Psychedelia, p.71
Psychedelia, page 71
In the 2000s, the complexities of the Eastern religious traditions and the sacrifices involved in a fully committed lifestyle are hopefully better understood among the young men and women in the West who enjoy the spiritual stimulation of The Psychedelic Experience. Much would be gained if psychedelicists took the singular, unprecedented nature of their (full-spectrum) trip experiences as a vantage point for their spiritual work, objective and empirical. Insights and techniques from both religion and psychology, and probably occultism too, can still be absorbed along the way if they seem to apply. As Albert Hofmann suggested, it would be most natural for a Western spiritual seeker to first attach him or herself to the mysticism and non-theistic spirituality of the European and American cultural heritages. Given the rich legacy that stretches from ancient Greece to the vivid alternative Western subcultures of today, he or she may here find a stimulating, rewarding and less demanding spiritual road that aligns with modern entheogens and the celebratory hedonistic- pantheistic lifestyle they encourage. The anamnesis or remembrance of a higher world that Plato spoke of and which was offered via the kykeon in the Great Temple at Eleusis, is still available to validate and inspire one's spiritual beliefs.
4
As the Good Friday Experiment proved, there is no doubt that psychedelics can produce an experience that is similar to the point of being indistinguishable from the classic visions of mystics and saints. This fact offers several routes of speculative departure, and much akin to what went on within 1950s-60s psychology, one might argue that the spiritual interpretations chosen for Psychedelia are not the most appropriate ones. The problem is essentially one of tradition. In the West, what is known as mystical experiences are not terribly popular to begin with, and if they do exist, they're the property of a few religious fanatics; people who are chosen, or marked in some way. The fact that millions of ordinary people have had similar experiences over the centuries has been routinely ignored as the products of overly imaginative minds, or even symptoms of pathology. With great visionaries like Swedenborg and Eckhart dislodged as exceptions to the mainstream rule, the channel for Western mysticism grew narrow, relegated to traditional religious domains.
It is therefore not surprising that the large catalog of anecdotal trip reports gathered during the height of LSD use displays a significant bias towards non-Western interpretations of the experience. Although these trips occurred within a Christian-Judaic cultural tradition, heterodox visions such as the formless Void of Buddhism are not only frequent but often described as desirable. The Psychedelic Experience guide-book from 1964 does not even concern itself with a discussion or examination of other possible interpretations, but insists upon a ready-made Tibetan Buddhist model. This Orientalizing reflex was strong almost to the point of dogma during the height of the psychedelic counterculture. Some may want to dismiss it as mere exoticism and generational rebellion of the '60s, but the extreme mind states in which these visions occur make socio -cultural explanations insufficient. The psychedelic peak experience corresponds to the highest vision states of ancient mystics and saints, and the source and morphology of these states are still today considered mysteries of consciousness. Leaving psychology behind as they entered the uncharted parts of Innerspace by way of LSD, many Westerners found themselves in what seemed like Buddhist, Hindu or Taoist realms.
A better explanation for the psychedelic embracement of non-Christian interpretations may lie in the way an altered consciousness reacts to ego-loss and non-dualism. In order to ascend to the highest states of the trip space, it is necessary to pass through a state where one's sense of Ego falls away, a familiar experience to both veteran psychedelicists and advanced non-drug visionaries. The ego-less mindstream in turn opens up for a non-dualist, non-composite, perception of the totality of the world, where distinctions between self and externals, and between all objects, cease to exist. This experience, if had under LSD, may be taken as an Eastern stream-enterer's glimpse of nirvana, even if there are fully comparable accounts from Western visionaries. However, to some psyche- delicists the ascension into these radical states will appear destabilizing or even threatening, depending on their personality, and they may seek to restructure the experience into a manageable, non-threatening format. If a strong threat response like this is elicited, the figure of Christ offers an organizing principle that is both dualist, benign and easily accessible.6
Yet to many psychedelicists in the acid heyday of the 1960s-70s, the falling back upon an established dualistic structure like Christianity could be taken as failing the Acid Test. With their insistence upon soteriological end-states, nothing less than the total dissolvement of both ego and dualistic phenomena would do. This inner death-rebirth theme is the main thrust of The Psychedelic Experience. The New Testament doctrine, although culturally validated and spiritually rich, has little to say of the radical states of consciousness that are marked by ego-loss and non-composite energy. Orienting oneself towards the Hindu Brahman or the Buddhist Void thus becomes a validation of one's ascent to the highest possible realms of The Psychedelic Experience, where the traditional Western heritage seems to fall short.7
Unfortunately, formal research into psychedelic spirituality during the pre-legislation era didn't progress much beyond the Good Friday Experiment in 1962, and outside anecdotal observations it is difficult to determine how and why the Eastern orientation became so pronounced during the '60s-'70s. A third factor that may have contributed during the psychedelic counterculture phase is the specter of mental illness connected with Messianic ideation. In the modern West, identification with Christian Avatars, and the Christ figure in particular, is not considered a heresy as much as a phenomena related to psychiatric treatment of the mentally unstable. In the lore of Psychedelia and in society at large, a Messiah trip invokes references to destructive cult leaders such as Charles Manson and Mel Lyman, along with pathological-schizophrenic connotations. This too is likely to have contributed to the rejection of Christian reference points among psychedelicists.
Parallel to how the unique richness of The Psychedelic Experience was strangely subjugated into a therapeutical tool by psychologists, some people of a modern spiritual bent have tried to present Psychedelia as some sort of stepping stone towards 'real' religion. One could instead turn the table on this view, and suggest that many religious systems are simply attempts to project structure and doctrine on a mind experience that is actually otherworldly and unacculturated. Terence McKenna once opined that the whole wave of neo-spirituality, the New Agers, Western Buddhists and the Jesus Movement of the 1970s, was simply a case of psychedelicists escaping the radical strangeness of the hallucinogenic experience for something that was spiritual but had clearly defined properties and an established language. Add the zeitgeist LSD backlash and societal pressures of the time, and a curiously inverted situation developed, where something boundless and unknown was relegated to the position of a 'stepping stone'.
Rather than a religion, psychedelics are best understood as an esoteric spiritual school like the ancient Mysteries, or the higher shamanic systems. The fact that a psychedelic unio mystica or sotapanna causes some inexperienced psychedelicists to reach for religion as a referential crutch is not a new phenomena. Reflexive spiritual behavior of this kind has been the subject of much research within the academic branch of Psychology of Religion, where scholars seek to find the relationship between psychological and spiritual processes. A leading theory in this field suggests that the religious visions of saints and prophets were in fact formless, extreme mental experiences which the visionary individual clothed in religious attributes as a reflex. in order to contextualize wholly alien states of consciousness. In other words, according to this line of research, mystic revelations of Buddha's Pure Land or the Crucifixion are not really religious, but supra-normal mental states hidden inside religious iconography. These otherworldly states of consciousness may in fact be universal and ontologically undefined, so that only the overlays of cultural interpretations differ. Outlined in the 1950s-60s by scholars of religion such as Professor W T Stace, these ideas have not been given the weight they deserve in the field of Psychedelia. Stace's reflexive- interpretative model applies just as well to The Psychedelic Experience as it does to the traditional visions of saints and prophets.
Due to the West's immersion in a single, monotheistic, highly regulated and mediated religion, mystic insights like those produced by the Good Friday Experiment can only be accepted if presented as unquestionably religious-mystical and specifically Christian. In direct opposition to this, Stace and fellow branch academicians in the Psychology of Religion proposed that not only is the mystical-visionary state not specifically Christian, but in fact not religious at all. Stace developed the criteria used to define a mystical experience that were applied in the analysis of the Good Friday study, and with minor variations, his parameters have gained wide acceptance.8 Those who have experienced a sufficient dose of a psychedelic compound will find most or even all of Stace's criteria familiar, as did the nine theology students in Marsh Chapel. Stace himself had no doubts about the existence and value of the visionary experience, or as he put it. 'The Psychedelic Experience isn't similar to mystical experience, it is mystical experience'. The mystical state exists as a definable phenomena, but it is not in and of itself religious. It has however been frequently religiously interpreted, for the psychological and socio-cultural reasons discussed above. A myriad of other, non-religious interpretations probably exist, if the religious reflex can be short-circuited. With this vital distinction on the table, it is not hard to see how backwards much of the thinking on psychedelic drugs and spirituality has been.
Yet it needn't have been like that. W T Stace's hypothesis of a non-specific, supra-cultural mystic state was invoked not only in the scientific protocol used in Marsh Chapel, but also in the learned debate that erupted concerning the religious validity of drug experiences (see Chapter XVIII). Some of the leading scholars in the Anglo-Saxon world took part in this important cross- scientific discussion, which today works as a reminder of the fruitful path that Psychedelia temporarily embarked on towards the end of the Huxley era, after the psychotomimetic nonsense had been abandoned, and before legislation and '60s pop culture moved in. Despite a largely unfavorable climate within philosophy and the social sciences, a spirited discussion was ignited concerning the nature of visionary experience and the validity of psycho-active drugs; essential topics unfortunately lost in the increasing media hysteria around the new and not overly intellectual hippie counterculture. Timothy Leary's 1966-67 "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out" campaign effectively ensured that a continued serious debate on the spiritual value of hallucinogenic drugs among learned men remained unlikely for decades to follow. It was another opportunity lost as the Huxley- Heard era gave way to the Leary-counterculture era.
One of Stace's successors in Psychology of Religion, Professor Hjalmar Sund'n, augmented the notion of a non-specific mystic state with his role theory. This theory suggests that as the individual is having his (or her) transcendental experience, his agitated consciousness will not just invoke a religious frame of reference, but it will invoke a fitting, specific role for himself within that spiritual tradition. In a predominantly Christian culture the person is likely to remember Biblical prophets and visionaries, and project his otherworldly state upon the stories of Moses, or Christ, or John of Pathmos. By doing this, an entire cultural structure becomes available to organize the mind in its alien, visionary mode.9 Such a response inevitably brings a dualistic split of the experience into seer-vs-godhead, a modality directly opposite the ego-loss and non-dualism frequently reported from profound vision states. While Sund'n's model offers a useful perspective on the mystic revelations of the prophets and apostles within the Abrahamite religions, it seems less appropriate for most non-Western mysticism, be it Indian religions, Taoism, or indigenous shamanism. As shown above, the particular circumstances around psychedelic vision states and Western religiosity tend to transfer the invoked belief system from dualist Judeo-Christian monotheism towards Eastern metaphysics. This by itself does not contradict the fundamental mechanics of Sund'n's role theory, but the more complex deity concepts and the lack of singular prophets like a Moses or Jesus of Nazareth, make the role theory less obviously applicable on world religions outside the Abrahamite triptych.
As part of his academic research, Hjalmar Sund'n examined and commented upon that most well-known religious trip guide: Leary-Metzner-Alpert's The Psychedelic Experience. His conclusion was that this 'guide' book will not outline a journey as much as it will define and populate the experience, an observation that seems particularly relevant in the case of a psychedelicized, highly impressionable reader. It is entirely possible that the modern acid tripper who has studied the book will see 'the Lotus Lord of Light' appear in the 'Second Bardo', but this is not because this particular apparition enters on cue like a stage actor, but because the preparation and expectation of the psychonaut conjures it up. In that sense the book becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, which may explain its popularity during the '60s (it even inspired a Beatles song) and it is probably the only psychedelic trip guide that was really put to use.10 But, for reasons explained by Sundén, its usefulness was directly dependent on the faith the tripper had in it, and as the authors themselves later admitted, the connection to the Tibetan Book Of The Dead was spurious and not very well understood. And so it became yet another religious treatise in a dimension that is not in its nature truly religious.
The suggestion that presumed religious visions are extreme brain states clothed in certain languages and symbols is even more controversial if one bears in mind that substantial parts of the world religions have visionary, prophetic states at their origins. D T Suzuki even went so far as to say that visionary experiences formed the beginning of all major religions. For the adherent of a certain belief system, the fact that some of its fundamental tenets derive from moments of spiritual extremity gives further credence to the beliefs. The doctrine is perceived as inherently true, because it has been reported since the earliest days as a unique experience of a unique individual; a prophet. Applying the Staceian paradigm on these moments of prophetic vision, key elements of the fundamental doctrine are suddenly called into question. History as well as everyday life is filled with mystic experiences; each one a profound moment, but when taken together, they form a multitude. Who is to say that the original prophecy that gave birth to a religion was not an attack of epilepsy, or a random peak in cerebral neurochemistry of a spiritually gifted individual? Or, of course, the effect of a psychedelic drug.
5
The cause-or-effect dilemma of classic religio-mystic visions that Stace, Sund'n and other scholars brought forth needn't concern the student of hallucinogens. Unlike the saints and yogins, the psychedelicist knows with certainty that it wasn't some deus ex machina that placed him or her inside a glowing Martian cathedral vibrating with angelic song, but rather the ingestion of a chemical catalyst. A religiously flavored LSD vision is not necessarily dwelled upon endlessly in terms of its content, because during the next trip, or maybe later in the same trip, one may find oneself equally immersed in a tropical jungle, or spun around a science fiction high-tech landscape. These are all things that occur, depending on set, setting, dosage, and our cultural references. Reaching a state of non-dual, non-composite bliss -- if one should be so lucky -- does not automatically make the trip 'Buddhist'; it means simply that you may find the most relevant correlate for your experience in Buddhist literature. Visions of Christ, or even becoming Christ, may not be the final sign for you to come out as a born-again Christian, but rather that the combination of your mental state, the chemical superconductivity of your brain, and your cultural reference points, put you in that place at that time.
This non-partisan approach leaves us with a few fundamental points to consider. To begin with, which visionary traditions, if any, can be found useful from a psychedelic viewpoint? As shown in a preceding section, the extended communication that has taken place between Psychedelia and Zen Buddhism is not founded on any substantial similarity between the two schools. Zen may in fact be further removed from a psychedelic lifestyle than most other religious practices. Yet it would be wrong not to recognize the value for anyone, including a sworn hallucinogen aficionado, to look into the mental techniques developed within Zen and other Eastern schools. Although different names may be employed, the meditative and intellectual tools available within Buddhist, Hindu and Taoist traditions are remarkably similar, resting upon a few recurring principles. This knowledge of the mind can be appropriated by the psychedelicist, just like one can learn shamanic tricks for navigating the aboriginal Otherworld (such as to never actively summon a force or entity), in order to protect one's spiritual integrity. The advantages of being able to willfully enter mind-states of still, quiet observation should be obvious to any thinking person, psychedelicists more so than others.
The major Eastern schools distinguish between two types of inner contemplation. The first is what could be called concentration meditation, or dhyana. The aim of dhyana is to attend a higher state known as samadhi. To reach samadhi, the student learns to quiet and direct his mind via single- pointed attention towards a meditative object. The benefits of dhyana are many, as any Western meditation student will attest, and this familiar type of meditation forms the entire content of some spiritual schools that have been brought to USA and Europe. Its popularity is also due to it being propagated in both Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism, albeit with certain differences. With proper application of dhyana, the ego's neurotic grip on personality and its obsession with past and future events fade away into the background. According to both the Buddhist and Hinduist view, the highest level of samadhi is not an absolute end-state like nirvana or moksha, but an apex of the potential of dhyana practice which leaves the yogin in an enlightened mode, yet able to function in the ordinary world.11
