The Psychedelic Saviour. Part VII: Scientism and Religiosity

Like an unexamined life, it’s not good to have an unexamined dark side clattering behind you, and today we are stuck with two dark sides regarding psychedelics. The dark side of the rational/materialist approach is a scientism that portrays psychedelics as a tool that is predictable, controllable, and quantifiable, once you have properly manicured the “set and setting.” In fact though, what makes psychedelics so extraordinary is their wildcard nature, where they are unpredictable, they may or may not relate to the intentions you set for the experience, and emotionally, they have potential for both good and bad consequences.  

Religiosity is the dark side of the spiritual approach, where the need for social conformity within the psychedelic circle overwhelms – or at least intrudes upon – each person’s mystical vision, while untethered spirituality often has trouble discerning between the will of God and its own. Or, on reflection, maybe that’s the mistake of the psychiatrists.  

The graveyard of open-hearted curiosity is littered with “isms” and “osities,” of which scientism and religiosity are just two of the bigger weeds, forbidding their adherents to ask awkward questions like, “Is psilocybin really as consistent as your study conclusions say?” or “If Grandmother Ayahuasca never gives us more than we can handle, how come I know people who have been seriously screwed up by it?” Who are we being faithful to here, our principles or our party?

 When Socrates spoke in his defense while on trial for his life in Athens, he likened himself to the gadfly, an insect that goes around stinging unsuspecting people all day long. The philosophic gadfly goes about “arousing and persuading and reproaching” society and asking awkward questions to those in power. We need to be gadflies to ourselves, bringing curiosity to our own “isms” and “osities,” and keeping ourselves from slipping inside self-made mental boxes. In the Canadian Broadcast Corporation podcast called Ideas, Salman Rushdie said,

 The idea of a homogenous self is no longer tenable. We are all heterogeneous selves, we are all a bag of selves in a bag of skin. That’s what makes us interesting, that’s why we like meeting people, because we are complicated…We are not simple creatures, we are unbelievably complicated and messed up…I won’t be put into a box…we won’t be put into those boxes any more.  

Those boxes are the “mind-forged manacles” William Blake describes in his poem, London:

 I wander every chartered street

Near where the chartered Thames does flow

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every shout of every man,

In every infant’s cry of fear,

In every voice, in every ban,

The mind-forged manacles I hear.

 In psychology these manacles, these boxes, have labels on them meant to pin down our shitty moods and despondent dispositions. The more curiosity about what’s actually in front of us gets shut down, the more ornate becomes the label, such in “dysthymia with mood-incongruent psychotic features,” “disruptive mood dysregulation disorder,” and “body dysmorphic-like disorder without repetitive behaviors;” there’s “oppositional-defiant disorder” for the kiddies who once upon a time used to be just naughty, and the person who likes their mushrooms too much might have “unspecified hallucinogen-related disorder.” These boxes don’t exist for the sake of their residents but for the box-making hierarchical structures, whose main interest is to keep things orderly. But we are, as Rushdie says, complicated, and the very parts of us that don’t fit in may be the ones that carry our genius. As Walt Whitman said, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself; I am large, I contain multitudes.”  

And there is this strange thing about despair. In a world of crises and impending dooms of various kinds, many of us feel despair, yet there is no diagnosis, no psychological box, provided for it. That’s quite a lacuna, and maybe that’s because you have to despair of something, you might despair of the joy that once was natural to you, despair of finding love or purpose. Despair means that something has gone wrong in your relationship with the outside world, a lost mariner may despair of sight of land, a person figuratively tied to their desk in America or literally chained to a machine in a far-off factory, may despair of escape and open ground. The despair did not originate entirely with the disordered person in the box, or their genes, the fault is more to do with what happened to them. And for the disease of what happened to them to go into remission you would need to repair racism, sexism, exploitation, and violence in all its manifestations. This is a condition for which the pharmaceutical industry has no medication.

 Robert Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy said, “He that increaseth wisdom, increaseth sorrow,” which plays havoc with our linear, upbeat worldview, though it does help make sense of his other line, “Melancholy can be overcome only by melancholy.” Gerard Manley Hopkins described his despair in his wrestle with God this way:

 Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;

Not untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of man

In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;

Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.

 The danger for psychedelics, if domesticated and declawed, is that they will not be used to deepen our insane/heroic wrestling match with the divine, but to divert us from the causes of despair. Phillip K. Dick in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? describes the ultimate machine for declawing our moods through technological manipulation. In his dystopia, which is set in 2021, the Penfield mood organ allows people to dial up the mood of their choice so they can be as efficient and upbeat as possible. But Iran, wife of Rick the android slayer, contrives, after a diligent search, to find a setting in the machine that reflects her actual mood – despair:

Her dark, pert face showed satisfaction, as if she had achieved something of worth. “So I put it on my schedule for twice a month; I think that’s a reasonable amount of time to feel hopeless about everything, about staying here on Earth after everybody who’s smart has emigrated, don’t you think?”

 “But a mood like that,” Rick said, “you’re apt to stay in it, not dial your way out. Despair like that, about total reality, is self-perpetuating.”

 “I program an automatic resetting for three hours later,” his wife said sleekly. “A 481. Awareness of the manifold possibilities open to me in the future; new hopes that – ”

 “I know 481,” he interrupted. He had dialed out the combination many times; he relied on it greatly. “Listen,” he said…”Forget what you’ve scheduled and I’ll forget what I’ve scheduled; we’ll dial a 104 together and both experience it, and then you stay in it while I reset mine for my usual business-like attitude.”

Would today’s psychologists seize upon such a mood organ if they could, even if it had a self-referentially evil setting like number 3, that “stimulates my cerebral cortex into wanting to dial”? Uh, yes! We already have deep-brain stimulation surgery as a mental health treatment, and magnetogenetics, where the behavior of mice and zebra fish have been controlled by magnetic stimulation. That’s not to say that these things are in the least bit bad in themselves, but where zebra fish go, can humans be all that far behind? And since today’s science fiction can turn into tomorrow’s old hat, we need to consider how the psychedelics of our psychedelic renaissance may be manipulated into being mood organs by well-meaning psychologists, along with sharp-eyed entrepreneurs.

 Psychedelics have been described as non-specific amplifiers, meaning that they enhance the mood or mindset that you currently happen to be in, which means they are very manipulable. If psychedelics are forced into the box of mental health pathologies, then there is no place for the disruptive side of the experience. They risk becoming just one more medication, and like so many other mental health medications, after a bright start they might slowly settle into a ho-hum middle age of more or less acceptable results, if you skew the data the right way just a little.

 The disruptive side of the experience might possibly mess us up for a while, bring us to a state of confusion, and sting us like a rather large gadfly. If this happens we may be forced to reappraise not just where our values are at, but what is reality itself, what is not real, what is relatively real, what is kinda sorta real when looked at it upside down, and so on. When you infuse something from way outside our ken into ordinary life, you have no idea what the result may be. It may upset your whole value system and instead of becoming a better producer of goods and services, you may want to join that Buddhist monastery or take an unexpected gap year, or decade.

 Instead of being solely under the control of psychologists and entrepreneurs, what if psychedelics were also in the hands of artists and poets? They could help us explore our internal forests and prairies and appreciate them, rather than having them rendered into a trillion little personal lawns. With things like VR and immersive experiences, it is the artists who could design a future where mind-altering drugs meet mind-expanding spaces. Look at the work of Randy Polombo and the installations at Artechhouse to see inklings of what could happen with this. These kinds of installations could become the temples of the future, venues for a choose-your-own-revelation Eleusinian mystery space, because working with psychedelics may be the preserve of the clinician but playing with them happens in the land of the artists.  

 On the cultural timescale, we haven’t yet grown to trust the medicine – meaning ourselves – enough yet. But trust or no trust, with the impetus of corporate wealth supercharging the effort, it’s now a case of ready or not, here the psychedelics come. Pretty soon they are bound to take their place beside donuts, coffee, beer, transcendental meditation, and all the other accoutrements of modern life. Right now, the people in charge of this are the psychologists and venture capitalists, with the spiritual approach beating an entirely separate path of providing an ersatz indigenous experience. Surely for this to reach its fullness the rational/materialist, the spiritual and the artist’s way would have to be melded into something new.

 Then we might start to disintegrate the cloud of usual expectations and limiting assumptions that close off our shadowy doors of perception. We could aspire beyond putting our mental health disorders into remission and look with real hope for that huge joy we assume is our birthright, but these days hardly dare wish for. Self-indulgent? Not if it produces people who know how to laugh, cry and care about each other. We could discover new portions of our wholeness, a wholeness that includes the dark moods, the nonsense moods that fly in the face of the “usual business-like attitude,” and the rapture where joy and pain become indistinguishable.