text
stringlengths
11
1.23k
And when most of them, when they talk about theology, they reveal their abysmal ignorance of the whole matter. So the thing absolutely falls, BANG, between two stools, and there is no class of people—although there are individuals, there is no accepted, there is no recognized class of people—who might be called, for example, theo-botanists or theo-neurologists. And we very much need the development of such a profession.
And until we have it, we will be in a difficult situation as to how to deal with drugs, if you will, or chemicals, that do not seem to have as their primary use the healing of a physical disease. But there is a sense in which these substances are medicine rather than diet. What is the difference between a medicine and a diet?
Medicine is something you need when something is wrong, when something is out of order. A diet is what you live on permanently. Of course, corrections in diet can have a medicinal effect.
But surely, there is a very true sense in which we can say that our world, based on the ordinary egocentric consciousness, is very seriously sick. Psychically sick. I’m not going to—you know, everybody knows why.
We can see it all around us that we are stark staring raving mad and are busy preparing to destroy ourselves. And that is a sickness which needs some kind of remedy, and maybe even a desperate remedy. The use of things that would lift us out of the egocentric situation could therefore be considered medical: as healing for a social disorder.
But again, I would say that they, used in that way, should be used as medicine in the sense that they don’t become diet. Because in my experience—and, of course, in this matter everybody speaks for themselves, but say I consider just myself alone: I wouldn’t feel very put out if, say, LSD were to vanish from the Earth tomorrow. Because I have discovered that this is not the sort of thing you sort of take every so often, like you go to church.
Or, if you do, it’s something that you can take several times in a gradually diminishing quantity, and then you had it. Beyond that, it’s up to you to integrate your vision with everyday life and with all the various kinds of knowledge. Enough is enough.
But there are other people who seem to think that the great thing to do is to start out with a little, and then keep on going, making it bigger and bigger and bigger—as if they were looking for something that should lie at the end of the line. And then it becomes a diet. Now, that is indeed getting hooked on medicine.
And doctors don’t like to hook you on medicine, and very rightly. Because the ideal of a good doctor is to get rid of you as a patient. He doesn’t want chronic patients.
Poor people always hanging on to him, always rushing for help. He wants to set you back on your own feet. And that is an excellent principle.
This is where the doctor really has something to say to the priest. Of course, priests tend, by and large, to want to hook you—in other words, to keep you coming to church so that you will pay your dues and the church will prosper. So the more people they can get hooked on religion, the merrier.
Now, priests in this way ought to learn from the doctors and try and get rid of people by telling them their gospel, or whatever it is they have to say, and say: “Now you had it. Go away!” Because, you see, if you do that, you will create a vacuum, and it will always be filled. Just as, the faster a doctor can get people out of his office, they go around and tell everybody: “This man cured me.
I didn’t have to go back to him.” So more people will be coming in. There are always plenty and plenty of people. It’ll never come to an end.
So, in a way, the religious man ought to handle a huge turnover of people coming through and going away, coming through and going away. Then he’s really working. But he should not get them hooked on the medicine.
Indeed, there is a famous Latin phrase: crux medicina mundi—“the cross, the medicine of the world.” But people get hung up, you see, on the cross. And Jesus didn’t, you remember? According to the the Christian mythology, Jesus came alive again afterwards.
He didn’t get hung up. Only for a while. And so, in the same way, if Christians really believed in the inner meaning of their doctrine, they wouldn’t get hung up on the cross either, except temporarily.
“I am crucified with Christ. Nevertheless, I live.” So, also, when it comes to the use of any technique whatsoever—whether it’s yoga or LSD or what have you—for spiritual awakening, there applies to it the Buddha’s symbol of the raft. The Buddha likened his method, his dharma (or doctrine, or method), to a raft.
It’s also called a yāna (or vehicle). Hence the Mahāyāna (the “big vehicle”), the Hīnayāna (the “little vehicle”). And it takes you across the river of which this shore is birth and death, and the other shore liberation; nirvāṇa.
Now, you get on that raft and you go over, and when you get to the other shore you leave the raft behind. Same way they say in Zen Buddhism. Their technique, the use of the kōan (or meditation problem) is like knocking at a door with a brick: when the door is opened you don’t carry the brick inside, you leave the brick behind.
So, with all these things, they are means (upāya) and they have as their objective deliverance from means. The Christian mystics speak of the highest state of contemplative prayer, or union with God, as a union without means. And I would extend the sense of the word “means” even to ecstasy.
In other words, ecstasy is invariably, in the great religious traditions, not a final state. Ecstasy is an intermediate state. So, for example, in Zen, when the experience of satori (or awakening) comes about, there is an ecstasy.
You feel marvelous. You feel as if you were walking on air. You feel absolutely unobstructed.
You feel as happy as a lark. You feel, you know, this fantastic bang. It’s marvelous.
But that in itself is only incidental. A Zen saying says: that monk who has a satori goes to hell as straight as an arrow. In other words: to have it is to cling to it.
And if you think that the ecstasy is the important thing in it—it isn’t. The ecstasy is an intermediate stage to bring you back to the point where you can see that everyday life—that your ordinary mind, as they say in Zen—is the Buddha-mind. That everyday life, as it is, is the great thing.
And there is no difference between that and the divine life. So this is why you should read, especially—there’s a new little book out on Zen edited by Lucien Stryk. What’s the name of it, Jano?
It’s Prayers, Poems… yes, this has got some very good things in it about how the great masters insist that for everything you seem to have attained, every great insight, every great ecstasy, you must drop it, let go of it, and immediately go ahead. Because in the end—thank you—if you think that—here it is. Zen: Poems, Prayers, Sermons, Anecdotes, Interviews by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto.
It’s very good. But they insist on the point that so long as you as you think that there is a state of affairs in which you can say about the big thing—whether it’s God or whether it’s nirvāṇa, Brahma, the Divine, the Tao—“I’ve got it,” you haven’t. Because the moment you regard it as some sort of object, some sort of state, some sort of thing which you can lay your hands on, you’ve put it away from yourself.
See, the one thing you can’t lay hands on is you. You’ll never find it out. In a million years you can’t find out who it is that wants to find out.
And who it this that wants to find out who it is that wants to find out? Never get at it! You see?
But that’s the thing. It’s the thing that is most close to you. As Francis Thompson said: “Nearer is he than breathing; closer than hands and feet.” So what is absolutely central to you is what you can never make an object of knowledge.
And so when you finally get to the point that you don’t have to have anything—because you’re it—and you don’t even need to to insist on yourself that you’re it, because if you have to insist on that, it means that you doubt it. You don’t have to go around saying to yourself, “Be still and know that I am God” or something like that. That’s for beginners, you see?
That’s for beginners. But when they really get at the end of it, there isn’t a trace. See?
No means are left. No methods, no getting hold of it. No meditation, no LSD, no nothing!
Because it’s just the way it is. But before a person sees that, then means are used—whether it be yoga, whether it be chemicals, whether it be anything else. So let me sort of sum up.
In the last analysis, all spiritual awakening involves something beyond the will and the ego. You cannot do it yourself. So it makes little difference what you use for this.
Some ways are easier than others. It’s easier if you use theo-botany, a divine plant, than if you just bang your head against a brick wall. But with the very ease of it there is the danger that you may neglect the discipline that must go with it.
In the banging your head against a brick wall method, they are sure at least that you know the discipline before anything happens. And so that is the danger in a relatively easier way. But, of course, as Aldous Huxley once said: to insist upon using the more difficult ways to attain the mystical state is rather like having to burn down your farmhouse every time you want roast pork.
The problem for us is that we don’t have… the split between the role of priest and the role of physician has left both roles impoverished. And so there is nobody who is really competent to deal with death or to deal with preparation for death. And that’s what makes it a problem for us.
Finally, that the most subtle danger in all these things—whether it be yoga methods or whether it be chemical methods—is fixation on ecstasy: not to know how to go beyond ecstasy and beyond looking at the divine as something that one can possess personally. I was saying yesterday that psychedelic experiences tend to have two aspects. As a matter of fact, you can classify their effects in many different ways.
And people who say there are three things to be remembered, or four things to be remembered about so and so, are really making this in order to put a point across; these sort of classifications. There are always 530 things to be remembered about anything. So don’t take this too seriously.
But I’m doing it to make a point. And these two aspects are, on the one hand, the alteration of sense perception, and on the other hand, intuitive insight. And if we could say that the intuitive insight is the aspect of psychedelic experience that corresponds most closely to the natural mystical experience—which does not necessarily involve the types of sensory alteration or alteration of perception so often involved with the chemicals—nevertheless, it’s hard to draw a very straight line between these two aspects.
Because every so often the sensory alterations suggest some kind of insight. I, first of all, want to go into the nature of some of these alterations, typical alterations, and discuss them. But first: you are aware, I suppose, that these chemicals are often classified as hallucinogens—that is to say, chemicals which generate hallucinations.
And this has seemed to me a very bad word indeed. Because, of course, hallucination always carries with it some kind of condemnation. It’s a pejorative word.
And I have rarely come across an instance of where the use of LSD or mescaline or psilocybin has created a genuine hallucination. For a hallucination is the appearance of something to a particular individual, unseen by others, which he believes to be part of the real world. In other words, if you saw a ghost, it might be claimed that this was a hallucination if you took the ghost as really out there.
But things like that don’t tend to happen. What might be classed as hallucinations are of two kinds. Visions seen with the eyes closed.
But of course, you know that these are visions. You know that you are under the influence of a brain-altering chemical, and that therefore unusual things are likely to happen which you are not going to mistake for events in the external world. And therefore, when you close your eyes, and behold the most amazing patterns constructed out of jewels, moving with splendid order in the dark, or see infinite complexities of ferns where the stems sprout fronds and the fronds sprout fronds, and the frondlets sprout frondlets, and forever and forever and forever.
Or marvelous arrangements of crystal arabesques. Translucent colored balls moving in space in many dimensions. Enormous temples, vast architectural creations with every kind of wall and tower and cauliflower going on for ever and ever through gigantic spaces.
Getting involved in thistles with prickles upon prickles for ever and ever and ever. Visions of Persian palaces, of courtyards, of arabesques, of dancing girls and angels, and knights in armor. All sorts of fantastic things will appear before closed eyes.
But you know all the time that these are visions. And of course they create the most extraordinary questions. What are they?
Because, although they are visionary, although they aren’t there in the external world, they very much are in the internal world, and they must have some kind of neurological basis. What are we looking at when we see those things? This is a question which nobody knows how to answer.
For, in some way, there must be a physiological basis for this kind of patterning. Is it that we are getting a glimpse of patterning processes within the brain, processes which organize our ordinary thinking about things? After all, you know that when you use the telephone and you dial somebody, there is a machinery which handles it all, but if you go and look at that machinery, you find it has an extraordinarily interesting design.
The patterns of electronic equipment are sometimes very beautiful. But you’re not aware of those patterns when you make a telephone call. You’re aware of voices, and that’s it.
And bells ringing. So it may be in the same way that, within our minds, our brains, there are perfectly marvelous pattern organizations which we become aware of only under special circumstances. In other words, what one tends to do under the influence of a psychedelic chemical is to become aware of being aware—that is to say: you turn your senses back on themselves.
And one is only inclined to do this when there is an alteration in the normal form of perception. That is to say: in seeing, you do not notice your eyes. In hearing, you do not notice your ears, especially if they’re healthy.
But if some disease should attack the eye or the ear, or some temporary inconvenience, and you see spots in front of your eyes, you know that those spots are within the structure of the eye. And if there is singing in your ear, you know that that singing sound is within the structure of the ear. And this turns the sense upon the sense.
So, in exactly the same way, if something alters your normal way of seeing things, your attention is diverted from what you see to seeing itself. And this, of course—this awareness of awareness, the turning you back upon yourself, even at this still rather superficial level—is the beginning of a process of self-exploration and self-knowledge. But it takes a little alteration to do it—as it were, to fasten your interests, because when your eyes are seeing perfectly, there is nothing to fasten on, you see?
The eye creates a visual space of total clarity and emptiness (although that’s all inside your head), and you find it difficult to attend to that which has no distinctive features. But when an alteration is introduced, there is some new distinctive feature to sight, but these are very hard to pin down. I gave you an illustration last night of the feeling that everything is at a funny angle.
When a picture, as I said, is out of alignment, you know it’s wrong, it’s queer. Now, supposing everything gets out of alignment and everything has a sense of being funny—I don’t mean funny haha, I mean a bit funny queer; everything is just odd, just a little bit odd. It’s as if everybody had suddenly grown pointed ears.
And not only people, but everything has pointed ears on it. Little projectiles sticking up in these kind of pointed ears, you know? That’s elven, that’s foxy.
It’s something funny. And leaves on trees suddenly have all pointed ears, you see? We forget that this sort of impression is very strange and very hard to pin down.
So one of the first inquiries that is always interesting in the psychedelic state is to discuss with yourself: what is the difference between this way of seeing things and the normal way? And you can get a group of people sitting around and talking about that, and it becomes one of the oddest conversations because people can’t quite pin down what it is. They all agree there’s something funny.
Everything is a little bit off. And yet it looks the same as it should look. But it’s off.
And what do we mean by that? We really don’t know. And it would be very difficult to establish a physiological basis for this.
It might be done. But, you see, in the same way as when you put on colored glasses everything becomes colored with the color of the glass, and soon your consciousness will start to eliminate that effect, and it will begin after a while to look normal—as it does when you wear sunglasses. So, in the same way, if you put on a glass for every sense that you have, and the name of that glass is funny, everything will look funny.
But nevertheless, this discussion—what is the difference between normal awareness and funny awareness—focuses you on the whole thing of awareness; on the whole process, which does not ordinarily happen unless you do meditation practices designed to do exactly that. So another thing that is comparable to this that happens is what I would call the feeling that everything is significant. This is a funny word.
Taken literally, “significant” means something which serves as a sign, which signifies something other than itself. I say, “This is a very significant remark that you’ve made.” It means that it has a deep meaning. But there is another sense of significant which means “important,” “valuable,” “interesting,” in that sense.
Now, how can you possibly describe a state of mind in which everything appears to be significant? Logically, this is absurd. Just like everything being off-center at a funny angle.
But nevertheless, however absurd it is logically, it is nevertheless a characteristic of this state. For example, supposing somebody reads. Somebody sits down and reads poetry.
Well, you see the meaning of the poetry in the ordinary way. But you also see a lot more than you normally notice. That is to say, every tone and texture of the reader’s voice, every clearing of his throat, every pause to take a breath, every gesture is integrated into the poem.
It becomes important. It becomes significant. It is as if there were some sort of signal system in the brain which attaches cues to various experiences.
So that you know, for example, the difference between a direct experience and a memory. Because some experiences have the “here and now” cue attached to them, as when you sit and look at somebody. Other experiences, as when you close your eyes and remember the face of a friend who’s not here, they have the “memory” cue attached to them.
So you know that that’s not a “here and now.” Well so, in a similar way, our experiences, we attach to them cues: “important,” “notice this.” There are other cues: “unimportant,” “don’t bother,” or perhaps no cue at all. Now here, in this state of consciousness, everything gets cued. Everything!
Everything you look at becomes important. And you realize that it’s only an arbitrary kind of human scheme of selection that says these things are important and those are not. Because everything is important to something.
You then get this curious sense, you see, that it doesn’t really matter what you look at or what you listen to. Anything will do. Only, there does remain a residue of value judgment so that you are still capable of saying, “I would rather look at this than at that.” But if it so happens that you just, for the sake of experiment, choose to look at what you would rather not look at, it in turn becomes absolutely fascinating.
Among the other alterations—I’ve thought of quite a number of them—I mentioned already the motion alteration, where the world seems to breathe, where walls seem as if they were made of cloth with an electric fan behind so that they they wave, where the pile in a carpet, if you look closely into it, every little bunch of threads constituting pile can start to wiggle. Now, similar to that is what I would call the experience of grain in the senses. Once I was in this experiment, and I was looking at the mullions in windows—like here, you see?—and although I wasn’t seeing any more mullions than they actually are, I wasn’t seeing double, nevertheless, the arrangement of one after another gave the impression of doubling.
It was like seeing double. And yet, on account, I counted the same as a person in the ordinary state of consciousness. But one seemed to be a replica of another, of another, of another, of another.
And the same would be true in looking at any sort of regular pattern in a carpet, or whatever. And then the doctor said, “Hold up a finger and see if you see that double.” And no, I said, “No. Oh, but yes!” But what I had seen was that, just beside my finger, there was a wisp of cigarette smoke.
And this wisp—being just at the same height as the finger, right here—became a basis for an eidetic image of a second finger. In other words, just the same way as you work the Rorschach blot into all sorts of shapes, so I work the Rorschach blot of smoke in the air into a second finger beside the first. And for a moment it seemed just like it, until I detected the source of the illusion.
This led to examination of stones. And very quickly I suddenly somehow got into the impression that the whole space of the visual field seemed as if handfuls of pebbles had been thrown into it. And the whole visual space was constructed out of ever so many interlacing concentric circles.
You know, for example, in the way that color pictures are sometimes reproduced. There are several techniques. They depend on the various kinds of screen that are used for printing.
Well, there is a type of screen that is made up of ever so many circular patterns, all interlocking and intermeshing with each other. And so the whole visual world seemed to be based on a screen or grid of this kind. Now, the interesting thing was that I could not at any point isolate actual lines in space forming this grid which did not coincide with some ordinary sense-perceived object.
In other words, there was nothing to be seen that would not ordinarily be seen, and yet my eyes had organized what is ordinarily to be seen into this pattern of ever so many concentric circles. It’s as if, in other words, when you listen to an alarm clock—you know, the old-fashioned kind that go click-clock, click-clock, click-clock, click-clock, click-clock? Now they don’t.
They go. Click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click. But you hear click-clock or tick-tock because your mind resents the monotony of tick-tick.
And then, you know, afterwards you can rhyme doggerel to this clock. And you can hear tunes in it: it becomes the beat, and you fit tunes in with the beat and things like that. Well, in just the same way that you do that, so your eyes can organize what they see into patterns which (we would say in the ordinary way) aren’t there.
They can pick out waves: as I see a row of people sitting, with their heads on top, there’s a thing like this, you see? Rippling right through you. See?
And ever so many things like that can be done. And so you start, when you see that, asking questions. What is the right way to organize the way you see the world?
Everybody running around and agreeing, of course, that they see the world the normal way and the proper way—yes, but is this actually so? After all, it’s an agreement. Supposing we had agreed to see it a different way.
See, because the world, as I’ve often said, is essentially an enormous Rorschach blot. It’s profoundly wiggly, except in places where men have tried to straighten it out by building straight walls, straight highways, and so on. But the natural world is wiggly all the way through, including our own bodies.
Well, how are you going to interpret these wiggles? How are you going to decide how much of a wiggle constitutes one wiggle? What is a unit of wiggle?
You see? So apparently, what has happened in the course of many, many millennia is that persuasive human beings have said, “Well now, look: this is the way it goes and everybody’s got to agree with me. Surely this is this is the way it goes.” And everybody says—because this guy is kind of rough—“Yes!
That’s right! That is the way it goes.” So whether these people were powerful physically or powerful persuasively, we’ve all more or less agreed to see the world the same way. Although we have not agreed—yet, you see—to speak the same language.
We’re still using an enormous number of different languages. But these things, you see—these organizing patterns which we project upon the world—are, as it were, languages of another kind. They are patterning methods: methods of thinking, structures of thinking, which we use to organize the external world in exactly the same way that one uses the string-bag of longitudes and latitudes in which the world is hung to organize it.
Or the celestial latitudes and longitudes to organize the stars. These webs, these grids, are fundamental to organized thinking about the world. Numbers, you see, are a similar kind of patterning.
And the mathematician knows all kinds of patterns. Lattices, matrices, and so on, which can be used for organizing things. So, another aspect of this grain-experience in the senses is what I would call pointillism.
You know, pointillism is a school of painting that was invented in France, especially associated with the name of Seurat, where the painting is composed of minute dots in many colors. And this is a very common psychedelic phenomenon, similar to the concentric circles that I just mentioned: to see everything consisting of points. Once again, you are not able to specify, actually to put a needlepoint, on any one of these points.
And yet, everything that you see, the ordinary vision of the world, seems to be made up of my new dots. And you begin to wonder. You know that, after all, you have many nerve ends.
All over your body there are endings of nerves, and these are especially sensitive in the retina. And you wonder: am I becoming aware of the multiplicity of my nerve ends, of every single unit that picks up the external world? And therefore I see in the external world a point corresponding to each one of my nerve ends that picks it up?
Well, it might be that. But as you think about that, you are liable to get fascinated with the idea of one nerve end: one point, one—as it were—basic unit of sensitivity. And I have christened this basic unit the eenie-weenie.
The eenie-weenie is a fundamental, you might say, unit of conscious life; sensitive life. And when you begin to think about this one unit of conscious life, very extraordinary things begin to happen. Because you realize: well, we’ve got really down to simplicity now.