This article argues that psychedelic experiences and altered states of consciousness can serve as decolonial tools for designing consciousness, potentially helping to reorient human social and environmental relations toward ontologies of relatedness and interconnectedness. It examines how such states might challenge modernist and colonial thought, building on radical design and decolonial theory to envision new ways of being that transcend design's modern philosophical inheritances.
Anthropologists have studied psychedelic drug use across cultures for over a century, but this literature has never been compiled. A survey of ethnographic research on classic psychedelics in the Global North reveals a robust subfield—the anthropology of psychedelics—that lacks diversity, focusing predominantly on Indigenous use or Indigenous–Global North encounters. There is a gap regarding widespread psychedelic use in urban Global North contexts. As scientific research on therapeutic psychedelics grows, cultural analyses of the extra-pharmacological dimensions of psychedelic experiences and effects are increasingly needed.
Entheogens—drugs that produce ecstasy and have traditional religious and shamanic uses—can provoke experiences described in spiritual, religious, philosophical, or secular terms. These experiences allow individuals to generate meaning and gain novel philosophical insights, which users attribute directly to the experience itself. Such experiences can shift a person's fundamental philosophical commitments and ethical dispositions, making them more credible to the user than abstractly held beliefs. By examining the phenomenology of entheogenic experiences, the work argues that entheogens carry ethical significance.