Self-Compassion

Each one of us has a war going on inside between the forces of shame and compassion. Shame, part of our cultural inheritance whatever our culture is it seems, engenders feelings of worthlessness and hopelessness, and as the psychologist Christopher Germer says, you feel guilty because of what you have done, you feel shame because of what you are (or have been told you are). We have been given that feeling as children by adults who let us know how bad we are, whether that’s bad because we don’t share nicely, bad because we don’t do our homework, or bad at tying our shoes. And in case we might escape from this personal vortex, institutions like school, home, and sports continue the pressure to be a winner not a loser all the way into adulthood. Religion reminds us that we are sinful sinners who have sinned, while our jobs can’t resist co-opting shame as a way of keeping us quiet and in line. Shame is the main pollutant in the air we breathe. We’ve been told that hurt people hurt people but also, shamed people shame people. It’s the vehicle our automatic selves relate through.

 When I have no sense of okayness about myself I start developing mental health ‘disorders’ like anxiety, anger, depression, addiction and so on. There’s nothing ordered about it, and shame dissolves away the essential faith I have in myself. The being who believes itself unworthy in its core remains unworthy in all settings and circumstances, and cannot be redeemed by hard evidence to the contrary. At that point the only tools I have to deal with it are distraction from, compensation for, and the assuaging of these impossible feelings. Only to the extent that I can dissolve the shame that dissolves me, can I go to the world and dare to be an actor in it. Then I am free to be, without the usual propaganda.

 The magic pill, the antidote to this poison, is self-compassion. In sending self-compassion to the young parts of us that received the original wound, we become the comforter and loving witness they never had at the time when they were damaged. When there is compassion, shame has to go; and when there is a lot of shame there is a shortage of compassion. So it’s a good idea to send that compassion to yourself, even if you don’t fully believe it, even if you don’t believe in it the slightest little bit. Because this is not a belief system, it’s a let’s suppose system. In the spirit of build it and they will come, say the words, and the feeling eventually will penetrate through and through until it reaches our own lost children, deep down inside. Sometimes at night when I dream, the part of me that is covered in shame falls asleep, and then for moments the world comes alive, and wonderful adventures are possible. Our potential is alive for as long as we are.

 And the same is true for psychedelics. When/if that young part of us receives what we call divine love it can know, not believe, that all is right with the world, that “all will be well.” That is the reset humanity has been waiting for. So often though, after the impact of the drug has worn off, in the days and weeks that follow, we return to the prison cell of shame, hopelessly recalling what it had been like to dance outside in the sunshine. Then our only good recourse is to renew the words of self-compassion – you are loved, you are worthy – filing away at the prison bars of this cage with the one true weapon we have. The day in the sunshine was not a release but a precursor, a promise of what can be.

 When I don’t know which part of me should be in charge or what I should do next, when I am in a state of confusion I can, as a default, send self-compassion to all those who have sinned in my particular shame vortex. This shame in me is a fractal image of the entire fuck-up of the Western world, and it is on me to fix it, in my particular little corner. When I care about all things, then all things come under my care; compassion is the one true star of the north, around which all other objects spin. Fixing my eyes and my heart on that, a lot can be done in fractal me. It’s infinitely better to follow compassion than to spin round the black hole of shame, trying to assuage its cruel demands or to distract myself from them. From that voided centre the best I can do is suppress shame and push it down, knowing that like a cork in a pond, it keeps on bobbing back up again. The action of love, on the other hand, is to erode shame into its constituent parts. Hard as its surface seems to be, shame is in fact biodegradable.  

 All your childhood secrets are now locked away behind the walls of adult performance. The performance is really the sound of a little puppy yelping, “Love me! Love me!” translated of course into acceptable terms such as, “See how mighty I am, how cute I am, how natural I am…friendly, efficient, clever, fascinating…acceptable in whatever way you want to contrive for me!” But the real wish is for someone to say, “Relax, you are loved. All is well.” The thicker the wall of adult performance, the stronger and deeper was our sin-based conditioning. But all walls develop fissures in time, and in those fissures we can place, not destruction, but self-compassion, the urge to be sorry for our young selves, our non-believing selves, and our unworthy selves, so they can unfreeze and come back to life. That doesn’t usually happen fast, but we can make moment by moment choices to bring in the element of self-compassion. Even when we don’t believe it ourselves, we can still use self-compassionate words and send down the message, plumbing into our lower depths, like a coin dropped into the sink hole of a cave. Who knows who it may reach. Our fate can depart the realm of automatic shame-making and enter a different realness. Freedom can be birthed into our hands and we can receive it as we might a new-born child, chanting its love to the world.

 May all things be well

May all beings be filled with joy

May all beings be peaceful and at ease

May we all be free from suffering.

May love fill everything

May love cover and uncover everything

May love find us all.

 May the impulse of life fulfill itself

May the truest, deepest desire be fulfilled

May all things be bathed in love.

May I love and accept the many parts of me

As they were, as they are

And as they will be.

Let us walk in beauty.

Thor Among the Giants. Part VI: The Omega Point

Regular God is such a nut. He made everything, he knows everything, he sees everything, but he spends most of his time acting the part of a cosmic policeman, patrolling the humanity beat, bullying us into good behavior with outrageous threats of eternal damnation and torment. You’d think divinity would find something more exciting to do, or would at least have made us better people if he was so intent on high standards. It’s this God, I believe, that Frederick Nietzsche in 1882 declared was dead, though to be fair to organized religion, it seems that Regular God has well outlasted the old philosopher.  

Teilhard de Chardin’s version of divinity is far more plausible. His God is endlessly evolving, or as Henri Bergson put it, is in a state of “a perpetual becoming.” Not for Teilhard is the clockmaker who once upon a time set all things in motion and now sits back to admire his workmanship; to Teilhard the creation is an ongoing process that continues to unfold, and our own creativity is a part of it. Teilhard calls the epicenter of all sacredness the Omega Point, with the idea that if the start of existence was an Alpha point of pure potential then Omega would be the endpoint of actualization. The Omega Point is the “supercentre” of divine energy, simultaneously in and outside of time, or as he puts it, “At the same time that it is the term of the series, it is also outside the series.” It attracts us toward an ecstatic future while at the same time living at the heart of each one of us, the attracted.  

The human project, says Teilhard, is about building the noosphere, the sphere of consciousness around the planet, and once we have evolved a coherent noosphere with its own collective human consciousness, we will move towards uniting with the Omega Point in a fusion of the human with the divine. In this process all of our current preoccupations with materiality, our concerns about sin, our inherited feelings of core worthlessness would dissolve and we would become the ecstasy containers we have always secretly known ourselves to be. We could hardly imagine – or at least Teilhard doesn’t – that at this point the process would then grind to a halt with a Mission Accomplished sign hanging over the galaxies. For Teilhard, we (if we remain recognizably us) would then progress to still more immense unions. This contrasts sharply with the heat death theory of the universe, where, as entropy slowly winds everything down, we all get frozen to the bus stop of time.  

What, Teilhard asks, should we be doing to help move our evolving along?

 Our works? But what in the very interests of life in general is the work of human works if not for each one of us to establish in ourselves an absolutely original centre where the universe is reflected in a unique and inimitable way: precisely our self, our personality? Deeper than all its rays the very focal point of our consciousness is the essential thing for Omega to retrieve if it is to be truly Omega.

                                                                                    The Human Phenomenon

 When “each one of us” establishes “an absolutely original center,” we bring a new uniqueness to the world. Shakespeare is writing more Shakesperean plays, Liszt is playing yet more Lisztian piano, and you and I are cooking our fried eggs in our own “unique and inimitable way.”  My work is to develop more me, your work is to develop more you, so there is more genuine “me-ness” in existence. That’s me as a unique expression of the divine, not me as in “Me Generation.” To use William Blake’s language, we will be developing into our four-fold nature of Eternity, while Herbert Marcuse described it as freeing ourselves from alienation, a disconnection from self and others, and instead becoming at ease with who we are. That surely is exactly what we do when we trip – sorting out who we are and what is important to us, in us. Even the euphoric part of a regular “recreational” drug experience is forwarding humanity’s ecstatic exploration, though this particular euphoria is often condemned as a dead-end of self-indulgence, as if there was something disgraceful about experiencing intense private joy.  

So when all these centres (i.e. people) Teilhard talks about, meet and merge into a coherent noosphere, that noosphere starts to locate itself in relation to a “supercentre” – Omega.

  In every organized whole the parts perfect and fulfill themselves. By failing to grasp this universal law of union, so many kinds of pantheism have led us astray in the worship of a great Whole in which individuals were supposed to become lost like a drop of water, dissolved like a grain of salt in the sea…No, in confluence along the line of their centers, the grains of consciousness do not tend to lose their contours and blend together. On the contrary, they accentuate the depths and incommunicability of their ego. The more together, they become the other, the more they become “themselves.” How could it be otherwise, since they plunge into Omega? Can a centre dissolve? Or rather is it not its own way of dissolving precisely to supercenter itself?

                                                            The Human Phenomenon 

Which makes us think of that old singer of self-songs, Walt Whitman: 

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

                                                            Song of Myself 

And later in the same poem he says: 

I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself. 

All the paradoxes of the normal tripper! 

The more the grains of consciousness (us) melt into the Omega Point, the more they become their true selves, as we like to say. Teilhard illustrates that with the idea of being in love. When you are in love you feel merged with, “at one” with, your lover, and far from that impeding your own identity, it makes you feel all the more complete and alive. When the beloved is the sacred, the plunging into the other and the feeling fully alive are still more profoundly felt. 

O guiding night!

O night more lovely than the dawn!

O night that has united

the Lover with his beloved,

transforming the beloved in her Lover. 

I abandoned and forgot myself,

I abandoned and forgot myself,

Laying my face on my Beloved;

All things ceased; I went out from myself,

Leaving my cares

Forgotten among the lilies.

                                                Saint John of the Cross  Dark Night of the Soul 

Clearly, Saint John’s dark night of the soul was not the dark night of isolation and abandonment we have turned that phrase into. If there is an ego death here at all, it is one where the ego is consummated – not consumed – in the Beloved. Not a passing away of all I thought myself to be, but a non-violent merging that ends in bliss, not destruction. The beautiful fate of the butterfly emerging from the chrysalis: 

 With love of spouse, love of children, love of friends, and to some degree, love of country, we often imagine that we have exhausted the various natural forms of loving. But precisely the most fundamental form of passion is missing from this list, that passion which under the pressure of a universe closing on itself precipitates the elements upon one another in the whole. The passion of cosmic affinity, and as a result the cosmic sense…A love that embraces the entire universe is not only something psychologically possible, it is also the only complete and final way in which we can love.

                                                                                    The Human Phenomenon 

In its first stage, the material stage, evolution was divergent – matter proliferated in complexity from the simplest bacteria and one-celled creatures, to living plants and animals, on to self-conscious beings such as us. With us, Teilhard maintains, evolution has reached a point where it becomes convergent, so that the grains of consciousness – us again – draw together towards the Omega Point in an exultant coming together. The God we merge with is “hyperpersonalized” energy, a sacredness so personal that the closer we approach it the more we realize who we are. It is the same god of whom Meister Eckhart said, “God is nearer to me than I am to myself; he is just as near to wood and stone, but they do not know it.”  It is through this lens of becomingness that we might view our joy and sadness, our accountable and unaccountable depressions – what I see as my disease is part of some larger and more interesting logjam.  

 Rick Doblin of MAPS anticipates a future of “mass mental health”, where psychedelics will sweep through the DSM like a new broom and clear out the depressions, anxieties and addictions that lie in its table of contents. And why shouldn’t this happen if relief of suffering is what we want? But another and more psychedelic goal lurks, one that involves “mass mysticism,” where our current religions, obsessed as they are with sin, social control and killing the heretics and infidels, will be seen to be insufficient. This mass mysticism could help us create a religion of the future, one fit for the upcoming noosphere, where, in Teilhard’s vision, (and ours too, at least when we are tripping) the expansion of love is the whole point of everything, the beginning, middle and the end of the sermon.  

Right you are John, all you do need is love.

 I believe that forming the universal being (species consciousness, Albion, the noosphere) will be based on love, trust and creativity. Love, as Teilhard puts it, is the be-all and end-all of our evolving; trust, through self-trust, our capacity to trust others and our own trustworthiness will produce the level of human connectedness needed to move us into a future of organized coherence; and it is the fun of creativity that makes us the playful, openly intelligent creatures who stay interested in all this evolving. From these three qualities the fronds of our evolution peek out and announce their magic.

 The Omega Point had a brief flash of celebrity when Teilhard was first published in the sixties and seventies, but then, along with a lot of other far-out thinking and art, it was firmly put on the back burner as we resumed politics, money and business as usual. It was Terence Mckenna who a couple of decades later reincarnated the idea as the transcendental object at the end of time:

 Based on 25 years of this stuff and a lot of reading and a lot of head scratching, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is a transcendental object ahead of us in time, you could call it God, you could call it Jesus, you can call it her, you can call it flying saucers from Zata Reticuli…but whatever you call it, it’s an attractor, it lies ahead of us in the future and all of human history is being channeled toward it, pulled toward it, and I see the entire history of the universe as a journey across a landscape of energy and matter toward union with this transcendental object.

                                    Transcendental Object at the End of Time, YouTube          

 Where Teilhard is studious, poetic and dense, McKenna is performatively whacky. Teilhard predicted that the union with Omega could occur one day, some day; McKenna took the theatrical step of naming the date, which unfortunately was…December 21, 2012. Much sadder is that McKenna died long before the day the world didn’t end. No doubt if he had been there to (not) see that end date, he would have given a wry grin, made a goofy joke about the unreliability of aliens, and reminded us that:

 Everything hangs in the balance, because we are between monkeydom and starshiphood, and in the leap across those 25,000 years energies are released, religions are shot off like sparks, philosophies evolve and die, science arises, magic arises, all these things which control power with greater or lesser degrees of ethical constancy. There is, as in the metaphor of dying, the possibility of mucking it up, of aborting the transformation of the species into a hyperspatial entelechy.   

We are now, there can be no doubt, in the final seconds of that crisis…which involves the end of history, the departure from the planet, the triumph over death, and the release of the individual from magic. We are in fact closing distance with the most profound event planetary ecology can encounter, which is the freeing of life from the dark chrysalis of matter, the old metaphor of psyche as butterfly is a species-wide metaphor. We must undergo a metamorphosis in order to survive the momentum of historical forces already in motion.

                                    Transcendental Object at the End of Time, YouTube 

Just as Teilhard speaks about divergence and convergence in our evolving, McKenna describes us as an “unevolving species,” in that we have replaced physical evolution with the far more agile agents of culture and technology. 

Technology is the real skin of our species. Man, correctly seen in the context of the last 500 years, is the extruder of a technological shell. We take in matter that has a low degree of organization, we put it through mental filters and we extrude Lindisfarne gospels, space shuttles, all of these things. This is what we do. We’re like coral animals embedded in a technological reef of extruded psychic objects.  

McKenna develops Teilhard’s beautiful proposition that the divine is “radiating from the heart of matter” by pointing out that nature has something of the divine about it, and we are undoubtedly part of nature, even if we simultaneously glorify and mistreat it: 

We all have a model of history, a model of the future, and we all feel capable of stepping into the shoes of our leaders and discharging that responsibility. Well in order to do that we need to overcome our amnesia about how we got to this place. You see, what science would have you believe and explicitly implies is that we are an aberration. Over here you have nature, the beautiful rain forests, the wonderful coral reefs, the symmetry of the humming bird, the sea urchin, the butterfly; and here you have us grimy, tawdry, polluting, ugly, driven, in disequilibrium, in denial.  

I don’t believe that. I believe that this kind of thinking that breaks humanity away from the rest of nature is the first of the great disempowering myths by which the western mind has enslaved itself, and we are not outside of nature, we are not a runaway toxic process, we are not a mutation, we are in fact that part of nature which has been deputized for a purpose. We are the energy-gathering aspect of the Gaian mind, we are the language-forming capacity of nature herself…The main effect of humans on this planet has been to greatly accelerate the speed at which nature has been able to creatively express herself…  

This is what it’s like when a species prepares to move on to the next dimension. The entire destiny of all life on the planet is tied up in this. We are not acting for ourselves or from ourselves; we happen to be the point species in a transformation that will affect every species on this planet at its conclusion.

                                    Transcendental Object at the End of Time, YouTube 

Like Teilhard, McKenna believes in a purposive universe, one that has things in store for us. Teilhard stuck to his guns, and for all the hard times his Catholic superiors gave him, maintained to the end of his days that Catholicism was the best bet for guiding us into this mystical future, even if he had no compelling reasons why. McKenna’s religion of the future does not come out of any of the old allegiances, but is one based on (primarily psychedelic) visionary experiences. Can we be guided by our trippy visions? Yes, if we are willing to play with them with love, trust and creativity:  

 If you think the universe is mundane, if you think there are no more adventures to be had, I’m telling you, you can turn your living room into the bridge of Magellan’s ship on a long Saturday evening with five grams of psilocybin in silent darkness.  

We are living in the most empowering age in human history, because all of the energy of the ancestors, not only the human ancestors, but our animal, our primate ancestors, all that energy pours into, is focused into this moment. We are the transition generation, we have one foot in matter and one foot in hyperspace, and we can redeem the trust of thousands of years, all of the horror of history can be redeemed if we don’t drop the ball – every pogrom, every instance of racial, sexual or minority persecution can be redeemed if we give the human adventure meaning, and we give it meaning by discovering the totality within ourselves and then exemplifying it for each other. And this dissolves boundaries, strengthens the weak, enlightens the strong, and brings hope to all, and this can only be done if we accept the gifts which nature has offered us.

                                    Transcendental Object at the End of Time, YouTube. 2:53 

The primary gift that nature has offered us is life itself, and we accept that offer by experiencing what is going on for us, moment by moment, in as fine a detail as possible, and it is this gift that is instrumental in guiding/luring us towards Omega. As McKenna puts it, this experience, “the felt moment of immediate experience” is our escape hatch from fractured and pained self-consciousness into the wholeness of being that Blake named as four-fold Eternity:  

It isn’t who you were, or what you were, or who you will be or what you will be, it’s the felt moment of immediate experience, and this has been robbed from us by media, and by our tendency to denigrate ourselves, to see the world in terms of the great ones not here – Aristotle, Madonna, Jesus, whatever your particular bent is. The overcoming of neurosis, of unhappiness, of toxic lifestyles is the felt presence of immediate experience, in the body, in the moment. Psychedelics, sexuality, gastronomy, sport, dance, these are the things that put you in the felt presence of the moment.  

And that’s all you really possess, your memories are eroding away, the futures you anticipate will probably not come to pass, and the real richness is in the moment. It’s not necessarily some kind of be here now feel-good thing, because it doesn’t always feel good, but it always feels, it is a domain of feeling. It’s primary. Language is not primary, ideology is not primary, the propagation of future and past vectors is not primary, what’s primary is the felt presence of experience, and that is the source of love, and that is the source of community.

                                    Transcendental Object at the End of Time, YouTube.  

There is nothing guaranteed about humanity’s happy ending with the Omega/transcendental object, far from it. McKenna says it will only happen “if we don’t drop the ball,” while Teilhard similarly warns it will only take place “if all goes well.” The fossil record shows far more dead-ends and die-offs than floridly successful species, and if we don’t make it, there is plenty of inert matter left lying around for another try. Both thinkers agree that we are poised at an inflection point where we may make the leap into some kind of spiritual hyperspace or just as easily crash and burn ourselves on Spaceship Earth. I hope Exon and Shell are taking note: 

We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it's not easy.

Terence McKenna This World...and Its Double 

Since the death of both of these visionaries, psychedelics have emerged into unexpected respectability, meaning that the cultural powers that be have focused their beady eyes on their potential. If psychedelics are domesticated into becoming a prime tool in the psychological repair shop of late-stage capitalism then, if all does not go well, these revolutionary, anti-materialistic forces will be co-opted into helping one-dimensional humanity stay in its robotic shell.  

Stressed out bankers, coders and sales managers can be whisked away from the industrial fray, treated for their mysterious depressions, anxieties, addictions and manias, have their mystical moment, and then be returned to the corporate battlefields. Real live soldiers can take their MDMA, get over their PTSD, and also return to the fray. Carolyn Chen in Work Pray Code has described how Silicon Valley has already perverted mindfulness practices into becoming a work-based spirituality, supporting the one true god – becoming a more productive worker. Though psychedelics would most naturally be the solvent of society, disintegrating our most embedded prejudices and cherished assumptions, they can easily be twisted into becoming a coagulant, and by becoming respectable, become dangerous. We carry a responsibility to keep psychedelics unpredictable, undomesticated, unmedicalized and uncommodified, so that we may some day be more that way ourselves. 

Self-improvement can go only so far. A persistent depression, an inexplicable anxiety, an embarrassing addiction you cannot control, are all signs that we have not managed to incorporate the whole of Albion or Christ in us, we need more help in what Teilhard calls noogenesis, the creation of a world soul that we can all knowingly partake in. We look for a Christ who synthesizes horror and doubt into new belief – a holy being possessed by wholeness – while a pure Christ has no wholeness to give us. I cannot lop off my arms and hands in order to enter the kingdom of heaven. You have to take all of lousy me for it to be me! 

Grandmother Christ

Fear of Death Christ

Outdoor Christ

Horror Christ

Worm Christ

Christ of our Supreme Laziness,

Eat our sins

And find their nourishment

For your next incarnation.

Until that time

We will hold back terror

With our ridiculous incantations.

Ruined Christ

Dancing Christ

Makeshift Christ

Fake Christ

Dead And Alive Christ

Forgive us our triumphs,

Guide us past the shoals

Of righteousness,

Remember our longing eyes

As we cast you onto the rocks

Of our lockjaw religions.

 What we call ‘mental’ illness is just one of our terrified incantations against the unbearable abyss of truth, as we cling frog-like to the one-dimensional world that William Blake called Ulro. The conventional treatments our society offers can only substitute our stricken posture with congenial disguises, a re-immersion into convention, an amazing makeover of outworn habits. There is no lift-off there. We are not here to scrub our behavioral health clean with bars of mental hygiene soap, we are here in our livid humanity, gazing as best we can upon truth, to further the cause of love. In the words of W.B. Yeats:  

Now that my ladder's gone

I must lie down where all the ladders start

In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

                                                W.B. Yeats

What To Do About Bad Habits

When we are not having enough joy in life, we will make up for it with compulsions and bad habits. If I am feeling active, engaged and alive in the world, I have no need for doom scrolling, over (or under) eating, repetitive thoughts, getting lost in regrets, getting drunk, gossiping, or whatever else might hit the bad habit spot. When the soul is hungry enough it will find dinner somewhere. If it can’t be good food, then bad food will suffice.

 We often think of self-improvement as picking the no-food option over bad food. It is the squeamish legacy of our (or somebody’s) Puritan ancestors. If I am dieting, I try to force myself into literal and emotional no-food, which seems to do not much more than turn snacking into the most utterly compelling activity in the world; if I am meditating and trying to pay attention to my breath some mission control center in my brain quite firmly decides that daydreaming is just the right thing to do, and even though my meditation teacher tells me to chill and just watch the wonderful cavalcade of my thoughts, I suddenly turn thinking into the Great Satan. Too Bad! I cry, as I try to force the square peg of rationality into the round hole of my actual being.

 If I wasn’t enveloped by my mental or physical bad habit, what would I be doing instead? In order to put the bad nourishment of the bad habit to one side, I need the good food of something else. This is where it gets tricky. I know what that good food might be – something like a fulfilling 6:00am yoga class, the exhilaration of a morning swim, that long sought-after regular meditation practice, joining a book club and then reading the book, the options are endless, but I often torture myself more than ever by feeling guilty for ditching the class and rolling over for another hour’s sleep.

 The art of life, let’s call it, is to find the particular yoga class, book, etc. that I find genuinely compelling. Then what we call self-discipline becomes relatively easy, and the good food becomes an attractor in my life, a refuge as they call it, not something I make myself do. That requires a more a diligent than usual search for what hits my particular spot. Wild swimming in a pristine mountain lake does not do it for me, though for someone else it may be just the ticket.

 Keeping the food metaphor going, would you go on a dumpster dive if you were literally starving? Most probably. I remember a news story of two men in Damascus during the war there, and they had not eaten for several days after government bombing of their part of town. As they searched through the rubble of bombed-out houses they found a rather ancient cake that was beginning to go mouldy. One of the men described this sudden, unexpected sweetness after weeks of survival food as the most delicious meal he ever had in his life.

 Certainly, in the spiritual and emotional realms we are all eating the mouldy cake of repetitive thought patterns, self-blaming, other-blaming, addictive consuming and so on, almost every minute of every day. They have their own sweetness. To resist this cake, you may have noticed, is virtually impossible. You best do it by finding something more enticing. Who would dumpster dive if they were offered a table at the restaurant? Our mission is to find good spirit restaurants that work for us. As a foodie obsesses over the best menus in town, we can become “life-ies,” connoisseurs of life chasing after the most nourishing, community-making, fulfilling activities we can find. Compulsions fill the spiritual vacuums of our life; fun drives out compulsion.   

Psychedelics can be a very good restaurant, giving us a ‘taste’ of wholeness. Whole people don’t do fractured things, and for a few hours or moments to be whole is a delight. After the medicine I can gather myself, gradually, gradually over time, getting to know fractured me more intimately, and so helping him/her/them, as we say, “heal.” Heal suggests there was disease or injury while wholeness suggests a reorganizing or an addition of missing parts. I think here reorganizing is the most useful word. Something gets fractured, shattered, and seeing how the jigsaw puzzle will look when it is back together is invaluable. But we do not just become whole for ourselves, as ourselves alone we are a small portion of another fragmented thing; we become whole as a devotional duty to the divine.

Emmanuel Kant and Demon Possession

Psychedelics have suddenly become the new cure for mental health issues, mainly because they give us that most novel of all experiences: a spiritual one. The idea is that a spiritual experience will brings us to a place of peace and wellbeing, which in turn will kickstart that mood reset we have all been looking for. But the variety of spiritual experience includes a lot more than gazing at beautiful sunsets or sitting at the bottom of a waterfall; you can also have encounters with extra-terrestrials, demons, hellscapes, angels, and all manner of other spirit beings that were not on your mind when you carefully set your intentions. If your worldview is basically a secular one, having these encounters can seriously rock that world and leave you feeling far less stable than when you started out. Wrestling with demons that can’t exist must be the one worry your poor anxious brain never considered.

 And when the trip is over, that world of yours may remain rocked for some while. Was my spiritual encounter an initiation into a huger and more bizarre universe than I ever imagined, or was it some drug-addled madness I need to forget about as quickly as possible? Oddly enough, I am going to argue that this apparently irreducible question of ‘which real is the real real?’ is simply the wrong one. But to get the right question we need the help of a new philosophy, or at least a wider and more deliberate one, and for that we go to Emmanuel Kant (1724-1804), the Western world’s philosopher in chief.

Kant separated out our belief about what’s real, which is based on our sense impressions, from what he called “the thing in itself,” the something or other out there that we name as the world. The thing in itself, according to Kant, is by definition unknowable. We are like people in the matrix who have not yet been offered the blue pill or the red pill, naively mistaking the information of our sense impressions for direct knowledge of the thing in itself. Even if you then take the red pill and see that you are sitting in a vat being mind-controlled by evil aliens, how can you know that this world is not also a simulation that yet more powerful, commercial strength red pills will sweep aside, and so on ad infinitum? My wrestling match with a spirit being might have been just as I felt it, or it could have been an image conjured up by an exotic Jungian backwater of my brain, or it may have been a psychotic symptom curable by excellent prescribed pharmaceuticals, or something else entirely that I can’t even imagine. Perhaps the last. Kant’s point is that what I receive from my senses,that carefully crafted worldview of mine, are all inventions about a “thing in itself” that cannot in any way be known.

There is much in today’s science that agrees with Kant. Subatomic particles, rather than being reliably something, have properties that only come into being when someone is taking the time to measure them; the thing in itself remains a mystery. Matter, even the densest, hardest rock is mostly empty space with teeny tiny particles zooming around in it, and those particles may in fact be actual stuff or they it may be slightly tweaked light waves. Our eyes, which we take to be pretty reliable reporters of what is going on out there, only perceive three basic colours, while birds for instance also see ultraviolet light, meaning they can see a plethora of non-primary colours that we can’t perceive. So, when William Blake said that a fool sees not the same tree as a wise man, he could have added that even a wise man sees not the same tree as a humble sparrow. And after that there’s also string theory, which maintains that multiverses are perfectly plausible, in fact likely, and that there are eleven dimensions in all, the extra ones somehow tucked in this 3-D world of ours in unexpected little pockets that no-one can quite find.  

Neuroscience also agrees that we don’t know what we think we know. Perception is called “a controlled hallucination”, a hastily constructed sketch that the 86 billion neurons of our brain create while sitting in the darkness of the skull, trying to make sense, not of the world, but of the electric signals that are constantly being fed to it by sense organs. It would be massively wasteful for this brain to fiddle around with concepts like ultimate reality or truth, when its real remit is to create internal representations that are accurate enough to get us to survive through the afternoon. All the rest is self-promoting propaganda, and that right there is the brain’s dirtiest of dirty little secret.

So, when this slightly lazy but massively efficient brain of ours is confronted with a demon possession or with a beatific vision, it has to quickly make sense of something it has not encountered before. Let’s say it starts out on a trip with the rationalist template this culture provides it, but that all gets blown away with our very first chat with an extra-terrestrial centipede spirit-child. After the rationalist constructs have been shredded, the remaining cultural frame that we have is the ancient one of spirit beings, angels, demons, etc. The brain fulfills its job of making order from chaos, and apparently comes to the executive decision that it’s better to create an unpleasant world, even a previously impossible one, than to offer no world at all. We are story-telling creatures who will make sense of our experience, and while it’s happening we believe whatever the brain tells us about it, just as you believe you are flying when you have a flying dream, or that right now you are reading someone’s blog.

So, if no-one, from the pope to Christopher Hitchens, knows what’s really going on, then trying to figure out if this angel or if this demon is real, is pointless. We can no more discover the spiritual “thing in itself” than we can the physical one, and we have been stressing over the wrong question. The right question is: what’s next? Whatever the reality may have been, you have to figure out what the demon-free life is going to be like, and how you are going to keep yourself from inadvertently inviting the little monster back inside you. As Saint Matthew said, if the expelled demon goes back to his “house,” (i.e., you) and finds it “empty, swept and garnished,” he will invite “seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first state.” Turning to a more cheerful note, if you spent hours of unalloyed blissful adoration in a palpably real paradise, how do you infuse that utter bliss into your regular humdrum day-to-day existence?  

Let’s start with the demons. Whether the mythology I adopt is demon-based or psychological, I will probably feel “lightened” by my exorcism or whatever it was, and want to keep it that way. On the personal level you could say that demons get in through our weak spots, through windows left open or doors left ajar. These weak spots are things like negative patterns of thought, fears and aversions, and insufficiencies in our capacity to respond to others and live a full and creative life. Now that we have been purged of the bad guy, it’s our job to fix up those thought patterns, fears and insufficiencies. We do that with the normal tools of therapy, or whatever self-help gig it is that you most admire.

Where do these weak spots come from though? I believe they comes from negative inheritances in our particular family lines, which themselves come from the larger culture, and finally from us as a species. Human culture is the freight train that bad energy sometimes hops onto and will ride to the end of the line if we let it. Its most favorite caboose is those endless negative thought loops, the shame, the closure, the fear and rage that we are all wrestling with. It strikes me how many of us believe somewhere in our souls that there is something about us that makes us uniquely worthless, that I am the excruciatingly obvious odd one out in the room, that I am a child inside while everyone around me is a grown adult. This gets passed on to us through direct trauma and abuse, through parental shortcomings like an inability to speak out or advocate for oneself, and through a general societal silence, such as the unwritten rule that we don’t suddenly stop and stare at the beautiful sky while walking down the street, or uninhibitedly hug a tree or lamppost if we feel like it. This stuff has been going on a long time, and every measure I take to fix it is a blow for humanity and our collective trauma karma.

 And now for the beatific visions. Back in the Middle Ages these were a part of the regular cultural landscape, well understood by everybody. You just needed to check with the local churchman that your vision was not cunningly sent by Satan to deceive you, and after that you were good to go. Then along came the scientific revolution and we all, by and large, became secular. Visions went out of style. All in all that’s a good thing, because we also came to understand the world more accurately, learned how to feed ourselves better, invented the idea of human rights, and no longer think that the lord of the manor is the boss of our lives.

 Today we don’t have to starve in the desert for months or live in a monastery for years, we can pop a pill, have our visionary experience on a Saturday afternoon, go home in an Uber, and make it to for work on Monday. This is a good thing, because now we are on the brink of combining the commonsense fairness of the secular worldview with the richness of the visionary one. But since we left behind the Mediaeval inner mapping, we don’t have yet have a new cultural framework to replace it. Until that framework is built our visions will more easily slip away from us and six months after my union with God I may totally be back in the emotional doldrums, and that ego which so happily conspired its own demise while tripping is now happily up and running again.

 We will build this new cultural framework by giving ourselves a spiritual education. That may (probably should) include meditation or some similar kind of practice, prayer of some sort, and reading the spiritual literature. You don’t get an education without reading. We are very lucky that these days that the spiritual traditions of the entire world are at our fingertips, but oddly perhaps, I personally have grown interested in the mystical traditions of the local culture, the writings of mystics like Julian of Norwich, Meister Eckhart, and from more recent times, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Anyway, there’s plenty to choose from, especially since there’s also the literature of near-death experiences, spiritual emergence, circular economy, and how to save the planet.

 These two things – putting the spiritual house in order so that the goblins don’t get in, and giving yourself a spiritual education – are what’s needed for the next step in human growth, what Teilhard de Chardin described as the development of planetary mind. Right now our planetary mind is still a pretty grumpy one. In the YouTube video The Most Important Moment of a Person’s Lifetime a woman named Reinee Pasarow describes how her near-death encounter led to a new perspective on the importance of simple human kindness:

 I moved into a sea of light. It was as if every atom, every molecule in this room had been electrified with love, with very creative and powerful love…this love I realised was the greatest force of all things, and it is as if every atom were singing and was welcoming me and was full of love. And yet I was more and more attracted to what I perceived to be the centre of this sea of light, it’s as if in the centre of this sea there was a sun, and my heart was irresistibly attracted to that…and in a tremendous and magnificent instant I entered this centre of the sea of light, this sun in the sea, the light,  the heart of the light, and it was as if I were devastated, it was as if I were, you know, just spider silk in the solar wind, completely devasted by bliss, and by rapture and by ecstasy…

 And it seemed as if I was in that non-place, that place of non-being as an individual forever, and then yet again my consciousness at some point was gathered back together as an individual, like sands upon a shore into an individual form, and I was accompanied now by a presence as opposed to simply being devastated by this holy storm of light, and I was called to recount for the deeds of my life…What was more important than just the choices I made were my motivations and my intent and the state of my heart in doing any single action.

 And I realised…how every action one takes is like a stone cast in the water, and if it’s loving, that stone that’s cast on the water goes out and touches the first person it’s intended for, and then it touches another person, and then it touches another person, because that person interacts with other people, and so on and so on, and every action has a reverberating effect on every single one of us on the face of this planet. So if I had committed a loving action, it was like love upon love, upon love, upon light and…if I had committed a truly pure and loving action it had reverberated throughout the stuff of every individual on the planet. And I felt that action reverberating through them and through myself, and I felt it in a way that is beyond what we can even feel ourselves on this plane of existence…so the significance of one’s actions totally changed.

 It looks like Pasarow’s realizations about loving kindness have moved from something that happened in her near-death experience into a “totally changed” understanding of regular life. She now has a deeper take on life than the culturally received one she was born into, and sees that apparently small actions carry huge significance when they come from a “pure and loving” heart. These actions reverberate far beyond what we can perceive, into “the stuff of every individual on the planet,” and this kind of self-transformation happens not as a strategy for improved mental health, but as a contribution we can make to the work of the world.

 Like the question of what’s real in the psychedelic, we don’t have to agonize over whether Pasarow authentically entered dimensions beyond time and space, that’s a “thing in itself” we will never know. Getting your mythology right is not a matter of nailing down what’s true, it is about making productive meaning. We have the freedom to pick from the smorgasbord of metaphors at our disposal, but whatever we light upon, our efforts are all about the further development of love. Love is at the heart of all our many and various worldviews, and how much we can love will be the measure of who we are. So, if we have found ourselves wrestling with demons or oddly at home singing in the heavenly choir, it is not important because it might improve or hinder our mental health outcomes, it’s important because it might soften our hearts.

Thor Among the Giants: Part V

THE NOOSPHERE

The 20th century paleontologist and spiritual philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin created a mythology that can help us in a different way to William Blake’s system. Where Blake saw the human enterprise as restoring what has been lost, Teilhard saw it more as creating the as-yet uncreated. Teilhard was a Catholic priest who believed in evolution at a time when such ideas were not in vogue with his church, so they sent him from his native France to China and forbade him from lecturing or publishing. Twenty-three years later the exile had clearly backfired, since Teilhard had absorbed Asian philosophy and it was in China that he co-discovered Home Erectus, a vital “missing link” in the chain of human evolution.

 But Teilhard didn’t please his fellow scientists either. Rather than seeing evolution on the usual materialist grounds of random mutations he viewed it as the unfolding of divine love. To him, as matter moves into ever greater complexity, the divine is expressing itself more and more fully and accurately. Our planet started as a rocky sphere with a molten core, out of which evolved a hydrosphere of water, an atmosphere, and eventually a biosphere of organic life. This transition from inorganic to organic was of course a great leap forward, as was the emergence of consciousness and self-reflection from, say, pond weed into us. Up until now, says Teilhard, evolution has been divergent, creating multiple different life forms, but now it has become convergent, as the self-aware spirit, in the form of humans, seeks to connect and cohere towards a planetary mind:

 Are we not experiencing the first symptoms of an assembling of an even higher order, the birth of some kind of unique focal point from the converging fires of millions of elementary focal points scattered over the surface of the thinking earth?

                                                                                    The Human Phenomenon

 This “assembling” is the evolving of a new sphere around us, beyond the geosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere and biosphere, and Teilhard calls this new one the noosphere, from the Greek noos, meaning thought or mind:

 From day to day the human mass is “setting”; it is building itself up; it is weaving around the globe a network of material organization, of communication, and of thought. Submerged as we are in this process and accustomed to regard it as nonphysical, we pay little attention to it. Suppose that we at last come to look at it as we would a crystal or a plant: we immediately realize that, through us, the earth is engaged in adding to its lithosphere, its atmosphere, its biosphere and its other layers, one more envelope – the last and the most remarkable of all. This is the thinking zone, the “noosphere.” Humankind…is indeed the “hominized” earth – we might even say “hominized” nature.

                                                                                    The Human Phenomenon

 The noosphere is not tangible like, for instance, the hydrosphere, but it is perceptible, just as radio waves and light are:

 For an imaginary geologist who might come in the distant future to inspect our fossilized globe, the most astounding of revolutions experienced by the Earth would unequivocally be put at the beginning of what has been so aptly called the Psychozoic Era. And at that very moment, for some Martian capable of analyzing sidereal radiations psychically as much as physically, the primary characteristic of our planet certainly would not seem to be how blue it is with seas or green with forests – but how phosphorescent with thought.

                                                                                    The Human Phenomenon

 From his earliest days as a child the mystic in Teilhard saw, as he recounts it, “the divine radiating from the blazing heart of matter,” something that the thoughtful tripper might relate to with some ease. It is this divine spark which has been driving evolution forward, realizing itself more and more completely as we evolve. Aldous Huxley saw this divine spark in the humblest example of matter when, as he recounts in The Doors of Perception, he looks at the painting “Judith” by Botticelli:

 My attention was arrested and I gazed in fascination, not at the pale neurotic heroine or her attendant, not at the victim’s hairy head or the vernal landscape in the background, but at the purplish silk of Judith’s pleated bodice and long wind-blown skirts.

 This was something I had seen before – seen that very morning, between the flowers and the furniture, when I looked down by chance, and went on passionately staring by choice, at my own crossed legs. Those folds in the trousers – what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity! And the texture of the gray flannel – how rich, how deeply, mysteriously sumptuous! And here they were again, in Botticelli’s picture.

                                                                                    The Doors of Perception

 Cleaned up doors of perception create a different state of being in the perceiver, in this particular case, Aldous. To Teilhard, the insight of the mystic is not that spirit is superior to matter and we should all fly away to God Land, but that spirit is the energized dimension of matter which we have been mulishly disregarding all along. Blake said it too:

 Man has no Body distinct from his Soul, for that called Body is

A portion of the Soul discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets

Of Soul in this age.

                                                The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Given that today you can be in an online chat including people from all the inhabited regions of the earth, it has been natural for some commentators to equate the noosphere with the emergence of the internet. You might at first question that, since so much of the content of our global communication is nonsense, triviality and hate speech, but the fact that we can talk to one another from far and wide has significance for planetary mind. Human civilization does best when we are packed in together, as with the first Mesopotamian city of Ur, while the Renaissance kicked off in the close-knit cultural centers of a few small Italian city states, and the intensity of modern science came when we massed into huge industrial cities. More people talking to more people generates a vital intensity of innovative thinking.

 But Teilhard is saying something more. He suggests that besides exchanging fresh ideas with one another, global connectivity generates a literal planetary mind, of which we individuals are constituent “grains”. Or, as Blake would have it, an awakened Albion is a new consciousness composed of our many consciousnesses, an emergent property of coherently collected individuals. When he rises from his spiritual slumber, Albion’s consciousness will be made from all of us, just as we are made of cells which at an earlier evolutionarily stage were once individual micro-beings. What force is pitching us into this increasing coherence? Teilhard names this the Omega Point, and that’s what we will look at in the next section.   

Thor Among the Giants: Part IV

A Something Lost

Depression is a lamenting that something has been lost; anxiety is fearing that it will become lost, and compulsions/addictions are trying to make up for the fact that it has already been lost. But what’s lost?

 Some traditions call it the garden of Eden, others say it’s our Buddha nature, while others again might argue that it’s personal authenticity or even mental hygiene; we all just know that something very important inexplicably went missing in the mail between me and myself. In this essay we’ve looked at a few models that offer a description of what went awry for the human condition. The chemical imbalance theory of mental health says that what was lost is the proper amount of serotonin in the brain, get that straightened out and you can be happy again. This turns out to be the brainchild of the pharmaceutical industry and just a fable to sell more product.

 The trauma theory holds that our emotional well-being was damaged after devastatingly painful things that happened to us. This certainly is true, but it does restrict our thinking to the personal domain, and with that, just like Thor, we are wrestling with the world-size Midgard Serpent while taking it to be a household cat. Herbert Marcuse broke out of this limitation by showing us that nobody can be at ease with themselves in an alienated society, even one with unprecedented wealth and comfort. We have put ourselves in a candy floss hell of our own making, and only the Great Refusal of no longer participating as compliant consumers can get us out. Marcuse points out that we get our hearts broken not just by the families we come from but by the world we live in.

 William Blake takes it up a notch, from the societal to the cosmic. Blake envisaged humanity as one single person, who he names, in rather inbred English fashion, as Albion. Albion has a problem: he has fallen into spiritual sleep, and each one of us, as an individual cells in Albion’s body, suffers from the self-same ailment as the giant we compose. With our wounds of individual trauma and ancestral inheritance, and the inevitable spiritual doziness of living in an alienated society, we are dissociated from our feelings and from contact with spiritual vision, the Human Imagination. Our doors of perception are a mess. Blake saw this as a “fall,” like the fall of Adam and Eve, but Albion did not fall because he disobeyed the laws of a crabby and pedantic God, his discomfiture came when his dominant reasoning powers began to lord it over his other energies of emotion, sensation and imagination. In the moment of its fall, humanity entered the “one-fold” dimension of Ulro, so strikingly similar to the world of Marcuse’s one-dimensional man.

 In Blake’s longer prophetic works, Albion’s resuscitation  involves a somewhat dizzying host of characters battling it out in various ways, and in the end, he revives into a new heyday of wholeness that will live inside us individually and between us socially. When he is all well, Albion is reunited with his female self who, oddly enough is the city of Jerusalem as well as being his girlfriend. It’s that kind of an epic, and you and I can urge the process of Albion’s awakening along right now, when we lie down with an eye-mask, listening to a playlist, taking a little something for our brain, and sinking into the great unconscious mind.

 Seeing our personal problems from the societal and the cosmic dimensions helps us better understand what’s going on, as we work on healing ourselves and unclogging the doors of perception, not just for us as individuals, but for everybody. We don’t have to feel bad if it turns out to be a bigger job than we first thought. But while Blake saw the spiritual journey as a revival of an Edenic state we once had, another thinker much closer to our time saw it as an evolving into a something that has yet to emerge into existence. That thinker was Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

And now...a Poem

So much of tripping seems to boil down to love — divine love, and love between humans. Being human, our part of this love thing is to get in touch with the divine stuff and spread it out as best we can among ourselves. But there’s a lot of accumulated inertia in the way, from the whirlpool of folly (our own crazy lifestyles, jealousies, attachments) to the valleys of the ghosts (the lives we lead where we fail to pick up the opportunities to love and let it die). The solution comes up in so many trips — let love be, that is let love be it’s own weird self, and follow the trails it wants to go down. Love will always bring surprises.

How does 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 wish for
In the whirlpool of folly
That we struggle to flee.

Down the far wide valleys
Of the moonlight
The bitter and the doleful
Ghosts are howling
For the love they forsook
And allowed to fly free.
If of love
You would be given
Let love be,
Let love be.

When a Veterinary Surgeon is the Best Trip Sitter

Reindeer go wild for those red and white mushrooms, elephants get drunk on naturally fermenting fruits, while apparently some lemurs lick, or nip, toxic millipedes to get a buzz. Have a heart then for this young bear, who went all out on the rhododendrons. Is it fanciful to wonder if the vet used ‘the teddy bears’ picnic’ as part of the play list?
Tripping Bear

Thor Among the Giants: Part III

 When Marcuse wrote One Dimensional Man, he meant that title metaphorically, not, as it were, mathematically. It’s another way of saying that life in Western civilization had become automated, zombie-like, and it sucks to be us. The eighteenth/nineteenth century poet and artist William Blake however, had a vision of humanity that involved distinct dimensions, four of them in fact, and this vision encompassed a mythic roadmap for how to get from an alienated, one-dimensional world like Marcuse’s, into a four-dimensional world of freedom and fullness. We gotta get out of this place said William Blake, and pretty often he did.  

 Literary people don’t have all that much to say about Blake the artists, and art people tend to ignore him as a poet; but we will contrive to ignore both and consider him for his system of thought. Central to Blake’s thinking was the four-fold (i.e., four-dimensional) vision, which comprises of Ulro (the one-fold world), Generation (two-fold), Beulah (three-fold) and Eternity, or Eden (four-fold). That four-fold world is the one most often entered by mystics, saints, madcap poets, and people who took mushrooms 45 minutes ago.

 Now I a fourfold vision see,
And a fourfold vision is given to me;
‘Tis fourfold in my supreme delight
And threefold in soft Beulah’s night
And twofold Always. May God us keep
From Single vision & Newton’s sleep!

                                    Letter to Thomas Butts

 It may seem odd at first that Blake had it in for Isaac Newton, plus some other Enlightenment luminaries of his time like John Locke and Francis Bacon, who after all were the vanguard of the scientific revolution and the birth of liberalism. But for Blake Newton’s sleep is the triumph of reason over vision, it’s the dark side of the Enlightenment, where matter is just whirling lifeless particles, and consciousness is an emergent property of particles that have fortuitously arranged themselves into the shape of a brain. To Blake though, the world is “all alive…where every particle of dust breathes forth its joy,” and this world is animated by the Human Imagination, which is nothing less than the “divine body.” Imagination is the primary reality, and all others are secondary:

 In your own Bosom you bear your Heaven
And Earth, & all you behold, tho it appears Without it is Within
In your Imagination of which this World of Mortality is but a Shadow.
                                                                                    Jerusalem

 One-dimensional Ulro is where Newton would take us – a mechanical, lifeless, monovision realm with landscapes of sand and stone and a thought-world composed of rule books and an unyielding moral law, the harsh machineries of the mind. It’s rock bottom for humanity. Blake describes, for instance, how in Ulro artisans and craftsmen are turned into slaves of complex lifeless wheels turning the cogs of other lifeless wheels whose spiritual outcome is:

To perplex youth in their outgoings and to bind to labours
Of day and night the myriads of Eternity, that they might file
And polish brass and iron hour after hour laborious workmanship
Kept ignorant of the use that they might spend the days of wisdom
In sorrowful drudgery to obtain a scanty pittance of bread
In ignorance to view a small portion and think that All
And call it Demonstration blind to all the simple rules of life
                                                            The Four Zoas

Given “a scanty pittance of bread,” the youth, the workers, suffer not only from physical deprivation, but from the spiritual deprivation of the “small portion” of reality assigned to them in this alienated world. Their life has shrunk into a travesty of humanness by the cold and linear world of proof, disproof and Demonstration, which at the time Blake wrote was in the process of creating the “dark, Satanic mills” of an industrializing society. We create machines, and then our machines recreate us, as in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, where Charlie busily mends the moving cogs of giant machinery as they convey him through the bowels of a massive, dehumanized factory. Or in the darker vision of the automaton-like workers trudging out of the factory in the shift-change scene at the beginning of Metropolis. Such realities can only come as a result of impoverished Imagination:

 To the eyes of a Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun & a bag worn with the use of Money has more beautiful proportions than a Vine filled with Grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way...As a man is So he Sees.

 The two-fold world of Generation is a step up from Ulro, but not by all that much. It has at least organic life in it, but it is the life of what Blake calls “the Vegetative World,” a place, or state of mind, ruled by striving, sex and power, where everything has its opposite or contrary, like male/female, subject/object, predator/prey and so on. All the genes here are selfish ones and, “Life lives upon death & by devouring appetite all things subsist on one another.” It is better than Ulro because at least it has the pulse of life in it, but it does not have that divine spark, Imagination. In the Christian myth though, Generation is where the sacred snuck in and incarnated itself and, as they say, the Word was made flesh.  

 Beulah, the three-fold world, is an odd one. It is a dreamy, soft, paradisical dimension, lit by moonlight and bedecked with flowers where love, especially sensual love, rules – as opposed to the straight up sex of Generation. In Beulah there are people, not just forces, and those people are in relationship with one another, but it is a waystation, a resting spot, between spiritually dead Ulro and the fullness of Eternity. Beulah is where Imagination makes its first appearance in Blake’s schema, and you might be in Beulah when you enjoy a trippy summer’s afternoon with friends, Woodstocking around between trees and bushes.

 Eternity is the place where we fully live our humanness, the destination point for those emerging from the nightmare of one-dimensional existence, This is not the eternity of the Christian heaven where, as a reward for failing to do all the selfish things you wanted to do, you get to be singing forever and ever with your saintly chums. Blake’s Eternity is alive and engaged and has nothing to do with endless duration. Instead of the heavenly party you cannot leave, Blake’s Eternity is outside of time, as these couplets make clear:

 To see the World in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.

 You reach Eternity not through good behavior but through improved perception, as his oft-quoted saying points out: “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is -- infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” A cavern, we could say, composed of the stones of Ulro. But Eternity is a state of total enchantment with creation; as Blake said, “Eternity is in love with the productions of time,” and it was Henry David Thoreau who gave the corollary that: “As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.” The tripping brain can go into a state of such powerful concentration that we may dutifully enter Eternity not only by being exposed to say, sublime music or spectacular scenery, but by perceiving any portion of creation, such as a weed or a pebble.  

 In the alienation model, Marcuse saw escape from the one-dimensional world through what he called the Great Refusal, where we choose to no longer indulge ourselves in the soporific consumer joys that chain us to the current economic (and we might say spiritual) system. Blake had an entirely different way to escape from Ulro. It is not so much a jailbreak as a consummation, where the other three states fold into Eternity – the reasoning faculty of Ulro, the bodily powers in Generation, the mortal love of Beulah, completed by the fire of Imagination in Eternity. It’s a four-fold completeness where the states are in balance and harmonized together, not unlike C.G. Jung’s process of individuation, where the four human faculties of thinking, sensation, feeling and intuition harmonize into one unity he calls Self. Jung’s claim was that these four human qualities correspond to the four elements of Mediaeval thought, and in that system the thinking function = air, sensation = earth, feeling = water and intuition = fire. To Jung the bad science of the Middle Ages turned out to be good psychology, or at least significant archetypal psychology that can be useful for us today.

 The four dimensions of Blake’s system correspond to Jung and to the four elements like this: Ulro = thinking = air; Generation = sensation = earth; Beulah = feeling = water; and Eternity = intuition = fire. As in these other systems, it is when the four things are harmonized into one whole that they find completeness. We may feel this too sometimes while tripping, when we experience the peace beyond all understanding, and we gain a temporary alignment, a true taste of paradise, where everything is “okay” and we don’t need to change a thing. In Eternity those bad boys Locke, Bacon and Newton finally fall in their rightful place, all friends together and counterbalancing the great and fiery poets Milton, Shakespeare, and Chaucer.

 Blake’s personal mythology is complex and sometimes bewildering, but there is simplicity in the fact that his main hero, called Albion, is the person where this harmonizing takes place. Blake was a tad chauvinistic in picking this name, since Albion personifies England and maleness, not something we will all totally identify with. If we forgive him this indiscretion, Albion can stand as a placeholder image for humanity as a whole. Albion, “the Four-fold Man,” is not in very good shape, because he has had a fall from grace rather like Adam and Eve in the Fall from Eden, except that Albion’s Fall has nothing to do with sin, it is a loss of his capacity for visionary experiences. He has divided from his Imagination.  Albion’s fall involves a profound and troubled spiritual slumber that has landed him in the dismal reaches of Ulro. Most of Blake’s prophetic works are about Albion’s fitful, reckless, and often quite violent efforts to wake up. It’s a compelling picture, though not a pretty one:

 I see the Four-fold Man. The Humanity in deadly sleep…
I see the Past, Present and Future, existing all at once
Before me; O Divine Spirit sustain me on thy wings!
That I may awake Albion from his long and cold repose.
For Bacon & Newton sheathed in dismal steel, their terrors hang
Like iron scourges over Albion, Reasonings like vast Serpents
Infold around my limbs, bruising my minute articulations
I turn my eyes to the Schools and Universities of Europe
And there behold the Loom of Locke whose Woof rages dire
Wash’d by the Water-wheels of Newton, black the cloth
In heavy wreathes folds over every nation; cruel Works
Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic
Moving by compulsion each other: not as those in Eden: which
Wheel within Wheel in freedom revolve in harmony & peace.
                                                                        Jerusalem

 Albion, however, has more than just sleep issues to deal with. In his fall from grace, he fractures into different parts, the main ones being his Emanation, his female side, and his Specter, the reasoning self. It is the Specter who is responsible for the “cogs tyrannic”, the churning, lifeless wheels that powered the dark Satanic mills of a rapidly industrializing merrie England. These wheels have hardly relented in the modern age, as they churn out the super-rationalist mindset of mass production, mass bureaucracy, and mass marketing, with a Midas touch for death of the spirit. This perilous circumstance, this cultural “setting,” is where we have no choice but to take our psychedelics and try to get an expansive taste of Eternity. Meanwhile, we risk taking a ride to Ulro, which we will experience as being trapped inside a fractal, or an endless computer game or some other kind of soulless hell region. 

 What, it’s worth asking, is the personal experience of Eternity? In Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov Markel, the older brother of the saintly Father Zossimo lives a life of complete cynicism and dissolution until, when confronted by death at an early age, he suddenly and almost miraculously gets it how vacuous his life has been, and he finds his way into Eternity. This exchange on his sickbed is recalled by Zossimo:

 “Mother don’t weep darling,” he would say, “I’ve long to live yet, long to rejoice with you, and life is glad and joyful”
“Ah dear boy, how can you talk of joy when you lie feverish at night, coughing as though you would tear yourself to pieces.”
“Don’t cry mother,” he would answer, “life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we don’t see it; if we did we should have heaven on earth the next day.”

  Markel says both that paradise is now, and that heaven on earth would be the next day. Why the delay? I think it’s that the tripping, or the ecstatic, brain can move into Eternity right now at this moment, as the doors of perception go through a thorough cleaning; but heaven on earth can only be experienced with other people, and it will take time for us to recognize each other and develop trust. Hence the tomorrow, and when in Jerusalem Blake said to Albion:

 Awake! awake O sleeper of the land of shadows, wake! expand!
I am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine

he was looking towards the collective awakening, not just a private one. We can say that Markel, having found himself in the mutual love divine, is a bit of a spiritual early riser, and he reaches out to his fellow humans in a way they don’t yet understand. Blake’s mission was to let us know that we could all wake up to mutual love, and in Jerusalem he gives us a job description that is not just for him as an artist, but for all of us:

 I rest not from my great task!
To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes
Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought: into Eternity
Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination

The bosom of God is the Human Imagination, and once we realize this, experience it rather, Albion will start to rouse from his sleep. But this heaven is not the perfected heaven of Christianity, any more than being in Eternity stops the passage of time, death and corruption. It is the heaven we see in the little flower, the joy of an Eternity outside of time. Many people over the years have tried to wake up the collective by building Utopian communities which have flourished for a while, but all seem to flounder in the end, not always because there was anything particularly wrong with their ideas, but because there was too much Ulro in the personnel involved, as there inevitably has to be at this point in our evolving. This is perhaps why Marx was wise in saying that he would not try to write recipes for the cook-shops of the future.  

 Soon after that last exchange Markel was told he was expected to die in the next few days. He then said:

 “Why reckon the days? One day is enough for a man to know all happiness. My dear ones, why do we quarrel, try to outshine each other, and keep grudges against each other? Let’s go straight into the garden, walk and play there, love, appreciate, and kiss each other, and glorify life.”

 “Your son cannot last long,” the doctor told my mother, as she accompanied him to the door. “The disease is affecting his brain.”

 The window of his room looked out into the garden, and our garden was a shady one, with old trees in it which were coming into bud. The first birds of spring were flitting in the branches, chirruping and singing at the windows. And looking at them and admiring them, he began suddenly begging their forgiveness too, “Birds of heaven, happy birds, forgive me, for I have sinned against you too.” None of us could understand that at the time, but he shed tears of joy, “Yes,” he said, “there was such a glory of God all about me; birds, trees, meadows, sky, only I lived in shame and dishonoured it all and did not notice the beauty and the glory.”

 We routinely dishonour our literal and imaginal birds and meadows by not seeing them from the eyes of Eternity, and indeed, the consumption-based society we live in has no regard for the sacred or for birds. Thoreau saw that it has no regard even for its inhabitants:

 Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistakes, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them…Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything other than a machine…  The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another so tenderly.
                                                                                                            Walden

 For those of us who do not have spontaneous mystical experiences, adherence to a psychedelic regimen is probably our best ticket to Eternity. Some of us were driven to psychedelics for solutions to what at the outset we called mental health conditions, and it would make sense that the ones more burdened by suffering should be a vanguard for change. No everyone has noticed that this dance we are doing is on hot coals.

 Psychiatry is coalescing around the idea that the peek into paradise can be a tool to alleviate a gamut of mental conditions, from fear of death, to PTSD, to nicotine addiction and so on. But this is like giving CPR to the canary that just keeled over in your coal mine. It’s a refusal to read the cultural warning signs so you can order everyone back to work. When the world bakes into an Ulro garbage heap of toxic waste what will it matter if we in the West have done enough therapy to become “well-adjusted”? The emotional anguish of the individual cells in the body of Albion signals that all is not at all well, not just for too many suffering individuals, but for the culture, with all humanity. When the scope of the problem is restricted to a model of personal mental health issues, of symptoms and intervention, that restricted view pushes humanity back towards spiritual doziness.

 To see things fully we have to shift from a paradigm of mental health disorders, interventions, and relief, and into creating Markel’s heaven on earth. Not that you will find that in the mission statement of most mental health clinics, I’ll admit, but I believe that nevertheless we must get serious about treating one another with kindness, like that tender fruit Thoreau mentioned. We have to take the time to see a tree as a living miracle, not a green thing in the way. “As we are, so we will see,” and if we practice new seeing we will incrementally change who we are.

 When we are burdened by “treatment-resistant” depression or anxiety, we are feeling the pain of being confined to the Imagination-free realms of Ulro and Generation. We don’t so much have mental hygiene deficits, as if we forgot to wash our mental hands, we lack vision, and as the Book of Proverbs says in the Bible, “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” When I get depressed, or I despair, it’s not just me, it is me as part of a people that is perishing, and my struggle is our struggle. Psychedelics have the capacity to help us in a struggle that is not just for our own “wellness goals,” but part of a spiritual imperative to save the people. It’s just that the arena for the struggle is personal experience.

 When Blake says:

 He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in Eternity’s sunrise

 he is pointing out the offramp to the last exit from Ulro. The mental health industry, when it studies psychedelics and remarks on their efficacious effects at a six-month follow-up, it is trying to bind up “the joy” of our experience with logic and Demonstration. The mystical experience is suddenly in vogue today, and when psychiatrists declare it an effective intervention, they are overlooking its volatile nature and trying to trap it in the butterfly net of rational categorization. The mystical experience, by its very nature however, will work to disintegrate the cannon of psychological classification into the glory of Eternity’s sunrise.

 I remember one day, back when dentists were nice enough to give us nitrous oxide, being quite high in a dentist’s chair one day when I realized with a sudden shock that I was being duped. There was no numbing here, this was not a painkiller; it was just that the dance of consciousness had suddenly become so absolutely compelling to my mind that I couldn’t shift my attention back to the pain. I had moved from our usual mode of pain/defense/grab to one of explore/delight/express, and the capacity to focus on pain was just gone. Something similar may happen after a psychedelic journey – the emotional pain is not necessarily gone, but the moments of sheer ecstasy have changed our perspective on it and rendered it more marginal. “Everything has changed and nothing has changed,” we sometimes say after a journey, and in that aftermath, yes we still bring our fragmented selves to a fragmented world, but now we perceive the world and us differently, and the parts of us that were previously troublesome and shameful have now become a worthy object of interest and compassion.

 Culturally, we are not in a place right now where we can expect this heaven-on-earth perspective to remain durable. It slips away, and we forget ourselves until the next visit to Eternity. It’s good to do a practice of some sort not only to keep the fairy dust in our hands for as long as possible, but also to do the long, slow work of bringing that new perspective inside us until, eventually, we may become its spontaneous expression. We all have to find what works for us, and it’s worth trying different things until we find what really suits.

 A practice I like is walking among trees. If I can find a spot quiet enough and tree-ey enough, where I can walk very slowly, then I creep among the trees, as if tracking something. I do my best to pretend that my local park is mine alone and ready to turn itself into a personal fairyland. It’s not much more than a walking meditation really – except that I am not shutting off my surroundings in order to tune into my body, I am tuning into the props and cues around me, known as trees, so I can absorb some of their magic and remember my own. As a kid I used to do this, much more effectively, when I went birds spotting. It was like slowly creeping through my own secret cathedral as I tried, not so successfully, to be so quiet even the wild birds would not notice me.

 Whatever the practice may be, and I hope it will be different for everybody, it requires a shift in identity’s centre of gravity. For me as a child a good deal of my identity naturally drifted towards Eternity/Eden, as did yours, but when we go through the slings and arrows of regular life, we are forced to attend to our ego wounds and ego dangers until we move location to the worried, angry, self-recriminating day-to-day world of pain/defense/grab. And then you wake up one morning and say, “Oh, how strange, I don’t know who I am any more.” Instead of being ugly ducklings that grow into beautiful swans, we have somehow reversed the process, and are in danger of losing the essence of what Mary Oliver called our “one wild and precious life.”

 I believe our personal practice should not be a severe self-discipline but an act of delicately recapturing that wild and precious life. When I sat in that dentist’s chair something sacred was happening, as Eternity was once again falling in love with the productions of time, through the vehicle of one lucky human being. The thing about psychedelics is that they give us hope; it’s not a hope portrayed in MRI scans, where brain circuits “light up” in one way or another, it is the taste of heaven-on-earth that threw Mandel into an ecstasy, because he saw what was possible. It is within us to realize that.  

The Chemical Imbalance Theory Topples Off Its Pedestal

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is known as the therapist’s Bible, perhaps because we worship at the altar of health insurance reimbursements. In any case, the DSM has dictated treatment for the different kinds of human suffering world-wide for many decades. You would expect this domination of Western medicine would have been based on Western scientific research, but it hasn’t. In this talk James Davies shows what happened. He interviewed the main players in the creation of the DSM and he dug into the archival records of their meetings. He reveals that the DSM was made by a bunch of people getting together in a room and deciding by consensus (not research evidence) what seemed a likely mental health condition and what its criteria ought to be. In other words they basically made it up.

Davies goes on to describe how the psychiatric profession has been corrupted by pharmaceutical industry, with payoffs and bribes to promote their particular products, leading to a vast over-prescription of mental health drugs, falsifying of research, and the prescription of drugs with dubious efficacy. He explodes the ‘chemical imbalance’ theory of mental disorders, which maintains that depression is caused by a shortage of serotonin in the brain. This myth has been the backbone of over-prescription for decades.

James Davis

Funnily enough just this week the University College of London came out with a study that shows serotonin levels are no different between depressed people and non-depressed people. One of the lead researchers pointed out in an interview that when anti-depressants help someone that is no proof of a chemical imbalance, since “having a headache does not mean you have a Paracetamol deficiency, or if you are socially anxious at a party that you have an alcohol deficiency.”

Serotonin study

None of this is to say that anti-depressants don’t work, and work well, for some people. But our science has been subsumed under the banner of marketing campaigns and promotions, while the inconvenient truths have been swept under the carpet. The mental health industry has fallen in love with classifying, numbering, and medicalizing. It forgot the fact that we become sad and despairing because of life conditions, trauma, or attachment wounds – not because something went wrong with our brains.  

The Flowering of Love

What I call my personal journey is the accumulated suffering, learning, and meaning-making that come in a lifetime. But why should I think of it as my journey only? If I am ‘part of’ a community, a species, a life-force, then what was distilled in my journey belongs not just to me, but that larger something as well. It’s like being one tiny picture in the much bigger picture of a photomosaic. Finding meaning is not about individual me, making sense of things on my terms, it’s about noticing how I fit into the various bigger pictures of which I am a part.

The biggest of these big pictures is the journey of love, love on its pilgrimage of soul-forming and universe-consummation. Love on a mission. Suffering is not my personal bad luck or bad karma, it is what happens when love does not reach into all the nooks and crannies of our beings. Suffering shows us how far the tide of love has yet to reach. If humanity is not just a concept but an entity with a living heart, then we are the atoms of its body, each with a role to fulfill. If the toes are hurting, the ears will sooner or later hear about it, because in the end the one great thing that all of us must follow, and that we cannot allow to be impeded, is the flow and the flowering of love.  

Dead-End Jobs

In life you probably want to have your heart broken a few times, to suffer disappointments, see a few setbacks that you either overcome or learn to reconcile with, so you can be seasoned into the full flavour of the human sauce. But it’s hard to even imagine a flavouring so complex and profound that it requires us to devise the pain of a soul-crushing job that repeats over and over again into stupefying boredom; the agony of being a child in a world that will nurture your body while it is enraged by the expression of your spirit; of being in a family relationship or a social setting where your personhood is treated as the enemy. Some deprivation and making-do is part of the adventure of life, and demanding that the adventure be adventurous all the time is asking too much, misses the point. There have to be dull bits to every story. But to weary your days away in drudgery is a bitter pill that simply denies life its reason for being there. Why do we hide from our own hearts how awful it is to squander the life force in constructs like a ‘soul-destroying’ job? No one can want that as part of the toxic waste of industry.  
And we who have been the victims of spiritual strangulation then continue the strangulation on our own time, because like those before us and around us, we don’t have a better gameplan. But you can say to yourself (that makeshift self we have been living in and responding to the world with since we left the crucible of childhood), enough! We do not need to be creating the same dilemmas and choosing the same dull options (like complaining and blaming) over and over again. We can breathe, enjoy, and do the be here now thing. It really is a perfectly workable option. We can agree to disagree with ourselves, and we are always allowed to wish for what we want in the face of our foolish self-programming. I can have deliberate conversations with the habitual version of me, the one on automatic, and tell him there is pleasure in the next breath if I just choose to scoop it up. Those conversations can happen whenever I choose, for as long as the listener is there to receive.

Thor Among the Giants: Part II

Poor old Thor, thinking he was doing ordinary tasks, like drinking a tankard of beer or tussling with a little cat, only to find out later that everything was happening on a cosmic scale he was totally unprepared for. And like him, we assume our persistent emotional afflictions are purely personal small-scale stuff when really they are part of a fierce and terrible wailing, reverberating through the centuries from the grief of long-forgotten bones. We have forebears who did not live in happy, rustic villages, but in harsh climates, warm or cold, where survival was touch and go, and one deception or betrayal might mean survival for one family and death for another. Where the rich were owners not just of property but of people, free to dispose of them at their whim or sadistic pleasure. The butchery of humans against humans has been going on a long time now, and the wreckage is all around us and in us.

 Trauma is unavoidable. We live in a world where life maintains itself by destroying itself, where animals eat each other, where cold, hunger and death are part of the deal. But the trauma we humans create in war, in the workplace and the household is totally gratuitous. The long, frozen East European winter is unavoidable, but the siege of Mariupol was a human-made catastrophe, as was World War II, the war in Iraq, etc. And on the smaller, household scale, there is the constant, moment-by-moment uncalled-for violence and micro-violence we do to each other that Leonard Cohen described as:

            The homicidal bitching
           That goes down in every kitchen
            Over who’s to serve
            And who’s to eat.

 The trauma theory of mental health, superior as it is to the “brain dead” chemical imbalance theory that came before it, looks away from the wailing of the bones down the centuries and keeps us in the personal realm of the here and now, today. But you know what happens to those who ignore their own history...It’s not that the trauma theory is in any way wrong, it’s just incomplete. Not only do hurt people hurt people, but self-limited people limit people, who themselves become self-limited people, and so on, involuntarily down the generations. To discover what trauma is part of, what it is transmitting, we have to go cosmic and grapple with the Midgard Serpent of our collective pain.

 To take an example, the average European citizen of the early modern period would likely have been wrestling with an overwhelming sense of guilt and original sin, chastising themselves in even the littlest expression of joy or exuberance, fearing that it will bring them to the gates of Hell and eternal torment. That guilt passes on down to today, quite possibly to someone who has had little contact with the ins and outs of the Christian belief system, but nonetheless carries a conviction that at core there is something wrong with them, that they must work day and night to lift the spell of their unworthiness, and that accolades and praise are, for them empty words. The source of my pain may be in my childhood, but it is also in some seventeenth century preacher inveighing against things like the crime of dancing, or of feasting on the Sabbath. In powerful, if slightly obscure language, William Blake describes the process:

The caterpillar on the leaf
Reminds thee of thy mother’s grief.

 In vain-glory hatcht and nurst,
By double Spectres, self accurst,
My son! my son! thou treatest me
But as I have instructed thee.
On the shadows of the moon
Climbing thro' night's highest noon:
In time's ocean falling drown'd:
In aged ignorance profound,
Holy and cold, I clipp'd the wings
Of all sublunary things,
And in depths of my dungeons
Closed the father and the sons.

The lines, “In aged ignorance profound…” are accompanied by an illustration showing a bespectacled old man, looking rather like God the father, methodically clipping the wings of an angel or cherub with an enormous pair of scissors.

 Those wings are still clipped today, and these personal traumas comes in the societal context of alienation. That is the theory with which we can make sense of our persistent, resistant pain. The idea of alienation was thought up by Hegel, developed by Marx and revived by Herbert Marcuse in the nineteen sixties. Alienation is the problematic estrangement and separation of things that really should belong together, and Marx saw four kinds of alienation: of people from their work, people from one another, from their environment, and finally from themselves. When the bosses treat us as widgets of the workplace, it is hard for us to keep our full humanity intact; when personal relationships are dominated by status, power and keeping up appearances, we struggle to hold on to authenticity; when the planet has descended from being Mother Earth to a resource for widget-making and a dumping ground for the resultant toxins, we lose touch with our own Source; and finally, when all these alienations have taken place, it’s really hard to be a happy bunny we are lost from our own selves, estranged from our own joy and sense of what’s real. Quite a mess.

 Marx’s interest was political, and he saw the core alienation as being alienation from work, since work produces money and money – capital – keeps whoever the current ruling gangsters are in power. He believed that the proletariat – the working classes – would inevitably get sick of being alienated and oppressed all the time, rise up to improve their condition and eventually become rulers of themselves. This ultimate Utopian condition was so far off that to predict its final shape was futile, and he said, “I don’t write recipes for the cook-shops of the future.” But he was confident that capitalism was at its heart an unstable mechanism for human existence and that economic forces that today keep us in a state of unrest would eventually toss us onto the shore of a just and equitable society.  

 Fast forward to the 1960s however, with the Communist countries making a complete hash of the human rights thing, while capitalist countries seemed to be ticking along quite nicely. It was time for a Marxian revamp, and it came in Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man, which did a re-set on alienation as well. Western industrial society, Marcuse said, has made life so comfortable for people, or at least a sufficient number of us, that we have sunk into a soporific stupor of consumer goods and consumable entertainments, no longer feeling an impulse to tear down the system and start anew. As the old song goes,

I’ve got the foreman’s job at last
So stick the red flag up your arse.

 If Marx said we have nothing to lose but our chains, Marcuse observes these chains have not gone away, they have become so softly padded that we barely notice them any more – but they do still restrict us, just as much as in a full-on totalitarian state. According to Marcuse, we are just as totalitarian as anywhere else, but we are controlled not by state-sponsored terror but by this soporific, one-dimensional state we have lulled ourselves into – which makes our system infinitely more effective and stable.

 Our consumerism and our entertainment industry create “false needs” like the need for name brand clothing, cars that go vroom vroom, shows with A-list celebrities, and so on. If Marcuse knew about cell phones, Apple watches, the internet, social media platforms, and smart toasters, his hair would have probably jumped out. All these things, he says, have so co-opted our minds and lulled us into a mental passivity or sleep that if they were suddenly taken away from us cold turkey, we would all go quietly – or perhaps noisily – mad. We are so far away from our real needs that we have no idea what they are, let alone how to fulfill them. And so here we are, trapped in a cotton candy hell, barely able to notice the real situation. Who knows? Maybe Siri has the answer.

 For Marcuse and Marx, the solutions came down to political revolution, but, as we have noticed, regime change generally leads to a new set of stooges taking over and wearing the crown for a while.  More interesting is the spiritual take on alienation. What if the engine of alienation is not the lust for status, sex, political power and lots and lots of money, but spiritual timidity? At a dinner party in 1725 William Blake remarked that Jesus Christ was the one true and only God. Then he added to his fellow dinner guest, “And so am I. And so are you.” Anyone who has taken a psychedelic might follow the overwhelming bigness of what he said. That bigness of who and what we are is far more terrifying than scary ghosts or hairy monsters, and the spiritual destiny that beckons is so intimidating that any person of this world might easily take a raincheck on it and say thanks, but I think I’ll stay in my little closed world a while longer.

 The level of trust that is required from ourselves and from those around us to create, as Eckhart Tolle calls it, a New Earth, is almost shocking and quite frightening. After the great contracture of denying our full selves, it makes sense to amuse ourselves with power, money, and the shiny toys of high status, just to stay safe from the destructive beauty of love. If we cannot step into our fullness, we are compelled to retreat into our smallness, whether that is the traumatized world of homicidal bitching or the candy cotton consumer paradise that tries to cover it over.

 The pinch of alienation gives us a clue to our real situation, as may the fact that we have half the world enslaved or starved in order to fulfill our cotton candy needs, and that we are turning our beautiful planet into a convection oven filled with microplastics. Like having a drinking problem, the next sip is not a big deal, and so on. In the context of this profound collective insanity, it now makes sense to us that our anxieties, depressions and compulsions won’t go away by an act of rationality or of will. Or by having a weekly conversation with a nice person who doesn’t criticize us the way mom and dad used to. The promise of therapy, especially cognitive behavioral therapy, is that we will become the CEO of our own lives and whip that depression into shape. We really think we can outrun Thought or wrestle down Old Age, but no, what we have taken as a personal blight is the reality of the collective situation staring us in the face and refusing to go away.

 What I took to be purely my problem is part of the cosmic problem of humanity trying to wake itself up before it destroys itself. We’re not only traumatized, we are alienated from our own selves. For some of us, the level of disquiet that creates will just be the background radiation of what it means to live in the regular world; but others, whether by accident, fate, or predisposed sensitivity, are more exposed to the full ramifications of the nightmare of modern history, and for them the pain will be persistent and hard to bear. They are the ones who will get a “mental health” diagnosis. In the personal realm they have a disorder; in the collective context they are carrying a larger share of the burden of history. For things to deeply change inside me I need to have a super-sized understanding of what is going on. Otherwise, I will be like Thor, perplexed and enraged that my best efforts are just not good enough.

 The condition we are in today is where our inner lives, with their harsh, unyielding critical voices, their sudden plumets of despair, and their unassuageable cravings, are like a picture of Dorian Grey, growing more and more monstrous in the attic, while the outer appearance of gleaming skyscrapers, sparkly consumer products purveyed by sexy happy people, all organized by celebrity politicians, gives a false version on the outside. Some people think they still have a shot at always living in sexy/happy/celebrity candy land, while others seem to be condemned to fester in the attic. As a collective, we need to face down the portrait of Dorian Grey and more fully humanize ourselves; there are no mental health conditions, there are only spiritual conditions, and we all have an innate capacity to find the beauty behind the mask.

A Pet Peeve

Like everyone else, I have been reading about the scramble that nations have been going through to cut themselves off from Russian oil and Russian gas, in support of Ukraine staying free from cruelty and oppression. In reasonable-sounding voices, national leaders point out that it’s very difficult for a country to change its entire energy base over a few short weeks and months. My pet peeve is that we’ve had fifty years to go from oil and gas to energy sources that don’t eat us while we eat them. That was plenty of warning.  

Here is Walter Cronkite on the first Earth Day, in 1970, with the bright young things of the time bemused and frustrated that their elders could get the science and the morals so badly wrong…and predictably enough, the Boston police force getting the law and the morals badly wrong.

Earth Day

And here, 16 years after that, is Carl Sagan patiently explaining to Congress that we are on course to destroy ourselves, “by the next century.” A Congress where the bulk of the members are fighting for their two-year terms of office.

Carl Sagan

 Then, the plaintive and achingly youthful voice of Neil Young singing, “Look at Mother Nature on the run in the nineteen seventies.”

 Neil Young

And just to cheer us up, here is Leadbelly singing We’re in the Same Boat Brother, with this prophetic last verse: 

Oh, the boiler blew somewhere in Spain
Oh, the keel was smashed in far Ukraine
And the steam poured out from Oregon to Maine
Oh, it took some time for the crew to learn
What is bad for the bow ain't good for the stern
If a hatch takes fire in China Bay
Pearl Harbor's decks gonna blaze away. 

It's same boat, brother
We're in the same boat, brother
And if you shake one end
You're gonna rock the other
It's the same boat, brother.

 Leadbelly

Thor in the Land of the Giants: Part I

Maybe the strangest part of the long strange trip of psychedelics is how seamlessly they have moved from the discotheque to the psychiatrist’s office. No longer just the stoner’s delight, they are now touted as the new cure for anything from the fear of death, to anxiety, to addictions and compulsions, to the famous “treatment resistant” depression. With all the new studies and news releases coming out, our default mode networks must be trembling in their boots. But what makes our depressions, fears and compulsions so resistant in the first place? What’s up with them? After I have done my ten thousand hours of yoga, meditation, and therapy, after I have thrown up from ayahuasca and scarred myself with kambo, how come I am still the same old me, essentially with the same old hang-ups? It seems unfair that the brain, subjected to more pills, therapies and theories than any other human organ, should be so obstinately immune to change. Why can’t the Western World just cheer up?

Paul Simon said it simply enough:

 I’m not the kind of man who tends to socialize
I seem to lean on old familiar ways
And I ain’t no fool for love songs
That whisper in my ears

Still crazy after all these years
Oh, still crazy after all these years.

Now I sit by my window and I watch the cars
I fear I’ll do some damage one fine day
But I would not be convicted
By a jury of my peers

Still crazy after all these years
Oh, still crazy
Still crazy
Still crazy after all these years

 Simon doesn’t ask why he is still crazy, he just notices the unavoidable fact. In therapy, since we are paying money to get better, we do ask why. But some days we might notice that the therapist is also a little crazy, as are the bulk of the other people we know – our friends, family and colleagues. It may even have occurred to us that our bosses are far from immune to the infliction, in fact they may be worse off, as are most world leaders, our thought leaders, and certainly our delightfully scandalous celebrities, we’re all off our rocker in our own special way. Is there anybody still sane after all these years?

 Something weird is going on here, so we have to go to weird places to start figuring it out. In this case the weird start is Thor, Norse god of thunder, lighting, and war. At the end of time, the Norse gods will fight all the giants of the world in one almighty ultimate battle that, like a bar room brawl that wrecks the joint, will destroy Planet Earth. But that Ragnarök as it’s called, is a long way off, and in a lesser-known and more peaceful preview meeting, Thor and his young servant, who has the catchy name of Thjalfi, go to visit the giant Utgard-Loki (no relation to the mean trickster god named Loki) in his castle. Utgard-Loki happens to have a bunch of his giant friends over when Thor arrives, and as guests Thor and Thjalfi are feasted and feted in proper fashion with laughter, music, and of course lots of manly contests.

 In the first contest, Thjalfi, takes on one of the giants in a foot race. Now Thjalfi is known to be the fastest runner in the world, so it is a huge surprise when he is beaten by a country mile by the giant’s champion. Next comes the drinking competition, and Thor exudes confidence over this one because of all things competitive drinking is his strong suit. The giants challenge Thor to empty a flagon of beer in three pulls, explaining that they do this all the time as a warm-up exercise. He sets about his business but to his astonishment, after three tremendous pulls at the drinking horn, the level of the beer has barely gone down a few inches.

 Thor is astonished at this defeat, but the giants say never mind, we’ll give you something easy to do – see the household cat over there, the children here like to pick it up and play with it for fun, so see if you can pick it up too. The cat comes forth, Thor struggles with all his might, but eventually, after an immense contest, he can only raise one of its paws off the ground. Enraged, he dares all the giants to wrestle against him. The giants, being sensitive souls, say it would offend their dignity to take on such feeble opposition, but if he wanted, he could wrestle with the old nurse dozing in the corner. Thor wrestles back and forth with her, but she eventually tosses him to the ground. Thor and Thjalfi are sumptuously feasted by the giants, they have no complaints about that, but by the time they go to bed their feelings of defeat and dejection are, understandably, quite treatment resistant.

 In the morning Utgard-Loki accompanies them out of the castle and onto the plain beyond. Once they are safely outside the castle Utgard-Loki explains to Thor what had really been going on. Thjalfi did not race against a person at all, but against Thought, and no-one can outmatch the speed of thought; the drinking horn that Thor drank from was connected to the ocean, and he drank so hard that the sea level all round the world went down terrifyingly, creating the daily ebb and flow of tides; the household cat was really the Midgard Serpent in disguise. The Midgard Serpent encircles the world, and when Thor lifted the cat’s paw off the ground he nearly dislodged the Serpent from its place, which would have put the whole planet out of kilter; and the old nurse was really Old Age, whom no-one has ever overcome, nor ever will. In a rage, Thor turns with his hammer to mash up Utgard-Loki for his trickery, but too late, giant, castle and all have vanished, and the only thing to be seen was “the spacious and beautiful plain.” Thor goes back home to Asgard a very grumpy god.

 Thor only had to wait till morning to discover the cosmic proportions of his tasks, while we may forever be blaming ourselves for the emotional undertakings we don’t accomplish. When we take on the challenges of life – outrunning our fears, wrestling down our depressions, subduing our bad habits – we may, like Thor, find that lifting even one paw of the pussy cat is far harder than we ever dreamed it could be. The first stop on our journey to see how deep it all goes, where our personal trauma connects with things beyond us, was summed up by Phillip Larkin:

 They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
   They may not mean to, but they do. 
  They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

 But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,   
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

 It was Freud, speaking about the individual life, who said that forgotten memories are not lost, meaning that our memories don’t have to be conscious to bump around inside us and have their full impact on daily life. But this applies to our collective memory too, where our accumulated species pain reverberates through to the present moment. Every country has been a war zone and every ancestral blood line has poignant, wonderful, terrible, tragic stories that have been told, re-told, forgotten, lived and re-lived over and over. These ancient events live on in us through our moods, our habits and the way we treat each other. How many famines, wars and persecutions whisper down to us from tribes whose names we no longer know? The tankard of history goes all the way to the creation of the first pain cell, (Whoever it was thought that one up!) and when we drink from our depression or dive into our compulsions, we are encountering elements on a collective as well as a private scale. We have, all along, been looking at “our” problems through entirely the wrong lens.

The Things We Do and Don't Diagnose

The trouble with the mental health industry is that it is a symptom of the disease it is trying to fix. Part hierarchical bureaucracy and part Linnaean catalogue of cultural artifacts that it calls disorders, mental health tries to reduce the ailments of the human condition to a list of criteria and numbered categories. If an industry could be said to have a memory, the mental health industry has forgotten that a lot of our problems today come from having already been objectified and categorized far too much in our linear worlds, and that you can’t classify feelings and moods the way you might with medical ailments such as Covid or a broken bone. I’m not saying there is no such thing as a mental illness, it’s that the lens through which our culture sees mood issues has some glaringly missing pieces. 

 The standard mental health model starts with the dodgy premise that depression, for instance, is caused by a genetic predisposition that leads some brains to make insufficient amounts of serotonin to keep them topped with happiness. The patient will be told, “you have a chemical imbalance,” to which the patient might think, “ah, well at least I finally know what is going on,” and this is followed by the wonderful news that this imbalance can be redressed through the judicious dispensing of mental health drugs. These drugs, usually the SSRIs, work on neural receptors to keep serotonin, the happy neurotransmitter, around in neural synapses for longer than usual. Except that brains adjust to the superfluity of serotonin over time by reducing the number of all receptors, so that things go back to the previous stasis, and if you try to go off this SSRI, you will have less serotonin and other neurotransmitters in your head than before. Plus, SSRIs don’t work for 40% -60% of people, implying that those folks for sure never had an imbalance in the first place.

 False theories persist when they serve someone’s needs, and here they serve the needs of a profession that wants to give patients a simple, plausible story of how they got sick and how they will get better. The moral at the end of the story is Prozac or one of its near neighbours. And the myth of course suits the needs of the pharmaceutical industry, which makes out like a bandit. Best of all for them, those lacunae, the missing pieces of the puzzle, stay firmly in the shadows.

 Fannie Lou Hamer said that “nobody’s free until everybody’s free,” which is not a new idea. Mikhail Bakunin, in the middle of the 19th century said, “I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free. The freedom of other men, far from negating or limiting my freedom, is, on the contrary, its necessary premise and confirmation.” It is a catchy idea, and since the “I” in question might be a quite wealthy or powerful person, how exactly are they not free? Both Hamer and Bakunin were diagnosing an entire society, meaning that the slave owner as well as the slave is in chains, or what William Blake called the “mind-forg’d manacles.” And not wishing to ladle on too many quotes at one time, it was Rousseau who said that “man is born free but everywhere is in chains.” And we can say that this person in mental chains cannot be truly happy, no matter how well their serotonin is getting topped up.    

 A step in the right direction, replacing the defective brain mechanism theory with something that comes from our own lives, is the trauma-informed way of working with people. Trauma-informed theories quite sensibly say that if you have been through a terrible experience it can mark you for life, until you find a way to address it and heal. But the trauma theory soon starts to fray at the edges. Trauma theorists had to quickly distinguish between what they call “big T trauma” and “little-t trauma.” Big T trauma is the kind of event that no-one would give you an argument over as trauma – abuse or some kind of terrible event. Little t trauma is where the fraying begins. It starts off fine – let’s say you have a parent who was cold, neglectful and non-responsive, they can do just as much psychological damage as a parent who exploded with rage and hurt the child in discreet incidents. Big T – a physical attack, little t, night after night of being ignored and made to feel worthless. But where exactly does little t end? Some parents are not so much neglectful, they are working three jobs to keep their kids fed and come home exhausted. Some children are far more sensitive to shortfalls in parenting than others. That means that the same “developmental traumas” affect different people in totally different ways, until you’re not quite sure what the trauma was at all, It’s  just that something happened to a person, perhaps the slow drip, drip, drip of not being treated like a someone who was worth listening to or worthy of serious attention. Bad? Yes. Traumatic – well the word starts to lose its meaning.

 Monty Roberts, in Join Up: Horse Sense for People, describes how a horse, early in life, saw a bright red hat stuck to a bush on a certain trail, got spooked and reared up. Ever after that day, the horse would be skittish around that same spot, even though there was no red hat there any more. I don’t think it would be a useful template for us to say that the horse had a small t trauma, it’s just that horses behave that way, and given that they evolved as prey animals, it’s not irrational of them. Humans, similarly, develop belief systems as children that just seem to stick around and become frozen in time inside us, whether it’s that the world is a safe and wonderful place, or that you can’t trust those bastards out there. Sadly for us, the latter is more often the rule, and though mistrust, fear, loneliness and so on are all too common, they aren’t necessarily the result of what we would sensibly call trauma. They may just be the result of a family that couldn’t be perfect or even near perfect, and was passing on belief systems based of fear, domination and aggrandizement that had been going on for ten thousand years.

 The trauma theory is a step in the right direction, because it places human suffering in the arena of human affairs, our actions and inactions, rather than in our brain chemistry. The brain chemistry theory lets far too much off the hook, even though we do have brains and they are made of chemicals. The vital missing factor here that I have been referring to is alienation.  Herbert Marcuse, a critical theorist who came to fame in the sixties said in his critique of psychology, “No therapeutic argument should hamper the development of a theoretical construction which aims, not at curing individual sickness, but at diagnosing the general disorder.”

 Even the words, “mental health,” show that our theoretical construction of human pain pointedly ignores the “general disorder” of hierarchy, dehumanizing bureaucratic structures, in-groups and out-groups, extraordinary wealth inequity, and the fact that the more machines take over our work, the harder we seem to be working as a result. We are alienated in the work that we do, in our relationships with others, from the natural environment, and even from our own selves. The structures of modern society set huge burdens on the individual. Many of us are suffering deeply and traumatically, from war victims in Somalia and Ukraine to refugees trying to cross into Texas, to victims of mass incarceration. And many of us who have the luck to not be one of them have the hidden existential suffering of a profound sense of living in a world from which the certainty and meaning have been drained.  We are living out our lives of quiet desperation, clinging to the ladder of success, but not sure it’s the right ladder to be on.

 And then along come psychedelics. The mental health industry grabs a hold of them with glee, as the first really new and innovative drugs in 50 years, arriving just at the time when the whole structure of mental health diagnosis was in danger of crumbling, or at least in need of a serious revamp. Psychedelics set the brain awash with serotonin, create a top-ten in a lifetime mystical experience, and also do a brain reset, so we long as they work in the prescribed and hoped-for way. They are, logically enough, conceived of in terms of the current system, its beliefs, its limitations, and its mind-forg’d manacles.

 Let’s do something different with psychedelics than constrain them the same way we have constrained ourselves. Let us use their liberation potential, since liberation is what we need. Psychedelics are the perfect instruments to point out the missing pieces in the mental health model, because they reach out way beyond our normal conceptions into what we may call the world of spirit. They can help us wipe our bones clean of ancestral pains that go back beyond memory; they can open our eyes to what, as alienated people, we are doing to our environment, and hence ourselves; they illustrate to us that all work, every single job in the world should be about healing and nurturing our fellow humans and creatures; they tell us that the habitual and cynical wrongs of the world are an offence to all of us; and they tell us that our destiny is not about getting up that ladder of success but about seeing how deep and profound joys are all around us in the little things. An awful lot depends on red wheelbarrows. The mental health industry would happily transform the individual and leave the society they are nested in unchanged. That cannot be done. As a medicine it would fail. Psychedelics are here to turn the world upside down and maybe this time enough of us are ready to do the somersault.

After The Glow Starts to Go

In this week’s disintegration group we had a conversation about the magic glow that can come after we take the medicine, and for days or weeks fill us with a marvelous hope and a new sense of self.  And then it fades. This fading is especially poignant and painful because the new me felt so wonderful and so right. What, if anything, can we do about it?

 The first thing I notice about the conversation we had on Tuesday was how much all of us took it as a purely personal problem. On reflection, I think it is part personal and part social. If I am singing in a choir where everyone is off tune and is out of time, it’s incredibly hard for one singer to carry on through the cacophony. Or even worse, if everyone else is singing a different song. When we are at work, on the train, in the check-out line, and all the faces and voices around us are tense, tight, competitive, defensive – well let’s at least say not very radiant – it makes it immensely harder to stay on song. And it’s not like you and I are the first ones to have to put up with this, William Blake was moaning about the exact same thing back in 1794:

 I wander every chartered street

Near where the chartered Thames doth flow

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

 In every cry of every man

In every infant’s cry of fear,

In every voice, in every ban

The mind-forged manacles I hear.

 In that sense the weight of history is against us, but I’m also remembering Terence McKenna’s idea of the transcendental object at the end of time, which says we are not just blindly blundering through history, but that beauty has already been reached and hovers there at the end of time, drawing us towards it like a great attractor. For me, the idea of this giant lovely magnet makes things feel less vulnerable and accidental. With psychedelics, when we are lucky, we can have a taste of that beauty and bathe in its glory, a lost birthright and a golden emancipation that some future version of “we” will eventually re/capture. You and I are just tentative steps along the way. 

 This reminds us that though the loss of the glow is painful, the transcendent object has not gone away, my sight of it has. Everything still holds in place, and the transcendent object is still tugging away at humanity, which means me too. In a way we should not be surprised that we return to a low vibration baseline, because as someone said in group, “that’s where I live.” The momentum of a lifetime of bad mental habit and self-limiting beliefs draws me back to my day-to-day worried and tense self, and the rest of the choir – the culture round us – doesn’t do much to help.

 So we can start to put this re-loss of Eden into the context of some kind of longer game. I thought I had a foothold in paradise, in fact I just had afternoon tea there. How then, do we change “where I live,” to somewhere a bit greener? As far as I can see there are two ways of going about that. The first is with the psychedelic or some other powerful experience, where our mental habits and old beliefs, briefly at least, get blown away by an immensely powerful force; and the second is in regular consciousness, where a practice like therapy, meditation and so forth can slowly alter my self-limiting beliefs and habits over time. One experience is explosive, the other is an erosion, and the question we are asking here is how may the explosive experience infiltrate normal life?

 I think it can be done if we bring the contents of the trip (if we were lucky enough to have that kind of trip) to bear on the contents of our everyday brain. We can deliberately recall the sense memory of the moments, the gestures, the actions, the images and breakthroughs that happened during the experience, and consciously call them to mind. Let’s say there was a sound that I made during ceremony that meant something or did something then, I can vocalize that sound again after it’s all over and feel it reverberating through my body. Or maybe it was a gesture I can repeat, an image I can recall, a body sensation to feel into, the way I was breathing, or the whole narrative of the trip. We restore that state of mind by, to whatever degree we can, re-enacting part of it.

 By juxtaposing these startling new impressions against my business-as-usual self, it may help in the dissolution, the disintegration, of the old stuff. As well as the psychedelic being an actual chemical inside my body, the memory of the experience can work like a chemical too, seeping into the systems and assumptions that seems so substantial but are really an accretion of defensiveness over essential me. This imaginary chemical needs to be maintained at a certain level of heat, of conscious attention, to stay viable, and if I don’t bring my mind to it the chemical will becomes inert and its disintegrating potential lost. I can make a practice out of revivifying what went on in ceremony. This may not recapture the high I was on after the high, but it can bring more to bear on the process of becoming the spontaneous, exuberant, less stressed, more kind person that I want to be.

 At a very deep level – where else would it be – we make a daily, hourly choice to retain our messed-up patterns of thought, expectation and belief. The psychedelic experience can reach down to that level and help us fundamentally alter our thinking, but when change happens it’s usually a sample of the change we want, or a template for change, not the whole thing. If as a man I find it hard to cry, I must remember that a thousand generations of men before me have been not crying. The post psychedelic work of re-membering myself means I reach into my own depths with as much of regular me as I can muster and see where I may sit beside my old habits and expose them to the new information from my brush with the divine. If I became a tree or if I bathed in sublime light, that’s not a thing in the past, it is living somewhere inside me, and I may be able to bring the heat of that memory to bear on the old structures that once upon a time were of value to me, or maybe to a forebear. The glue that fastens structures which have waltzed down through the generations can begin to soften and move towards melting point. We who have been traveling so long deserve this much.

With My Hand on This Book, I Diagnose Thee

Everyone sees the world through the eyes of their own culture, which means that no-one sees the world. It is always our creation.

Robert Wolff describes how a group of Western anthropologists devised what they thought was the ultimate culture-free exercise for children: the kids were given paper and pencils and asked to draw “anything, anything at all.” The children in question were Indonesian, and they were completely nonplused by this instruction, and were unable to draw. This carte blanche freedom was absolutely foreign to them, and rather disturbing. Then Wolff changed the instruction and asked them to draw their homes, and they merrily drew, improvised and elaborated on the theme, and once started it was hard for their exuberance to stop. What they needed was a starting point, and Wolff crossed a language barrier of the mind by giving them one.  

My experience then is not just subjective to me, it is subjective to those around me too. I am only partly an individual, and like any other social object, I have been forged in the crucible of education, advertising agencies and politicians’ (i.e. my) lies. I can’t know all the things that have composed me, any more than a blind spot can know the eye that it has activated.

Some cultures are almost more blind spot than they are vision, for instance religion, which can only begin a conversation with do you believe this particular credo, do you eat this diet, will you despise such-and-such a thing or action. Religion is the leprosy of the spirit.

Can we be humble, and at the same time bear being who we are?

Psychotherapy was once an exploration of who we are and now it has become the industry of helping people cheer up and fit in. Can there be a correct diagnosis outside of Diagon Alley? When true magic has gone AWOL, we comfort ourselves with a Linnaeus-like classification system where, by the power of naming, we believe we have conquered. As Prufrock said,

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

Then how should I begin

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

               And how should I presume?

And if I did spit out all those butt-ends, would anything be left of me? Could the unformulated selfness that was here before the world began presume existence in our ordinary atmospheres?

Psychological diagnosis could only work if a new word was thought up for each person’s situation. Like twigs thrown into the fire of life, we all bend and glow in our own unique way, turning under the heated air and revealing the story of all our years. If we have time, we could lean back and admire each other’s brief and glorious consumption by the living flame.

Setting an Intentionless Intention

These days the expected thing to do if you are taking psychedelics is to set an intention. Coming to a psychedelic circle without an intention is a bit like arriving at a potluck supper without a plate of food or a birthday party without a present. Social realities aside, it’s certainly true that it is good to reflect on what you are wishing for in your trip, because, as they say, if you don’t know what you want there is a very good chance you will get it. But should you always come to ceremony with an intention? Are there times when a wishless wish is the better option?

 Some of us are approaching psychedelics as a promising fix for mental health issues, and here the intention appears to be relatively simple: relieve me of this depression, this anxiety, or whatever it is that ails me. But looking at it more closely, that intention is a wish for a negative, for something to not be there. When relieved of this depression or anxiety, what do I actually want for myself? The answer generally brings us into the spiritual realm, and what we want for ourselves is light, peace, love, joy, sense of purpose, something of that ilk.

The best intentions are usually the short ones, since memorizing a paragraph or two while tripping your brains out is just not on. Whittling it down to a few words is a demanding task, or as Thoreau said about writing, it’s not that “the story need be long, but it will take a long while making it short.” Even so, once we have created a firm intention like, “May I find love,” “May my heart open,” something of that nature, we should nevertheless hold it lightly. When the wishes and expectations of my regular self are at a low ebb, then the new information has a better chance of coming in. In fact, if this is a journey of radical self-discovery, the most important parts almost have to show up in terms we can’t yet grasp.

By taking psychedelics we are showing a certain readiness to lose what is most dear and familiar to us and see that it was just a habit, a construct. If not, we probably should have done some other kind of drug. In East Coker, the second part of his extended poem, Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot, a poet who was not too big on drugs at all, gives an account of that liminal state where life has called the bluff of the ego and all its machinations. Like a person on a trip, Eliot is left dangling between terror and revelation as he wonders what is real about himself:

 I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—

Eliot wrote this while he was living in London during World War II and working at night as a fire warden during the Blitz. The world that was threatened was not just his own personal spiritual domain, but a whole civilization. He lived in a moment when there was a very real possibility that, as Shakespeare put it, our revels might soon be ended and we would turn out to be such stuff as dreams are made of. Whether the threat is personal, societal, or both at the same time, what is there to wish for when the world turns upside down and nothing you thought was solid is solid? What intention should you set then? Luckily, Eliot pops up with the answer:

 I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought

Something not yet imaginable wants to manifest, and I can help prepare the way by saying to my soul, be still. It is an intentionless kind of an intention where the most useful thing is to quiet ourselves and wait, to let go, as best we may, of all the usual equipment we have stored to get us through the trials of life and allow our house to be empty. The faith is in the waiting, not in the believing, it is an act of faith to sit with ourselves and yet be still. We can reach beyond the self that got us into this mess in the first place, the one who mistook the stage props of life for real hills, trees and distant panoramas, and say, in the words of W. B. Yeats,

Players and painted stage took all my love

And not the things that they were emblems of.

 Even our sense of the divine has to be let go of, since the God of my understanding is just that: something of my understanding, a painted stage that can be rolled away in the darkness. This leads us to a via negativa, the road of negation, where words start to double up on us and the entrance way into, let’s call it another dimension, is composed of absurdity, paradox, and the indigestible:  

 To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

 These are not koans to be figured out and overcome, but bitter rules of life that can destroy us. The self who can survive in this new world is one we can barely conceive of, and it might be said that only when we don’t know whether we are being born or dying is when we can be born. Like all birth and death, it will, in any case, eventually have its way:

 So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.

The Knickerbocker Glory of the Human Condition

Long ago, when I was a kid growing up in England, the knickerbocker glory was the icon of supreme ice-cream deliciousness. The only thing that might have surpassed this fame was its legendary expensiveness, which is why I only got one per year, while on holiday, at the seaside. Not so well known, is that the knickerbocker glory is also a very good illustration of the relationship between the human condition and the tripping brain – but first, what is this knickerbocker glory?

 Champagne comes in a champagne flute, brandy comes in a brandy glass, and likewise the knickerbocker glory comes in its own special knickerbocker glory glass – very tall, wide at the top and tapering to narrow at the bottom.  In the bottom portion is poured a brightly coloured fruit syrup, such as strawberry or lime. Above that comes another syrup of contrasting colour, perhaps pineapple or blackcurrent, and on and on up the glass they go in a festival of colours, each syrup forming a discrete and separated layer, like sedimentary rocks. Then as the glass widens come more layers – now of different flavoured ice creams, meringue, and sometimes even cake. At the very top, perching high above the rim of the glass, sits a huge blob of whipped cream, with wafers sticking up, all of it crowned with a maraschino cherry. Genius!

 Here is the modern version of the knickerbocker glory, which to my mind is just a cheap knock-off, so to do it full justice imagine six or seven more layers. The important part though, and the reason this picture is here, is for you to notice how distinct and separated each layer is from the next:   

 (My apologies here, you will have to cut and paste to see these wonderful images, it is beyond my powers to find a way to dump them in to the website.)

https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/330873903863728866/

AND:

https://www.theemporiumdirect.co.uk/the-original-knickerbocker-glory-glass-10oz-28cl.html

 And how exactly is this a fitting symbol for life, the universe and the tripping mind? Well, the whipped cream at the top is Me-Central, the ego, taking itself to be the ruler of all below, silly thing. Underneath it come all the other layers of our humanness, each with its own belief system and world view that its neighbours may agree with, disagree with, or know nothing about. These layers may only intrude upon the whipped cream world through inexplicable dark mood, an unexpected irritation or anxiety, a craving, or some unforeseen burst of joy. These moods, and even physical sensations, turn into the night-time narratives we call dreams, and they also show up as the beautiful, weird, scary, and redemptive imagery of our trips.  There are more things in the knickerbocker glory’s heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the whipped cream’s somewhat limited philosophy.

 In the psychedelic experience a straw goes down through all these layers and for a few wonderful or stultifyingly frightening hours the layers have a chance to get to know one another. Layers that are stuck in post-traumatic belief systems – that they are worthless, are in immediate danger right this second, that the world sucks and is against them, etc., – may temporarily dislodge from their automated ruts and receive new information, while in a mystical experience layers holding cramped and painful beliefs are exposed to shafts of light where, by being seen and opened to love, they can get some healing.

 Whether this shaft of light is from some kind of lemony layer inside the knickerbocker glory or if it is pouring in through the window of the restaurant from outside, I would not know, but the light of loving attention is the engine of healing. Do those negative belief systems, cast in the crucible of trauma and with the momentum of many years of habit behind them get dissolved forever in a single afternoon? Surely not. But they do get a “taste” of freedom.

 And then the trip is over, the knickerbocker glory, which has temporarily taken on the action of a lava lamp, returns to normal, and the layers go back to their separated ways. After good trips we wonder how we can hold on to the perspectives and insights that were vouchsafed us, while after a bad trip we would be so happy to just return to our old complacency. It’s the first question, how do I hold onto my fading insights, that I will look at here. To start with, there is the impossible conundrum of, I want to hold on to this glowy feeling and these insights with all my might, but holding on sounds like grasping, and grasping is part of what the insights were telling me not to do. Already I seem to be talking the wrong language to my lower layers.

 This contrasts with the mystical experiences of those who have made it their business to be exposed to divine light – the saints and mystics. Generally speaking, they do not ponder on how to keep a hold on the experience, but more often report on how it cannot be forgotten. Saint Teresa of Avilla put it this way:

 In the orison of union, the soul is fully awake as regards God, but wholly asleep as regards things of this world and in respect of herself. During the short time the union lasts, she is as it were deprived of every feeling, and even if she would, she could not think of any single thing…

 Thus does God, when he raises a soul to union with himself, suspend the natural action of all her faculties. She neither sees, hears, nor understands, so long as she is united with God. But this time is always short, and it seems even shorter than it is. God establishes himself in the interior of this soul in such a way, that when she returns to herself, it is wholly impossible for her to doubt that she has been in God, and God in her. This truth remains so strongly impressed on her that, even though many years should pass without the condition returning, she can neither forget the favour she received, nor doubt of its reality.

 As a nun, meditation (“orison”) was Teresa’s day job as well as her passion, so that by the time the orison of union happened, her knickerbocker glory layers were all lined up, ready to receive the light and have at it with the Godhead. When psychedelic adventurers go knocking on heaven’s door, if the winds are right, we can sometimes get to that same union for a couple of hours, or moments, but after that, even if we are covered in awe and wonderment, our business-as-usual lives, with their stresses and their calls on our attention, reassert. The task then is how to make the experience alive and substantial, not just a picture postcard memory you could share with friends at a dinner party. How do you stay in touch with fairyland after you have lost your supply of pixie dust?

 Most of us can’t go off and live in a monastery, or wouldn’t like the food if we did, but we can create some kind of a “do try this at home” practice that will help keep the dialogue going with the syrupy layers below our whipped cream ego-consciousness. It doesn’t even have to be a religious practice per se, it might be walking in the woods, or gardening, or playing bass, anything that helps you connect with your layers again. For the contemplative, the spiritual practice organizes their being towards having a mystical experience; for the psychedelic traveler, the mystical experience prompts them into a supportive spiritual practice.

 A practice of this type that I have come across is a tweak on a variation of the Buddhist lovingkindness meditation. The lovingkindness meditation is most often a guided meditation where you are invited to open your heart and send feelings of lovingkindness first to yourself, then to the people closest to you, then to neutrals, then to people you don’t care for, then people you really can’t stand, and finally to all sentient beings. A client told me about a variation on this that he was taught while on a meditation retreat. He was instructed to send sentences along the lines of, “May I have peace,” “May I have joy,” “May I be free from suffering,” to himself throughout the day, not necessarily in the orderly fashion of the guided meditation, but just as he was going about his business. It was emphasized for him to not work hard on saying it with feeling, but just to get the words out. That helps take the expectations – and the dashed expectations – out of it.

 This reminded me of some psychedelic journeys where I spent time sending messages like, “I accept you,” “you are loved,” and so forth, down into my lower knickerbocker layers. The plus of being on a drug is that there is a chance you will see your lower layers receiving the messages, and maybe even how they react. Given that, my tweak on the variation of the lovingkindness meditation is that we direct the well-wishing messages not so much towards people outside us or even to ourselves, but to parts of us, those lower layers that can operate with a sometimes scary degree of autonomy. Your whipped cream, forsaking what may usually be a more insular style, can wish the lower layers well, and they seem to like that. With an intra-personal lovingkindness practice you can send kind messages like, “may you be happy,” “may you be at ease,” or “may you be safe,” to any parts of you that popped up during your journey. And maybe the message need not be as formal sounding as the Buddhist ones – it might be, “you poor thing,” or, “it’s okay,” or whatever it is your lower layers would like to hear.

 You can do the same thing with the trip imagery. I worked with someone who had been in an ayahuasca circle where she started out the ceremony stuck in habitual mental loops of self-denigrating and self-condemning thoughts. At one point though, she broke free from that and was able, after the manner of ayahuasca, to turn into a plant. She was not any particular plant, but simply feeling her plantfulness, alive, vibrant and free. Negative self-talk was gone because plants don’t really do self-talk. The solution to her negativity was to be something else. She said to herself at the end of the ceremony, “I want to remember what this is like, so I can know this is possible.”

 As we worked on this afterwards, she re-visualized the plant experience and re-lived some of the plant feelings again. Recalling that strength and vitality, she devised well-wishing messages like, “I am healthy,” “I am strong” and “I am free” that were like booster shots to her parts trapped in painful loops. Having heard it loud and clear during the ceremony, these lower knickerbocker layers now had the chance to remember their epiphany.

 There’s only but so much band width in our conscious heads, and to the degree that we fill it with well-wishing messages, the less space there is for culturally normal self- critical and complainy messages that boil down to a mantra of, “He’s an idiot, she’s an idiot, I’m an idiot too.” We are more machine-like than we would like to admit, and the mechanical replacement of automatic negative thoughts with automatic positive ones can turn garbage in, garbage out into more of lovingkindness in, lovingkindness out. Oddly though, we have to make a continuous deliberate choice to bring in the good stuff. Annoying, eh?

 And now for a word on words. Given that this well-wishing exercise is entirely based on words, we have to wonder why it is that words so often get a bad rap in psychedelic circles. Once we’ve had our ego death and gone “beyond words,” then as the thinking – or the folklore – goes, we shall unite with the One, find wisdom, something like that. And that might be true, but is it a reason for words to always play second fiddle to silence? You can’t describe the flavor of tomato soup to someone who has never tasted it, but by being “beyond description,” it doesn’t mean that canned tomatoes are that much closer to God than we are? Words are the first great human achievement and, as Salman Rushdie noted, our specialness lies in being the only story-telling animal. In fact, it has been noted that in the beginning was the word.

 Part of the bad press about words is that we have used them so much to dumb down reality, with our bad habit of over-analyzing and over-thinking. We have used intellectual verbiage and the language of bureaucratic instructions to divorce us from ourselves and build the great chasm that has instinct and imagination on one side and our less-than-thrilling daily realities on the other. On the biological scale it’s us who made all the layers in the knickerbocker glory, and on the cultural scale it’s us who arranged it so they would stop talking to one another. The power of a word is more than its labeling capacities; it is poetry, incantation, magic spells, and love charms to ourselves that reawaken the conversation with the lost and forbidden parts of who we are. Words are the magic carpet that flows between us and the invisible realms.

 “I am a shining tear of the sun” said the ancient Welsh bard Amergin as he first planted his foot on Irish soil, apparently with less than friendly intentions. This was part of a longer incantation, where he named the many things he could shape-shift into, until you start to wonder if there is anything he couldn’t do – which I suppose was the point. In this one line of the poem he is human, he is water, he is fire; and not only that, he also, lives in the sky and yet is close enough to run down a cheek. It takes a very essential self to be all those things, and this is what I was pondering for an hour or several with the help of some mushroom friends one afternoon, when, before things got away from me and became a bit too ineffable, I tried to convey this freedom to some of my more fearful and uptight layers. Poetry was helping me do my internal well-wishing. Here is the whole poem:

 I am a stag of seven tines

I am a wide flood on a plain

I am a wind across the sea

I am a shining tear of the sun

I am a birdsong in the wood

I am a hawk on a cliff

I am fair among flowers

I am a god who sets the head afire with smoke

I am the point of a lance in battle

I am a salmon in the pool

I am a hill of poetry

I am a wild boar of valour

I am the roar of the ocean

I am a wave of the sea

Who but I knows the secrets of the unhewn stone?

I am the queen of every hive

I am the fire on every hill

I am a word of science

I am the ox of seven combats

I am the ninth wave of eternal return

I am the grave of every vain hope

Who is it that throws light into the meeting of the mountains?

Who is it that announces the ages of the Moon?

Who teaches the place where the Sunset falls?

Who is the god who fashions the enchantments of the wind?

Who but I am both the tree and the lightning that strikes the tree?

So, no confidence issues with this guy.

 It was after that client told me about the variation of the lovingkindness practice that I tried my tweak for myself, and for a few days I spent time sending nice messages to some of my less enlightened lower layers, until I woke one morning with the words, “Now it is possible to eat the spring” in my head. Not yet awake enough to misconstrue its meaning, I got it that something down in my lower layers appreciated my kind messaging, and it was reporting back to me that a new spring-like energy had shown up, and it was possible to digest that energy, like a food.

 True, you and I are not Saint Teresa or Amergin, brimming with supernatural powers, and our first notes-to-self can be modest ones like “you’re okay,” or “may I be safe,” or borrowed words, or anything else you may wish to say. Essentially, we can speak to ourselves in ways we would like to be spoken to, and go outside of, as Greta Thunberg might put it, the usual blah, blah, blah of the habitual, self-critical mind-loops. We can re-member the psychedelic experience of wholeness by re-minding ourselves about it with our well-wishing messages. Then it comes down to hope and trust that our inner knickerbocker glory layers will respond. Very often, it’s when those layers find conscious expression that they feel genuinely satisfied. 

 Why is it that today the popular psychedelic conversation is so dominated by what is happening in the most recent research somewhere in the world or how the government is permitting a next step in clinical trials? Where is the conversation about poets, artists, dancers and philosophers? We merry pranksters will get nowhere if we kick the poets off the bus. In 1819 one of those poets, Percy Byshe Shelley, started a conversation with the wind that has not yet reached its conclusion. That wind is still blowing through our trips and ceremonies, even if our business-as-usual consciousness does not feel its force:

 If I were a dead leaf thou mightiest bear;

If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;

A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share

The impulse of thy strength, only less free

Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even

I were as in my boyhood, and could be

The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,

As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed

Scarce seem’d a vision; I would ne’er have striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.

Oh lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

 To be lifted by this wind we must contrive to be as light as the leaf, wave, and cloud. That will surely involve dropping our looping thoughts, our downer self-criticism and bureaucratic naming. We must be ready to wander over Heaven without taking on travel insurance. Shelley’s leaves belong to Autumn, cold, and death, but where are they blowing to? His final words in the conversation are, “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” Why don’t we eat it?