The Psychedelic Savior Part V: We Don't Need No Education

An infant comes into the world as pure wholeness, a complete innocence, and as Wordsworth put it, “trailing clouds of glory”. In that state of completeness, every moment is sacred, and as carers of this person, our challenge is to create an environment that can nestle the infant into infinity. Less than that and things start to go seriously awry, whether by the designs of cruelty or by the default of the ordinary. Exposure to too much trauma and to too much ordinariness, especially in combination, is an offense to the exuberance of the spirit. We may remember though, that the innocent and complete child is always still there somewhere inside us, still experiencing what we experience, though somewhat at a distance.

What we call education is too often the culture’s hands-on way of teaching the child about the nature of trauma, fear and the unbearable tedium that can be found in this world. While they are learning their times tables, children also learn fear with their bodies and in the cells of their bodies as they tighten and restrict under the teacher’s scrutiny and punishing hand. This is a place of origin for our internal alarm signals and non-self-acceptance, where the culture passes on the baton of interior war with self, never willing to kiss and make up with your own being.

 In our culture this unfortunate body-knowledge used to be passed on mainly through violence, but nowadays it is more often passed on with targets, testing scores and tracking. The teachers are put under such pressure that they become nervous wrecks, and they pass that panic attack onto the kids, who learn by age seven they are already behind in life and their school might even close if their scores don’t improve. Things did not become less cruel when we removed corporal punishment, the cruelty just shifted around with changing times, and no child was ever really left behind in the trauma game. William Blake described this spiritual betrayal in “The Schoolboy:”

 I love to rise in a summer morn,

When the birds sing on every tree;

The distant huntsman winds his horn,

And the skylark sings with me:

O what sweet company!

 But to go to school in a summer morn, -

O it drives all joy away!

Under a cruel eye outworn,

The little ones spend the day

In sighing and dismay.

 Ah then at times I drooping sit,

And spend many an anxious hour;

Nor in my book can I take delight,

Nor sit in learning's bower,

Worn through with the dreary shower.

 How can the bird that is born for joy

Sit in a cage and sing?

How can a child, when fears annoy,

But droop his tender wing,

And forget his youthful spring!

 That was written in 1789, the year we discovered liberty, equality and fraternity. Apparently the revolutionaries forgot to bring along their own children, because nearly 200 years later, in 1970, John Lennon had this to say:

 As soon as you're born, they make you feel small
By giving you no time instead of it all
'Til the pain is so big you feel nothing at all
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be

They hurt you at home and they hit you at school
They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool
'Til you're so fucking crazy you can't follow their rules
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be

When they've tortured and scared you for 20 odd years
Then they expect you to pick a career
When you can't really function, you're so full of fear
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be

And nine years on, Roger Waters of Pink Floyd described how things had not perked up at all:

 When we grew up and went to school
There were certain teachers who would
Hurt the children any way they could

By pouring their derision
Upon anything we did
And exposing every weakness
However carefully hidden by the kids

We don't need no education
We don’t need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone

Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!

All in all it's just another brick in the wall.
All in all you're just another brick in the wall.

 Water’s wall is one portion of the cavern Blake said we humans have closed ourselves up in. But what on earth is all this cruelty about, and why do we all have to so diligently trauma our way out of awareness? This is not just a bad hair day for humanity, there has to be a reason for such a consistent attack on our own sensitive selves. One possibility that infinity scares us and we would rather do without it. Another has to do with our cultural evolution. It’s said that once we moved from being hunter gatherers to being farmers, then food storage, taxation and empire building all started to happen. And once empire gets to be possible, some bright spark will want to be the boss of it, and said bright spark will start to organize things in a way where his own interests and the interests of his support structures come first.

 For instance, you need soldiers for your conquests, and your soldiers need to march in straight lines and not trample over one another’s feet like a big rabble. Likewise, your workers need to put in a full shift and not wander off when they lose interest or have enough money for the day, while your congregations need to shut up and listen to the sermon about being a good member of the flock. Following a different drummer is fine, but not for the captains of industry or the church fathers and mothers. Historically, we have gotten ourselves organized by collectively suppressing massive amounts of ourselves and then living in whatever measly emotional/spiritual trickle of us remains. Childhood spontaneity is not so much lost, as consigned to some empty shunting yard of the soul.

 Psychedelics are one tool which may help us grow the emotional and physical violence out of the collective. By turning our interest and fascination away from the mechanics of power and towards – I want to say back towards – the interior castle of our own beauty and the beauty of the world, we alter the basis of our own value systems. We need to have infinity at our root, not just survival.

 Our trauma is held in our bodies, we know. But quite a few people say after a psychedelic experience that they did not just let go of their own trauma but also the accumulated trauma of generations before them, or at least some of it. There was stuff inside them that was not of them. We have a lot of ancient atrocities clogging up our doors of perception, a legacy that is held in our bodies, infused in our thinking, and written on our hearts. When we write a new story, we are widening the chinks in Blake’s cavern, loosening the bricks in Roger Waters’ wall, and when we get better in that way, we are getting better for everybody, not just for ourselves.  

 Since we are not yet evolved into what we want to become, our efforts towards getting better for everybody are bound to be fallible and beset with dead ends. All we can do is recall what happened in the psychedelic experience as best we can, and then be as faithful to it as we can. Even clever people can get overwhelmed with sloppy thinking and self-indulgence, but it’s on us to figure out how to create selves that will sustain the vast exuberance of the human spirit while playing our part in the world around us.

 Remember Miranda, the girl mentioned by Tobin Hart in Part IV, who stood in the ocean for an hour and a half, being the ocean? Getting better for everybody means fashioning a world where she could do that at any time in her life, not just in the period of innocence, not just when, in some sense, she didn’t know any better. In this future world, childhood spiritual experience would not be an odd, or even cute, cultural footnote, but the foundation of everything we do afterwards. And that next thing would be a world where the adults could also have their moments of unconstrained connection and joy without the silent censure of society, whether it happened on a beach, while stopping and staring into the clouds on a busy street, or just pausing in silence in the middle of dinner. We would all know what one another were about with this, and be ready, without embarrassment, to have and to share the thoughts that, as Wordsworth said, are “too deep for tears.”