Psychedelics and Cerberus

What’s so special about childhood is that the imagination is alive and undaunted, free and unchained, as the child reacts completely and spontaneously to everything that comes its way. Which is probably why toddlers always act like a bunch of impetuous little tipsy day-trippers. Then, as we become thinking creatures, we are driven into a defensive posture by the frightening and coercive world around us, our thinking mind gets preoccupied with self-protection, and we lose the ability to properly mediate between the world we live in and the world of the mind inside us. A kind of trauma freezes our mental innards; parts of us that were bound for a more interesting and absorbing destiny get pressganged into an entirely protective posture as they fend off the slings and arrows of regular life; and the most tender pieces of our young identity lay distant and gleaming in the far off underworld of the heart. The first job of entering, re-entering rather, our personal underworld is to reassure the defensive parts, the Cerberus guarding the threshold, that times have changed, and safety may indeed be possible.

 A daunting task, for this Cerberus, the fierce three-headed dog creature, is a very jittery monster! In the psychedelic journey though, we give Cerberus a sleeping potion, so that the imagination, in all its baroque splendor, pours out of its hidden home and inundates us for a brief flair, before the trip winds down and all retreats into its normal stance. This revelation is nothing more than a sign of what once was, the integrated life of childhood, and what may someday be, if we can contrive to play our collective spiritual cards right. What needs to be done after a trip is not so much an integration into the daylight world of diagnoses and to-do lists, but an act of remembering; remembering our selves, the places we have been when we snuck past Cerberus, the lives we lived there, the enormous pattern of which it seems we are but a tiny pixel, but playing our little pixel part. Having seen that dance of life, and having steeped it into our being, we can be at peace with our own selves and shortcomings. “It’s all very simple,” we say, though keeping it simple is one of the harder tasks of life.

If every one of us could calm down their inner Cerberus, what a different world it would be! Attuned to myself, I could attune to others, and others to me, so that the orchestra of community could play in full concert. “For me to be healed, everyone has to be healed,” says Pema Chodron. And do not be too disappointed that this music of humanity has not yet started playing, and may not play in our lifetime – we are so lucky to just be part of this delightful endeavor. And even when over time my deep remembering gets ground out of me by the traffic of normal life, I can still at least recall that the connecting did happen, that there was a day when I encountered something worthy of the soul’s fidelity, and nothing more than the provisions of circumstance and the wish to do it, stops me from going back there again.  

 We are all, all of us are twisted into different shapes and contortions by the childhood trial by fire, just as wood shavings twist in the flames of a camp fire, none of them in exactly the same way. This we call the shaping of the personality, the makeshift identity we have acquired from the accidents of laughter and pain, what W. B. Yeats calls the rag and bone shop of the heart. This may be so, but it need not shift attention from the original task. Even as we writhe in the fire of unmet needs, the question that hovers over me and my ancestors remains: how well did you encounter your imagination?