Spirituality Studies 10-1 Spring 2024 41 Samuel Bendeck Sotillos Entheogens and Sacred Psychology Samuel Bendeck Sotillos, PsyD, LMFT, LPCC, CCMHC, NCC, CPRP, CCTP, MHRS, is a practicing psychotherapist who has worked for many years in the field of mental health and social services. His focus is on comparative religion and the intersection between culture, spirituality, and psychology. His recent works include The Quest For Who We Are: Modern Psychology and the Sacred (2023), Paths That Lead to the Same Summit: An Annotated Guide to World Spirituality (2020), and Dismantling Freud: Fake Therapy and the Psychoanalytic Worldview (2020). His email contact is samuelbendeck@yahoo.com. ←← La visión de “Tatutsi Xuweri Timaiweme” – Arte del pueblo wixárika (huichol), by Juan Carlos Fonseca Mata, 2010. Received February 26, 2024 Revised March 13, 2024 Accepted March 14, 2024 Key words Sacred, mental health, entheogens, PsychedelicAssisted Psychotherapy Samuel Bendeck Sotillos The psychedelic renaissance did not emerge from a void. While a tremendous upswell of interest in psychedelics can be observed today, there is scant acknowledgment of the current spiritual crisis that has led to this burgeoning enthusiasm. Having lost our sense of the sacred, we have – with disastrous consequences – become alienated from ourselves, others, and the natural environment. Secular psychotherapy and psychiatry have failed to address the myriad mental health problems that are prevalent right now, which has compelled people to desperately look for alternatives to fill the void in their lives. Sacred medicines have been used for millennia in humanity’s traditional cultures as part of their spiritual practices. Now that Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy (PAT) is being developed, we must avoid repeating the mistakes of modern psychology, which misguidedly seeks to situate entheogenic therapy on a desacralized foundation of materialism, reductionism, and scientism. Nevertheless, although the full benefit of entheogens can likely be gained only in the context of a sacred tradition, they may still have some measure of therapeutic value even when used in conjunction with secular psychotherapy. This article examines the metaphysical foundations of sacred psychology and argues that entheogenic therapy needs to be grounded on the same basis. The framework employed here is a transpersonal perspective that applies the insights found in the world’s great wisdom traditions. It will be argued that the adoption of psychedelics in mental health treatment presupposes a fully integrated psychotherapy that is possible only when it is rooted in a spiritually informed ontology.
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