The Psychedelic Savior Part II: Encased by the Darkness of the Skull

If humanity can clean up its doors of perception we will reach a collective spiritual transformation and get much more fun out of life, at least that’s what William Blake claims. And yet, if I take the “the doors of perception” to mean my senses, well actually I see, hear, taste, and so on just fine – so what needs this cleansing Mr. Blake? Blake saw the body as “the portion of the soul perceived by the five senses,” so that my sense perceptions are not separate from my soul, they are part and parcel of it.  In our world we call a spade a spade because spade-like things are what we know, but in Blake’s world a spade is as likely as any other object to be a portal into the infinite. So, what kind of muck and clutter is getting in the way of our spiritual processes?  

 It’s Aldous Huxley again, and his ideas about psychedelics that can shed some light. Huxley presents the idea of the reducing valve, a mechanism that screens out the deluge of sensory (and cosmic) information that is always bearing down on us from Mind at Large, which is a way of saying cosmic consciousness, the infinite, Source, God, or what one of the Desert Fathers called That Yonder.

“To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet…Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he or she has been born – the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people’s experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness in the only awareness and it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.”

 We might argue with the idea that this closure came with the advent of language, but surely this “measly trickle” is the same as the tiny bit of light coming through the narrow chinks in Blake’s cavern. If the reducing valve gets overactive and does its job too well, it leads to impoverished emotional and spiritual perceptions, and a dull time for everybody.   

A more sciencey name for what may be the same event, is the default mode network that has recently been popularized in Michael Pollan’s book Changing Your Mind. The default mode is what is happening in the brain when it is just ticking over with nothing special to do – the daydreaming, loosely associating mind that may be chewing over the past or ruminating on the future. At the outset, the default mode did not excite much notice, and it was seen as the baseline from which more interesting brain activities might be measured, the where-you-are before the experiment proper begins.

Gradually researchers got interested in this baseline itself and saw the default mode as an activity in its own right that takes place in certain linked areas throughout the brain that they appropriately called the default mode network. Interesting things took off in 2012 when researcher Robin Cahart Harris put people in brain scanners while they were tripping (poor things) and saw that rather than getting more active during the mental fireworks of the trip, the default mode network actually slowed down dramatically. That goes along with our oft-encountered experience while tripping of ruminating “me” becoming a much more tenuous and porous entity than normal. As the default mode network stops grabbing all the neural pathways, unexpected and original connections are made between disparate areas of the brain that don’t usually get to meet each other – rather like a family reunion where your noisy uncle finally falls asleep in an armchair. As the reducing valve (or default mode) falters in its duty, the doors of perception get a good psychedelic cleansing and the tripping brain takes a peek at the infinite. At least, that’s one metaphor for what happens to us while we are tripping.

Why does muck and clutter accumulate on the doors of perception in the first place? Some of the reason for this is to do with the nature of perception itself. Neuroscientist Anil Seth points out that the central organ of sense perception is not the eyes or ears etc., but the brain which receives and coordinates all these sensory inputs. The brain does not ‘see’ or ‘hear’ anything, it is encased by the darkness of the skull, and from there it takes the electrical impulses that come from the sense organs and it composes a representation of the world, modeled by its expectations of what is out there. What we take to be seeing and hearing is really a game of battleships that the brain is playing with the world, filling in its internal map as more information comes along.

According to Seth, half or more of the neuron pathways involved with perception are actually sending information from the brain outwards to the perceiving organs, while the remainder are bringing electrical impulses from the perceptual organs in. To save time and energy the brain is its own reducing valve, making an educated guess at what it expects to perceive, presenting its prediction as reality, and then adjusting as it goes along – that’s why we do a double take when we see the unexpected. “Normal perception is a fantasy constrained by reality,” says Seth, “We’re all hallucinating all the time; when we all agree on our hallucinations we call it reality.” The brain’s mandate is not to tell truth, it is to make the world navigable at the least possible expenditure of energy – and it needs to conserve energy, because at 2% of our body weight the brain burns up 20% of our calories. The doors of perception are clogged up with preconception.

So, the brain has only a passing interest in what’s really there, and more than that, according to Iain McGilchrist, in The Master and his Emissary, it has little direct interest in our emotional and spiritual wellbeing either. Like the rest of the animal kingdom, we have two hemispheres to our brain, the left and the right, and though they are both intimately involved in all our activities, the left hemisphere specializes in classification and naming while the right hemisphere is more involved with the global picture, relationship, emotion and nuance. The left hemisphere is totally literal, it doesn’t get irony or humour, while the right hemisphere does not do expressive speech; you want your left hemisphere if you are driving a car or totting up your bank account, and your right hemisphere if you are pondering the meaning of life. The left hemisphere is an excellent servant for the right hemisphere, with its capacity to organize and categorize, but a terrible boss. And what has happened is that over the last few centuries in Western culture is that the left hemisphere, with its penchant for counting, quantifying, bureaucratizing, and putting everything in straight lines, has become our boss – to the detriment of everybody. What do I do today if I want a fulfilled life? I check off all the items on my bucket list. There, done!

Perception then, is not at all what we take it to be. Blake, a prophet who railed against the early stages of the left-brain take-over said, “a fool sees not the same tree as a wise man,” meaning that for one person it is “a thing in the way,” for another a source of potential money, and for another a portal into this infinite, and so on. For instance, many years ago, in my twenties, I was walking with my friend Dean on some street in Oakland, California while Dean was tripping. I, as representative of Anil Seth’s collective hallucination called “reality,” was taking care of him. Passing a small tree in flower, Dean stopped and gazed at it in wonder. Now, it was a truly gorgeous tree, but he spent an absolute age standing there, until I was getting restless and slightly embarrassed by the people walking past us. “It’s alive,” he said at long last, with such profound reverence that I knew he was taking in levels of beauty and levels of information that my non-tripping brain could not fathom. “Yes,” I replied from the other side of our divide, and we stood there an age longer. In terms of this particular tree, Dean was the wise man, and I got to play the part of the fool.

And fools we continue to be. One recent morning, as I was going into a park near my house in Brooklyn, I was struck by the beauty of one of the trees on the approach road. This tree did not have its cover of leaves yet, so the jagged shape of its branches against the sky illustrated some kind of law from chaos theory or maybe the Fibonacci sequence, not in general, but as it filtered through that particular being in its particular conditions. I felt that if I could gaze upon the tree with the right degree of concentration, I could do a Dean, and take in living information about the structure of things. But with my reducing valve firmly in place I could only detect a faint and distant echo of that kind of communion. It was more of an “if only” moment than an “aha.” Still, I shouldn’t feel too bad, better people than me have had the same problem. Here’s William Wordsworth, who was around for much of the same time as William Blake:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore; —
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

 In the same long poem, Ode: Intimations of Immortality, he did also have this more cheerful idea:

 Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and its fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Sometimes, despite the reducing valve and the default mode network conspiring with the left brain to make life miserable, we are still able to feel things just as deeply as Wordsworth describes. Our potential for the future, the human bet on life, is that I as an individual, and us as a collective being can reach into our hearts and open our perceptions into something closer to the tripping mindstate, without doing ourselves the least bit of harm. We might harm the economy though, by not needing so many useless knickknacks and toys afterwards. But for ourselves – it would do us a world of good.

Too many years of crossing on the green, pondering over our to-do lists and being told to pay attention in class have gummed up our ability to easily get into that state, and although in childhood it might have been easy to unselfconsciously be transfixed by the sight of a tree, or an ant on the sidewalk, or a passing truck, today such spontaneity is taboo for grownups. There is no written law against it, but there is a strong social law, and you will be seen as weird or crazy if you are caught doing it. If you don’t believe me, take note of how many people you see on a busy street suddenly stopping and sighing with joy at the sight of a beautiful cloud. The truth is that we are discomforted by people who want to experience their perceptions deeply, who like Dean or William Blake, can openly drink in the power and the glory.  

We don’t remember having chosen it this way, but we have self-selected for a limited life. To battle against our personalized depression states, anxiety states, OCD, ADHD, PTSD and so on, we take a pill or talk to a therapist, not in order to re-enliven the world, but to get rid of the pain that comes with being part of a sick system. The project should instead be to re-animate the spiritual corpse of humanity by starting at the beginning – ourselves. With psychedelics we can sometimes reach the mindspace of intense communing that will throw us into ecstasy and remind us about what’s what. When we can reach that special state, the tragedies of life, our terrible moods, the tumult of our feelings – none of these go away, not if we are human – but they become part of the tapestry, not a grey lens covering it all. We can be free.

The Psychedelic Savior Part I: Why Mental Health Has Gone Mental

Here I am an adult – and I’ve been one for what seems like ages now – and I’m still grappling with the same old issues, whether that’s depression, anxiety, stuck thinking, or having one drink too many when I know I shouldn’t. You have to wonder: Isn’t there a point where you put the past behind you and just get on with it?

 For all our boot-strapping self-advice, the turmoil that so often follows us out from childhood does have a habit of sticking around. Our moods and our obsessions come from a place that is deep inside us, are intimately part of us, and yet – strangely and annoyingly – can’t be directly touched by us. You can try saying, “stop it” to a difficult mood, but it doesn’t seem to think you are its commanding officer. The whole thing is quite weird.

 The problem with the problem is that we are looking at it the wrong way. Just as a for instance, next time you are on the bus, in the store, or wherever, take a critical look at the people around you. Does anyone glow with the radiance of living that wonderful depression-free life you believe you are missing out on? Do any of us have the air of true freedom about us? In fact, we all seem to be very much in the same soup together. The issue of my mood, my stuckness, my dumb compulsions is intimately part of a collective cloud cover over the whole culture that we live in, it’s not just me. My personal problems may be a lot more communal, than I think.

Think of a culture as its own entity, just as you think of a person or an animal as one being rather than billions of disparate cells cobbled together. In the case of a culture the cells are individual people, and if the larger organism gets sick all the individual cells within it will be affected, even though they might not see that and wonder what is the matter with me, why aren’t I functioning so well? Our strivings to get better can only happen within the constraints of the being of which each one of us is a tiny part. If the whole economy tanks I’m probably not going to make my fortune; if my country declares war it might be my house that gets burned down, and if my culture falls short of being joyous, creative and open minded, I won’t go unscathed.

 But when it comes to mental health, we don’t see this part of things. The government puts out information about depression rates, substance use levels how high they are and so on, but we take no collective steps towards the big picture aspects of the problem. Individual sufferers are told about their genetic flaws, chemical imbalances in their brains (which is a debunked theory), and their patterns of erroneous thinking. What doesn’t get a mention are the structural causes behind our despair, the travails of a hierarchical and empire-driven culture beset with racism, sexism, patriarchy and exploitation of all involved. Life is artificial, communal relationships break down, but it is the single “cell” of the individual person that gets the diagnosis while the body politic gets the free pass.  

The fall-out from this is summed up in the title of James Hillman’s 1992 book, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse. For all our new therapeutic drugs and many new psychological modalities, people are just as depressed, despairing, anxious and crazy as ever, and let’s just say the world has not been bathed in sunshine since Hillman’s book came out. Would it be unfair to measure the success of a healthcare industry by how much the diseases are being reduced? That’s how we rate cancer and diabetes, so why do we think of mental health so very differently.

Why is the big picture aspect of the conundrum of human healing passed over so consistently? I believe it’s a fox guarding the henhouse situation where the system that created the hamster wheel of modern life is the same one that is charged with fixing the little hamsters that freak out or drop from exhaustion. It’s so much easier to find defects in the hamster than in the wheel, and then fix up the hamster so it can start running again. The status quo remains unharmed.

 If someone goes to a mental health clinic the treatment will begin with a diagnostic code and go on to compliance with paperwork regulations, negotiations with the insurance company, discussions about what drugs they might be given, and eventually a discharge plan that will spit them back out through the revolving door. Who is the consumer here, the customer who clicks their way in and out of the entrance, or the institution that consumes clients as its meat and drink? The bottom line is that you can’t ask the sickness to make you well.

 And that is where we stand as psychedelics re-enter our culture. For the mental health industry psychedelics are the latest greatest magic bullet, and they will keep psychiatrists, pharmacists and regulators busy for years — not to mention venture capitalists. But the real promise of psychedelics lies somewhere totally different. They could revive us out of our spiritual and ethical torpor and spark a self-help practice for the culture, not just for individuals. The diagnosis for the culture is arrested spiritual/emotional growth, and we are all suffering from it/because of it. The primary marker of this is our worsening relationship with the divine and with our own imaginations, and it turns out that the strong suit of the psychedelics experience is exactly these two things –access to the divine and access to the imagination.

 When Aldous Huxley brought psychedelics to popular notice in the 1950s, he named his book The Doors of Perception. His inspiration was from William Blake’s famous quote that “if the doors of perception can be cleansed, we shall see everything as it is – infinite.” These words catch the state of the human imagination as it is today – well, 1790 actually – where our sense of the infinite is quite divorced from the experience of daily life.

 Blake completed his thought with, “For man has closed himself up, till he sees only thro’ the narrow chinks of his cavern.” If we agree that is the predicament, it doesn’t help much when the most we do is make our individual depressions or anxieties bearable enough to get back on the hamster wheel. In our own individual way we need to be working to get a little more light into humanity’s cavern, and psychedelics may be just the right chisel to carve a few holes in it. But the escape into sunshine won’t happen by magic, and psychedelics could be just as easily used to keep the hamster wheel paradigm in place as they could to be a tool for transforming humanity, the organism of who we all are.

There Is Only One Diagnosis

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the book that mental health workers use to make diagnoses, lists 157 psychological disorders across 947 rather dense pages. But we all know that there is only one diagnosis for humanity: the thwarted wish to give and receive love. Everything else is just mopping up the details.

Whatever kind it may be, love with a partner, the love between a parent and a child, the love of a friend, or the love of the natural world around us, the great joyful exchange is the act of seeing and being seen in all the fine and complete details. That fact of love is, I believe, what psychedelic experiences will sometimes show us – that love is what holds everything together, or even that it is the everything that is held together. Once you have that, what more do you need than a vegetable patch, a few friends and a nice warm fire? The destructive materialism we are mired in now is feeble compensation for actual connection.  

Where to begin? One place is to allow ourselves to mourn lost love, the many years and moments when we did not get to savor the joy of seeing and being seen by another. The staleness of what we call ordinary life, its missing magic. To mourn where love has not flourished is itself a labor of love, it is a process that moves through our bodies and asks only to be witnessed. To feel the ache in our hearts without undue comment or commentary, and to let that ache – or whatever it may be for you – to move, change, grow, stay the same, or what it will. To be a steadfast witness to the motions of the heart.

When we are able to mourn for our own lost love, for all the expression and joy that never took place, a stronger interest in the fellow sufferers around us can grow. The love we crave and hold inside us is ready to dance more intently with others. That secret rose inside us is what psychedelics have the potential to awaken and express. If we have had the good fortune of being in bliss, we may remember to keep a good hold on it when we return.

How does my love grow?

Ask the holly bush.

Where did my love go?

Follow the bee.

Will the night last long?

Only the blood-red moon knows.

What does love ask for? 

To be seen, and to see.

 In the quiet of the night

I hear it rising

The great wise salmon

Of the Western Sea.

True death, true life

Is all we long for

In the whirlpool of folly

That we struggle to flee.

 Down the long wide valleys

Of the moonlight

The bitter and the doleful

Ghosts are howling

For the love they once cherished

But allowed to slip free.

If of love

You would be given

Let love be,

Let love be.

The Power of Not Now

I am always impressed by the people and teachers who are living “in the Now.” It must be a lovely place to be, but I always miss it by a few seconds, or I’m daydreaming about something interesting and then scolding myself afterwards. In fact, being in the Now is getting harder and harder as I notice just how closely the past packs up against it on one side and the future crashes in on the other. If, as various Good Books tell us, both past and future are illusory, I will have to become an increasingly thin person to wedge myself in between the two of them. Some people even say that there is no “now,” any more than there is an actual edge to the ever moving ocean on the beach. Now keeps slipping away from me, like a mosquito I’m trying to slap, but all I hit is myself.

Given how much of a problem the Now actually is, I am ditching “Nowism” and taking up a new philosophy of living in the “Not Now.” It seems so much more achievable. Having had this revelation, I realise how much I am there already. When I think about doing the dishes or tedious paper work the first words that spring to mind are “not now” – always. The tremendous power of Not Now is in our most basic instincts. Children, perhaps because of their innocence and propensity for joy, are natural masters at living in the Not Now, especially when asked to clean up their rooms or finish their homework. My bank, I have noticed, is fully in the Now when it comes to making deductions from my account, but is in a much more healthy Not Now of “three to five more business days” when it comes to crediting me my money. Not Now makes the world go round.

I wonder if it is possible to live in the Not Now more deliberately and fully. Not Now for answering every email within thirty minutes, Not Now for organizing my day perfectly, and Not Now for the damn filing. Would anybody really notice? Think of the ramifications though if this caught on. If we all – I mean every single one of us – lived in the Not Now. For a start, capitalism would totter and fall, not because we took to the streets and threw things at the police, but precisely because we stayed home, and stayed, and stayed, and basked in the Not Now. Probably the cops would would appreciate the change of pace too. And just as the air is clearing up all over the world during this whole coronavirus thing, it would certainly do the same under a regimen of Not Now. And the oceans would also get a break if, unlike me so far, we apply Not Now to all the needless crap we buy on Amazon, with all its needless packaging. Admittedly, that’s a work in progress.

And then, as the emails, phone messages, dishes and pieces of paper pile up, we could all go downstairs, sit out on the stoops of our houses and apartment buildings, and celebrate the Not Now together. We could listen to podcasts and even each other, and as spiritual beings having a human experience, we could duck the Now and see if it wants to follow us. Maybe it’s lonely and wants some company. Ah, I’m beginning to feel the relax already.

Putting the bullshit self-criticism aside...

Putting the bullshit self-criticism, self-judgment, etc. to the side, what do you wish for yourself? When you consider the parts of you that hold your anxiety, your small mindedness, your fears and so on, what do you wish for them if you’ve put aside your bullshit self-criticism and judgment?

The bullshit self-criticism says of whatever is bugging you at this particular time, “I hate it, I wish I could cut it out of myself and throw it away.” Which makes its own kind of sense when that same anxiety or whatever has put you through a lot of trouble, trials and tribulation. And embarrassment. But when you think about it more, what you’re saying is that you want to get rid of a part of your own totality, a piece of you that is scared, or confused, or sensitive to slings and arrows of the world around us. We don’t really want to excise our sensitivities and our softer sense of being. Really we want to help out those parts so that they are not in pain. No pain – they’re great!

So ask your bullshit self-criticism and your bullshit self-judgment to step back, and then think about what you really want for the part of you that appears to be so annoying. What would you say to it? Maybe it’s just a word, like calm, confidence, or grace. Try this lying on your back, tune into yourself, maybe even look for where the problematic feelings live in your body as well, and then say to them something like, “Calm to you, confidence to you, grace to you.” Anything nice will be fine.

That’s what I call self-soothing, because my self is directly talking to other parts of me in a soothing way. When self-criticism and judgment pop up, remind them that their message may be defensive and some kind of self-preservation gesture, but it is not truth. Truth is that when someone suffers, even if it is a part of me, the natural instinct is to help it out. So step back self-criticism, I’m doing the helping out now. It will even benefit you in the end.

And then, inevitably, you will have to consider the bullshit self-criticism and self-judgment as objects of your soothing too. Even if they put on a tough guy act, they also could do with the same kind thoughts, the same soothing voice as all the rest of you. They are just as angry and scared and flustered as everybody else in there. Kind and loving thoughts will help them in the process of being rescued from their particular spot in purgatory.

What if in this movie there are no bad guys, just patients to be healed, and you are both patient and doctor, chauffeur and passenger, actor and audience to your own drama? Your menagerie of crazy characters may not get regulated into something palpably less ridiculous and more socially acceptable, but you will get to be more at peace with yourself, more at home in your own home. They say it takes a village to raise a child, but inside ourselves we are a village, one where the fighting and fussing can soften considerably. Be at peace with your whole, true crazy self. It’s the only one you’ve got. 

Thoreau's Cabin. Part II: Contentment v. Compulsion

The spontaneous mindset brings contentment, while the fruit of haste is compulsion. As a kid, walking back from the hills to our holiday farmhouse, I felt a sense of contentment that had nothing to do with achieving anything or upregulating my self-esteem. It was a natural state of being, like when you push your chair away from the table having finished a good meal with great friends. All feels right with the world and it’s not much more complicated than that.

But there is not a whole lot of satisfaction and joy to be squeezed out of the haste-based regime we seem to live under. And yet, we crave a deep satisfaction or at least a strong experience, and it is frustrating when we go too long without getting one. We need something to hit that spot, and an experience that has a big charge to it without being profoundly satisfying may just have to do. Compulsion is a high energy hit that promises more than it can deliver in terms of cosmic peace and ecstatic union but it does give you a rise.

These usual suspect compulsions are the stigmatized ones, like compulsive sex, drugs, over (or under) eating, gambling and so on, each of which comes with its own treatment program. Other compulsions, like being a dedicated consumer or thinking non-stop when you might be at your ease, are more socially smiled upon and are not always thought of as problems. Either way though, they all function as a safety valve to the tightly wound haste mindset. If  in the spontaneous state you feel delight at a sunset or a flock of birds, for the haste mindset it would have to be a beer, a joint, a slice of chocolate cake, a something, at the end of a shitty day so you don’t have to feel what you’re feeling. Meister Eckhart, the 14th century mystic put it this way, “God and God’s will are one. I and my will are two.” A split will can never reach wholeness, and without some degree of wholeness, the fun stops.

And so, having abandoned wholeness but in need of a fairly regular high energy feeding, we find that even the stupidest compulsion makes genuine sense. It’s not that we believe that stuffing our faces with sweet gooey stuff will be transformational or that getting drunk tonight is a genius idea why didn’t I think of that before, it’s just a matter of simple math. Zero plus something beats zero plus zero. If we are sitting in the dark and we have to suffer, most of the time we can put up with it, but if we are sitting in the dark and there is some sort of solace close at hand, however meagre it is, it’s hard to say no.  

We will need our compulsions, even the embarrassing ones, until we can decommission enough of the haste mentality to start getting more of our nourishment from spontaneity/contentment. An old song by the doo-wop soul group the Persuasions says, “Stop, look, listen to your heart, hear what it’s saying.” If we can do that we may notice that the party was going on around us all the time. Examine your fingers. Pretty, aren’t they? Look more closely at the sidewalk, the wall, and all the other little sensory things. With a full heart, and so long as the conditions around me are not actually threatening or dangerous, life itself is just fun.

For generations now we have trained our brains into the haste mindset with a billion traffic lights, traffic jams, timelines, assembly lines, and deadlines. We are living out the lives of quiet desperation that Thoreau said most of us would. If we don’t like that, it’s on us to make an effort to get out of haste/compulsion and into the spontaneity/contentment world. Better if we could live lives of quiet inspiration.

Culturally, collectively, we have built so many glittering palaces and roared down so many asphalt roads that it will not be easy for us to slow down now. But we are all free to make our contribution to the project of disenchanting ourselves from this haste bullshit. In the wise words of Timothy Leary, we can start to turn on, tune in and drop out. Turn on to the original spontaneous way of being, tune in to the simple, sensory world around us, and drop out of the joy-abandoning haste mentality. Then we can feel like we belong here.

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.