Psychedelia, p.88
Psychedelia, page 88
A previous section discussed the field of Non-Aristotelian Semantics, one of the fundamental ideas within the philosophy launched by the mathematician Alfred Korzybski. Another and perhaps more familiar element in Korzybski's major work Science & Sanity (1933) was his perspective on the classic question of language versus experience. In the same spirit as his criticism of Aristotelian categorizations, Korzybski and his followers, such as the language professor and US state senator S I Hayakawa, argued that our everyday use of language was 'unsane' and disturbed our perception of the world as it truly is. By assigning generalized terms such as 'birch tree' to any and all trees that bear the agreed upon characteristics of the invented name 'birch tree', we debase our impression of the single specimen, taking too much note of its taxonomic generalities and too little note of its unique, individual traits. This constantly on-going abstraction of unique phenomena into various man-made generalizations affects our perception of the world profoundly, and one goal of General Semantics is to educate us, via reminders, that the word-tags we affix to objects are not real in any fundamental sense. "The map is not the terrain'' is a famous motto of Korzybski and his followers, an effective meme phrase which may be familiar even to those who have never heard of the actual school of thought.
What is experienced under psychedelics, even on a small dose on one's first experience, is the fundamental truth of this teaching. We learn to see, beyond linguistic tags, beyond abstractions, as Aldous Huxley noted in an admirably perceptive conclusion to his mescaline contemplation of Platonic roses and Van Goghian '…However expressive, symbols can never be the things they stand for'. Korzybski's General Semantics received their greatest attention during the 1950s and '60s, at the same time that psychedelic research was rapidly expanding, and it is no surprise that a certain crossbreeding occurred between the two fields, as shown earlier. Terence McKenna, who may have arrived at a Korzybskian position without actually having read him (at least his name is not mentioned), gave another good example of how the process works:
Imagine an infant lying in its cradle, and the window is open, and into the room comes something marvelous, mysterious, glittering, shedding light of many colors, movement, sound'a transformative hierophany of integrated perception. And the child is enthralled. Then the mother comes into the room and she says to the child: 'That's a bird, baby. That's a bird.' Instantly the complex wave of the angel-peacock iridescent transformative mystery is collapsed into the word. All the mystery is gone.
(interview in Psychedelic Illuminations #6)
So a rose or a bird as observed during one's first LSD trip may seem like a glowing unique object, the ontological discovery, or re-discovery, of an underlying ding-an-sich, after it has shed its layer of human language. However, this ideal Platonic manifestation is really just another hallucination, because in the kitchen window there may be another rose, and out in the garden a whole row of roses. Each one of them can be subject to the same type of Kantian-Platonic miracle of perception. It seems that there are as many 'The Rose' as there are roses. Aldous Huxley's keen intellect traversed this entire chain of realization in a single mescaline sitting; for most of us it takes several explorations of psychedelic perception and insight, perhaps leading to a mild sense of disappoint- ment. General Semantics' view of this hallucinatory conundrum is to recognize that the ontological classes man has inferred from his environment do have some fundamental value, as do the names we attach to these classes. To properly reflect the unique quality of everything that populates the sense world, and still uphold linguistic tools we need to communicate, they suggest that we think and refer to these roses and chairs as rose1, rose2, chair1, chair2, and so forth. This may seem unwieldy or preposterous, but we are in fact already employing a similar system when we give each other more or less unique names.9
Notes
* * *
1 Jack Kerouac under the influence of psilocybian mushrooms, cited by Allen Ginsberg.
2 William James: 'Some years ago I myself made some observations on ... nitrous oxide intoxication, and reported them in print. One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mental ity which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question -- for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality.' (Varieties Of Religious Experience, 1902)
3 According to Stan Grof's model, four different types of 'Basic Perinatal Matrices' are identified and mapped against a number of clinical cases and LSD experiences. Certain personality scenarios are described as being played out over and over in life, especially in traumatic or difficult situations. Such a recurring structure is what Grof calls a COEX, or system of condensed experiences, which consists of layers of iterative and possibly self - reinforcing behavior patterns, which are tracable back in time, ultimately to the original birth or pre-birth trauma. Interesting and influential as Grof's theories are (later developed into a non-drug therapy known as Holotropic Breathwork) the psychedelic student here encounters the schooled therapist's usual bias towards Freudian psycho-dynamics over psychedelic phenomenology. Incidetally, Grof used the European psycholytic model, which means a series of gradually increased doses of LSD, beginning at a low level.
4 Korzybski's Science And Sanity may seem intimidating to the new student, but an excellent condensation of many of his thoughts can be found in S I Hayakawa's Language In Thought And Action (1978).
5 Leary's contribution to the ETC journal was accompanied by a critical comment from LSD researcher William McGlothlin, who found it hard to understand and sprawling. This seems an accurate view, and it can be argued that Tommy Hall's half-page about General Semantics and LSD on the 13th Floor Elevators LP contains more valuable information than Leary's 30-page rant.
6 The quantitative verse of classic poets worked with a fundamental unit of vowel length. A certain formal style was differentiated from another style by observing how the long and short vowel sounds were placed. This model appears alien to us, because we are (unconsciously at least) accustomed to an entirely different unit for poetic language, one which deals with stressed syllables (i e: the number of stressed syllables in each line are observed, along with their distribution). So what we have is a fundamentally altered way of crea ting and analyzing the foremost expression of what Mallarm' and Eliot called 'the dialect of the tribe'.
7 Another of Leary's more successful Tao Te Ching verses, I/5, was later partly used by George Harrison in the title track on his All Things Must Pass album.
8 The general phenomena of a trip 'afterglow' has been formally studied: '…The Spring Grove group refers to this aftereffect as the "psychedelic afterglow" which seems to appear quite regularly in patients after the LSD session, lasts sometimes for weeks, is characterized by a greatly reduced anxiety level and, psychologically, by a "shifting of the emotional center towards loving and harmonious affections" and "a seemingly enhanced capacity and disposition to enter into close interpersonal relationships and a sort of generalized benignity of outlook…' (Kurland and Unger); referenced in 'DMT And Homologues' by Stephen Szara, Psychotomimetic Drugs, 1970)
9 A special case that adheres very well to Korzybski's suggestion is the American naming conventio n where generational offspring are named Senior, Junior, III and so forth.
'If you are still only seeing geometrical designs, you are still very much behind.'
XXII
CLIMBING THE VINE OF THE SOUL
1
According to Terence McKenna, the person who calls himself 'shaman' is the one you should trust the least. Undoubtedly speaking from personal experiences among the mestizos of Colombia, McKenna's admonition remains relevant when applied to the recent phenomena of westernized ayahuasca rituals, be it a $500 therapy session for rich Manhattanites, or the embarrassing spectacle of ayahuasca tourism in Peru. The assimilation of ayahuasca and DMT into various alternative cultures of the West has been rapid and powerful. As early as 1996, Ram Dass observed in Tricycle magazine that 'ayahuasca is the ritual of choice for the moment', and since then its presence has grown exponentially. At the end of the '90s, the once near-unknown plant entheogen had become enough of a cult drug to be paid tribute by the two leading artists on the downbeat electronica music scene, Shpongle and Entheogenic, in much the same way that leading rock bands sang praise of LSD in the '60s. The major motion picture Renegade (2004) featured a long and beautifully designed ayahuasca trip, and its director Jan Kounen proceeded to make a documentary on the subject (Other Worlds, 2004). With James Cameron's massively successful Avatar (2009), ayahuasca and entheogenic plant cultures received a supportive mainstream presentation which in hallucinogen history is only matched by the Beatles' LSD-inspired albums from 1966-68.
Perhaps due to its organic and aboriginal background, ayahuasca has also been enthusias- tically adopted by New Age and alternative therapy communities. Unlike pure DMT, which has always been a somewhat elusive compound, the ayahuasca plant material is not only readily available via mail-order but also, in many countries, entirely legal. Whether this development is to its advantage remains to be seen, but given the often physically challenging nature of the experience, it seems a dubious candidate for replacing MDMA or even psilocybin in therapeutical usage. Nevertheless, ageing hippies and young seekers alike have exposed themselves to shamanic purging rituals transposed to Western contexts, an example of which is described with a mild sarcasm in Daniel Pinchbeck's Breaking Open The Mind (2002). The tone in Ralph Metzner's anthology of trip reports Ayahuasca (2005) is naturally more benign, but a reader familiar with a genuine ayahuasca experience may be inclined to agree with Benny Shanon, who dismisses several of the experience accounts as 'wishful thinking' rather than genuine trip revelations. The ayahuasca world has its own idiosyncrasies different from both LSD and psilocybin, and the encounter with the active alkaloid on its own – by smoking DMT – is in turn radically different from the meeting with 'the vine of the soul'.
In addition to the peculiar and often awesome experience that a genuine ayahuasca journey will deliver, it is an entheogen of particular interest when considering the context and execution of a psychedelic trip. This is not a party drug, like LSD has to some extent become. Ayahuasca and DMT are necessary reminders of the original magic of the hallucinogenic experience, bringing back a sense of the pioneering, jaw-dropping trips of Hofmann and Huxley and Leary. The overwhelming Innerspace landscapes of dimethyltryptamine is an appropriate remedy to the increasingly accustomed and blas' attitude within the psychedelic underground. Some of the questions raised by the DMT family of drugs are entirely new within Psychedelia, others need to be reconsidered in light of the new information these drugs raise. Beyond opening up realms of Innerspace quite unlike anything encountered via LSD and mescaline, there are lingering effects on personality and lifestyle to be reckoned with, some of which may in fact be revealed as common to all the major serotonergic hallucinogens. The classic ritual trinity of set, setting and dosage remains an unshakable foundation for any psychedelic excursion, but beyond that point, these relatively new Western drugs offer journeys into largely uncharted waters.
In the psychedelic state there is a marked tendency, almost like an inner reflex, towards self- healing and self-improvement. This seems to be a common trait of all major psychedelics, but is particularly noticeable in the tryptamines space of mushrooms and ayahuasca. The symbolic representations of various inner agents will set about the uncovering and handling of one's mental and psychosomatic traumas with substantial energy and attention, almost like a medical team. At the same time, there may be a certain lack of finesse or caution in the treatment, reflecting a situation where time is of the essence. Thus, one may feel like a patient at a field hospital in the middle of a warzone, where the doctors and nurses of the soul have only so much time to take care of your treatment, and can't afford to be subtle about it. With the DMT drugs the Innerspace 'surgery' is often perceived as both physiological and mental:
All of a sudden I saw two men who were the most beautiful beings I had ever seen in my life. They were resplendent, like fire! They began to take out my whole skeleton from within my living flesh without hurting anything. As they worked, they vibrated everything from side to side, and I, on the other side, was watching all they were doing. Next, they took out my organs. One of them held my guts in his hands. Together they used a hook that opened, separated, and extracted from my guts three nail-sized insects, which were responsible for what I felt walking up and down inside me. Then the one who had been seated next to my prostate body, which was still stretched out on the floor, came very close to me and said, 'Here it is! What was killing you were these three insects, but now you will not die from them anymore.' Then they closed my body. Do you see any scars? There are none.
(Forest Of Visions by De Alverga, 2000)
Several accounts from the pure DMT (administered intravenously) sessions reported by Rick Strassman in DMT--The Spirit Molecule are of a similar nature; alien or huge insect-like 'doctors' in Innerspace perform a kind of operation in which a trauma, and sometimes its psychosomatic expression, are removed. For some, the encounters with old, inveterate wounds may be too radical an experience, and they reject the healing process, which often triggers a difficult trip developme nt. The struggle may continue until the very last wave of psychedelic energy before the subject finds courage, perhaps through the guiding wisdom of a shaman or teacher, to overcome the fear of old pain and accept the realness of the haunting images inside him or her. With this embracement of the self-healing powers comes an instantaneous change of tone of the trip space, and the paranoia or neurosis quickly dissipates. The integrative phase that follows will have its moments of melancholy, but is typically driven forward by the sense of a new beginning that has emerged.
On LSD, the therapeutic, self-healing procedure plays out in much the same way, but the analytical, impersonal climate of the lysergic realms in Innerspace can foster a more suspicious attitude towards any strongly marked tendencies during the trip. With the tryptamines, there are usually humanoid presences who instruct you, as they can, on what you need to work upon; these presences include the familiar Mushroom Voice (the Logos of Munn and McKenna, see chapter X), the helpful doctores and angels of ayahuasca, and the peculiar groups of mischievous 'little people', elfs or children, reported from many hallucinogenic traditions. Of course, running into presences that want to initiate a dialogue in the midst of breathing walls and swirling fractals may not comfort all new arrivals to Innerspace, but with proper preparation and experience, their appearance and benign intentions will facilitate a sense of trust, much like at a renowned hospital. In a shamanic healing session with ayahuasca, the appearance of these helpful entities is the very purpose of the drug experience that the shaman and the patient share.
Perhaps due to the supposed inferior quality of modern LSD-25 (see Chapter IX), many tryptamine enthusiasts feel that this ability of one's consciousness to metaphorize complex procedures of self-healing is somehow impaired on acid, and that the result is a more brutal version of an inner healing that was brusque even in the tryptamine version. It is not easy to verbalize the difference between ayahuasca's mindstream and a classic LSD sequence, except to say that the tone of communication is more personal and intimate, like watching someone's home movies in a pleasant setting, while the LSD sequence has a drier and more clinical feel, like being in a class-room to see an educational film. At the same time, paradoxically, the ayahuasca movie will move its focus from the inner healing to domains of Innerspace which are not directly related to one's person, but of an impersonal, unclaimed nature. These realms that lie beyond the grids and signs of each subject's private world, are the prime target when, constructing new maps of Innerspace. Terence McKenna, and neo-shaman Jim DeKorne after him, referred to an 'abrasive psychoanalytic' nature of the LSD trip, in contrast with the psilocybian mushrooms. Precisely why and how the vital process of symbolic-mythical self-healing diverges between different classes of psychedelic drugs is unknown, and certainly warrants further examination.1 As often, it is a topic closer to modern consciousness research than psychology.
This trait may also explain the relative popularity of the trip guide, or trip therapist, when doing LSD sessions; an idea which a tryptamine aficionado like McKenna rejected. On mushrooms or ayahuasca, the guide is already present within the trip space. On pure DMT, the experience unfolds in such a rapid way that no real relationship with this overseer or 'Master of Ceremonies' can be established, and the communication is instead assigned to the various visualizations encountered by the third eye, be it aliens or elfs or indescribable golden contraptions. Such emissaries may be encountered under Psilocybin and ayahuasca too, but then there will often be a sense of a higher instance looming in the background, the Tryptamine MC or Mushroom Voice, to whom questions can be put and from whom, if the circumstances are right, answers will emerge. Only during the first few sessions, when one may be too intimidated or simply too confused to maintain an effective dialogue with the inner helpers, may there be a need for an outer guide.
