Dialogues Beyond Duality—In Conversation with Nature
What if we would listen to the river before we design environment around it?
Welcome to Psychedelics Design – where design meets psychedelics!
When was the last time you had a conversation with nature? This is exactly what I have been talking about increasingly with fellow designers, climate activists, policy makers, community builders and psychonauts alike.
In a world where speed is king and productivity trumps presence, we’ve narrowed our lens of perception. We’ve favoured logic over intuition, control over emergence, and metrics over meaning.
INTRODUCING
Mabel is a European female-founded and driven company. After years of research and collaboration with experts, they developed a radical approach to target some of the most overlooked symptoms faced by women today. Mabel’s products are easy to use and highly effective, designed with women in mind from the ground up. While Mabel was thought for women, we are an inclusive company and we welcome all.
We’ve come to view ourselves as other than, creating systems of convenience and classification that favour this over that and us over them. We have proliferated a narrative structure to our lives and industries that serves to support - and dare we say, incentivise - separateness. As such, we find ourselves amidst a range of dire crises, some of which are nearing or have surpassed a tipping point.
But what if there's another way? A more integrative path towards growth that doesn’t sacrifice creativity for structure, or the ineffable for the empirical? How might we move from self-serving control over nature to a stewardship of and with the more-than-human world?
An altered state creation approach could offer such a bridge.
“A teacher comes, they say, when you are ready. And if you ignore its presence, it will speak to you more loudly. But you have to be quiet to hear.” -Robin Wall Kimmerer “Braiding Sweetgrass
Why Altered States?
Altered states — whether reached through meditation, breathwork, psychedelics, movement, or deep immersion — shift us out of habitual modes of deeply conditioned thinking. In these states, time can dilate, the ego quiets, and new patterns emerge. This is where insights are primed to strike, where the veil between the self and the environment thins, and where meaning becomes multidimensional.
These states allow us to:
Access non-linear problem-solving abilities
Reconnect with embodied and ecological intelligence
Perceive systems as wholes rather than fragmented parts
Tap into emotion, intuition, and archetypal energies — tools often ignored in the rationalist toolkit
In short, altered states open doors to create in communion with life, not just in service of filling gaps in the market in the name of ‘growth’.
Designing with the River
Imagine this: You’re deep into a design sprint for a regenerative urban infrastructure project. But instead of only referencing environmental data, you sit beside a river, not as a resource to be managed, but as a living partner in the creative process. You drop into an altered state through stillness or breath or sound or lower dose substance (where allowed), allowing you access to a more sacred sensibility; one with a deeper and more ancient knowing. The river begins to speak — not in words, but through energy, metaphors, or imagery.
In a conversation with my friend Julia Mande today, she reminded me of the importance to learn to listen truly and deeply; to yourself, to your body, to nature, spirit, and all living things. I wanted to extend that reminder and invitation to you today.
This isn’t just poetic license. Many Indigenous and ancestral cultures have long understood landscapes as alive, conscious, and communicative. The idea of a lived ecology — where we are not separate from the systems we exist within — is not new. What’s new is our willingness to re-remember and integrate this wisdom into how we consider ‘growth’ from a holistic perspective, not as quaint spirituality, but as radical creative intelligence. Psychedelics might just help some of us to reconnect and learn to listen and be in conversation — as we design our future.
"Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” -Lao Tsu
The idea that we can or should innovate on behalf of nature — without deep listening — is a holdover from a colonial mindset. Altered state frameworks remind us that we are not separate from the rivers, the fungi, the data streams that flow from and through the natural world. That creation is not about control, but co-evolution. Growth should be in service of conscious progress that is persistent yet patient, and intentionally productive, not mindlessly destructive.
This approach won’t be for everyone just yet. But for those working at the edges — systems thinkers, regenerative designers, psychonauts, artists, and spiritual technologists — it offers a way to go deeper. To make the invisible visible.
And as my friend and partner Jalen Salazar reminded me: “To become intimate with the connective tissue of creation, and to unapologetically engage with the mystical intelligence and energetic messages that surround us.”
INTERESTING READS & NEWS
Leveraging Psychedelic Neuroscience to Boost Human Creativity Using Artificial Intelligence
A recent peer-reviewed article (June 2025) explores how “psychedelics, such as LSD and psilocybin, disrupt entrenched cognitive patterns by facilitating novel insights and new associations; and considers how AI can potentially mimic these psychedelic-induced cognitive disruptions to augment and enhance human creativity.”
Enhanced meaning in life following psychedelic use: converging evidence from controlled and naturalistic studies
A new article in Frontiers in Psychology (2025) highlights the meaning-enhancing properties of psychedelics and their mediator role in creativity, spirituality, and therapy. The study underscores how psychedelic experiences can foster a sense of meaning and purpose, which in turn may fuel creative thinking and innovation.
Centre for Psychedelic Research, Department of Brain Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom
Carhart-Harris Lab, Department of Neurology, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States
If Everyone Tripped on Psychedelics, We’d Do More About Climate Change
Research continues to suggest that people who use psychedelics tend to report greater concern for the environment and are more likely to engage in pro-environmental behaviors compared to users of other substances. This association is thought to be driven by the increased sense of nature connectedness that psychedelics can foster, although causality remains difficult to establish. An article from 2019.
FROM OUR FRIENDS & PARTNERS
A Field Guide on the Nagoya Protocol – By Common Field
Julia Mande wrote in the latest update on the Common Field Community: “There is a world, one that we are co-creating, where commerce grows from life-affirming values. Where supply webs support the life on our planet and the livelihood of stewards protecting natural resources. Now, more than ever, we must cultivate economies rooted in reciprocity. It is both our life force and our pathway to interconnection.
Common Field is a community of professionals embodying this coexistence. We learn (and unlearn) patterns that cultivate agency and interconnection.
In a practical way, there are existing instruments to help usher this repair. The Nagoya Protocol is one of them. At its core, it centers respect through consent and reciprocity through benefit sharing, offering a framework for mutuality.”
👉 You can download the Field Guide on the Nagoya Protocol here
South Africa – Myth, Medicine & MagicCould South Africa be not only the cradle of humankind, but also the cradle of spirituality?
For the past five years, Cullen Taylor Clark has been on a remarkable journey to uncover undeniable evidence of fungal use among the Indigenous peoples of Southern Africa. At its heart, this project is about tracing the fading footprints of ancestral fungal knowledge — sitting with healers and diviners, learning the sacred names, uses, and ceremonial recipes of fungi, and exploring their vital role in medicine, spirituality, and tradition.
Support Cullen’s research and read more about this important and ground breaking work:
👉 patreon.com/cullentaylorclark