Psychedelics and Human Potential: Practices for Deep Healing and Self-Actualization

What Is the Human Promise?

The Eidos of Entelechia

What do I mean by the Human Promise? The Human Promise is not a static goal or endpoint; it is continuous and ongoing. Its path is inner work, and it requires a conscious directed effort toward growth and realization. The Human Promise is a fulfillment—and a transcendence—of our human potential.

Human evolution isn’t a straight path—it’s a series of steady steps punctuated by exponential leaps forward or decisions that lead to stagnation. Sometimes we inch ahead through effort and understanding. Other times, everything changes all at once, like a light switching on in a dark room. This book is about one of those leaps, what I call the Human Promise.

I coined the term Human Promise, and it’s central to everything we explore here. It’s about a transformation, transmutation and transcendence, one that could redefine not only how we understand the universe but who we are as human beings.

To help you imagine it, picture this: Right now in Southern California, monarch butterflies are beginning their migration. You probably remember from school that these butterflies begin life as caterpillars—creatures that live low to the ground, eating leaves and crawling through the dirt. Their entire existence revolves around survival as a caterpillar. There’s no sign they’re destined for anything beyond that.

But something extraordinary happens. They undergo metamorphosis, transforming into butterflies—creatures of color, light, and flight, capable of traveling thousands of miles. That caterpillar had no way of knowing what it was becoming. Its potential was to be a better caterpillar. But its promise was to become something utterly different.

That’s what I intend to mean by the Human Promise. The actual work toward it will be presented as the Human Promise Program, a course offered by the World Health Foundation for Development and Peace. I started this foundation during the International Year of Peace of the United Nations, and we later received the Messenger of Peace Award in the 1980s. As a species, our potential is to become stronger from within, kinder, wiser, more loving versions of ourselves. But our promise goes beyond that—it’s to become something radically new. Not just better humans, but beings that exist in a completely new way, with a new consciousness we can’t yet imagine. With the advent of powerful AI, we must be careful to learn to find our essence instead of believing we are an algorithm that provides utilitarian information in this new era and religion of datism.

This book shares ideas, practices, and tools that help us shed the layers of conditioning, history, and false identity that keep us locked into the familiar. I call this path the realization of the Human Promise (HP). Many of these practices—meditation, mindfulness, conscious company, breathwork, rituals, even psychedelics—have helped people grow for thousands of years. But if any of them could fully unlock this transformation, we’d already be there. These tools matter, but they’re only part of the preparation for the leap. The embodiment of the teaching is fundamental to be able to transmit it for the time needed to present a set of experiences that the location of its nonlocal identity matters.

Consider physics as an example. For centuries, Newtonian physics helped us understand and interpret the world—it was a massive breakthrough in its time. But then came quantum mechanics, which changed everything. It wasn’t a refinement of the old—it was a completely new paradigm that opened doors we didn’t even know existed. The laws of Newton still worked, when contextualizing reality at that exact level, but quantum theory showed us a deeper and different explanation of that nature of what we call reality.

The Human Promise is like that. It’s not about becoming slightly better—it’s about entering a new paradigm. A new way of being. And just like quantum physics, it might arrive through insight, not effort. A shift that redefines what it even means to be human.

This book invites you to hold this idea in your thoughts, in your heart, in your quiet moments. Sit with the possibility of a transformation that isn’t just about progress, but about transcendence. It may sound bold—but I believe it’s not only possible . . . it’s our destiny.

And isn’t that a more exciting future than simply becoming a slightly better version of ourselves?

The Human Promise is the tendency toward enlightenment. It is not just about personal fulfillment or success but involves a deeper, conscious, more altruistic, compassionate, and inclusive engagement with the world, others, and the messages of the cosmos. Collectively, it suggests that humanity can evolve toward greater harmony, understanding, and cooperation, achieving heights of civilization previously unimagined. By tapping into and actualizing our individual potential, we partake in a shared journey toward a more aware, caring, and interconnected global community, fulfilling the grand Human Promise of individual and collective progress and well-being. The Human Promise is like a curve that remains asymptotic to an ideal line of events and never touches, which I refer to as a “tendency.”

We live in an exciting novel time, full of possibilities. Technological innovation is accelerating at an ever-increasing rate, yet our inner development has seemingly not kept pace with external progress. Human beings still create a tremendous amount of unnecessary suffering for themselves, the planet, and other species.

In my introduction, I mentioned the role of psychedelics within the traditional medical model. From a technology perspective, we would call this the break/fix model. Psychedelics can help us fix problems in our consciousness that we have intentionally or unintentionally created.

While they can be powerful medicines to help alleviate suffering, this only scratches the surface of their ultimate potential. While some mental illnesses are heritable, all of them carry a genetic component and many of them are created by humans acting in ways that create suffering for ourselves and others around us. War, sexual assault, wo/men trafficking, negative parenting, and a misunderstanding of the purpose of life can all create suffering that could then be sometimes alleviated or cured by traditional or psychedelic medicines.

However valuable these medicines are, spending so much effort to cure conditions that we create is not the purpose of human life. It seems circular.

There is the possibility that instead of spending trillions in resources to fix problems that we create, we can go inward to address the root problem of why we do this to ourselves and learn how to stop. We can then apply our vast resources to the positive exploration of the Human Promise.

An Overview of Entelechia,
the Realization of Fullest Potential

The eidos (meaning “idea” or “essence”) of the Human Promise represents a profound exploration of our possibilities, both individually and as a species. It encompasses the idea that ALL persons harbor unique capacities, developmental expansion, and virtues that, when fully realized, contribute to the collective advancement of the individual and all of humanity.

The Human Promise is rooted in the philosophical term entelechy, derived from Aristotle’s ancient Greek term entelechia, which signifies the ongoing realization of something’s fullest potential. This principle suggests that both individuals and groups are engaged in a continuous journey toward achieving their utmost capabilities, a process that evolves and reveals practical implications over time.

Aristotle’s works (particularly Metaphysics and On the Soul) frequently discuss the interplay between potentiality and actuality across various domains, including physiology, metaphysics, and ethics. Potentiality is the inherent capability of something to evolve into a more complete state. It is often categorized into two types: a strong potentiality, which emerges from a natural tendency and unfolds almost inevitably under the right conditions, and a weak potentiality, which is transient and occurs sporadically by chance. Actuality, on the other hand, is the manifestation of potential through action or change, rather than remaining in a passive state. Aristotle introduced two terms to describe this actualization process: energia, which is the basic state of being actively engaged, and entelechia, a more advanced form of energia that achieves the ultimate potential or purpose of an entity.

This dynamic of actualization underscores that achieving one’s ultimate potential is not a static endpoint or a final destination but a state of continual engagement and effort. The work of fulfilling the Human Promise is ongoing and integral to what I term inner work. Inner work is the conscious awareness and focused action directed toward realizing one’s own entelechy. It isn’t just about having the right conditions but involves a constant, directed effort toward growth and realization.

Thus, the Human Promise suggests a transformative process where the potential is not just a static quality but is dynamically realized through continuous effort. This echoes the mythical philosopher’s stone, believed to turn base metals into gold and grant immortality, symbolizing the profound and transformative and evolutionary power of achieving one’s full potential through persistent and dedicated effort.