s telling is usually met with wordless murmurs and nods. In our culture there’s some talk about art’s relation to healing, but for the most part it is considered a leisure activity: something that comes – if it comes at all – after the serious business of living has been done. Medicine, by contrast, is the stuff of real life. Resonant with gravitas, the word’s use in this context delivers a double charge: first signaling the presence of some kind of need or deficiency, it then invests art with the power to treat the affliction. Both leave the Western mind flummoxed. But I suspect that for those of us who find the Ghana story moving, our response is ultimately one of recognition; despite art’s marginal status in our culture, perhaps we know on some level that it is necessary for us too, and that there is thus in our cultural consciousness an unattended wound. Out of deference to my ignorance of Ghanaian culture (I can’t possibly know what these objects mean there), it is what the story suggests about us that I want to explore.

If art is for us an unacknowledged medicine, two questions beg answers: First, what kind of medicine is it, and second, what, indeed, is the disease? One thing we can say with some confidence is that art is probably not going to shrink any tumors or stabilize anyone’s glucose levels. If we think of this kind of medicine first it is likely because of what the word means in our culture – namely, something that treats pathologies of the body, often by targeting symptoms rather than the systemic conditions that give rise to them. Given the dominance of the reductionist model, it’s easy to forget that things have ever been otherwise. But the fact is that for most of human history medicine has been intimately connected with psychospiritual wellness (“has been” because in many places it still is). Even here in the West it was not so long ago that medicine men (and, presumably, women) treated not just ailing bodies but also ailing souls: people who had become alienated from larger sources of meaning. While we do have psychiatry and its affiliate fields, the mainstream variants of these say nothing of the soul, concerning themselves instead with pathologies of brain chemistry and disorders specific to trauma or neurosis. If art is a kind of medicine, it is likely to be the kind that has been with us for millennia: a kind of psychospiritual agent that acts on needing souls. (For those uncomfortable with the word, by soul I simply mean that part of the self-concerned with larger-than-self sources of meaning.)

But it is the second question – the one about the disease – that brings us fully into the matter. For here is where things start to vex the Western mind; although we might be willing to accept that there is something healing about art, is the healing that art does responding to a need? Bluntly stated: who’s to say we’re broken to begin with? In pursuing this question, a curious parallel presents itself – one that takes us into a corner of Western medicine itself, and one that, in what it has to tell us about the human psyche, warrants what might seem a considerable detour.

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Taney Roniger, Eclipse #1, 2023, charcoal and graphite on watercolor paper, 51″ x 86″.

Right now in this country and in many places in Europe, there is something of an underground revolution occurring. It goes by various names, but the main thrust is the rediscovery, after fifty years of suppression and criminalization, of the powerful healing potential of psychedelic substances (which has, it must be said, been common knowledge in indigenous cultures for as long as there have been cultures). Working in the margins of mainstream medicine, a growing number of researchers are seeking to recover this potential for Western sufferers. Fueling the movement is the fact that trial results have been overwhelmingly positive, with many patients claiming to have had life-altering, psycho-spiritual experiences. If art is also a kind of psychospiritual agent (albeit one taken in by the senses rather than ingested chemically), a look at how and why these chemicals work might shed some light on our question.

In the vast literature emerging, one thing upon which there seems to be a consensus is that these chemicals don’t give us something we don’t already have; rather, what they do is suppress something. (It’s worth noting here the literal meaning of “psychedelic,” which is “mind manifesting,” not mind altering.) What they suppress is what is known as the default mode network, or the patterns of thought we fall into when not attending to something outside ourselves (which is, as the name suggests, most of the time). It is what Michael Pollan has described as the “seat of the ego”: an inner executive whose chief function is the maintenance of boundaries – those between self and world and those between the conscious and unconscious realms of the mind. With this function of the mind suspended, several remarkable things happen. The first is that the world rushes in; one experiences, in vivid richness, all that the mind is always perceiving but that, being irrelevant to the ego, is denied entry into ordinary consciousness. Green erupts into infinitely many greens. Sounds intensify, details become crystalline. Turning inward toward the self, the mind makes new connections and reshuffles contexts, leading to new understandings of oneself and one’s life. Finally, but not least, the majority of people report having some kind of unitive experience: a felt awareness of one’s continuity with a larger whole, be it nature, cosmos, God, or simply world. This dissolution of the self is so central to the experience that the word ecodelic has been suggested as a complement to the standard term. If “psychedelic” covers the inward-oriented aspect of the experience, “ecodelic” speaks to the expansive turning-outward: the move into an awareness of one’s interbeing with the world.

It is this ecodelic aspect that is of interest to us here. But before we return to art, we still need to know why these experiences are healing: Why do shifts into nonordinary states of consciousness heal psychic wounds? That this appears to be the case raises an interesting possibility. Could it be that it’s not so much the individual wounds that the experience heals but rather a pathology of ordinary consciousness itself – in other words, something we all share? That every known culture has pursued non-ordinary states, whether by way of plant medicines or chanting or breathwork or dance, seems to offer support for the hypothesis. For rather than attributing this universality to a human yen for intoxication, it may just as well be that somewhere in the human mind lies an awareness of a fundamental psychic truth: the truth that ordinary consciousness, if it is to remain healthy, needs supplementation by something else. What psychedelic substances do, then, is force the issue: By disabling the ego’s inhibitory function, the self reclaims its native expansiveness, and in so doing regains the capacity to heal itself. The experience is temporary, of course, and so it must be, for we rely on the inner executive to function normally in the world. But having had regions of the mind activated that usually lie dormant, one emerges changed. In the most profound cases, one’s understanding of the world has shifted. Indeed, in these cases there has been a genuinely transformative spiritual experience, or what Gregory Bateson has described as “an involuntary shift in deep unconscious epistemology.”[1] Essentially it is a shift from a merely expedient way of knowing (ego consciousness) to a way of knowing that is consonant with the relational nature of our world.

What, then, is the “disease” in need of treatment? It would be too facile to suggest that the ego is the disease, for clearly, we cannot function without a sense of self. Rather than the ego per se, perhaps the disease is the ego’s tendency to occlude other aspects of the self – to come to seem, in its tenacity, the whole rather than a part. Twofold creatures in so many ways, we may well have a need for a fundamental twoness of experience. Like a lens shifting between equally necessary foci, the mind may need, to achieve its full potential, two modes of experience: self-experienced as separate and bounded, and self-dissolved and continuous with the world.

What we’re calling the disease – this tendency of the ego to get stuck in the narrow mode — is a human problem. Different cultures will have different ways of addressing it, depending on the degree of their awareness of its existence. In our culture, however, the situation seems most peculiar. For if we think about the dominant model of what mental health means here, we find that it runs directly counter to these ideas. Here, mental health is measured in terms of autonomy, individuation, agency, and control – in short, in terms of the degree of the strength of the ego. According to this model, ego dissolution is the disease, which, along with their unfortunate cooption by the 1960s counterculture, helps explain the demonization of psychedelics that has led to their criminal status. Now add to this a social environment that rewards selfhood at every turn (what is a hit on social media if not a reinforcement of the self?), and there is little incentive for the ego to release its stranglehold on the mind. For us, then, the disease is compound: it is both the tendency of the self to stay locked in the ego, and, abetted by a conspiracy of powerful external forces, its refusal to acknowledge that there is anything else. If we had to choose one word to describe our current moment, we might indeed call it egodelic.

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Taney Roniger, Three Dissolving, 2023, charcoal and graphite on watercolor paper, 51″ x 86″.

Given the ego’s current reign over our culture, it has been suggested by some that we all need psychedelics. But if it’s the ecological aspect of psychedelics that is the antidote to ego, surely there are other means of achieving a similar end. For taken literally, ecodelic can refer to anything that makes ecological truths manifest, be it a profound experience in nature, witnessing an act of extraordinary empathy — or, indeed, standing before a great work of art. Art as ecodelic experience: does this not resonate? For essentially what we’re talking about is an experience of deep attention to otherness: a kind of radical unselfing by which one enters into communion. Is this not what the best art does? 

Think about the last time you were stunned to silence by art. For me it was a show of Ad Reinhardt’s paintings. Standing before these glowing, mysterious presences I had a distinct feeling of self-dissolution, of becoming smaller and smaller before something momentous. It was not self-diminution only, however, for as I allowed my sense of self to be eclipsed by the work, whatever was left opened up and was absorbed into a wordless vastness. The feeling was, moreover, saturated in rightness; it was as if I’d been granted access to a deeper truth normally denied me. I had become dilated, open to the world, continuous with it.  Returning home, I recalled my friend’s Ghana story. Yes, I thought, I had taken the medicine.

And then, of course, ordinary life interrupted. An errand needed my attention, and I once again contracted. But with the experience lodged deep in my body, I had been, however subtly, changed.

Very well, you might say, but not all art is Reinhardt. Very true; great art is far rarer than the mediocre kind. It’s also true that not all art aspires to be ecodelic, that in fact the majority of today’s art has other concerns altogether. This is quite so. But I suspect there is another reason we are rarely offered this experience, and this has to do with today’s model of what it means to be an artist. It should come as no surprise that here too we find ego. For what is the given role of the artist today if not that of an individual agent striving for personal success? Left unexamined, our models come to seem natural – situations arisen of necessity that could not have been otherwise. But in this case we know this to be untrue. Anyone who has studied art knows that it, like medicine, had its origins in the sacred, or at the very least in ritual practice performed in and for community. If we were to recognize that the ecodelic experience is a vital part of being human, might artists begin to question the inherited model? Further, if artists were to recognize that there is an unmet need for this experience, might they begin to identify as medicine makers of sorts – not in a grandiose sense, but in the more humble one that implies service? Finally, were all this the case, might artists then feel not just a renewed sense of cultural relevance but also a newfound sense of responsibility?

Taney Roniger, Nine Hovering, 2023, charcoal and graphite on watercolor paper, 51″ x 90″.

But there is an even more compelling reason to contemplate such a shift, this one having to do with those on the receiving end of art. Were we to ask art enthusiasts if they need art to be medicine, they may well say no thank you, we’re not suffering, we just want to be entertained. But more truth is found in bodies than in words. When we look at what today’s bodies do, what do we find? We find the vast majority of them performing a curious ritual. It involves a small artifact that is carried around in the pocket. With all the zeal of the converted, the bodies seize upon the thing again and again, grasping and fondling it as if it would deliver them. As they peer into its tiny screen, we can imagine the dopamine hit we know all too well, the bodies’ egos growing larger and larger as the hits accumulate. An alien dropped into this scene might reach the following conclusion: given these humans’ obvious reverence for these things, and given the intensity with which they attend to them, these little devices must be devotional objects: incarnations of some entity before which they stand small. Why then, this alien may wonder, do the humans seem uncontented? Restless, agitated, insecure, adrift: the humans seem anything but in communion with a greater other. Strange fellows, these, he may think. Perhaps they’re diseased.

The alien may be bewildered, but of course we are not. For what he cannot see is that, while these objects are devotional, they are ultimately just mirrors; fashioned to render whatever is reflected in them large, our devotional objects only show the self itself. If we can recognize the value of attending to otherness, we can see very clearly that – and perhaps why – despite whatever they might say, the humans are suffering. We are suffering. Some may feel that our devices offer an anodyne for our insecurities. More will concede that they only make them worse. It seems worth considering, then: While we have what we need to make us feel large, perhaps what we really need is something that renders us small. What we need is more Reinhardts – or whoever or whatever delivers you there. But whatever your means, we will all need a reminder, for forgetting to be small is part of the ego’s imperative. Alongside the smart phone, then, we might carry a small token: something – anything – to represent the precious antidote. Pulling this object out periodically throughout the day, we might hold it aloft, recalling again and again what so needs recollection. Then, having taken the symbolic taste, we might run out as soon as we can and imbibe the real medicine.

[1] For an excellent essay on the transformative potential of spiritual experiences, see Gregory Bateson’s “The Cybernetics of ‘Self’: A Theory of Alcoholism” in his Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

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All images copyright and courtesy of Taney Roniger

Art, Culture, Imagination, psychedelic