"when a single ketamine session costs $400+ and MDMA-assisted therapy runs into the thousands, we're not talking about the Fool's journey anymore. We're talking about a luxury retreat."

I totally see this, and the gentrification of consciousness framing is sharp. But here's the thing that keeps nagging at me — and I'm genuinely not trying to be contrarian here, I'm just working through it — my friend who probably makes less in a month than one of those clinical sessions costs had what sounds like a textbook ego death experience last year. In his apartment. With mushrooms he grew himself from a spore syringe that cost like $20.

And like, I know that's not the same thing as guided psychedelic therapy. I know there's real value in the therapeutic container, the integration work, the clinician who knows what they're doing. I'm not dismissing that. But when we talk about who "gets to meet God," I think we might be conflating two really different things: the clinical model that's being gatekept, and the raw experience itself which is... kind of not?

The thing that complicates your Fool metaphor for me is that the Fool doesn't actually need a guide. That's kind of the whole point. The Fool is naive, unprepared, stepping off the cliff with nothing. Which, honestly, sounds a lot more like my friend's DIY mushroom trip than a $3000 MDMA session with a licensed therapist and a prep packet.

But then I immediately second-guess myself because — okay, the Fool also winds up getting eaten by a dog in some interpretations. There's a reason the Major Arcana exists as a journey and not just one card. The structured path matters.

I think what I'm circling around is that maybe the gated community isn't the only door, even if it's the one getting all the attention and institutional backing. The danger I see is that by framing this purely as an access issue, we accidentally reinforce the idea that the clinical route is the legitimate route. Which might be doing the gatekeeping work for them, just from a different angle.

"sacred for who?"

Okay but I keep going back and forth on this — isn't there a version where the gentrification argument is... incomplete? Like, indigenous practices weren't universally accessible either; they were gated by lineage, initiation, community standing. The "free for everyone" version is kind of a modern Western fantasy we're projecting backward. I'm not saying the current paywall model is good, just that maybe the Fool's leap was never actually free — the cost just looked different.