🫠 Psychonaut POV

Welcome to Tricycle Day. We’re the psychedelics newsletter hoping to reincarnate as a cat. (Share this email with a friend so we both collect some karma points.) 😽

Martijn Schirp was a poker pro who took the money and ran… to a monastery in Nepal. Years later, he co-founded Synthesis and came away convinced psychedelics alone won’t cut it. Now he runs a year-long program that pairs 'em with Buddhist teachings. 

We asked Martijn what the unraveling of Synthesis taught him, what Buddhism has that the psychedelic world is missing, and why healing is essential but not the whole story. 

Our fingers and toes are crossed, Cyclists.

Psilocybin is barreling toward FDA review, and we’d be stoked if it were approved. But there’s this teeny tiny issue…

Compass, the drugmaker pushing psilocybin through the regulatory process, has hinted that their synthetic product will cost roughly $20,000 a dose. And if it is approved, it’ll be for treatment-resistant depression only at launch.

Again, options are great. We’re all for it. But we believe in access for all.

With Althea, natural psilocybin is already available now for adults 21+. You don’t need a diagnosis. Nor do you need 20 grand.

Looking back now, I see poker became an important attempt to escape my childhood suffering. Like many kids, I mistakenly believed the epitome of success was material success, and poker became this opportunity to make more money than I ever thought possible.

I remember playing the main event at the World Series of Poker in Vegas. I was only 21 years old and naively believed I had everything I ever wanted. But gambling, sex, and partying—the holy triangle of hedonism—didn't lead me to lasting well-being or a way to process what I, my parents, and my great-grandparents went through. I actually ended up feeling very empty.

A counselor at my university recommended When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chödrön, a Buddhist book I didn't quite fully understand. But a few lines pierced right through me, and I realized I'd been avoiding feeling things. I quit poker and began to study Buddhism in Nepal.

Soon after that, I began sitting with ayahuasca, first with Shipibo ayahuasqueros in the Netherlands. The first night, I felt that much of the pain I carried wasn't mine. It was my grandfather's, who grew up in an orphanage after the Second World War. The second night, I had a vision of what awakening could look like, and it changed my aims in life. My nihilistic, materialistic worldview gave way to something much more caring and connected.

I started writing about psychedelics for High Existence, then volunteered at the OPEN Foundation, where I got to know some amazing researchers. Later, I met Paul from Third Wave. We connected on a real need for these experiences in a more secular, clinical, scientific setting. That's how Synthesis started.

Interest came immediately, from clients and from Imperial College London, which ran research at our very first retreats. Within six months, we'd raised our seed funding. Our founding team was truly talented.

COVID was the moment we never fully recovered from. We had never been profitable, and when we lost all of our revenue overnight, we pivoted to training and survived by raising more capital. Then we had two businesses to sustain at once and slid into growth for growth's sake. When pressure mounted, disagreements grew across the organization, and in the end we could no longer work together. It was incredibly painful.

The big lesson for me was that psychedelic experiences alone simply aren't enough. You can have amazing intentions, a sophisticated container, and profound experiences, and that still doesn't necessarily lead to lasting, durable, and ethical changes. I saw it in our team dynamics and across the field. The people who should have known better, myself included, continued to show up with significant blind spots.

Part of that stems from ontological assumptions in our culture, which produce alienation that we then mistake for our identity. I think our crisis is a crisis of perception, and no technology will fix it.

Buddhism offers a path toward a vision of well-being and pro-social behavior that's quite alien to our culture. It has a sophisticated analysis of what makes us sick to begin with, and practices and philosophy that help us see clearly what gets us stuck.

Part of that analysis is how we justify selfish behavior. We're incredibly good at it, and at minimizing what it costs other people, without realizing we're inextricably interdependent. Buddhism teaches that we can't extract from others without hurting ourselves. The only way to maximize your own benefit is to benefit others. There's no inherently existing self. You're an expression of countless things coming together, so taking care of them is taking care of yourself.

Buddhism traces much of the harm we cause to attachment to outcomes, identity, and views. That's conditioning we can undo through training, insight, and wholesome community. Through practice, I can see that whenever I've been harmful to myself or others, it was a moment of unawareness. With more awareness, I can hold my conditioning and other people's conditioning with more kindness and wisdom.

We seek well-being through material success, status, and collecting peak experiences, while not realizing that none of that can truly satisfy us. Buddhism points out that this whole strategy is fundamentally erroneous. Psychedelics can lead to similar insights, but the hard part is training them in a durable way so they become lasting realizations. An opening is not the same as a path. The question isn't how profound an experience you can have. It's what kind of person you can become, and Buddhism lays out precisely which views help, how to practice them, and how to tell you're on the right track.

I haven't received pushback myself, but I know it exists. In the psychedelic space, some people believe peak experiences are enough. Buddhism can come with dogma and maybe an overly religious attitude, and its rigor and necessity for discipline aren't always appreciated.

On the Buddhist side, one view points to the Fifth Precept against intoxication and says psychedelics should therefore be avoided. I think that's erroneous, because what makes something an intoxicant can also make it a medicine. It depends on how it's used, who's using it, and why. Others claim psychedelics are inherently Buddhist, that psychedelic states are a form of enlightenment, or that there's historical precedent, though the evidence is thin. I don't agree with those claims either.

I do think psychedelics can be used as a form of skillful means, especially for those of us in the West, because they open up views beyond materialism and show how malleable reality can be. I know long-time Buddhist practitioners who had a psychedelic experience and suddenly understood what the texts were writing about. It's no substitute and no shortcut, but it can make some insights more accessible. Buddhism argues that all experience is fabricated. Add a psychedelic, and suddenly you have an incredibly different experience. Aidan Lyon, a philosopher who teaches in my program, argues that the benefit of psychedelics isn't that they reveal the mind, but that they reveal the possibility of revealing the mind. That insight comes with new agency and new responsibility.

That's why I think psychedelic experiences benefit from being rooted in a wisdom tradition, under the guidance of lineage holders, with daily contemplative training. It keeps you safe, oriented, and supported. Without one, you might drift into echo chambers that exploit that same flexibility. Discernment matters, and while Buddhism is certainly not infallible, it offers a vision of flourishing that includes our impact on others.

Both matter. Clinical healing is about becoming an integrated, functioning self. You can regulate, take care of yourself, and function in society. That's essential, even if you want to walk the spiritual path. The psychedelic or spiritual path will never be a sufficient substitute for that work.

That said, the vision of awakening adds profound possibility. Integration then becomes: what's your way of life? Think of all the energy we invest in habitual patterns. If we stop, we can recognize our deepest nature, which is awakening itself. Psychedelics can give beautiful glimpses of that nature, but a genuine path can teach you how to experience this freedom no matter what you're going through, as it's always available right here, right now.

That's incredibly empowering, because you don't need a new identity, new clothes, or material abundance to recognize it. That level of freedom is alien to the therapeutic model. Those aims still matter, but I don't think they're the whole story.

For people who are curious, the road can go much deeper, into fearlessness, into peacefulness. Imagine knowing, on the deepest level possible, that the essence of your being couldn't be harmed by any experience. Of course you still take care of your body and mind, but you also recognize that no experience can harm you, and no experience can truly benefit you. You're completely free. That's what liberation is.

Explore the curriculum for A Path Between Worlds, his year-long training in Buddhist practice for people exploring psychedelic experience.

That’s all for today, Cyclists! Whenever you’re ready, here’s how we can help.

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DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice. The use, possession, and distribution of psychedelic drugs are illegal in most countries and may result in criminal prosecution.