Borrowed States: From Chemical Regulation To Natural Embodiment

Disclaimer: This paper examines how medications and other substances can alter human states and what those changes may reveal about healing. It does not advocate beginning, resuming, stopping, or changing any medication or substance, and it should not be read as encouragement to use substances, particularly for anyone who struggles with addiction or dependency.

Think about how many ordinary problems are answered by changing chemistry. A person feels tired and drinks coffee. Someone cannot settle into sleep and takes a sleep aid. Another person is overwhelmed by anxiety and takes a medication that makes the anxiety quieter. A stimulant can make sustained attention easier. Alcohol can loosen social inhibition. Cannabis can change emotional and bodily awareness. Psychedelics can alter perception, identity, connection, and meaning. These substances are not equivalent, but they share a simple ability: they can move the same human organism from one internal state into another.

A state is the overall condition in which the body and mind are operating at a particular moment. We already recognize states such as alertness and sleepiness, tension and calm, emotional openness and emotional shutdown, scattered attention and focused attention. Chemical regulation, as the term is used in this paper, means using a substance to shift one of those conditions through its effects on the body. Once described this plainly, chemical regulation stops looking like an unusual behavior associated only with addiction or recreational drug use. It is woven into ordinary life and into modern medicine.

What Chemical Regulation Reveals

The scale of that reliance is easy to miss because each use is usually considered separately. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention currently reports that 49.9% of people in the United States used at least one prescription drug during the previous thirty days, based on National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey data collected from 2017 through March 2020.[8] That number includes medications used for many physical conditions, but the same pattern appears directly in mental health care: in 2024, 19.3% of American adults reported taking prescription medication for their mental health, compared with 14.0% who reported receiving counseling or therapy from a mental health professional during the previous year.[9] Whatever judgment is made about any particular medication, the larger cultural pattern is clear. Changing internal conditions through chemistry is one of the most common tools available when a person cannot comfortably remain in the state their body is producing on its own.

That fact becomes more interesting when we compare regulation with a change in the system itself. Imagine a door that always swings shut. One way to keep it open is to hold it with your hand. As long as the pressure remains, the doorway stays open. Another possibility is to change the hinge so that the door no longer keeps returning to the same position. Both approaches can produce an open door, but they produce it in different ways. Sometimes chemical regulation works like the hand on the door: it creates or maintains a state while the chemical is exerting its effect. Healing asks a different question - whether the conditions that keep pulling the person back toward the old state can themselves change.

The two papers before this one already established the pieces needed to ask that question without rebuilding them here. Unlocking Access showed that the same organism can have very different access to its existing capacities depending on its state. The Physiology of Expenditure then showed that fear, vigilance, suppression, tension, and other protective responses require work from the body, and that healing can reduce some of that work by changing why the protection is needed.[1] Borrowed States takes that logic and applies it to chemical regulation.

Consider what a chemical change can reveal. A person who feels anxious almost constantly may take a medication and discover what thinking feels like when anxiety is quieter. Someone who is painfully self-conscious may drink alcohol and become spontaneous, funny, affectionate, and socially confident. Someone who habitually suppresses emotion may use cannabis and suddenly find themselves able to cry. A psychedelic experience may give another person temporary access to connection, compassion, wonder, or a sense of meaning that feels almost absent from ordinary life. In each case, chemistry changes more than comfort. It creates a comparison between what the person can ordinarily access and what becomes available when the biological conditions change.

The shy person makes the pattern especially easy to see. Before drinking, they may monitor every sentence, anticipate judgment, hold back spontaneous comments, and continually check how they are being perceived. After drinking, much of that monitoring may weaken and a very different social person can appear. Alcohol did not teach them language, humor, affection, or the desire to connect during the hour it took to change their state. Those capacities were already part of the person. What changed was how much interference stood between the person and their expression. In that situation, the chemical acts less like pressing harder on the gas and more like releasing part of a brake.

This is the point at which the title of the paper becomes useful. When chemistry makes a psychologically meaningful state available that a person cannot yet reliably access or sustain under ordinary conditions, that state is borrowed. The experience is real, but access to it depends on temporary chemical support, so calm, focus, social ease, emotional openness, pleasure, confidence, connection, and even profound love can all become borrowed states.

The important question is therefore not simply whether the chemical works. Its effect gives us another piece of information: what changed when the person entered the borrowed state? If fear became quiet, what normally keeps it active? If inhibition disappeared, what ordinarily requires so much inhibition? If emotion became accessible, what keeps it suppressed? If medication creates enough stability for a person to think, connect, or function differently, what becomes possible while that stability is present? The distance between those conditions is the next part of the theory.

The Access Gap

The access gap is the distance between a psychologically meaningful state that becomes available through chemical regulation and the same person's ability to access or sustain that state without the same chemical support. Not every pharmacological effect belongs in that gap. Hallucinations, extreme euphoria, dissociation, heavy sedation, or total disinhibition can be direct effects of a substance rather than capacities a person would naturally embody. The useful comparison is narrower: whether chemistry has made a meaningful human capacity available that ordinary conditions keep difficult to reach.

Once a borrowed state becomes valuable, repeated use becomes easier to understand. Someone may consciously think, “I want a drink,” when what they are really seeking is the ability to relax around people, while another person may repeatedly use cannabis because it has become one of the few circumstances in which sadness feels accessible. The conscious desire names the chemical, but the recurring pattern may be organized around the state it provides.

The nervous system does not need a conscious theory explaining why the substance works. It only needs to learn that a particular chemical reliably produces access to something valuable. This overlaps with the self-medication literature, which has long proposed that people can become attached to the specific psychological effects of substances because those effects alter painful or dysregulated internal states.[2] Repeated learning of that kind can create what this paper calls compensatory desire: desire not simply for the chemical itself, but for the psychological function the chemical performs.

The larger the access gap, the stronger the compensatory pull can become. If ordinary life already contains much of the state being sought, the chemical route has comparatively little psychological work to do. When that state is otherwise extremely difficult to reach, the same route can become far more important because it is crossing a much larger gap.

This does not mean heavier or more frequent use automatically proves greater psychological distress. Physical dependence, tolerance, withdrawal, genetics, social environment, habit, reward learning, availability, and many other processes affect substance use. But when use is strongly compensatory, recurring desire may contain information about both what is missing and how important that missing state has become.

A useful question is therefore not merely, “How much does this person use?” It is, “What do they continually return to that substance to experience?” The answer may point toward the gap itself: disinhibition may point to excessive inhibition, numbness to emotions that feel overwhelming, relaxation to chronic activation, emotional release to suppression, connection to difficulty reaching connection ordinarily, and wonder or meaning to an everyday life that feels far removed from those experiences. These are clues rather than diagnoses; the recurring function of the substance can reveal the shape of what ordinary consciousness is failing to provide.

The Chemical Bridge Is Not the Healing

A chemical can bypass a psychological defense without resolving it. When its effects wear off, the conditions that made the borrowed state difficult to access may still be intact. Someone can reach grief, connection, relaxation, or social freedom for several hours and return afterward to the same suppression, fear, tension, or self-monitoring that limited those capacities before.

The chemical bridge therefore crosses the access gap temporarily, while healing changes the conditions that created the gap. As shame decreases, emotion no longer has to be suppressed, being seen carries less threat, social judgment loses power, chronic tension resolves, or pleasure becomes safer to experience, less effort is required to keep those capacities out of ordinary life. The qualities that once appeared mainly under chemical support can then begin to emerge without it.

This distinction becomes especially important when a chemical is being used recreationally, compulsively, or as a repeated form of self-regulation. Stopping the substance and healing the reason it was useful are not necessarily the same thing. Avoidance can be valuable, especially when the substance itself is causing harm, and removing the chemical route may force a person to develop another way of reaching what had been missing. But the bridge can disappear while the gap remains.

Someone can stop drinking for years while still deeply missing the freedom, confidence, happiness, or emotional release that drinking once provided. The behavior has changed, but the psychological job performed by the substance may still be needed. A deeper change appears when the compensatory need itself fades, creating a meaningful difference between “I really want this, but I refuse to use it” and “There is nothing in that state I feel I need anymore.”

The progression is therefore not simply from use to abstinence. It moves from needing what the substance provides, to recognizing what it provides, to understanding why that state is inaccessible naturally, and then to developing the same capacity without chemical assistance. When the original compensatory desire disappears because the state is no longer missing, the psychological job that once made the substance valuable has become obsolete. That is what closing the access gap looks like.

Psychedelics and the "Bad Trip"

Psychedelics present a particularly interesting version of this process because they do not simply provide relaxation or disinhibition. They can dramatically loosen ordinary psychological organization. Thoughts, memories, emotions, bodily sensations, fears, symbolic imagery, beliefs, and aspects of identity that are normally controlled or avoided may suddenly become extremely difficult to ignore. Research on psychedelic experiences has found that baseline surrender, acceptance, openness, and mindset are associated with the character of the acute experience, while apprehension, confusion, and low surrender are associated with more difficult reactions.[3]

Within this theory, this creates a unique version of the access problem. The same protective system that normally keeps painful psychological material outside conscious reach can suddenly find itself unable to maintain that distance.

A person may encounter grief they have spent years avoiding, fear they cannot immediately explain, a painful realization about themselves, loss of control over their usual identity, or an experience that fundamentally contradicts how they normally understand reality. Their existing protective system may respond exactly as it has learned to respond to threatening material: resist it, escape it, suppress it, control it, or make it stop.

Under a psychedelic, those strategies may no longer work as usual. The person tries to control or escape what is surfacing, but the experience becomes less controllable; that loss of control increases fear, which leads to stronger resistance, which makes the experience feel even more threatening. A feedback loop forms in which the attempt to contain the material becomes part of the distress. A cognitive-behavioral model of psychedelic therapy describes the same pattern: attempts to exert control over challenging experiences can fail or intensify aversion, while surrender and acceptance can shift the experience.[4] Within this theory, one major form of a bad trip occurs at that collision point: material that ordinary defenses normally keep at a distance becomes accessible while the survival system is still trying to force it back out.

If resistance eases, the person may sometimes be able to move through the emotion or psychological material instead of continually defending against it. In some cases, the experience can provide a powerful corrective lesson: I can experience this emotion, uncertainty, vulnerability, or loss of control without being destroyed by it.

This does not mean every bad trip is secretly healing or that resistance explains all challenging psychedelic experiences. Dose, environment, preparation, social support, preexisting distress, psychiatric vulnerability, and other factors can substantially affect the likelihood and severity of difficult experiences. Research on challenging psilocybin experiences has documented both enduring perceived benefits and genuine harms, including a minority of people who sought treatment for lasting psychological symptoms.[5] More recent research has also documented prolonged anxiety, fear, depersonalization, derealization, existential struggle, and social disconnection after some psychedelic experiences.[6]

The narrower point is that resistance can sometimes amplify the experience. What feels like the psychedelic "turning against them" may be the felt consequence of ordinary defenses losing their usual ability to maintain distance. In that case, the experience reveals not only the material itself but how much effort had been required to keep it outside awareness. Psychedelic-catalyzed insight is common and is frequently associated with therapeutic improvement.[7] That association does not establish that every interpretation produced during an altered state is literally true; the meaning of an insight still has to be evaluated rather than accepted automatically.

Closing the Access Gap

Everything up to this point leads to a central prediction. If repeated chemical use is serving a compensatory psychological function, then healing the pattern that creates the access gap should reduce the need to reach that state through chemistry. The expected change is not simply stronger resistance to the substance; the reason for wanting it should weaken as the previously missing state becomes more available in ordinary life.

That prediction can be applied without treating every kind of chemical use as equivalent. With prescribed medication, the contrast can show what becomes possible when a symptom is sufficiently regulated for the person to function differently. With recreational or compulsive use, what the person repeatedly seeks may reveal what fear, repression, chronic activation, or other protective organization keeps difficult to reach. In both cases, the chemically supported state provides information about the conditions under which the person functions differently.

Natural embodiment is the point at which qualities that once depended primarily on chemical regulation become increasingly available because the person or organism has changed. Where that change is possible, the chemical is no longer the only doorway into the state.

The Pattern Is Older Than Medicine

Only after the everyday mechanism is clear does the older history become relevant. People were deliberately using chemistry to alter consciousness thousands of years before modern medicine existed, and many of the surviving examples appear inside religious or ceremonial systems. Seen from the framework developed above, those practices can be examined not as strange exceptions but as earlier attempts to enter states that ordinary consciousness did not easily provide.

Some of the earliest examples are already familiar from ancient religious traditions. Soma, the sacred drink praised throughout the Rigveda of ancient India, occupied a central place in Vedic ritual and was described as producing unusual states, even though the plant or plants used to make it remain uncertain.[10] In the Americas, archaeology gives us physical evidence rather than only written descriptions. At Chavin de Huantar in present-day Peru, researchers found psychoactive plant remains and chemical traces in inhalation devices from ceremonial spaces, showing that altered states were deliberately built into organized ritual more than two thousand years ago.[11] A roughly 1,000-year-old ritual bundle from southwestern Bolivia contained several psychoactive compounds, including bufotenine, DMT, harmine, and cocaine-related compounds, gathered from plants growing in different ecological regions. The bundle therefore reflects specialized knowledge of how particular plants could be combined to change consciousness.[12]

The religious history that eventually develops into Judaism provides another unusually direct example. At Tel Arad, an eighth-century BCE shrine belonging to the Kingdom of Judah, researchers analyzed residue preserved on two limestone altars. Judahite means belonging to ancient Judah, the Israelite kingdom centered on Jerusalem from which later Jewish religious traditions developed. One altar contained frankincense. The other contained THC, CBD, and CBN, cannabinoids associated with cannabis, together with evidence that the cannabis resin had been mixed with animal dung to allow mild heating. The researchers concluded that cannabis had been deliberately burned as part of the shrine ritual.[15] Whatever meaning the worshippers gave the experience, this is physical evidence that a consciousness-altering plant was being used inside a Judahite religious setting.

Wine adds another layer because ancient wine was often more than fermented grapes. At Tel Kabri, a Middle Bronze Age Canaanite palace in what is now northern Israel, chemical analysis of a forty-jar wine cellar found resins, herbs, oils, honey, and other botanical additives. The researchers described the mixture as reflecting knowledge sophisticated enough to balance preservation, taste, and psychoactivity, meaning effects on mental or bodily state.[16] The important point is not that every ancient wine was psychedelic. It is that wine was already being used as a carrier for additional plant chemistry, so drinking it could deliver far more than alcohol alone.

The Mediterranean evidence makes that possibility even more concrete. At a Roman-period farmhouse near Pompeii, archaeologists found a storage vessel containing an unusual plant-and-bone assemblage that included opium poppy and numerous plants known for medicinal use. The original archaeological interpretation was that the deposit may have been the residue of a medicinal preparation resembling complex ancient antidotes such as Mithridatium or Theriac.[17] Brian Muraresku brings this evidence together with Greek mystery traditions, ancient pharmacology, and the long practice of mixing herbs into wine in The Immortality Key, arguing that drug-infused wines belonged to the religious world from which early Christianity emerged.[19] His continuity argument is interpretive, but the underlying historical point is well established: ancient Mediterranean cultures possessed sophisticated knowledge of combining wine and other liquids with active botanical ingredients.

Christian evidence adds a separate visual strand rather than proving the same thing chemically. Wine became central to the Eucharist, the Christian ritual meal built around bread and wine. In the Catacomb of Saints Marcellinus and Peter in Rome, several late-antique banquet paintings include female figures labeled Agape, meaning Love, and Irene, meaning Peace, alongside inscriptions directing them to mix the wine or provide hot water.[18] These images establish that prepared and mixed wine was part of the banquet imagery, but they do not reveal a chemical recipe. Muraresku places these frescoes alongside evidence from ancient infused wines and material he examined in Christian and Vatican collections as part of a broader argument that older Mediterranean traditions of prepared sacramental drinks may have continued into early Christianity.[19] That proposed continuity is a historical interpretation rather than residue evidence from the Christian cup itself.

The same pattern survives openly in traditions that never separated healing, religion, and altered consciousness as sharply as modern Western culture often does. Peyote, a cactus containing the psychedelic compound mescaline, has long been used ceremonially and medicinally by Indigenous peoples of Mexico and North America and later became central to the Native American Church.[13] Ayahuasca, an Amazonian psychedelic brew, has likewise been used in ceremonial and healing settings and was incorporated into organized religions including Santo Daime, Barquinha, and União do Vegetal.[14] In these settings, the chemical state is not treated merely as recreation. It is placed inside preparation, community, interpretation, healing, and a larger account of what the experience is for.

Across cultures and centuries, the recurring pattern is not merely substance use but structured access: chemistry is placed inside ritual, preparation, community, healing, initiation, communion, or encounters understood as divine. That history raises a new question for Borrowed States: when a chemically altered state is treated as spiritually important, what qualities of consciousness are people trying to reach, and which of those qualities might eventually become stable without requiring the same chemical doorway?

Why This Matters Spiritually

The Cosmic Game Theory of Consciousness: The Synthetic Codification of Spirituality's Emergent Scientific Grammar began this series by asking what consciousness can become and by identifying love as one of the recurring themes that spiritual traditions place at the center of human development. If the deeper purpose of life is ultimately to learn love, then the question for Borrowed States is what chemically altered experience can reveal about the barriers that ordinarily limit love of self, love of others, or both.

Those two forms of love do not necessarily develop in a fixed order. Greater self-love can make it easier to love others without fear, control, jealousy, or dependence, but deeply loving another person can also expose the places where we do not yet love ourselves. Experiencing compassion for someone else can teach us compassion toward ourselves. Feeling unconditional love for another person can reveal what unconditional love actually feels like and gradually change how we relate to ourselves. The development can move in either direction, and each form of love can deepen the other.

From this perspective, many psychological struggles can be understood as places where love remains incomplete. Shame reflects difficulty fully accepting oneself. Judgment and hostility toward others can reflect limits in our ability to understand or love them. Fear of rejection gives another person’s response power over our own worth. Jealousy, control, resentment, defensiveness, and the need for approval can all emerge where love of self, love of others, or both remain conditional.

Even vulnerability begins to look different from this perspective. Vulnerability exists because revealing ourselves places something we value into another person’s hands. If someone’s judgment can change how I feel about myself, then being seen carries risk. But if self-worth becomes completely secure, there is progressively less to protect. I can be misunderstood, rejected, disliked, or disagreed with without those experiences determining my value. What once felt like vulnerability simply becomes openness.

The same is true of authenticity. Authenticity is usually treated as something a person has to deliberately practice because fear has taught them to hide, alter, or suppress themselves. As those fears disappear, authenticity stops feeling like an achievement. There is no longer a performed self competing with a hidden one. There is simply living.

Altered states can sometimes make those possibilities directly experiential. A person may encounter profound love for themselves or another person, compassion for someone they previously resented, freedom from judgment, deep connection, emotional openness, or an effortless ability to exist without defending an identity. The spiritual importance of such a state is not that the substance is automatically sacred or that every insight is literally true, but that a way of being that once seemed unavailable can become something the person has actually experienced.

If divinity is understood not as a separate kind of being but as the progressive development of consciousness, then psychological healing and spiritual development may be different descriptions of the same movement. Increasing consciousness means bringing more of what was unconscious into awareness, becoming less governed by automatic survival responses, and becoming more capable of love without the conditions fear places upon it.

Borrowed states matter in that process because they can make an otherwise abstract developmental possibility experiential. Chemistry may briefly reveal a way of being that the person cannot yet sustain; healing is what determines whether that possibility becomes lived. Natural embodiment is therefore the point where qualities once reached only through a temporary doorway become part of the consciousness that moves through ordinary life.

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