How to Use Psychedelics

Bicycle Day and Earth Day sit just three days apart on the calendar, a timing that feels more like an ontological alignment than a coincidence.

On April 19th, 1943, Albert Hofmann took the world’s first intentional L*D journey. His laboratory notes famously recorded the phrase “Home by bicycle,” marking a ride that began in terror and ended in a profound, ego-dissolving realization: the absolute illusion of our separation from the living world.

Hofmann spent the subsequent decades advocating for L*D not merely as a pharmacological curiosity, but as a “medicine for the soul”—a tool specifically designed to help humanity move past the destructive belief that we are outside observers of Nature.

—

From the perspective of ecopsychology, the environmental crisis is a crisis of relationship. We have spent centuries conditioned by a neurocentric model that treats the planet as a passive backdrop for human activity.

Bicycle Day reminds us that altered states can act as a radical intervention in this narrative. By temporarily suspending the Default Mode Network, these experiences allow for a “biophilic” awakening—a felt sense of ecological attunement where the boundary between self and soil becomes permeable.

—

Earth Day asks us to care for the planet, but information and data are rarely enough to inspire the kind of stewardship we need. True care doesn’t come from a sense of duty; it comes from a sense of kinship.

When we perceive ourselves as an embedded planetary process, “protecting the environment” is no longer an external task. It becomes an act of self-preservation.

The legacy of the bicycle ride is a shift from neurocentrism to an ecological consciousness. It is the realization that we do not live on the Earth, but as a conscious expression of it.