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And many people have found that it was, in fact, very helpful. They could remember what they saw under the psychedelic experience and, with great ingenuity, translate it by technique, by discipline into a remarkable painting. So obviously, then, psychedelic chemicals are no substitutes for skill, discipline, and wisdom in the sphere of religious or mystical experience.
Nevertheless, they are an extraordinary boost to give a person a real understanding that there is something in the nature of deep insight, of union with God or whatever you want to call it. They give him a taste of it—a taste which many people never, never have. And from that initial taste there arises the enthusiasm to pursue the matter further.
I do not see why this should not be so in view of an integral way of looking at soul and body, spirit and matter. Really, the burden of proof as to why it should not be so rests upon those who claim that it shouldn’t. Why must any genuine spiritual insight be independent of what you eat or what you drink?
Since you yourself are really addicted to eating and drinking. Let’s take another parallel case that’s very instructive, which is that an enormous number of people are apparently addicted to music. Now, music—when you look at it from a strictly practical survival point of view—music is a waste of time.
You don’t really need music, do you? I mean, you could go on and you could do your business without any music at all. Music’s a luxury.
And yet, it is a major industry today; producing music. And I suppose you could say—Ed Dalton made the suggestion—that people who are addicted to music have a disease called chorditis. And really, music should be stopped.
It’s such a terrific waste of time. It achieves nothing constructive and is really, therefore, very bad for you because you become hung up on it. You can’t do without music if you’re a real music lover.
And music even isn’t something you eat! It’s just something you listen to. But boy, can you become addicted to it!
So should we get rid of it? Dancing is something you do. It’s also a total waste of time.
And, of course, righteous Baptists and people like that have always condemned dancing. They say that’s no way of behaving. They think everybody should always be dignified and shouldn’t jig around.
Because Wilhelm Reich was perfectly correct in saying that people like that are people who are afraid of orgasm. They’re afraid of the lilt. You know, in dancing there’s always this kind of motion—if you really dance.
And that sort of goes all through you. It’s like a flip in the middle of you; it’s like a whiplash, you know, where it goes flip all the way through. And if you can’t do that, you see, you’ve got a rigid body.
But even that, you see, doesn’t depend directly on any kind of food stimulus, drug stimulus. But still, dancing can be very addictive. You just plain get to like it.
You have to do it. The strange thing is, of course, that the psychedelic chemicals are not addicting—except in the sense that you may belong to some in-group, and all the members of this in-group are constantly boasting to each other of how much of this sort of stuff they’ve taken. And so, to be respected by the group, you have to keep on taking it.
But none of it has the same kind of physical addictive properties as the opiates or alcohol or tobacco where, if you relinquish their use, you’ll get remission symptoms which are very uncomfortable. And this just doesn’t occur. In other words, let’s say—well, take any of them: mescaline, LSD, psilocybin.
So far as I’m concerned, for my own personal reasons, if they all vanished off the face of the Earth tomorrow I wouldn’t be too unhappy. I would only be unhappy for other people. So far as I’m concerned, I’ve seen what they have to tell me.
I’ve got the message. I don’t need it anymore. Because I do feel that they are really more like medicines than diets.
And, of course, one should not become addicted to medicine. And here we get a very curious and amusing difference between doctors and clergymen. Doctors are always trying to get rid of their patients.
They give the medicine and say, “Now, I hope that’ll work and you won’t have to come back.” And they give them a limited amount of the medicine on prescription. But a clergyman hopes you will come back, and you’ll become a member of the church, and you’ll pay your dues every week, and generally, for life, get hooked on the religion. Even though there is the Latin saying about the Cross of Christ, crux medicina mundi: “the cross, the medicine of the world.” You get addicted.
Now, the Buddha—in referring to his own doctrine, his dharma, his method—likened it to a raft and said, “Now, when you cross the river on a raft from the shore of saṃsāra to the shore of nirvāṇa, when you get to the other shore, don’t pick up the raft and carry it with you.” Almost: get there, give it a shove, and send it back to the other side. But a whole lot of people, you see, are on this raft. And they are absolutely fascinated with the raft.
And they become monks and permanent religion people. And they go back and forth, back and forth, you know? They’re all ferrymen, see, who can’t let go of Buddhism, and they’re addicted.
So, you see, it’s in a very funny sense true that religion is the opium of the people—insofar as people become addicted to religion as a permanent situation. And so they’re hung up on it. And this is one of the great parts of Zen training: is to get you free from Zen.
If you don’t get free from Zen, you suffer from what’s called Zen stink. So religion, then, can be addictive. For—we’ll say it doesn’t have physical remission symptoms, but there’s a psychological addiction.
And so, in the same way, we might say that taking psychedelics (whether they be LSD or marijuana or what will you) can be psychologically addicting. It’s a separate question as to whether that does any serious damage. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t.
But you could become dependent on these things in that way. But if they were used as medicines, as I believe they should be used, then—a few times it requires a little practice to use any of them properly and to get the full insights that they can afford—but once you’ve seen it, you’ve seen it. And there seems to be no point in going back and back and back and back to see it again.
I will modify that statement in this way: if I am making a special study of the changes in consciousness produced by one of these substances, and I am therefore recording or in other ways studying the changes that take place, and this is naturally a difficult task, I may need to go back many times in order to get my picture straight, to see how it does it under certain different circumstances, to work out all the ramifications of it. And for me, my own reason for being interested in these things at all is that, as a writer, as a philosopher, it is my great life game to describe what is allegedly undescribable. And, for example, there’s a drug called dimethyltryptamine (DMT for short), and this is a forty-minute run where your consciousness is really screwed up.
And I was told about this and I inquired of the doctors whether it was, you know, dangerous or harmful or would leave you with the heebie jeebies. And they said no, it doesn’t do anything like that. It’s just about forty minutes of sheer insanity.
And they said it renders people speechless. I said, “It won’t render me speechless!” “Oh,” they said, “no, no! You come off it.” So, “Alright,” I said, “I’ll bet you anything you like.
Give me a tape recorder and give me this chemical, and I will tell you just exactly how it feels in a coherent way.” Well, wow! They gave me the first shot (which was about 1.3cc), and although there was a kind of vaguely interesting change, nothing much happened. So then they gave me 1.9cc, I think, and then it came on.
It was as if, say, your elbow as a point in my field of vision suddenly came at me, but in a spiral pattern against the background that was spiraling the other direction. See? So you’ve got this sort of thing going on.
And then this suddenly caught hold of my body, sucked it into the system, and twisted my body into the same spiral motion. And that everything started seeming to go like this. And it was all converted into brilliantly illuminated plastic.
So it became a cross between a toy shop and Times Square; vaguely menacing. And, you know, you hardly knew which way up you were. And so it was difficult, but patiently I talked into the tape recorder every single thing that was going on and what it was like.
Now, a lot of people would say, “Well, you shouldn’t do that. That destroys the experience; when you talk about it.” It doesn’t! That’s the funny thing about all these things: that they’re much more interesting when you do some work with them.
The work seems to throw something into the experience and then it gives you another task back. And that all adds to the interest of the thing. And I found out that, in working with these things, there was no further conflict between the intellect and the intuition.
That the more you intellectualized, the more the intuitive insight sprung up to correspond to the intellectual. And so instead of, therefore, having a session in which you just curl up and go into your own little private womb and let it take over, and you come back and all you can say is, “Man, it was a gas!” See? So what?
What’s the point of going on a heroic journey and not bringing something back? The whole point in every myth: heroes who take strange journeys must bring back a feather of the fabulous bird, a claw of the dragon, or the beheaded head of the villain that they slew. And say, “See, here it is.” So I always feel it’s necessary in any of these adventures to bring something back.
And so you get the great intense fun—really, the most stimulating thing—of saying: we’re going to devote this session to the study of a particular problem. One of the best LSD sessions I was ever in on was conducted by a group of people who were all very competent in the world of painting and sculpture. They knew art history, they knew how to do it.
Very well-trained people. And we sat in front of the first cubist painting that was ever done, and the whole session practically was taken up by a discussion of this painting. And it was absolutely extraordinary and rewarding.
And maybe that what we came out with in the end was not the truth about the painting. It may have been our Rorschach blot; that we projected something into it—I think that’s very likely. But nevertheless, it drew us all out in the same way, say, there are certain people who have a marvelous capacity for drawing other people out, making them be at their best, making them talk at their best.
And so the picture did that for us. And one person present was a very famous and very successful sculptor. And he said, “My!
That’s what I call art criticism!” But the whole conversation through this was completely sane. Even though it might have had some projective elements in it, like you project on a Rorschach glove and see your own individual scene in it. But because we were all talking together, we evolved a common scene.
We evolved the idea that this particular artist, living at the beginning of this century, was a master of technique. He knew all the European techniques, and therefore that he had painted five superimposed paintings in five great classical European styles and integrated them into the cubist painting. We could see Flemish paintings, we could see French impressionism, we could see primitive Italian, Flemish, and so on.
Various levels all together. Of course we will never know—he’s dead—whether he had this intention or not. But it sure made sense at the time.
When I looked at the painting before the experience, I thought I knew what it was about. Now I look at it after the experience, I have no idea what it’s about. I thought it was a painting in cubist style of a hillside with a village on it.
But now I can’t see that anymore. I just can’t see it. But I can again catch glimpses of the different levels that we saw during this experience.
So I think, then, that these kind of chemicals are tools—and very strong tools. Like, an automobile is a very strong tool: it’s a death-dealing engine and you have to be very careful when you drive one. Now, of course, because what is good for America is good for General Motors, et cetera (the other way around, too), everybody sort of makes driving an automobile the test of whether you’re competent.
See? So they say: if you took LSD or marijuana, should you or shouldn’t you drive an automobile? This is the test to whether it’s a good thing or not.
Now, I submit that you should not play a violin while driving an automobile, you should not make love while driving an automobile, nor should you read a book. All of these are very creative activities. But there are certain concentrated, absorbing activities that are incompatible with piloting a death-dealing engine along a freeway.
And just because, in a certain state of consciousness, you would be incapable of being in charge of an automobile doesn’t mean it’s bad—unless you’re a hopeless sucker for the policies of General Motors. But these things, you see, they are powerful, dangerous tools which put you into a state of consciousness which (if you don’t know what’s going on) can be quite terrifying. In other words, if you take a journey of this kind, you should have a map.
And you should know what you’re liable to encounter. Let’s take this, now. For example, I thought—you know, when I first investigated this—that it couldn’t possibly bring anything about like a mystical experience.
And the first time I tried it, it didn’t. It had brought a most interesting aesthetic experience. But I wouldn’t have called it mystical.
But later on, when I said this and a lot of people realized that this was my opinion, another psychiatrist came, and he said, “I just don’t think that you have been on the right track with this. Try it again.” So I tried it again with him. And to my great embarrassment it produced a mystical experience.
And there could be no question about it. Now, how do I know it’s a mystical experience? Well, I have had mystical experiences of a mild nature that were purely spontaneous, that were not connected with any sort of drug.
And, in some sense, I can compare it with those. But these experiences went much deeper. And the basic feature every time, invariable, is what I call polar awareness.
Now, what is polar awareness? Polar awareness is to see that what you do and that what happens to you are aspects of the same process. Ordinarily, we pull them right apart: the voluntary and involuntary; the behavior of the organism on the one hand, the behavior of the environment on the other.
But it becomes utterly clear in this state of consciousness that what you do, think, initiate, will, and what you don’t do but what happens to you, are one and the same process. When you are steering a car and you move the wheel, are you pushing or pulling the wheel? Now, push and pull are formally opposed terms.
But actually, when you consider it on a steering wheel, you are simultaneously pushing and pulling. Alright—now, then, imagine that I put out my hand to pick up my pipe. This is normally a push motion, isn’t it?
And this a pull motion. Now, under the effect of one of these chemicals, it becomes apparent that this motion is also being pulled, and that when I pull it towards me, I’m being pushed. At the same time, as in steering the car.
In other words, as I said before in the first session: I feel myself simultaneously to be the puppet of nature, the cork on the stream, and to be in charge of everything that’s happening. If I take either one of these interpretations by itself, I’ll be wrong. But if I take them both together as two ways of looking at the same thing, the one modifying the other, then I realize that these two ways of talking (that I am a puppet, that I am in charge),I talk that way because I don’t understand.
If I did understand, all I could say was that I see that my behavior (or what has formerly been called my behavior) and all other behavior are not really separate. They are one single process. And so what happens on the inside of the skin goeswith what happens on the outside.
It isn’t that what happens on the outside controls on the inside or vice versa. Just like when a snake goes wiggling along: which side moves first, its left or its right? You now, they move together.
So, in exactly the same way, you get the sensation that everything going on out there and everything going on in here is all absolutely connected, like the two different ends of any moving object. They go this way, go that way, go this way, go that way. And you see with the most total clarity that this process that’s working this way is in every way harmonious; that what is happening is what ought to happen—including people’s objections to what is happening.
They ought to happen, too. You just see that everything in this universe is in accordance with the Buddhist doctrine called jiji muge. This means: the mutual interdependence of all things and events.
That everything in the universe is vitally important. The whole universe hangs on every single event or thing that is in it. And without it, the whole could not be.
It all is of a piece. As Teilhard de Chardin said: the only true atom (that is, the indivisible unit) is the universe itself. Or, if we take anything out of the universe and separate it, it is raveled at all its edges.
Because everything is interconnected. That’s what you see. And you see it with just complete clarity.
And you say, “My God, what’s the matter with me? Why didn’t I see that before? It’s so completely obvious!” At a somewhat deeper level of this experience it also becomes obvious that—this is a little bit more difficult to describe—but you see absolutely clearly that you and the eternal energy of the world are the same thing.
But that energy is pulsing. All energy is only known in terms of pulsation. In other words, constant pressure applied without pulse is not energy, because that constant pressure applied is all one direction.
Energy is jit, jit, jit, jit, jit, jit, jit, jit, jit, jit, jit, jit, jit, jit, jit, jit. Very slow or very fast. So slow that you don’t notice the pulse, or so fast that you don’t notice the pulse.
But it’s still pulse. So: to be and not to be, life and death, appearing and disappearing are all forms of it. And therefore you live—let’s go back to our vision of the world as energy patterns and imagine we make a picture of these energy patterns as ripples, you see.
Going back to the image of the water: ripples appearing and disappearing in water. You suddenly see that all this—the people around you, the houses, the mountains, the stars—are ripples in a kind of energy water. And they come and they go, they come and they go, they come and they go.
But the water is always there. And that’s you. That there’s this marvelous mirage going on.
But you are it. You’re not just the ripple that comes and then disappears, you’re the whole process. Only, you don’t always know it for the simple reason that part of the fun of the whole thing is to forget it and to imagine that you’re all lost and alone.
And wowee! What a thrill that is! See?
And it does all these things. And it does it and ever so many dimensions. Because it isn’t only this universe that we see now.
There are probably infinitely many universes that could be visualized by different sense organs, different receivers, different wavelengths as on the radio. Now, when you get into that state and you’re not ready for it, you may get scared absolutely out of your wits. Because you suddenly feel the unaccustomed sensation of: I’m doing the whole thing.
And you see everything that you do notice outside you is known to you as a transformation of your own nervous system. And insofar as that is you, then you are the behavior of the man working out there on the roof. And if you think that’s the case, you just say, “Oh, heavens!
I’m in charge of the whole universe!” What a sticky situation that is! It’s like the kid who turned himself into the Los Angeles police on a bad trip with a little piece of paper which said, “Please help me,” signed “Jehovah.” Or, on the other hand, you may feel the opposite: that you are absolutely powerless and that everything you do is simply the determined effects of anything. And then you think, “Well, how can I rely on that?
How do I know that I’ll be able to think in English the next minute? How will I remember who I am? Will I know the way home?
How can I be sure I won’t commit a murder, or commit suicide, or do something dreadful?” You suddenly see you have no guarantee. Either way you know: if you’re God, how can God rely on himself to be always sensible? That’s real spooky.
So naturally, a lot of people feel completely insecure. No ground to put their foot on because there’s no longer anything other. You see that, for example, “other” is a different kind of other.
You see that self and other simply presuppose each other. You wouldn’t know who you were, you wouldn’t know what you meant by “me,” unless you felt something other than you. Well, that implies the two go together.
They’re inseparable. They’re one life. And that disturbs people.
And so, as a result of that, they start calling for help. And as you panic, the panic is exaggerated. Because everything that you feel is exaggerated; is more intense.
And people think up the most weird horrors. They get paranoid and project all sorts of ghastly schemes that are afoot to destroy them. That’s why the underground press is so full of paranoia.
Because of so many of these people are on LSD or something, you see? They get very paranoid. But if you understand the principles of this—if you understand what organism-environment unity is, what reciprocity is, what the doctrine of jiji muge is—instead of getting frightened, you say, “Well, well, well!
Look at that now. It was true, after all! That’s the way it works.” And you just relax and you let you happen.
Because there’s nobody left apart from the whole experience to permit it to happen or not permit it to happen. You are simply what goes on. And you’re not either controlled by it (because it’s no “you” separate from it to be controlled by it) and you don’t control it (because there’s no “you” separate from it to control it).
It is just what gives. So it’s neither voluntaristic on the one hand, nor deterministic on the other. Now, that’s a difficult idea to get through into people’s common sense.
But anybody who has had a deep experience—either straight mystical, or through one of these chemicals—knows exactly what that means. Just as a person who is a mature student in physics understands Einstein’s relativity theory almost without it having to be explained. And for me that is a great mystical experience.
And furthermore, it’s very valuable for the reason that I mentioned in the first lecture: that we have to realize our actual, full energy relationship to the external world so that we can create a human civilization which cooperates with nature instead of opposing it. Yesterday afternoon I was talking about the relationship between psychedelic experiences and mystical experiences, and pointing out that the there were really two major features in common. One: the sensation of polarity, of “you” as a subject, a knower, a center of action, get this astonishing experience of being inseparable from everything that you had hitherto defined as “other” than yourself.
Because you understand that the sensation of self cannot be experienced except in relation to the sensation of something other, and therefore, that there is something in common between everything experienced as other and everything experienced as self. It’s as if there was sort of a conspiracy—like Tweedledum and Tweedledee agreeing to have a battle. And you see, and you have the vivid sensation of the motions and behaviors going on inside you which are voluntary being simply (as it were) the other face of all the motions and behaviors that go on, whether inside you or outside you, that are involuntary.
As if they were two sides of the same coin dancing together. And this is a very fascinating feeling and a very good feeling if you have the—there’s something iffy about this, which I’ll come back to. But a very good feeling on the whole, because you feel that the whole arrangement of life, of the the world, of the universe, is fundamentally harmonious.
Even though you can understand that there are tragedies and agonies, nevertheless, for some peculiar reason, you see that those are, shall I say, bands on the spectrum of experience. The spectrum of experience is vast, is multidimensional, and that the energy of the world is playing on all parts of the spectrum. So it ranges, you see (on what we could call the pleasure/pain scale), from extremes of ecstasy to extremes of agony.
Now, what we feel, you see, we always feel that the extreme of agony is threatening because it can bring about death. And we have been carefully trained to try to avoid experiences on the agony-extreme of the band. When you were a little baby and, for example, you vomited, your mother may have reacted “Ugh!” you see?
And that taught you that vomiting was not a pleasant sensation—although in fact it is. And when people got sick, your parents got anxious and said, “Oh! Oooh!
Ughh!” And you learn to imitate those reactions. When people died they started crying, and had a funeral, and it was all very solemn. And so you learned that dying was a bad thing.
But all these attributions of good and bad to the natural events of life are artificial. They’re social conventions, they’re a game being played. And when we play games, we take various elements—like, say, supposing you’re playing poker and you’ve got chips, and you say red chips worth so much, blue chips worth so much, white chips worth so much.
And you put your valuation on the chips. So in exactly the same way, life is going on and you put your valuations on it. Your parents put valuations on it because they were playing games with life.
Competitions, who wins, who loses, et cetera, et cetera. You see? And so they put all these values on them.