Doc Nic. Psychology, neuroscience, translational research.

Another route through the manual

Applied Lenses

Psychedelic practice sits at the intersection of psychology, medicine, neuroscience, addiction treatment, philosophy, spirituality, culture, and other fields with their own ways of describing human experience. Practitioners encounter models that overlap in some places, disagree in others, and sometimes describe nearly identical experiences in very different language.

Applied Lenses gives those models a place inside the Global Competencies without asking the larger framework to belong to any one of them. Each lens begins with a model as it was proposed, follows its ideas into areas of practice where they may be useful, and identifies where an explanation reaches beyond the evidence. The question is whether a model helps practitioners notice something about a participant, an experience, the environment, or their own behavior that competent care requires them to see.

The 13 Functions and 50 criteria remain organized around practitioner responsibilities. Readers entering through embodiment, attachment, learning, consciousness, culture, interpersonal power, or another conceptual framework can follow that domain into the relevant competencies.

Illustrative pre-treatment consultation and preparation

Featured lens

Ibogaine Safety and Risk Management

Preparation, monitoring, participant support, and continuing care

A detailed guide for participants and facilitators, with clinical reference material, interactive heart rhythm demonstrations, and practical tools for each phase of care.

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An observer considers different frames around the same landscape

Featured lens

The Eight Circuit Lens

Timothy Leary’s model of consciousness reconsidered through contemporary psychedelic practice

Timothy Leary’s Eight Circuit Model remains one of the stranger and more ambitious attempts to describe the range of consciousness associated with psychedelic thought. It begins with bodily survival and security, moves through emotion, hierarchy, symbolic thought, sexuality, family, culture, and embodiment, then extends into awareness of mental programming, genetic consciousness, and experiences he attempted to explain through atomic and cosmological processes.

Nearly fifty years later, different parts of the model deserve different levels of confidence. Some observations remain psychologically recognizable; some touch domains with a more developed scientific literature today. Other mechanisms remain unsupported or extend well beyond contemporary neuroscience and genetics. The experiences it tries to organize still deserve examination.

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