How to Change Your Heart

Financial independence and psychedelics as gateways, not goals

I was interviewed on the Earn and Invest podcast last week about financial independence and psychedelics.¹ I discuss my own FIRE² story, material and spiritual enoughness, and how psychedelics can and cannot change your life.

My main point in the interview is that both financial independence and psychedelics are gateways, not goals. Getting your personal finances in order to simply to “retire early” is an impoverished view of money and indeed, an impoverished view of your own life. Likewise, taking psychedelics as a sort of “consciousness tourism” is a missed opportunity.

The Trappist monk and mystic Thomas Merton wrote:

“Why do we spend our lives striving to be something that we would never want to be, if only we knew what we wanted? Why do we waste our time doing things which, if we only stopped to think about them, are just the opposite of what we were made for?”

Both FIRE and psychedelics are opportunities to find out who you were made for. But independent of acting on it, neither FIRE or psychedelics create the life you were meant to lead. In Hindu terms, both are gateways to discover to your dharma.³ But gateways aren’t paths. Once you go through the gate, you have to keep walking. And that’s what the spiritual integration of psychedelics is about.

How many times have you met someone who has gone to a “transformative” retreat, or workshop, or trip, but a few months or a year later, their lives are still the same? Maybe it’s happened to you. Intention and transformation are not the same thing. Intention is simply a thought. Transformation is action: a change that is uncomfortable but ultimately more satisfying than remaining tight in the bud.⁴

"That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.” - David Foster Wallace

Vicki Robin, the godmother of the FIRE movement, wrote that most people’s money problems are stem to a lack of direction in life. Once you know what you’re about, you make financial decisions much easier, because money becomes a tool for what you’re really about.

Most Americans don’t know what they’re really about. So the money they earn is simply money to be spent: Home renovations. More expensive trips. Gifts for loved ones. Nicer cars. Gadgets. None of these things are “bad” in any particular way (well, other than the collective environmental cost we’re all experiencing). But to echo Thomas Merton, buying more expensive things and experiences isn’t what you were made for. Your life was meant to have meaning.

There is nothing more confining than the prison we don't know we are in. - William Shakespeare

Management guru Peter Drucker once said, “Tell me what you value and I might believe you, but show me your calendar and your bank statement, and I’ll show you what you really value.” Likewise, I ask my FF1 students: if someone audited your budget, what would they find out about you? What, and who, do you really care about?

So much of our spending is an exercise of our egos.

How do change your heart

So how do you really change? Michael Pollan has a book and Netflix series about psychedelics out, called “How to Change Your Mind.” It’s as if Pollan, the UC Berkeley academic, believes that change comes intellectually. But for most, change comes emotionally. In the Bible, Jesus says that going to heaven requires metanoia, which is usually translated as “conversion.” A better translation, according to Franciscan mystic Richard Rohr, is “change of heart.” A change of heart is real, everyday transformation: being grateful, surrendering the trappings of the ego, letting go of the insistent demands we have on life. Metanoia is making heaven a place on earth.

In the first half of your life, you’ll find meaning in the trappings of the ego. In the second, not so much. Not everyone chooses to undergo the transformation to the second half of your life (what Jungians call. your “second, real, birth). But the alternative seems worse.

One finds so much richness of experience, so much growth of consciousness, so much enlargement of one’s vision that the work proves well worth it. The false gods of our culture, power, materialism, hedonism, and narcissism, those upon which we have projected our longing for transcendence, only narrow and diminish.

A life that constricts meaning wounds the soul. - James Hollis

So how do you have a change of heart? I think, as I say in my interview, you’ll live your way into a new way of thinking faster than you’ll think your way into a new way of living. It’s not in the head. It’s in the heart. And when we do, we’ll get to what Sri Chinmoy once said:

When the power of love replaces the love of power, we will have a new name: God.

If you are seeking integration from your psychedelic experience, to understand how you want to live in this material world after experiencing that mystical world, I offer spiritual direction. This world, this one right here, is drenched in meaning. Amazingly, your dharma has a place in it.

1. Jordan Grumet, Doc G, is a hospice doctor and FIRE expert who has just written a book about what we can learn from the regrets of the dying and how to apply them to our money and to living a full life. I’m planning on reading it this month.

2. Financial independence, retiring early

3. “I have lived what I call a committed life; a life that is governed by my highest commitments, not by my desires. If you live a life of commitment, where you give your word for something larger than yourself, you are constantly in a state of fulfillment. I am not saying that there are no struggles, no problems. It leads you to a life you could never have planned. It does not have anything to do with ambition. It has to do with surrender. You cannot surrender to get that kind of a life because that is cheating. You have to really surrender and somehow it is given to you.” When you're living a committed life, your own small desires start becoming petty. My commitment wakes me up in the morning and tells me what to wear, who to meet with, why to go here or there.” - Lynne Twist

4. “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.” -Anais Nin