Psychedelia, p.84
Psychedelia, page 84
As discussed in chapter XIX, Psychedelia does not belong in the field of religion, no matter how liberal one's ramifications are, or how fervent beliefs the psychedelicists express. It remains what it has been in the past, a mystery cult among the Westerners and a shamanic system among aborigines. As for the age-old question addressed by the perennial philosophy, the burden of proof lies with its adherents. Perhaps all major religions could be aligned along some abstract structure to display isomorphic similarities; these similarities may in turn be the very factors that caused the great success of these particular religions as opposed to others. From the psychedelic pe rspective the question is of no immediate concern, as these are simply different fields of research. The dream of the universal system theory dies hard among renowned thinkers, yet the psychedelic antidote is not more complicated than the unbiased study of individual experiences, the more the better.
The empirical impressions of Innerspace offer very modest incentives to include Psychedelia in a grand crosscultural hypothesis such as the perennial philosophy, transpersonal psychology, or Jung's collective unconscious. No matter what psychological or semantic belief systems one applies, the mapping is not impressive. The rational response, from the present author's view, is to regard the psychedelic studies of Innerspace as a discipline of its own, in which extant maps developed in other fields are of only limited use, while the difficulties of creating new maps with human language as the main tool are humbly recognized. From the raw data of phenomenology emerges structured information, which the field of consciousness research should find useful. Even without utilitarian benefits, the psychedelic charting of the topography of Innerspace serves the basic function of purposeless play, and its commerce continues independent and uncompromised.
2
Following their long-running 1960s project of LSD and mescaline psycho-therapy in New York City, Robert Masters and Jean Houston expressed a desire to integrate or at least label what they referred to as 'mystical' reports from the patients, and devoted a special section of their Varieties Of Psychedelic Experience (1966) to such states, which correspond to the fourth and highest ('Integral') level of the psychedelic trip, according to their model. However, despite the intelligence and verbal clarity of their accounts, the reader ultimately finds that these mystical experiences are simply deeper and more dramatic expressions of the same psycho-dynamic processes gathered under the 'Symbolic' level. Like their peers at Millbrook and elsewhere, Masters & Houston remained faithful to the dominating interpretative models of, firstly, classic psycho-analysis, and secondly, classic religious experiences. This application of conventional paradigms colors their examination of reports from Innerspace, as evident from the use of a charged phrase like 'authentic religious experience'. From the current perspective, such terms do not only introduce a self-limiting bias upon the phenomenology of the events, but refers as being 'religious' what should be called 'visionary', while the coupling of 'authentic' and 'religious' seems almost oxymoronical.
There are other, less predictable obstacles in the studying of old case reports from the higher realms of psychedelic research. What seems to be lacking with both Stanislav Grof and Masters & Houston, besides an unbiased empirical approach, are accounts of truly 'transpersonal' and metaphysical experiences; stories from the realms that open up beyond the ego. The Varieties Of Psychedelic Experience devotes almost its entire chapter about mystical states, some 30 pages, to the single case history of the subject 'S-3'. Detailed LSD trip accounts tend to be dull and overly personal, much like nocturnal dream reports, but the fearlessness and remarkable ability to report his inner experiences shown by Mr S-3 makes for fascinating reading. Across the span of several consecutive acid trips he passes through internal dramas that uncover deeper and deeper layers of conflict and defense mechanisms, invoking a massive menagerie of religious, mythological and animal symbols:
…S now imagined and physically felt himself to be standing in an immense and brilliantly illumined hall where shone a preternatural light, predominantly an 'indescribable blending of white and gold'. The presence of God was tangible and overpowering within this hall and S understood that he was about to be initiated into some kind of order as yet not defined. Before him he saw a very large 'occult' circle, etched into the highly polished substance of the floor. Many complicated symbols encrusted with precious stones were seen around the inner edges of the circle. And beyond the circle, through which he must pass, S perceived two tall, rectangular and gleaming white boxlike thrones. In one of these was standing, facing towards him, an enormous and exceedingly beautiful tiger; and, in the other, stood a lion of equally awesome stature and beauty'
After a seemingly successful resolution of this unusual individual's battle in the psyche, the reader finds that what was called 'mystical' and 'religious' were in fact just more of the same psy cho- analytical therapy, albeit on a deeper scale than usual; more Jungian than Freudian. The epic struggles depicted were all internal to S-3's personality, and their disparate elements are neatly tied up into a ribbon around his case file. There was no ego-loss, no contact with truly alien phenomena, no breakdown of subject-object dualism. The presumed religious or mystical aspects remain limited to an atypically rich invocation of symbols and Avatars, while the truly mystical moments of impersonal visionary revelation or inexplicable metaphysical encounters were few or none. At the very end of the book, Masters & Houston devote a few pages to genuine cases of ego-loss and non- dualist experience, and it appears that they simply did not have much material in this domain. In a comment they perceptively suggest that these types of experiences are only available to individuals who have progressed enough in their inner development that they do not display the various types of psychological problems usually found in therapy patients.
As will be shown in the discussion of DMT and ayahuasca, the most intriguing regions of Innerspace are the ones that lie beyond the familiar psycho-dynamic neighborhood of conflicts and defenses. Grof's notion of 'transpersonal' domains is accurate in the sense that these experiences transcend the individual psyche with all its baggage, and take place in a no-man's-realm that may still be part of consciousness but appears objective and impersonal, with little or no bearing on the psychedelicists' personality. Factors like set and setting may still play a part, but the intent of these hallucinogenic trips is less individual-therapeutic and more universal-instructive. The distinct trip event of ego-loss is related to this high state, but it is possible to receive substantial transpersonal input even without ego-loss .
Curious as it may seem, this neutral ground in Innerspace appears to lie closer within reach via tryptamine drugs such as psilocybin, DMT and ayahuasca, than with the other serotonergic psychedelics. There is to the author's knowledge no formal study of this vital topic, but judging from vast amounts of anecdotal data, it is from the tryptamine drugs that most of the impressions can be drawn when mapping out a transpersonal Innerspace, while the thousands of case reports involving LSD reflect a strong dominance of private, self-therapeutic experiences that lie at the hither part of the inner landscape. Psychedelicists like Terence McKenna and Jim DeKorne have referred to the overly psycho-analytic nature of LSD as compared to other hallucinogens. However, the question is likely to be more complex than any blanket statement allows, and may involve both the purity of drugs as well as the degree of experience of the tripper.
It is also vital to bear in mind that researchers like Grof and Masters & Houston worked almost exclusively with subjects that were psychologically disturbed (i e: patients) to varying degrees, which naturally had a pronounced impact on the 'set' factor. Had they worked with a population of average health, the number of profound and mystical experiences is likely to have been higher. As it was, the objective was therapeutical, and the surreal and alien material a kind of bonus for which they were unprepared. As the more remote parts of Innerspace opened up, the established maps clearly did not match the terrain, whether it'd be the psychotomimetic map of the 1950s, or the psychotherapeutic map of the 1960s, or the transpersonal map of the 1970s.
Yet one cannot fault the professional men and women for their unwillingness to let go of the mysterious compounds; the very same fascination is what informs books like the current one. The psychologists and psychiatrists believed that the psychedelic drugs 'belonged' to them, and clung to this belief even after it had been shown that LSD-25 had very limited clinical use and furthermore produced experiences that fell outside their established norms of consciousness. The over-zealous labeling of individual psychedelic experiences and the probable dismissal of experiences that fell outside such labels was not the fault of intelligent researchers like Masters & Houston as much as a reflection of the slightly arrogant positivism that charged all the soft sciences during the 1950s-60s. As discussed in the preceding chapter, the intellectual contributions from the field of religious science (rather than psychology) tended to be somewhat more cautious in their classification of exceptional drug experiences, but instead often suffered from an innate animosity to the phenomena itself. Other attempts at squeezing The Psychedelic Experience into the nomenclature of Eastern religion, for example, were hardly more successful. In hindsight it does not seem far-fetched to view these ambitions as essentially doomed attempts by branch professionals to fit something vast and amorphous into the ramifications of their own field of specialization.
The proper approach, once more, is to recognize the need to build one's understanding from scratch, with a conceptual tabula rasa, whose initial emptiness is slowly filled with phenomeno- logical data. A unified psychedelic model that manages to 'explain' the more fantastic experiences in Innerspace is a remote vision on the horizon, maybe only a mirage. There can be no such explication until there is a corresponding theory of consciousness, a theory which today is completely lacking, to the scientific community's embarrassment. In the early 2000s the current state of research was reported by eight leading neuroscientists in the form of an apology:
We have no idea how consciousness emerges from the physical activity of the brain and we do not know whether consciousness can emerge from non-biological systems, such as computers... At this point the reader will expect to find a careful and precise definition of consciousness. You will be disappointed. Consciousness has not yet become a scientific term that can be defined in this way.
('Human Brain Function' by R Frackowiak et al, 2004)
With conventional science in such an embryonic phase, it's obvious that scientific perspectives are more or less useless when applied to the strangeness of Innerspace; science is not in a position to explain nor refute anomalies in consciousness. To paraphrase Arthur C Clarke, any sufficiently advanced activity involving the mind is indistinguishable from magic. Until substantial progress is made in the study of consciousness, psychedelic phenomenology should be applied to observe and report Innerspace experiences, without passing judgment. Data thus tallied could be projected upon a cross-scientific matrix drawn from anthropology, ethnobotany, pharmacology, psychology, quantum physics, religious science, esoterica, visionary art and evolutionary biology, either to inform socio-cultural studies, or to enrich the purposeless play that characterizes the active mode of Psychedelia, not unlike Hermann Hesse's Glasperlenspiel. Its most likely use is however to be found when scrutinized for recurring patterns in the service of future consciousness research.
3
The overwhelming realness of the psychedelic state, noted already by Dr Hofmann ('one is seeing the world as it really is') and confirmed in similar phrases by Aldous Huxley, effectively undermines our habitual idea of what is real and not, and drives home the point that William James made; there are multiple modes of consciousness around us, and one cannot automatically designate one as more 'real' than any other. A familiar way to understand this is via the nocturnal dream, where events occur in such an overwhelming way that they trigger emotional responses in us, just like the everyday reality we are used to. The logical outcome of the dream experience was elegantly condensed in Master Zhuangzhi's old Chinese parable, which acidheads like to quote:
I dreamed I was a butterfly, dancing in the sky; then I awoke. Now I wonder: am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming I am a man?
The familiar, 'baseline' reality seems to have an ontologically superior status to us simply because of habit and cultural patterns, but one needn't look further than the Vedic religions to find the mundane world completely dismissed as an illusion, maya. A similar belief exists among the Amazonian Shuar tribe, who perceive the world seen on ayahuasca as true reality, and the everyday world as a false illusion. There are different ways to slice the Jamesian manifold, ways which the quester may award shifting degrees of faith and intellectual agreement. Most convincing, always, is the insight gained via direct revelation, as testified by saints, visionaries and any number of psychedelic explorers. As the more alien planes are traversed, whether in tantric meditation or on DMT, the limitations of descriptive language as opposed to immediate experience becomes abundantly clear.
The problem is not the presumed 'ineffability' that scholars of mysticism lament. Such a notion seems rooted in the assumption that a description of an experience must equate the experience–an idea which is not only unrealistic, but fundamentally impossible. Anything written, whether a postcard or a poem, about an experience such as looking out over the Grand Canyon, will always fall short of the mark. Human language can never fully capture the transcendental moment of Now and Here, yet it has served us for thousands of years as a richly developed tool for communication, rather than replication. The problem of language is not due to any intrinsic property, but rather the inflated role and status awarded to this instrument in modern thought. One school posits language as an evolutionary agent in the growth of human consciousness, while another school treats language as the sole fabric of human awareness and consequently turns the entire spectrum of humanistic studies into a critique of language. These lingo-centric theories do not concern the psychedelicist for the simple reason that they are not validated by The Psychedelic Experience, or indeed by any higher spiritual belief system. As the futurist scholar John Steiner pointed out, '...a culture that is overly concerned with the use or nature of language, as opposed to immediate experience and action, is in a state of decadence. The least useful member of the tribe is he who sits and admires the importance of his tools, rather than using or improving them.'
The world is constituted of language only in the sense that the modern Westerner's deluded view of reality is accentuated by Aristotelian applications of language. If judged from the metaphysical-holistic level at which the spiritual experience reaches its apex, language contributes mainly to the delusion of separateness. False dualisms are created and un-needed levels of abstraction are inserted. The challenge facing the psychedelicist is to communicate his impressions via descriptive language with as little violation of the underlying experience as possible. This ambition has an immediate connection to a school of thought that psychedelic culture repeatedly has crossed paths with, Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics. Korzybski's teachings rest upon a few distinct, seemingly radical criticisms of language, which go against the mainstream trend of late 20th century thought and for that reason have been overlooked in recent times.
The psychedelicist will find much to agree with in Korzybski, perhaps most of all his Non- Aristotelian Semantics, a concept readily understood by the Innerspace traveler.4 The Aristotelian method of analysis and classification is not necessarily brought into question, as General Semantics remains a practical-oriented philosophy that recognizes its relative use. Instead it is a critique of human linguistic habits, where desire for brevity and efficiency have instilled a careless tendency to assign fixed attributes to phenomena that are actually situation-bound; mistaking the temporary for the permanent, the local for the global. It is an imprecise, often outright incorrect mode of reasoning which stems from a myopic fixation upon single objects and events, rather than objects in an environment and steps in a process.
The Psychedelic Experience short-circuits this tunnel-visioned reflex, and, even at fairly low doses, offers a view of a world that is somewhat like one of Van Gogh's famous landscapes: the distinctions between objects appear wave-like and flexible, and the totality expresses an alien, mysterious homogeneity. Allen Ginsberg touched upon this holistic mode of perception in his "Wales Visitation" (1967), describing a vast rural landscape as seen under LSD.
All the valley quivered, one extended motion, wind
undulating on mossy hills'
When we shift our gaze from the single object before us to a panoramic view of the room or the garden, we move from one linguistic modality to another; at least if one is a General Semanticist. Performing the same act under psychedelics can be a powerful experience, as a much richer perceptual totality fills one's field of sight, while still retaining the homogenous quality that the higher state of mind brings. Augmenting this impression with the awe-filled admiration that a bountiful pastoral vista can produce, the idea to dissect such a generous vision into Aristotelian components and scholastic categories may seem a meaningless violation of the landscape's sacred pantheism. Psychedelia is the world of Plato and Plotinus, not Aristotle or Aquinas.
As noted in Chapter XIV, this aspect of Korzybski's semantic philosophy was a major influence on the pioneering psychedelic rock band the 13th Floor Elevators. While under the influence of LSD, the band's spiritual leader Tommy Hall had observed the accuracy of Korzybski's critique of Aristotelian language habits and the unwarranted compartmentalization of inter- connected phenomena. In the liner notes to the band's debut album Psychedelic Sounds (1966), Hall discusses this 'unsane' (the word is Korzybski's) mental behavior and how it works to separate man from his environment. He then points to The Psychedelic Experience as a way to 'resystematize his knowledge so that it would all be related horizontally, and enjoy the perfect sanity that comes from dealing with life in its entirety'. The hallucinogens, under a reasonably effective dose, serve not only to discover the problems of analytical language, but also to effect the change by which one breaks out of the Aristotelian rut to follow a more holistic lifestyle.
