Shakespeare, good sherry and Altered Consciousness

Unless you count the drunken John Falstaff saying that, “A good sherry sack…ascends me into the brain…and makes it…full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes,” or the Roman general Coriolanus demanding, “Have we no wine here?” it’s true, I concede that William Shakespeare was not a big psychonaut, and he certainly gave no Terence McKenna style talks on altered consciousness. But, I invite you to read this sonnet (#29) and then I’ll make the case that its ideas are useful to us, even though at face value all he is saying is that when life is hard he gets depressed and goes into self-hating mode, and it’s only thinking about a mysterious lover that cheers him up:

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

(Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

       For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

       That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

The start-off state of “desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope” which leads to “myself almost despising,” is the state that many of us are in when we approach psychedelics. We’ve got problems, and we haven’t been able to sort them out with our own resources. And though we may talk about rewiring our brains and so on, the promise of psychedelics down the ages has been a mystical experience, an action of a kind of love that has us no longer caring about our shortcomings because we have so recently had the privilege of singing “hymns at heaven’s gate.”

In the poem Shakespeare tells us nothing about the source of the love he is talking about. We might assume it is a lover or a friend, but the truth is that lovers and friends may go off us, or we may go off them, but in tripping, when we are lucky and have a mystical experience, we come face to face with a love that is undeniable. Whatever it was that Shakespeare had in mind, I think this take on his “sweet love” as the core love of a spiritual experience helps us. The trials and tribulations of what we call mental health, or the lack of it, are not always going to be fixed with clever interventions or energetic self-cheerleading. Once I start to argue that I am indeed worthy, it leaves room for those sneaky voices that tell me I’m not.

And that’s the beauty of the love that Shakespeare talks about. It doesn’t try to improve me, fix me, or upgrade me, what it changes is my state, and that can happen just by the love being remembered. (“For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings…) I believe that what the psychedelic experience can — again, if we are lucky — give us, is contact with a love that doesn’t need us to prove or improve ourselves, it’s freely given in such completeness that we are okay with being not okay — just as larks don’t check their worthiness before they break into song. And the value of the psychedelic is that the experience of having been loved in that way even for just a few hours or seconds, helps us recall the totally different, expansive perspective that this love comes from. For all our apparent faults and mediocrities we bathe in spectacular love, and we don’t need anything more than that.