The Action of Psychedelics on Original Sin: Part 2

Imagine the differences in child-rearing between a Tibetan peasant and John Calvin. Calvin sees the wee babe as “defiled and polluted,” while to the peasant that child may be their great grandma come back to live among them again through reincarnation. Since, in the eyes of original sin, even an innocent new-born infant is just a sinner with a pretty face, what chance do those babies have of being treated with full human respect as they turn into toddlers, then full-blown children, and after that into horny teenagers? A snowball’s chance in a bible-bashing hell? And how does a responsible teacher turn these wickedly disposed children to the ways of righteousness? You give them a good smacking of course. John Robinson, a 17th century English puritan said this way:

Surely there is in all children, though not alike, a stubbornness, and stoutness of mind arising from natural pride, which must, in the first place, be broken and beaten down…

For the beating, and keeping down of this stubbornness parents must provide carefully for two things: first that children's wills and wilfulness be restrained and repressed, and that, in time; lest sooner than they imagine, the tender sprigs grow to that stiffness, that they will rather break than bow. Children should not know, if it could be kept from them, that they have a will of their own, but in their parents' keeping: neither should these words be heard from them, save by way of consent, “I will” or “I will not.””

Yikes! I’m not sure how much parental love can creep into a relationship where the goal is not just to break the child’s will, but to ensure that it never crossed their mind to have a will. It sounds more like a CIA torture chamber, or using the whip to break in a horse, than the bosom of the family home. For what is will but an expression of self? The result of that destruction of the self is described by Lady Jane Grey about a century earlier than Robinson, in her portrait of the quiet agony of drawing room life in upper class England:

For when I am in the presence either of father or mother, whether I speak, keep silent, sit, stand or go, eat, drink, be merry or sad, be sewing, playing, dancing, or doing anything else, I must do it, as it were, in print, and look as demurely as the saint that stands in the glass.

A constant performance enforced by others can only lead to living life, “as it were, in print,” in a state where the only safe place is one of dissociation of self from self. Lady Jane was to see just how much of a puppet to her father’s will she was, as he forced her into a brief role as queen of England, as part of the wrestling match between Protestants and Catholics for power. As the political tides changed, Lady Jane was deposed after nine days and beheaded at the age of 16 or 17. In a slightly belated act of justice, her father was beheaded two days later. I wonder if he ever thought to say sorry.

 No modern child-rearing manual will claim that children are little beasts rotten to the core and that the goal of parenting is to destroy their identity, at least not the bestsellers. But I believe the ghost of parenting past still comes back to haunt even the average household, and many of the people I get to talk with had experiences of belittling, punishment, and random abuse as the mood music of their growing up lives. Parents when stressed, or unskilled, or just plain short of love in their hearts, revert back to the archetypal playbook of imposing their own power, of breaking their child’s will – no longer to ensure the child a place in heaven, but to bolster the parent’s own sense of power within the family walls, and for the convenience that an obedient  child provides. Young children show the same openness and susceptibility as adults do when they are tripping, and so the messages of “you are less than,” “how dare you,” and so on – the messages that engender that trance of unworthiness are – as another person said to me,  something that “I took into my essence.” And then the worthlessness message echoes down through our lives long after the messenger has gone.

 Once imbibed, what does this messaging do to the soul? It seems to sit there, at the center of our being, guiding our current feeling life with the realities that were at play decades before. We may, at times, say with T.S. Eliot’s Alfred J Prufrock:

 Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

               So how should I presume?

 I remember in the sixties (or was it the seventies?) that the phrase “the personal is political,” came into fashion, and I believe something similar applies here, though in this case we would say that the personal is cultural, part of a cultural force, and one individual’s imposter’s syndrome is a signal that the whole culture is aching, paying too high a price for its stability. And so, when I try to undermine a feeling that I am flawed or less than, or any of the other symptoms of, let’s call it the Original Sin Syndrome, I am not just taking on elements of myself, I am working to heal the culture itself, by cleaning up the little corner that I live in. I am taking on something with deep roots, and no wonder if it takes time for me to see changes or improvements, and if I never do completely clear my corner of false beliefs, that may be as much to do with where the culture has progressed to, as it is to do with the quality of my efforts.

 If we emerge a little from that unworthiness trance we might find that the quiet (or noisy) discomfort we feel is not the discomfort of being ultimately flawed or lacking, or sinful, but the discomfort of having not lived as fully as we could. Children come into life completely assuming it will be a blast, and live in the exuberance and joy of simply being alive, until the situation is shown to be otherwise. Shown by things like the boring hours spent confined in dusty school rooms.

 Ah! then at times I drooping sit,
And spend many an anxious hour,
Nor in my book can I take delight,
Nor sit in learnings bower,
Worn thro' with the dreary shower.

How can the bird that is born for joy,
Sit in a cage and sing.
How can a child when fears annoy.
But droop his tender wing.
And forget his youthful spring.

 Or so says William Blake. Our doors of perception start out nice and clean, and it takes time for them to get gummed up with fears, tedium, and so much repetition that we no longer look at what we see. But psychedelics let us revisit the world through younger eyes, whether that is a world of joy or terror, and maybe the ‘message’ of psychedelics is not this insight here or that nugget of wisdom there, but the fact that perception itself can be amazingly gratifying, and well, mind-blowing. This makes the trance of unworthiness grow thinner, as we see a world more remarkable than our ego selves normally perceive, a fascinating world in its endlessly varied and fluid details. The Original Sin Syndrome is powerful, and it takes the big medicine of psychedelics to combat it and revive the knowledge that we didn’t come into this amazing world just to feel lousy about ourselves. We came here to grow through joy – what else should we be up to?