Sex, Money, Death, and Psychedelics
I was honored to deliver this talk at the Psychedelic Science conference presented by MAPS in June of 2023. This event drew over 13,000 participants and became the largest psychedelic conference in history.
The Catalyst of Awakening: A Personal Journey
Thirty years ago, I accidentally took a heroic dose of mushrooms (as a student at New College, shout out to Rick Doblin’s alma mater). That night changed the course of my life. I was a feminist/environmentalist and a radical teenage activist when the night began and by the time the sun rose, I was initiated. I had been baptized by the fire of the fungi, suddenly understanding that life is impermanent, death inevitable, god was not separate from my consciousness, and that the purpose of a human lifetime is to spiritually awaken.
Not an easy initiation at 19. I woke up that next morning and understood immediately that I was not going to be able to turn back to who I had been 24 hours prior. “Oh, fuck,” I thought to myself. “Now I am one of those spiritual people.” It wasn’t anything I would have wished for. Spirituality, in my mind, was for rich, bored people who were more interested in navel-gazing over action. But I knew I had been irreversibly changed by the night. I jumped on my bike, road to the book store and bought my first spiritual book, ‘Zen Mind, Beginners Mind” to simply have some starting point, some operating system for this new world I had been born into.
I have been so indelibly marked by this experience that I will always look at the world through a big pair of psychedelic god goggles. Enlightenment is not a moment in time. It is not something we achieve and then place on a shelf like a trophy. It is a frame of understanding, a continually deepening perspective, a vertical perspective of that which is timeless and integrating it into the horizontal - which is what we are born to “do” here on the early plane. This is not a binary ‘being vs. doing,’ but being embedded in doing.
This is the only awakening that matters - one that includes the totality of the human experience, especially the aspects that we tend to shun and surround with fear and confusion: sex, money, and death.
Nothing is shunted to the shadows more than sex, money, and death.
In fact, if you look at how traditional gurus always get in trouble, it is around sex and money. This is another indication of how tricky these aspects are and how resistant they can be to integration and awakening.
Psychedelics and Sex: Reconnecting with Sacred Energy
Let’s start with sex. The conversation often centers around which psychedelic is the best for sex, but I think that is the wrong question. When we say, “best for sex,” what does that even mean? How do we measure good sex from bad? We live in a strange time with two concurrent phenomena: the widespread understanding of permission and consent concepts, paired with extraordinary access to pornographic stimulation. Yet there is an epidemic of people self- reporting feelings of frigidity, sexual dysfunction, and brokenness. Why? We have unwittingly wired a tremendous amount of our sexual energy in ways that serve stimulation but do not serve expansion.
All psychedelics, when used wisely, re-wire the parts of ourselves that are cut off from our divine nature back to the source. This includes sexual energy, desire, and pleasure. There is a groundswell of people experiencing awakening through psychedelics that are beginning to restore this connection.
Instead of feeling broken, and trying to fix themselves through external techniques, they are realizing that they were never broken and that their sexual energy thrives when it is held in a sacred way. In other words, the psychedelics aren’t healing our sexuality because they are stimulating us in a certain way, they are healing us because of their capacity to restore our sexual connection to source.
While there is nothing wrong with all of the millions of varieties of sexual stimulation out there, we seemed to have missed out on understanding that the feeling of truth and presence inside ourselves, and with another, is an aphrodisiac in itself. Revealing this understanding is one of the primary tasks at hand for these medicines we work with.
Psychedelics and Money: Transforming Perspectives on Wealth
Now let’s consider money. These medicines offer us the opportunity to take one of the most filthy things in the world and transform it. As seen from the eyes of the uninitiated, money is about as far from divinity as possible. Just take a moment to feel this inside yourself. How far away does money feel from spirit inside of you? Do you do things for and with money that aren’t aligned with your soul?
Psychedelics can heal the ways in which we have split our souls apart from money. They help us pierce through the veil of separation from all things. Our entire culture is wired to believe that money is the root of all evil, but money is really just an instrument. It is a concept of convenience to transfer value from one place to another. That is all money is.
Seen from the other side of initiation, money is waiting, hungry, and eager to wake up with us. As our consciousness evolves with the assistance of pnat allies, the enhanced quality of consciousness is infused into our capital. This is what it means to be conscious with your capital. Money is no longer a tool to control, create scarcity, hold apart, or be hoarded as a result of your unbounded fear. Money becomes a force infused and saturated with your presence, and every decision you make that touches your money is made from a perspective of abundance and generosity.
I remember one night in a deep and difficult ayahuasca ceremony when I went going through a ‘death experience.’ On other side of that death, I was temporarily granted access to a temple where all of the great sages were busy praying for us humans and our planet. In that temple, they were also praying for our money. I saw how the blockchain and the foundations of the crypto paradigm were one of the fundamental infrastructures needed to help us as we transform our relationship to money. As we grow, so must the energy that lives within money.
Today, our collective consciousness is not evolved past the current paradigm of fiat currency and economic borders. The blockchain is solving in advance for the day in which we are evolved enough to be able to utilize, distribute and grow a higher form of money. In fact, in that vision, I heard quite clearly a voice saying, “God blesses the coders.”
Psychedelics and Death: Embracing the Mystery
Death is the hardest of all things to wake up. We live in a culture where death and aging are pushed to the side, to the least visible corners. Death is ripe for a revolution. We are so ridiculously afraid to die, afraid to talk about it, and afraid to think about it. We have created entire industries built around its denial; from botox to longevity clinics to legislation that removes our right to end our lives intentionally when we face terminal diagnoses. One of the most precious psychedelic healings is for the end of life. While my experience is limited, my observation is that most of the fear of death when working with terminal patients is related to this same separation from our divinity.
I once worked with a woman in her early 50’s who was on her deathbed, dying of cancer, and angry about it. This death sentence felt like a punishment by an unjust and cruel god. In the session, she was able to get under the edge of her suffering just enough to let in the smallest crack of light. That light is the mystery. She went, in front of my eyes, from being in deep pain and regret, to understanding that her death was part of a beautiful, benevolent, and grace-saturated design to wake her up. In fact, she could see that her body was just a shell, and like a hermit crab, her death was just her soul switching out an old shell for a new one. That is the miracle of these substances we are all gathered here to celebrate, research, and support.
The Divine Thread: Psychedelics as Catalysts for Reunion
I warned you that I have on some pretty thick god goggles as a result of working with these sacred medicines over my lifetime. And of all the dirty words out there, surely the concept of god has caused the most aggression and strife between humans. Wars are fought for resources and money, but our history as humans is full of wars fought in the name of god. We are fundamentally intolerant of other belief systems from our own, and use religion as a primary wedge between cultures and individuals.
This is why it is so important to keep the conversation around the divine front and center in all our psychedelic endeavors. Psychedelics are here to heal our essential sense of separation, and from that more unified and mystery-saturated view, to help us create a world with better everything - including better sex, better money, and better death.
After thirty years of working with all kinds of trauma - the trauma of war, the trauma of sex, the trauma of death, and the trauma of money -I have seen one single consistent factor heal them all. Reunion. The mystical scale. Love.
Invite sex, death, and money to sit at the table with god. And begin the conversation.
Sylvia Benito is a portfolio manager with 20 years of experience in managing family office investments. She has worked in various capacities in wealth management, from hedge fund analyst to CIO for family offices and ultra-high net worth individuals, managing $1B in assets.
She is also an indigenously trained shaman. Sylvia connects consciousness to capital by bridging the traditional world of investing to the alignment, awareness, and transformative purpose of wealth.
With fluency in the languages of money and energy, Sylvia is a sought-after international speaker with an extraordinarily rare range of mastery.
