What Do I Own?

You can buy a star of your own from NASA for as little as $39.40, though bright stars cost more than dim ones, and a binary will go for as much as $69.90. Compare that to the current cost of one square foot of real estate in midtown Manhattan – $1,153 right now – and you will see what a bargain these stars are, especially since the NASA website tells us that your certificate of ownership will come with “fast shipping.” Not the star itself of course. And naturally, after I receive my certificate of ownership I no more own that pinprick of light than I ever did, it’s just a cute fundraising pitch. If I go up to the roof the next night and look up into the night sky I will probably be hard put to even locate my property, while the star itself will remain quite impassive about the whole affair.

 Now let’s imagine that I, as a New Yorker, buy a hundred acres of woodland in somewhere out West. It fulfills my dream of having my own patch of dirt on this Earth, and I certainly plan to make it somewhere special for me, maybe even build a structure there some day. But life is busy, I never get around to even visiting, and eventually I get so old it will not be convenient to go there at all. But it is still mine, and I may sell it one day, hopefully at a profit.

 Is the unvisited woodland any different to the star? To what degree can I say that it is functionally mine? Maybe I feel like it helps if I hire some local to put Keep Out signs and No Hunting signs around it, but the squirrels and the birds there will never see the top of my head as I walk through it, and not a drop of my sweat will fall on its soil. The land, like the star, will know nothing of me, not in any way you could ever permutate the word “knowing.”

 And so, in the same way, if I went to the store and bought a shirt, and then kept it, still in its wrapping, in my closet, am I really the owner? I may have the sales receipt, just as I have the certificate of ownership of the star, but as with the star, what I actually own is the piece of paper – until I get into relationship with the shirt by putting it on. I could buy myself a hundred shirts, just like I bought a hundred acres out West, but how much do I own any of them?

 You might say that a shirt, like a woodland, a bird, or a star, has a soul, and when our souls have intertwined, we contain each other, and then we could talk of ownership. If I have fallen in love in this shirt, been fired from a job in it, got drunk with a friend in it, seen my child born while wearing it; if it fades over the years, takes on some repairs, is never quite the same again, why then our souls have truly intertwined. The shirt is mine, just as a cat of many years is mine, and I truly, deeply, madly, belong to the cat. The unworn shirt, the distant hundred-acre wood, the star, however, have no history with me, they occupy no space that I have occupied, and our souls have not comingled.

 I can even ask the same question of my arm. That surely must be mine! But only to the extent that, like the shirt that covers it, we have comingled. I would miss my arm if ever it were gone, but that suggests there is a separate me to miss this arm, and the me who misses it must be more essential to myself than the arm, beloved as it is. Even my own arm perhaps, is a woodland I must walk in many times, with much care, attention, and interest, before we can say we own each other. We must suffer and love together and remember that each other is there.

 This ownership thing then, is very tricky. Bits of paper denote ownership according to the state, but not to the soul, and for the soul we can only own but so much, because we don’t have endless attention. If I own more than a few shirts my attention flags, and too many new shirts are simply tiring and hurtful. While in my folly I might aspire to own lots and lots of things that really are owned by the shelves they came from, my real capacity for ownership shrinks and rises with the seasons of the soul. With fewer things and more attentiveness, I may give myself a chance to do ownership. Who knows, one day I may become a homeowner, if I could just encompass the place. One day, having worn it through rain and shine, I mean even own my own soul. 

The Psychedelic Saviour. Part VII: Scientism and Religiosity

Like an unexamined life, it’s not good to have an unexamined dark side clattering behind you, and today we are stuck with two dark sides regarding psychedelics. The dark side of the rational/materialist approach is a scientism that portrays psychedelics as a tool that is predictable, controllable, and quantifiable, once you have properly manicured the “set and setting.” In fact though, what makes psychedelics so extraordinary is their wildcard nature, where they are unpredictable, they may or may not relate to the intentions you set for the experience, and emotionally, they have potential for both good and bad consequences.  

Religiosity is the dark side of the spiritual approach, where the need for social conformity within the psychedelic circle overwhelms – or at least intrudes upon – each person’s mystical vision, while untethered spirituality often has trouble discerning between the will of God and its own. Or, on reflection, maybe that’s the mistake of the psychiatrists.  

The graveyard of open-hearted curiosity is littered with “isms” and “osities,” of which scientism and religiosity are just two of the bigger weeds, forbidding their adherents to ask awkward questions like, “Is psilocybin really as consistent as your study conclusions say?” or “If Grandmother Ayahuasca never gives us more than we can handle, how come I know people who have been seriously screwed up by it?” Who are we being faithful to here, our principles or our party?

 When Socrates spoke in his defense while on trial for his life in Athens, he likened himself to the gadfly, an insect that goes around stinging unsuspecting people all day long. The philosophic gadfly goes about “arousing and persuading and reproaching” society and asking awkward questions to those in power. We need to be gadflies to ourselves, bringing curiosity to our own “isms” and “osities,” and keeping ourselves from slipping inside self-made mental boxes. In the Canadian Broadcast Corporation podcast called Ideas, Salman Rushdie said,

 The idea of a homogenous self is no longer tenable. We are all heterogeneous selves, we are all a bag of selves in a bag of skin. That’s what makes us interesting, that’s why we like meeting people, because we are complicated…We are not simple creatures, we are unbelievably complicated and messed up…I won’t be put into a box…we won’t be put into those boxes any more.  

Those boxes are the “mind-forged manacles” William Blake describes in his poem, London:

 I wander every chartered street

Near where the chartered Thames does flow

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every shout of every man,

In every infant’s cry of fear,

In every voice, in every ban,

The mind-forged manacles I hear.

 In psychology these manacles, these boxes, have labels on them meant to pin down our shitty moods and despondent dispositions. The more curiosity about what’s actually in front of us gets shut down, the more ornate becomes the label, such in “dysthymia with mood-incongruent psychotic features,” “disruptive mood dysregulation disorder,” and “body dysmorphic-like disorder without repetitive behaviors;” there’s “oppositional-defiant disorder” for the kiddies who once upon a time used to be just naughty, and the person who likes their mushrooms too much might have “unspecified hallucinogen-related disorder.” These boxes don’t exist for the sake of their residents but for the box-making hierarchical structures, whose main interest is to keep things orderly. But we are, as Rushdie says, complicated, and the very parts of us that don’t fit in may be the ones that carry our genius. As Walt Whitman said, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself; I am large, I contain multitudes.”  

And there is this strange thing about despair. In a world of crises and impending dooms of various kinds, many of us feel despair, yet there is no diagnosis, no psychological box, provided for it. That’s quite a lacuna, and maybe that’s because you have to despair of something, you might despair of the joy that once was natural to you, despair of finding love or purpose. Despair means that something has gone wrong in your relationship with the outside world, a lost mariner may despair of sight of land, a person figuratively tied to their desk in America or literally chained to a machine in a far-off factory, may despair of escape and open ground. The despair did not originate entirely with the disordered person in the box, or their genes, the fault is more to do with what happened to them. And for the disease of what happened to them to go into remission you would need to repair racism, sexism, exploitation, and violence in all its manifestations. This is a condition for which the pharmaceutical industry has no medication.

 Robert Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy said, “He that increaseth wisdom, increaseth sorrow,” which plays havoc with our linear, upbeat worldview, though it does help make sense of his other line, “Melancholy can be overcome only by melancholy.” Gerard Manley Hopkins described his despair in his wrestle with God this way:

 Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;

Not untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of man

In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;

Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.

 The danger for psychedelics, if domesticated and declawed, is that they will not be used to deepen our insane/heroic wrestling match with the divine, but to divert us from the causes of despair. Phillip K. Dick in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? describes the ultimate machine for declawing our moods through technological manipulation. In his dystopia, which is set in 2021, the Penfield mood organ allows people to dial up the mood of their choice so they can be as efficient and upbeat as possible. But Iran, wife of Rick the android slayer, contrives, after a diligent search, to find a setting in the machine that reflects her actual mood – despair:

Her dark, pert face showed satisfaction, as if she had achieved something of worth. “So I put it on my schedule for twice a month; I think that’s a reasonable amount of time to feel hopeless about everything, about staying here on Earth after everybody who’s smart has emigrated, don’t you think?”

 “But a mood like that,” Rick said, “you’re apt to stay in it, not dial your way out. Despair like that, about total reality, is self-perpetuating.”

 “I program an automatic resetting for three hours later,” his wife said sleekly. “A 481. Awareness of the manifold possibilities open to me in the future; new hopes that – ”

 “I know 481,” he interrupted. He had dialed out the combination many times; he relied on it greatly. “Listen,” he said…”Forget what you’ve scheduled and I’ll forget what I’ve scheduled; we’ll dial a 104 together and both experience it, and then you stay in it while I reset mine for my usual business-like attitude.”

Would today’s psychologists seize upon such a mood organ if they could, even if it had a self-referentially evil setting like number 3, that “stimulates my cerebral cortex into wanting to dial”? Uh, yes! We already have deep-brain stimulation surgery as a mental health treatment, and magnetogenetics, where the behavior of mice and zebra fish have been controlled by magnetic stimulation. That’s not to say that these things are in the least bit bad in themselves, but where zebra fish go, can humans be all that far behind? And since today’s science fiction can turn into tomorrow’s old hat, we need to consider how the psychedelics of our psychedelic renaissance may be manipulated into being mood organs by well-meaning psychologists, along with sharp-eyed entrepreneurs.

 Psychedelics have been described as non-specific amplifiers, meaning that they enhance the mood or mindset that you currently happen to be in, which means they are very manipulable. If psychedelics are forced into the box of mental health pathologies, then there is no place for the disruptive side of the experience. They risk becoming just one more medication, and like so many other mental health medications, after a bright start they might slowly settle into a ho-hum middle age of more or less acceptable results, if you skew the data the right way just a little.

 The disruptive side of the experience might possibly mess us up for a while, bring us to a state of confusion, and sting us like a rather large gadfly. If this happens we may be forced to reappraise not just where our values are at, but what is reality itself, what is not real, what is relatively real, what is kinda sorta real when looked at it upside down, and so on. When you infuse something from way outside our ken into ordinary life, you have no idea what the result may be. It may upset your whole value system and instead of becoming a better producer of goods and services, you may want to join that Buddhist monastery or take an unexpected gap year, or decade.

 Instead of being solely under the control of psychologists and entrepreneurs, what if psychedelics were also in the hands of artists and poets? They could help us explore our internal forests and prairies and appreciate them, rather than having them rendered into a trillion little personal lawns. With things like VR and immersive experiences, it is the artists who could design a future where mind-altering drugs meet mind-expanding spaces. Look at the work of Randy Polombo and the installations at Artechhouse to see inklings of what could happen with this. These kinds of installations could become the temples of the future, venues for a choose-your-own-revelation Eleusinian mystery space, because working with psychedelics may be the preserve of the clinician but playing with them happens in the land of the artists.  

 On the cultural timescale, we haven’t yet grown to trust the medicine – meaning ourselves – enough yet. But trust or no trust, with the impetus of corporate wealth supercharging the effort, it’s now a case of ready or not, here the psychedelics come. Pretty soon they are bound to take their place beside donuts, coffee, beer, transcendental meditation, and all the other accoutrements of modern life. Right now, the people in charge of this are the psychologists and venture capitalists, with the spiritual approach beating an entirely separate path of providing an ersatz indigenous experience. Surely for this to reach its fullness the rational/materialist, the spiritual and the artist’s way would have to be melded into something new.

 Then we might start to disintegrate the cloud of usual expectations and limiting assumptions that close off our shadowy doors of perception. We could aspire beyond putting our mental health disorders into remission and look with real hope for that huge joy we assume is our birthright, but these days hardly dare wish for. Self-indulgent? Not if it produces people who know how to laugh, cry and care about each other. We could discover new portions of our wholeness, a wholeness that includes the dark moods, the nonsense moods that fly in the face of the “usual business-like attitude,” and the rapture where joy and pain become indistinguishable.

The Psychedelic Savior Part VI: Everything Breathes While I Am Tripping

In his essay “The Mystical Child,” Tobin Hart said that childhood spiritual experiences are not just cool things that happen when you are young, they are “an innate source of character and spiritual growth” and they can be foundational to the rest of one’s life. Father Zossima in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, shows how they may be our only lifeline:

“ People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood is perhaps the best education. If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one has only one good memory left in one's heart, even that may sometime be the means of saving us.”

 Whether it is the classic religious one, the oft-dismissed childhood one, or the stigmatized one of psychedelics, the value in a spiritual experience is in how it connects you to the hidden sacred inside all of us. It is the trump card that misery cannot outbid.   

 And yet how easy it is for us to get it wrong with the sacred! In The Varieties of Religious Experience William James describes several spiritual people who in their day were seen as extraordinarily devout, but now strike us as just crazy. One of them was Louis of Gonzaga, a sixteenth century Catholic saint. At the age of ten, as a gift to the Virgin Mary, Louis made a vow of perpetual chastity, and according to his biographer, quoted by James:

 “Thenceforth he never raised his eyes, either when walking in the streets, or when in society. Not only did he avoid all business with females even more scrupulously than before, but he renounced all conversation and every kind of social recreation with them, although his father tried to make him take part; and he commenced only too early to deliver his innocent body to austerities of every kind.”

 When he was 17 Louis joined the Jesuit order, and as that same biographer describes,

 “…when a year later his father died, he took the loss as a “particular attention” to himself on God’s part, and wrote letters of stilted good advice, as from a spiritual superior, to his grieving mother. He soon became so good a monk that if anyone asked him the number of his brothers and sisters, he had to reflect and count them over before replying. A Father asked him one day if he were never troubled by the thought of his family to which, “I never think of them except when praying for them,” was his only reply. Never was he seen to hold in his hand a flower or anything perfumed, that he might take pleasure in it. On the contrary, in the hospital, he used to seek for whatever was most disgusting, and eagerly snatch the bandages of ulcers, etc. from the hands of his companions. He avoided worldly talk, and immediately tried to turn every conversation on to pious subjects, or else he remained silent. He refused to notice his surroundings.”

 Not someone you would want to invite to the family barbeque. But in his time, far from being a sicko, Louis was celebrated as an exemplar of spiritual devotion and piety, and in fact he remains the patron saint of young people to this day. Let’s just hope the young people don’t notice . William James judged saints like Louis of Gonzaga as passionate but narrow-minded fanatics who were short on the grown part of being a grown-up.

 In the Middle Ages, before Louis’ time, spirituality was the fulcrum of almost all political and personal life in Europe. Maiming, torture and execution were the usual fate for heretics, atheists and free-thinkers – those whose childhood sacred moments probably sparkled a little differently to the norm. The Reformation emphasized the individual’s personal relationship with God, but it did nothing to lighten up this shadow side of spirituality. The continent exploded into nation state wars, civil wars and ongoing persecution over what today are eye-wateringly dull points of abstruse theology. These wars continued quite unimpeded until the scientific revolution and then the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century took the air out of religious belief system. Only then did the mayhem finally start to calm down. Thank God we all became atheists, or enough of us anyway.

 That Enlightenment was defined by Emmanuel Kant as “Man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage.” But now at the distance of over 200 years, we may ask how complete this release was. The impulse that gave us science, public health, democracy and personal wealth has also driven us to the brink of destroying our planet. The rational/materialist thinking that freed us from our self-imposed dogmatic chains seems to have brought droves of decent-minded people who believe they have “no reason” to be depressed and lost, to deeper and deeper levels of misery. When Malidoma Some, a spiritual teacher from Burkina Faso, was asked if European and American people needed to undergo the grueling and painful initiations common to African cultures, he answered, “No, you have suffered enough already.” But have we suffered productively – or stupidly?   

 No, this is not the happy ending the eighteenth-century promised us. Having rid ourselves of a God who smiled benignly over torture and killing, we now fear a dark emptiness at the heart of everything. The pointlessness of existence is fended off by our mounting collections of cool shiny toys and ever more extravagant bucket lists, but we are not magpies, we are people, and in the end all a BMW can do is take you from one useless place to another. Trinkets do not work as talismans. And then if life, as an existentialist would tell us, is devoid of any ultimate meaning, why do we still contrive to be so utterly tense and anxious about a trinket world that in the words of T.S. Eliot is no more than “a handful of dust”? Even as our minds are highly distractible, our hearts remain inconsolable.  

 In (just about) the words of Laurel and Hardy, this is a fine mess we’ve got ourselves into! Organized religion has killed endlessly more people than organized crime, while rational/materialism is creaking to a messy and probably quite unpleasant end. A new element entering our culture that might be able to address some of this chaos is psychedelics. Please save us psychedelics! It’s a good bet that if we can ditch ourselves out of this fine mess at all, we will need to reach into that startling mystical moment which, as Father Zossima said, is our best education. We need to touch ourselves at the core. During the pre-Enlightenment times this depth was reached regularly, but only by a few mystics and solitaries; in the materialistic era it went out of fashion entirely, but with a psychedelic we can all give ourselves a fighting chance of getting there any afternoon we choose. It’s a mysticism more reliable than the living in a monastery for 20 years type of mysticism, or the spontaneous struck by lightning kind. The mystical experience is not a tool – we are its tool – but the drugs that get us there are our tools.

 This on-demand magic has endured a rather long and massively unfair dark night of the soul since our culture first really noticed it in the 1960s, when psychedelics became the bullseye on the back of a deeply feared and despised counterculture. Yet the same drugs that were rotting our moral fibre fifty years ago are now our new mental health little helpers, on the brink of being dispensed by smiling psychiatrists. It’s the same process as happened with the blunts, splifs and joints that just ten minutes ago in cultural time were deadly gateway drugs. The substance that would then get you serious jail time if you were of the wrong colour or the wrong income level has now become “medical” and is available in gummy bear form at your local dispensary for grandma and grandpa to have a good chew on.

 Obviously, some serious repackaging went into this, and we should all be grateful. Advocates, primarily MAPS (the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies), were smart enough to not cast psychedelics as a tool for instant mystical experiences or as a non-addictive way to have harmless fun. Supporting their contentions with research that would calm the authorities, these advocates sold psychedelics as mental health medications with weird if short-lived side-effects. Their success has been in getting these consciousness-altering substances out of the shadows and into positive mainstream attention. The price tag for this is that psychedelics might be rendered innocuous and stripped of the very qualities that might save us. That is not necessarily MAPS’ fault, they have to sell this thing to the same society that created the war on drugs, Rikers Island, Guantanamo Bay, the satanic panic of the 1980s, and more anciently, the Salem witch trials. Unfortunately, to get the tiger into the room it had to be declawed.

 Central to this declawing process is the idea of psychedelic integration. Unlike the Timothy Leary recipe where you turn on, tune in and drop out, the current rationalist take on psychedelics is that their purpose is to mitigate symptoms of mental disorders, and that integration is work that you do to make the experience valuable. Not that there is anything wrong with work or valuable experiences, but by aligning integration with the Protestant work ethic, it dismisses to the shadows the manic trickster-clown who creates the discomforting, explosive, disruptive and fun realities of the “turn on” part of psychedelics.

 In this firmly post hippy but barely post puritan psychedelic renaissance, the proposed norm is to work on our psychedelic integration in just the same way as we work on paying rent or sculpting our abs. A very volatile experience, popularly associated with hedonism and reckless danger is thus rendered respectable once it is safely under the supervision of a responsible clinician in a setting professionally designated as appropriate. We will no longer be tempted to fly out the window or join a Zen monastery. The clinically sanctioned psychedelic experience may cast light upon our personal darkness, but it does not cast light on the cultural darkness that we and our torments emerge from – because that examination could make us proceed to the “drop out” phase of Leary’s psychedelics, or even to ask who should be held culpable in the glossy ruins of late-stage capitalism. If this is light, it the light of a candelabra illuminating a dungeon.

Dungeons, as we well know, should only be illuminated by one lone candle, about to gutter out while the rats excitedly chatter in the background. Integration however, which in and of itself may be important or even vital to us, has been utilized as a sales point in the domestication of the psychedelic. Integration legitimizes tripping by rendering the trip as just part of the treatment of a pathology; having a pathology is what makes you a viable candidate to legally do these drugs, meaning that in order to have a chemically induced spiritual experience you must pathologize yourself. And as Laurie Anderson said, only an expert can deal with the problem. 

 If the point of taking psychedelics is to explore/expand who you are, then contracting it all into a treatment for a pathology goes against the character of the medicine – a high price of admission to the modern psychedelic cinema. As a person taking a ketamine treatment wrote during his experience, “the notion that there is something wrong with me keeps me from going deeper.” Or as another person said, “Everything breathes when I am tripping” – explain that to the health insurance people. Back in the days before cognitive therapy ruled the roost and psychologists were people who wore elbow patches, Carl Rogers said, “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” This indeed is magical thinking – coming as it does from the place where magic lives. That magic is the source-place of the “good, sacred memory” of Father Zossima, and if we don’t conform to the mind-set of evidence-based solutions and “best” practices, we are then in the running to find “perhaps the best education.” The classroom door is open.

Rational/materialism may have let us down, but what if the spiritual approach to psychedelics is not such a good scene either? Spirituality is itself quite difficult to manage, and as we have seen, it can easily be given to excesses of closed-mindedness and fanaticism. There is nobody more boring than someone who knows they are spiritually in the right. Back in the 1960s, (while we were invading faraway countries) we simultaneously imported gurus with long beards from other faraway countries so we could pitch ourselves at their feet and learn their version of the wisdom of the beyond. And now, 50 or more years later, (as our violent hands extricate themselves from still more exotic climes) the shaman has pipped the guru to the top of the charts, feathers and beads have replaced the flowing robes, and we are still checking our critical faculties at the door. Meanwhile, interest remains low in taking a common or garden online philosophy class, or listening to the words of the local pastor, whose robes are nowhere near as good as the shaman’s.

The underground psychedelic spiritual scene is by definition unregulated, which makes it almost inevitably an odd mix of wisdom holders, goodly saints, shifty character, charlatans and rank amateurs. And the seeker who draws the short straw will go to an intellectual dead-end at best, and possible trauma at worst. The grand tour of the psychedelic experience does not only include the sacred heavenly realms, there is always that screaming abyss to keep in mind, and that’s not a good place to discover that the guide for your journey is a bit dodgy. The mainstream’s old-time terror that our youth would all become Hare Krishna devotees singing dreadful repetitive songs all day long may not have been so ill-founded after all.

Admittedly, your local ayahuasca circle may not be a cult of long-robed, long-daggered fanatics, but a spiritual circle like all others, is a social circle, and social circles develop their own unspoken rule books, their in-crowd language, conventions and taboos. Just like Starbucks won’t say small, medium and large, in the spiritual circle you don’t say drugs, you say plant medicine, and the drugs may have a new name too, like Grandmother for ayahuasca. Insights like, “that was like being more drunk than I’ve ever been in my life” are not encouraged, while random and quite trivial coincidences get social cache if they were “meant to be,” even if the agency and mechanism of this “meant” are left quite vague. ‘Natural’ drugs will be valued over ‘artificial’ ones like MDMA and ketamine, even if the latter produce just as beneficial experiences. The bad part of the spiritual approach is not so much the rather remote chances for being abused or hijacked into a cult, it is the routine way in which we turn a shimmering and inexpressible experience into one more version of church on Sunday. Oddly enough – or rather not oddly when you think about it – the only legal way to do psychedelics in a spiritual setting in this country is when the government ordains it as a bona fide church, like Santa Daime. A free conversation with the unspeakable still has a long way to go.

The Psychedelic Savior Part V: We Don't Need No Education

An infant comes into the world as pure wholeness, a complete innocence, and as Wordsworth put it, “trailing clouds of glory”. In that state of completeness, every moment is sacred, and as carers of this person, our challenge is to create an environment that can nestle the infant into infinity. Less than that and things start to go seriously awry, whether by the designs of cruelty or by the default of the ordinary. Exposure to too much trauma and to too much ordinariness, especially in combination, is an offense to the exuberance of the spirit. We may remember though, that the innocent and complete child is always still there somewhere inside us, still experiencing what we experience, though somewhat at a distance.

What we call education is too often the culture’s hands-on way of teaching the child about the nature of trauma, fear and the unbearable tedium that can be found in this world. While they are learning their times tables, children also learn fear with their bodies and in the cells of their bodies as they tighten and restrict under the teacher’s scrutiny and punishing hand. This is a place of origin for our internal alarm signals and non-self-acceptance, where the culture passes on the baton of interior war with self, never willing to kiss and make up with your own being.

 In our culture this unfortunate body-knowledge used to be passed on mainly through violence, but nowadays it is more often passed on with targets, testing scores and tracking. The teachers are put under such pressure that they become nervous wrecks, and they pass that panic attack onto the kids, who learn by age seven they are already behind in life and their school might even close if their scores don’t improve. Things did not become less cruel when we removed corporal punishment, the cruelty just shifted around with changing times, and no child was ever really left behind in the trauma game. William Blake described this spiritual betrayal in “The Schoolboy:”

 I love to rise in a summer morn,

When the birds sing on every tree;

The distant huntsman winds his horn,

And the skylark sings with me:

O what sweet company!

 But to go to school in a summer morn, -

O it drives all joy away!

Under a cruel eye outworn,

The little ones spend the day

In sighing and dismay.

 Ah then at times I drooping sit,

And spend many an anxious hour;

Nor in my book can I take delight,

Nor sit in learning's bower,

Worn through with the dreary shower.

 How can the bird that is born for joy

Sit in a cage and sing?

How can a child, when fears annoy,

But droop his tender wing,

And forget his youthful spring!

 That was written in 1789, the year we discovered liberty, equality and fraternity. Apparently the revolutionaries forgot to bring along their own children, because nearly 200 years later, in 1970, John Lennon had this to say:

 As soon as you're born, they make you feel small
By giving you no time instead of it all
'Til the pain is so big you feel nothing at all
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be

They hurt you at home and they hit you at school
They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool
'Til you're so fucking crazy you can't follow their rules
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be

When they've tortured and scared you for 20 odd years
Then they expect you to pick a career
When you can't really function, you're so full of fear
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be

And nine years on, Roger Waters of Pink Floyd described how things had not perked up at all:

 When we grew up and went to school
There were certain teachers who would
Hurt the children any way they could

By pouring their derision
Upon anything we did
And exposing every weakness
However carefully hidden by the kids

We don't need no education
We don’t need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone

Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!

All in all it's just another brick in the wall.
All in all you're just another brick in the wall.

 Water’s wall is one portion of the cavern Blake said we humans have closed ourselves up in. But what on earth is all this cruelty about, and why do we all have to so diligently trauma our way out of awareness? This is not just a bad hair day for humanity, there has to be a reason for such a consistent attack on our own sensitive selves. One possibility that infinity scares us and we would rather do without it. Another has to do with our cultural evolution. It’s said that once we moved from being hunter gatherers to being farmers, then food storage, taxation and empire building all started to happen. And once empire gets to be possible, some bright spark will want to be the boss of it, and said bright spark will start to organize things in a way where his own interests and the interests of his support structures come first.

 For instance, you need soldiers for your conquests, and your soldiers need to march in straight lines and not trample over one another’s feet like a big rabble. Likewise, your workers need to put in a full shift and not wander off when they lose interest or have enough money for the day, while your congregations need to shut up and listen to the sermon about being a good member of the flock. Following a different drummer is fine, but not for the captains of industry or the church fathers and mothers. Historically, we have gotten ourselves organized by collectively suppressing massive amounts of ourselves and then living in whatever measly emotional/spiritual trickle of us remains. Childhood spontaneity is not so much lost, as consigned to some empty shunting yard of the soul.

 Psychedelics are one tool which may help us grow the emotional and physical violence out of the collective. By turning our interest and fascination away from the mechanics of power and towards – I want to say back towards – the interior castle of our own beauty and the beauty of the world, we alter the basis of our own value systems. We need to have infinity at our root, not just survival.

 Our trauma is held in our bodies, we know. But quite a few people say after a psychedelic experience that they did not just let go of their own trauma but also the accumulated trauma of generations before them, or at least some of it. There was stuff inside them that was not of them. We have a lot of ancient atrocities clogging up our doors of perception, a legacy that is held in our bodies, infused in our thinking, and written on our hearts. When we write a new story, we are widening the chinks in Blake’s cavern, loosening the bricks in Roger Waters’ wall, and when we get better in that way, we are getting better for everybody, not just for ourselves.  

 Since we are not yet evolved into what we want to become, our efforts towards getting better for everybody are bound to be fallible and beset with dead ends. All we can do is recall what happened in the psychedelic experience as best we can, and then be as faithful to it as we can. Even clever people can get overwhelmed with sloppy thinking and self-indulgence, but it’s on us to figure out how to create selves that will sustain the vast exuberance of the human spirit while playing our part in the world around us.

 Remember Miranda, the girl mentioned by Tobin Hart in Part IV, who stood in the ocean for an hour and a half, being the ocean? Getting better for everybody means fashioning a world where she could do that at any time in her life, not just in the period of innocence, not just when, in some sense, she didn’t know any better. In this future world, childhood spiritual experience would not be an odd, or even cute, cultural footnote, but the foundation of everything we do afterwards. And that next thing would be a world where the adults could also have their moments of unconstrained connection and joy without the silent censure of society, whether it happened on a beach, while stopping and staring into the clouds on a busy street, or just pausing in silence in the middle of dinner. We would all know what one another were about with this, and be ready, without embarrassment, to have and to share the thoughts that, as Wordsworth said, are “too deep for tears.”    

The Psychedelic Savior Part IV: Though I Sang in my Chains Like the Sea

When it comes to childhood spiritual experiences, the grown-ups are not showing very much interest. Despite the fact that, with their unclogged doors of perception, children are excellent candidates for mystical states, we don’t investigate it closely. People are queuing up to write books about childhood development, i.e. how they turn into us, but what they can already do – is neglected. Most of what is out there shows up as either conventional religious parenting advice or new agey stuff about angels, past lives, and premonitions. Of the articles I came across that really focus on children, one politely described this as “a developing field,” while another said that “studies exploring the spirituality of young children are scarce.”

 Despite a leaning towards angels and past lives, Tobin Hart, a researcher out of West Georgia University, does get some information on how common childhood mystical experiences are, and what they are. Hart gave a questionnaire to 453 of his college students which asked questions like, “Have you ever found yourself knowing and/or saying something that seemed to come through you rather than from you, expressing a wisdom you don’t normally have?” 54% of the college kids said yes they had, and 80% of those said that it happened in childhood or youth. To the question, “Have you felt a sense of awe and wonderment inspired by the immediate world around you” 80% said that they had, and of those 85% said it happened before the age of 18. Many more of us are having childhood mystical experiences than just the rare or occasional fool on the hill.

 In Hart’s article, “The Mystical Child,” he describes an exchange between a father and his 8- year-old daughter when they go to the beach and she spends an inordinate amount of time just standing still in the tide:

Miranda soon wandered into the soft and steady waves pulsing against the shore. She stood in the water up to her waist, just moving back and forth with the waves. Ten or fifteen minutes passed and Mark thought that her eyes were closed. Thirty minutes went by and she was still swaying in the gentle surf in the same spot. After an hour…he wanted to make sure she was all right. “Was this some kind of seizure?” “Does she have enough sun screen on?” he wondered; but he managed not to intrude. It was nearly an hour and a half before she came out of the water absolutely glowing and peaceful. She sat down next to him without a word. After a few minutes he managed to gently ask what she had been doing. “I was the water,” she said softly. “The water?” he repeated. “Yeah, it was amazing. I was the water. I love it and it loves me. I don’t know what else to say.” They sat quietly until she hopped up to dig in the sand a few minutes later.

The child stands extremely still because she is in a state of high concentration, and I believe she is glowing and peaceful at the end because, well, that’s what that stuff does to us. Had she said, “I was in the water,” instead of “I was the water,” it would have been just as powerful, even if many a person might have replied, “Yup, I could see that.” Being “me” and being aware of it, in that element we name “water,” is itself a double miracle of self and world that requires fully functioning doors of perception.  It is the kill-joy of all other pleasures.

 Many of us have had childhood experiences similar to this little girl’s. I called mine the Mood at the time, and sometimes it would come over me when I was in nature but often it would just arrive for no apparent rhyme or reason at all. In these spontaneous experiences I felt an ineffable oneness, an excitation, yet a sense of peace at the same time, and above all else joy at being alive. Every moment could open out, as Blake said, into the infinite. Then, as inexplicably as it had come, it would fade off again and I would be back in this world, and not always a happy camper at the arrival. Though the Mood faded as I grew older, it became the yardstick by which I would measure all other experiences in my life. It was my one piece of solid truth in a rather confused world.

 I was confused myself by the fact that nobody else was talking about this kind of stuff, not in the family or at school, on TV or radio, in church, or just in general conversation. It was either unknown or in some strange way forbidden, It didn’t help that conventional religion, rather than getting excited at direct contact with the sacred, would turn our attention almost exclusively to how we were doing on the sin quota – always a rather discouraging measure for me.

But the conspiracy goes far beyond this. Our whole society is implicated in what Alan Watts called the taboo against knowing who you are. The child who can fine tune into mystical/emotional realms is at risk of being accused of daydreaming or spacing out, and if they persist (I have this information first hand) will also be considered weird and ill-equipped for getting on in life. And the older we get the more profoundly does the disapproval go. Consider this: how many drivers break quite clearly codified rules about going over the speed limit, jumping the traffic lights, and a million other infractions? It happens all the time. And how many of us dare to break the unwritten rules for pedestrians? I mean the ones where you are not supposed to suddenly stop on the sidewalk and stare into space, admire a cloud or the light on a building, or get lost in a beautiful sequence of thought? No, it’s not because you might get in people’s way, it is because you will be considered weird, perhaps mad or uncanny. We don’t want that level of scrutiny and embarrassment in a moment of great openness and vulnerability, so we refrain from doing it. In fact we refrain so much that it gets to be hard to do it even when we want to.

 So, don’t look to the clergy, the researchers or social scientists for interest in children in this way. If you want someone who is open to the kids, go to the poets and artists. In “Fern Hill,” Dylan Thomas does not just recall his childhood ecstatic state, he recreates it so that we can feel it too:

 Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs

About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,

The night above the dingle starry,

Time let me hail and climb

Golden in the heyday of his eyes,

And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns

And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves

Trail with daisies and barley

Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns

About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,

In the sun that is young once only

Time let me play and be

Golden in the mercy of his means,

And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves

Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hill barked clear and cold,

And the sabbath rang slowly

In the pebbles of the holy streams…

But for Thomas there is a sell-by date to this Eden, and there is not much the child can do to avoid the trainwreck of conforming adulthood that is barreling down the tracks.  

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me

Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,

In the moon that is always rising,

Nor that riding to sleep

I should hear him fly with the high fields

And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,

Time held me green and dying

Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

Is the girl who was the sea really condemned to sing in her chains like the sea? Kathleen Raine, a poet from around Dylan Thomas’ time, gives us reason to hope that’s a no. Her childhood mystical experience were a connecting with natural forces that pre-dated her and probably pre-date us, and if that is the case there is no reason to suppose that the specialness of the connection dies with childhood . She also grew up on a farm, and in Autobiographies, she remembers fetching the water:

 Our drinking water I had to bring from the well in the farmyard; a task which burdened me to the extreme limit of my strength but whose imaginative delight was of a quality to which I find it difficult to give a name, for it seemed to touch springs of thought at that time unknown to me…To drink that well water, cold and clear, was a kind of austere luxury, almost a rite; my Aunty Peggy never failed to praise, as she drank, the water from the well as the best water she had ever known, as people praise wine…

 The well must I think have been very old; the roughly-hewn well-head which covered the spring might have dated from the forgotten monastery; and simple as it was it spoke a language entirely strange to me at the that time, not of nature, but of a different kind of meaning, which I recognized because this primitive shrine was raised upon a marvel of nature itself whose magic, it served to enhance. I shared, as I drew my water, the wonder of those who had built the well-head, recognizing in it the expression of a mind for which, as for my own, a spring was something pure, mysterious, more than natural. The spring was not deep, and I could plunge my arm to the depth of the sand-grains which danced on the bottom perpetually, as the cold clear water welled up. This perpetual welling up of the water was to me a marvel, that emergence from the rocky darkness where water has a secret life of its own, profound, flowing in underground streams and hollows under the hills which none can know or enter. It was as if at this spot a mystery were perpetually enacted. If I found in the stone basin leaves or water-shrimps I removed them as from a sacred source.

Raine responds to the sacred in a dutiful way, and she also notes a dividing line between the magical and the commonplace, a line that will also be struck between her childhood awareness and the mundane world mindset that preoccupies (Bedevils? Infects even?) adult life:

Yet once it had left the well-head the little trickling stream which overflowed continually did not seem to me in any way sacred or mysterious. In it paddled the farm-yard ducks and geese, and a few yards below the well it gathered into a small muddy pond where the beasts drank.

Raine’s description leaves us with a magic that is retrievable, if we could only devise the way. The Romantic poet William Wordsworth brought this thinking to a philosophy of life well before either Thomas or Raine were born. In “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Childhood” he locates the spiritual dimension not in a sort of archaic panpsychism like Raine, but in an eternal spirit realm beyond this one. “Heaven lies about us in our infancy” and children come into this world “trailing clouds of glory” – a theme that later teachers would beat into the brains of bored and frightened schoolchildren without even a hint of irony. Here Wordsworth speaks to the “Mighty Prophet,” a kind of universal child:

Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie

                      Thy Soul's immensity;

Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep

Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,

That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,

Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,—

                      Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!

                      On whom those truths do rest,

Which we are toiling all our lives to find,

In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;

…Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might

Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height.

One of Wordsworth’s best friends was the scientist and inventor Sir Humphrey Davy, and one of Sir Humphrey’s best discoveries was nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, as he named it. Davy shared his new discovery with Wordsworth, and we can guess that the levity of the gas may have helped the poet soar to new heights of insight, though I don’t think he ever quite sang in his chains like the sea, Dylan Thomas-style, even though the Welsh bard rigorously stuck to his whiskey. Wordsworth, the measured English gentleman, did however, find his way through to a more optimistic take on the possibilities of adulthood:

What though the radiance which was once so bright

Be now for ever taken from my sight,

                Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;

                      We will grieve not, rather find

                      Strength in what remains behind;

                      In the primal sympathy

                      Which having been must ever be;

                      In the soothing thoughts that spring

                      Out of human suffering;

                      In the faith that looks through death,

In years that bring the philosophic mind.

That seasoned state of wisdom, according to the poet, even has some advantages over the

spontaneous glory of the child:

I love the Brooks which down their channels fret,

Even more than when I tripped lightly as they;

The innocent brightness of a new-born Day

                      Is lovely yet;

The Clouds that gather round the setting sun

Do take a sober colouring from an eye

That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;

Another race hath been, and other palms are won.

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,

Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Wordsworth might say, yes William Blake, we do accumulate a great load of gunk in front of our doors of perception, but the suffering involved in clearing it away, or trying to, develops the human heart and makes us far more complex and interesting beings as a result. What Wordsworth doesn’t get into though, is the business of creating a roadmap to this place of seasoned wisdom – other than having enough time on your hands to tramp around the countryside thinking deep thoughts.

 In starting on this map, Tobin Hart suggests that the childhood experience itself may be an essential orientation point to developing the seasoned wisdom. In a podcast called Interviews with Innocence, he said, “Childhood moments of wonder are not merely passing reveries, they shape the way a child sees and understands the world and they often form a core of his or her identity, morality and mission in life.” We may, as Wordsworth put it, be able to find “strength in what remains behind” and the childhood mystical state, whether it’s an overtly spiritual experience like the little girl standing in the ocean, or a bunch of kids totally caught up in one of Lyra’s mud battles, may be the beginning of a process.

 This process, rooted in the child’s intimate experience of the world, can lead to something like Wordsworth’s state of wisdom, not just as a sign that we have suffered and come to his  “philosophic mind,” but that we have evolved into, well as Shakespeare would have it, something rich and strange. A firm sign that the process is not taking place is when we compensate for our losses with status, glittery possessions, an insatiable thirst for novelty – in other words, all the hallmarks of modern culture.

 The whole task of integration, whether it’s of an ecstatic state as a three-year-old or the secrets of the universe you saw from behind an eyemask yesterday afternoon, is a perceptual and a moral adventure. Although nobody ever took him up on his idea, it was probably not a throwaway line when Jesus Christ said, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” But before we investigate more of how we might get there, we will look at the cruel and oddly fraught relationship between children and adults, between us and our own selves.

The Psychedelic Savior Part III: The Children of the Clayburners

The story of this extended blog so far: the idea of “mental health” falls short because it focuses on a disease model for individuals to the exclusion of social realities and ancestral traumas. This medical approach patches up flagging individuals so they can get back on the hamster wheel of life and continue producing and consuming. A more viable description of the human condition comes from William Blake and his famous saying that if the doors of perception were cleansed we would see everything as it is – infinite. This blog is a meditation on that thought. Aldous Huxley, who used Blake’s quote for the title of his book on psychedelics, points out that the human mind acts as a reducing valve, rendering the feast of sensory information into a measly trickle that serves our evolutionary but not our spiritual purposes. And so the task is to clean up our doors of perception so we can live more fulfilling and compellingly happy lives. 

 Who then, is out there to serve as a good model for uncluttered doors of perception? There is of course the temporary person equipped with a tripping brain, but that person comes back to earth rather quickly, and anyway we shall look at them later. Outside of that I see three firm candidates: mystics, some indigenous peoples (the ones who don’t have their own empires and hierarchies) and children. We will start with the people we know best because we have all been one: children.

Children are annoying. When you have to wipe someone’s ass or grab hold of their hand in case they impulsively dart out into the traffic, it’s hard to think of them as your superior. On the other hand, it stands to reason that on Day One each person comes into the world with clear doors of perception and it is the burden of experience and acculturation (i.e. contact with you, me and the rest of us adults) that clogs things up. Babies, for instance, are enormously entertaining because they find everything around them enormously entertaining. To the infant, ogling away at what you and I might call an empty room, a paper tissue sticking out of a tissue box and waving in the wind is just as incredible as a shooting star, or the greatest piece of artwork in the world, or a pink sparkly unicorn telling a joke to a traffic cop, for that matter. They don’t have to work to find the extraordinary in what we have deemed ordinary.

The job of a culture is to acculturate of course, and our culture is far from alone in making the acculturation process one of limiting the growing infant mind. Despite the lip service to individualism, we are not encouraged, each one of us, to walk to the beat of our own personal drummer. At some point we have to go to school, learn stuff and get with the programme. And when it comes to remembering what it was like to have uncluttered doors of perception, biology is against us too. Starting around the age of five and going through to about ten, a “synaptic pruning” happens, where the brain dumps its less-travelled neural pathways and gets on with the business of becoming a coherent social person. Pathways of thinking and feeling that don’t get used so much are pruned away, and so are do most of our early memories.

Those pre-pruning years from infancy through toddlerhood are like one long psychedelic trip, with a couple big grown-ups on hand as your personal trip sitters. Then for the next few years you are still tripping pretty hard, except as you start to come down you notice how annoying and bossy your trip sitters can be. It’s then, before we have properly learned to sit still, behave, be nice, learn numbers and learn shame, that the doors of perception are still swinging wide open. That’s when food tastes stunning or outright disgusting, and scary things like darkened bedrooms become a sheer terror filled with ghosts, burglars and monsters, while fun is just so much fun. Maybe the most spiritual thing about childhood is that the distance between us and the world is pretty much zero.

This is one of the most easily forgotten facts of childhood, and Phillip Pullman, in his fantasy novel The Amber Spyglass, captures its pure unalloyed joy. The child hero of the book, Lyra Belacqua, goes down into the land of the dead in hopes to rescue her best friend Roger. The ghosts of the dead children have been down there so long they have almost forgotten the world of sense impressions, and they crave it more than anything else. Lyra tells them about Oxford, where she grew up, and where the children of the town are in a constant state of war with the children of the clayburners, who live outside of town by the river. The main weapons of this war are huge great lumps of clay from the river bank:

“Please!” they were whispering, “You’ve just come from the world! Tell us, tell us! Tell us about the world!”

…And Lyra began to talk about the world she knew…she told them about the great battle between the Oxford townies and the clayburners. First she described the claybeds, making sure she got in everything she could remember, the wide ocher-colored washing pits, the dragline, the kilns like great brick bee hives. She told them about the willow trees along the river’s edge, with their leaves all silvery underneath; and she told them how when the sun shone for more than a couple of days, the clay began to split up into great handsome plates, with deep cracks between, and how it felt to squish your fingers into the cracks and slowly lever up a dried plate of mud, trying to keep it as big as you could without breaking it. Underneath it was still wet, ideal for throwing at people…As she spoke, playing on all their senses, the ghosts crowded closer, feeding on her words, remembering the time when they had flesh and skin and nerves and senses, and willing her never to stop.

Then Lyra describes the final battle, where the different factions of townie children gang up together to attack the children of the clayburners and all the kids were:

…hurling handfuls and handfuls of heavy, claggy clay at one another, rushing their muddy castle and tearing it down, turning the fortification into missiles until the air and the ground and the water were all mixed inextricably together, and every child looked exactly the same, mud from scalp to sole, and none of them had had a better day in all their lives.

But it is not only the children who are entranced by Lyra’s description, even the harpies, the malign and bitter guardians of the underworld, come up and listen with secret longing to her simple tales:

As well as the ghosts, silent all around her and her companions, close and living, there was another audience too: the branches of the trees were clustered with those dark bird forms, their women’s faces gazing down at her solemn and spellbound.

The harpies will tear you limb from limb if you veer from the truth, but because Lyra stays away from her normal fantasies and tall tales, and sticks only to tangible sense impressions, they will eventually release her from the underworld and allow her go on to the next step in her adventures. Not only that, the power of her truth-telling leads the harpies to eventually agree to change their role from tormentors of the dead to conducting them through the underworld and out to freedom, where they can finally dissolve back among the elements of the physical world. The spell of the everyday is a special magic, or as William Blake said, “Man has no Body distinct from his soul; for that called Body is a portion of a Soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.”

This recognition of the tangible as the spiritual is often the lesson of psychedelic experiences too.  Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception, describes how in his mescaline trip he encountered colour, form, and texture entirely anew:

The vase contained only three flowers – a full-blown Belle of Portugal rose.. a large magenta and cream-coloured carnation; and, pale purple at the end of its broken stalk, the bold, heraldic blossom of an iris. Fortuitous and provisional, the little nosegay broke all the traditional rules of good taste. At breakfast I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its colours. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation – the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.

 …what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were – a transience, that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing, that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute , unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of existence…At the same time, and no less obviously, it was these flowers, it was anything that I – or rather the blessed Not-I, released for a moment from my throttling embrace – cared to look at.

This is the state that W.B. Yeats described in “A Dialogue of Self and Soul:”

So great a sweetness flows into the breast

We must laugh and we must sing,

We are blest by everything,

And everything we look upon is blest.

It is not just the great artists and thinkers who have access to this, but all of us everyday people, since as far as the universe is concerned, we are all members of the same club. The first experience of it for me did not involve flowers, but Lyra-like mud, mud, glorious mud. It was in my college days, just as my first ever acid was coming on, and I stood with two friends on a bridge overlooking the very unimpressive river of our college town. It was low tide, and as I looked out over the lack of river and abundance of mud, old tyres and tin cans, I realised I had never come even remotely close to seeing mud before. I was, like Huxley, released from my own throttling grip, and there before me was an extraordinary and enchanting richness almost pulsing with joy and life, endless details and landscapes beckoning at my attention, while a totally unforeseen variety of colour, from burnished bronze to thick, rich browns and decadent yellows melted me. We stood on that bridge for I don’t know how long, taking in the banquet of impressions. It was a brief lesson in infinity, showing that you never need grand vistas or complex art to become awestruck by beauty. Leonard Cohen said as much in a song that came out in those same days:  

Suzanne takes your hand and she leads you to the river,

She is wearing rags and feathers from salvation army counters

And the sun pours down like honey on Our Lady of the Harbour

And she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers,

There are heroes in the seaweed there are children in the morning

They are leaning out for love and they will lean that way forever

While Suzanne holds the mirror.

The Psychedelic Savior Part II: Encased by the Darkness of the Skull

If humanity can clean up its doors of perception we will reach a collective spiritual transformation and get much more fun out of life, at least that’s what William Blake claims. And yet, if I take the “the doors of perception” to mean my senses, well actually I see, hear, taste, and so on just fine – so what needs this cleansing Mr. Blake? Blake saw the body as “the portion of the soul perceived by the five senses,” so that my sense perceptions are not separate from my soul, they are part and parcel of it.  In our world we call a spade a spade because spade-like things are what we know, but in Blake’s world a spade is as likely as any other object to be a portal into the infinite. So, what kind of muck and clutter is getting in the way of our spiritual processes?  

 It’s Aldous Huxley again, and his ideas about psychedelics that can shed some light. Huxley presents the idea of the reducing valve, a mechanism that screens out the deluge of sensory (and cosmic) information that is always bearing down on us from Mind at Large, which is a way of saying cosmic consciousness, the infinite, Source, God, or what one of the Desert Fathers called That Yonder.

“To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet…Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he or she has been born – the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people’s experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness in the only awareness and it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.”

 We might argue with the idea that this closure came with the advent of language, but surely this “measly trickle” is the same as the tiny bit of light coming through the narrow chinks in Blake’s cavern. If the reducing valve gets overactive and does its job too well, it leads to impoverished emotional and spiritual perceptions, and a dull time for everybody.   

A more sciencey name for what may be the same event, is the default mode network that has recently been popularized in Michael Pollan’s book Changing Your Mind. The default mode is what is happening in the brain when it is just ticking over with nothing special to do – the daydreaming, loosely associating mind that may be chewing over the past or ruminating on the future. At the outset, the default mode did not excite much notice, and it was seen as the baseline from which more interesting brain activities might be measured, the where-you-are before the experiment proper begins.

Gradually researchers got interested in this baseline itself and saw the default mode as an activity in its own right that takes place in certain linked areas throughout the brain that they appropriately called the default mode network. Interesting things took off in 2012 when researcher Robin Cahart Harris put people in brain scanners while they were tripping (poor things) and saw that rather than getting more active during the mental fireworks of the trip, the default mode network actually slowed down dramatically. That goes along with our oft-encountered experience while tripping of ruminating “me” becoming a much more tenuous and porous entity than normal. As the default mode network stops grabbing all the neural pathways, unexpected and original connections are made between disparate areas of the brain that don’t usually get to meet each other – rather like a family reunion where your noisy uncle finally falls asleep in an armchair. As the reducing valve (or default mode) falters in its duty, the doors of perception get a good psychedelic cleansing and the tripping brain takes a peek at the infinite. At least, that’s one metaphor for what happens to us while we are tripping.

Why does muck and clutter accumulate on the doors of perception in the first place? Some of the reason for this is to do with the nature of perception itself. Neuroscientist Anil Seth points out that the central organ of sense perception is not the eyes or ears etc., but the brain which receives and coordinates all these sensory inputs. The brain does not ‘see’ or ‘hear’ anything, it is encased by the darkness of the skull, and from there it takes the electrical impulses that come from the sense organs and it composes a representation of the world, modeled by its expectations of what is out there. What we take to be seeing and hearing is really a game of battleships that the brain is playing with the world, filling in its internal map as more information comes along.

According to Seth, half or more of the neuron pathways involved with perception are actually sending information from the brain outwards to the perceiving organs, while the remainder are bringing electrical impulses from the perceptual organs in. To save time and energy the brain is its own reducing valve, making an educated guess at what it expects to perceive, presenting its prediction as reality, and then adjusting as it goes along – that’s why we do a double take when we see the unexpected. “Normal perception is a fantasy constrained by reality,” says Seth, “We’re all hallucinating all the time; when we all agree on our hallucinations we call it reality.” The brain’s mandate is not to tell truth, it is to make the world navigable at the least possible expenditure of energy – and it needs to conserve energy, because at 2% of our body weight the brain burns up 20% of our calories. The doors of perception are clogged up with preconception.

So, the brain has only a passing interest in what’s really there, and more than that, according to Iain McGilchrist, in The Master and his Emissary, it has little direct interest in our emotional and spiritual wellbeing either. Like the rest of the animal kingdom, we have two hemispheres to our brain, the left and the right, and though they are both intimately involved in all our activities, the left hemisphere specializes in classification and naming while the right hemisphere is more involved with the global picture, relationship, emotion and nuance. The left hemisphere is totally literal, it doesn’t get irony or humour, while the right hemisphere does not do expressive speech; you want your left hemisphere if you are driving a car or totting up your bank account, and your right hemisphere if you are pondering the meaning of life. The left hemisphere is an excellent servant for the right hemisphere, with its capacity to organize and categorize, but a terrible boss. And what has happened is that over the last few centuries in Western culture is that the left hemisphere, with its penchant for counting, quantifying, bureaucratizing, and putting everything in straight lines, has become our boss – to the detriment of everybody. What do I do today if I want a fulfilled life? I check off all the items on my bucket list. There, done!

Perception then, is not at all what we take it to be. Blake, a prophet who railed against the early stages of the left-brain take-over said, “a fool sees not the same tree as a wise man,” meaning that for one person it is “a thing in the way,” for another a source of potential money, and for another a portal into this infinite, and so on. For instance, many years ago, in my twenties, I was walking with my friend Dean on some street in Oakland, California while Dean was tripping. I, as representative of Anil Seth’s collective hallucination called “reality,” was taking care of him. Passing a small tree in flower, Dean stopped and gazed at it in wonder. Now, it was a truly gorgeous tree, but he spent an absolute age standing there, until I was getting restless and slightly embarrassed by the people walking past us. “It’s alive,” he said at long last, with such profound reverence that I knew he was taking in levels of beauty and levels of information that my non-tripping brain could not fathom. “Yes,” I replied from the other side of our divide, and we stood there an age longer. In terms of this particular tree, Dean was the wise man, and I got to play the part of the fool.

And fools we continue to be. One recent morning, as I was going into a park near my house in Brooklyn, I was struck by the beauty of one of the trees on the approach road. This tree did not have its cover of leaves yet, so the jagged shape of its branches against the sky illustrated some kind of law from chaos theory or maybe the Fibonacci sequence, not in general, but as it filtered through that particular being in its particular conditions. I felt that if I could gaze upon the tree with the right degree of concentration, I could do a Dean, and take in living information about the structure of things. But with my reducing valve firmly in place I could only detect a faint and distant echo of that kind of communion. It was more of an “if only” moment than an “aha.” Still, I shouldn’t feel too bad, better people than me have had the same problem. Here’s William Wordsworth, who was around for much of the same time as William Blake:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore; —
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

 In the same long poem, Ode: Intimations of Immortality, he did also have this more cheerful idea:

 Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and its fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Sometimes, despite the reducing valve and the default mode network conspiring with the left brain to make life miserable, we are still able to feel things just as deeply as Wordsworth describes. Our potential for the future, the human bet on life, is that I as an individual, and us as a collective being can reach into our hearts and open our perceptions into something closer to the tripping mindstate, without doing ourselves the least bit of harm. We might harm the economy though, by not needing so many useless knickknacks and toys afterwards. But for ourselves – it would do us a world of good.

Too many years of crossing on the green, pondering over our to-do lists and being told to pay attention in class have gummed up our ability to easily get into that state, and although in childhood it might have been easy to unselfconsciously be transfixed by the sight of a tree, or an ant on the sidewalk, or a passing truck, today such spontaneity is taboo for grownups. There is no written law against it, but there is a strong social law, and you will be seen as weird or crazy if you are caught doing it. If you don’t believe me, take note of how many people you see on a busy street suddenly stopping and sighing with joy at the sight of a beautiful cloud. The truth is that we are discomforted by people who want to experience their perceptions deeply, who like Dean or William Blake, can openly drink in the power and the glory.  

We don’t remember having chosen it this way, but we have self-selected for a limited life. To battle against our personalized depression states, anxiety states, OCD, ADHD, PTSD and so on, we take a pill or talk to a therapist, not in order to re-enliven the world, but to get rid of the pain that comes with being part of a sick system. The project should instead be to re-animate the spiritual corpse of humanity by starting at the beginning – ourselves. With psychedelics we can sometimes reach the mindspace of intense communing that will throw us into ecstasy and remind us about what’s what. When we can reach that special state, the tragedies of life, our terrible moods, the tumult of our feelings – none of these go away, not if we are human – but they become part of the tapestry, not a grey lens covering it all. We can be free.

The Psychedelic Savior Part I: Why Mental Health Has Gone Mental

Here I am an adult – and I’ve been one for what seems like ages now – and I’m still grappling with the same old issues, whether that’s depression, anxiety, stuck thinking, or having one drink too many when I know I shouldn’t. You have to wonder: Isn’t there a point where you put the past behind you and just get on with it?

 For all our boot-strapping self-advice, the turmoil that so often follows us out from childhood does have a habit of sticking around. Our moods and our obsessions come from a place that is deep inside us, are intimately part of us, and yet – strangely and annoyingly – can’t be directly touched by us. You can try saying, “stop it” to a difficult mood, but it doesn’t seem to think you are its commanding officer. The whole thing is quite weird.

 The problem with the problem is that we are looking at it the wrong way. Just as a for instance, next time you are on the bus, in the store, or wherever, take a critical look at the people around you. Does anyone glow with the radiance of living that wonderful depression-free life you believe you are missing out on? Do any of us have the air of true freedom about us? In fact, we all seem to be very much in the same soup together. The issue of my mood, my stuckness, my dumb compulsions is intimately part of a collective cloud cover over the whole culture that we live in, it’s not just me. My personal problems may be a lot more communal, than I think.

Think of a culture as its own entity, just as you think of a person or an animal as one being rather than billions of disparate cells cobbled together. In the case of a culture the cells are individual people, and if the larger organism gets sick all the individual cells within it will be affected, even though they might not see that and wonder what is the matter with me, why aren’t I functioning so well? Our strivings to get better can only happen within the constraints of the being of which each one of us is a tiny part. If the whole economy tanks I’m probably not going to make my fortune; if my country declares war it might be my house that gets burned down, and if my culture falls short of being joyous, creative and open minded, I won’t go unscathed.

 But when it comes to mental health, we don’t see this part of things. The government puts out information about depression rates, substance use levels how high they are and so on, but we take no collective steps towards the big picture aspects of the problem. Individual sufferers are told about their genetic flaws, chemical imbalances in their brains (which is a debunked theory), and their patterns of erroneous thinking. What doesn’t get a mention are the structural causes behind our despair, the travails of a hierarchical and empire-driven culture beset with racism, sexism, patriarchy and exploitation of all involved. Life is artificial, communal relationships break down, but it is the single “cell” of the individual person that gets the diagnosis while the body politic gets the free pass.  

The fall-out from this is summed up in the title of James Hillman’s 1992 book, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse. For all our new therapeutic drugs and many new psychological modalities, people are just as depressed, despairing, anxious and crazy as ever, and let’s just say the world has not been bathed in sunshine since Hillman’s book came out. Would it be unfair to measure the success of a healthcare industry by how much the diseases are being reduced? That’s how we rate cancer and diabetes, so why do we think of mental health so very differently.

Why is the big picture aspect of the conundrum of human healing passed over so consistently? I believe it’s a fox guarding the henhouse situation where the system that created the hamster wheel of modern life is the same one that is charged with fixing the little hamsters that freak out or drop from exhaustion. It’s so much easier to find defects in the hamster than in the wheel, and then fix up the hamster so it can start running again. The status quo remains unharmed.

 If someone goes to a mental health clinic the treatment will begin with a diagnostic code and go on to compliance with paperwork regulations, negotiations with the insurance company, discussions about what drugs they might be given, and eventually a discharge plan that will spit them back out through the revolving door. Who is the consumer here, the customer who clicks their way in and out of the entrance, or the institution that consumes clients as its meat and drink? The bottom line is that you can’t ask the sickness to make you well.

 And that is where we stand as psychedelics re-enter our culture. For the mental health industry psychedelics are the latest greatest magic bullet, and they will keep psychiatrists, pharmacists and regulators busy for years — not to mention venture capitalists. But the real promise of psychedelics lies somewhere totally different. They could revive us out of our spiritual and ethical torpor and spark a self-help practice for the culture, not just for individuals. The diagnosis for the culture is arrested spiritual/emotional growth, and we are all suffering from it/because of it. The primary marker of this is our worsening relationship with the divine and with our own imaginations, and it turns out that the strong suit of the psychedelics experience is exactly these two things –access to the divine and access to the imagination.

 When Aldous Huxley brought psychedelics to popular notice in the 1950s, he named his book The Doors of Perception. His inspiration was from William Blake’s famous quote that “if the doors of perception can be cleansed, we shall see everything as it is – infinite.” These words catch the state of the human imagination as it is today – well, 1790 actually – where our sense of the infinite is quite divorced from the experience of daily life.

 Blake completed his thought with, “For man has closed himself up, till he sees only thro’ the narrow chinks of his cavern.” If we agree that is the predicament, it doesn’t help much when the most we do is make our individual depressions or anxieties bearable enough to get back on the hamster wheel. In our own individual way we need to be working to get a little more light into humanity’s cavern, and psychedelics may be just the right chisel to carve a few holes in it. But the escape into sunshine won’t happen by magic, and psychedelics could be just as easily used to keep the hamster wheel paradigm in place as they could to be a tool for transforming humanity, the organism of who we all are.

There Is Only One Diagnosis

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the book that mental health workers use to make diagnoses, lists 157 psychological disorders across 947 rather dense pages. But we all know that there is only one diagnosis for humanity: the thwarted wish to give and receive love. Everything else is just mopping up the details.

Whatever kind it may be, love with a partner, the love between a parent and a child, the love of a friend, or the love of the natural world around us, the great joyful exchange is the act of seeing and being seen in all the fine and complete details. That fact of love is, I believe, what psychedelic experiences will sometimes show us – that love is what holds everything together, or even that it is the everything that is held together. Once you have that, what more do you need than a vegetable patch, a few friends and a nice warm fire? The destructive materialism we are mired in now is feeble compensation for actual connection.  

Where to begin? One place is to allow ourselves to mourn lost love, the many years and moments when we did not get to savor the joy of seeing and being seen by another. The staleness of what we call ordinary life, its missing magic. To mourn where love has not flourished is itself a labor of love, it is a process that moves through our bodies and asks only to be witnessed. To feel the ache in our hearts without undue comment or commentary, and to let that ache – or whatever it may be for you – to move, change, grow, stay the same, or what it will. To be a steadfast witness to the motions of the heart.

When we are able to mourn for our own lost love, for all the expression and joy that never took place, a stronger interest in the fellow sufferers around us can grow. The love we crave and hold inside us is ready to dance more intently with others. That secret rose inside us is what psychedelics have the potential to awaken and express. If we have had the good fortune of being in bliss, we may remember to keep a good hold on it when we return.

How does my love grow?

Ask the holly bush.

Where did my love go?

Follow the bee.

Will the night last long?

Only the blood-red moon knows.

What does love ask for? 

To be seen, and to see.

 In the quiet of the night

I hear it rising

The great wise salmon

Of the Western Sea.

True death, true life

Is all we long for

In the whirlpool of folly

That we struggle to flee.

 Down the long wide valleys

Of the moonlight

The bitter and the doleful

Ghosts are howling

For the love they once cherished

But allowed to slip free.

If of love

You would be given

Let love be,

Let love be.

The Power of Not Now

I am always impressed by the people and teachers who are living “in the Now.” It must be a lovely place to be, but I always miss it by a few seconds, or I’m daydreaming about something interesting and then scolding myself afterwards. In fact, being in the Now is getting harder and harder as I notice just how closely the past packs up against it on one side and the future crashes in on the other. If, as various Good Books tell us, both past and future are illusory, I will have to become an increasingly thin person to wedge myself in between the two of them. Some people even say that there is no “now,” any more than there is an actual edge to the ever moving ocean on the beach. Now keeps slipping away from me, like a mosquito I’m trying to slap, but all I hit is myself.

Given how much of a problem the Now actually is, I am ditching “Nowism” and taking up a new philosophy of living in the “Not Now.” It seems so much more achievable. Having had this revelation, I realise how much I am there already. When I think about doing the dishes or tedious paper work the first words that spring to mind are “not now” – always. The tremendous power of Not Now is in our most basic instincts. Children, perhaps because of their innocence and propensity for joy, are natural masters at living in the Not Now, especially when asked to clean up their rooms or finish their homework. My bank, I have noticed, is fully in the Now when it comes to making deductions from my account, but is in a much more healthy Not Now of “three to five more business days” when it comes to crediting me my money. Not Now makes the world go round.

I wonder if it is possible to live in the Not Now more deliberately and fully. Not Now for answering every email within thirty minutes, Not Now for organizing my day perfectly, and Not Now for the damn filing. Would anybody really notice? Think of the ramifications though if this caught on. If we all – I mean every single one of us – lived in the Not Now. For a start, capitalism would totter and fall, not because we took to the streets and threw things at the police, but precisely because we stayed home, and stayed, and stayed, and basked in the Not Now. Probably the cops would would appreciate the change of pace too. And just as the air is clearing up all over the world during this whole coronavirus thing, it would certainly do the same under a regimen of Not Now. And the oceans would also get a break if, unlike me so far, we apply Not Now to all the needless crap we buy on Amazon, with all its needless packaging. Admittedly, that’s a work in progress.

And then, as the emails, phone messages, dishes and pieces of paper pile up, we could all go downstairs, sit out on the stoops of our houses and apartment buildings, and celebrate the Not Now together. We could listen to podcasts and even each other, and as spiritual beings having a human experience, we could duck the Now and see if it wants to follow us. Maybe it’s lonely and wants some company. Ah, I’m beginning to feel the relax already.

Putting the bullshit self-criticism aside...

Putting the bullshit self-criticism, self-judgment, etc. to the side, what do you wish for yourself? When you consider the parts of you that hold your anxiety, your small mindedness, your fears and so on, what do you wish for them if you’ve put aside your bullshit self-criticism and judgment?

The bullshit self-criticism says of whatever is bugging you at this particular time, “I hate it, I wish I could cut it out of myself and throw it away.” Which makes its own kind of sense when that same anxiety or whatever has put you through a lot of trouble, trials and tribulation. And embarrassment. But when you think about it more, what you’re saying is that you want to get rid of a part of your own totality, a piece of you that is scared, or confused, or sensitive to slings and arrows of the world around us. We don’t really want to excise our sensitivities and our softer sense of being. Really we want to help out those parts so that they are not in pain. No pain – they’re great!

So ask your bullshit self-criticism and your bullshit self-judgment to step back, and then think about what you really want for the part of you that appears to be so annoying. What would you say to it? Maybe it’s just a word, like calm, confidence, or grace. Try this lying on your back, tune into yourself, maybe even look for where the problematic feelings live in your body as well, and then say to them something like, “Calm to you, confidence to you, grace to you.” Anything nice will be fine.

That’s what I call self-soothing, because my self is directly talking to other parts of me in a soothing way. When self-criticism and judgment pop up, remind them that their message may be defensive and some kind of self-preservation gesture, but it is not truth. Truth is that when someone suffers, even if it is a part of me, the natural instinct is to help it out. So step back self-criticism, I’m doing the helping out now. It will even benefit you in the end.

And then, inevitably, you will have to consider the bullshit self-criticism and self-judgment as objects of your soothing too. Even if they put on a tough guy act, they also could do with the same kind thoughts, the same soothing voice as all the rest of you. They are just as angry and scared and flustered as everybody else in there. Kind and loving thoughts will help them in the process of being rescued from their particular spot in purgatory.

What if in this movie there are no bad guys, just patients to be healed, and you are both patient and doctor, chauffeur and passenger, actor and audience to your own drama? Your menagerie of crazy characters may not get regulated into something palpably less ridiculous and more socially acceptable, but you will get to be more at peace with yourself, more at home in your own home. They say it takes a village to raise a child, but inside ourselves we are a village, one where the fighting and fussing can soften considerably. Be at peace with your whole, true crazy self. It’s the only one you’ve got. 

Thoreau's Cabin. Part II: Contentment v. Compulsion

The spontaneous mindset brings contentment, while the fruit of haste is compulsion. As a kid, walking back from the hills to our holiday farmhouse, I felt a sense of contentment that had nothing to do with achieving anything or upregulating my self-esteem. It was a natural state of being, like when you push your chair away from the table having finished a good meal with great friends. All feels right with the world and it’s not much more complicated than that.

But there is not a whole lot of satisfaction and joy to be squeezed out of the haste-based regime we seem to live under. And yet, we crave a deep satisfaction or at least a strong experience, and it is frustrating when we go too long without getting one. We need something to hit that spot, and an experience that has a big charge to it without being profoundly satisfying may just have to do. Compulsion is a high energy hit that promises more than it can deliver in terms of cosmic peace and ecstatic union but it does give you a rise.

These usual suspect compulsions are the stigmatized ones, like compulsive sex, drugs, over (or under) eating, gambling and so on, each of which comes with its own treatment program. Other compulsions, like being a dedicated consumer or thinking non-stop when you might be at your ease, are more socially smiled upon and are not always thought of as problems. Either way though, they all function as a safety valve to the tightly wound haste mindset. If  in the spontaneous state you feel delight at a sunset or a flock of birds, for the haste mindset it would have to be a beer, a joint, a slice of chocolate cake, a something, at the end of a shitty day so you don’t have to feel what you’re feeling. Meister Eckhart, the 14th century mystic put it this way, “God and God’s will are one. I and my will are two.” A split will can never reach wholeness, and without some degree of wholeness, the fun stops.

And so, having abandoned wholeness but in need of a fairly regular high energy feeding, we find that even the stupidest compulsion makes genuine sense. It’s not that we believe that stuffing our faces with sweet gooey stuff will be transformational or that getting drunk tonight is a genius idea why didn’t I think of that before, it’s just a matter of simple math. Zero plus something beats zero plus zero. If we are sitting in the dark and we have to suffer, most of the time we can put up with it, but if we are sitting in the dark and there is some sort of solace close at hand, however meagre it is, it’s hard to say no.  

We will need our compulsions, even the embarrassing ones, until we can decommission enough of the haste mentality to start getting more of our nourishment from spontaneity/contentment. An old song by the doo-wop soul group the Persuasions says, “Stop, look, listen to your heart, hear what it’s saying.” If we can do that we may notice that the party was going on around us all the time. Examine your fingers. Pretty, aren’t they? Look more closely at the sidewalk, the wall, and all the other little sensory things. With a full heart, and so long as the conditions around me are not actually threatening or dangerous, life itself is just fun.

For generations now we have trained our brains into the haste mindset with a billion traffic lights, traffic jams, timelines, assembly lines, and deadlines. We are living out the lives of quiet desperation that Thoreau said most of us would. If we don’t like that, it’s on us to make an effort to get out of haste/compulsion and into the spontaneity/contentment world. Better if we could live lives of quiet inspiration.

Culturally, collectively, we have built so many glittering palaces and roared down so many asphalt roads that it will not be easy for us to slow down now. But we are all free to make our contribution to the project of disenchanting ourselves from this haste bullshit. In the wise words of Timothy Leary, we can start to turn on, tune in and drop out. Turn on to the original spontaneous way of being, tune in to the simple, sensory world around us, and drop out of the joy-abandoning haste mentality. Then we can feel like we belong here.

Thoreau's Cabin. Part I: Haste v. Spontaneity

In 1845 Henry David Thoreau built himself a cabin by Walden Pond in Massachusetts where he could escape from the rat race of his day. He resolved to “live deliberately,” and “front only the essential facts of life.” But it was what he said next that really struck me. On building his cabin he said, “In April, for I made no haste in my work, but rather made the most of it, my house was framed and ready for the raising, .” By not making haste with his work but by making “the most of it”, Thoreau overthrew the ethic of produce, produce, produce, and replaced it with an ethic of slow down, appreciate and enjoy. the spontaneity of the moment.  

If life felt hasty to Thoreau in 1845, I can’t imagine what he would make of today’s antics. We have enshrined overcommitment and frantic rush into our cultural DNA, while pausing to actually experience experience is seen as a slightly eccentric byway, mainly reserved for yoga studios and meditation seminars, but not ‘real’ life. Speaking of which, Thoreau said that he did not want to discover at the end of his life that he had not really lived it. But us? We don’t act like we share that concern.

In making “the most of” his work Thoreau didn’t mean it in the way you or I might if we said, “it was a rainy day at the beach but even so we made the most of it.” I believe he was talking about squeezing out all the joy from his sense perceptions, feelings and thoughts in every moment of his work. Simple things, I would guess, like the feel of the wood boards in his hand or the sun on his back, the simple things that can be a door to the divine. Children already have that without trying, while sages have done the work to get there. It’s that state of aliveness and spontaneity where you don’t really need much else to feel good.

When I was a child, we used to go on holiday to the countryside in England, and in the evenings after dinner I was allowed to wander off around the fields without the constraint of an adult to make sure that I was “all right.” As the evening crept on the starlings would rise up into what’s called a murmuration, a huge flock that rises and changes shape like a single being in the sky, a spectacle of pure motion. I would stand on top of a hill and become an instant sun worshipper as I watched it going down in a blaze of colour, and soon after that the owls would start hooting and I would come back, regretfully, to the farmhouse. Those moments threw me into a spontaneous ecstasy of colour, sound and beauty, and the whole ‘what is next?’ mentality was gone. That spontaneous contact is, I believe, the primary form of experience, the one that’s there before we clutter ourselves up. We have inadvertently exchanged fullness of heart for a scorecard of empty achievements.

And now, during this time of lockdown, I find a renewed invitation from the outside world to remember the spontaneous state. I have no trains to catch, my to-do list is a little bit shortened, and although I’m not as good at it as when I was nine, I can sometimes unwind a little, take walks and notice things for themselves, -- like the sky, the bark on trees, the busy birds. This state of happy noticing is opposite to haste, and it gives us some of the high energy fuel that makes us truly contented. Beat that, capitalism!

Something to Do During Lockdown: Talk to Yourself

This lockdown time for us who take psychedelics has reduced access to the usual fun and games, since ceremonies are not going to happen for a while and home alone trips without a guide or sitter are not always the best idea. This makes it a good time to extend the internal work we may normally do between sessions and develop it into more of a practice. One such activity is deliberate self-talk.   

I have found that during a psychedelic experience we can sometimes listen more carefully and skeptically to the ongoing negative self-talk that is so often the background music to our lives. That self-talk is like bubbles coming up through the water of a deep pond and we don’t notice them until they pop up on the surface, or we don’t consciously notice these nasty little messages at all. With psychedelic, we can sometimes go down under the surface, catch a hold of the bubbles and say something new like, “be at peace,” or “I accept myself.” Stuff that a spiritual being having a human experience might find palatable.

Once the trip is over it’s so easy to forget that this method is perfectly usable in regular consciousness. Here’s how it goes: I take a few words, or maybe just a single word, anything that sounds useful and true. Then I think of that word or words for each of five mindful breaths. My favorite word right now is “calm,” and I say that inside myself as I breathe in and as I breathe out. Sometimes I send it to a particular part of my body that seems to want that message. It’s a kind of a pause, and a reminder of what I wish for myself.

Some other messages I have used are, “I am okay,” “well-being,” “strength,” “heart be well,” “listen to the stomach,” “allow everything,” and so on. You can make whatever you want, based on your own needs and wishes. Originality is not important, just make it kind, and make it pretty short and sweet.

My aim is to take this pause at least one time for each hour of the day. I have found that a good support for this is to keep track of the hours I have done the exercise, otherwise I l get lost and the whole thing starts to feel a bit messy. So, I send myself a text for each hour that I’ve done the practice.

I generally don’t actually send the text until I have four hours collected together, and at the end of day then I write down my total in my calendar book. Not because I care about the record keeping, but because this is what seems to keep me on point. For you it might be a quite different system, maybe a much more elegant one on an app, or no record keeping at all.  And if you forget to do it for a few hours – no big deal, there are no prizes, no competition, no brass band at the finish line.

I think that when we say something kind or something soothing to ourselves, we relieve the world of one tiny droplet of the stress and self-harm that is needlessly driving us all crazy. As people take to the streets to demand social justice and the rollback of entrenched institutional cruelty, we can also take a march down our internal streets and let it be known what it is that needs to happen.

Psychedelics and Faith

I was brought up in a religious tradition where every time I questioned something that did not make sense to me, I was told to have faith. Faith was a kind of escape hatch when logic couldn’t sustain the argument. I’m afraid that for me, the idea of having faith became an ordeal of telling myself something I couldn’t believe, but having to to believe it anyway. Things didn’t work out very satisfactorily.

Psychedelic faith is based on experience, if a rather distant one. It’s more like memory. I remember understandings and openings I had when I was in the different state of consciousness that the medicine gives me, and though I am not in that state now I do recall that I was there. I recall that certain experiences happened, and rumour has it that they happened to me.

Through an act of faith I cling to - call it - a five dimensional state of being with these three dimensional hands and fingers. I trust that what took place in that other reality was indeed real and living. Faith says, if I were to return to that place, my trust will be verified and I may experience ( or perhaps endure?) that state again.

Psychedelic faith then, is the capacity to recall something of higher consciousness while in a state of ordinary consciousness. By that recollection, we are percolating something from the beyond into our regular here and now. And we do that recollecting by opening our hearts and caring about what is most important and about what comes from the most high. As William Blake said, “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.” Apparently Eternity is in love even with us and all of our wild shenanigans.

I Stepped out of Nothing Visible: Part II

Song of the Children

We clung to you without reservation

We thought only of our own pleasure

As we died and lived in your arms.

We were days and nights there.

We were born so many times.

We drank from bright green leaves

And poured our faces into the secret forest.

We rolled through bushes, down hills

And at the bottom became Mud People.

The animals were tamed by our abandon.

They stopped and stared at us

With orange, or yellow, or green eyes.

Small fierce cats were ready to roughen

Our hands with their sharp pink tongues.

And the rivers!

They mirrored us,

Drowned us

And delivered us up

Safe as the floating leaves.

Then we tried to please you and guess your needs.

We noticed when your eyes were closed from us.

We counted numbers and breathed carefully.

We found, to our dismay, we could contain ourselves.

The world fell apart like paper

And our organs went giddy inside us.

Our clothes turned out too small for our bodies.

We tasted boredom and its antidotes.

Slowly, sadly, we put down our sticks and said,

This world is chosen as the real one.

And now? Eden flickers on and off

Like lightning through backyard windows.

I Stepped out of Nothing Visible: Part I

"I stepped out of nothing visible, as if I was shedding a layer of clothing - all those little details of shoulds and should nots, discarding the invisible cloak of culture that just clings and is so heavy, so heavy. I just walked out of it and didn't care. It's such a heavy coat. The sticky, prickly burdensomeness of all the details. But the soul inside is right. I want to walk in peace."

“Lisa”, after her plant medicine experience in September of 2018.

Do you remember putting on the cloak of culture? I think that when we were kids there was a time when “good” was an innate feeling of joy moving through our bodies, a joy that originated in the soul, which now lies under the heavy cloak of culture. In putting on that cloak, the immediacy of joy got replaced by the satisfactions of being thought of as morally good, or even just of getting the right answer in a test. Feeling good in the body was supplanted by “being” – or rather acting – good in class, in church, at temple, or at the dinner table.  

There's no natural connection between these two kinds of good, so feeling good by thrilling to sensations, impressions and thoughts, had to be sacrificed at the altar of acting good. Because we are such exuberant creatures, this could only be done through fear, physical constriction and a deliberate dulling of the senses – as in having to sit at a desk all day, listening, let’s say, to somebody else’s logic or a history not our own.  

In adulthood the stakes get higher and the cloak of shoulds and should nots grows more burdensome. Our natural exuberance gets drained even more, and we find ourselves able to sit in front of a machine or a screen all day long, while we spend money on “stuff” to alleviate the stifling weight of this conforming. We even get to be in on the plot against ourselves, trust in our own instincts ebbs low, and we become co-conspirators in our own betrayal.  

And then some day we take a psychedelic. A genuine possibility exists for us to wake to our predicament and momentarily at least, step out from the coat of culture. There’s the chance that we will get to feel our way through the many layers of self, and with luck, see that core, that soul again, in all its brilliance. Nothing really went away.

Inside us is a process that wants to happen, if we can reach down deep enough. A world wants to open. The things that we think concern us don’t really concern us at all, and it turns out that the great comforts in life are the comforts of the soul, which have to be purchased in their own currency. I accept myself and I accept not accepting myself. It turns out that “thy will be done” has nothing to do with submission but with more intelligent alignment. The fun of childhood leads in adulthood to the play of the gods.

"A safe fairyland is untrue to all worlds." J.R.R. Tolkien

Tolkien, author of the Lord of the Rings, wrote those words in a 1937 letter to a friend who had expressed the thought that Tolkien’s stories might be too scary for bedtime reading to the little ones. Pretty clearly, Tolkien was not moved.

I’ve often thought that when we approach psychedelics we are like Bilbo or Frodo, weighing the pros and cons of staying in the comforts of Hobbiton against venturing out into the wide world beyond. With the menacing forest of Mirkwood, the uncanny barrow wights of the Barrow Downs, orcs, Ring Wraiths, and of course Mordor, the epicenter of evil, this was not an easy place for a little hobbit to set out on.

And yet in that world were the beautiful places too — the Last Homely House of the Elves, Galadriel’s Well, Tom Bombadil’s house — and we somehow instinctively know that the lovely places could not be there unless this Light was balanced by a fierce and shuddering Dark. Every soul needs its Dark Night, and that’s what we must pay to reach morning.

Those who take psychedelics must recognise that their journey is a package deal of dark and light, and that there is indeed no safe passage to our own internal fairyland. Frodo did not ask to go to the catacylsm of Mount Doom by bus.

Tolkien’s view of fairyland came from its folk roots, a land of mysterious lights, dangerous enchantments, spells, curses and more than the occasional trickery. People could be spirited away, only to return centuries later, while children might be stolen from their cradles and replaced with fake versions of themselves, or changelings. It was very real to very many people, and it was no joke. You messed with fairyland at your peril.

As we approach the sacred plants, remember how little control we have over our own wild lands. What we are reaching out for may indeed include joy, wisdom, and relief from pain, but the new wisdom can come at the price of hearing the Nazguls’s cry searing through our being and rocking our world to its foundations. Out of that emotional earth tremor you may indeed bring wisdom and insight into your own personal Hobbit Hole, but psychedelics are no short cut to spirituality, or to mental health, and there is no sale season on knowledge.

So if you choose to take a psychedelic, be aware that you may be embarking on far more than hitting an inner reset button or shaking the mental snow globe. It’s about more than sprucing up the neural pathways, it is about serving what is good and true. And if we are to be true to our own inner world — or any other one — we have to recognise the astounding beauty and wisdom that is there. But if you want a safe fairyland with no monsters or dragons — stay home!

Paradise Is Today

There is the story of the old Midwesterner who says he would love to come live in New York, “once they have it finished.” Our personal and collective to-do lists seem to define our lives and they never get cleared, even though we, unlike New York City, will come to completion soon enough. For as long as we chop off its head, the to-do list of modern existence just keeps growing at the tail.

But let’s imagine the day when every task that’s going to be done will be done, and the last item is finally crossed off the very last check list. Then the world will set aside its fears and notions, look at the holy, the wicked, the scared, the scarred, and say in huge relief, “It is finished.” The need for war, struggle, kings, even the need for pretense, protection, status and stature will be gone. There will be nothing to fight for, nothing to prove, or even to lose. We could finally, really stop.

Then, when we can be our simple naked selves, maybe the joy of just existing will, child-like, rise among us, and we will see the things of the world, like trees and clouds, hammers and birds, houses and cars, in all their unvarnished splendor. No more preoccupation with “are we there yet?” no more, “am I near to creating the conditions I need for happiness?” Because Paradise is today.

Speaking my mind on Changing Your Mind

It looks like Michael Pollan's book, How to Change Your Mind, may signal the breakthrough moment where psychedelics hit our mainstream culture, and then stay there. Momentum has been building over the past number of years, as the Johns Hopkins and NYU studies of have brought psychedelics into the health section of newspapers and out of the crime blotter. Yes it's been a long strange trip, but at this point is it in danger of becoming a predictable one?

Some people in the psychedelic community have expressed the thought that it's a shame that an outsider, previously naive to psychedelics, should be the one to usher them into the popular awareness. There are so many other people who actually knew what they are talking about before they started writing their book. Personally I'm fine with the notion that Pollan's main credential is his 'beginner's mind' in this area, and he certainly did a hell of a job researching his material and making it accessible to regular people who will not give you a knowing wink if you say 'kambo' or '5MeO."

I was there in the sixties, dutifully not remembering very much, but even at the time Timothy Leary's "Turn on, tune in and drop out" sounded massively hokey and not likely to win over my super uptight aunties and uncles. More relevant to what's going on today is Jules Evans' "Turn on, tune in and sell out," in a piece he wrote for www.aeon.com. As we stand at this tipping point of psychedelics becoming genuinely accepted, the risks of acceptance in a world of rules, regulations and commerce have to be weighed, and I'm not sure Pollan does a good job of that.

Let's take a look at another time this happened. In the 1820s the Quakers, according to John Whittaker in his brilliant book Mad in America, created a way to take care of the mentally ill members of their community. They brought them to little cottages where they were dressed in Sunday best clothes, invited to drink tea and sit properly, and were always treated with dignity and kindness. When they started raving or talking to people who weren't there, the conversation was politely brought back to something nice to talk about. And after a while, the people got better, and went on with their lives. The Quakers called these places away from the stress of life asylums. The medical establishment of the time could not deny the efficacy of the model, so they professionalized it, gradually evolving asylums into a total institution horror show of electric shock therapy, Thorazine and shuffling lost souls. We do have the capacity of turning the good into the bad.

Today's psychedelic cottage industry is one of shamans, would-be shamans, white coats, professional sitters, and decidedly unprofessional ones. Once psychedelics become even quasi-legal, the floodgates will open and the forces of medicalization, bureaucratization and monetization will bear down on us full force. Now is the time to watch out, as various commercial enterprises are already preparing the future for us. Having conquered and tamed the external wildernesses, the internal wild lands may be the next for the chopping block. Some will say that the spirit realms are way too enormous for us to ruin, but we humans have developed a remarkable capacity to get things twisted in almost any dimension.

Psychedelics are, or can be at least, a doorway to a land of wonder and revelation. I'm not confident that in the hands of the medical bureaucracy and the commercial establishment they will stay unblemished. The deeper genius of psychedelics is their ability to totally undermine materialism and comfortable categories by blasting us into ridiculously remote realities. The medical model and the commercial model will never tolerate that. They will find a way to restrict, contain and sanitize. Exactly how, I don't know, but no system will deliberately destroy itself, it would rather consume and digest the systems around it. 

The model I like best is the one quietly in use in underground treatment right now, where the sitter makes the environment as home-like as possible (like doing it in someone's home for instance) and then be the one to gladly hold space. Being present, not promoting your own ideas and theories, and seeing to the every need one someone who is quietly tripping behind an eye mask is a demanding task and it goes on for six or seven hours. It's probably not the cup of tea of psychologists bent on fixing symptoms and having clever insights.

In the sixties psychedelics were the tool of cultural revolution. That revolution was followed by a tsunami of a backlash that was in no way the fault of the medicines. Today we have finally gotten over ourselves and are ready to reapproach. I understand why today's researchers take great care not to wear beads and sandals, but as the time comes when psychedelics become as ubiquitous as vacuum cleaners, I hope we summon the wisdom and fortitude to let them do their transformation on us without the process being damaged. Rather than fixing up the emotionally walking wounded so they can return to their jobs in Big Data etc., I hope we can allow them to do their real business of reminding us to wonder why and who the hell we are. 

Maria Sabina, the Mazateca woman who inadvertently introduced the West to psilocybin mushrooms and died in extreme poverty said, "From the moment the foreigners arrived to search for God, the saint children (mushrooms) lost their purity. They lost their force; the foreigners spoiled them. From now on they won't be any good, there is no remedy for it." I hope that we still have it in us to find a civil relationship with the saint children, but to do that will take a lot of humility, kindness and diligence. Let's try to do that.