Psychedelic Sangha presents,
"Psychedelics as Skillful Means
on the Path"

An Interdisciplinary Approach with Guest Speaker Martijn Schirp

November 18th
7:00 pm EST

Live online
(With asynchronous viewing option)

In a time of ecological collapse and widespread political polarization, what guidance can a Psychedelic Buddhist Path offer to those seeking a deeper meaning, engagement, and purpose? What makes engagement with psychedelic sacraments potentially skillful or not? And how can we approach developing Buddhist containers with the aim of liberation and awakening?

Join Martijn Schirp—Buddhist practitioner, psychedelic facilitator, and founder of Upāyosis—for a tantalizing presentation on "Psychedelics as Skillful Means on The Path: An Interdisciplinary Approach."

Drawing from predictive processing, Tibetan Buddhism, contemplative science, and "actor-network theory", as well as years of hands-on facilitation, Martijn unpacks psychedelics as potential powerful upāya—skillful means that can illuminate core Buddhist insights: how suffering (duḥkha) arises through grasping and reification; how the apparent separation between “self” and “other” is one of many fabricated (and thus empty) dualistic perceptual lenses; and how making these hidden models and fabricated networks visible, through meditation and psychedelic practice, allows us to "open up" to ontological pluralism, widening what we allow to exist and empowering our imagination to co-create new sacred landscapes.

Together, we’ll ask: how can psychedelics and contemplative practice enhance each other—personally and collectively—on the path of service, awakening, and liberation? And can this help us perceive and remediate what lies at the root of the inability of the West to recognize the urgency and suffering of our omnipresent ecological crisis?

Weaving insights from more than a decade of guiding and building psychedelic learning spaces (including HighExistence, Apotheosis, and co-founding and leading Synthesis, one of the first modern legal psilocybin retreat and training centers), and now culminating in Martijn’s flagship yearlong training A Path Between Worlds, he offers a timely and urgent message: our current crisis can be an initiatory chrysalis, and psychedelics, with wisdom and care, could be a unique skillful means for our unsustainable extractivist predicament.

Join us in a journey into meditative deconstruction and reconstruction, learn how our minds and everything around is co-constructing reality, and how this embodied understanding can be applied to re-discover our 'ecodelic interbeing', entangled networks of co-construction, and through this, how to engage with psychedelics to support our awakening journey, moving beyond an egocentric focus to practicing solidarity with all sentient beings and actively engaging with the Earth.

More about Martijn Schirp
Martijn Schirp is a longtime Buddhist practitioner and the founder of Upāyosis, where he curates A Path Between Worlds, a yearlong contemplative training integrating Buddhist practice, contemplative science, ecological ethics, and optional sacramental psychedelic work. He supports others as a spiritual companion and facilitator, designing structured contemplative pathways that cultivate stability, insight, and compassionate action within a caring community container.

Previously, Martijn co-founded and led the Synthesis Institute, helping pioneer modern, medically supervised psilocybin retreats, developing naturalistic insight through research partnerships with academic institutions, and training hundreds of psychedelic practitioners in the 'many ways of knowing' model.

Today, Martijn’s primary vessel is A Path Between Worlds, where he and guest teachers support practitioners through progressive training, weekly guided meditations, and a dedicated community oriented toward awakening and planetary service. He continues to write, teach, and mentor at the intersection of Buddhist wisdom, ecological ethics, contemplative science, and psychedelic practice.