Transpersonal psychology and sustainability: An interview with John Buchanan

Dr. John Buchanan has a new book out which offers fascinating insights for anyone looking to deepen their understanding of, and feeling for, the web of connections that make up our lives. Titled, Processing Reality: Finding Meaning in Death, Psychedelics, and Sobriety, John writes from the perspective of a psychologist and philosopher with lifelong interests in existential questions of meaning and purpose and their connection to sustaining Planet Earth. John has been an integral part of the Pando community since our earliest days.

Pando: John, it’s great to see you! Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us about your book, “Processing Reality: Finding Meaning in Death, Psychedelics, and Sobriety.” It connects a lot of dots of great interest to folks in the Pando community and does so in fascinating ways, which is why I want to bring it to the attention of our audience. 

John Buchanan: It’s a great pleasure to be with you.

I’ve been reading your book and am most drawn to how it deals with transformation, at fundamental levels.

We talk about Pando’s mission being to “save the world,” and to collaborate with colleges and universities to actually do that. But it’s easier to think this way than it is to actually do. And I think the reason for that is that so much of our modern life and education don’t take us to the feeling level that you talk about.

So I’d love your help in drawing out these connections. 

Great! Hopefully ideas will flood into this space as we go along.

Your work focuses on transpersonal psychology—a field that deals with phenomena that can open us to deeper aspects of reality. 

This potentially makes transpersonal psychology a useful intellectual collaborator in our work for sustainability. 

So, let’s start with a basic question: How would you explain transpersonal psychology to our audience, and its relevance to Pando?

Well, let’s see—transpersonal psychology literally means “beyond the personal.” It refers to experiences that fall outside what we think of as everyday life. They are experiences that often get ignored. But transpersonal psychology says, not so fast – they may be opening a deeper window into reality.

This would include things like parapsychological phenomena—telepathy, religious or mystical experiences, near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, and often psychedelic experiences. Another way of putting it is that it’s a range of extraordinary experiences.

Stan Grof has written a number of books that map out a whole “cartography” of these transpersonal experiences. They range from encounters with wrathful or blissful deities to what he calls the “metacosmic void.” They also include telepathy, or experiences of merging with another person’s identity.

So it’s a wide range of experiences that are quite different from our everyday routines—going to work, picking up kids from school, watching the news. Dreaming might fall into this area as well—especially lucid dreaming.

Transpersonal psychology asks, What can we learn about the nature of reality from the whole range of experience – not just those experiences that seem neat and tidy and that we think we know what to do with? 

Fascinating to explore. But first, you mention Stan Grof here and in your book—tell us who he is. 

Stan Grof is probably the preeminent researcher in psychedelic studies, particularly psychedelic psychotherapy.

He was in Czechoslovakia training as a psychiatrist when LSD was sent there in the 1950s as an experimental drug. He took it himself, and later worked in a psychiatric hospital where he conducted LSD-assisted psychotherapy with patients.

He eventually came to the United States and was part of the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center’s psychedelic research program until that work was shut down.

After that, he went to the Esalen Institute, where he and his wife developed holotropic breathwork—a non-drug method for inducing non-ordinary states of consciousness.

He has participated in and facilitated thousands of sessions involving both psychedelic and non-psychedelic altered states, so I see him as a leading researcher in this area.

Why should people take this category of phenomena seriously? I think most people dismiss altered states as aberrations—let alone engage with them, seek insight from them, or relate to them in any meaningful way.

Well, when surveys are done, it turns out that most people have had some variety of these experiences.

A simple example is thinking about someone and then the phone rings—and it’s them. That might be one of the most common forms. Even animals seem to have these experiences—dogs often know when you’re coming home, even if it’s at an unusual time.

More importantly, these experiences can be extremely transformative. Almost anyone who’s had a near-death experience or a spontaneous mystical experience describes it as profoundly life-changing.

So, while we might try to ignore them intellectually, these experiences are ones that most of us take very seriously in a deep way. They open up a new way of thinking about the world. And they deepen and broaden—and even heighten—one’s sense of what is, and what could be.

And I think, especially now with the world in the condition it is, we need a deeper sense of reality, spirituality, and possibility.

How has this worked in your own life—that is, given you a broader, deeper experience?

Our everyday experience remains as it is. It’s just that it can be enriched.

I remember one of the first times I got drunk, it was like: wow. There’s this whole other range of how I can feel. It really surprised me that a substance could so dramatically change my experience of the world.

That’s something most people can relate to.

But then, when I started taking more psychoactive substances—marijuana, and especially LSD—it felt like I was getting an intimation that there’s a whole world I had been missing.

It’s very hard to describe, but it’s as if suddenly the things mystics talk about start to make sense.

I remember one time on LSD thinking: “Oh—that’s right. This is what they mean.” That state that meditators describe as being fully present, fully here. And it felt like, how could I have forgotten this?

There’s this intense presence. And along with it, a sense that the self diminishes. Experience becomes more fluid, more unified, more like a kind of flowing whole.

So the world becomes richer, more complex.

In the book, I write about my “big trip.” It was a very powerful mystical experience. I felt like I was approaching an incredibly powerful light. It had a sense of personal redemption—like I was moving toward something that felt like… some version of God.

Some kind of overwhelming intelligence or presence.

Up to that point, I had thought of the universe as complex, maybe even spiritually rich—but I hadn’t really entertained a theological dimension in a serious way.

But there’s a big difference between reading about traditions—Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism—and having a direct experience of what they might be pointing to.

You mention in the book something called the “Substance of We-Feeling.” I’m not sure how you pronounce the acronym—SWOF? 

I think it’s pronounced “swaf,” yeah.

“Swaf”—okay. Not the easiest acronym, but the idea sounds very Pando.

Can you talk a bit about that? You describe it as helping to overcome alienation—which, for our audience, goes right to the heart of sustainability, ecological destruction, and that whole mindset.

Would you unpack this for us?

I’ll try.

The acronym comes from Doris Lessing’s book Shikasta, the first in her five-volume series. It’s a kind of a space-Sufi narrative about beings trying to help—or save—the world, while other forces interfere with its fundamental sense of interconnection.

That interference disrupts a deep feeling of belonging—of connection to others and to the world.

And so restoring that feeling becomes the central plot.

For me personally, that really resonated. I felt quite alienated when I was younger. My father died suddenly when I was 11, and I didn’t really understand what I was feeling—but I became very disconnected, very defensive. Like the world was a dangerous place, and people were out to get me.

I think a lot of people feel that way today, often for understandable reasons.

Substances like alcohol can relax those boundaries a bit, and psychedelics can do it even more. Internally and externally, the boundaries start to soften.

It’s not that you completely merge, but there’s a sense of mergence—of becoming more part of the world.

You feel belonging. You feel at home.

And that sense of being “at home” is crucial. If you feel like you belong here—like this is your home—you don’t want to destroy it. You want to care for it.

When we don’t feel that connection, the world becomes disposable—like throwing trash out the car window. But you wouldn’t do that in your own living room.

So if that feeling of “home” expands—to include the world and other people—it becomes environmentally important, socially important, politically important.

When people are suffering—say, in war—it’s no longer something happening “over there.” It feels personal. It’s happening to us.

There’s a line I love from Paul McCartney: “Lay down your umbrellas… you’ve never felt the rain, my friend, till you felt it running down your back.”

I love that because it captures this shift. The environment isn’t something to fight against—it’s something to experience, appreciate, even love.

And I think that’s the core idea: love.

When we love others and the world, we want to preserve it. We want to protect it. The experiences of transpersonal psychology can open us up in this direction. 

But these insights need to be carried into everyday life and action.

That reminds me of John Cobb and his book The Structure of Christian Existence, where he talks about different structures of existence over the course of human history. He sees Jesus’s theme of love as striking something genuinely new in the evolutionary process.

Do you see the kinds of experiences you’re describing here as capable of deepening that sense of “we” that self-transcending love implies? Might there even be an evolutionary leap that’s possible beyond that—another step?

That’s a really interesting question.

And by the way, I love that book of John’s—I think it’s one of his most overlooked works.

It’s so good, especially for psychology and understanding the development of the self.

I read it recently again. 

As I recall, he works through different structures of existence–primitive, Homeric, Buddhist, Socratic, Christian, etc. For Christian existence, the idea being that there is something like an ever-transcending spirit that pulls us forward, so that a person is constantly transcending who you were and what was.

It’s a kind of maximal openness. Instead of being locked into old patterns or prior ways of thinking, you’re continuously opening to novelty, to new possibilities, and to what is actually there.

I think that’s quite brilliant.

And it’s a bit different from just a general “love everybody” ethic. It’s more active, more adaptive to moment-to-moment living. It’s not simple.

Because sometimes the appropriate response is not gentle—it’s more complex than “love your neighbor” in a naïve sense. Life requires nuance.

Sometimes you respond one way, sometimes another. Nothing is reducible to a single moral gesture.

We’re often stuck in a binary—either we’re angry and divided, or we say “these are our people—and those over there aren’t.” That kind of polarization doesn’t get us very far.

John was very good at holding nuance. He could annoy people because he refused simple positions. I remember him saying during Trump’s first administration that while he didn’t like a great majority of things he had done, there were some he agreed with.

People didn’t always want to hear that kind of complexity, especially when emotions are high.

Absolutely. As you know, John was someone who was willing to talk about absolutely anything. Any possible topic could be on the table about any category of thought—political, theological, moral, historical, you name it.

That’s very different from the climate in universities today where there’s a lot of fear of open discussion and students and faculty alike have to be very careful about what they say.

Have you ever seen the recording of John talking with David Bohm?

The physicist – sometimes called Einstein’s protege. No.

It must have been in the 1970s. It’s just a short recorded conversation where John is pressing Bohm on the philosophical implications of his physics.

It’s remarkable. You can see John’s mind working—very precise, very direct. Bohm doesn’t always seem to have thought through things at that level of detail.

It’s an extraordinary exchange. John was such a brilliant man.

Unafraid of any idea.

By the way, on this “substance of we-feeling” that you mentioned earlier—Dan Siegel at UCLA has coined something similar: “MWe,” to signal the interconnectivity between me and we.

It’s something like a Pando worldview.

He’s written beautifully about it and made it central to his work in psychology.

Sounds like an upgraded version of Martin Buber’s “I and Thou”—less separation, more integration.

“I and Thou” would be an antecedent.

I’m thinking about the different ways people can experience this broader sense of “we.” This expanded view of reality.

What can people do to open their lives to this deeper, interconnected sense of reality?

There are many ways.

Psychedelics are one. But more generally, anything that loosens the boundaries of ordinary perception can open this up.

For me, a lot of ideas come when I’m in a bathtub—fully relaxed. That kind of bodily relaxation softens boundaries and opens space for insight.

Meditation, Tai Chi, anything that brings attention into the body can do something similar.

Being in nature is another. I think of Nietzsche walking in the Alps—he did a lot of his thinking while hiking in the mountains. It’s not just nature itself, but being removed from everyday distraction.

There are also more structured practices. For example, lying down, focusing on breath, feeling energy move through the body, and imagining it flowing outward into the universe. That can bring a very powerful sense of connection—though you don’t know exactly what you’re connecting to.

The contemplative priest Richard Rohr includes in a list of practices  that can open people up in this way such things as prayer, contemplation, meditation, and so on—and also psychedelics.

Oh, really?

Yeah, absolutely.

Actually, in my own experience as well—I may have told you this—I spent time with Malcolm Boyd. Do you remember him? The Episcopal priest who was very active in the civil rights movement.

He wrote Are You Running With Me, Jesus?—it was a million-copy bestseller at a time when theologians might get on the cover of magazines like Look.

He was a dear friend.

Anyway, Malcolm and his husband provided the setting—and the mushrooms, that we took one Saturday afternoon.

It was a profound, life-changing experience. So meaningful and illuminating. And yet it was never something I felt I needed to repeat and I never have.

But it opened doors and gave me profound experiences that I still clearly remember.

I was actually thinking you might ask whether I still do mushrooms, and I was going to say no, I don’t anymore.

And it made me think of something else. One of the most profound transformative experiences in my life has been Alcoholics Anonymous.

Being in those meetings creates a space where people open up, share deeply, and feel safe. People come in at very low points in their lives, and through simple practices—being seen, being heard, being cared for—their lives are transformed.

It’s remarkably powerful. And takes you to a level of experience where you directly know interconnectivity. 

Ideally, this is what churches would do. I’m not sure how often they still function that way.

There are times when people don’t make it at AA, and that’s part of the reality of it. But overall, it is an extraordinary form of spiritual community.

And I think far too many people don’t have access to anything like it.

Yes. That kind of community is perhaps the most direct expression of “we.”

Exactly. The Twelve Steps themselves are fundamentally “we”-oriented: we did this, we did that.

This is why Ed Bacon, Pando board chair, and a number of others see such potential here. There is real hunger, especially among young people, for connections they often don’t find in existing institutions.

In your book, you use the phrase “second maturity,” and also governing systems, to name a more enlightened, more connected way of living. 

Could you elaborate in the context of what we’ve been discussing?

Yes. “Second maturity” comes from Gerald Heard, a thinker who is now often overlooked.

I learned about him through Jean Houston, who is a great admirer of his. His major work, The Five Ages of Man, outlines stages of consciousness or ways of being in the world.

He suggested that humanity moves through different stages, and that we may be on the cusp of another leap in consciousness—what he called the “leptoid man,” the leaping human.

I used to be more optimistic about that kind of leap, especially when I was younger and influenced by psychedelics. Now, even if I’m less optimistic that we can get there, it feels more urgent than ever that we need that kind of transformation, because time is short. 

“Second maturity” is the stage of human development that follows that of the rational individual—the autonomous, independent self. What comes next is a more interconnected form of being.

This is where experiences like holotropic breathwork, psychedelics, and other altered states can help shift underlying patterns.

Stan Grof’s idea of “governing systems” is related. These are deep, often unconscious frameworks—like psychological operating systems—that shape how we see and respond to the world.

They can be constructive or destructive, but shifting them is difficult. So these extraordinary experiences that transpersonal psychology analyzes can sometimes help reorganize them.

For example, moving from a worldview where extraction and conflict are core toward one where care and belonging are central is the kind of reorganization he’s talking about. It’s prioritizing loving the world rather than exploiting it.

And when you mention young people feeling spiritually hungry—I often think about the phrase “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual.”

That’s fine, but I think what’s missing is the “we” dimension. Religion, at its best, is shared spirituality. Spirituality but with “we” at the heart.

If spirituality remains purely individual, it risks becoming an isolating experience. We don’t need more isolation—we need connection.

I’m reminded of something the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said—that religion is what a person does with their solitude. I think William James said something similar. 

There’s truth in that, but it also feels incomplete. It doesn’t fully express the relational dimension.

Yes. That phrase has always felt slightly puzzling to me as well, because it seems at odds with his broader emphasis on interconnectedness.

Final question—why does all of this matter for people who care about “saving the world”?

I draw heavily on Whitehead in my work, and I think worldview is central here.

A worldview functions for all of us almost like a governing system—it shapes perception and action at a subconscious level. We rarely examine our worldviews—instead, we take worldview assumptions as “just the way the world is” and not in need of serious critique. But we do that to our peril. 

Most people dismiss extraordinary experiences because they don’t fit their existing worldview, which is largely inherited from an older intellectual framework.

But Whitehead offers an alternative, and transpersonal psychology enriches it further by expanding the range of human experience we should take seriously.

When we understand ourselves as deeply interconnected—and when we recognize that reality itself is far more complex and alive than we typically assume—then our sense of responsibility changes.

We stop seeing ourselves as isolated individuals in a neutral environment, and instead recognize a shared world that is meaningful, fragile, and worth caring for.

That shift has profound implications for how we live—and for what it means to care for future generations.

It’s such a privilege to be talking with you. Thank you.

Now, one last-last question: What should we be reading—other than your own “Processing Reality,” of course! Perhaps authors or books we should revisit, or new ones we haven’t encountered?

If you’re interested in Stan Grof, I’d recommend Beyond the Brain. It’s a great entry point into his cartography of experience and his broader psychological framework.

For Alfred North Whitehead, Catherine Keller’s From a Broken Web is an excellent introduction—accessible and insightful.

And one of my favorite works is Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker (1937). It’s extraordinary speculative fiction with a Whiteheadian and Marxist sensibility—deeply concerned with consciousness, evolution, and cosmic perspective.

The neuroscientist John Lilly once said it was the only book that fully accommodated everything he had ever experienced.

It’s not a conventional novel—there are no real characters in the usual sense—but it’s one of the most expansive works ever written.

I have a new set of books to read. 

One more thing—you ever listen to Firesign Theatre?

No.

They were a 60s–70s comedy group. There’s a bit where someone asks, “How does an old man like you stay alive?”

And he replies: “I don’t eat.”

It’s absurd, but it always stuck with me.

Anyway—I also recommend their album Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers.

I’ll add it to the list!