Dancing With Time

In group this past week we were talking about what happens in ceremonial psychedelic journeys when the trauma healing has, for the time being at least, been dealt with. What do we do after we have, as it were, played catch-up with pain? The mental health approach to psychedelics is about the relief of symptoms, but since the hallmark of psychedelics is a mystical or an other-worldly  experience, what are we looking at when the suffering is not the front and center focus this time? You could say that tripping is about two things: healing and exploring, but let’s think of the primary one as exploration. If you look at it this way, then the healing is a preliminary that sometimes has to be done to before the exploring, to make it more fulfilling and complete.

 The words that came into my head as we were talking last Tuesday were “dancing with time,” as in music, even the music of the ceremony itself, which dances with time as it creates beats, measures, pauses, crescendos, diminuendos and so on. In the same way, the brush strokes of a painting show moments in time, and ceremonies themselves are a dance with time where they vary the energy level, create their own crescendos and critical moments, and so on. In tripping, the energy itself can be like a kaleidoscope, coalescing into new shapes and dramas as we, just by having our consciousness, provide the forum for patterns to happen in. William Blake said that Eternity is in love with the productions of time, and since we are the ones currently stirring the pot of time, we can partake in this love, noticing the new patterns that pass, change, develop and then collapse into new forms.  

 It occurred to me after group was over that this dancing with time is the primary impulse of the psychedelic, and that trauma is, almost by definition, a freezing of time, a suspension, a dissociation, where consciousness is so stuck in horror that time has ceased to operate properly and we are mired or frozen. We may take psychedelics to heal, or to alleviate symptoms of pain, but we could more expansively say that we take psychedelics in order to better participate in the dance of life. If you take your car (okay, if you have a car) to the mechanic for a diagnostic, and the car gets repaired, you drive it away down the highway, you don’t leave it resplendently “healed” outside the garage. If we have come here to learn anything, it is how to enjoy ourselves more and more and dance more interestingly with life.

 Labour is blossoming or dancing where

The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,

Nor beauty born out of its own despair,

Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.

O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,

Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,

How can we know the dancer from the dance?

                                    W.B. Yeats, Among Schoolchildren