The Clench...And Psychedelics, Part II
/How do we encourage the process of change, as opposed to the stuckness of the struggle? Through prayer. Or, prayer is probably the closest word to what I mean, if you strip away the meanings I don’t intend – such as the normal meaning where you have a religion and you pray for things to go the way you want. “Oh God, please help me make rent this month,” “May the in-laws not crash at our place again this weekend, oh please,” and so on. That meaning presupposes a God who listens to prayers and files some in the “okay” box and some in the “forget it” bin. Not that God, and not those prayers.
In fact in psychedelics is where we get to a more interesting kind of God, one of our own personal experience, or perhaps impersonal experience, where the object of prayer might be light, or the ineffable, or something we want to call the divine but have no idea what that actually is, and so on endlessly. If the prayer has words in it, they will be spontaneous, or there may be no words, just an action of the heart, not of the lips. If I am a half-evolved being, a half-opened blossom, I open my heart towards some kind of a Most High, and look to connect with it, to be wrapped in its ecstasy, and certainly when we’re tripping, that’s a thing we can sometimes do. This experience, I believe, will make me more me, more of the being that doesn’t consume himself with regret over whether or not to eat a donut or continue to blame himself over that stupid, stupid thing he said ten years ago.
For each one of us this prayer is its own internal motion, our own gesture. It could be to move your hands in front of your body and feel if it affects the energy inside (I know, seems weird, try it out anyway), or it may be to feel into your heart, “open” it, whatever that means, raise the hands (cupped and open!) and pour the energy upwards, as best you may. Our old pal Plotinus spoke in the Third Century of reality emanating from that ineffable place he called the One or the Good, going down to the Nous or the Divine Intelligence, down from there to Soul, and then hitting rock bottom in Matter. Then from Matter, the energy can go back up again to Soul, then on to Nous and back to the One or the Good, a process he calls Procession (the energy going down) and Reversion (going back up again). For him, meditation is not an emptying of the mind, but an enraptured upwelling of love back towards the ineffable Good:
Therefore we must ascend again towards the Good, the desired of every Soul. Anyone that has seen This, knows what I intend when I say that it is beautiful. Even the desire of it is to be desired as Good…And one that shall know this vision – with what passion of love shall he not be seized, with what pang of desire, what longing to be molten into one with This, what wondering delight! If he that has never seen this Being must hunger for It as for all his welfare, he that has known must move and reverence It as the very Beauty; he will be flooded with awe and gladness, stricken by a salutary terror; he loves with a veritable love, with sharp desire…For This, the Beauty supreme, the absolute, and the primal, fashions Its lovers to Beauty, and makes them also worthy of love.
Ennead I, Sixth Tractate
If you want a powerful and spontaneous expression of this Reversion, look to the 19th century nature writer Richard Jeffries, who describes ecstatic silent prayer, in his afternoon walks to the top of a hill near his house in Wiltshire. He tells us in The Story of my Heart:
I was utterly alone with the sun and the earth. Lying down on the grass, I spoke in my soul to the earth, the sun, the air, and the distant sea far beyond sight…Then I addressed the sun, desiring the soul equivalent of his light and brilliance, his endurance and unwearied race. I turned to the blue heaven over, gazing into its depth, inhaling its exquisite color and sweetness. The rich blue of the unattainable flower of the sky drew my soul towards it, and there it rested, for pure color is rest of heart. By all these I prayed; I felt an emotion of the soul beyond all definition; prayer is a puny thing to it, and the word is a rude sign to the feeling, but I know no other. By the blue heaven, by the rolling sun bursting through untrodden space, a new ocean of ether every day unveiled.
Jeffries had quite a talent for walking up a hill and having a self-induced mystical experience – would that we could do the same! But then that’s what psychedelics are for, and when we’re tripping we can sometimes go up our own hill and reach that same state of rapture, of being enwrapped with the One or the Good, that Plotinus talks about. But when we come back to earth, what then? The whole point is that even in our “normal,” boring non-altered state, we can still make the same gesture of reaching out to Spirit, the Most High, whatever you want to call it or not call it, and even that small and limited version of reaching outwards will inch the process of Reversion along, the process that in some way or another, we all came here to do. It’s a matter of going after the golden fleece rather than staying home and putting out fires.
And so, back to the note I wrote at the end of group – two weeks ago now: “Let go of the struggle and have faith in the process.” Instead of trying to reason and argue, or cajole and enforce our way out of our problems, we can refocus on the process of change. “Let go of the struggle”: Spend less energy in trying to close down rumination that you know are going to return in a few minutes or seconds anyway; let go of the self-improvement efforts which quickly turn into self-bashing. “Have faith in the process:” the active, open-hands process which keeps going by meditation and by “prayer,” in the Richard Jeffries sense, through reaching out towards – let’s call it spirit – and wishing for the future you want. To reach for a oneness of intention rather than the scatteredness of fighting that cloud of midges that constantly comes out of our brains. In Little Gidding T.S. Eliot put it clearly, if a little severely:
You are not here to verify, instruct yourself or inform curiosity,
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid.
And I think the Chaldean Oracles said it even more plainly: “Seek Paradise.”