Thor Among the Giants, Part IX: Unreal City
/So, a summary of the last section: We can think of history as being the Intact Period, epitomized by the Middle Ages where faith and science were the same thing, the Rupture that came with the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries when accurate science and greater skepticism set the cat among the pigeons, and the Fractured Period which is from then till now, where the more the technology improves, the more alienated we seem to be. The industrialization of the 19th century only deepened our sense of dislocation, and Nietzsche did nothing to cheer things up when he didn’t just tell us God is dead, but that we are the perps. The existentialists who statuesquely followed him in their smokey left bank cafes said, man up everybody, there never was a God in the first place, nothing is sacred, get over it and if you want meaning, make it up yourself. Meanwhile, as a poet, T.S. Eliot felt no obligation to look for explanations, he just depicted the sorry situation:
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar.
The Hollow Men
Eliot shows the self that is hidden behind modernity’s mask of status, power and happy creature comfort – incoherent beings in a realm of Hungry Ghosts, suffering more than anything else from an insufficiency of identity. While the Dorian Grey of modern society goes brazenly on with its skyscrapers, fashion shows, Academy awards and so on, up in the remote attic of our being is its lurid double, the terrifying portrait of our inner lives – the oil-polluted rivers of Nigeria, the toxic chemical blast in Bhopal, dying forests in the Amazon. Those of us who sense this horror in the room above us cannot feel entirely right with the world, we may do a poor job of covering up our suffering, and we risk a “mental health” diagnosis that will explain away both us and our malady. But as Krishnamurti pointed out, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” The mental health client, just like Socrates, has enough wisdom to know that they know nothing, while their provider casts unremitting positivity over the well of gloom. What we seek is redemption, not, as we once thought, from sin – or for that matter from a diagnosis – but from meaninglessness. The Hollow Men, in being aware of their suffering, can at least desire change.
One of Eliot’s core images is the Waste Land, from the poem of the same name, and it refers to the Arthurian myth of a land laid waste and infertile around the castle of the enfeebled Fisher King, the keeper of the holy grail. This devastated land where nothing grows may be the blasted forests and farmland round a grail castle, or it may as easily be the jostling hub of a cosmopolitan city:
Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet,
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
The Waste Land
Lame Deer the Lakota wise man, saw this too, and in Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions he even added a slight dash of hope at the end:
Your old prophets went into the desert crying for a dream and the desert gave it to them. But the white men of today have made a desert within themselves. The white man’s desert is a place without dreams or life. There nothing grows. But the spirit water is always way down there to make the desert green again.
Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions
A couple of years after The Waste Land came out, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary that she saw people as “splinters and mosaics; not, as they used to hold, immaculate, monolithic, consistent wholes.” By that I think she means that the Victorian sensibility she grew up in could not tolerate seeing the splinteredness of humanity, and so held fiercely to a mask of respectability that covered the faces of the Hollow Men. The Victorians – let’s admit it, us back in an earlier day – ignored the alarm calls of the hidden, cringing self that was no more than an improvised conglomeration of fractured reactions against pain. In endorsing our masks, we cling to a belief that this apparent “consistent whole” can successfully function as it masquerades as the sum of its smashed-up mosaic parts. What we have to pin our hopes on now is that some central core, some noosphere-creating portion of us, will enfold this ragtag appendage of fragments in a journey towards real wholeness. We have to forgive our shattered selves in our own splintered way.
But when you think about it, nobody is just on their own personal grail quest through a localized Waste Land. That thing called “me,” is one tiny picture in the huge photomosaic that comprises humanity, or if you like, it’s one cell playing its part in the body of Blake’s image of humanity. Ralph Waldo Emerson in his Essays said of this:
If the whole of history is in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience. There is a relation between the hours of our life and centuries of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repositories of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star hundreds of million miles distant, as the poise of my body depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces, so the hours should be instructed by the ages and the ages explained by the hours. Of the universal mind, each individual man is one more incarnation. All properties consist in him. Each new fact in his private experience flashes a light on what great bodies of men have done, and the crises of his life refer to national crises.
Emerson assails the idea that a truly private life, isolated from other lives, is even conceivable, and if that is true then the dramas of my ‘mood disorders’ are inevitably written large in the nation and, conversely, the rumbling hidden moods of the nation will constantly seep into me – even though no-one has yet been diagnosed with “societal dislocation disorder.” Perhaps because there is no corresponding pharmaceutical to be prescribed for it. My disquiet, which I so often take as unreasonable, self-indulgent or the result of my own weakness, may not even be fully my own: it is there because of the fertile cultural ground it grows in. Blake portrays this dynamic with his own special force and outrage:
The dog starved at its master’s gate
Predicts the ruin of the state…
Each outcry of the hunter hare
A fibre from the brain doth tear
A skylark wounded in the wing
A Cherubim does cease to sing…
The Babe that weeps the Rod beneath
Writes Revenge in realms of Death
The Beggars Rags fluttering in Air
Does to Rags the Heavens tear
Auguries of Innocence
These little tragedies and indignities that at first glance make strike us as sad but unrelated, are not just profoundly related, but are signatures of the larger system: “And the hapless soldiers sigh/Runs in blood down palace walls.” But, says the writer and wildly unsuccessful presidential candidate Marianne Williamson, there are ways in which this can be empowering and enlivening for us as individuals:
For the world is a projection of our own psyches, collected on a global screen; it is hurt or healed by every thought we think. To whatever extent I refuse to face the deeper issues that hold me back, to that extent the world will be held back. And to whatever extent I find the miraculous key to the transformation of my own life, to that extent I will help change the world.
The Gift of Change
However, so far at least, the world is not yet pulling on the t-shirt saying, “We’re All In This Together,” and the splintering of personhood percolates into the community, while fragmented communities continue to create splintered people. The psychologist Donald Kalsched calls it an internal democracy when the parts and factions inside us speak to each other with a measure of equality, and no-one gets shouted down. It may be lively inside there, but we are, essentially, at peace with ourselves. An inner Fascism however, comes when parts like an inner critic lord it over others, bullying them into a state of shame and submission, just as bosses, parents, and others are known to do in the larger system of our somewhat nominal democracy. When the mask of the “immaculate, monolithic, consistent” self disowns the more tender and inconvenient corners of our being, it fosters the riotous algae blooms of conspiracy theories, duplicity and blind self-interest we are dogged with today. Generation by generation we have carried and nurtured our sickness together, and if we now prepare to get well again, we must do so with and for one another.
Religion is the institution most naturally charged with this repair job of humans, but conventional religion is not actually well-suited to the task – witness the body count. Too often the Good Shepherd spends his time keeping his flock in check and massacring rivals, rather than leading humanity towards some sort of “noospheric” promised land, or, again in the words of Teilhard de Chardin, towards the religion of the future. Teilhard wasn’t blind to the shortcomings of institutional religion, having suffered from them himself, but he had a vision of spirit in which, “for twenty centuries thousands of mystics have drawn such burning passion from its flame that their brilliance and purity far outstrip the impulses and devotions of any kind of human love.” Devotional love, then, is the core form of love, more basic than romantic love, love of country or love of family, because by loving what he calls God, we are loving the most passionate and personal source of all. As Meister Eckhart intriguingly put it, God is closer to us than we are to ourselves. But how is this love to be best expressed and best propagated? Teilhard has a hopeful idea about this:
What is truly a phenomenon of capital importance for the science of the human is that a zone of thought has appeared and grown over an appreciable region of the Earth, one in which a genuine universal love has not only been conceived and preached, but has shown itself to be psychologically possible and operational in practice – and what is more, far from dying out, the movement seems to be bent on gaining speed and intensity.
The Human Phenomenon
For Teilhard the “zone of thought” that shows so much promise is Christianity, but then, being a Catholic priest, you wouldn’t expect him to suggest it was Brazilian shamanism. No doubt he would have been aghast at the idea of taking drugs to reach the higher realms, but that was him in his time and place, and we are in ours. In our time we can begin by saying that in a world where “genuine universal love” is thin on the ground, tripping is one of the more reliable ways of getting in touch with it – as opposed to going to a monastery, meditating for 20 years, and hoping that you did it right. When Timothy Leary – you might say naively or you might say as an opening flourish to a cultural dialogue – suggested we put LSD in the water supply, I think he was getting at the idea that if the body politic, all of us in this together, could find this universal love, then the world could be transformed.
It’s William Blake again who sketches things out for us here. Blake saw through religion the way you might see through a pane of glass that has been partially painted over with a picture. You see the picture and its representations, but you also see past that into the vast and active spirit world beyond. A religion of the future won’t necessarily try to do away with the pictures painted on the glass – we seem to like them – but it will see them as representations rather than dogmatized actualities:
The religions of all Nation are derived from each Nation’s different reception of the Poetic Genius which is every where called the Spirit of Prophesy…All men are alike (tho’ infinitely various) So all Religions, & as all similars have one source, the true Man is the source, he being the Poetic Genius.
All Religions Are One
Forgive him here for calling us the “true Man” – consistent with everybody else in his time, he was mistaking the high-energy spirit world behind the window for the sexist daubings on it. The piece about the Poetic Genius he did get right:
The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive.
And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity; Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood; Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.
And at length they pronounc’d that the Gods had order’d such things. Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Here we are in 1790 and Blake is already saying that the source of spirit, the Poetic Genius, is not external, but here inside us, in the human breast, – though you just have to wonder what he would have made of our own times, where we have forgotten that the Poetic Genius exists at all. It’s very noticeable how seldom the psychedelic experience corresponds to the visual imagery of conventional religion and how often it gives visions of universal love, living light, ineffable ecstasies – apparently a more direct communication from the Poetic Genius than a God with a face or a name. The core mystical experience is not owned by any particular system of belief or non-belief, just like you can be struck by lightning without holding any particular view on the nature of electricity. Teilhard’s idea of the noosphere, where we take an evolutionary leap into a more unified, communal and organized level of consciousness, is a plausible outcome, so long as we—the collective we including all the billionaires and politicians – choose to pursue it. If it sounds entirely implausible that this leap will come solely through our combined generosity and goodwill, we can remember that after having done psychedelics you might are also tempted to say that the forces of love are irresistible. As are the forces of climate change and environmental degradation which, if we don’t take action together, will take us down, down, down. As Teilhard said, we must “see or perish,” and since the seeing can be highly enjoyable, let’s hope we manage to do it.
They say that every country gets the government it deserves, which may or may not be true, but it’s certainly true that every culture gets the spiritual life it deserves, and it’s not someone else who has created this Waste Land all around us. If we can’t dig deep enough to find those wellsprings of spirit water that Lame Deer spoke about, we are compelled to erect images of false deities in the human breast, such as Success, Power, and Personal Abundance. These are not even trying to satisfy the longings of the soul, but they do anesthetize us from the suffering of being alone in a cruel desert. You could say that Mental Health is another one of these heathen gods, not that there is anything wrong with ameliorating your anxiety or depression, it’s just that it is not a deity. A mental health movement that can’t answer the questions of the soul will, in the end, only offer us adjustment to the sick society.
The pinnacle of mental health is happiness and resilience, neither of which address the issues of meaning and purpose we bring to psychedelics, or, alternatively, that psychedelics will sooner or later bring to us. The mental health idea, which isn’t a very old one, is designed to approach the issue of well-being in a post-sprit age. When someone goes to a church and takes holy communion, psychology describes that as an act of self-soothing, without ever investigating the human need to ponder the incarnation of spirit into the material world, an incarnation that will set us free of all cares, even the pesky ones that don’t ever go away. Eternity, as Blake said, is in love with the productions of time, and if that’s true, then Eternity won’t stop making love to materiality for as long as there are still things around to manifest in. You don’t have to see this as a rescue scheme where spirit pitches in to save the mucky material world from itself, but instead you can see it as the higher vibrations, having a more expansive vision than the lower ones, perceive the beauty in our muddy puddles, our dirt, our grey moods, when we ourselves fail to. Thus, at the end of a trip, people will sometimes say, “Everything is just the way it should be,” suggesting that our warts and all reality is in fact a very fine one. As with Blake’s doors of perception that need a little cleansing, it’s the capacity to perceive what is there that is lacking, not the reality itself. Which, when you think about it, is a huge relief.
The end-goals of mental health are about stability and adjustment, they are not aimed at the excitation of reverence and awe, the preserve of the Poetic Genius. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but that eye is conditioned by the perception-capacity the beholder possesses, which in turn will be influenced by mood, belief systems and unconscious presumptions. When we are set and ready to start the self-exploration of a trip, our wish is that our mental health will support us in this exploration and expansion, and we may hope that our mood, belief systems and unconscious presumptions get the proverbial “reset,” or at least don’t get too much in the way. When the Poetic Genius honours us by bursting into consciousness, we wish for strong enough egos to navigate the swirling waters of the mind, so we can get a proper taste of what’s really going on up there, or in there, or however you choose to locate it. And so, ask not what psychedelic journeys may do for your mental health, ask what your mental health may do for your psychedelic journey.