Psychedelics and Buddhism: Why Peak Experiences Aren't Enough (with Martijn Schirp)

Martijn Schirp and I have known each other for nearly a decade. He first reached out after reading a meditation article I posted on Reddit, a message that ended up changing my life and led to us co-founding HighExistence and running retreats together in Costa Rica.

Since then Martijn has lived several lifetimes. Professional poker player who finished 102nd at the World Series of Poker. A crisis of meaning in Vegas that took him to a Buddhist monastery in Nepal. Then co-founding Synthesis, one of the first legal psilocybin retreat centres in the world, which partnered with Imperial College London and got called the gold standard of psychedelic retreats.

Then it collapsed. In 2023 Synthesis went bankrupt, leaving hundreds of students and staff in limbo. Martijn got physically ill from the stress and spent years recovering, volunteering on a farm in Portugal, working with the soil, reconnecting with his teachers.

Now he is back with something new: Upayosis and A Path Between Worlds, a 12-month program that weaves Buddhist contemplative training with intentional psychedelic practice. It is the first time we have spoken in depth in years, and I was struck by how different he seemed. As he put it: I do not have to seek anymore. I think I have found it. Now it is more a question of deepening.

In this conversation we get into the intergenerational trauma he traced back through plant medicine, why he believes the container is the medicine, what actually went wrong at Synthesis and what he learned, the Buddhist take on whether psychedelics break the Fifth Precept, why peak experiences are not enough and what lasting change actually requires, animism and our relationship to the non-human world, why spiritual friendship is the whole of the path, and what his new program involves.

I am joining this program myself, not as an endorsement but because I have seen how thoroughly Martijn builds things and I want to deepen my own practice. If you have had meaningful psychedelic experiences but feel stuck, or you meditate and you are curious how these paths meet, this one is for you.

Learn more: upayosis.com

Contact Martijn: upayosis.com/contact

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