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, you can’t call William Shakespeare a big psychonaut, and he certainly gave no Terence McKenna style talks on altered consciousness. But, even so, take a look at this sonnet (#29) and then I’ll tell you why I think it is useful in the spiritual journey of psychedelics, 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 it may be useful to think of it as rewiring our brains and so on, the promise of psychedelics down the ages has been that a mystical experience, an action of a kind of love that has us no longer caring about our shortcomings, allows us to “sing hymns at heaven’s gate,” and that, we might say, is transformational.

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 “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, no 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 even 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 in the morning. 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. Depression, anxiety and despair are misapprehensions of our spiritual situation, and for all our apparent faults and mediocrities, when we bathe in that spectacular love we don’t need anything else.