---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2002 13:41:14 -0800
From: radtimes <resist@best.com>
Subject: Is Taking a Psychedelic an Act of Sedition?
Is Taking a Psychedelic an Act of Sedition?
http://www.tikkun.org/magazine/index.cfm/action/tikkun/issue/tik0203/article/020313c.html
by Charles Hayes
Tikkun Magazine
The disturbances of September 11 have sent us reeling, driving many to seek
relief from anxiety and depression through socially-sanctioned
psychotropics such as Prozac, Xanax, and alcohol. But some of the so-called
psychedelic drugs (cannabis, LSD, peyote, psilocybin, ayahuasca, and MDMA
or Ecstasy), targets of America's deeply misguided War on Drugs, could have
a more profound and healthful effect, if used responsibly. The very idea of
going off on a psychedelic "head trip" in this hour of national crisis
might be seen as self-indulgent folly, or worse, an act of cerebral
sedition. Yet a cold and sober look through the smoldering smoke of Ground
Zero leads me to believe that, depending on individual circumstances, of
course, there are now even more compelling reasons to sanction the practice
of judicious psychedelic use.
If combat readiness is an issue, if your function is to evacuate a building
in a hurry, screen airline passengers, detect the presence of microscopic
pathogens, analyze forensic evidence that could lead to the apprehension of
culpable or would-be terrorists, or execute a commando raid on an Afghan
mountain, this is probably not the season for psychedelics. But if you're
not sure who the real enemy is, if you're inclined to ask more questions
about the nature of the reality that's just swung out into a broad new arc,
or if you're seeking solace and healing from trauma or debilitating stress,
it could well be the time to venture out into new psychical frontiers by
means of certain time-tested plants and chemicals. In fact, for some
especially scarred, it might even be foolish not to, given that there might
not be as much time to lose as we thought we had.
Granted, a state of war, or any other condition in which physical security
is under threat, is not the ideal circumstance to explore inner realms. The
removal of base concerns for food, shelter, and bodily safety has been a
key factor in the evolution of human consciousness from such immediate
distractions to plans for future (inner and outer) space exploration. To
paraphrase Terence McKenna, the late shamanologist and outspoken champion
of psychedelic consciousness, if you remove stress and threat, add a lot of
alkaloids, and perturb the brain, it will transcend three-dimensional space
and unfold into a four-dimensional matrix. In an era in which Terror and
the War Against It are being waged, the safe and supportive setting long
advanced by psychedelic gurus and pundits would seem harder to provide.
But let us not suppose that psychedelics are only for the serene and that
their impact on the psyche is purely pacific and unobtrusive. Because they
dissolve boundaries to cognitive, emotional, and spiritual understanding,
there is, in fact, something uniquely destructive about them, particularly
the sort that effectively "kills" the ego through a symbolic death that
blows the hatch on one's clinging obsessions and deconstructs one's entire
perception of reality^×a nuclear fission of the psychological world with
impacts not unlike some of the far-flung effects of September 11. Aldous
Huxley's proposed invocation for psychedelic sessions includes the
admonition: "Your ego and the [fill in your name] game are about to cease."
Deployed with ill intent, along psychotomimetic lines (the first use of LSD
and mescaline earmarked by the scientific community), such an assault could
wreak havoc on individuals and populations. The CIA tested LSD as a weapon
for immobilizing enemies and extracting secrets from them. Conversely,
hashish was allegedly used to induce visions of paradise and thereby stoke
the courage of a secret order of Muslim guerrillas called the People of the
Old Man of the Mountain, which terrorized Christians during the Crusades by
stealthily killing their leaders; hence the term "assassins" from the
Arabic Hashshashin for "hashish smokers." Subject to the wrong input, the
vulnerability of the psychedelicized mind can be grossly abused. History is
rife with such examples of the perversion of technology or magic.
Still, the CIA and the Saracen assassins were onto something, albeit in the
most unwholesome of ways. Psychedelics are a weapon of war, the war of
perceptions, priorities, and values. More readily than the reverse, they
can be used to erode the will to use military force, so long as survival
isn't at stake. How many thousands of Americans in the Sixties, tripping
out on acid, grass, mushrooms, or mescaline, got a heightened sense of the
utter absurdity of killing Vietnamese in their own country? Anti-war
activists declared openly that LSD was a guerrilla weapon of pacifist
resistance, and one that ultimately helped to end that war.
For Paul Krassner, a cofounder of the Yippies, taking acid was a political
act, something he did on the occasion of his testifying at the Chicago
Conspiracy trial. His new book, Psychedelic Trips for the Mind (High Times
Books), celebrates the synchronicity of the crystallizing counterculture, a
profusion of spontaneous acts of elation kindled by psychedelics that
helped to consolidate the unified mind of a generation. "The CIA originally
envisioned LSD as a means of control," says Krassner, "but millions of
young people became explorers of their own inner space with it instead.
Acid was serving as a vehicle to help deprogram themselves from a
civilization of inhumane priorities. Rand Corporation researchers
speculated that LSD might be an antidote to political activism, but the
CIA's scenario backfired."
^Õ ^Õ ^Õ
If death is another name for the process of undoing to which all of our
doings must and do lead, then the psychedelic experience is most certainly
concerned with death, with endings that, if we could only see, become
beginnings in other forms. McKenna once wrote that psychedelics anticipate
the dying process, and just four month's from his own passage, he told a
group at Esalen, "If psychedelics don't prepare you for the Great Beyond, I
don't know what really does." In revealing that the emperor wears no
clothes, that things fall apart, psychedelics decrypt the death bound into
things and offer us a chance to capture^×or recover^×the rapture of union, to
snap out of the trance that sustains the illusion of our separateness.
There is a diaphanous quality to things seen on the psychedelic, a
sympathetic blurring of the lines, an overdrape of molecular fabric that
suggests that we are a part of everything.
Such a vision proved to be the stuff of psychic liberation for the late
Israeli Holocaust survivor Yehiel De-Nur, who tells, in Shivitti (Gateways
Books and Tapes) of a miraculous breakthrough during a 1976 LSD-assisted
psychotherapy session in Leiden, Holland with Dr. Jan Bastiaans, the
psychiatrist who identified Concentration Camp Syndrome. During the
session, De-Nur relived the hell of Auschwitz and then saw his own face
over that of his tormenter, deducing that all of humanity^×including
himself^×was complicit in the Nazi horror, that it could have been him on
the other side of the dynamic, herding people into the ovens, that there
was a collective burden of guilt for all to share. Far from being a "bad
trip" in which he recoiled at identifying with a fiendish executioner, the
epiphany catalyzed a redemptive rebirth for his stricken soul, dissolving
the victim/perpetrator dichotomy.
A thirty-year belief in the power of psychedelics to confer such
transformations spurred Rick Doblin, president of the Multidisciplinary
Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS; see www.maps.org) to submit an
historic protocol for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy in the treatment of
patients afflicted with chronic post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
brought on by criminal deeds. The protocol, approved by the Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) on November 2, 2001, surprisingly with no snags over
the issue of neurotoxicity, will be used for the first U.S. study ever to
evaluate if MDMA can have actual mental health benefits.
The FDA ruling may clear the way for an Israeli study of the efficacy of
MDMA-assisted psychotherapy in the treatment of PTSD caused by terrorism or
war. MDMA manufactured by Israeli syndicates is used in raves and clubs
there, as well as by a growing colony of disaffected young army veterans
and other Israeli escapists settling in Goa, India. The Drug Enforcement
Administration (DEA) suspects the Israeli mafia of being, along with
dealers in Holland, behind the spike in worldwide MDMA production, some of
it smuggled as "Ecstasy" tablets^×often by Hassidic couriers^×into the United
States, hence the Israelis' hesitation to proceed with MDMA research until
the United States approved a protocol for it first. Now, however, according
to Jorge Gleser, Deputy Director of Mental Health Services at the Israeli
Ministry of Health, the Ministry will welcome the submission of a slightly
revised version of the MAPS protocol. If approved, the study will probably
be supervised by Dr. Moshe Kotler, former chief of psychiatry for the
Israeli Defense Forces.
Doblin was in Tel Aviv fresh from meetings with Gleser and Kotler when he
learned of the September 11 attacks. News of the disaster brought home his
sense of "Zionist duty to bring psychedelics to Israel," a nation he sees
as a traumatized society where a succession of shocks over the last century
has left many of the people "frightened and unable to trust, even when
trust should be given." Declares Doblin, "I honestly believe that
psychedelics used sensibly and therapeutically can help bring peace to the
Middle East, by reducing both personal and social conflicts."
Those in power who could take hemispheric strides toward peace and
accommodation if they surrendered their armor and reactionary impulses are
not likely to use MDMA, LSD, or other psychedelics, in therapy or
otherwise. But Doblin holds out the hope that they can learn by example, by
seeing that more and more people can go through the psychedelic ego death
and rebirth without losing touch with their cultures. Dr. Charles Grob, a
child psychiatrist at UCLA, who in 1994 conducted the first FDA-approved
study of the effects of MDMA on human volunteers, asserts that MDMA's
capacity to promote empathy could have a powerful impact on geopolitical
affairs. "Well, you're not going to get Sharon and Arafat to take MDMA
together," he grants, "but let their children get together one day to do it
in a medical setting and have a mutually empathetic experience, seeing the
humanity of the other side." Grob thinks that MDMA could have a healing
effect on Americans rocked to varying degrees by the September 11 attacks,
by fostering empathy for the families of victims, and, less directly, for
the bereft and disenfranchised anywhere in the world.
MDMA has already proven to be a bonding agent on a vast scale, within the
rave movement, which is international in scope, and pacific, empathic, and
celebratory in nature. Just as LSD was a bedrock for the Yippie ethos
nearly two generations ago, Ecstasy could well become the social glue for a
new activism, should an urgent and well-articulated need arise. MDMA
dissolves boundaries for the individual's immersion into a communal group
mind, according to author and media theorist Douglas Rushkoff in an essay
entitled "Ecstasy: Prescription for a Cultural Renaissance" (included in
Ecstasy: The Complete Guide by Dr. Julie Holland, Inner Traditions). "On E,
lies are inefficient," he writes, "and the peculiarities and weaknesses
they are meant to obscure no longer seem like offenses against nature."
Hence the doors of perception are cleansed, but without blowing them off
their hinges. MDMA is unique among so-called psychedelics for leaving the
ego unthreatened by inducing a pervasive sense of peace and trust that
enables fruitful self-inventory, therapeutic healing, and a powerful
feeling of appreciation for one's fellows.
^Õ ^Õ ^Õ
Prior to September 11, the nation was beginning to enjoy an increasingly
rich dialogue about the role of psychoactive drugs and the impact of the
War on Drugs, led most notably by Bill Maher of ABC's "Politically
Incorrect," whose comic quips roasting government drug policy complemented
the dignified propriety of calls for reform by the Republican Governor of
New Mexico, Gary Johnson. Nick Bromell, author of Tomorrow Never Knows:
Rock and Psychedelics in the 1960s (University of Chicago Press), observed,
optimistically, in a June 2001 essay on the "New Cultural Assent to Drug
Use" in The Chronicle of Higher Education that "more and more Americans are
unwilling to take a hard line against drugs if that means simplistically
refusing to consider why people actually take them."
The ironies of the drug war are everywhere today. "If [September 11
hijacker] Mohammed Atta had been a dope dealer," Grob complains, "we would
have been on him. Since he was only suspected of terrorism, he eluded our
watch. Our preoccupation with illegal drugs has contributed to our head
being in the sand. Last spring we gave $43 million in food aid to the
Taliban for suppressing poppy production. It's affected our value system,
our ethics, our intelligence-gathering ability. The government could tax
drugs to subsidize its war on terrorism." Grob, who objects to Ecstasy use
at raves and clubs, says he does not advocate an open market for all drugs,
but notes, "Controlled drugs are completely out of control! Anybody can do
them under any circumstance, whereas trained professionals can't. Who's
being controlled?"
Recent trends in medicine are redrawing the map of human consciousness as
an interaction of specific biochemical agents and processes. The new study
of neurotheology is examining the causal relationship between brain
chemistry and spirituality. Dr. Rick Strassman, author of the briskly
selling DMT: The Spirit Molecule (Inner Traditions; see
www.rickstrassman.com) focuses the search for a biochemical catalyst for
spirituality on a single endogenous compound, DMT, the most powerful
hallucinogen known. In the early Nineties, he conducted FDA-approved
research on human subjects with the material. In his book, he posits the
theory that blasts of resident DMT from the pineal gland at key moments of
stress, including birth and death, are responsible for spiritual
awakenings. Contemplation of the grisly carnage of September 11 has
strengthened his belief that upon death, bodies should not be disturbed, so
that this process is able to play out and facilitate the soul's transfer to
a noncorporeal state.
Funnily enough, in a May 2001 cover story that examined "How We're Wired
for Spirituality" ("This is your brain on God") Newsweek managed to dance
around the issue of psychedelic drugs as mediators of mystic states. The
magazine's religion editor, Kenneth Woodward, strained reason when he wrote
that the emotions of "losing oneself in prayer ^Å have nothing to do with
how well we communicate with God." Such a dismissal of peak experiences is
tantamount to saying that the flush of joy felt by a child in the
realization of his parents' love could never translate into a deepened
understanding and appreciation of life. Recently, no less an authority on
religion than Huston Smith has said, "If religion cannot be equated with
religious experiences, neither can it long survive their absence." As he
and others, including myself, have documented, extraordinary changes in
brain chemistry induced by psychotropic substances can, under the proper
circumstances, occasion such experiences.
The going may be rough, of course, though that, says Smith, is no reason to
discount the results. In Cleansing the Doors of Perception (Council on
Spiritual Practices; see www.csp.org), he points out that religious
experiences in general have fearsome properties. Those brought on by
psychedelics are no different. "The drug experience," he writes, "can be
like having forty-foot waves crash over you for several hours while you
cling desperately to a life raft which may be swept from under you at any
moment." Thus, he refutes the claim that the expansive relief from ordeal
that some psychedelic experients feel is an invalid path to religion,
because we do, after all, accept battlefield conversions and those made in
the throes of physical crises.
Nor should we discount drug-abetted awakenings because they're one-time
affairs. Echoing the great religion scholar William James, Smith notes that
the ephemeral nature of peak experiences sparked by psychedelics makes them
no different from any other sort of mystic encounter with the mysterium
tremendum. Such soul-rocking events are indelible in spite of their
transient nature, whether you're a born-again Christian or an acid mystic
turned Buddhist monk. But the degree to which they will affect you over
time, and the tenacity of your newfound conviction, depend on how well you
integrate the often alien or otherly vision into your daily life.
So long as such stormings of heaven are outlawed and dismissed, the greater
the likelihood for relapse from the cosmic consciousness they engender to
the coarse materialist outlook that is consensus reality. It takes a
prolonged commitment to mindfulness to prevent the sort of recidivism
epitomized by Yippie Jerry Rubin's high-profile conversion to yuppiedom,
just as it will require high vigilance and honesty to ensure that
profiteering doesn't befoul the surging waters of heart-felt patriotism, as
has already begun to occur just weeks after September 11.
With religion-inspired hatred on the loose, many see religion itself as a
culprit for the September 11 troubles, and point to psychedelics^×or
entheogens, divine-generating agents^×as a means of bypassing religion to
get to the wellspring of spirituality. Because they produce the primary
experience on which faith is inspired, "entheogens prove that no
intermediary is necessary," states Clark Heinrich, author of God Without
Religion (yet unpublished) and Strange Fruit (to be published in the US by
Inner Traditions), a speculative history about the role of the Amanita
muscaria mushroom in several world religions. After his own drug-induced
awakening, the late British Ecstasy advocate, Nicholas Saunders (see
www.ecstasy.org), surmised that religions may very well have been invented
to explain entheogenic experiences.
Still another nondenominational yet transcendental usage seen for
psychedelics is as a tool of hyper-ratiocinative perception, a means to
deconstruct media charades and help the intellect to cope with ambiguity
and uncertainty, according to Erik Davis, author of Techgnosis: Myth, Magic
+ Mysticism in the Age of Information (Three Rivers Press). "I wouldn't
necessarily want to trip in the aftermath of September 11," concedes Davis,
"but I can now use my psychedelic training for coping with the
epistemological cyclone of a cataclysm such as this. I grew up in the
cushiest reality in the history of the planet. Now I see demons pouring
over the lip of my existence, but I've learned through psychedelics how to
breathe through it and not believe its story."
^Õ ^Õ ^Õ
In a subtle sense, September 11 has had the effect of a virtual psychedelic
experience, breaking up the world and reorganizing it. In this respect,
says Krassner, the event was "an instant 'trip' for many who are now face
to face with what to do with their lives, what their concept of God is." In
the wake of the attacks, we have witnessed that a cataclysm can have a
positive outcome. A tangible new sense of tighter community has come into
being, woven from the supplest fibers of the human spirit rebounding from
the obliteration of the old order. For those with the courage to trust, the
psychedelic experience can orchestrate a sort of manageable in-house
cataclysm^×wreaking only epistemological havoc, not mortal carnage^×and one
that can heal by enlivening these same regenerative psychical tissues. Used
wisely, psychedelics can thus open the heart to compassion and enable the
mind to decouple itself from neurotic or burdensome patterns.
Because of this potential for unsettling the already shakable self, if only
temporarily, the tool of psychedelic consciousness is certainly not an
imperative, and not for everyone; it must be utilized, managed, and
regulated skillfully. In order to fill the sensorium with as much
preternatural light as can be metabolized, and liberate the psychedelic
experience from the underworld darkness of proscription, the practice
should be sacramentalized and institutionalized under the administration of
the scientists, doctors, psychologists, and spiritual leaders most
knowledgeable about its propensities and potentials.
Psychedelic sessions would then be structured and guided by the collective
wisdom generated from centuries of shamanic ritual, as well as from modern
clinical research and lessons learned from more informal practices. Select,
certifiably pure psychedelics could then be placed once again in the
service of private therapy for individuals, couples counseling, and the
treatment of drug or alcohol dependency, depression, and other mental
maladies. And they could also be shared in settings for congregational
worship, as the Native American Church uses peyote and the Santo Daime and
Uniao de Vegetal churches in Brazil use ayahuasca.
On a more massive scale, I can envision devoting a single day in the near
future on which, say, five million people worldwide took a good healthful
dose of MDMA (or hashish, psilocybin^Å) and opened up their hearts and minds
to each other and to the universe. Such a rite of pure Dionysian grace,
involving communal song, dance, and invocations of prayer, would strum the
invisible wires of the emergent global consciousness network, striking a
harmonious chord from Chicago to Bangkok, Sydney to Sao Paolo, London to
Delhi, Durban to Tehran.
What immediate effect this would have on our disposition toward the war
would most certainly not be a tauter clench on lethal weaponry but rather a
quickened pulse in the bond of human kinship we've begun to feel more
acutely in the wake of September 11. Such a communal connection, kicked
home by a deep, soul-tickling intoxication with the Breath of (all,
nonpartisan) Life, would strengthen the resolve to oppose terror in all of
its guises, not just those our respective governments don't like. The
weapon that psychedelic consciousness brings to the War on Terrorism is as
a perceptual laser that dissolves the blind rage of which it is a symptom,
dispelling the rumor of our disparateness.
By deploying psychedelics sensibly, not for jaunts of recreational escape
but for mindful meditations, more and more people would come to appreciate
the treasure of life here and now, in a time and place of war or not^×and
know, as William Blake observed, that such "gratitude is heaven itself."
Humanity's failure to exploit such opportunities for life's gratuitous
graces will only prolong the condition of war.
Charles Hayes is author of Tripping: An Anthology of True-Life Psychedelic
Adventures (Penguin); see www.psychedelicadventures.com. His work has
appeared in Shaman's Drum, Oxford American, High Times, and E Magazine.
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