Thoreau's Cabin. Part I: Haste v. Spontaneity

In 1845 Henry David Thoreau built himself a cabin by Walden Pond in Massachusetts where he could escape from the rat race of his day. He resolved to “live deliberately,” and “front only the essential facts of life.” But it was what he said next that really struck me. On building his cabin he said, “In April, for I made no haste in my work, but rather made the most of it, my house was framed and ready for the raising, .” By not making haste with his work but by making “the most of it”, Thoreau overthrew the ethic of produce, produce, produce, and replaced it with an ethic of slow down, appreciate and enjoy. the spontaneity of the moment.  

If life felt hasty to Thoreau in 1845, I can’t imagine what he would make of today’s antics. We have enshrined overcommitment and frantic rush into our cultural DNA, while pausing to actually experience experience is seen as a slightly eccentric byway, mainly reserved for yoga studios and meditation seminars, but not ‘real’ life. Speaking of which, Thoreau said that he did not want to discover at the end of his life that he had not really lived it. But us? We don’t act like we share that concern.

In making “the most of” his work Thoreau didn’t mean it in the way you or I might if we said, “it was a rainy day at the beach but even so we made the most of it.” I believe he was talking about squeezing out all the joy from his sense perceptions, feelings and thoughts in every moment of his work. Simple things, I would guess, like the feel of the wood boards in his hand or the sun on his back, the simple things that can be a door to the divine. Children already have that without trying, while sages have done the work to get there. It’s that state of aliveness and spontaneity where you don’t really need much else to feel good.

When I was a child, we used to go on holiday to the countryside in England, and in the evenings after dinner I was allowed to wander off around the fields without the constraint of an adult to make sure that I was “all right.” As the evening crept on the starlings would rise up into what’s called a murmuration, a huge flock that rises and changes shape like a single being in the sky, a spectacle of pure motion. I would stand on top of a hill and become an instant sun worshipper as I watched it going down in a blaze of colour, and soon after that the owls would start hooting and I would come back, regretfully, to the farmhouse. Those moments threw me into a spontaneous ecstasy of colour, sound and beauty, and the whole ‘what is next?’ mentality was gone. That spontaneous contact is, I believe, the primary form of experience, the one that’s there before we clutter ourselves up. We have inadvertently exchanged fullness of heart for a scorecard of empty achievements.

And now, during this time of lockdown, I find a renewed invitation from the outside world to remember the spontaneous state. I have no trains to catch, my to-do list is a little bit shortened, and although I’m not as good at it as when I was nine, I can sometimes unwind a little, take walks and notice things for themselves, -- like the sky, the bark on trees, the busy birds. This state of happy noticing is opposite to haste, and it gives us some of the high energy fuel that makes us truly contented. Beat that, capitalism!

Something to Do During Lockdown: Talk to Yourself

This lockdown time for us who take psychedelics has reduced access to the usual fun and games, since ceremonies are not going to happen for a while and home alone trips without a guide or sitter are not always the best idea. This makes it a good time to extend the internal work we may normally do between sessions and develop it into more of a practice. One such activity is deliberate self-talk.   

I have found that during a psychedelic experience we can sometimes listen more carefully and skeptically to the ongoing negative self-talk that is so often the background music to our lives. That self-talk is like bubbles coming up through the water of a deep pond and we don’t notice them until they pop up on the surface, or we don’t consciously notice these nasty little messages at all. With psychedelic, we can sometimes go down under the surface, catch a hold of the bubbles and say something new like, “be at peace,” or “I accept myself.” Stuff that a spiritual being having a human experience might find palatable.

Once the trip is over it’s so easy to forget that this method is perfectly usable in regular consciousness. Here’s how it goes: I take a few words, or maybe just a single word, anything that sounds useful and true. Then I think of that word or words for each of five mindful breaths. My favorite word right now is “calm,” and I say that inside myself as I breathe in and as I breathe out. Sometimes I send it to a particular part of my body that seems to want that message. It’s a kind of a pause, and a reminder of what I wish for myself.

Some other messages I have used are, “I am okay,” “well-being,” “strength,” “heart be well,” “listen to the stomach,” “allow everything,” and so on. You can make whatever you want, based on your own needs and wishes. Originality is not important, just make it kind, and make it pretty short and sweet.

My aim is to take this pause at least one time for each hour of the day. I have found that a good support for this is to keep track of the hours I have done the exercise, otherwise I l get lost and the whole thing starts to feel a bit messy. So, I send myself a text for each hour that I’ve done the practice.

I generally don’t actually send the text until I have four hours collected together, and at the end of day then I write down my total in my calendar book. Not because I care about the record keeping, but because this is what seems to keep me on point. For you it might be a quite different system, maybe a much more elegant one on an app, or no record keeping at all.  And if you forget to do it for a few hours – no big deal, there are no prizes, no competition, no brass band at the finish line.

I think that when we say something kind or something soothing to ourselves, we relieve the world of one tiny droplet of the stress and self-harm that is needlessly driving us all crazy. As people take to the streets to demand social justice and the rollback of entrenched institutional cruelty, we can also take a march down our internal streets and let it be known what it is that needs to happen.

Psychedelics and Faith

I was brought up in a religious tradition where every time I questioned something that did not make sense to me, I was told to have faith. Faith was a kind of escape hatch when logic couldn’t sustain the argument. I’m afraid that for me, the idea of having faith became an ordeal of telling myself something I couldn’t believe, but having to to believe it anyway. Things didn’t work out very satisfactorily.

Psychedelic faith is based on experience, if a rather distant one. It’s more like memory. I remember understandings and openings I had when I was in the different state of consciousness that the medicine gives me, and though I am not in that state now I do recall that I was there. I recall that certain experiences happened, and rumour has it that they happened to me.

Through an act of faith I cling to - call it - a five dimensional state of being with these three dimensional hands and fingers. I trust that what took place in that other reality was indeed real and living. Faith says, if I were to return to that place, my trust will be verified and I may experience ( or perhaps endure?) that state again.

Psychedelic faith then, is the capacity to recall something of higher consciousness while in a state of ordinary consciousness. By that recollection, we are percolating something from the beyond into our regular here and now. And we do that recollecting by opening our hearts and caring about what is most important and about what comes from the most high. As William Blake said, “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.” Apparently Eternity is in love even with us and all of our wild shenanigans.

I Stepped out of Nothing Visible: Part II

Song of the Children

We clung to you without reservation

We thought only of our own pleasure

As we died and lived in your arms.

We were days and nights there.

We were born so many times.

We drank from bright green leaves

And poured our faces into the secret forest.

We rolled through bushes, down hills

And at the bottom became Mud People.

The animals were tamed by our abandon.

They stopped and stared at us

With orange, or yellow, or green eyes.

Small fierce cats were ready to roughen

Our hands with their sharp pink tongues.

And the rivers!

They mirrored us,

Drowned us

And delivered us up

Safe as the floating leaves.

Then we tried to please you and guess your needs.

We noticed when your eyes were closed from us.

We counted numbers and breathed carefully.

We found, to our dismay, we could contain ourselves.

The world fell apart like paper

And our organs went giddy inside us.

Our clothes turned out too small for our bodies.

We tasted boredom and its antidotes.

Slowly, sadly, we put down our sticks and said,

This world is chosen as the real one.

And now? Eden flickers on and off

Like lightning through backyard windows.

I Stepped out of Nothing Visible: Part I

"I stepped out of nothing visible, as if I was shedding a layer of clothing - all those little details of shoulds and should nots, discarding the invisible cloak of culture that just clings and is so heavy, so heavy. I just walked out of it and didn't care. It's such a heavy coat. The sticky, prickly burdensomeness of all the details. But the soul inside is right. I want to walk in peace."

“Lisa”, after her plant medicine experience in September of 2018.

Do you remember putting on the cloak of culture? I think that when we were kids there was a time when “good” was an innate feeling of joy moving through our bodies, a joy that originated in the soul, which now lies under the heavy cloak of culture. In putting on that cloak, the immediacy of joy got replaced by the satisfactions of being thought of as morally good, or even just of getting the right answer in a test. Feeling good in the body was supplanted by “being” – or rather acting – good in class, in church, at temple, or at the dinner table.  

There's no natural connection between these two kinds of good, so feeling good by thrilling to sensations, impressions and thoughts, had to be sacrificed at the altar of acting good. Because we are such exuberant creatures, this could only be done through fear, physical constriction and a deliberate dulling of the senses – as in having to sit at a desk all day, listening, let’s say, to somebody else’s logic or a history not our own.  

In adulthood the stakes get higher and the cloak of shoulds and should nots grows more burdensome. Our natural exuberance gets drained even more, and we find ourselves able to sit in front of a machine or a screen all day long, while we spend money on “stuff” to alleviate the stifling weight of this conforming. We even get to be in on the plot against ourselves, trust in our own instincts ebbs low, and we become co-conspirators in our own betrayal.  

And then some day we take a psychedelic. A genuine possibility exists for us to wake to our predicament and momentarily at least, step out from the coat of culture. There’s the chance that we will get to feel our way through the many layers of self, and with luck, see that core, that soul again, in all its brilliance. Nothing really went away.

Inside us is a process that wants to happen, if we can reach down deep enough. A world wants to open. The things that we think concern us don’t really concern us at all, and it turns out that the great comforts in life are the comforts of the soul, which have to be purchased in their own currency. I accept myself and I accept not accepting myself. It turns out that “thy will be done” has nothing to do with submission but with more intelligent alignment. The fun of childhood leads in adulthood to the play of the gods.

"A safe fairyland is untrue to all worlds." J.R.R. Tolkien

Tolkien, author of the Lord of the Rings, wrote those words in a 1937 letter to a friend who had expressed the thought that Tolkien’s stories might be too scary for bedtime reading to the little ones. Pretty clearly, Tolkien was not moved.

I’ve often thought that when we approach psychedelics we are like Bilbo or Frodo, weighing the pros and cons of staying in the comforts of Hobbiton against venturing out into the wide world beyond. With the menacing forest of Mirkwood, the uncanny barrow wights of the Barrow Downs, orcs, Ring Wraiths, and of course Mordor, the epicenter of evil, this was not an easy place for a little hobbit to set out on.

And yet in that world were the beautiful places too — the Last Homely House of the Elves, Galadriel’s Well, Tom Bombadil’s house — and we somehow instinctively know that the lovely places could not be there unless this Light was balanced by a fierce and shuddering Dark. Every soul needs its Dark Night, and that’s what we must pay to reach morning.

Those who take psychedelics must recognise that their journey is a package deal of dark and light, and that there is indeed no safe passage to our own internal fairyland. Frodo did not ask to go to the catacylsm of Mount Doom by bus.

Tolkien’s view of fairyland came from its folk roots, a land of mysterious lights, dangerous enchantments, spells, curses and more than the occasional trickery. People could be spirited away, only to return centuries later, while children might be stolen from their cradles and replaced with fake versions of themselves, or changelings. It was very real to very many people, and it was no joke. You messed with fairyland at your peril.

As we approach the sacred plants, remember how little control we have over our own wild lands. What we are reaching out for may indeed include joy, wisdom, and relief from pain, but the new wisdom can come at the price of hearing the Nazguls’s cry searing through our being and rocking our world to its foundations. Out of that emotional earth tremor you may indeed bring wisdom and insight into your own personal Hobbit Hole, but psychedelics are no short cut to spirituality, or to mental health, and there is no sale season on knowledge.

So if you choose to take a psychedelic, be aware that you may be embarking on far more than hitting an inner reset button or shaking the mental snow globe. It’s about more than sprucing up the neural pathways, it is about serving what is good and true. And if we are to be true to our own inner world — or any other one — we have to recognise the astounding beauty and wisdom that is there. But if you want a safe fairyland with no monsters or dragons — stay home!

Paradise Is Today

There is the story of the old Midwesterner who says he would love to come live in New York, “once they have it finished.” Our personal and collective to-do lists seem to define our lives and they never get cleared, even though we, unlike New York City, will come to completion soon enough. For as long as we chop off its head, the to-do list of modern existence just keeps growing at the tail.

But let’s imagine the day when every task that’s going to be done will be done, and the last item is finally crossed off the very last check list. Then the world will set aside its fears and notions, look at the holy, the wicked, the scared, the scarred, and say in huge relief, “It is finished.” The need for war, struggle, kings, even the need for pretense, protection, status and stature will be gone. There will be nothing to fight for, nothing to prove, or even to lose. We could finally, really stop.

Then, when we can be our simple naked selves, maybe the joy of just existing will, child-like, rise among us, and we will see the things of the world, like trees and clouds, hammers and birds, houses and cars, in all their unvarnished splendor. No more preoccupation with “are we there yet?” no more, “am I near to creating the conditions I need for happiness?” Because Paradise is today.

Speaking my mind on Changing Your Mind

It looks like Michael Pollan's book, How to Change Your Mind, may signal the breakthrough moment where psychedelics hit our mainstream culture, and then stay there. Momentum has been building over the past number of years, as the Johns Hopkins and NYU studies of have brought psychedelics into the health section of newspapers and out of the crime blotter. Yes it's been a long strange trip, but at this point is it in danger of becoming a predictable one?

Some people in the psychedelic community have expressed the thought that it's a shame that an outsider, previously naive to psychedelics, should be the one to usher them into the popular awareness. There are so many other people who actually knew what they are talking about before they started writing their book. Personally I'm fine with the notion that Pollan's main credential is his 'beginner's mind' in this area, and he certainly did a hell of a job researching his material and making it accessible to regular people who will not give you a knowing wink if you say 'kambo' or '5MeO."

I was there in the sixties, dutifully not remembering very much, but even at the time Timothy Leary's "Turn on, tune in and drop out" sounded massively hokey and not likely to win over my super uptight aunties and uncles. More relevant to what's going on today is Jules Evans' "Turn on, tune in and sell out," in a piece he wrote for www.aeon.com. As we stand at this tipping point of psychedelics becoming genuinely accepted, the risks of acceptance in a world of rules, regulations and commerce have to be weighed, and I'm not sure Pollan does a good job of that.

Let's take a look at another time this happened. In the 1820s the Quakers, according to John Whittaker in his brilliant book Mad in America, created a way to take care of the mentally ill members of their community. They brought them to little cottages where they were dressed in Sunday best clothes, invited to drink tea and sit properly, and were always treated with dignity and kindness. When they started raving or talking to people who weren't there, the conversation was politely brought back to something nice to talk about. And after a while, the people got better, and went on with their lives. The Quakers called these places away from the stress of life asylums. The medical establishment of the time could not deny the efficacy of the model, so they professionalized it, gradually evolving asylums into a total institution horror show of electric shock therapy, Thorazine and shuffling lost souls. We do have the capacity of turning the good into the bad.

Today's psychedelic cottage industry is one of shamans, would-be shamans, white coats, professional sitters, and decidedly unprofessional ones. Once psychedelics become even quasi-legal, the floodgates will open and the forces of medicalization, bureaucratization and monetization will bear down on us full force. Now is the time to watch out, as various commercial enterprises are already preparing the future for us. Having conquered and tamed the external wildernesses, the internal wild lands may be the next for the chopping block. Some will say that the spirit realms are way too enormous for us to ruin, but we humans have developed a remarkable capacity to get things twisted in almost any dimension.

Psychedelics are, or can be at least, a doorway to a land of wonder and revelation. I'm not confident that in the hands of the medical bureaucracy and the commercial establishment they will stay unblemished. The deeper genius of psychedelics is their ability to totally undermine materialism and comfortable categories by blasting us into ridiculously remote realities. The medical model and the commercial model will never tolerate that. They will find a way to restrict, contain and sanitize. Exactly how, I don't know, but no system will deliberately destroy itself, it would rather consume and digest the systems around it. 

The model I like best is the one quietly in use in underground treatment right now, where the sitter makes the environment as home-like as possible (like doing it in someone's home for instance) and then be the one to gladly hold space. Being present, not promoting your own ideas and theories, and seeing to the every need one someone who is quietly tripping behind an eye mask is a demanding task and it goes on for six or seven hours. It's probably not the cup of tea of psychologists bent on fixing symptoms and having clever insights.

In the sixties psychedelics were the tool of cultural revolution. That revolution was followed by a tsunami of a backlash that was in no way the fault of the medicines. Today we have finally gotten over ourselves and are ready to reapproach. I understand why today's researchers take great care not to wear beads and sandals, but as the time comes when psychedelics become as ubiquitous as vacuum cleaners, I hope we summon the wisdom and fortitude to let them do their transformation on us without the process being damaged. Rather than fixing up the emotionally walking wounded so they can return to their jobs in Big Data etc., I hope we can allow them to do their real business of reminding us to wonder why and who the hell we are. 

Maria Sabina, the Mazateca woman who inadvertently introduced the West to psilocybin mushrooms and died in extreme poverty said, "From the moment the foreigners arrived to search for God, the saint children (mushrooms) lost their purity. They lost their force; the foreigners spoiled them. From now on they won't be any good, there is no remedy for it." I hope that we still have it in us to find a civil relationship with the saint children, but to do that will take a lot of humility, kindness and diligence. Let's try to do that.