Study Trip
What Is Intention?
What Is Intention? is the first chapter from the new book Study Trip: Psychedelics for Research and Art (published by Set Margins’), in which psychedelics are a way to learn, research and make art. Equally suited to seasoned practitioners and to readers who have never taken a psychedelic substance or practiced any technique, the book makes the case that art is itself inherently psychedelic, and that the questions raised by psychedelic study, about knowledge, community, and connection to the living world, belong to anyone working creatively.
A STUDY TRIP CELEBRATES a question. The conscious intention at the start of a study trip is the abandonment of all intention: you can only find a question when you are not already preoccupied by one that was formulated by your ego or by institutions. Letting go of intent is exactly how you will find new intent.
If you don’t know your intentions, psychedelics will show them to you. If you do, psychedelics will take you to a place where you don’t know them anymore, where your intentions meet with those of the living worlds around you.
The word ‘psychedelic’ literally means: that which makes the mind or soul manifest. It turns the world upside down and inside out, because you’re suddenly seeing around you what otherwise remains hidden; a world of phenomena that are not yet explicit, not yet manifested, only manifesting. This includes your own feelings and thoughts as part of the collective of all feelings and thoughts. In other words, a world of pure intention.
Intention can be shared, but not measured; it can be hidden, but not falsified. Your will can align with an intention, but you cannot will an intention into being. Your will is powerless in psychedelic spacetime, but you can attune your attention to an intention already out there. You move through intention with and by attention only.
For instance, your ego cannot decide to stay longer in substance-induced psychedelic space, or to get out faster. But should you come upon the intention to leave with full attention – perhaps because of some emergency – you will be out of your trip instantly. Similarly, self-centred will cannot impose a longer meditation, but should you align with the intention to stay longer, you might be able to stay indefinitely.
The highest form of attention is completely dedicated, surrendered to whatever may come, in faith, witnessing all things with love. No status, money, power or fame can come from it. What you encounter is revelation, a breakthrough. It remains a mystery whether the seeing itself might already have an effect. Even if you cannot go in with any expectations or plans, you might find there entire scenes or constructions, that you can help come into being when you return.
What intentions might a bear, a lemur or a millipede have when they trip? Would a tree ever wonder what it might be like to walk? The visions are non-linguistic, but full of meaning. The entire world is animated with life, communicating synaesthetically.
It seems even a chair wants to speak. Ideas, feelings, emotions or sensations that you might have long cherished, or that you might not have known before at all, can now come over you, move through you, in iridescent, tingling, ghostly forms, lighting up with flashing, delightful insights, heating your body up as they energise you, and tell you wordlessly how to stay attuned.
Are you ready, too, to open up to any suffering you might observe? Can you bear witness to it? Can you learn to stay present without engaging, until you align with exactly those intentions that are beneficial for you and yours? And so, in giving up conscious intention before a study trip, you may find you align with other, unconscious, deeper intuitions. You may study childhood memories, a bodily pain – of yours or someone else’s – or particular, alien presences.
This is how creative work can grow, as well. There is an unspoken question at the heart of every artwork: something you work towards, hold space for, by lingering in a state of openness. Something you might know, but might not yet be able to formulate. This is similar to attuning your attention towards a specific intention on a study trip. Psychedelics facilitate what may happen in creativity, too: a form of attention so full that your ego disappears. Whether you do it once in a lifetime, every week, or multiple times daily, the purpose of a psychedelic session is to regenerate the world, which is another way of saying: experiencing the intention to co-create, which you share with everything around you.
