How Psychedelics Can Be a Path to Transformation
by Phil Wolfson, alternet.org
March 18th 2011
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The California ballot initiative for partial marijuana legalization
(Proposition 19) may have been defeated for the moment, but nevertheless more
than four million voters said "yes" to it. Between the recent reduction in
California's penalties for use -- now reduced to a fine for possession of under
an ounce of marijuana -- and the burgeoning medical marijuana industry, clearly
the times are a-changin'. There are many hundreds of thousands of certified
medical marijuana users in California, and twelve other states now have some
reduction in marijuana criminalization as well. With scientific research into
the clinical effects of psychedelics also burgeoning and a growing number of
papers indicating benefit for various psychiatric conditions (post-traumatic
stress disorder, depression, terminal illnesses, and drug addiction), thereby
bolstering historic claims for clinical utility, and with the horrific costs of
failed prohibition more and more obvious to the public, decriminalization -- if
not legalization -- has become more of a possibility. With this as background,
it is imperative to undertake a public reevaluation of where we are with
respect to psychedelic use, its risks, and its potential to support personal,
spiritual, and cultural transformation.
The History: Ancient and Modern
Psychoactive substance-induced alteration of consciousness is ages old, the
specific history dependent on humans' particular geographic location and
corresponding native plant habitats. The remarkable discovery, perpetuation,
refinement of use, and sacralization of psychoactive substances in early and
stone age cultures testifies to the timeless human interest in transcending
"ordinary" historical and cultural realities.
Marijuana use dates at least to 4000 years BCE -- the earliest cultivated plant
remains known having been dated to that time. Humans and marijuana have
co-evolved, influencing each other reciprocally in terms of cultivation and
culture.
The use of mushrooms and other psychoactive plants in Mesoamerica is
undoubtedly thousands of years old and was ineradicable despite the deliberate
murder of practitioners by the Inquisition and genocidal suppression of
indigenous cultures by the European colonizers.
In fact, Europe was desperately poor in psychedelics, these being limited to
the toxic tropane alkaloids contained in mandrake, henbane, and poisonous
nightshades such as datura (popularly known as thorn-apple, jimson weed, or
devil's trumpet). European consciousness developed its particular distortions
in concert with the addictive and easily manufactured toxin known as ethanol,
which is of limited value for mental and spiritual transformation.
Most remarkable is the Amazonian creation of ayahuasca (yage), the admixture of
two separate plants that had to be bundled to create the remarkable oral
dimethyltryptamine-based experience that was practiced as divination and
personal transformation by native shamans. Ayahuasca use has recently spread to
North America, culminating in the U.S. Supreme Court's recognition of the União
do Vegetal with hoasca as an acceptable sacrament and indispensible part of the
União do Vegetal Church's ceremonial life, much as peyote is legal for the
Native American Church.
Prohibition has often arisen in tandem with use, and has tended to serve elites
who, hiding behind moral authoritarianism, attempt to regulate the "mind" in
order to control dissidence. On the other side, use of substances for social
control has its own history. For example, the Opium Wars were aimed at securing
British capitalist interests in China and sedating the Chinese and, as many
have argued, the pestilence of heroin use in the ghettos of the United States
was fomented by the CIA in the 1960s and '70s. Prohibition and criminalization
-- and, in our times, the "war on drugs" internationalized by the United States
-- distort the discussion of psychoactive substance use and criminalize the
exploration of mind-altering drugs, as if this were an activity to be
controlled by the state. That demonization makes for both propagandistic
deception and overstated advocacy.
The best course has always been to provide information and education.
Suppression can result in destruction of entire countries -- Afghanistan,
Honduras, Colombia, etc. -- because "money" is the most powerful hard drug of
our times and attracts so many passionate adherents globally who are fixated on
the accumulation of capital and, much like hardcore drug addicts, care little
for the havoc their addiction wreaks.
The Essential Safety of Psychedelics
Our epoch is unique for the mass use of psychedelic substances despite
oppressive prohibition. This makes it crucial to understand why so many people
defy drug laws and police to experience psychedelic effects. If the "war on
drugs" is a lost cause despite the billions spent and the hordes of bureaucrats
and enforcement agents who make their living off of it, why does the individual
consumer still persist in driving the demand in the face of draconian penalties?
The addictive potential of substances such as cocaine, meth, the various
opiates, and others are likely the driving force behind their consumption, but
this is not the case for all drugs. The demand for psychedelic substances such
as LSD, psilocybin, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), and mescaline -- and their
relatives the empathogens (MDMA, 2-CB, etc.) -- is not dependent on users
getting hooked.
Psychedelics are relatively safe substances, especially as compared to alcohol,
cocaine, meth, and other drugs. Rates of acute psychosis and incidents of
physical harm are scant. Casualties do occur though, so a concern for safety
and an understanding of risks (and the types of use that increase risks) is a
must. For example, at the height of the Rave period of mass use of ecstasy in
the U.K. between 1988 and 1997, when tens of millions of doses were consumed,
often in tandem with other substances and under difficult conditions in which
masses of people danced together in crowded hot spaces resulting in
dehydration, the total number of deaths upon which the media became fastened
amounted to 50-100. These deaths were certainly needless and stopped occurring
for the most part when the causes were defined and appropriate preventive
measures taken. For the United States the figure has been about one death per
million users, and these figures generally reflect mixed substance abuse, with
ecstasy being one component. Contrast this with alcohol-related deaths in the
same period in the U.K., which amounted to 625 deaths per million users
annually -- yet there is an acceptance of that carnage. Such contradictions
seem irreconcilably irrational, yet they occur because corporate interests have
wielded their power to ensure that alcohol promotion and the alcohol-related
catastrophe remain completely acceptable.
To be absolutely clear, deaths due to drugs are tragic, regrettable, and
potentially preventable. Substances carry their own particular toxicities, but
humans invent the circumstances that harm, like jam-packed clubs. Alcohol is
the most significant gateway drug to other intoxicants, yet the official focus
has been on marijuana, which seems more likely to serve as a gateway to safer
and less addictive drugs like psychedelics, in those cases when it serves as a
gateway at all.
The Possibility of Transformation
To return to the question of the allure of psychedelics, the most potent
explanation is that they offer the possibility of a transformation of
consciousness. That may occur as an intimate acute experience or a form-shaking
permanent alteration -- it is a spectrum of effect that has incalculable
personal and social consequences. The introduction of psychedelic substance use
to masses of people in the sixties was part and parcel of the immense cultural
change that occurred. Liberation from the suppressive, repressive yoke of
McCarthyism that had penetrated darkly into the family culture of the late '40s
and '50s was in part due to the mind expansion made possible by psychedelic
use, which blew up restrictive mental fetters and fear of the personal
imagination. This was transmuted reciprocally to and from new cultural and
political formations. If the entire New Left didn't succumb to rigid and
dogmatic Leninism, it was to a great extent protected from that by personal
mind-expanding experiences that escaped control by all ideologies and false
consciousness. But it is not a perfect record, and psychedelics were also used
to corrupt and control humans. Consider, from opposite perspectives, the final
catastrophic period of the Weather Underground (and its mind-numbing use of
psychedelics, which facilitated a cultish, delusional, and destructive view of
what made for revolution) and, at the other destructive extreme, the sinister
dealings of the CIA, which has had a compulsive interest in using psychedelics
adversely to extract information or to create group and personal confusion, and
even madness.
Some aficionados of the pure psychedelic experience argue that the unmitigated
experience itself is sufficient to deliver transformation. And there are
others, such as me, who find that the transformative influence of the
psychedelic experience makes a quantum leap when integrated with spiritual
practice such as Buddhist contemplation or when integrated with liberating
psychotherapy. Unsupported psychedelic experience is unpredictably
transformative. Integrations from the spirit side with ordinary lived reality
are easier if we recognize that psychedelic transformation is but one element
in our efforts to free ourselves from the corporate materialist culture. That
is not a simple or straightforward task.
The Varieties of Pyschedelic Experience
To convey the varieties of psychedelic experience is to experience the only
partially descriptive capacity of words. Without intending to reify, or
circumscribe, I will present a taxonomy of experience that reflects my personal
history and observations over forty-seven years, since I and a small group of
new friends just commencing medical school in New York City dropped acid (LSD).
With this I am attempting to convey the psychedelic allure and am using
"states" rather than some hierarchical notion based on "levels" -- all such
states have value for transformation.
The Mundane State: Conventional allure flows from curiosity, a desire to change
oneself, the temptation of forbidden fruit, and emulation of others.
The Personal/Psychotherapeutic State: In 1964, I was a young, awkward, and
self-conscious male, repressed and having just finished a psychoanalytically
oriented psychotherapeutic experience that had helped me to alleviate some of
the pain of my hypercritical feuding parents that I had introjected. I was
beginning to find my own voice and guidance. In the flash dance of a few hours,
my inner structure rocked and shifted. LSD and I met, and I passed through
great fear to feel my self-hate alleviated and my imagination freed to inform a
creative new consciousness. Art came alive, as did everyday experience. After I
came down from the LSD trip, I was deliberately determined to hold onto that
freedom -- a determination informed by a structural psychological awareness
that had been obtained in the intensity of my earlier psychotherapy experience.
My subsequent introduction to marijuana freed me of physical and sexual
awkwardness, turned me onto intimate discourse, facilitated a heightened
closeness in my friendships, and furthered my sense of being a creative person.
This was not completely linear. There were ups and downs, and the process took
place with absorption in the growing Movement, which came with a sense of being
in a community of progressive people worldwide. Psychedelic use in that
formative period increased my self-confidence and sensuality. It did not
prevent me from making all manner of errors in personal and political life, but
I was much better at discernment, moving on, kindness, and forgiveness.
Psychedelic use invariably affects the personal/psychological matrix. Starting
a journey forces an encounter with fear -- of the unknown, of the lurking
dangers believed hidden in one's own mind, of coming back altered. In the
encounter the first period is generally absorbed with the personal:
relationships, guilt, love, longing, grief, attachments, and self-concepts.
This encounter opens the way to examination, release, and change, to reframing
and heightened awareness of self and the others. A bad trip -- usually in an
uncomfortable setting under stressful circumstances -- can result in fear,
paranoia, and a recoil from the opened space that is perceived as threatening.
Some folks never use psychedelics again. Occasionally too young people and some
others -- I know personally of several twelve- and thirteen-year-olds --
experience damaging mental effects that may last far too long. Set (the mind's
orientation) and setting (the circumstances of use) always affect the quality
of significant psychedelic experiences. Conscious preparation, good location,
and the presence of supportive friends make for better experiences and outcomes.
The Empathic State: Generally any psychedelic experience may heighten empathy
and empathic awareness. This awareness can manifest as love and affection; as
the ability to see another's point of view and put oneself in the other
person's shoes; as deep respect and regard; as elimination of barriers that
separate; as communion with nature; or as a transcendent feeling of warmth for
all things. In the eighties, the potency of ecstasy (MDMA) was recognized as a
means -- a tool -- for heightening the quality of communication between people
and for fairly reliably producing a state of warmth, affection, and nonsexual
sensuality. Many therapists, including myself, introduced MDMA psychotherapy
within couple, family, and group contexts. Because the experience was fairly
replicable, generally positive, and without much in the way of distortion and
hallucination, a new name was coined for a cluster of substances for which MDMA
was the exemplar: "empathogens." Those of us who saw MDMA's potential for
positive impact were able to demonstrate its medical utility before the Drug
Enforcement Administration's own administrative law judge. The agency went
against its own judge's finding, which would have placed MDMA in an accessible
Schedule II classification, and placed it in the highly criminalized and
inaccessible Schedule I group of substances that included other banned
psychedelics and heroin. In the years that followed the 1986 ruling, MDMA use
soared and the "rave" phenomenon began to attract huge numbers of people --
again a testimony to the power of the substance to facilitate loving, intimate,
sensual experience. MDMA's appeal continues to be based on the facilitation of
a state of communion and community larger than the personal self's usual
strictures allow. MDMA consciousness can be learned and generated without the
drug as part of an expansive, loving, daily life. Much of the concern about
brain damage due to serotonin depletion was based on phony research that was
retracted from the literature when it was exposed. Hundreds of millions of
doses have been consumed in the past few decades, notwithstanding the recent
twenty-four years of prohibition, and yet my informal census of other
therapists and friends who were there from the start fails to reveal names and
numbers of any individuals with brains damaged by MDMA.
The Egolytic State: For the most part, the psychedelic experience exerts a
damper on egotism and egocentrality. A sense of smallness and particulate being
in the universe may be a fundamental part of the experience: I am truly an
insignificance. A reduced sense of attachment to material goods, a sense of
being awestruck with life and the psychic ground, a spaciousness of mind, a
situating of the self as but a speck in the cosmos, and a sense of ease at
being free of self-inflated importance may compose much of the trip. For some,
this can be difficult and disorienting as a loss of the centrality of self and
a confusion as to how to manifest and reintegrate. For most this state provides
a welcome relief from the tension of being a particular totalization in the
personal world and the competitive, demanding outer life.
The Transcendent Transpersonal State: Stripped of ego, personal psychology, and
investments, the psychedelic traveler enters the ground state from which
thought, feeling, form, and formlessness emanate. It is as if the source of
mind becomes the mind experience itself. This is certainly not restricted to
psychedelic states. In the unadorned meditative experience, this too is
highlighted for periods of time. An apocryphal story from those who travel in
both the spiritual and psychedelic realms is that the great guru drops a
bazillion micrograms of LSD and stays beaming and untouched the entire trip; he
is already so spiritually elevated in his nature that the drug is not altering
or transformative -- he is the ground state itself. Ram Dass, among others, is
fond of this tale. I have my doubts. In the psychedelic state the flux, the
movement, of stimulated consciousness is what is experienced at a heightened
level of manifestation. Some psychedelic experiences are difficult to recall
and are difficult ones in which to maintain an observational awareness.
However, most experiences include intense observational awareness. Dose is a
factor -- generally, the more you take, the greater awareness tends to
diminish. It is my view that psychedelics tend to make more available for
experience and scrutiny -- by amplifying the phenomena coming into being --
what Tibetans refer to as Dzogchen or primordial awareness as it is commonly
translated, the sunyata state in Sanskrit, and in the less developed Western
explication, the state of awe. By learning to reside in a nondualistic state of
mind, by choosing to enter that state, and by having experiences that create
faith in the goodness of that state, spaciousness, creativity, and compassion
arise from nonattachment, from living in the flow, from not grasping at every
object that comes to mind and attracts our attention.
Within the Transcendent Transpersonal State, a multiplicity of experiences and
views will arise. They are generally not pre-programmable, but they have some
degree of specificity depending on the substance ingested (different substances
tend to produce a quality of experience specific to those substances) and to
the user's state of mind. I will mention a few by description that I class as
"Vistas." This is certainly not meant to be exhaustive.
The Sensual Universe Vista: Traveling through space as on a rocket ship, or
being that rocket ship, I encounter extraordinary forms and shapes.
Neon-colored blazing fractal worlds open. Forms emerge: animals, beings from
other galaxies, lovers, and forgotten friends. I morph to meet them, and my
morphing morphs. I am eaten and eat, am absorbed and absorb. Sexual encounters
may occur. Love spills everywhere. Or fear brings on its own forms and
monsters. Psychological themes come from my everyday life and are given forms,
often allowing for a working through of trapped emotional energies. There is a
sense of great exploration and great bliss, and at other times of the terror of
being alive and vulnerable. The Entheogenic Vista: A personal experience of
god(s), or a relationship to the personally held notion of god that deepens,
may occur. A sense of traveling in the starry cosmos freed from all constraint
may occur, of being part of a perceived universe. Buddhists are told that they
have, as do all sentient beings, "Buddha Nature." In the psychedelic realm, I
became the Buddha and felt that meaning and that responsibility. I moved about
as the Buddha. I have tried to maintain that sense of awesome responsibility in
my usual unenhanced state, to varying depth and effect -- it is difficult. At
other times, there can be the sense of the devil within, of the play of evil
and the hunter/murderer, which we also contain and constrain. In mind
traveling, there is no risk in exploring this aspect of us, knowing and
accepting what we are capable of and explicitly reject. The Connection Vista:
The experience of connection and interdependency gives rise to feelings of
gratitude, love, humility, and desire to benefit others. Our personal lifeline
extends backward through a near infinite unbroken number of progenitors to the
unformed stuff of the great earthly soup from which the first life forms emerge
and forward to the future, as well. I have felt myself to be, much as a
mushroom sprouts from the great mycelial mass, its myriad threads stretching
underground in all directions, sprouting beings who as their time ends return
to the rich mulch while new sprouts -- humans -- emerge. There is a sense of
vibrant biological immortality. Or in contrast, a sense of the human mass as
itself a cancer, having all of those characteristics -- unrestrained
expansionism, proliferation in all directions, and lack of concern for others'
needs and requirements -- and eating everything in its path, out of control.
There is also the sense of group mind, the experience of sensation outside the
confines of the personal body/mind, in resonance with the others with whom one
is traveling as a new assemblage in which the mind is intrapersonal. The
Cartesian Vista: I am the source of all that I experience. I create it. The
outside realm -- all of it -- is a manifestation of my mind. This passes before
me as I scan all of my creations, from scientific texts to great vistas to my
friends and my partner. I am the author of life and death. Moving about within
this perspective, I am able to revise what exists and what will be, for a time,
until I am drawn back to the usual perspective of subject and object. This
Cartesian experience, while one of false consciousness, increases the
sensitivity to the difficulty of being by nature an interpreter removed from
direct experience with only a mediated awareness of the external, and a
personal awareness of the interior. While in this inflated state, I am god and
master of the universe, prophet, seer, and enlightened being. And then there is
the crash, and hopefully great humility.
Integration
In the post psychedelic condition, integration is the key to maintaining
transformation. Integration is a function of intentionality -- conscious and
unconscious. Integration occurs both without effort -- as a redesign of the
central processor of our minds -- and voluntarily as a deliberate effort to
understand, find meaning, and as rectification -- of our behavior towards
others and towards ourselves. The psychedelic experience in and of itself may
be transformative of our consciousness, but support for change by deliberate
and disciplined absorption in the myriad
spiritual/emotional/psychological/activist opportunities for increasing clarity
and breadth most probably results in a more long-term and positive
transformation of self. The human mind while extraordinarily plastic,
adaptable, and mutable is also built with a great rubber band that returns us
to our dominant character. This serves both as preserver of the integrity of
the self and as a block to transformation -- holding onto deluded Self.
Grounding in the world of the interior and the external world -- finding
balance -- is a prerequisite for successful psychonautical voyaging and for a
mind expansion that is in essence kind, creative, and that loosens the spell of
the propaganda-filled social world we inhabit that tells us what to think and
feel and especially what to desire and purchase.
A lovely, illustrated history of mind-altering drug use: High Society by Mike
Jay Park (Street Press, 2010).More on the sixties, the CIA, LSD, etc.: Acid
Dreams by Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain (Grove Press, 1985) and Storming Heaven
-- LSD and the American Dream by Jay Stevens (Grove Press, 1987).A glorious
mytho-poetic encyclopedia of psychoactive substances: the Pharmako trilogy by
Dale Pendell (North Atlantic Books, updated editions 2010).For the current
state of psychedelic science, policy, and controversy, subscribe to the journal
from MAPS -- the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Substances
(www.maps.org).
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