The Psychedelic Savior Part VI: Everything Breathes While I Am Tripping

In his essay “The Mystical Child,” Tobin Hart said that childhood spiritual experiences are not just cool things that happen when you are young, they are “an innate source of character and spiritual growth” and they can be foundational to the rest of one’s life. Father Zossima in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, shows how they may be our only lifeline:

“ People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood is perhaps the best education. If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one has only one good memory left in one's heart, even that may sometime be the means of saving us.”

 Whether it is the classic religious one, the oft-dismissed childhood one, or the stigmatized one of psychedelics, the value in a spiritual experience is in how it connects you to the hidden sacred inside all of us. It is the trump card that misery cannot outbid.   

 And yet how easy it is for us to get it wrong with the sacred! In The Varieties of Religious Experience William James describes several spiritual people who in their day were seen as extraordinarily devout, but now strike us as just crazy. One of them was Louis of Gonzaga, a sixteenth century Catholic saint. At the age of ten, as a gift to the Virgin Mary, Louis made a vow of perpetual chastity, and according to his biographer, quoted by James:

 “Thenceforth he never raised his eyes, either when walking in the streets, or when in society. Not only did he avoid all business with females even more scrupulously than before, but he renounced all conversation and every kind of social recreation with them, although his father tried to make him take part; and he commenced only too early to deliver his innocent body to austerities of every kind.”

 When he was 17 Louis joined the Jesuit order, and as that same biographer describes,

 “…when a year later his father died, he took the loss as a “particular attention” to himself on God’s part, and wrote letters of stilted good advice, as from a spiritual superior, to his grieving mother. He soon became so good a monk that if anyone asked him the number of his brothers and sisters, he had to reflect and count them over before replying. A Father asked him one day if he were never troubled by the thought of his family to which, “I never think of them except when praying for them,” was his only reply. Never was he seen to hold in his hand a flower or anything perfumed, that he might take pleasure in it. On the contrary, in the hospital, he used to seek for whatever was most disgusting, and eagerly snatch the bandages of ulcers, etc. from the hands of his companions. He avoided worldly talk, and immediately tried to turn every conversation on to pious subjects, or else he remained silent. He refused to notice his surroundings.”

 Not someone you would want to invite to the family barbeque. But in his time, far from being a sicko, Louis was celebrated as an exemplar of spiritual devotion and piety, and in fact he remains the patron saint of young people to this day. Let’s just hope the young people don’t notice . William James judged saints like Louis of Gonzaga as passionate but narrow-minded fanatics who were short on the grown part of being a grown-up.

 In the Middle Ages, before Louis’ time, spirituality was the fulcrum of almost all political and personal life in Europe. Maiming, torture and execution were the usual fate for heretics, atheists and free-thinkers – those whose childhood sacred moments probably sparkled a little differently to the norm. The Reformation emphasized the individual’s personal relationship with God, but it did nothing to lighten up this shadow side of spirituality. The continent exploded into nation state wars, civil wars and ongoing persecution over what today are eye-wateringly dull points of abstruse theology. These wars continued quite unimpeded until the scientific revolution and then the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century took the air out of religious belief system. Only then did the mayhem finally start to calm down. Thank God we all became atheists, or enough of us anyway.

 That Enlightenment was defined by Emmanuel Kant as “Man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage.” But now at the distance of over 200 years, we may ask how complete this release was. The impulse that gave us science, public health, democracy and personal wealth has also driven us to the brink of destroying our planet. The rational/materialist thinking that freed us from our self-imposed dogmatic chains seems to have brought droves of decent-minded people who believe they have “no reason” to be depressed and lost, to deeper and deeper levels of misery. When Malidoma Some, a spiritual teacher from Burkina Faso, was asked if European and American people needed to undergo the grueling and painful initiations common to African cultures, he answered, “No, you have suffered enough already.” But have we suffered productively – or stupidly?   

 No, this is not the happy ending the eighteenth-century promised us. Having rid ourselves of a God who smiled benignly over torture and killing, we now fear a dark emptiness at the heart of everything. The pointlessness of existence is fended off by our mounting collections of cool shiny toys and ever more extravagant bucket lists, but we are not magpies, we are people, and in the end all a BMW can do is take you from one useless place to another. Trinkets do not work as talismans. And then if life, as an existentialist would tell us, is devoid of any ultimate meaning, why do we still contrive to be so utterly tense and anxious about a trinket world that in the words of T.S. Eliot is no more than “a handful of dust”? Even as our minds are highly distractible, our hearts remain inconsolable.  

 In (just about) the words of Laurel and Hardy, this is a fine mess we’ve got ourselves into! Organized religion has killed endlessly more people than organized crime, while rational/materialism is creaking to a messy and probably quite unpleasant end. A new element entering our culture that might be able to address some of this chaos is psychedelics. Please save us psychedelics! It’s a good bet that if we can ditch ourselves out of this fine mess at all, we will need to reach into that startling mystical moment which, as Father Zossima said, is our best education. We need to touch ourselves at the core. During the pre-Enlightenment times this depth was reached regularly, but only by a few mystics and solitaries; in the materialistic era it went out of fashion entirely, but with a psychedelic we can all give ourselves a fighting chance of getting there any afternoon we choose. It’s a mysticism more reliable than the living in a monastery for 20 years type of mysticism, or the spontaneous struck by lightning kind. The mystical experience is not a tool – we are its tool – but the drugs that get us there are our tools.

 This on-demand magic has endured a rather long and massively unfair dark night of the soul since our culture first really noticed it in the 1960s, when psychedelics became the bullseye on the back of a deeply feared and despised counterculture. Yet the same drugs that were rotting our moral fibre fifty years ago are now our new mental health little helpers, on the brink of being dispensed by smiling psychiatrists. It’s the same process as happened with the blunts, splifs and joints that just ten minutes ago in cultural time were deadly gateway drugs. The substance that would then get you serious jail time if you were of the wrong colour or the wrong income level has now become “medical” and is available in gummy bear form at your local dispensary for grandma and grandpa to have a good chew on.

 Obviously, some serious repackaging went into this, and we should all be grateful. Advocates, primarily MAPS (the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies), were smart enough to not cast psychedelics as a tool for instant mystical experiences or as a non-addictive way to have harmless fun. Supporting their contentions with research that would calm the authorities, these advocates sold psychedelics as mental health medications with weird if short-lived side-effects. Their success has been in getting these consciousness-altering substances out of the shadows and into positive mainstream attention. The price tag for this is that psychedelics might be rendered innocuous and stripped of the very qualities that might save us. That is not necessarily MAPS’ fault, they have to sell this thing to the same society that created the war on drugs, Rikers Island, Guantanamo Bay, the satanic panic of the 1980s, and more anciently, the Salem witch trials. Unfortunately, to get the tiger into the room it had to be declawed.

 Central to this declawing process is the idea of psychedelic integration. Unlike the Timothy Leary recipe where you turn on, tune in and drop out, the current rationalist take on psychedelics is that their purpose is to mitigate symptoms of mental disorders, and that integration is work that you do to make the experience valuable. Not that there is anything wrong with work or valuable experiences, but by aligning integration with the Protestant work ethic, it dismisses to the shadows the manic trickster-clown who creates the discomforting, explosive, disruptive and fun realities of the “turn on” part of psychedelics.

 In this firmly post hippy but barely post puritan psychedelic renaissance, the proposed norm is to work on our psychedelic integration in just the same way as we work on paying rent or sculpting our abs. A very volatile experience, popularly associated with hedonism and reckless danger is thus rendered respectable once it is safely under the supervision of a responsible clinician in a setting professionally designated as appropriate. We will no longer be tempted to fly out the window or join a Zen monastery. The clinically sanctioned psychedelic experience may cast light upon our personal darkness, but it does not cast light on the cultural darkness that we and our torments emerge from – because that examination could make us proceed to the “drop out” phase of Leary’s psychedelics, or even to ask who should be held culpable in the glossy ruins of late-stage capitalism. If this is light, it the light of a candelabra illuminating a dungeon.

Dungeons, as we well know, should only be illuminated by one lone candle, about to gutter out while the rats excitedly chatter in the background. Integration however, which in and of itself may be important or even vital to us, has been utilized as a sales point in the domestication of the psychedelic. Integration legitimizes tripping by rendering the trip as just part of the treatment of a pathology; having a pathology is what makes you a viable candidate to legally do these drugs, meaning that in order to have a chemically induced spiritual experience you must pathologize yourself. And as Laurie Anderson said, only an expert can deal with the problem. 

 If the point of taking psychedelics is to explore/expand who you are, then contracting it all into a treatment for a pathology goes against the character of the medicine – a high price of admission to the modern psychedelic cinema. As a person taking a ketamine treatment wrote during his experience, “the notion that there is something wrong with me keeps me from going deeper.” Or as another person said, “Everything breathes when I am tripping” – explain that to the health insurance people. Back in the days before cognitive therapy ruled the roost and psychologists were people who wore elbow patches, Carl Rogers said, “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” This indeed is magical thinking – coming as it does from the place where magic lives. That magic is the source-place of the “good, sacred memory” of Father Zossima, and if we don’t conform to the mind-set of evidence-based solutions and “best” practices, we are then in the running to find “perhaps the best education.” The classroom door is open.

Rational/materialism may have let us down, but what if the spiritual approach to psychedelics is not such a good scene either? Spirituality is itself quite difficult to manage, and as we have seen, it can easily be given to excesses of closed-mindedness and fanaticism. There is nobody more boring than someone who knows they are spiritually in the right. Back in the 1960s, (while we were invading faraway countries) we simultaneously imported gurus with long beards from other faraway countries so we could pitch ourselves at their feet and learn their version of the wisdom of the beyond. And now, 50 or more years later, (as our violent hands extricate themselves from still more exotic climes) the shaman has pipped the guru to the top of the charts, feathers and beads have replaced the flowing robes, and we are still checking our critical faculties at the door. Meanwhile, interest remains low in taking a common or garden online philosophy class, or listening to the words of the local pastor, whose robes are nowhere near as good as the shaman’s.

The underground psychedelic spiritual scene is by definition unregulated, which makes it almost inevitably an odd mix of wisdom holders, goodly saints, shifty character, charlatans and rank amateurs. And the seeker who draws the short straw will go to an intellectual dead-end at best, and possible trauma at worst. The grand tour of the psychedelic experience does not only include the sacred heavenly realms, there is always that screaming abyss to keep in mind, and that’s not a good place to discover that the guide for your journey is a bit dodgy. The mainstream’s old-time terror that our youth would all become Hare Krishna devotees singing dreadful repetitive songs all day long may not have been so ill-founded after all.

Admittedly, your local ayahuasca circle may not be a cult of long-robed, long-daggered fanatics, but a spiritual circle like all others, is a social circle, and social circles develop their own unspoken rule books, their in-crowd language, conventions and taboos. Just like Starbucks won’t say small, medium and large, in the spiritual circle you don’t say drugs, you say plant medicine, and the drugs may have a new name too, like Grandmother for ayahuasca. Insights like, “that was like being more drunk than I’ve ever been in my life” are not encouraged, while random and quite trivial coincidences get social cache if they were “meant to be,” even if the agency and mechanism of this “meant” are left quite vague. ‘Natural’ drugs will be valued over ‘artificial’ ones like MDMA and ketamine, even if the latter produce just as beneficial experiences. The bad part of the spiritual approach is not so much the rather remote chances for being abused or hijacked into a cult, it is the routine way in which we turn a shimmering and inexpressible experience into one more version of church on Sunday. Oddly enough – or rather not oddly when you think about it – the only legal way to do psychedelics in a spiritual setting in this country is when the government ordains it as a bona fide church, like Santa Daime. A free conversation with the unspeakable still has a long way to go.