Setting an Intentionless Intention

These days the expected thing to do if you are taking psychedelics is to set an intention. Coming to a psychedelic circle without an intention is a bit like arriving at a potluck supper without a plate of food or a birthday party without a present. Social realities aside, it’s certainly true that it is good to reflect on what you are wishing for in your trip, because, as they say, if you don’t know what you want there is a very good chance you will get it. But should you always come to ceremony with an intention? Are there times when a wishless wish is the better option?

 Some of us are approaching psychedelics as a promising fix for mental health issues, and here the intention appears to be relatively simple: relieve me of this depression, this anxiety, or whatever it is that ails me. But looking at it more closely, that intention is a wish for a negative, for something to not be there. When relieved of this depression or anxiety, what do I actually want for myself? The answer generally brings us into the spiritual realm, and what we want for ourselves is light, peace, love, joy, sense of purpose, something of that ilk.

The best intentions are usually the short ones, since memorizing a paragraph or two while tripping your brains out is just not on. Whittling it down to a few words is a demanding task, or as Thoreau said about writing, it’s not that “the story need be long, but it will take a long while making it short.” Even so, once we have created a firm intention like, “May I find love,” “May my heart open,” something of that nature, we should nevertheless hold it lightly. When the wishes and expectations of my regular self are at a low ebb, then the new information has a better chance of coming in. In fact, if this is a journey of radical self-discovery, the most important parts almost have to show up in terms we can’t yet grasp.

By taking psychedelics we are showing a certain readiness to lose what is most dear and familiar to us and see that it was just a habit, a construct. If not, we probably should have done some other kind of drug. In East Coker, the second part of his extended poem, Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot, a poet who was not too big on drugs at all, gives an account of that liminal state where life has called the bluff of the ego and all its machinations. Like a person on a trip, Eliot is left dangling between terror and revelation as he wonders what is real about himself:

 I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—

Eliot wrote this while he was living in London during World War II and working at night as a fire warden during the Blitz. The world that was threatened was not just his own personal spiritual domain, but a whole civilization. He lived in a moment when there was a very real possibility that, as Shakespeare put it, our revels might soon be ended and we would turn out to be such stuff as dreams are made of. Whether the threat is personal, societal, or both at the same time, what is there to wish for when the world turns upside down and nothing you thought was solid is solid? What intention should you set then? Luckily, Eliot pops up with the answer:

 I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought

Something not yet imaginable wants to manifest, and I can help prepare the way by saying to my soul, be still. It is an intentionless kind of an intention where the most useful thing is to quiet ourselves and wait, to let go, as best we may, of all the usual equipment we have stored to get us through the trials of life and allow our house to be empty. The faith is in the waiting, not in the believing, it is an act of faith to sit with ourselves and yet be still. We can reach beyond the self that got us into this mess in the first place, the one who mistook the stage props of life for real hills, trees and distant panoramas, and say, in the words of W. B. Yeats,

Players and painted stage took all my love

And not the things that they were emblems of.

 Even our sense of the divine has to be let go of, since the God of my understanding is just that: something of my understanding, a painted stage that can be rolled away in the darkness. This leads us to a via negativa, the road of negation, where words start to double up on us and the entrance way into, let’s call it another dimension, is composed of absurdity, paradox, and the indigestible:  

 To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

 These are not koans to be figured out and overcome, but bitter rules of life that can destroy us. The self who can survive in this new world is one we can barely conceive of, and it might be said that only when we don’t know whether we are being born or dying is when we can be born. Like all birth and death, it will, in any case, eventually have its way:

 So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.