Psychedelics and Decreation
/“For if we were exposed to the direct radiance of his love, without the protection of space, time and matter, we would evaporate like water in the sun, there would be not enough I in us. To abandon the I out of love. Necessity is the screen put between God and us so that we can be. It’s up to us to pierce the screen and cease to be. There is a ‘’’deifugal’ force. Otherwise everything would be God.”
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
Psychedelics reduce the “protection of space, time and matter,” that shield us from “the direct radiance” of the divine, like a cloud cover protecting us from exposure to the full radiation of the sun. We may need this protection in order to live regular life, and yet Simone Weil (pronounced Vay, like “tray”) reminds us that the human journey is to peck away at this protection as we go along, and “abandon the I out of love” and “evaporate like water in the sun.” A task that many people have little taste for, or as T.S. Eliot put it, “humankind cannot bear very much reality.”
That untethered, between two worlds, feeling we may have after a trip is spiritual sunburn we get when we go further in the act of “decreation” as Weil calls it, than we were comfortable with on the trip, even if at the time it may have been a good day out at the beach. Psychedelic journeying can whittle away more of the “I” than could possibly be comfortable.
And yet Weil says “it’s up to us to pierce the screen and cease to be” – not an enticing prospect. Gravity and Grace was published in 1947, so Weil could not have had tripping in mind (she would probably been aghast at the idea) but was talking life after a mystical experience. Whether by chemicals or by spiritual practice, having been zapped by extraordinary light, we now have the slow job of decreating ourselves so we can become a nothing in union with the divine. Humankind may not be able to bear very much reality, but apparently we can train ourselves to put up with a little more of it. It is like Marguerite Porete, the Mediaeval mystic who said:
“Being completely free, and in command on her sea of peace, the soul is nonetheless drowned and loses herself through God, with him and to him. She loses her identity , as does the water from a river – like the Ouse or the Meuse – when it flows into the sea. It has done its work and can relax in the arms of the sea, and the same is true of the soul. Her work is over and she can lose herself in what she has totally become: Love…The soul now has no name but Union in Love. As the water that flows into the sea becomes sea, so does the soul become Love. Love and the soul are no longer two things but one.”
Marguerite Porete, A Mirror for Simple Souls
Since she lived more than 1500 years after him, Porete did not have the chance to read the Buddha and see that he said, “We live in illusion and the appearance of things. There is a reality. We are that reality. When you understand this, you see that you are nothing, and being nothing, you are everything. That is all.” All the mystics seem to be on the same page about this nothingness, but it is not to do with what William Blake scornfully called the Moral Law of regular religion, where little humans grovel in front of God because God is all-powerful. That is a worship of power. The mystics seem to have found some sort of law of spiritual physics.
You have to admit that an artificially induced mystical experience is a weird thing – “I have appointments on Wednesday so I can’t visit the divine then, but I’m free all weekend,” we might find ourselves saying. Even so, when we come back from the trip we are like any other mystic coming back from the outer spaces, with connections and whisps of memory to keep alive and a brain that probably needs a lot of updating and revising. Simone Weil did get the chance to read the Buddha, and it seems like she agreed with him:
“Once you realize you are nothing, the goal of all your efforts is to become nothing. It is to this end that we suffer with acceptance, it is to this end that we act, it is to this end that we pray.
My God, allow me to become nothing. As I become nothing, God loves himself through me.
…To become nothing in order to be at one’s true place in the whole.”
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
The task is to find the perspective from which this becoming nothing is an attractive proposition. It is unnatural to accede to your own death. All beings turn away from it and even the worm wriggles desperately when attacked. The question then becomes, die to what? The only thing I can think it might be tempting to die to, is overwhelming beauty. What you might call the most high.