Healing and Peak States
Jamie Wheal: There is a Direct and Reciprocal Relationship Between the View From the Top and the Work in the Trenches
Notes by Natalie Ola
4 min read · 19.7.2025
Passionate About Healing
It feels like generally that is kind of the nut to crack of the human condition—being aware that life begins and someday it ends.
And wrestling with that is kind of arguably the human experience; and along the way it feels like that combination of access to our highest and best selves—what Abraham Lincoln called “the better angels of our nature” and the fact of what Thomas Hobbes observed of life being “nasty, brutish, and short”—therein lies Shakespear, therein lies the Great Tragedies, therein lies all of art and poetry and song and civilization.
So can we get to the better angels of our nature while taking the slings and arrows of life as it’s lived?
What is the Relationship Between Healing and Peak States?
It seems like—and I don’t quite know why this is the case, but it does appear consistently across people’s subjective reports—that when you have a peak experience (and it doesn’t really matter what door you go through—it could be meditation, it could be smart technologies, it could be float tanks, it could be sexuality, it could be pharmacology including psychedelics—when you have a peak experience it seems to pop you up above the clouds, the fog of everyday living, and we often have two things happen—one is we feel ourselves at full strength.
We feel ourselves standing, not stooped. And that can often be profound, and that can often lead to access to more information as well if we’re sort of constantly kind of distracted, tunnel-visioned, down in our day-to-day life—up on the high ground, up on the mountain top we can often see more.
And that can be the state of the world, the nature of things, things that are problems we’re working on personally or professionally.
And quite often (and this is a metaphor, I don’t presume this is actually the case) it feels like (if we accept the metaphor) —in those peak states—light is flowing through us.
It's almost like an electrician with a diagnostic meter—and we get to see all the places the light doesn’t actually flow into.
We see our holes, we see where our wires are crimped, we see where our fuses are blown.
Peak States Homework
And that information feels like it's sort of our homework. So you should get the list on the mountain—it was a great comment from Suzuki Roshi, the Zen master, he said,”You’re perfect exactly as you are, and you could use a little work.”
And so the peak experience reminds us of our perfection—thank God I’m not just banged up, broken, worthless, guilt-ridden throw-away. I actually have the capacity in me, and here’s the laundry list, here’s the blown fuses, and the crimped wires.
And it feels like if we combine those two things, if we go back and do our homework, then we’re rewarded at the next level of the game.
The next time we go to the high ground, then we get to the next level of the infinite game. Like the bonus round we get extra shields, extra weapons, cool toys—shoes that fly, all kinds of things.
If we bypass our homework, so if we neglect to mend and integrate that which we’ve been shown, and we try and go back, and ring the bell again prematurely—I think there’s even a term for it in the psychedelic culture (you know they have some of their online wiki’s and sort of like terminologies) and it’s called the hyper slap.
And the hyper slap, particularly for aficionados of dimethyltryptamine, is when you go back too soon and you get stuck in the corner, or you try and go through what they might call the kind of the “gate to hyperspace” you just face against the window like a bird that didn’t see the screen door.
And so it feels to me like there is a direct and reciprocal relationship between the view from the top and the work in the trenches and if we can balance those then we have the chance to really develop into fully expressed versions of ourselves.
Reference:
Jamie Wheal of Flow Genome Project. Healing and Peak States With Jamie Wheal. The Synthesis Institute. 17.12.2019
