The Creation of the temple of harm reduction

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the temple of harm reduction is a non-denominational interfaith church that grew from the work Mitchel Gomez had already been doing for most of his life. Helping people meet altered states with knowledge, care, informed consent, and community. Not fear. Not silence. Not punishment.

Long before the Temple had a name, Mitchel was drawn to questions of consciousness and perception. As a child, he encountered psychedelic literature and became fascinated by a simple, destabilizing idea: the world a person experiences is filtered through the mind. That early insight shaped much of what followed. Mitchel was never interested only in counterculture or policy. He was interested in consciousness itself, and in the human responsibility to care for people who explore it.

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From Consciousness to Community Care

Mitchel’s path led him through psychedelic culture, New College of Florida, and the wider world of MAPS, Erowid, Burning Man, research, activism, and festival communities. At Burning Man in 2008, he camped at Entheon Village, a gathering of psychedelic elders, artists, researchers, and cultural builders. That experience helped show him that sacramental culture did not have to remain hidden or ashamed. It could be public, creative, rigorous, and world-building.

His Jewish background became the moral root of what would eventually become the Temple. Three principles stayed with him: tikkun olam, the obligation to repair the world; pikuach nefesh, the duty to preserve life above nearly every other rule; and Lifnei Iver, the commandment not to place a stumbling block before the blind.

That last teaching became central. In Jewish ethics, it is not only about a physical obstruction. It also means that withholding knowledge someone needs to make a wise decision is a moral wrong.

Mitchel had been assigned that commandment for his bar mitzvah when he was 13. Decades later, as the Temple began to form, he recognized it as an early seed. The future Temple was already present in that teaching. Do not hide knowledge from people who need it. Do not let people stumble because the truth was withheld.

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Harm Reduction as Sacred Duty

For 11 years, Mitchel worked in secular harm reduction through DanceSafe. He gave public talks, educated communities, and argued that people have a right to accurate information about what they are choosing to encounter. Even before he had an institution that could hold the religious side of the work, he spoke about it in moral language. He described a Jewish obligation to challenge prohibition and to help people survive the risks created by fear, stigma, misinformation, contaminated supply chains, and bad law.

In 2025, Mitchel was unexpectedly let go from DanceSafe. The loss was not only professional. He had believed that work was his life’s work. The break created space to name what had always been present. Harm reduction was not only his life’s work. It was his calling.

The answer came at Psychedelic Science in 2025. Another psychedelic church proposed an event-based harm-reduction program: peer support, education, testing, consent resources, and spiritual outreach. At first, it sounded like an event-services project. But as Mitchel sat with it, the idea became much larger.

He realized he was not merely joining a program. He was helping found a church that followed the religion he had always practiced. Repair the world. Protect life. Speak the truth people need to hear. If you believe that, you are already part of the work.

Mitchel found this path through his Jewish upbringing, but its heart is ancient and interfaith. The same duty appears across religious traditions. the temple of harm reduction emerged from that recognition. Mitchel had already been living harm reduction as sacred duty. The Temple gave that duty a name, a structure, and a theology.

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What the Temple Teaches

The Temple’s central insight is that harm reduction is not only practical work. It is worship.

The sacred work is care, knowledge, truth, consent, testing, preparation, integration, peer support, and the refusal to abandon people in moments of risk or transformation. The sacraments of the Temple are not only the plants, mushrooms, or compounds that people may seek. The sacraments are also the tools that help people prepare for, survive, and integrate encounters with altered states.

This is the heart of the Temple: people will seek altered states, meaning, insight, beauty, and God. A moral community does not meet that reality with silence or punishment. It meets it with knowledge, care, and the sacred obligation to keep one another alive. Read more about our sincerely held beliefs, our practice, and our sacraments.

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The Three Foundings of the Temple

Mitchel describes the Temple as having three foundings.

The Ancient Founding

The first founding happened when an early ancestor entered an altered state and another member of the group responded with comfort instead of fear. Someone was overwhelmed. Someone else stayed. That act of care is the oldest root of the Temple.

The Human Founding

The second founding belongs to the dawn of symbolic consciousness, when sacred mushroom experience and guidance may have helped shape language, metacognition, religion, and the ability to speak about inner worlds. In this telling, harm reduction is not a modern addition to sacramental culture. It is part of the original religious act. The guide, the witness, and the caretaker belong at the beginning of humanity’s spiritual life.

The Modern Founding

The third founding came when Mitchel recognized that his years of education, advocacy, Jewish ethics, festival work, grief, and moral conviction were converging into a new religious movement.

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Practical Work, Not Theory

The Temple is taking practical shape around event work and community infrastructure. Current plans include visible harm-reduction service at Burning Man, with support connected to Camp Questionmark at 2:00 and Esplanade. The absence of the Zendo Project has created urgency. Mitchel is organizing resource lists, on-playa coordination, and an offline harm-reduction app with information about consent, testing, and where to find help.

Beyond the Burn, the longer vision includes off-grid resources, encrypted mesh-network communication, and systems that can share safety information at any event without relying on cell service. The goal is simple: when people need help, accurate information and grounded support should be close at hand. We continue searching for better technology to keep our brothers and sisters safe while we walk each other home.

Mitchel also began imagining congregations. Some may be place-based, such as a Denver congregation. Others may be practice-based, such as a visionary art congregation. The Temple is not limited to crisis response. It includes preparation, integration, meaning-making, and helping people bring visions back into life in useful, grounded ways. Everything rests on a foundation of power with, never power over.

You can follow this work through the Temple’s current projects, including its Burning Man harm-reduction work and the development of new tools for community care.

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Why the Temple Matters Now

The Temple exists because prohibition has made seeking more dangerous. It rewards secrecy, increases stigma, pushes markets toward more potent and unpredictable materials, and separates people from the knowledge that could keep them alive.

The Temple’s answer is disciplined compassion. Tell the truth. Test what can be tested. Teach what can be taught. Treat life-preservation as sacred.

At its core, the temple of harm reduction is Mitchel’s lifelong calling made visible. It joins Jewish ethical duty, psychedelic history, sacramental theology, cognitive liberty, bodily autonomy, and practical care. Its message is simple and demanding: do not let people stumble because the truth was withheld.

The theology names this work. The congregation gives it life.

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