Thor Among the Giants Part VIII: The Force of Ancient Memory
/I am quite willing, many of us would say, to exchange give up a lifetime of what turns out to be quite bland materialist dopamine hits for the extraordinary ecstasies in the “immense world of delight” Blake talks about. Bring it on. The question that lurks across lifetimes though, is how do we bring on the spiritual connection that was maybe so immediate and palpable in a trip? Blake, who was somehow born directly and seamlessly into a pantheistic, utterly alive universe, talks about this as a condition where “every particle of dust breathes forth its joy,” a sentiment echoed by an ibogaine tripper I met, who said that “There is…a vital force in every atom.” Usually though, we are too encased in repetitive thought patterns and automatic moods to stop and sniff the infinite roses. What exactly is it that makes finding our own basic nature such a task? After all, me finding me shouldn’t be all that hard…
It is not just some native dullness that prevents us from seeing the world “as it is;” you can blame this closure on pain, fear and force of habit. In the fear and pain department, I’d say there are three elements at play that clog our doors of perception: the personal trials and tribulations we have all been through, the vast ancestral traumas that sweep through our family lines from generation to generation; and the spiritual closure of the society we live in, the cultural air we breathe, the language we speak. In order to improve our “sensual enjoyment,” we need to be in, or otherwise create, a culture that is about the business of cleaning up its perception doors. Currently – you’ll notice we are not there yet.
These three elements – the personal, ancestral and societal – are not totally distinct from one another, they are basically one thing, known as the human condition, and they merge like the colours in a rainbow. So let’s look at the items in this construct one by one.
We quite naturally think of our ‘personal’ problems as being restricted to our own persons, and given that, the solutions, as in most mental health treatment, will be restricted to our own persons too. This is the domain of cognitive therapy, where we redress the erroneous thinking that has developed on the back of difficult experiences; the therapy work is a reversing of bad mental habits, of inadvertent self-inflicted pain. And cognitive therapy addresses all this very well, so long as the pain does not chain down too deeply into old family traumas, or resonate too closely with the chiming of ancestral bells. The roots of some cognitive distortions go deeper than reasoning can reach, and it’s no good proving to myself that I need not be depressed this bright morning when this depression is a family heirloom from way back. This quintessentially person-based mental health method is a good start, but it doesn’t take us to the finish line, and you will notice that you never find yourself diagnosed with “beset by rampant capitalism disorder,” or “haunted by ancient religious shame syndrome.”
The ancestral dimension brings us back to our old friend Thor, from back in Part I. When Thor visited the castle of the giants they gave him challenges, like trying to pick up the household cat and drinking one tankard of beer. It was basically a mythological version of the modern drinking game. Thor, who prided himself on both his strength and his drinking ability, was astounded when he could hardly raise one of the cat’s paws off the ground, and then with enormous pulls at his tankard, that he could barely bring down the beer level more than a few inches. What the giants knew and Thor did not, was that the cat was really the world-encircling Midgard Serpent, artfully disguised, and that the drinking cup was hooked up to the world’s ocean. While Thor was mystified and his self-esteem was plummeting, the giants were having a good chuckle to themselves. As it was for Thor, so it is for us: why can’t I resist this little slice of sweet cake, why can’t I control my temper, why, after all my efforts, can’t I control my anxiety when I am speaking to more than two people? And so on. Our “treatment resistant mental illness” is the same as Thor’s tasks: we totally misunderstand its dimension, and so we go about fixing it the wrong way. I take pills to fix my broken brain, I address my cognitive distortions, but my personal Midgard Serpent loops back to ancestral pattern of pain from long before I was born; we forget about the pressure that the past exerts on us, conveyed, for instance, through:
The homicidal bitching
That goes down in every kitchen
Over who’s to serve
And who’s to eat.
Leonard Cohen
Violence and abuse are one vehicle of transmission, and simple osmosis is another, where we inadvertently leak our nervousness and despair out into the atmosphere, and the kiddies soak up it all up. Our forebears have been through endless migrations, famines, wars, all kinds of race, gender and caste-based hatreds, and then all the little cruelties we needlessly inflict on those we love and those we don’t even know. But we have to also remember that they have meditated together deep into the night, been unexpectedly kind, made sacrifices, and devised beautiful ceremonies with one another. Our ancestors have written their names into the structure of our bones, into the stance our bodies take, our thought patterns, and the way we hold or don’t hold our breath. We are the force of ancient memory, eating its way into the future.
If you are around people who trip regularly, you will sometimes hear them say things like, “I wept for five hours straight, and I don’t even know what for,” or, “I cried tears that I swear were not my tears.” Sometimes pain is being released from who knows when or where, and at the end of it, it feels like the ancestors inside us are finally reaching resolution. When the songs say, “cry me a river,” that may be what it takes. Even though I may have gone to the medicine for personal healing, I am also there for the long-dead people I contain. It’s not just self-healing, it is setting a family curse to rest, a tearing up old and duplicitous contracts around shame and self-limitation.
And now, as the mental health industry approaches the explosive possibilities of psychedelics, it tries to bend the genie in the bottle to its own will and its own worldview. It has latched on to the language of its bugbear and super-anti-hero, Timothy Leary, who first popularized the importance of “setting” for a psychedelic journey. Assuming themselves instant experts on what makes a good setting, the mental health researchers wheeled the medical instruments out of their clinic rooms, wheeled in a comfy couch, put artwork up on the wall, and piped in soft, spooky New Age music. Little have they considered how much there is to learn from the cathedral builders, the creators of the Eleusinian mysteries, and all the endless, varied ceremony makers across the world and through time. The porous surface of the collective unconscious remains unscratched by our culture as we remain addicted to the linear, and the new psychedelic experts have never paid heed to William Blake when he said, “Improvement makes straight roads, but the crooked roads without improvement are the roads of genius.”
The ultimate “setting” though, is not any kind of physical space at all, it is the culture that has formed us, the assumptions and hidden prejudices that you, I, your psychedelic practitioner, and the people passing by on the street all share. Every culture has its own unwritten rules and no-no’s, and here are some of ours: You may not fall on your knees or raise your arms in a state of ecstatic union except in certain kinds of churches or at a rock concert; waterbugs are innately repulsive, fancy cars are innately desirable; birth is sacred, death is a tragedy; and we are all fundamentally selfish, violent and competitive at heart, even though we really have no idea what we are. And so on. This mixture of empty materialism with the dying embers of a self-flagellating religion undergoes a profound culture shock when it collides with psychedelic multi-dimensionality.
It's natural to feel like your worldview is written in bold letters in the sky, when really it is embedded in the dendrites of our squooshy neural pathways. We can no more step outside our own culture than we can walk away from our own shadow, but it helps us, when we don an eyemask, eat a mushroom, and start to listen to the winds of spirit, to understand we are partway through a very long story whose ending is still unknown. We who don’t remember history are indeed forced to repeat it, and since all of us have come in halfway through the movie of western history, we can’t do anything useful until we know the story so far. And the 21st century story is that we are getting closer and closer a the splitting of the ways between climate disaster on one hand and Teilhard’s leap of faith into the noosphere on the other.
What I am going to say is, like any other theory, is a mental construct. It is a game of seeing faces in clouds: the images are subjective, and the insights are quite fleeting. You can say that a cat is a thing, a jam jar is a thing, a doormat is a thing, but a scientific paradigm is not a thing, a diagnosis is not a thing, and a theory is not a thing, they are all just ways of looking at things. The value of these ideas is in the use we make of them: a diagnosis, for instance, might be a huge relief at times, while at other times it may be an unwieldy label, and at others a mind forged manacle. I choose my particular cloud-peering game to be the spiritual journey of humanity, a sport that has been strangely neglected issue, when you think about how important it is. All the better, to get some You Are Here signs like this one onto our psychedelic road maps.
Think of western culture as having gone through three periods, with one hoped-for period to come:
· The Intact Period (when there was a commonly held belief in a creator and a purpose-led universe, but most of the science was hopelessly wrong)
· The Rupture, (the coming of the scientific revolution and, along with its benefits, a barren, non-purposed universe)
· The Fractured Period (us ever since the scientific revolution, trying to make sense of what presents as a world without meaning)
· The Synthesis (A possible future world where, in the coming noosphere of shared consciousness, we will combine science that works with spirit that has heart.)
The Intact Period is epitomized by the Middle Ages, where there was certainly no less greed, treachery, and cruelty than at any other time, but there was considerably less doubt. What remained “intact” was a belief that God was real – realer than us – as the normal position. He ran human affairs from up there in the sky – slightly above the sky actually – as the stars rotated in celestial spheres between him and us, and rang with beautiful music far above our heads. Looking back at it from the seventeenth century, the poet John Dryden, more with nostalgia than anything else, captures some of its grandeur and imaginal integrity:
As from the pow’r of sacred lays
The spheres began to move,
And sung the great Creator’s praise
To all the bless’d above;
So when the last and dreadful hour
This crumbling pageant shall devour,
The trumpet shall be heard on high,
The dead shall live, the living die,
And music shall untune the sky.
A Song for Saint Celia’s Day, 1687
The Intact Period was certainly not a time of unity, and heresies of different sorts kept popping up all the time, but they were all squabbles about the fine details of this God, not whether or not the whole idea was a load of rubbish. Science and religion didn’t just get along at this time, they were the same thing, ruled under the heavy thumb of biblical and Aristotelean truth. The historian David Wootten described the world system like this:
According to orthodox Christian thinking...the universe had been made to provide a home for humankind. The sun was there to provide light and heat by day, the moon and stars light by night. There was a perfect correspondence between the macrocosm (the universe as a whole) and the microcosm (the little world of the human body). The two were made for each other. The Fall had partly disrupted this perfect arrangement, forcing human beings to labour to survive; but the original architecture of the universe was still viable for all to see.
The Invention of Science
The first major blows to this Iron Age system of thought came when people like Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo started to throw some serious cold water on the heavenly spheres business. Copernicus calculated that the earth was not the centre of the universe as everyone had assumed. This medieval belief about our centrality was not as self-absorbed as it first sounds. According to this system, the higher you go more rarified things are, so that God was way, way up there, and the Earth, the region of corruption and decay, was as actually low as you could go. But Kepler did the math and figured that the perfect circles of the heavenly spheres did not jibe with the actual motion of the planets, while Galileo, gazing through his three-inch telescope, saw that the planet Jupiter has its own moons, debunking the idea that everything revolves around one God-created centre. Training his scope on the moon, Galileo then saw that it has mountains and depressions just like earth, not possible if the Moon is made of purer stuff than us. God’s celestial handiwork was starting to look more and more like a botched job, so what was going on? As the whole edifice of a divinely constructed universe began to crumble, God himself had to be put into question.
Galileo tried to ditch us out of this conundrum by saying that “The Bible shows the way to go to heaven, not the way the heavens go,” but when in 1687 Isaac Newton showed that that the same force of gravity that makes apples fall on your head also makes the planets rotate in the sky, the inconsistencies had piled up too much. You can’t Spanish Inquisition our way out of every intellectual attack, and it was clear that the celestial spheres were a fantasy. Wooten tells us that, “By 1700 every educated person was familiar with the idea that the universe might be infinite and that there were probably other inhabited worlds. Indeed, the idea had become entirely respectable.” Blaise Pascal, the 17th century mathematician and essayist who clung on to his religion but didn’t have recourse to mystical unions or ecstasies, tells us what it looks like when there is only the little human pitted against this big emptiness:
When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the small space which I fill, or even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified, and wonder that I am here rather than there, for there is no reason why here rather than there, or now rather than then…The eternal silence of these infinite spaces alarms me.
This sense of eternity as cold, immense, and uncaring encumbered few minds before the 17th century, but even Galileo, the man who busily tried to stay out of trouble while constantly getting himself into it, put religion in its place when he said, “Measure what is measurable and make measurable what is not so.” If you can’t measure it, it ain’t there – so take that, infinite God!
Much later, with the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species in 1859, the final hammer blow fell on Intactness with the destruction of the story that humanity started with one man and one woman in a magical garden. No, we started out as hairy apes. Pandora’s box of fondly believed myths had opened and all the standard orthodoxies had flown out, but unlike the Greek myth, hope was left trapped inside. This leads us in the end to a reductionist science that has little good news for us as personal beings:
You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.
Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis
Is there any value to the Intact Period at all? Strangely, yes. The Christian mystics, such as Saint John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila and Meister Eckhart, like all the great mystics of the world, had their own sophisticated system of thought based on direct experience with spirit, and though no-one seemed to be ingesting pretty red and white mushrooms at the time, their resultant reports got pretty trippy pretty fast. Here is Julian of Norwich, holding the universe in her hand, and contemplating her “oneing,” a union with God:
In this same time our Lord shewed me a spiritual sight of His homely loving…He shewed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel nut in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with the eye of my understanding, and thought: What may this be? And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made. I marveled how it might last, for methought it might suddenly have fallen to naught for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasteth, and ever shall last for God loveth it. And so All-thing hath Being by the love of God.
In this Little Thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it, the second is that God loveth it, the third, that God keepeth it. But what is to me verily the Maker, the Keeper, and the Lover, -- I cannot tell; for till I am Substantially oned to Him, I may never have full rest nor very bliss; that is to say, till I be so fastened to Him, that there is right nought that is made betwixt my God and me.
Revelations of Divine Love
Medieval Europe was like having thousands of meditation centres, going not for week-long or month-long retreats, but for lifetimes. Thousands of monks, nuns, and anchorites in the monastic system, with long hours of prayer, meditation and isolation, must have been quietly blissing out all the time everywhere, without the help of drugs and without fanfare afterwards. It would have made the mystical experience a regular part of life, something to be expected, mulled over and interpreted, and unlike today, not at all out of the ordinary scheme of things. This is the spiritual baby that the scientific revolution that drained out with the Medieval bathwater. Listen, for instance, to Meister Eckhart, a 14th century Dominican monk, on time, space and the ineffable:
Nothing hinders the soul’s knowledge of God as much as time and space, for time and space are fragments and God is one. And therefore if the soul is to know God it must know him above time and outside of space; for God is neither this nor that, as are these manifold things. God is one!
Sermon Six
Compare Eckhart’s musings about the meaning of Christmas with today’s depth of thought in wishing one another “happy holidays” or “season’s greetings:”
We are celebrating the feast of the Eternal Birth which God the Father has borne and never ceases to bear in all eternity…But if it takes not place in me, what avails it? Everything lies in this, that it should take place in me.
Meister Eckhart, Sermon One
In another sermon (appropriately named This is Another Sermon) Eckhart speaks to our role as midwives of the divine:
In fact, whatever the perfection that may come to the soul, let it be divine light, or grace, or any other blessing, it cannot come except by birth. No other way is possible. Cherish in yourself the birth of God, and with it all goodness and comfort, all rapture, reality, and truth will be yours…Moreover, in this birth you will have a part in the divine stream (that flows into life) and will share its benefits…It is the soul that is especially designed for the birth of God, and so it occurs in the soul, where the Father’s child is conceived in the core, the inmost recess, where no idea ever glowed or agent of the soul crept in.
With the idea of birth comes the recognition that the divine light is reaching into a place it never was before, otherwise what exactly would be born? That suggests a divinity that is not perfect and unchangeable, but something changeable and capable of expansion, just as a noosphere may one day expand across a globe. With psychedelics comes the possibility, for an afternoon at least, or across the length of a night, of reaching into the “inmost recess,” that place of silence in the soul where we can engage in divine birthing. Our own personal Christmas Day. That, surely, puts our personal mental life, our despairs and worries, our relationship with emotional pain, our fears, joys and desires, into an altogether new perspective. The core anxiety generated by those vast interstellar spaces, what Teilhard de Chardin calls our “space-time sickness,” can only be assuaged by something yet more vast, and infinitely more comforting:
In a flux, however incredibly vast it might be, that is not only becoming, but genesis, which is something quite different, consciousness is reinforced on itself. Actually, as soon as a definitive movement appears, giving them an expression and a face, time and space are humanized…But then, human of the twentieth century, how can you explain that you are waking up to horizons and therefore to fears your ancestors never knew?
The truth is that half our present disquiet would be transformed in elation if we would only decide, in obedience to the facts, to place the essence and measure of our modern cosmologies in a noogenesis. Along this axis there can be no doubt. The universe has always been moving and it continues to move at this very moment.
The Human Phenomenon
This “noogenesis” means the genesis, birth, of the noosphere, not, I believe, an equivalent to Eckhart’s Christmas birth of the divine in us, but the same thing. What else that could topple our very understandable core anxiety and existential despair as we face the cosmic void? Mental health practitioners look at this through the other end of the telescope and celebrate the fact that their research subjects rate psychedelic journeys as one of the top five experiences of their life, touting this as evidence of the excellence of their new-found method. Well, why shouldn’t it be at the top of our hit parade, when the eternal birth of divine presence has tried, however stutteringly, to begin its birthing process in the piece of hominized matter called me?
You could say that when we take psychedelics, we are working to restore the Christmas baby that went out with the Intact bathwater, but don’t take it that the Rupture is the bad guy here, shoving its way between us and our divine selves. The Rupture was inevitable and it was good that it happened. Even the most spiritual among us is quietly grateful to the scientific revolution for making life more comfortable, organized, logical and safe. In any case, we could not stay in the old system’s ignorance forever – sooner or later someone somewhere was going to pop the balloon of our fairy tale astronomy and our fanciful science. And if the Rupture is part of a natural progression, then in spite of all appearances, the ultra-artificial, bent on self-destruction, world we live in now is right on target in terms of our progress. You could call it a learning moment for humanity as we see that survival depends on giving up this comfort-through-sparkly-toys culture for more enduring, and actually far more entertaining stuff. If that is all true, then getting lost in materialism is not a dead-end, it's just a weird turn in the road, and once equipped with more substantial thought vehicles like noogenesis or the birth of the divine, we will then be able to stare down the terrifying face of empty immensity.
In the Fractured Period, which we could say is from the scientific revolution to now, there is a level of self-doubt that humans never encountered before; down the generations people have suffered unspeakably, have endured all kinds of privations, oppressions and persecutions, but one suffering they were not subjected to was overwhelming doubt; they did not have to confront invasive thoughts that the universe is a pointless conglomeration of uselessly spinning atoms of which we are a whirling epicentre of supreme, pointless pointlessness. With the telescope, the microscope, then the steam train, the factory and eventually the computer, came a brand-new level of ennui and despair, based on the fact that the God who used to reign in Heaven is now residing in the homeless shelter. We are, as Max Weber said:
Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
Fairly grim. On entering modernity we have cast foolish superstition aside, but we have also grown out of sorts with ecstasy. We see it as delusional, or weird, special or extraordinary in some way, something that the bulk of regular people will not, and probably should not, encounter. We have rendered it a niche subject. But what if, to tweak Rick Doblin’s vision of a future of “mass mental health,” we could enter an era of mass mysticism? Could we handle that, or is it safer for us to continue whistling in the dark of the interstellar spaces? Since the scientific revolution Western philosophy has been largely about trying, one way or another, to restore meaning to a world busted up by the Rupture. Descartes, recognising that he could no longer trust what a fact was any more, or even his own sense impressions, proposed the thought experiment that if there was an evil demon capable of deluding him into any sort of error or folly, the one piece of remaining solid ground that remained to him was that even his most deluded thoughts were still thoughts, demonstrating that he was thinking. If still thinking, then there must be a thinker, hence, “I think therefore I am.” This was not so much to propose the primacy of thought over everything else, but to establish an unshakeable bottom line of existence. From here, with rather fanciful logic, Descartes tried to prove the existence of a Maker, and so repair the Rupture, but quite rightly he is better remembered for being among the first to admit how devastating the Rupture had been. Maybe we who have tripped, who have conducted ourselves through all sorts of mazes of self-delusion and self-doubt, and who perhaps have been through ego deaths (and usually quite healthy ego resurrections) can sympathize with Descartes, puzzling over how to resuscitate his existential Humpty Dumpty.
But hitting bottom had to go further than Descartes, and by the time of Frederich Nietzsche, we got a real taste of what a real nadir might look like, a level of existential despair that no Medieval person could have conceived of:
Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history,” but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die.
One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no additional mission which would lead it beyond human life. Rather, it is human, and only its possessor and begetter takes it so solemnly — as though the world’s axis turned within it. But if we could communicate with a gnat, we would learn that he likewise flies through the air with the same solemnity, that he feels the flying center of the universe within himself.
On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense
The Deists, who included a few signers of the US constitution, tried to split the difference between the busybody God of the bible and genuine godlessness by saying, yes there is a God, but he doesn’t take an interest in the day-to-day affairs of the world. This God, like an extremely brilliant clockmaker, created the universe, wound it up and set it ticking as it were, and then wandered off to do other things, leaving theologians to refine the moral laws, and smart people like Isaac Newton to tease out the scientific laws of “natural philosophy.” Like the early Protestant reformers, the Deists were dead set against the weirder, wilder forms of ecstatic religion, which they called superstition, seeing, for instance, the theatrics of the Catholic church as cynically playing on the credulity of a bunch of rubes. Who knows what they would have made of a sweat lodge or an ayahuasca circle.
They didn’t at all notice how the ceremony in spiritual practice can – can – excite the imagination into journeys of discovery that pure reason could never fathom. As science brought the Intact Period to a close, it inevitably ended our contact with ecstatic states and mystical enchantments, making life a bit less exciting, a bit more reasonable. With nothing mystical to believe in any more, how could we have mystical experiences? Lacking the excitation of the ecstatic state, we slipped into a rather low-grade experiencing of everyday same-old, same-old life. Only young children, primed as they are for joy, go there, while we adults, who have not achieved sufficient improvement in the “sensual enjoyment” that Blake described, have become “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.”
We dare not dip too fully into the river of life, half in fear of the enormous interstellar emptiness and half in fear of an all-too intimate exchange with the divine. Many of us carry that emptiness as a physical/emotional “black hole,” or “abyss” inside us, a legacy of the interstellar spaces that first terrified Pascal, or perhaps the very same thing. We endlessly fill it with gadgets, preoccupations, addictions, and anything else that might suit. But the only thing that has sufficient gravitas to counter its enormity is love unfolding. Julian of Norwich, finding the universe sitting in the palm of her hand, no larger than a hazel nut, went on to say in Revelations of Divine Love:
For this is the cause why we be not all in ease of heart and soul: that we seek here rest in those things that are so little, wherein is no rest, and know not our God that is All-mighty, All-wise, All-good. For He is the Very Rest.
If my personal black hole is the one the Rupture created, or is at the very least its close descendent, then any effort I make to unfold love into it is not just for myself, it is for all of us. This is a good thing, because every personal effort is in reality a communal contribution, and it is also a bad thing, because like Thor, I may become dismayed at the seemingly glacial rate of healing of what seems to be absurdly maladaptive emotional and behavioral bad habits.
What is glacially slow for an individual may be quite rapid change on a cultural scale, and we have to remember that there is more even than the interstellar terror to deal with here. Christianity, the banner religious belief of Western civilisation, is unusual among religions for its bleakness. In Buddhism we go through many lifetimes, lots of suffering etc., but in the end everyone is going to find their Buddha nature and enjoy themselves throughout eternity. Presumably after a few billion years of enjoyment, the memory of the bitter struggle to get there will fade off a bit. It’s similar with Hinduism, although there is the matter of the universe dying and then periodically big banging back into existence, but the sense of a happy ending for all is certainly there. In Christianity, it is a happy ending for some. Our core nature is found to be so corrupt, so inclined towards corruption and sin, that only God can save us from eternal torments of absolutely unimaginable mental and physical agony. So, you had better toe the line and be good, the only catch being that, like a game show where you have to pick the right box to win the prize, you have to pick the correct sect out of the dozens on offer, to find the real savior and not some fake one. And in the Calvinist branches even that does not help you, because God picked out his elect long before you were even born, and if you don’t make the cut it doesn’t matter how pious you are or how many good deeds you do, you’re off to Hell anyway, no questions asked.
I believe that for us in the western world this belief in sin and the terror of Hell has seeped into our collective psyche so deeply that we all carry a core belief about our own shameful worthlessness, silently brought down on us via the multiple lines of ancestral burdens. If a dozen people enter a room, most, I would wager, have the thought I don’t belong here, I am not worthy, all the others know what they are doing, I will soon be found out, and so on. The religious message that our self-worth does not come from us but from a God who may be nice enough to have mercy on us, has seeped deep into the culture, among believers and non-believers alike – that is of little importance regarding its dissemination – and, along with the terror of the abyss, we have this unfortunate belief that at heart we are all sinful wretches. Many of our decisions, reactions, even the way we reach out to other people, is subtly shame-based, and comes from what some long-ago bishop or preacher was saying to his flock to keep them in line.
Factor in also the competitiveness of a warrior culture that became a capitalist culture, and you have the added torture of knowing that if you could become a champion at something and beat out all the other wretches around you for some materialist prize, then you could temporarily silence your own shame-based belief systems. As the structures of religion fall away, these old internalized beliefs, if anything, have seeped more deeply and secretly into us, with the competitive remedy firmly in place as our default mode.
The mystical experience given us by psychedelics can – sometimes at least – overwhelm these messages. It reveals a world more glorious and fierce than we could ever have imagined, but also more gentle and comforting. The consistent message is that we are “enough,” that we can accept ourselves, not as we some day ought to be, but in our utter messiness right now. We are loved, we belong to something, and since there is room for every part of us in that love, we can wear the garment of our ego with a little more ease and forgiveness. Every culture creates its own pact with normalcy and although, like the force of a mighty river driving us forwards, the momentum of that normalcy wants to keep us as we are, all it is really, is a collective shrinking from the divine, a holding up of our hands to our eyes to protect us from the fierce light. Taking psychedelics is adjusting to that light so we don’t have to shield ourselves from it so much.
Not surprisingly though, our modern psychology sees possession by the sacred as something to be boxed, trammeled, and contained. Boxed into a diagnosis, trammeled by pills, contained enough so that you can rejoin all the normal people in their unremitting normality dance. Our communal backs turn stolidly from the dozens of elephants filling up the room, and we continue whistling a happy tune. To be fair, in the day-to-day, psychology does help people, and if I my suffering is getting too much, by all means crack open the pill bottles or whatever else may work! That’s not the problem. But when the treatment goal is to diminish us back into acceptability, then by definition the whole person never gets treated, and if the whole person doesn’t get treated, then the problem of negotiating black holes and shame-based beliefs about worthlessness get kicked down the road for another generation to deal with. Or the next. Apollo, god of light and reason, is firmly, if somewhat uncomfortably, settled on his throne, knowing that Dionysius, the party person of the Unconscious, is seething underground, waiting to smash his way into daylight.