Psychedelics: Thor Among the Giants: Part XII
/“Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair.”
So sung a little Clod of Clay
Trodden with the cattle’s feet,
But a Pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:
“Love seeketh only self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another’s loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.”
William Blake
In her initial skepticism that the Ladakhis could really be so different from the Western World, Norberg-Hodge (never mind the rest of us) makes the same mistake as the character called Britannus in George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, who “thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.” The Western take on human nature as essentially aggressive is the brainchild of a crowded continent that couldn’t stop warring with itself, and so assumed that everyone else was the same. Not that we are alone in that assumption, it is shared in most regions of the world, but Norberg-Hodge’s experiences in Ladakh suggest that this is not universal, but that in Pebble-shaping conditions we are likely to become Pebbles, while in Clod-shaping conditions we have a chance at least, of becoming happy Clods of Clay.
Norberg-Hodge doesn’t go into the history of Ladakh, nor into why they are the way they are, but we can make our guesses, and here is one: Ladakhi apparently lies on the margins of empires, hardly worth the toil of being conquered, since all it might produce is a few yaks and a meagre crop of barley; and so the Ladakhis were not called upon to spend time in becoming great warriors or fierce fighters to defend their borders, they could instead invest their energy on party planning to while away the winter hours. Add to that the blessing of not having been influenced by any of the three blood-thirsty Mosaic religions but by Buddhism, and you have excellent Clod-producing conditions. Had gold been found in them thar mountains – well, it all might have been a very different story.
Where else did this happen? Not a whole lot I think, but where it did happen appears at first to be in very disparate places. There are the Senoi people of Malaysia, the San people of the Kalahari Desert, maybe the Hopis of Mesoamerica, and the Central African foragers formerly known as Pygmies. What these people have in common is not that they are indigenous – there are plenty of aggressive and combative indigenous peoples – it is the fact that they already live in, or have been driven to, the margins. Not a heavily disputed margin where empires and races battled endlessly together, but the margins that no one could be bothered with. The Senoi and the Central African foragers lived in the impenetrable depths of rain forests, the San in the remote Kalahari Desert, and the Hopi were stuck up the top of uncomfortable-looking mesas. It’s only a supposition, but my guess is that these small civilizations flourished in these places because no one else could be bothered to live there, or in the case of the forests, found it just too impenetrable to reach – at least until modern times. Being consigned to these marginal places, they were relieved from continuous pressure from outside, and all had to pull together and get along; cooperation and not sweating the small stuff would have been the most adaptive trait.
Norberg-Hodge describes an incident that perfectly illustrates this Ladakhi frame of mind: a man called Sonam and his neighbour, have both been promised a number of window frames, but the neighbour takes more than his fair share, leaving Sonam short:
Yet he showed no signs of resentment or anger. When I suggested to him that his neighbour had behaved badly, he simply said, “Maybe he needed them more urgently than I did.” “Aren’t you going to ask him for an explanation?” I asked. Sonam just smiled and shrugged his shoulders: “Chi choen? (“What’s the point?”) Anyway, we have to live together.”
Ancient Futures 46
In New York City, Sonam would have been seen as being super passive and a bit of a sap, but here in Ladakh, is he doing something more interesting than that? Norberg Hodge pursues the question:
In traditional Ladakh aggression of any sort is exceptionally rare; rare enough to say that it is virtually nonexistent…I have hardly ever seen more than mild disagreement in the traditional villages – certainly nothing compared with what you find in the West. Do Ladakhis conceal or repress their feelings?
I asked Sonam once, “Don’t you have arguments? We do in the West all the time.”
He thought for a minute. “Not in the villages, no – very, very seldom, anyway.”
“How do you manage it?” I asked. “So what happens if two people disagree – say, about the boundaries of their land?”
“They’ll talk about it, of course, and discuss it. What should you expect them to do?”
I didn’t reply.
Ancient Futures 47
At my back I hear the spirit of Sigmund Freud saying no, this cannot be. In the unremitting war between our civilized selves and our animalistic core, sooner or later Sonam’s frustrated aggressions must lash out, and probably at the most embarrassing moment. The Jurassic Park monster of Sonam’s id will raise its snarling head above the smooth surface of politeness, and pick off a few tasty tourists of civilized pretension. Assuming, of course, that the Western model of psychology is universal to all people…but what if it isn’t?
In traditional Ladakhi society there are very few signs of neurosis. Nevertheless, they are recognized in the medical texts. An amchi (traditional doctor) once gave me two examples of mentally disturbed patients. One is always silent, very frightened. The other talks too much, is very aggressive, and will suddenly jump up and leave the room. The treatment, he said, involves shutting the patient up in his house with a friend, who will “tell him stories and sweet things.” He had never come across either of these two conditions himself but had merely read about them in books.
Ancient Futures 41
Take that, mental health industrial complex! Two diagnoses, one treatment, and no drugs. How does that stack up against the 357 diagnoses in the DSM, the U.S.’s mental health diagnostic manual? I suppose the more neurotic and complicated we get, the more complicated we want our solutions to be. Oddly, the Ladakhi treatment is very much like our original asylums, built in the early nineteenth century by the Quakers. Appalled by the mental institutions of the day, they reserved a few safe little cottages in the countryside, where the troubled person would live and be around kind and placid people who would have them dress up nicely for tea and tactfully change the subject if the conversation started to get too whacky. The Quakers called these cottages asylums, as in a place of calm and safe retreat, and only later did the “asylum” cottage morph into the sad and tragic warehouses of human pain that we know today. Simpler, surely, to be a Ladakhi, live on barley meal and dried apricots, and be happy:
But the Ladakhis I was staying with were content; they were not dissatisfied with their lives. I remember how shocked they used to be when I told them that in my country, many people were so unhappy that they had to see a doctor. Their mouths would drop open, and they would stare in disbelief. It was beyond their experience. A sense of deep-rooted contentedness was something they took for granted.
Ancient Futures (39)
It really does seem, doesn’t it, that these people are living by a different rule book to us, or as Thoreau would have it, marching to a different drum, one that we have trouble hearing. Mind you, I say “are,” but Ladakh has apparently changed a lot since 1975. Globalization has attacked their way of life in all the ways you might expect, and modernization and ruination have become synonyms in those mountains. I even heard on the news lately that their entire way of life is under assault by climate change, as the glaciers that supply their little bit of water are melting away. For the Ladakhi people, and for us if we know about it, this is tragic; but it does not detract from the lesson of Ladakh: a bunch of people have lived cooperatively, happily and sustainably over an extended period of time without much fuss. Are we humans a lot more malleable than we take ourselves to be? If so, we can be encouraged when designing a new story for a noosphere-based society. A William Blake one-liner (well, two-liner really) gives us a clue about how we might get there;
Mutual forgiveness of each vice
These are the keys to Paradise.
Want Heaven in Hell’s despite? Start channeling your inner Ladakhi:
“Perhaps the most important lesson of Ladakh has to do with happiness. It was a lesson that I was slow to learn. Only after many years of peeling away layers of preconceptions did I begin to see the joy and laughter of the Ladakhis for what it really was: a genuine and unhindered appreciation of life itself. In Ladakh I have known a people who regard peace of mind and joie de vivre as their unquestioned birthright. I have seen that community and a close relationship to the land can enrich human life beyond all comparison with material wealth or technological sophistication. I have learned that another way is possible.”
Ancient Futures 182
Another way is possible. And though it would be silly to try to carbon copy ourselves from people who live halfway up a faraway mountain, the “ancient” Ladakhi story of super-cooperation gives us a pointer for how we might build a “future” noosphere. In the arid mountains of Ladakh, Sonan’s story of “Maybe he needs it more than I do” works so much better than the “I’m going to get what’s mine” of our rugged individualism, in the same way that for us, going to the store and buying stuff works better than the more “rugged” story of let’s smash the windows and grab everything we can get. We tend to call that “chaos,” but it's not chaos, it is just a more vicious and less efficient rulebook than the one we have; and the one we have is a “chaos” compared to smooth-running Ladakh. According to Wikipedia, those few people who persisted in their selfishness in Ladakh would eventually risk complete social ostracization, which up in those mountains would be a far more ominous fate than having your neighbors not talk to you in your apartment building. Rather than be emboldened by the success of taking Sonam’s window frames, that man would probably want to lie low for quite a while, before too many community eyebrows were raised.
Our innate nature, then, has the capacity for extreme competitiveness and extreme cooperation, and they will get drawn out, depending on conditions. Violent conditions bring out the violent kid in us, and Ladakhi conditions, challenging as they are physically, bring out the super-cooperator. And are there any changes in conditions approaching us? Well, there’s the climate disaster, the pollution disaster, the extinction disaster, plus the plastic bags filling up the oceans disaster, don’t forget that, and all the other environmental apocalypses that will lead to a dead planet choked with garbage, unless we get a grip. As our predicament becomes more extreme and stark, our need to turn into something more Ladakhi-like becomes clearer, and Sonam’s words, “Anyway, we have to live together” applies to a lot more than window frames. We have to change our low down ways.
One part of this change is to retool our understanding of evolution. Teilhard de Chardin wove a story of evolution where matter progresses into greater and greater complexity: inorganic matter leads to living matter, which leads to self-conscious matter (us), which leads to a noosphere of globally connected self-consciousness. Our popular understanding of evolution as “survival of the fittest,” gets us through the night of modern times: in this story the strongest and most aggressive survive, and although it’s sad that the sweet and the kind don’t make it, that’s just how nature works. But when Darwin said, “the fittest,” he never did mean those of us who make it to the gym every day, or even the smartest and most ruthless entrepreneurs; by the fittest he meant those who are best fitted for current conditions, whatever they are. We think of the great white shark as king of the ocean, but actually that’s only in certain parts of it; go 2000 metres below the surface to the super-hot thermal vents on the ocean floor, and the shark, like most creatures, would immediately die. Other creatures, little tube worms and squiggly crab-like things, are nicely fitted out for thermal vent conditions, and they are the ones who hold sway there.
In the same way, Neanderthals were bigger than us, used energy more efficiently, and probably had larger brains than us, but apparently they didn’t master the fine details of team work and organization, and so they were strong but unfit, and died out; who knows, maybe no one wanted to be second in command. Future conditions may consign the ruthless entrepreneurs and the cynical politicians to the role of Neanderthals, as we move into a world where super-cooperation becomes the most important survival skill. We have painted ourselves into a corner where the challenges of climate change will either propel us into greater cooperation and value revamping, or we come to a sticky end. They say it would take five planet’s worth of resources to sustain the world’s population at Western levels of consumption. I never was good at math but…we either have to evolve into Sonam-like nice guy creatures, or die in one of the 57 varieties of our own toxic soup. And it is psychedelics that can help us do that leap into enhanced reciprocation and nice-guyness, just as the development of lungs helped some of the sea creatures check out what was going on outside of the water.
The mystic vision of the psychedelic experience says that part of us is in the noosphere already, or rather all of us is, but our normal fragmented attention does not see it. When tripping, we can realise the truth of ourselves, our wholeness, the fact that we never were broken in the first place. We might notice that the emotional inheritance of our culture, the mood state handed down through generations, is one of despair; despair that comes out of our materialism and/or the despair that comes from religions that keep their adherents in line by making them feel small. The soul is only satisfied with one thing – divine light, truth, whatever name you want to attach to it. We cannot live forever in the inherited despair, under the internal goad of “have to do better, have to do better,” not if the goal is to be resolved and at peace. This goad, which has been implanted in us through school, through work and doing even the simplest chores, is nothing more than a program left to run endlessly until we die. What got me through some junior high school exams may not be the tool for my next phase of spiritual evolution, and in fact I could have done with much better in junior high. We can’t be at peace until we are all bathing in the light, and we reach the light by reaching for the light, not by being our own taskmasters. And since this light appears to be infinite light, we’ve got everything we need, we are artists, we don’t look back, as Bob Dylan more or less said.