Zig Zag Zen: An Interview with Author Allan Badiner

Posted on April 8, 2018 by Reid Mukai

The Intersection of Psychedelic Spirituality and Buddhist Practice

By Jennifer Bleyer

Source: MAPS

Buddhism and psychedelic use have been linked since at least the 1950s, when influential thinkers and writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Alan Watts experimented with both as avenues toward understanding the mind. The tacitly acknowledged connection took a leap forward in 2002 with the publication of Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics, a collection of essays, interviews, articles edited by Allan Badiner, which examines the two realms and their similarities and differences. A new edition of Zig Zag Zen was published in 2015. Badiner, a contributing editor of Tricycle, is a longtime supporter of MAPS.—Jennifer Bleyer

How did you become involved in Buddhism?

I’d never had any interest or belief in any religion, but when I was in my early 30s, I spent a year traveling in India, and right before returning home I took some advice to enroll in a Buddhist meditation retreat in Sri Lanka. I hated it. My bones ached, the only food was stewed greens, the venue was overrun with bugs, and the bed was a blanket over wood boards. Suddenly, when the ten-day retreat was almost over, I felt free of any pain and almost ecstatic— and not just because I was leaving. The bugs were my relatives. I slept like a baby. I was overtaken by a subtle but persistent wave of ecstasy, and felt a diminished sense of separation from others.

And how were you exposed to psychedelics?

After that I trip I returned to California, and the meditative glow eventually faded. But I had been “bitten” by the Buddhist bug. I took classes with a senior Buddhist monk, studied Pali, the original language of the Buddha, and earned a Masters degree at the College of Buddhist Studies, a small Theraveda university in Los Angeles—all because I was trying to understand how to return to the blissful state I had experienced on the retreat. I was writing a column called “Mind and Spirit” for the LA Weekly while working on my Buddhist studies, and had a plan to interview Terence McKenna. He accused me of being an “armchair Buddhist” and challenged me to try sacred plants, such as psilocybin mushrooms. We became friends, and I visited him at his home in Hawaii where he treated me to yagé, or ayahuasca, the so-called vine of the soul. Sometime later, I experienced MDMA and got to know Alexander Shulgin. I regularly enjoyed Friday night dinners at the Shulgin home, where the Bay Area psychedelic community gathered. So, indeed, I became formally and viscerally connected to both Buddhism and psychedelics.

How do you describe the relationship between Buddhism and psychedelics?

Both share an interest in the primacy of mind and present moment awareness, and while they are very different in character, the 1950s Beat Generation and the 1960s cultural revolution were both heavily influenced by Eastern wisdom traditions, including Buddhism, as well as LSD, psilocybin, and peyote. I think their relationship manifests in the human pursuit of evolution. Many people seek the compassionate wisdom of the Buddhist philosophy, also known as the Dharma, as well as the psychic reset and transformational power that certain plant substances offer. A kind of practical magic results when the “Zig” zags into Zen—when a time-tested philosophy and ethical system meets plant-assisted changes in consciousness.

Your book identified the complementary natures of Buddhism and psychedelics as facilitators of the “liberation of the mind.” How has it been received in the Buddhist community?

It was fascinating to me that, with only one exception, every American Buddhist teacher I interviewed had personally experienced psychedelics prior to getting into Buddhism. One of the most revered and respected teachers, Jack Kornfield, went so far as to say that were it not for LSD, he would never have been able to grasp the Dharma. It should be noted that Zig Zag Zen also presents the thinking of teachers who are clearly not fans of psychedelics. I was secretly hoping for Zig Zag Zen to ruffle a lot of Buddhist feathers, envisioning that the controversy would drive sales. When the book was released, the Buddhist community in general was like, “Buddhism, psychedelics, ok…so?” The anti-Zig Zag Zen rallies and Buddhist book boycotts I was imagining never materialized. (laughs)

You said in a recent interview with Tricycle that “psychedelic use is an issue for many contemporary Buddhists.” Why is that?

Anyone who becomes seriously focused on spiritual development has to at least consider the issue of psychedelic use. Everyone knows someone who, after taking acid or magic mushrooms, or attending a peyote sweat lodge, experienced themselves as changed forever for the better. In the mid-20th century, famous Buddhist writers like Alan Watts and Ram Dass popularized psychedelics, even as Buddhist centers were filled with young people who had experienced psychedelics and were eager to find more practical and gentle routes to the same “destination.” Added to the question of psychedelic use is the realization that we live in a critical time ecologically. The sixth great extinction is underway. Who would have thought that we would live to see the extinction of elephants, or tigers, or orangutans? Coastal cities are experiencing unremitting flooding, and the end of ice caps is a planetary inevitability. Recognizing the interbeing of people and planet is the fundamental awakening of our time. Buddhists are enlightened by the extent of their compassion—for themselves, for other people, for all living beings, and for the planet itself.

Isn’t there a Buddhist rule about not using intoxicants?

Buddhist precepts are not hard rules or commandments but guiding principles meant to facilitate progress on the path. Buddhists refrain from killing, taking what is not given, sexual misconduct, and incorrect speech. According to Robert Thurman, the chair of Buddhist studies at Columbia University, the Buddhist fifth precept, which is interpreted by some as prohibiting all substance use, specifically refers to grain alcohol, which was a problem even in the Buddha’s day as it’s likely to lead to carelessness, and to the user violating the other four precepts. Obviously, one can misuse many substances to the point of intoxication, but it is not correct to say generally that psychedelics are intoxicants.

How did you get involved with MAPS?

I met Rick Doblin through mutual friends when he was a college student, and he had just attended a psychedelic conference at Esalen Institute, my neighbor in Big Sur. He was very excited about the emergence of a psychedelic culture consisting of scientists, physicians, caregivers, and psychiatrists. He had personally experienced the healing power of psychedelics and told me that he was dedicating his life to making these materials legal and respected for their helpful effects. I promptly told him he was hallucinating, so to speak, and that he should get a job, maybe in academia. These were the Reagan years. Attitudes about cannabis and psychedelics in the ’80s were harshly negative. It is a profound testament to the power of psychedelics and of Rick’s formidable persistence that now the government is approving clinical testing of psychedelic drugs for medical use. Rick’s dream is coming true. The physical, mental, and emotional healing possible with psychedelics makes this pursuit a moral imperative. Rick does not consider himself a Buddhist, but he is definitely in the business of relieving suffering—and that is the primary goal of Buddhism.

Why are you so passionate about MAPS’ work?

Well, having entered on the ground floor, I’ve watched MAPS grow from the moment Rick spoke about his vision in my driveway, to its emergence as an amazing organization making epic and sorely needed change. It is poised to open the first non-profit pharmaceutical company, turning psychedelics and cannabis into prescription medicines; educating therapists in to practice psychedelic-assisted therapy; building a network of clinics, and educating the public about the risks and benefits of these substances. As the psychologist, Ralph Metzner, a contributor to Zig Zag Zen, points out: “Two of the most beneficent potential areas for application of psychedelic technologies are in the treatment of addictions and in the psycho-spiritual preparation for the final transition.” I feel totally aligned with this vision.

Ultimately, what do you hope to achieve through your support of MAPS?

I hope to play a role in helping MAPS raise the funds required for the Phase 3 trials of MDMA as a treatment for PTSD—the critical step to becoming a prescription medicine. Like everyone, I see so many people suffering around me. I have confidence that psychedelics can be a serious medicine, as well as a powerful tool for personal self-development. The Anthropocene—the age of human-driven change to the Earth’s natural systems—has ushered in a new urgency for shamanic and psychedelic tools. The clock is ticking. We need all the help available to foment an evolution in our relationships with our neighbors, neighboring nations, and the planet.

Carl Sagan’s Thoughts On The War on Drugs

Posted on November 9, 2017 by Reid Mukai

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Since today marks the birthday of the late Carl Sagan, we can remember a lesser-known aspect of his greatness by reading (or re-reading) the following 1969 essay he wrote under the pseudonym “Mr. X” published in 1971 in Lester Grinspoon’s “Marihuana Reconsidered”:

It all began about ten years ago. I had reached a considerably more relaxed period in my life – a time when I had come to feel that there was more to living than science, a time of awakening of my social consciousness and amiability, a time when I was open to new experiences. I had become friendly with a group of people who occasionally smoked cannabis, irregularly, but with evident pleasure. Initially I was unwilling to partake, but the apparent euphoria that cannabis produced and the fact that there was no physiological addiction to the plant eventually persuaded me to try. My initial experiences were entirely disappointing; there was no effect at all, and I began to entertain a variety of hypotheses about cannabis being a placebo which worked by expectation and hyperventilation rather than by chemistry. After about five or six unsuccessful attempts, however, it happened. I was lying on my back in a friend’s living room idly examining the pattern of shadows on the ceiling cast by a potted plant (not cannabis!). I suddenly realized that I was examining an intricately detailed miniature Volkswagen, distinctly outlined by the shadows. I was very skeptical at this perception, and tried to find inconsistencies between Volkswagens and what I viewed on the ceiling. But it was all there, down to hubcaps, license plate, chrome, and even the small handle used for opening the trunk. When I closed my eyes, I was stunned to find that there was a movie going on the inside of my eyelids. Flash . . . a simple country scene with red farmhouse, a blue sky, white clouds, yellow path meandering over green hills to the horizon. . . Flash . . . same scene, orange house, brown sky, red clouds, yellow path, violet fields . . . Flash . . . Flash . . . Flash. The flashes came about once a heartbeat. Each flash brought the same simple scene into view, but each time with a different set of colors . . . exquisitely deep hues, and astonishingly harmonious in their juxtaposition. Since then I have smoked occasionally and enjoyed it thoroughly. It amplifies torpid sensibilities and produces what to me are even more interesting effects, as I will explain shortly.

I can remember another early visual experience with cannabis, in which I viewed a candle flame and discovered in the heart of the flame, standing with magnificent indifference, the black-hatted and -cloaked Spanish gentleman who appears on the label of the Sandeman sherry bottle. Looking at fires when high, by the way, especially through one of those prism kaleidoscopes which image their surroundings, is an extraordinarily moving and beautiful experience.

I want to explain that at no time did I think these things ‘really’ were out there. I knew there was no Volkswagen on the ceiling and there was no Sandeman salamander man in the flame. I don’t feel any contradiction in these experiences. There’s a part of me making, creating the perceptions which in everyday life would be bizarre; there’s another part of me which is a kind of observer. About half of the pleasure comes from the observer-part appreciating the work of the creator-part. I smile, or sometimes even laugh out loud at the pictures on the insides of my eyelids. In this sense, I suppose cannabis is psychotomimetic, but I find none of the panic or terror that accompanies some psychoses. Possibly this is because I know it’s my own trip, and that I can come down rapidly any time I want to.

While my early perceptions were all visual, and curiously lacking in images of human beings, both of these items have changed over the intervening years. I find that today a single joint is enough to get me high. I test whether I’m high by closing my eyes and looking for the flashes. They come long before there are any alterations in my visual or other perceptions. I would guess this is a signal-to-noise problem, the visual noise level being very low with my eyes closed. Another interesting information-theoretical aspects is the prevalence – at least in my flashed images – of cartoons: just the outlines of figures, caricatures, not photographs. I think this is simply a matter of information compression; it would be impossible to grasp the total content of an image with the information content of an ordinary photograph, say 108 bits, in the fraction of a second which a flash occupies. And the flash experience is designed, if I may use that word, for instant appreciation. The artist and viewer are one. This is not to say that the images are not marvelously detailed and complex. I recently had an image in which two people were talking, and the words they were saying would form and disappear in yellow above their heads, at about a sentence per heartbeat. In this way it was possible to follow the conversation. At the same time an occasional word would appear in red letters among the yellows above their heads, perfectly in context with the conversation; but if one remembered these red words, they would enunciate a quite different set of statements, penetratingly critical of the conversation. The entire image set which I’ve outlined here, with I would say at least 100 yellow words and something like 10 red words, occurred in something under a minute.

The cannabis experience has greatly improved my appreciation for art, a subject which I had never much appreciated before. The understanding of the intent of the artist which I can achieve when high sometimes carries over to when I’m down. This is one of many human frontiers which cannabis has helped me traverse. There also have been some art-related insights – I don’t know whether they are true or false, but they were fun to formulate. For example, I have spent some time high looking at the work of the Belgian surrealist Yves Tanguey. Some years later, I emerged from a long swim in the Caribbean and sank exhausted onto a beach formed from the erosion of a nearby coral reef. In idly examining the arcuate pastel-colored coral fragments which made up the beach, I saw before me a vast Tanguey painting. Perhaps Tanguey visited such a beach in his childhood.

A very similar improvement in my appreciation of music has occurred with cannabis. For the first time I have been able to hear the separate parts of a three-part harmony and the richness of the counterpoint. I have since discovered that professional musicians can quite easily keep many separate parts going simultaneously in their heads, but this was the first time for me. Again, the learning experience when high has at least to some extent carried over when I’m down. The enjoyment of food is amplified; tastes and aromas emerge that for some reason we ordinarily seem to be too busy to notice. I am able to give my full attention to the sensation. A potato will have a texture, a body, and taste like that of other potatoes, but much more so. Cannabis also enhances the enjoyment of sex – on the one hand it gives an exquisite sensitivity, but on the other hand it postpones orgasm: in part by distracting me with the profusion of image passing before my eyes. The actual duration of orgasm seems to lengthen greatly, but this may be the usual experience of time expansion which comes with cannabis smoking.

I do not consider myself a religious person in the usual sense, but there is a religious aspect to some highs. The heightened sensitivity in all areas gives me a feeling of communion with my surroundings, both animate and inanimate. Sometimes a kind of existential perception of the absurd comes over me and I see with awful certainty the hypocrisies and posturing of myself and my fellow men. And at other times, there is a different sense of the absurd, a playful and whimsical awareness. Both of these senses of the absurd can be communicated, and some of the most rewarding highs I’ve had have been in sharing talk and perceptions and humor. Cannabis brings us an awareness that we spend a lifetime being trained to overlook and forget and put out of our minds. A sense of what the world is really like can be maddening; cannabis has brought me some feelings for what it is like to be crazy, and how we use that word ‘crazy’ to avoid thinking about things that are too painful for us. In the Soviet Union political dissidents are routinely placed in insane asylums. The same kind of thing, a little more subtle perhaps, occurs here: ‘did you hear what Lenny Bruce said yesterday? He must be crazy.’ When high on cannabis I discovered that there’s somebody inside in those people we call mad.

When I’m high I can penetrate into the past, recall childhood memories, friends, relatives, playthings, streets, smells, sounds, and tastes from a vanished era. I can reconstruct the actual occurrences in childhood events only half understood at the time. Many but not all my cannabis trips have somewhere in them a symbolism significant to me which I won’t attempt to describe here, a kind of mandala embossed on the high. Free-associating to this mandala, both visually and as plays on words, has produced a very rich array of insights.

There is a myth about such highs: the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved when high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we’re down the next day. Some of the hardest work I’ve ever done has been to put such insights down on tape or in writing. The problem is that ten even more interesting ideas or images have to be lost in the effort of recording one. It is easy to understand why someone might think it’s a waste of effort going to all that trouble to set the thought down, a kind of intrusion of the Protestant Ethic. But since I live almost all my life down I’ve made the effort – successfully, I think. Incidentally, I find that reasonably good insights can be remembered the next day, but only if some effort has been made to set them down another way. If I write the insight down or tell it to someone, then I can remember it with no assistance the following morning; but if I merely say to myself that I must make an effort to remember, I never do.

I find that most of the insights I achieve when high are into social issues, an area of creative scholarship very different from the one I am generally known for. I can remember one occasion, taking a shower with my wife while high, in which I had an idea on the origins and invalidities of racism in terms of gaussian distribution curves. It was a point obvious in a way, but rarely talked about. I drew the curves in soap on the shower wall, and went to write the idea down. One idea led to another, and at the end of about an hour of extremely hard work I found I had written eleven short essays on a wide range of social, political, philosophical, and human biological topics. Because of problems of space, I can’t go into the details of these essays, but from all external signs, such as public reactions and expert commentary, they seem to contain valid insights. I have used them in university commencement addresses, public lectures, and in my books.

But let me try to at least give the flavor of such an insight and its accompaniments. One night, high on cannabis, I was delving into my childhood, a little self-analysis, and making what seemed to me to be very good progress. I then paused and thought how extraordinary it was that Sigmund Freud, with no assistance from drugs, had been able to achieve his own remarkable self-analysis. But then it hit me like a thunderclap that this was wrong, that Freud had spent the decade before his self-analysis as an experimenter with and a proselytizer for cocaine; and it seemed to me very apparent that the genuine psychological insights that Freud brought to the world were at least in part derived from his drug experience. I have no idea whether this is in fact true, or whether the historians of Freud would agree with this interpretation, or even if such an idea has been published in the past, but it is an interesting hypothesis and one which passes first scrutiny in the world of the downs.

I can remember the night that I suddenly realized what it was like to be crazy, or nights when my feelings and perceptions were of a religious nature. I had a very accurate sense that these feelings and perceptions, written down casually, would not stand the usual critical scrutiny that is my stock in trade as a scientist. If I find in the morning a message from myself the night before informing me that there is a world around us which we barely sense, or that we can become one with the universe, or even that certain politicians are desperately frightened men, I may tend to disbelieve; but when I’m high I know about this disbelief. And so I have a tape in which I exhort myself to take such remarks seriously. I say ‘Listen closely, you sonofabitch of the morning! This stuff is real!’ I try to show that my mind is working clearly; I recall the name of a high school acquaintance I have not thought of in thirty years; I describe the color, typography, and format of a book in another room and these memories do pass critical scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, unavailable to us without such drugs. Such a remark applies not only to self-awareness and to intellectual pursuits, but also to perceptions of real people, a vastly enhanced sensitivity to facial expression, intonations, and choice of words which sometimes yields a rapport so close it’s as if two people are reading each other’s minds.

Cannabis enables nonmusicians to know a little about what it is like to be a musician, and nonartists to grasp the joys of art. But I am neither an artist nor a musician. What about my own scientific work? While I find a curious disinclination to think of my professional concerns when high – the attractive intellectual adventures always seem to be in every other area – I have made a conscious effort to think of a few particularly difficult current problems in my field when high. It works, at least to a degree. I find I can bring to bear, for example, a range of relevant experimental facts which appear to be mutually inconsistent. So far, so good. At least the recall works. Then in trying to conceive of a way of reconciling the disparate facts, I was able to come up with a very bizarre possibility, one that I’m sure I would never have thought of down. I’ve written a paper which mentions this idea in passing. I think it’s very unlikely to be true, but it has consequences which are experimentally testable, which is the hallmark of an acceptable theory.

I have mentioned that in the cannabis experience there is a part of your mind that remains a dispassionate observer, who is able to take you down in a hurry if need be. I have on a few occasions been forced to drive in heavy traffic when high. I’ve negotiated it with no difficult at all, though I did have some thoughts about the marvelous cherry-red color of traffic lights. I find that after the drive I’m not high at all. There are no flashes on the insides of my eyelids. If you’re high and your child is calling, you can respond about as capably as you usually do. I don’t advocate driving when high on cannabis, but I can tell you from personal experience that it certainly can be done. My high is always reflective, peaceable, intellectually exciting, and sociable, unlike most alcohol highs, and there is never a hangover. Through the years I find that slightly smaller amounts of cannabis suffice to produce the same degree of high, and in one movie theater recently I found I could get high just by inhaling the cannabis smoke which permeated the theater.

There is a very nice self-titering aspect to cannabis. Each puff is a very small dose; the time lag between inhaling a puff and sensing its effect is small; and there is no desire for more after the high is there. I think the ratio, R, of the time to sense the dose taken to the time required to take an excessive dose is an important quantity. R is very large for LSD (which I’ve never taken) and reasonably short for cannabis. Small values of R should be one measure of the safety of psychedelic drugs. When cannabis is legalized, I hope to see this ratio as one of he parameters printed on the pack. I hope that time isn’t too distant; the illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.

The War On Consciousness

Posted on April 16, 2017 by Reid Mukai

By Graham Hancock

Source: Body Mind Soul Spirit

We are told that the “War on Drugs” is being waged, on our behalf, by our governments and their armed bureaucracies and police forces, to save us from ourselves. “Potential for abuse and harm” are supposed to be the criteria by which the use of drugs is suppressed—the greater a drug’s potential for abuse and harm, the greater and more vigorous the degree of suppression, and the more draconian the penalties applied against its users.

In line with this scheme drugs are typically ranked into a hierarchy: Schedules I, II, and III in the US, Classes A, B, and C in the UK, and so on and so forth all around the world. Thus, to be arrested for possession of a Schedule I or Class A drug results in heavier penalties than possession of a Schedule III or Class C drug. Generally if a drug is deemed to have some currently accepted medical use it is likely to be placed in a lower schedule than if it has none, notwithstanding the fact that it may have potential for abuse or harm. In the absence of any recognized therapeutic effects, drugs that are highly addictive, such as heroin or crack cocaine, or drugs that are profoundly psychotropic, including hallucinogens such as LSD, psilocybin, or DMT, are almost universally placed in the highest schedules and their use attracts the heaviest penalties.

The notable exceptions to this system of ranking according to perceived “harms” are, of course, alcohol and tobacco, both highly addictive and harmful drugs—far more so than cannabis or psilocybin, for example—but yet socially accepted on the grounds of long customary use and thus not placed in any schedule at all.

The Failed War

When we look at the history of the “War on Drugs” over approximately the last 40 years, it must be asked whether the criminalization of the use of any of the prohibited substances has in any way been effective in terms of the stated goals that this “war” was supposedly mounted to achieve. Specifically, has there been a marked reduction in the use of illegal drugs over the past 40 years—as one would expect with billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money having been spent over such a long period on their suppression—and has there been a reduction in the harms that these drugs supposedly cause to the individual and to society?

It is unnecessary here to set down screeds of statistics, facts, and figures readily available from published sources to assert that in terms of its own stated objectives the “War on Drugs” has been an abject failure and a shameful and scandalous waste of public money. Indeed, it is well known, and not disputed, that the very societies that attempt most vigorously to suppress various drugs, and in which users are subject to the most stringent penalties, have seen a vast and continuous increase in the per capita consumption of these drugs. This is tacitly admitted by the vast armed bureaucracies set up to persecute drug users in our societies, which every year demand more and more public money to fund their suppressive activities; if the suppression were working, one would expect their budgets to go down, not up.

Inventory of Harm

Such matters are only the beginning of the long inventory of harm caused by the “War on Drugs.”

Western industrial societies, and all those cultures around the globe that increasingly seek to emulate them, teach us to venerate above all else the alert, problem-solving state of consciousness that is particularly appropriate to the conduct of science, business, war, and logical inquiry, and to such activities as driving cars, operating machinery, performing surgery, doing accounts, drawing up plans, accumulating wealth, etc., etc., etc. But there are many other states of consciousness that the amazing and mysterious human brain is capable of embracing, and it appears to be a natural human urge, as deep-rooted as our urges for food, sex, and nurturing relationships, to seek out and explore such “altered states of consciousness.” A surprisingly wide range of methods and techniques (from breathing exercises, to meditation, to fasting, to hypnosis, to rhythmic music, to extended periods of vigorous dancing, etc.) is available to help us to achieve this goal, but there is no doubt that the consumption of those plants and substances called “drugs” in our societies is amongst the most effective and efficient means available to mankind to explore these profoundly altered states of consciousness.

The result is that people naturally seek out drugs and the temporary alterations in consciousness that they produce. Not all people in every society will do this, perhaps not even a majority, but certainly a very substantial minority—for example the 2 million Britons who are known to take illegal drugs each month³ or those 20 million people in the US who have been arrested for marijuana possession since 1965. And these of course are only the tip of the iceberg of the much larger population of American marijuana users, running into many more tens of millions, who have, by luck or care, not yet fallen foul of the law and are thus not reflected in the arrest statistics.

Needless to say, it is of course exactly the same urge to alter consciousness that also impels even larger numbers of people to use legal (and often extremely harmful) drugs such as alcohol and tobacco—which, though they may not alter consciousness as dramatically as, say, LSD, are nevertheless undoubtedly used and sought out for the limited alterations of consciousness that they do produce.

For the hundreds of millions of people around the world whose need to experience altered states is not and cannot be satisfied by drunken oblivion or the stimulant effects of tobacco, it is therefore completely natural to turn to “drugs”—and, since the “War on Drugs” means that there is no legal source of supply of these substances, the inevitable result is that those who wish to use them must resort to illegal sources of supply.

Herein lies great and enduring harm. For it is obvious, and we may all see the effects everywhere, that the criminalization of drug use has empowered and enriched a vast and truly horrible global criminal underworld by guaranteeing that it is the only source of supply of these drugs. We have, in effect, delivered our youth—the sector within our societies that most strongly feels the need to experience altered states of consciousness— into the hands of the very worst mobsters and sleazeballs on the planet. To buy drugs our sons and daughters have no choice but to approach and associate with violent and greedy criminals. And because the proceeds from illegal drug sales are so enormous, we are all caught up in the inevitable consequences of turf wars and murders amongst the gangs and cartels competing in this blackest of black markets.

Instead the powers that be continue to pursue the same harsh and cruel policies that they have been wedded to from the outset, ever seeking to strengthen and reinforce them rather than to replace them with something better. Indeed the only “change” that the large, armed bureaucracies that enforce these policies has ever sought since the “War on Drugs” began has, year on year, been to demand even more money, even more arms, and even more draconian legislative powers to break into homes, to confiscate property, and to deprive otherwise law-abiding citizens of liberty and wreck their lives. In the process we have seen our once free and upstanding societies— which used to respect individual choice and freedom of conscience above all else—slide remorselessly down the slippery slope that leads to the police state. And all this is being done in our name, with our money, by our own governments, to “save us from ourselves”!

Freedom of Consciousness

What is Western civilization all about? What are its greatest achievements and highest aspirations?

It’s my guess that most people’s replies to these questions would touch—before all the other splendid achievements of science, literature, technology, and the economy—on the nurture and growth of freedom.

Individual freedom.

Including, but not limited to freedom from the unruly power of monarchs, freedom from the unwarranted intrusions of the state and its agents into our personal lives, freedom from the tyranny of the Church and its Inquisition, freedom from hunger and want, freedom from slavery and servitude, freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, freedom of thought and speech, freedom of assembly, freedom to elect our own leaders, freedom to be homosexual—and so on and so forth.

The list of freedoms we enjoy today that were not enjoyed by our ancestors is indeed a long and impressive one. It is therefore exceedingly strange that Western civilization in the twenty- first century enjoys no real freedom of consciousness.

There can be no more intimate and elemental part of the individual than his or her own consciousness. At the deepest level, our consciousness is what we are—to the extent that if we are not sovereign over our own consciousness then we cannot in any meaningful sense be sovereign over anything else either. So it has to be highly significant that, far from encouraging freedom of consciousness, our societies in fact violently deny our right to sovereignty in this intensely personal area, and have effectively outlawed all states of consciousness other than those on a very narrowly defined and officially approved list. The “War on Drugs” has thus unexpectedly succeeded in engineering a stark reversal of the true direction of Western history by empowering faceless bureaucratic authorities to send armed agents to break into our homes, arrest us, throw us into prison, and deprive us of our income and reputation simply because we wish to explore the sometimes radical, though always temporary, alterations in our own consciousness that drugs facilitate.

The reason the anti-marijuana campaigns have failed is that millions of users know from their own direct, long-term experience that marijuana does not do them any great harm and (with reference to the most recent anti-marijuana propaganda) most definitely does not drive them mad.

Other than being against arbitrary rules that the state has imposed on us, personal drug use by adults is not a “crime” in any true moral or ethical sense and usually takes place in the privacy of our own homes, where it cannot possibly do any harm to others. For some it is a simple lifestyle choice. For others, particularly where the hallucinogens such as LSD, psilocybin, and DMT are concerned, it is a means to make contact with alternate realms and parallel dimensions, and perhaps even with the divine. For some, drugs are an aid to creativity and focussed mental effort. For others they are a means to tune out for a while from everyday cares and worries. But in all cases it seems probable that the drive to alter consciousness, from which all drug use stems, has deep genetic roots.

Other adult lifestyle choices with deep genetic roots also used to be violently persecuted by our societies.

A notable example is homosexuality, once punishable by death or long periods of imprisonment, which is now entirely legal between consenting adults—and fully recognized as being none of the state’s business—in all Western cultures. (Although approximately thirteen US states have “anti-sodomy” laws outlawing homosexuality, these statutes have rarely been enforced in recent years, and in 2003 the US Supreme Court invalidated those laws.) The legalization of homosexuality lifted a huge burden of human misery, secretiveness, paranoia, and genuine fear from our societies, and at the same time not a single one of the homophobic lobby’s fire-and-brimstone predictions about the end of Western civilization came true.

Likewise, it was not so long ago that natural seers, mediums, and healers who felt the calling to become “witches” were burned at the stake for “crimes” that we now look back on as harmless eccentricities at worst.

At the deepest level, our consciousness is what we are—to the extent that if we are not sovereign over our own consciousness then we cannot in any meaningful sense be sovereign over anything else either.

Perhaps it will be the same with drugs? Perhaps in a century or two, if we have not destroyed human civilization by then, our descendants will look back with disgust on the barbaric laws of our time that punished a minority so harshly (with imprisonment, financial ruin, and worse) for responsibly, quietly, and in the privacy of their own homes seeking alterations in their own consciousness through the use of drugs. Perhaps we will even end up looking back on the persecution of drug users with the same sense of shame and horror that we now view the persecution of gays and lesbians, the burning of “witches,” and the imposition of slavery on others.

Meanwhile it’s no accident that the “War on Drugs” has been accompanied by an unprecedented expansion of governmental power into the previously inviolable inner sanctum of individual consciousness. On the contrary, it seems to me that the state’s urge to power has all along been the real reason for this “war”—not an honest desire on the part of the authorities to rescue society and the individual from the harms caused by drugs, but the thin of a wedge intended to legitimize increasing bureaucratic control and intervention in almost every other area of our lives as well.

This is the way freedom is hijacked—not all at once, out in the open, but stealthily, little by little, behind closed doors, and with our own agreement. How will we be able to resist when so many of us have already willingly handed over the keys to our own consciousness to the state and accepted without protest that it is OK to be told what we may and may not do, what we may and may not explore, even what we may and may not experience, with this most precious, sapient, unique, and individual part of ourselves?

If we are willing to accept that then we can be persuaded to accept anything.

Santa, the Reindeer Shaman

Posted on December 25, 2016 by Reid Mukai

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By Jerry B. Brown Ph.D. and Julie M. Brown M.A.

Source: Reality Sandwich

The following is excerpted from The Psychedelic Gospels by Jerry B. Brown, Ph.D. and Julie M. Brown, M.A., published by Inner Traditions.

On Christmas Eve, when the streets are all covered with snow and a hush falls over the land, parents recite the story of Santa Claus to wide-eyed children. They discreetly wink as they tell the timeworn tale of a jolly old elf who is dressed all in red and white from his head to his toes. Miraculously, Santa travels around the world in one night, in a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer, stopping at each home to place gifts under the Christmas tree festively decorated in tinsel and colorful ornaments with a star on top.

How improbable! How curious! But what if this snow-white lie, which we dutifully recount each year, was grounded in an ancient reality whose roots reach back thousands of years to the vast forests of Siberia? What if the real story of Santa was even stranger than that of the commercial myth of Saint Nick, the little sleigh driver “so lively and quick”? What if it was stranger than most of us could ever imagine?

It was high in the Cairngorms in the heart of the Scottish Highlands that Julie first heard the true story of Santa Claus and his flying reindeer. Driving east from the Isle of Skye, where we spent our twenty-fifth anniversary, Julie and I stopped in Inverness, located at the north end of Loch Ness. From there, we followed route A9 as it twisted and turned up into Cairngorms National Park. After lunch in the alpine resort town of Aviemore, Julie made a few phone calls and found lodging at the Braeriach Guest House. Sitting on the banks of the River Spey in the quaint village of Kingcraig, this two-story stone-walled Victorian inn has five guest rooms, all furnished with wooden sleigh beds. The view from our bedroom window looked out past a flower garden to the fast-moving river, on to a wide pastoral valley dotted with black-and-white cows, and up to the peaks of the snow-capped mountains. Over tea that afternoon, we asked our innkeeper Fiona, a refugee from the hubbub of London, what we should see during our stay.

“Oh, my favorite place would be to visit the wild reindeer. When you return, you can have dinner at the Boathouse Restaurant, only a twenty-minute walk from here through the forest.”

The following morning we drove to the long wooden cabin that housed the Cairngorm Reindeer Center. There we met three other couples and our guides, Beth and William, who would lead us up into the mountains. Beth explained that the “reindeer were reintroduced into Scotland in 1952 by a Swedish reindeer herder, Mikel Utsi. Starting from a few reindeer, the herd has grown in numbers over the years and is currently held at between a hundred and thirty and a hundred and fifty by controlling breeding.”1 About fifty of these reindeer live in a natural environment in the forests and highland plateaus nearby. The region is rich with lichen, the chief food of reindeer.

After the orientation we drove in a car caravan up a steep, curvy road. After parking in a small clearing, everyone donned knee-high Wellington boots. It was a cold day, and the trail was wet and muddy from a drizzling rain. We were excited and a bit apprehensive at the thought of encountering creatures in the wild. As the trail opened onto a large pasture, bordered by a dense dark-green forest, the sun broke through the clouds and the rain lifted. As we shed our rain gear, Will put down the sack of food he had carried on his shoulder and instructed us how to behave around the reindeer—who were still nowhere to be seen. “You can pet them, even touch their noses, but not their antlers. They grow very fast, a couple of inches a week, and are very sensitive.”

Just then, Beth began bellowing loudly. It felt eerie to be huddled together on a chilly hilltop while our guide howled into the wilderness. It took a minute before we realized that she was rounding up reindeer. Suddenly, we saw a huge light-brown stag emerge from the woods. He strode majestically toward us, his giant antlers swaying to and fro. Another reindeer followed and then another, slowly walking toward us, a plodding procession of caribou.

As the males, females, and calves drew closer Beth began calling them by name: Sting, Marley, Cranna, Oryx, Gandhi, Magnus . . . Elvis. As the herd approached, Will opened the sack and scooped pellets of food into our hands, telling us to pick a reindeer and go up to him slowly with outstretched arms. I walked up to a large bull. He nuzzled his warm, silky nose into my palms, gently licking them clean. Julie stood back and observed. Soon, everyone was talking, smiling, and even giggling at the sheer delight of being in the presence of these gentle caribou.

Julie noticed an albino reindeer standing off to the side, away from the herd. She asked Beth why he did not join the group.

“Oh, him. Sircus is his name,” Beth replied. “He only takes food from me or Will. He’s a real loner.”

“Really? Do you know why?” Julie inquired.

“I think it’s because he loves mushrooms so much,” Beth said.

At the mention of mushrooms, Julie’s ears perked up. She glanced over at me with a knowing look. Aha, she thought.

“Now, don’t get me wrong,” Beth continued. “All reindeer love fly agaric, but for Sircus they are his favorite food, even more than lichen. Sometimes, during the summer mushroom season, he eats so many that he just stands there mesmerized, staring into the sun, swaying back and forth. That’s why his face is so blotched and pink. It’s sunburned.”

As Beth finished speaking, Sircus turned toward Julie and without hesitation walked up to her. He placed his soft muzzle into her palms and ate slowly, all the while looking into her eyes. Julie glanced toward me, her face beaming. She stood still for a long while, gently petting Sircus. Then, just as quickly as they had appeared, the reindeer turned and ambled back toward the forest. Sircus followed. Everyone was silent on the downhill walk back to the cars.

“Jer,” Julie said softly to me, taking my hand along the trail, “I swear I had a real connection with Sircus, as if we knew each other. Don’t you think it strange that I could have such a spiritual encounter with a reindeer?”

“Yes, you must be Saint Francis of the animals,” I said.

Julie laughed and nodded her head in affirmation.

Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer

Once back at the inn, I was tired from our excursion and lay down to take a nap. But when I happened to glance over at the bookshelf next to the bed, I noticed the Field Guide to Mushrooms of Great Britain. Soon, I was turning its richly illustrated pages. After finding Sircus’s favorite, the red-and-white Amanita muscaria, I eventually fell into a deep and restful sleep.

When I awoke, I carried the field guide downstairs, planning to show it to Julie. I found her sitting near a roaring fireplace. She was engaged in animated conversation about our reindeer adventure with the other houseguests: Anne and John, a well-groomed, middle-aged couple from Devon, whose English accent I could understand if I listened carefully, and Bonny and Sid, young punk bikers from Liverpool whom I could barely understand at all. No wonder George Bernard Shaw observed, “England and America are two countries separated by a common language.”

After Julie mentioned that the Reindeer Center rented the caribou out during the Yuletide season to pull sleighs bearing gifts for children across Great Britain, the conversation turned to Christmas and Santa Claus.

“Does anyone know what Santa has to do with Christmas, the birth of Jesus, and this?” I asked, opening the mushroom field guide and showing everyone the photo of the bright red Amanita mushroom covered with snowy white dots.

Before I could finish the sentence, I felt Julie’s two hands firmly tugging on my arm, as she said in her calming therapist’s voice, “Sorry to interrupt, honey, but if we don’t leave now, we won’t be able to walk to dinner and back before dark.”

We strolled under tall trees whose leaves sparkled in the late afternoon sunlight. The air carried a sweet scent of wildflowers. Soon we came to the rustic restaurant on the banks of an alpine lake. After finishing the delectable grilled trout fresh from the lake, Julie asked pointedly, “What were you thinking back there?”

“I was just trying to explain my theory of Santa Claus,” I said defensively.

“I . . .” “Come on. You know what I’m talking about,” Julie objected. “What about our vow of secrecy, the one we made to each other at the beginning of this trip? Right before I escorted you out the door, you were about to blurt out that we were searching for the psychedelic roots of Christianity. I need to know that you won’t go around talking to people about our work while we are on this research trip.”

“Okay, I promise,” I replied.

“Now, tell me,” Julie said with a sigh of relief, “what were you trying to say about Santa back there at the inn?”

“While most people think of Christmas in terms of the quintessential Christian celebration,” I began, “the truth is that nearly all of the symbols associated with Santa Claus are based on the shamanic traditions of pre-Christian Europe.”

“I always thought of shamanism as a tribal religion,” Julie said. “I certainly never thought of Santa as a shaman! What do you mean?”

Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy

The classic anthropological definition of shamanism comes from Mircea Eliade (1907–1986), who described it as “archaic techniques of ecstasy.” By “ecstasy” he was invoking the Greek term ekstasis, which literally means “to be outside oneself” and in this context figuratively means “flight of the soul.” In essence, shamanism refers to ancient methods for inducing the flight of the soul, for both the living and the recently deceased. One of the most concise descriptions of the universal foundations of shamanism is found in Peter Furst’s Hallucinogens and Culture. These foundations include “the skeletal soul of man and animal and the restitution of life from the bones; all phenomena in the environment as animate; [and] separability of the soul from the body during life.”

At the very center of these belief systems stands the persona of the shaman and his or her unique ecstatic experience. With the aid of spirit helpers he can travel to and intercede with the supernatural forces of the Upperworld and Underworld whose mystical geography he has traversed through training and trance. Frequently, although not always, his mastery comes from the use of sacred psychoactive plants, which serve both as a portal to other realms and as a source of transforming power or “soul stuff.” With the concept of “transformation” so fundamental to this worldview, it is easy to see why sacred plants with the power to radically alter consciousness and provide direct access to these supernatural realms would be universally revered in ancient religions. Throughout prehistory the religions of our ancestors were shamanistic.

“But how does shamanism work?” Julie asked.

Seeing a puzzled look on Julie’s face, I searched for an analogy.

“Imagine yourself,” I replied, “as a Koryak reindeer herder living a nomadic existence in the endless boreal forest belt of Siberia. You live in a world without maps, compasses, or clocks and certainly without GPS. Season upon season you travel with your clan and reindeer herd through a seamless landscape of green and brown forests sometimes interrupted by the blues and grays of lakes and rivers. Then one day you watch your favorite reindeer nibble on a bright red-and-white mushroom that popped up out of the moist ground overnight. Suddenly, the reindeer begins to cavort about in a very un-reindeer-like fashion. You try the mushroom and soon find yourself transported through magical landscapes filled with talking spirits who instruct you how to live well and prosper.”

Julie was listening intently as I asked her, “So what would you think about this world?”

“That it was showing me a spirit world that could help me thrive in the natural world,” Julie replied.

“Precisely,” I agreed, “and that’s the point. For tribal peoples, these supernatural realms were accessed through the shamanic flight of the soul. It’s only within the context of shamanism that we can understand the true origins of Santa Claus.”

Mushroom Rock Art of the Chukchi

Often overlooked and certainly overshadowed by Wasson’s cracking of the Soma code in the Rigveda is his equally surprising discovery of an ancient “Siberian fly-agaric complex” among the ancient indigenous peoples of the Arctic Circle. Peering deep into the wellsprings of time long before the Aryan invasion on the Indus Valley,* Wasson traced the roots of Aryan worship of the Soma mushroom back some six thousand years to the semi-nomadic reindeer herders of Eurasia known to anthropologists as the fathers of shamanism. Today there remain some three hundred thousand reindeer herders divided into thirty ethnolinguistic groups.†

*According to the widely accepted Aryan invasion theory, between the fourth and second centuries BCE, several migrations occurred involving different Proto-Indo-Aryan groups from the steppes of central Asia toward the alluvial plains and valleys of northwest India. However, academics continue to debate whether the Indo-Aryans invaded and assimilated the less sophisticated Indus Valley cultures, or whether the Indo-Aryans moved in as the superior Indus Valley civilization was in a state of decline, adopting their mythologies and technologies. †They inhabit three far-flung, forest-belt regions of Russia and Scandinavia. Among them are the Lapps and Nenets in the Far West; the Ostyak, Samoyed, and Vogul of the central tundra and taiga zones; and the Chukchi, Koryak, and Kamchadal who live in the extreme Far East of Russia.

When Wasson published Soma in 1968, he had to rely on secondhand data derived from folk tales and linguistic analysis and on the firsthand accounts of “explorers, travelers, and anthropologists” who visited these remote regions as far back as the late eighteenth century.4 At that time he was unaware of recent Russian archaeological expeditions that had found iconic evidence—dramatic images etched in stone—of the use of psychoactive mushrooms among the ancient Chukchi.

During field expeditions in 1967 and 1968, Russian archaeologist N. N. Dikov discovered numerous mushroom and reindeer petroglyphs (rock carvings dating from 1000 BCE) on the banks of the Pegtymel River in the Far Eastern Chukotka region, located across the Bering Sea from Alaska. These rock drawings graphically reflect the worldview of nomadic herders and their traditional shamanic practice of ingesting Amanita muscaria. Since that initial discovery, Russian researchers have identified more than two hundred similar compositions at rock art centers in northern Russian, mainly in areas inhabited by reindeer herders.

The central images of these carvings are reindeer and an increasing number of “incomparable” anthropomorphic images of people, mainly women, wearing huge mushroom-shaped hats or, in another interpretation, dancing women with mushrooms hovering over or emanating from the crowns of their heads.

The northern region where these figures are found is one where fly agaric thrive. In a later work, observing that these “doubtless” Amanita muscaria “mushrooms were much larger in scale than normal,” certainly when compared to the humanlike figures, Wasson concurs that this suggests “mushroom possession.” A common theme in these visions is the personification of the spirit (wapaq) of the mushroom as “little men or women.” The Koryak believe that the spirits residing in the fly agaric appear in the form of tiny mushroom folk who give instructions to the be-mushroomed person. One observer reports that among the Ob-Ungrians, “the mushroom eater enters the realm of the little people, talks with them, learns from them what he wishes to know—the future, the outlook for a sick person, etc.”

Santa, the Reindeer Shaman

“So are you saying that the story of Santa Claus originated with the reindeer herders?” Julie asked.

“Not at all,” I replied, “simply this: while most people think of Christmas in terms of the classic Christian holiday, the truth is that most of the symbols associated with Santa Claus are based on the religious traditions of pre-Christian Europe. In fact, every major meme of our modern myth of Santa Claus can be found in Wasson’s pioneering description of a Siberian fly agaric–reindeer culture.

“Convince me,” Julie insisted.

“Okay, I will,” I replied.

Flying Reindeer

In Soma, Wasson notes that “reindeer have a passion for mushrooms and especially for the fly-agaric, on which they inebriate themselves. Reindeer have a passion for urine and especially human urine. (When the human urine is impregnated with fly-agaric, what regal cate is there, to be served to a favored reindeer!)”9 In fact, some herders carry sealskins filled with their own urine to lure stray reindeer back to the herd.

Reindeer have a seminal place in the lives of these semi-nomadic herders as the primary source of useful everyday articles and of spiritual significance. Practically, the reindeer provide transporation by sleigh, food and milk, clothing, shelter in the form of skins for yurts, tools, and many other necessities. Spiritually, flying reindeer serve as guides for shamans, transporting them through the spirit world. The hundreds of flying reindeer megaliths found in Siberia and Mongolia offer graphic representations of myths and legends about winged reindeer who transport their ecstatic riders up into the highest branches of the Cosmic Tree, universally revered by ancient peoples as the Tree of Life.

Christmas Tree as Cosmic Tree

In addition to the nearly universal flood myth similar to the story of Noah in the Bible, many tribal cultures have a deep belief in a sacred Cosmic Tree. In the context of shamanism, this tree provides a cosmic axis around which the three planes of the universe revolve. Its roots run deep into the Underworld, its trunk holds Middle Earth, and its branches reach skyward into the Upperworld.

The birch, pine, cedar, and fir trees play a conspicuous role among Siberian cultures and serve as the nodal points for shamanism. But it was Wasson who first pointed out that birches and evergreens play an essential role in the life cycle of the fly agaric. This is because fly agaric has a symbiotic relationship with these trees in that its invisible spores colonize the host trees’ roots prior to the mushroom bursting into view aboveground as an early stage Amanita muscaria, wrapped in a pure white veil. As a result, tribespeople were amazed to witness how these mushrooms apparently sprang from the earth without any visible seeds in what appears to be a virgin birth.

Like the Cosmic Tree, the center point between heaven and earth, the North Star is also considered sacred. Among reindeer herders, it is also known as the “Immobile Star” or the “Pole Star,” because all the stars in the heavens revolve around it. Thus today we symbolically place a star at the tippy-top of the Christmas tree, and for this reason Santa makes his home in the North Pole.

Santa, the Archetypal Shaman

Our contemporary image of Santa Claus as a rotund, jolly, white-bearded fellow in a red suit (or robe) with white fir trim is a modern version of the archetypal Siberian mushroom shaman. In fact, even today some Siberian male shamans and female mushroom gatherers still dress in ceremonial red-and-white trimmed jackets when they go to gather the sacred mushrooms. The biochemical effects of Soma are most pleasant and transformative when the mushrooms are dried before consumption. For this reason, the shaman initially hangs the fresh fungi to dry in the branches of pine trees (like the colorful ornaments that decorate the Christmas tree).

After the mushroom harvest is complete, the shaman collects his gifts in a sack and places them on his sleigh, which a team of reindeer pulls back to his yurt (Santa’s sleigh full of toys, pulled by flying reindeer). A yurt is the nomad’s teepee-like dwelling typically made out of birch branches and reindeer hides. In winter, snow drifts can cover the yurt’s main entrance, so the shaman enters through the smoke hole at the top (Santa coming down the chimney) to deliver his gifts to appreciative clan members. To further dry the mushrooms, they string them up around the fireplace, and in the morning they awaken to a ritual feast of dried magic mushrooms (Christmas gifts placed in stockings over the fireplace). Once they ingest the mushrooms, the celebrants leave the physical plane and are transported to the mystical realms of the Cosmic Tree, guided by spirits that live within the mushrooms (Santa’s helpers, elves that live in the North Pole).

All of these Christmas themes include the image of Santa Claus: the Christmas tree, the flying reindeer pulling Santa’s sleigh, Santa coming down the chimney, the exchange of gifts—even the elves who live in Santa’s workshop at the North Pole.

Dusk was falling as we started to walk back around the lake toward the inn. The Santa Claus conversation had sparked Julie’s inquisitiveness. “What about the Christian Saint Nicholas?”

“To be sure, religious historians argue that many saints were simply Christian versions of earlier pagan gods, adapted by the church to encourage heathens to accept the new religion of Rome. It is said that Saint Nicholas’s legends were created mainly out of folk tales about the Teutonic god Hold Nickar, a malevolent water spirit who tips over boats and torments sailors, or even about Alte Hoerner, which stands for ‘Old Horney.’

Julie smiled at the sexual reference to Santa Claus.

“No, no, it’s not what you’re thinking. In old German, Alte Hoerner literally means ‘old horned one’ and in this case the ‘ancient horned god,’ referring to the headdress of reindeer antlers worn by Eurasian shamans. Later on, when pagan deities were demonized by the medieval church under Pope Gregory, the horned god of shamanism became the devil of Christianity. And ‘Santa’ became ‘Satan.’”

“Rings of Smoke through the Trees”

“Look, look around us!” whispered Julie. A low-hanging cloud was slowly creeping through the woods, completely encircling us in a ring of ghostly white gossamer. The mist moved silent as cat paws, covering the ground and the trunks of the trees in a blanket of clouds. The tops of trees stood bare, silhouetted against the gun-metal sky and the fading sun, silent sentinels of the forest.

“Jer,” Julie spoke, in hushed tones, “this is unearthly. All evening, we’ve been talking about the way of the shaman, portals between the worlds, about how all things are alive with spirit.”

“Look,” I said, patiently, “just because this rare cloud rolls in just as we were discussing shamanism doesn’t mean there’s a connection. You can’t prove that; no one can.”

“No, I can’t prove it,” Julie spoke quietly, “but think about what’s happened today! We came to the mountains for vacation, and I met Sircus, an albino, Amanita-loving reindeer, who walks up to me and peers into my soul. We spend the evening talking about mystical realms. And now all around us the forest is alive, as if the living spirit of nature was welcoming us to the world of the shaman . . . affirming our decision to retrace Wasson’s steps.”

I was about to object, but just then these lines from Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” ran through my head: “There’s a feeling I get when I look to the west/ And my spirit is crying for leaving. In my thoughts I have seen rings of smoke through the trees/ And the voices of those who stand looking. Ooh, it makes me wonder/ Ooh, it really makes me wonder.”

We stood silently in the middle of the mist-filled forest, wondering what the future would bring. At our next stop in Greece, the cradle of Western civilization, we walked among the monumental ruins of Eleusis, where rituals involving entheogens had been practiced for two thousand years.

The Journey of a Psychedelic Marine

Posted on December 4, 2016 by Reid Mukai

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The following is excerpted from Psychedelic Marine: A Transformational Journey from Afghanistan to the Amazon by Alex Seymour, published by Inner Traditions. This book follows Royal Marine Commando Alex Seymour as he copes with the extremes he’s experienced in the war through ayahuasca ceremonies in the Amazon.

By Alex Seymour

Source: Reality Sandwich

Force is temporary, consumes energy, moves from one location to another. Power is self-sustaining, permanent, stationery and invincible.
David R. Hawkins

We boarded the large motorized canoe that would take us all to where the riverbank met the jungle. The moon shone overhead, the water reflecting its brilliance like a mirror. The air temperature was a comfortable 75˚F. Ten minutes later the boatman killed the motor, and the canoe began to drift toward the riverbank. Waiting on shore to greet us was Alfredo, who prepared the ayahuasca, and his crew of four men, who had already cleared a space in the jungle for the ceremony and would act as a safety team.

We stepped ashore. Torches flicked on, and everyone trod off in single file into the jungle, each person walking quickly and staying close to the person in front. No one wanted to get left behind or stray off the freshly beaten path. We came to the clearing. A quick flick of the torch revealed it to be about twenty meters wide. Standing in the middle were eight tiny Shipibo women. None of these medicine or holy women was taller than five feet and most appeared to be quite old. None flinched as our torchlights passed over their faces, their eyes shining brightly in the swathes of light.

Torchlight was the only light. Insects buzzing, and occasional whispers from group members were the only sounds apart from the gentle footfall of people as they moved around, choosing a place to sit. Twenty thin mattresses had been laid out around the edge of the clearing. The Shipibo shamanas—all trained ayahuasqueros—sat in a row in the middle. César, an elderly man with a wide, beatific smile—the Shipibo master ayahuasquero—was seated on the ground at one end of the line of women. He nodded a welcome to each of us as we settled in.

The mood was somber. We all attended to our own needs, making ourselves comfortable as best we could, aware of the implications of where we were and what we were about to do. Most checked to ensure their torch, water, and other comfort items were close to hand.

Andreas called us all to rise from our mattresses and move toward the middle of the clearing and form a circle. He said “Argonauts . . . happiness is a choice! And know this: it’s also a skill, and with intention you can commit to making that choice and learning that skill.”

He instructed us to face north and hold our arms up toward the sky with hands outstretched. He began an incantation, his voice booming into the darkness: “To the eagle of the north, soar above us. Look out for us and guide us as we journey inside.”

He shuffled his bulk a quarter to the left, and we followed suit. “To the hummingbirds in the west, fly near and protect us, let your wings beat softly over us as we make this journey inside to peace.”

We turned south. “To the spirit of the Anaconda, encircle us with your protective strength as we seek love from the Divine Mother of the forest.”

Facing east. “To the spirit of the jaguar, give us your courage, your agility as we seek a connection to you and the spirit of the forest and of the Earth and the mighty river.”

Turning for the last time back to the center of the clearing, we lowered our arms, completing the calling in of the directions with a loud ho. This ritual would start the ceremony each night.

César began to sing very softly. Andreas called out names in groups of four, and we crept forward to receive a cup from one of the female ayahuasqueros. Each person stoically drank the foul-tasting brew, a few shuddered in disgust as the thick brown gloop made its way from mouth to throat to stomach. We crept back to our mattresses and prepared to journey. Andreas admonished us to remain sitting upright for the next twenty minutes to ensure the ayahuasca sank deep into our stomachs. César stopped singing, and we sat in silence, waiting for the brew to take effect.

Out of nowhere a long swathe of light snaked into my peripheral vision. OK, here we go . . . Within minutes phantasmagorical visions erupted volcanically in cataclysmic sensory overload. I watched multicolored geometrical shapes morph into organic sentient forms. As the visions came on in full force, I steadied myself. You’re grounded, you are sane.Despite the attempt to self-soothe, the sensations escalated to the completely otherworldly.

The eight tiny Shipibo women singing icaros were unbelievable! Their voices harmonized beautifully in layer upon layer of exquisite choral vibration. Each of them was singing an entirely different song, but it was woven into an aural tapestry, a giant sound-shawl gently laid over us. Alien, yet soothing. Pure South American genius.

The singing was the cue for us to lie down flat on our mats. A few people had already started purging into their buckets. I glanced up at the sky and the jungle canopy above. Wow! I could only see a chunk of sky filling one-third of my visual field. The rest was a mass of dark foliage. The jungle was dancing! This was my first session outdoors, and everywhere the branches, shrubs, and vines were bathed in neon light and were in motion in a primordial dance. Through the dancing canopy, stars were shining like I’d never seen light shine before. Luminescence from a thousand fireflies flickered on and off. Seeing them burst here and there, flashing one second, dark the next, it seemed Peter Pan’s Tinkerbell and her friends had come to visit. I extended my arms trying to grab them, like a child reaching for bubbles. Then I lay still, and they landed on my outstretched forearms, lights flickering on and off in concert. This couldn’t be happening! It was too magical!

The visual fireworks began to settle down, and I focused on my intention: show me how to trust. Overwhelmingly the thoughts were of my friend JJ. Over the next hour there wasn’t a minute that went by when I didn’t think of him. Here was that sense of the divine once again. I was feeling interconnected to everything, sensing how life on Earth was about us, the collective, not the individual. It’s our separation that’s causing our dis-ease and war. We are connected! My sense of ego diminished to something infinitesimally insignificant—to practically nothing—and it felt so good. For the first time in my life, I actually felt sensations emanating from my heart—emotions literally becoming heartfelt. Much of this energy was directed toward JJ. I sensed the pain from the catastrophe he had suffered in a way that was far more than empathy. JJ, I feel you—all the way from the Amazon. My God, our God, dear God, I feel you in my soul, brother. I felt comparable to a disciple and sensed that JJ was a true holy man. These were the extraordinarily peculiar thoughts that looped over and over for an hour. I got a sense that JJ had been born before and had been revered. It sounds insane, of course, but if you met him, you would know this was not an entirely insane thought.

My hands moved involuntarily, forming into a prayer position. An energy was controlling the actual physical position of my hands, so much so that when my hands moved away from one another, within a minute they mysteriously drew back together again in the prayer position, fingertips extended, touching lightly. Why did this always happen? I’m not religious but had an overwhelming sense that ayahuasca was teaching me something. JJ is a schoolteacher. I thought that he should come to the Amazon and drink. It was such a natural fit: the plant teacher and the schoolteacher. Together a formidable force for good. JJ come to the Amazon and drink ayahuasca. I recommend it 100 percent. I recommend it 1,000 percent. How ridiculous does that sound? But the same thought spilled over and over and over. I recommend it 1,000 percent. The words refused to go away.

The reverie was disturbed by queer noises coming from the people lying nearby. Until now everyone had remained disciplined and quiet. Occasionally, someone called out for Andreas, and he strode into the middle of the circle, his huge bulk silhouetted against ambient light from the moon and asked, “Who called me?”

When the person identified him- or herself, he went over and solved the problem. During the briefing on the ship, Andreas had told us that if someone appeared to be troubled or in need of assistance, we were to ignore them. He and his team would be on hand immediately to lend any assistance. He asked us to be selfish, to focus only on ourselves, to pay attention only to our intention. Hard as it might be, if someone needed assistance, we should not concern ourselves or take action—no matter how anguished the person seemed to be. “Do not help anyone!” he had explicitly commanded. Taking that instruction to heart had amplified the anticipation of what was to come.

But now exceptionally unusual noises were coming from a woman lying a few mattresses away. She was making a weirdahhh sound, more than a sigh, lasting as it did for five to ten seconds at a time. It started at a low pitch and rose higher and higher, or sometimes the reverse. Initially, rather than a woman in ecstasy, it sounded eerie. But it developed into much more than that—as if she were encountering an entity that possessed majesty so astounding that she was awed to a state where mere words were useless to express its magnificence. It was unnerving, the feeling you’d get from a wolf howling in the wild. She uttered occasional gasps of wonder, although she sounded simultaneously fearful and humbled in her rapture. At times it seemed as if she were on the cusp of either a scream or an uncontrollable laugh. I’d never heard anything like it. The noise must have been involuntary, because Andreas had instructed us to remain silent throughout the ceremony unless we needed his assistance. But as the ceremonies unfolded over the coming nights, this woman continued to make the same sounds.

In between my own intermittent gasps of wonder, introspection reigned. Understanding the significance of being able to detach my self from the ego was as insightful as learning the magnitude of the golden rule as a child. If only I could have parked my ego before now. It was infuriating that the solution to much of life’s angst had always been hidden in plain sight if only the veil could have been lifted. The fights I could have sidestepped, the conflicts and squabbles, the overwhelming enormity of self-inflicted suffering that could have been avoided didn’t bear thinking about. And with new comprehension I realized that it is entirely possible to cruise through life, from birth to death, and never even get out of the third gear of consciousness: asleep, awake, occasionally drunk. Repeat for eighty years. Die. There are men I know who will do this, of that there is no doubt. The unholy triumvirate of laws, beliefs, and culture will tragically exclude them from the psychedelic experience. A psychedelic encounter for many men would be like food to an anorexic—what could nourish them is denied, and denied by their own volition.

When the ceremony ended I lay there for a couple of minutes and watched the scene unfold as people rose up, shook themselves out of their introspection, and began talking. Robert, the heart surgeon, was near the foot of my mattress with Andreas, and I watched them embrace, two giants hugging. They held each other for a long while, an intimate moment. Andreas whispered in Robert’s ear. He listened intently for what seemed like an eternity, then slowly nodded and embraced Andreas again, only this time they placed their hands on each other’s upper arms and stared at each other in deep affection. Then they parted. I smiled, noticing a queue had formed behind Robert of other people who also wanted to thank Andreas. He asked us to thank César and the shamanas. We all clapped appreciatively, and they smiled rather shyly and nodded their heads in acknowledgment.

Back on board the ship, there was a celebratory atmosphere. Everyone seemed relieved that they’d gotten through the ceremony and were safe, sanity intact. Everyone I talked to was still very much feeling the aftereffects of the brew. People laughed, hugged, and kissed, inquiring, “So, how was it for you?”

I sat up on the top deck and shared a cigarette with Josh and Julian, the two young Americans. We were still feeling spaced out and woozy. I was thirsty and went to the dining room to grab a fruit juice. Glancing through the dining-room window, I saw Andreas sitting at the head of the long dining table on a high-backed chair reminiscent of a throne. He held a huge staff in his hand—a silent monarch. Two Australians—Phil and Trey—flanked him, sitting on each side, eyes closed, perhaps meditating. It was comically theatrical. I crashed into the room, breaking their trance. Andreas looked over, unfazed.

“Alex, how are you?” he asked, smiling warmly.

“Feeling supergood!” I gushed.

I got the juice, we said good night, and I trotted off to my cabin. Panos was still not back, and so I went over to the full-length mirror and stared at my reflection. My pupils were dilated. The beard—my first—longer than ever. Stripped to the waist, I could see ribs poking through. A pendulous crystal wrapped in a cross-section of ayahuasca vine hung on a leather cord around my neck. A castaway stared back at me—a grown-up Lord of the Flies survivor.

Panos returned, and we greeted each other like old friends. He looked deeply vulnerable as he described how he had developed what he referred to as a dark energy, a shadow, in his stomach area. He even had a specific name for this darkness—an Erebus, a kind of entity living in him. One of the reasons he had come on this trip was to try to manage his relationship with this Erebus. I surmised that Erebus were common to his part of Europe, a kind of ghoul that took up residence in certain unlucky people. He asked earnestly, “Do you have the same kind of thing where you come from?”

“I really don’t think so.”

Every night when he went to bed, he would liberally sprinkle Agua de Florida around him and tap his stomach with an eagle feather. While waiting to join the group back in Iquitos, he’d purchased the enormous feather, which was two feet long and six inches at its widest. He loved it, so much so that, before going to sleep each night, he gently waved it up and down, tapping the tip of the feather on his midriff, where the Erebus resided, furnishing himself the comfort he needed. The Agua de Florida is a sweet perfume often used by shamans and ayahuasqueros in ceremony to cleanse a person or environment of dark energy. It made our room stink.

Now, with this story of the Erebus, I understood that ritual—and that Panos was very superstitious. Sweet and gentle but plagued with doubts and conflicts exacerbated not only by his inability to see without glasses—to see things as they really are—but also by archaic beliefs about energies that could only be managed with rituals and potions. Then again, the shamans believed in and did the same thing. At the quantum level who really knows exactly what is happening?

In all the time we shared a room, Panos never once inquired about my life outside the Mythic Voyage: where I came from, who I was, if I had a family. I think he just enjoyed using his imagination.

I lay down and began to think about the war and the unorthodox possibility of how ayahuasca could help military men prepare for war and heal from war. If we could give modern combatants a sense of the possibility of an afterlife, as I had had with my very first experience with DMT, based on their own direct mystical experience and not something that was merely taught or dependent on faith, then this had to be worth exploring and a potential source of comfort. I lay there thinking that so much pain is endured by emotionally wounded troops. On returning to the US, more troops were committing suicide each year than were actually killed in Afghanistan. There are many men I know who have returned from serving in Iraq and Afghanistan who have suffered greatly, who are, at the very least, disillusioned. A friend of mine has serious post-traumatic stress disorder, is addicted to nicotine, and has been prescribed strong antidepressant medication for the last three years. Veterans like these are denied legal access to natural substances that can induce mystical states. Many feel misunderstood. Some go rogue and postal. Suicides are rife. Everyone loses. Surely, if a natural psychedelic could inspire me with such renewed optimism and faith in the value of life, then it could conceivably be of benefit to other veterans, too.

A totally unexpected gateway had opened in me to compassion, empathy, and a sense of everlasting life after death. The time for being culturally nudged into the seemingly blunt binary choice of being a religious believer or an atheist was over. This was a new alternative: spiritual. A new third way.

I drifted off to sleep feeling a genuine sense of forgiveness for my father and stepfathers. Once and for all, I had to just let that shit go.

Jan Kounen on Visionary Ayahuasca

Posted on May 2, 2016 by Reid Mukai

blueberry-movie

(Editor’s note: In honor of the 52nd birthday of director Jan Kounen (Blueberry, Other Worlds and 99 Francs), we’re sharing this Reality Sandwich interview with a focus on Kounen’s latest book Visionary Ayahuasca.)

By Benton Rooks

Source: Reality Sandwich

I spoke to acclaimed filmmaker Jan Kounen (Blueberry, 2004) recently on art, consciousness, and his most recent book Visionary Ayahuasca. Like many other RS readers I am a huge fan, so it was a pleasure to speak to him.

Visionary Ayahuasca is a really refreshing book on the subject because it comes from someone who has engaged in over 400 ceremonies with the sacred medicine over many years. The wisdom shines through from that experience level and permeates the text.

Why did you decide to structure Visionary in a non-linear format? I think it works really well because the reader can see the true juxtaposition from your earlier pre-aya self. Is it because you feel the experience of aya is experienced in non-linear terms?

I think that ayahuasca—both the teaching and journey—are fractals, a kaleidoscopic unfolding narrative.

Sometimes you have 15 ceremonies in a row and you only get what was the purpose at the last one. For me it’s a bit like a puzzle because sometimes you only discover the picture you are making when you put in the last piece.

I’m a filmmaker, so I created non-linear structures in films. This just allows me to tell a story slightly differently, so I’m used to learning in this way.

Do you think that darker experiences with ayahuasca test the strength of the psyche so that the soul can know the healing power of the plant? Is the infamous purge always necessary or something that goes away in time or after more practice?

I don’t think that there is any specific role of ayahuasca’s dark side necessarily, there is just the role of the medicine to put you in a better balance with yourself and the world.

So the dark side we are facing through ayahuasca, which acts as a mirror, can be coming from many directions simultaneously; bad food, physical illness, fears and trauma, self esteem issues, inflated ego, cultural implants, etc.

If you look at ayahuasca as an energetic medicine, all dark experience are really cleaning operations, re-establishing into the being a good balance (physical, spiritual, emotional, mental).

In other words, you don’t see in the normal state of consciousness how much of you inside is a mess (at least mine is), but you basically have the best possible healer with you, so you kind of purge through these dark visions.

So when you have the dark visions you ask the medicine to evacuate it, to vibrationally cleanse it in order to help you be rid of it. You might purge, you might not—especially in later journeys—but when the visions are gone then the next day you will feel like a new born.

Can you explain how working with these kinds of plant medicines have caused you to view your role as a filmmaker differently, or how it has effected your overall view of art and inspiration?

For me as a filmmaker, you’re projecting through a film, ideas, topics, concepts, emotions, rhythms, cognitive information.

Ayahuasca over a long period of use changes you holistically as a human being, so naturally it changes your relations to all of those realms at once. So it changed my approach to cinema, too.

You have to watch my pre-ayahuasca films, and my post ayahuasca films in order to see the changes I guess, but I look at my work differently now, more energetically.

A film, a painting, a piece of music, words, contain energy. So the question becomes; what energy do you want to propel into society?

In Visionary Ayahuasca there’s an amusing anecdote concerning peyote.

What do you see being the central qualitative differences between aya and other plant medicines?

Peyote is a different experience, more sensitive and bodily than visionary. I had an incredible moment with peyote that I describe in my book.

I have dieted on many varieties of Amazonian plants through the Shipibo way, it’s complementary to Ayahuasca.

Most Amazonian plant medicines function in healing. Some of them you have to be very cautious with because they are dangerous, Toé (Datura) for example, and they all work differently. For example some, like pignon blanco, are not inherently psychoactive, but will instead work to magnify the visual component of your dreams.

The quest in this case may be about finding the plant that you can have a good relation with, then a respected relation with love and caution can develop.

It’s a love story, and like anything you can have ecstatic love and drama sometimes equally.

The role of the healer is to aid in these encounters, to help you find the right plants that are willing be your ally.

What are your thoughts on neotribalism or neopaganism and the aspects of Western hegemony in re-appropriation of South American or shamanic practices in general?

Even though there is sincere and legitimate healing happening, there seem to be stereotypes of naive tourists who do want more of an ayahuasca vacation quick fix, and this image has also been magnified by mainstream media.

I suppose it’s the natural movement of the world, the crossover and dispersion of all things in global culture. In a way it’s probably logical to get to that stage in our culture.

But I did my films and books basically for 2 reasons:

The first is that I recognized the knowledge of indigenous cultures is way ahead of the West currently in the exploration of the inner world, the invisible world, and the nature of consciousness.

The second is simply to give some information to my fellow compatriots in the West about these experiences.

We are all still like children in these realms, but the wisdom and mystery of the teachers is there, too.

Concerning Westerner’s beliefs; I do not know of them. Life is short and I decided to concentrate on exploring those realities with the Shipibo, through their science and medicine. A life time of drinking ayahuasca may not be enough learning anyway!

This is a speculative question but, do you think that ayahuasca as we know it today was ever used by the past by any cultures outside of South America, or by those with European ancestry?

I’m thinking particularly of European witchcraft lineages which tended to have an extensive knowledge of visionary plants. Usually these were taken specifically to cure illness or in general to heal the mind. Scholars like Claudia Müller-Ebeling and Christian Ratsch have also speculated about this.

Of course. It’s evident for me.

We’ve had the knowledge of the plant world maybe more directly in the past, and we do still have many master plants in Europe.

A lot of this has been destroyed by religious cults under the notion of “progress”, but the scientific evidence for healing properties of plants is all over the globe and is still preserved in books as you say.

Visionary plants do seem to be encoded at the foundation of all religions, that’s the paradox; the plants still exist, but the knowledge about all all of the more rare plants might still be in danger of disappearing.

What would you say to those that think ayahuasca visions are hallucinations or mere tricks of the mind?

For instance, do you believe in astral projection, remote viewing, divination and other aspects of trans-subjective mass visions such as two or more people experiencing the exact same visions of spirits? There have been reports of said spirits being also verified by those that did not drink in ceremony.

Marlene Dobkin De Rios, John Perkins, and other scholars have documented all of this phenomena as being possible amongst the indigenous, too.

Ayahuasca visions are called tricks of the mind?

I don’t want to sound rude, but these sorts of thoughts usually do come from Westerners—the so-called non believers from the indigenous point of view—who have not yet taken this medicine.

If a person has taken a good dose of ayahuasca, if your mind and body are ready and prepared, and if you have the visions, the question of that same person may become the next morning; Ayahuasca visions, are they tricks or messages from God?

When I started writing the book I was over 100 ceremonies, I’m now over 400. In 16 years there is still one thing relevant for me:

You witness a lot of crazy stuff in ayahuasca ceremonies!

I’ve had sessions where life becomes magic and timelines explode, so in this sense it feels like anything is possible for me.

Nature is said to be an integrated communication system between species, and in that way it allows for access to non visible reality. The indigenous have the key, so we are lucky that some are STILL willing to share that wisdom with us.

As Arthur C Clarke has said “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Keeping The Portal Open: Erik Davis on TechGnosis and the Blurring “Real” & “Virtual”

Posted on December 13, 2015 by Reid Mukai

By Michael Garfield

Source: Reality Sandwich

Erik Davis is the author of TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, & Mysticism in the Age of Information (recently reissued by North Atlantic Books with a new afterword). An investigation into how our transcendental urges play out in the realm of high technology, it is a rare treat – both an exemplary work of scholarship and also a delightful read – a florid, fun, and virtuosic play of language. Even more impressive is that in our metamorphic times, this book has aged considerably well. TechGnosis is in ways more relevant today than it was in the rosy dawn of 1998, before The Matrix and the iPhone, Facebook, and Edward Snowden. We’re living in the future. Read this book and learn the territory.

Over a glitchy Google Hangout (you can watch both parts on YouTube), Erik and I discussed our culture’s highest hopes and darkest dreams for our collective future, and how they’ve both become more complicated since the turn of the Millennium.

If you imagine browser windows as a kind of portal in between dimensions – if you wonder when the apes and whales will open social media accounts – if you believe that we can find a way to surf the turbulence of our connected century with grace and humor – then read on…

(Thanks to Terra Celeste and Ivan Marko for transcribing this! This is about one-third of the full conversation. You can also read the transcript in its raw entirety here.)

Erik: I apologize for our developing-world level of internet connectivity. Here in San Francisco! That’s right, folks, you heard it right: I live in the city of San Francisco, the absolute white hot center of the technological creative mutation, and yet my internet’s kind of crappy.

Michael: Well, you know, San Francisco was where Skynet was headquartered in the last Terminator film, so it may just be that your home is becoming ever-more inimical to human existence.

Erik: And the Federation, too! In a way those were the two models, right? On the one hand, you have the Federation from Star Trek, where it’s a liberal, UN, kind of globalist model – we’re no longer fighting nation states, we’re still human beings, we have desires, we get to drink tea and explore the universe. That sounds pretty cool from a humanist point of view, and yet on the other side we have Skynet, which is of course a whole other ball of wax. In a way, isn’t that it? It’s the struggle between the Federation and Skynet.

Michael: It’s funny, ‘cause most of what I wanted to talk to you about today was about how your book -– which is a brilliant piece of writing – has aged since 1998. The new volume includes a new afterword from the 2004 edition, as well as a new afterword from the 2015 edition. One of the things that you discuss is the way that the expectation that we had of boundary dissolution and transcendence at the turn of the millennium has become more complex. Now, it’s more of just a general shifting and metamorphosis of the construction of new boundaries. And so, like in the most recent Star Trek films and Terminator films, we now have good Terminators that believe they are people and are willing to donate their heart to the dying members of the human resistance. You know, the actual human heart that these Terminators possess, in order spoof human security systems. And then, in the latest Star Trek film, the threat comes from within the Federation, from a black box military program. Our culture seems to be getting more and more comfortable with these liminal zones and these ethical complexities. Less naïve with respect to that kind of simple dyadic distinction.

Erik: Techgnosis first came out in ’98. I talk a lot about gnosticism in the book and about these ancient Christian heresies about the spark in us that can escape from this prison that’s run by evil demons who are fabricating reality. That ancient model of mysticism and theology just fits like a hand and glove in our digital era. And then the Matrix films come along and I was like, “Oh my God, so beautiful.” It was just a perfect expression, and I wrote about that in the afterword for the 2004 edition. Nowadays a lot of the topics that I wrote about are even more available and perceivable through popular culture because popular culture has gotten weirder, more full of occultism, more intense, even as, in some ways, it’s become more ordinary. A lot of these sort of topics were very fringe in the ’80s or even the ’90s, in the sense that you had to kinda dig for occultism, for Satanism, for people who believed that they were channeling deities. All this stuff was part of a subculture, an outsider culture. Whether we believed it or not doesn’t matter. In a way, it’s not that there are necessarily more people who believe in these things. It’s just that they’re more available, because of the way that popular culture introduces these ideas. We become fans of shows. Fantasy and science fiction have become the norm.

Michael: I’m sure you remember when James Cameron’s Avatar came out, and the Avatar world immediately took off within the LARPing community. And so you started to see this foreshadowing of a new dysphrenia, a psychological disorder of the possible fragmentation of worldspaces that we seem kind of doomed to experience with the advent of the true landing of virtual reality. These people were so just morose and desperate because they became so immersed in the Pandora world that they couldn’t readjust to their life as human beings. It’s sort of akin to my generation’s wave of acid burnouts, maybe. As we invest more and more of ourselves into this increasingly popular and available and sexy because it’s not just animated by our religious impulses, but it’s actively being advertised, and commercialized and sold to us. We’re really being encouraged to throw ourselves into these alternative worldspaces. And then there isn’t a landing pad for when we get back. So I feel like one of the lasting lessons of your book, one of the reasons that I feel its resonance remains, is because it allows a person to integrate those experiences. In a way, it functions as a manual for understanding our drives and the larger emotional matrix in which we play with new freedoms to explore occult realities.

Erik: That’s very well said, actually, because in conventional society, even very recently, these things have largely been shuttered out. My generation grew up in the shadow of the hippies, and those things were around, but they were very much part of the counterculture. They were either mocked or ignored in the New York Times reality, which is still kind of a good symbol for consensus reality. I’m not even sure if we have a consensus reality anymore, or if it’s not some crazy topological knot, but in the old days, it had a little bit more stability to it, and you would never see these things acknowledged. Or if they were, they were pathologized – it was crazy, it was absurd, it was narcissistic and navel-gazing. This was true for a whole range of things – meditation, esotericism, UFOs, psychedelics, the whole range of extraordinary experience that people wanted to seek and experience.

As someone who basically keeps my feet on the ground, I’m largely skeptical in temperament. I’m very anthropological in my approach, which means I like to go into environments and participate as I observe, that classic stance of participant-observation. And what’s come from that is a realization that you can plunge very deeply into very interesting, rich otherworlds that are full of magic and enchantment and bizarre synchronicities and wonderful downloads, but at the same time you can also trust the ability to return to the body, to the ordinary, to the conditions of human experience in an everyday way, and that those don’t have to be in conflict so much.

I think that these experiences are not only really valuable, but they’re absolutely necessary to understand what’s actually happening. Whether people acknowledge it or not, a lot of the time we are driven by desires to be in dreamworlds, to achieve unusual-states-of-consciousness, to find them inside ourselves and see the way that they’re driving us. There’s a strong kind of rationalist technologized way of thinking about experience that’s very pervasive now, that’s actually carried like a philosophical virus through the widespread notions of tweaking and controlling your experience, of making yourself more efficient or powerful. So for me it’s really important to keep portals open to the unknown, to the mystery, to the bizarre, because it’s precisely in those encounters that we see beyond the rationalistic frame, which often is, in my opinion, benighted. Instead, we can adopt a more open-ended, but not necessarily mystical, attitude to the whole range of otherworldly experiences.

Michael: There’s a through-line here in one of the last chapters of Coming into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness by William Irwin Thompson, someone whom I know that has inspired us both immensely. That books last chapter a chapter is about how the Ramayana tells how humans and animals allied to expel the demons from what we now take as take as mundane, everyday reality. Bill Thompson’s view was that the Electrical Imaginary descending back into our networked global civilization is opening a portal, and that the screen is literally a shamanic window through which these spirits are granted fresh access to our world. And then in your latest afterword you talk about how the irony of these ultra-hyper-realist-skeptic-atheist-revenge-of-the-enlightenment types is that you can’t actually create a complete model of the mundane world. You can’t perfectly map the enlightened cosmos without getting into all of the weird stuff, the out-of-body experiences, the UFO abductions. These things have to be explained in order to cast out all of the shadows, but the naïve attempt to cast them out is really just an invocation. It’s like the topological knot you mentioned earlier, where merely addressing them makes them a more vivid part of our reality.

Erik: Absolutely. I think that that’s part of the deeper logic behind the renaissance of psychedelics. In many ways, “psychedelics” as a topic is a key site in understanding how modern technological scientific people recover, rediscover, and repackage, if you will, these kinds of liminal states and otherworldly encounters, with their potential sources of meaning and spiritual experiences. I also think that one of the reasons we have seen such an incredible renaissance emerge so quickly is because it was an inevitable part of scientific logic. Science has to take the brain seriously, it has to take the experiences in the brain seriously. Psychedelics are clearly physical, material agents that produce somewhat regular phenomenological effects. We have to understand that if we’re going to understand the brain. Any reasonable scientist is going to say that. And, whoa, lo and behold, it actually seems to do some good. So the genie is out of the bottle, and the genie doesn’t mean that we’re going to return to some kind of mystical worldview. I don’t believe we are. I think we’re in a state of tremendous mixing, of a multidimensional view where we have to learn how to move between different kinds of frameworks, including occult and animist frameworks, including mystical or religious frameworks, but also including secular, critical, analytic frameworks – scientific in that classic sense as well. How to do that I don’t know. But I do know that it’s a multidimensional field and I think that that’s why we see this turn towards the very multidimensional psychedelics.

Michael: Yeah, definitely. That is, in the sense of the original articulation of TechGnosis. You’ve got that chapter, “The Path is a Network”. There is something about the way the network allows for this manifold, multifaceted appraisal of reality, that really breeds and encourages and nourishes multiperspectivism. And so, in a way, I think the inherently psychedelic nature of our age, and what’s become really just like much more imminently and vividly obvious and easy to spot about the mainstream culture in general, is that we don’t all agree. It’s a much deeper revelation of the same kind of cultural relativism that we started to experience through the global interchange and commerce a couple hundred years ago, but now it’s to the point where culture has splintered to such an extraordinary degree due to the fact that everyone at the dinner table is occupying their own iPhone reality portal, that the main yoga of at least the first half of the twentieth century seems to be the psychedelic yoga, of being able to take our ontological conclusions lightly, and to be able to juggle them and to adopt them when they’re appropriate but to treat them with the kind of middle-way balance of skepticism and sympathy that you have modeled for your readers.

Erik: Yeah, that’s a really important thing for me. Also, itIt also plays an important role in a lot of the stuff that we haven’t been talking about, which is the dark side of the tale. Probably my proudest thing about TechGnosis is that it first came out in 1998, so the book was written during the first internet bubble. This was the time when a truly millennialist set of ideas were held by many people working in technology, the new rules of the economy of abundance. That kind of utopian thinking.was partly legitimately believed. I knew a lot of these people, I was kinda part of that world, of people who were imagining the potential of virtual reality, of new kinds of political formations, people drawn together in new forms of community, etc. At the same time those ideas were also ruthlessly exploited by capitalist forces, which created essentially a kind of ponzi scheme of IPOs. And so, the sense that something new and different was actually happening was simultaneously exploited.

When I was writing TechGnosis, it would have been easy for someone to write a much more happy, fluffy vision of the connections between spirituality and technology. “Here we are, just around the corner, just about to break through!” But for me, that sense of transformation was always accompanied by a shadow. If you open the portal and you accept the existence of these half-fantastic beings, there are demons there as well. In our future visions now we feel the presence apocalyptic energies. There’s the sense of mass breakdown, of ecological collapse, or the rise of a fascist surveillance state. On some intimate level we know that every time we’re using a device we’re moving through a shadow realm where we don’t know what sorts of agents – entities, algorithms, human beings – are perceiving and making meaning out of our operations. That is an unnerving, uncanny situation, and it’s one that we have to live with.

We have to acknowledge that we do have these fears and terrors, and apocalyptic presumptions inside of us, inside our imaginations, inside our hearts, inside our stories, inside our cultural traditions. And so we have to be very careful about where and how we mix the apocalyptic templates that we carry in our imaginations with the actual real conditions that we find ourselves in. It’s very tricky, but I suspect it takes that same sort of balance of skepticism and sympathy into the shadow realm as well as the utopian, or at least poetic possibility. And in a lot of ways I feel that’s where we’re at. That’s part of why I do what I do, is to try to kind of map that ginger, open, but questioning space, because it seems like one of the places to try to navigate these very difficult issues.

Michael: So many people worship the idea of the return to nature, or Terence McKenna’s idea of an archaic revival, this sort of forward-escape atavism where we go all the way around and end up back where we started, transformed. But we’re also naïve to the lived reality of not being on the top of the food chain, and that’s absolutely part of this that comes back, it can’t be divorced from the rest of it. We long for the community of the tribal life that we left behind, for the openness, the permeability of the self that we experience. The last experiment of civilization was profoundly dissociative, isolated, and lonely, and as consequence, we have a totally pathological relationship to the natural world. But in restoring that, in the humility of science recognizing its ultimate ignorance, we move back into an age where we’re no longer able to kid ourselves quite so successfully about the dragons that we have swept under the map. They’re still there, and they’re in a way even more alive for us now.

In your interview with Vice, you said a god is just a fiction that everyone believes in. So in a way – and this is kind of Information Warfare 101 – even if the NSA did not have supercomputers inside that Utah data complex, the fact that they built it, and that it can be observed on Google Maps, holds this profound power over the human imagination, and so we’re all having to catch up really quickly to these magical concepts. Even if they’re not clothed in the language and trappings of magical traditions, we’re being reacquainted with the power of the symbol and the power of ritual, and the sway that an idea has over the population when it becomes harder and harder to verify things beyond the shadow of a doubt.

Erik: You could call it conspiracy thinking, although that gets defined in all sorts of ways, some of which I think are themselves forms of mind-gaming. Either way, we’re in a realm of mind-games, where perception is reality, and where the crafting of perception takes place on multiple levels through multiple agendas. Multiple agents are crafting reality in a more and more overt way, even as we’re technically learning to craft subjective experience more and more. Here we’re getting into the edge of Virtual Reality 2.0. I think that, again, familiarity with these occult or even animist liminal zones will help us navigate through the jungle that we’re in. I mean, I can totally understand why people want to drop out of this thing. Like, fully drop out – whether into criminal underworlds, into darknet trafficking, or whether they go off the grid, or try to monkey-wrench the show. Those desires makes a lot of sense to me. It’s not who I am, it’s not where I am, but I can resonate with that. So, as long as I’m still participating in this network world that we’re sharing, that we’re fabricating, that the machines are fabricating, that we’re sharing with the machines, we have to develop that kind of light step.

You also mentioned a sense of the larger ecological framework that we’re in. As we look at what’s happening with technology, as we try to understand what’s happening with communication and human civilization, it’s impossible to extricate it from this larger ecological condition of crisis and no-going-back. It really feels like what we’re being asked to do, ethically and imaginatively, is to extend our ability to sympathize, to engage with, and even just to leave a space open for that which is outside of us, outside of the human frame, outside of the human story. That Outside may be technology, in the sense of the algorithmic intelligences that are already beginning to swamp our world, as well as the complex institutions and networks that are distributing these things. But that Outside also supports a more ecological and even cosmic view. We’re on a planet, the planet’s changing rapidly, spinning in space. All of those larger views, I think, are what we’re called upon to connect with.

I think one of my greater fears or concerns – I mean, I have so many, but just talking specifically about technology, and how people use it – is that it’s very easy to stay within a kind of human narcissistic world through media, especially social media, and the internet. I see people putting their energy into virtual or technological information circuitry, getting absorbed into a mass-cybernetic web of media, with its transmission of human stories and human perceptions and human egos and identification and projection. The whole game is so absorbing, so seductive, so fascinating, so enervating, that it can drown out our ability to wrestle with the non-human – whether it’s technology, geology, animals, capital flows. We need to become better post-humans, not narcissistic post-humans seeking our pleasure buttons, figuring out the best way to design some kind of crazy experience. That’s great, it’s part of the whole picture, but we have to also really think about what does it mean to live in a profoundly interwoven cosmos that necessarily draws us out of our narrow human egoic frame.

Michael: I totally agree. So, in light of that, I’m really fascinated by what you might have to say on recent developments on the interspecies internet – have you heard much about this? There was a TED talk about it a year or two ago.

Erik: I think I know what you mean. Why don’t you set it up?

Michael: A couple of years ago, Vint Cerf, Peter Gabriel, and a couple other people – dolphin researchers, bonobo researchers, and technologists – came forward at a TED conference to launch the idea that we can get into the sensorium of other animals and understand the way they experience things well enough to create computer interfaces for them that perform something like “Babel Fish” or Google Translate, so that we can communicate – whether it’s through music, symbols, or something else – with some of these other animals that we know have high intelligence and a sense of self.

I was really excited about being a part of this in some way, just throwing my bid into this process, and then I started thinking about how it got more complex. Because, what’s really going on here is that we can scarcely recognize a world beyond ourselves without immediately attempting to colonize it with our technological bid for control. To reference George Dvorsky of io9, there’s something really beautiful in his fascination with animal uplift, and his vision of our ethical responsibility to involve non-human species in the fate of the planet – which is currently being decided by human parliamentary action. The dolphins should get a vote. The gorillas should get a vote. And the only way that they can get a vote is to involve them in the technological infrastructure that we’re creating that is allows us the hope and the opportunity for that Star Trek world government. At the same time, it enfolds them into our own personal and transpersonal nightmare that we just discussed, and ultimately they may not want to participate in our uniquely human breed of insanity.

Erik: Yeah, that’s very well put. You know, we keep stumbling onto this Faustian bargain. It increasingly seems to describe these kinds of situations. There are people who believe that we can design a good enough system where, even despite its flaws, we’re drawing in others to decisions about the best and most ethical thing to do. And at the same time you’re going to have people who are just, like, gagging in their throats. It’s like, after all of the violence we have exerted on the animal world, to do this is the final, most nihilistic violence – to draw them into this madness! And you could have the same discussion about the desire to colonize planets. How could we not get excited about the idea of human beings on Mars or even robots landing on asteroids? It’s just totally fascinating and wonderful, and yet it’s pretty easy to see what that would look like as an industry, and the kinds of problems that would arise in the way that seems stitched into the nature of human beings. Sometime you can almost be Christian about it. It’s a kind of original sin, a way of, like, always fighting and competing and outmaneuvering and exploiting and trying to create elites. All these things that civilization has been doing since the get-go, since we stepped outside of the Paleolithic life and made a pact with writing and social organization, with pyramidical structures. It’s an old, old, old pact, and it’s deeply religious. Our religion is fundamentally bound up with the mythology of the state.

And so, where I stumble now is…where is the state? Is it everywhere? Is it nowhere? Are we at a point where that whole relationship is shifting? Is it worth extending hope into these things, or is it reasonable to say, “Look, we just keep doing the same horrible thing over and over again, so let’s just tear it down.”

Getting back to the specific question about animals, though. I really buy that radical democratic notion in a lot of ways. Turning to the Outside, whether it’s animals or elements of technology or geological forces, is part of what democracy means. Part of the constitution in Ecuador recognizes the rights of nature. Not just nature, but “Pachamama” – and, as people who are interested in medicine work and indigenous worldviews know, Pachamama is a goddess. It’s a way of understanding and relating to the fecund, beneficent giving quality of the earth, in a spiritual light, or a personhood light, or an animist light, whatever you want to call it. And that’s part of the constitution, part of a legal document. The thinking behind that document is, “Look, it’s just extending the idea of rights, which is a modern construct. The notion of inalienable rights emerges at a certain point in Western history, it gets installed into governmental and legal forms. Initially it’s just for white men with property, then it’s just for men, then women get it, then people of color, whatever – you have this spreading of the notion of rights, so that now we are called upon to spread it into the environment as well.” Very tricky, very complicated, very confusing. What does it mean, to give nature a voice? Is “nature”, or Pachamama, even the right word? And at the same time, that seems like a very vital and significant mutation in the operating system of the state. You’ve got to factor in these others, even though exactly how that happens is so difficult to understand. So again, here we go! Plunging into the Faustian bargain!

Michael: It’s very much related to a book that I feel stands in a fun balance with yours. It came out this last year by Christian Schwägerl. It’s called The Anthropocene, and if you haven’t read it I highly recommend the read (editor’s note: Shwägerl has a number of excerpts published on Reality Sandwich). It ignores the mystical dimensions of things. Schwägerl lives in Berlin, and he’s very much operating from a secular, European Union, modern global ecological sensibility. But the whole idea of his book is that the last remaining wild places are, in a sense, artifacts, because they only exist due to the determination of the human hand to preserve them. That there is no real wilderness anymore on our planet, at least in the natural world. Everything is indoors, and we have to find a way to first recognize that the so-called “Human Age” is actually tilting us into this much more profound, complex, and difficult relationship with the non-human world.

But we do have to find a way to express that world in our own language and our own systems – for example, by honoring what he calls “ecosystem services” in our economy, not factoring out that the water cycle, the carbon cycle, and all of these supporting systems that have an order of magnitude greater economic value than anything we’re trading on the stock market. They must be preserved at literally all costs. But he is ethically divided by the question, “Do we have to talk about the rainforest in terms of its monetary value in order to save it?”

Erik: That’s the crux. I’m glad you brought up this topic of wilderness, because I think it’s a good way to reflect on one of the problems we face. On the one hand, we have the wild – what the wild represents, what it means to be wild, what it means to stumble across the wild in your life, We are talking the unknown, the mystery, the chaos, a kind of Dionysian encounter, an intensity that takes you beyond reason, whether it’s experienced in a natural environment or in your head, or in the city. There’s something about wildness that’s profound to human beings. It has a lot to do with what people seek when they’re spiritual seekers, when they’re religious, when they are plumbing the depths. When people question the autonomy or imperial demands of reason, it’s often in the name of some kind of wild – whether it’s the sacred or the archaic or the nonhuman.

At the same time, you can sit down and go, “But this whole idea of wilderness, of natural wilderness, well, it’s a construct, it’s part of the European imagination, and that imagination is over. It’s not doing anyone any good anymore.” Some very serious environmentalists will argue that ideas of wilderness or even “nature” are actually in the way. The argument is that the religious and spiritual ideas about nature that were such an important part of twentieth century environmentalism actually get in the way of the process of introducing these non-human factors into the system in a way that would actually force the system to recognize and negotiate with them, rather than pretending in this abstract, insidious way that they don’t exist. And I don’t know what to do with that tension between these two “wildernesses”. All I know is that it’s incredibly vital in whatever way that we keep a portal open to the wild.

In that sense I’m very different than rationalist people who think we just need to introduce everything into the system – that it has to be drawn into the logic of capital, it has to be commodified, it has to be seen. That the way to deal with pollution is to create carbon debt and to introduce it into the financial system. But that solution is a house of cards. I have a slightly, perhaps darker view that whatever tumult lies ahead, whatever sorts of forms of chaos we confront, whether they’re through a highly developed technological society that manages to keep things going, or whether society is forced to reorganize in the face of a major hiccups and breakdowns, whatever the thing is, the more that we are actually able to handle the wild, the chaos, the unknown, the mystery, the others, the whispers on the edge of our vision, the better we’ll be able to actually navigate that situation on an individual and a cultural level. There is a problem with the rational, reasonable, incorporate-everything logic, with its call to squeeze everything for its monetary value, to quantify everything, to quantify the self. All of that may be fine and well, but only as long as it keeps a space open for those kinds of encounters, for that kind of imagination, for that kind of risk and vulnerability.

But that’s often what doesn’t happen. So, in a way, my work, not just in TechGnosis, but in all the writing and conversations that I’ve done and continue to do is about riding these edges. I just want to keep those portals open, to keep the spaces open, so that people don’t feel like they have to be fools in order to engage these broader ways of seeing the world. That’s why it’s really important to keep those portals, those edges open.

Read more by Erik Davis here.

Read more by Michael Garfield here.

Terence McKenna’s Disillusioned Perspective on Mass-Consumerist Culture

Posted on September 16, 2015 by Reid Mukai

Editor’s note: Since Terence McKenna’s passing on April 3 2000, his ideas have only grown in relevance and popularity largely because of their prescience and resonance to growing segments of internet culture. In commemoration of the 70th anniversary of his birthday we’re sharing this article which reflects an important yet often neglected aspect of McKenna’s worldview.

By Jordan Bates

Source: Refine the Mind

“We have to create culture, don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow.”

Terence McKenna is one of those cult-famous, societal-fringe figures of whom the majority of people have never heard. He’s also someone whose views probably have a polarizing effect on anyone who encounters them. At the very least, though, Terence was an exceptionally original thinker, and those who explore a fraction of his work will note his erudition and incredible ability to articulate his thoughts.

McKenna was an American philosopher and ethnobotanist who passed away in the year 2000. He was known for possessing expertise on a broad range of subjects including history, biology, geology, botany, and ecology. He toured and lectured extensively on everything from language and science to shamanism and extraterrestrials, developing a sizable and enthusiastic following.

His controversial status is in large part due to his vocal advocacy of mind-altering substances. McKenna was a well-known psychonaut–one who explores consciousness through the ingestion of psychedelic hallucinogens–and a staunch proponent of the use of naturally occurring psychoactive compounds.

Obviously this latter aspect of McKenna’s legacy is an immediate turn-off to many. For a major sector of the population, the colossal stigma surrounding psychedelic substances is sufficient reason to lambaste the views of a well-known user. I, however, am not so quick to dismiss such a person, especially one as lucid, compelling, internally consistent, and dedicated to free inquiry as Terence McKenna.

McKenna’s Views on Mass-Consumerist Culture

I’ve delved into hours of McKenna’s lectures, and I am particularly interested in his ideas on culture. When McKenna speaks of culture, he seems to refer primarily to modern, mass-consumerist culture, so keep that in mind.

McKenna held a rather unfriendly position toward culture that can be summed up succinctly by one of his most famous quotations: “Culture is not your friend.” McKenna saw modern culture as a sort of engine detached from the interests of the individual and serving the manipulative, power-focused agendas of various institutions and wealthy individuals.

The following short video contains a portion of one of his lectures in which he addresses culture. I encourage you to watch it now (I will transcribe and elaborate on its central ideas below):

What Civilization is and What it Could be

McKenna certainly had a way of poetically articulating his ideas, and the video opens with what I feel is one of Terence’s most memorable metaphors:

“What civilization is is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other’s shoulders and kicking each other’s teeth in. It’s not a pleasant situation. And yet you can stand back and look at this planet and see that we have the money, the power, the medical understanding, the scientific know-how, the love, and the community to produce a kind of human paradise.”

With this statement McKenna addresses the hyper-competitive environment that is symptomatic of the modern capitalistic socioeconomic paradigm. Our culture has a tendency to glorify competition, and many would argue that competition drives innovation and “progress” (a slippery word). I doubt McKenna would argue that competition has not been essential to the invention of our modern world, but he seems to step back and ask, “Yes, but when will it be enough?”

McKenna suggests that we’ve reached a stage of technological advancement and knowledge that would allow us to “produce a kind of human paradise.” This declaration sounds vague and idealistic, but based upon what I know of McKenna, I assume that by “human paradise” he envisioned something like a drastic change in the work paradigm, an elimination of poverty and starvation, a great reduction in disease and illness-related death, the end of war, and a much more palpable sense of a world community.

“Culture is Not Your Friend”

These items might sound far-fetched, but McKenna is not the first to suggest that such a situation is possible with our modern technology. R. Buckminster Fuller comes to mind as another prominent thinker who held similar views. After making this statement, McKenna elaborates on what he believes prevents us from attaining this state of affairs–namely, a lack of significant resistance to the poor leadership, dehumanizing values, and damaging cultural “control icons” that he perceives in the world. He states:

“Culture is not your friend. Culture is for other peoples’ convenience and the convenience of various institutions, churches, companies, tax collection schemes, what have you. It is not your friend. It insults you. It disempowers you. It uses and abuses you. None of us are well-treated by culture.”

[…]

But the culture is a perversion. It fetishizes objects. It creates consumer mania. It preaches endless forms of false happiness, endless forms of false understanding in the form of squirrelly religions and silly cults. It invites people to diminish themselves and dehumanize themselves by behaving like machines.”

Modern World as Dystopia?

McKenna holds that modern culture is centered around the agendas of those who are almost certainly not you. He believes that culture diminishes and dehumanizes the vast majority of the population by inviting them to unreflectively reinforce its models.

McKenna seems to suggest that instead of focusing on creating the type of world that is possible, we are caught up in a game of culture–a robotic pursuit of fetishized objects and false visions of a proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.

To some, this view may seem rather grim and dystopian. I don’t see it that way. I see it as a warning that remains pertinent in 2013 [and 2015]. The culture McKenna refers to does exist, and its effects are far-reaching and potentially insidious. However, I know that there are many, many people who are aware of this cultural game and do not conform to its status quo, who resolve to try to choose their own way of life and who see through the glitzy media-images.

Simply by being among this latter group of people, I think we’re doing the work that McKenna believed needed to be done–the work of resisting the damaging and dehumanizing aspects of modern consumerist culture. The mere realization that we are culturally conditioned to behave in certain ways is a sufficient catalyst to begin assuming a more active and reflective role in deciding how to live and act.

I see nothing wrong with being a cultural participant, but it should be our goal to develop a deeper awareness of the ideals our culture would have us pursue. When we understand the culture’s vision for our lives, we can continue to exist within our given society while challenging its flaws in subtle ways. We can deliberately express ourselves in forms that disrupt its norms, and we can consciously choose which aspects of it are worth partaking in. In this way, we become active constituents of culture, shifting and re-imagining its values, contributing to the gradual creation of a culture that we can call our “friend”.

McKenna Suggests We Must Create Culture

McKenna was certainly a vocal critic of mass culture, but to his credit, he was also quite vocal about offering alternatives. He believed strongly in the importance and utility of art, the primacy of felt experience, and the need to create our own values and alternative spaces for expression.

I’ll leave you with one last quote from another of Terence’s lectures that is especially poignant here. He was a frank and opinionated speaker, to be sure, but don’t let his style put you off. Terence was also always quick to check his own views and make light of his position. He didn’t want to insult people–he just wanted us to ask questions. This message from beyond the grave is valuable to each of us; ponder it with an open mind:

“We have to create culture, don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you’re worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you’re giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told ‘no’, we’re unimportant, we’re peripheral. ‘Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.’ And then you’re a player, you don’t want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”
― Terence McKenna

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