15 ANTICIPATING THE ARCHAIC PARADISE
Let us turn to the kind of options available to someone who seriously wishes to redress the history-created ego imbalance within themselves. This requires a brief survey of the opportunities to explore plant hallucinogens presently afforded by non-Western societies around the world. REAL WORLD OPTIONS There is, of course, the psilocybin complex discovered by Valentina and Gordon Wasson—the magic mushrooms of central Mexico, which almost certainly played a major role in the religion of the Mayan and Toltec civilizations. This complex includes the more widely distributed Stropharia cubensis, which is thought to have originated in Thailand but is now found throughout the warm tropics. The highlands of Mazetecan Mexico are home to two species of morning glories. Ipomoea purpura and Turbina (formerly Rivea) corymbosa. The properties of ergot that interested Albert Hofmann and led eventually to his discovery of LSD, that of being a constrictor of smooth muscle and thus a potential aid in labor, had long been known to midwives of the Sierra Mazateca. The accompanying dissolution of perceived boundaries and influx of visionary information made these morning glories the preferred substitute in times when psilocybin-containing mushrooms were not available. With only one exception, all of the shamanic vision plants— including the morning glory complex of Mexico and the psilocybin complex—turn out to be hallucinogenic indoles. The single exception is mescaline, which is a kind of phenethylamine. And one must not fail to consider those other indoles, the short-acting tryptamines and the beta-carbolines. The short-acting tryptamines can be used separately or in combination with beta-carbolines. The beta-carbolines, though hallucinogenic in themselves, are most effective when used as monoamine oxidase inhibitors to enhance the effects of short-acting tryptamines and also to cause tryptamines to become orally active. I have not mentioned any synthetics, because I would prefer to separate the vision-producing plants from the popular notion of drugs. The global drug problem is a different issue entirely and has to do with the fates of nations and mega-dollar criminal syndicates. I avoid synthetic drugs and prefer the organic hallucinogens, because I believe that a long history of shamanic usage is the first seal of approval that one must look for when selecting a substance for its possible effects on personal growth. And if a plant has been used for thousands of years, one can also be fairly confident that it does not cause tumors or miscarriages or carry other unacceptable physical risks. Over time, trial and error has resulted in the choice of the most effective and least toxic plants for shamanic use.
Other criteria are also relevant when evaluating a substance. It is important to use only those compounds that do not insult the physical brain; regardless of what the physical brain does or doesn't have to do with the mind, it certainly has much to do with the metabolism of hallucinogens. Compounds alien to the brain and therefore difficult for it to metabolize should be avoided. One way of judging how long a relationship between humans and a plant has been in place is to notice how benign the compound is in human metabolism. If after you have taken a plant, your eyes are not in focus forty-eight hours later, or your knees are feeling rubbery three days later, then this is not a benign compound that has evolved into a smooth hand-in-glove fit with the human user.
THE CASE FOR HALLUCINOGENIC TRYPTAMINES
These criteria explain why, to my mind, the tryptamines are so interesting, and why I argue for the psilocybin mushroom as the primary hallucinogen involved in the Archaic origin of consciousness. The tryptamines, including psilocybin, bear a striking resemblance to human neurochemistry. The human brain, and indeed most nervous systems, run partially on 5- hydroxytryptamine, also known as serotonin. DMT, closely related to serotonin, is the hal- lucinogenic compound central to Amazonian shamanism, and is the most powerful of all hallucinogens in human beings and yet when smoked clears the system in less than fifteen minutes. The structural similarity between these two compounds may indicate the great antiquity of the evolutionary relationship between human brain metabolism and these particular compounds.
Having discussed options, it only remains to discuss techniques. Aldous Huxley called the psychedelic experience "a gratuitous grace." By this he meant that by itself the psychedelic experience is neither necessary nor sufficient for personal salvation. It also can be elusive. All conditions for success may be present and one can still fail to connect. However, one cannot fail to connect if all conditions for success are present and one does it over and over again— perhaps there is a temporal variable there. Good technique is obvious: one sits down, one shuts up, and one pays attention. That is the essence of good technique. These journeys should be taken on an empty stomach, in silent darkness, and in a situation of comfort, familiarity, and security. "Set" and "setting," terms established by Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner in the 1960s, have remained excellent reference points. Set refers to the interiorized feelings, hopes, fears, and expectations of the would-be psychonaut. Setting refers to the external situation in which the interior journey will take place—the noise level, light level, and level of familiarity to the voyager. Both set and setting should optimize feelings of security and confidence. External stimuli should be severely limited—phones unplugged, noisy machines stilled. Study the darkness behind closed eyelids with the expectation of seeing something. The experience is not simply eidetic hallu- cination (which we get when we press on our closed eyelids), al- though it begins like eidetic hallucination. Comfortable, silent darkness is the preferred environment for the shaman to launch what the neo-Platonic mystic Plotinus called "the flight of the alone to the Alone."
Major conceptual and linguistic difficulties are involved in conveying to people precisely what this experience is like. Most of those reading my words will have had at some point in their lives something which they would describe as a "drug experience." But did you know that your experience is bound to be unique and different from that of everyone else? These experiences range from mild tingling in the feet to being in titanic and alien realms where the mind boggles and language fails. And one feels the presence of the utterly unspeakable, the wholly Other. Memories fall, gritty and particulate, like the snows of yesteryear. Opalescence anticipates neon, and language gives birth to itself. Hyperbole becomes impossible. And therein lies the importance of discussing these matters.
HOW DOES IT FEEL?
What was the ambience of that lost Edenic world? What is the feeling whose absence has left us stranded in history? The onset of an indole hallucinogen is characterized first by a somatic activation, a feeling in the body. The indoles are not soporifics but central nervous system stimulants. The familiar feeling of "fight or flight" is often a feature of the first wave of somatic feelings associated with the hallucinogen. One must discipline the hind brain and simply wait through this turmoil within the animal body.
An orally active compound such as psilocybin makes its full effects felt in about an hour and a half; a compound that is smoked, such as DMT, becomes active in less than a minute. By whatever route the indole hallucinations are triggered, their full unfolding is impressive indeed. Bizarre ideas, often hilariously funny, curious insights, some seeming almost godlike in their profundity, shards of memories and free-form hallucinations all clamor for attention. In the state of hallucinogenic intoxication, creativity is not something that one expresses; it is something that one observes.
The existence of this dimension of knowable meaning that appears to be without connection to one's personal past or aspirations seems to argue that we are facing either a thinking Other or the deep structures of the psyche made suddenly visible. Perhaps both. The profundity of this state and its potential for a positive feedback into the process of reorganizing the personality should have long ago made psychedelics an indispensable tool for psychotherapy. After all, dreams have made a major claim on the attention of the theoreticians of psychic process, as have free association and hyp- notic regression; yet these are but peepholes into the hidden world of psychic dynamics compared with the expansive view that psychedelics provide.
FACING THE ANSWER
The situation that we now must deal with is not one of seeking the answer, but of facing the answer. The answer has been found; it just happens to lie on the wrong side of the fence of social toleration and legality. We are thus forced into a strange little dance. Those professionally involved know that psychedelics are the most powerful instruments for the study of the mind that are possible to conceive. And yet these people often work in academia and must frantically try to ignore the fact that the answer has been placed in our hands. Our situation is not unlike that of the sixteenth century when the telescope was invented and shattered the established paradigm of the heavens. The 1960s proved that we are not wise enough to take the psychedelic tools into our hands without a social and intellectual transformation. This transformation must begin now with each of us. Nature, in her evolutionary and morphogenetic richness, has offered a compelling model for us to follow in the shamanic task of re-sacralization and self-transformation that lies ahead. The to-temic animal image for the future human to model is the octopus. This is because the cephalopods, the squids and octopi, lowly creatures though they may seem, have perfected a form of communication that is both psychedelic and telepathic—an inspiring model for the human communications of the future.
CONSIDER THE OCTOPUS
An octopus does not communicate with small mouth noises, even though water is a good medium for acoustic signaling. Rather, the octopus becomes its own linguistic intent. Octopi have a large repertoire of color changes, dots, blushes, and traveling bars that move across their surfaces. This repertoire in combination with the soft-bodied physique of the creature allows it to obscure and reveal its linguistic intent simply by rapidly folding and unfolding the changing parts of its body. The mind and the body of the octopus are the same and hence equally visible; the octopus wears its language like a kind of second skin. Octopi can hardly not communicate. Indeed, their use of "ink" clouds to conceal themselves may indicate that this is the only way that they can have anything like a private thought. The ink cloud may be a kind of correction fluid for voluble octopi who have misstated themselves. Martin Moyniham has written of the complexities of cephalopod communication: The communication and related systems of. . . cephalo-pods are largely visual. They include arrangements of pigment cells, postures, and movements. The postures and movements can be ritualized or unritualized. Color changes presumably are always ritualized. The various patterns can be combined in many and often intricate ways. They can be changed very rapidly. Since they are visual, they should be relatively easy to describe and to decipher by human observers. There are, however, complications. . . .
Read or not, correctly or not, the patterns of cephalopods, like those of all other animals, encode information. When and insofar as they are messages, intentional or not, [they] would seem to have not only syntax but also a simple grammar. Like the octopi, our destiny is to become what we think, to have our thoughts become our bodies and our bodies become our thoughts. This is the essence of the more perfect Logos envisioned by the Hellenistic polymath Philo Judaeus—a Logos, an indwelling of the Goddess, not heard but beheld. Hans Jonas explains Philo Judaeus's concept as follows: A more perfect archetypal logos, exempt from the human duality of sign and thing, and therefore not bound by the forms of speech, would not require the mediation of hearing, but is immediately beheld by the mind as the truth of things. In other words the antithesis of seeing and hearing argued by Philo lies as a whole within the realm of "seeing"—that is to say, it is no real antithesis but a difference of degree relative to the ideal of immediate intuitive presence of the object. It is with a view to this ideal that the "hearing" here opposed to "seeing" is conceived, namely as its deputizing, provisional mode, and not as something authentic, basically other than seeing. Accordingly the turn from hearing to seeing here envisaged is merely a progress from a limited knowledge to an adequate knowledge of the same and within the same project of knowledge.
ART AND THE REVOLUTION
The Archaic Revival is a clarion call to recover our birthright, however uncomfortable that may make us. It is a call to realize that life lived in the absence of the psychedelic experience upon which primordial shamanism is based is life trivialized, life denied, life enslaved to the ego and its fear of dissolution in the mysterious matrix of feeling that is all around us. It is in the Archaic Revival that our transcendence of the historical dilemma actually lies. There is something more. It is now clear that new developments in many areas—including mind-machine interfacing, pharmacology of the synthetic variety, and data storage, imaging, and retrieval techniques—are coalescing into the potential for a truly demonic or an angelic self-imaging of our culture. Those who are on the demonic side of this process are fully aware of this potential and are hurrying full tilt forward with their plans to capture the technological high ground. It is a position from which they hope to turn nearly everyone into a believing consumer in a beige fascism from whose image factory none will escape. The shamanic response, the Archaic response, the human response, to this situation should be to locate the art pedal and push it to the floor. This is one of the primary functions of shamanism, and is the function that is tremendously synergized by the psy-chedelics. If psychedelics are exopheromones that dissolve the dominant ego, then they are also enzymes that synergize the human imagination and empower language. They cause us to connect and reconnect the contents of the collective mind in ever more implausible, beautiful, and self-fulfilling ways. If we are serious about an Archaic Revival, then we need a new paradigmatic image that can take us rapidly forward and through the historical choke point that we can feel impeding and resisting a more expansive, more humane, more caring dimension that is insisting on being born. Our sense of political obligation, of the need to reform or save the collective soul of humanity, our wish to connect the end of history with the beginning of history—all of this should impel us to look at shamanism as an exemplary model. In the current global crisis we cannot fail to take its techniques seriously, even those which may challenge the divinely ordained covenants of the constabulary.
CONSCIOUSNESS EXPANSION
Years ago, before Humphrey Osmond coined the term "psychedelic," there was current a phenomenological description for psychedelics; they were called "consciousness-expanding drugs." I believe that this is a very good description. Consider our dilemma on this planet. If the expansion of consciousness does not loom large in the human future, what kind of future is it going to be? To my mind, the propsychedelic position is most fundamentally threatening to the Establishment because, when fully and logically thought through, it is an antidrug, antiaddiction position. And make no mistake about it; the issue is drugs. How drugged shall you be? Or, to put it another way, how conscious shall you be? Who shall be conscious? Who shall be unconscious?
We need a serviceable definition of what we mean by "drug." A drug is something that causes unexamined, obsessive, and habitual behavior. You don't examine obsessive behavior; you just do it. You let nothing get in the way of your gratification. This is the kind of life that we are being sold at every level. To watch, to consume, and to watch and consume yet more. The psychedelic option is off in a tiny corner, never mentioned; yet it represents the only coun-terflow directed against a tendency to leave people in designer states of consciousness. Not their own designs, but the designs of Madison Avenue, of the Pentagon, of the Fortune 500 corporations. This isn't just metaphor; it is really happening to us.
Looking down on Los Angeles from an airliner, I never fail to notice that it is like looking at a printed circuit: all those curved driveways and cul de sacs with the same little modules installed along each one. As long as the Reader's Digest stays subscribed to and the TV stays on, these modules are all interchangeable parts within a very large machine. This is the nightmarish reality that Marshall McLuhan and Wyndham Lewis and others foresaw: the creation of the public as herd. The public has no history and no future, the public lives in a golden moment created by a credit system which binds them ineluctably to a web of illusions that is never critiqued. This is the ultimate consequence of having broken off the symbiotic relationship with the Gaian matrix of the planet. This is the consequence of lack of partnership; this is the legacy of imbalance between the sexes; this is the terminal phase of a long descent into meaninglessness and toxic existential confusion. The credit for giving us tools to resist this horror belongs to unsung heroes who are botanists and chemists, people such as Richard Schultes, the Wassons, and Albert Hofmann. Thanks to them we have, in this most chaotic of centuries, taken into our frail hands the means to do something about our predicament. Psychology, in contrast, has been complacent and silent. Psychologists have been content with behaviorist theory-making for fifty years, while knowing in their hearts that they were doing a potentially fatal disservice to human dignity, by ignoring the potential of psychedelics.
THE DRUG WAR
If there was ever a moment to be heard and be counted and to try to clarify thinking on these issues, that moment is now. For some time there has been a major attack on the Bill of Rights under the pretext of the so-called drug war. Somehow the drug issue is even more frightening to the public herd than was Communism, even more insidious. The quality of rhetoric emanating from the psychedelic community must improve radically. If it does not, we will forfeit the reclamation of our birthright and all opportunity for exploring the psychedelic dimension will be closed off. Ironically, this tragedy could occur almost as a footnote to the suppression of synthetic and addictive narcotics. It cannot be said too often: the psychedelic issue is a civil rights and civil liberties issue. It is an issue concerned with the most basic of human freedoms: religious practice and the privacy of the individual mind. It was said that women could not be given the vote because society would be destroyed. Before that, kings could not give up absolute power because chaos would result. And now we are told that drugs cannot be legalized because society would disintegrate. This is puerile nonsense! As we have seen, human history could be written as a series of relationships with plants, relationships made and broken. We have explored a number of ways in which plants, drugs, and politics have cruelly intermingled—from the influence of sugar on mercantilism to the influence of coffee on the modern office worker, from the British forcing opium on the Chinese population to the CIA using heroin in the ghetto to choke off dissent and dissatisfac- tion.
History is the story of these plant relationships. The lessons to be learned can be raised into consciousness, integrated into social policy, and used to create a more caring, meaningful world, or they can be denied just as discussion of human sexuality was repressed until the work of Freud and others brought it into the light. The analogy is apt because the enhanced capacity for cognitive experience made possible by plant hallucinogens is as basic a part of our humanness as is our sexuality. The question of how quickly we develop into a mature community able to address these issues lies entirely with us.
HYPERSPACE AND HUMAN FREEDOM
What is most feared by those who advocate the unworkable Luddite solution of "Just say no" is a world in which all traditional community values have dissolved in the face of an endless search for self-gratification on the part of drug-obsessed individuals and pop- ulations. We should not dismiss this only too real possibility. But what must be rejected is the notion that this admittedly disturbing future can be avoided by witch hunts, the suppression of research, and the hysterical spreading of disinformation and lies. Drugs have been a part of the galaxy of cultural concerns since the dawn of time. It was only with the advent of technologies capable of refining and concentrating the active principles of plants and plant preparations that drugs separate themselves from the general background of cultural concerns and become instead a scourge.
In a sense what we have is not a drug problem, but a problem with the management of our technologies. Is our future to include the appearance of new synthetic drugs, a hundred or a thousand times more addictive than heroin or crack? The answer is absolutely yes—unless we bring to consciousness and examine the basic human need for chemical dependency and then find and sanction avenues for expression of this need. We are discovering that human beings are creatures of chemical habit with the same horrified disbelief as when the Victorians discovered that humans are creatures of sexual fantasy and obsession. This process of facing ourselves as a species is a necessary precondition to the creation of a more humane social and natural order. It is important to remember that the adventure of facing who we are did not begin or end with Freud and Jung. The argument this book has sought to develop is that the next step in the adventure of self-understanding can begin only when we take note of our innate and legitimate need for an environment rich in mental states that are induced through an act of will. I believe we can initiate the process by revisioning our origins. Indeed, I have taken great pains to show that in the Archaic milieu in which self-reflection first emerged we find clues to the roots of our own troubled history.
WHAT IS NEW HERE
The hallucinogenic indoles, unstudied and legally suppressed, are here presented as agents of evolutionary change. They are biochemical agents whose ultimate impact is not on the direct experience of the individual but on the genetic constitution of the species. Earlier chapters drew attention to the fact that increased visual acuity, increased reproductive success, and increased stimulation of protolinguistic brain functions are all logical consequences of the inclusion of psilocybin in the early human diet. If the notion that human consciousness emerged out of indole-mediated synergy of neurodevelopment could be proven, then our image of ourselves, -our relationship to nature, and the present dilemma over drug use in society would change. There is no solution to the "drug problem," or to the problem of environmental destruction or the problem of nuclear weapons stockpiles, until and unless our self-image as a species is reconnected to the earth. This begins with an analysis of the unique confluence of conditions that must have been necessary for animal organization to make the leap to conscious self- reflection in the first place. Once the centrality of the hallucinogen-mediated human-plant symbiosis in the scenario of our origins is understood, we are then in a position to appreciate our current state of neurosis. Assimilation of the lessons contained in those ancient and formative events can lay the groundwork for solutions to meet not only society's need to manage substance use and abuse but also our deep and growing need for a spiritual dimension to our lives.
THE DMT EXPERIENCE
Earlier in this chapter, DMT was singled out as being of particular interest. What can be said of DMT as an experience and in relation to our own spiritual emptiness? Does it offer us answers? Do the short-acting tryptamines offer an analogy to the ecstasy of the partnership society before Eden became a memory? And if they do, then what can we say about it? What has impressed me repeatedly during my many glimpses into the world of the hallucinogenic indoles, and what seems generally to have escaped comment, is the transformation of narrative and language. The experience that engulfs one's entire being as one slips beneath the surface of the DMT ecstasy feels like the penetration of a membrane. The mind and the self literally unfold before one's eyes. There is a sense that one is made new, yet unchanged, as if one were made of gold and had just been recast in the furnace of one's birth. Breathing is normal, heartbeat steady, the mind clear and observing. But what of the world? What of incoming sensory data? Under the influence of DMT, the world becomes an Arabian labyrinth, a palace, a more than possible Martian jewel, vast with motifs that flood the gaping mind with complex and wordless awe. Color and the sense of a reality-unlocking secret nearby pervade the experience. There is a sense of other times, and of one's own infancy, and of wonder, wonder, and more wonder. It is an audience with the alien nuncio. In the midst of this experience, apparently at the end of human history, guarding gates that seem surely to open on the howling maelstrom of the unspeakable emptiness between the stars, is the Aeon.
The Aeon, as Heraclitus presciently observed, is a child at play with colored balls. Many diminutive beings are present there—the tykes, the self-transforming machine elves of hyperspace. Are they the children destined to be father to the man? One has the impression of entering into an ecology of souls that lies beyond the portals of what we naively call death. I do not know. Are they the synesthetic embodiment of ourselves as the Other, or of the Other as ourselves? Are they the elves lost to us since the fading of the magic light of childhood? Here is a tremendum barely to be told, an epiphany beyond our wildest dreams. Here is the realm of that which is stranger than we can suppose. Here is the mystery, alive, unscathed, still as new for us as when our ancestors lived it fifteen thousand summers ago. The tryptamine entities offer the gift of new language; they sing in pearly voices that rain down as colored petals and flow through the air like hot metal to become toys and such gifts as gods would give their children. The sense of emotional connection is terrifying and intense. The Mysteries revealed are real and if ever fully told will leave no stone upon another in the small world we have gone so ill in.
This is not the mercurial world of the UFO, to be invoked from lonely hilltops; this is not the siren song of lost Atlantis wailing through the trailer courts of crack-crazed America. DMT is not one of our irrational illusions. I believe that what we experience in the presence of DMT is real news. It is a nearby dimension—frightening, transformative, and beyond our powers to imagine, and yet to be explored in the usual way. We must send fearless experts, whatever that may come to mean, to explore and to report on what they find. DMT, as we have discussed earlier, occurs as a part of ordinary human neurometabolism and is the most powerful of the naturally occurring indole hallucinogens. The extraordinary ease with which DMT utterly destroys all boundaries and conveys one into an impossible-to- anticipate and compellingly Other dimension is one of the miracles of life itself. And this first miracle is followed by a second: the utter ease and simplicity with which enzyme systems in the human brain recognize the DMT molecules at the synapses. After only a few hundred seconds, these enzymes have completely and harmlessly inactivated the DMT and reduced it to by-products of ordinary metabolism. That, with the most powerful of all hallucinogenic indoles, ordinary amine levels in the brain are reestablished so quickly argues there may have been a long co-evolutionary association between human beings and hallucinogenic tryptamines.
Although psilocybin and psilocin, the hallucinogenic indoles active in the cattle-associated Stropharia cubensis mushroom, are not presently thought to directly metabolize into DMT before becoming active in the brain, nevertheless their pathway is the closest of relatives to the neural pathway of DMT activity. Indeed, they may be active at the same synapses, with DMT being, however, more reactive. The source of this difference is probably pharmacoki-netic— that is, DMT may cross the blood-brain barrier more readily, so that more reaches the site of activity in a shorter time. Affinity of the two compounds for the bond site is approximately equal.
As mentioned earlier, research on DMT, particularly in human beings, has been by and large inadequate. When DMT has been studied, it was administered by injection. This is the preferred procedure with experimental drugs because dosages can be known precisely. Nevertheless, in the case of DMT this approach masked the existence of the extraordinary "turnaround time" of the experience when DMT is smoked. The experience of DMT by intermuscular injection lasts nearly an hour; the peak of the experience obtained by smoking occurs in about one minute. In the Amazon Basin some tribal people have a tradition of using DMT-containing plants. They use the sap of Virola trees, relatives of nutmeg, or the ground and toasted seeds of Anadenanthera peregrina, a huge leguminous tree. The generally accepted method of activating the indole is to snuff the powdered plant material. Such snuffing is not left to the discretion of the user; rather, the user has a friend blow a hollow reed full of fine powder up first one nostril, then the other (see Figure 27). Excruciating as this process is, it leaves no doubt that Amazonian shamans learned what modern DMT researchers have not: the most effective route of administration is by absorption through the nasal mucosa.
HYPERSPACE AND THE LAW
Perhaps you will object, "But isn't DMT illegal?" Yes, DMT is currently a Schedule I compound in the United States. Schedule I is a classification for drugs with no proven medical application whatsoever. Not even cocaine rates a Schedule I classification. Psilocybin and DMT were made Schedule I without any scientific evidence at all being presented for or against their use. In the paranoid atmosphere of the late sixties, the mere fact that these compounds cause hallucinations was sufficient grounds for their placement in a category so restrictive that even medical research is discouraged. Faced with such hysterical Know-Nothingism, we would do well to recall that at one time dissection of corpses was forbidden by the Church and denounced as witchcraft. Modern anatomy was created by medical students who visited battlefields or who stole corpses from the gallows. To advance their knowledge of the human body, they risked arrest and imprisonment. Should we be any less courageous in attempting to push back the frontiers of the known and the possible?
The dominator mentality has always resisted change, almost as if it sensed the possibility of a kind of change that would leave it bereft of its power once and for all. In the phenomenon of the indole hallucinogens that prescient fear has born bounteous fruit— nothing less than the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. To eat it is to become as gods, and that will surely mean eclipse for the style of the dominators. Such would be the hope of any Archaic Revival.
MEETINGS WITH A REMARKABLE OVERMIND
The meltdown of Western rationalism has proceeded quite far, as anyone who will read any up-to-date popular book on cosmology or quantum physics can easily assure himself. Nevertheless, I wish to stoke the fires slightly by adding the concept of some kind of interdimensional nexus that is gained most reliably and directly through the use of indole hallucinogens with a long history of human usage and human coevolution. Such compounds are apparently functioning as regulators of cultural change and can be a means of obtaining access to the intentionality of some very large self-regulating system. Perhaps this is the Overmind of the species, or a kind of "mind of the planet' or perhaps we have been parochial in our search for nonhuman intelligence, and another minded, but radically different, intelligent species shares the earth with us. I offer these ideas in a speculative vein. I have no strong personal intuition as to what is going on. What I do believe is that I have a sufficient grasp of the customs, expectations, rules of evidence, and "common knowledge" of human beings to be able to report that what is going on inside the DMT intoxication is much more peculiar than anything anyone ever dreamed could be covered by the term "intoxication." When intoxicated by DMT, the mind finds itself in a convincingly real, apparently coexisting alien world. Not a world about our thoughts, our hopes, our fears; rather, a world about the tykes—their joys, their dreams, their poetry. Why? I have not the faintest idea. These are the facts of the matter; this is how it is with us.
Alone among twentieth-century schools of mainstream thought, Jungian psychology has sought to confront some of the phenomena so central to shamanism. Alchemy, which Jung studied very carefully, was the inheritor of a long tradition of shamanistic and magical techniques, as well as more practical chemical procedures such as metalworking and embalming. The literature of alchemy shows that the swirling contents of the alchemical vessel were fertile ground for the projection of the contents of the naive prescientific mind. Jung insisted that alchemical allegories and emblems were products of the unconscious and could be analyzed in the same way as dreams. From Jung's point of view, finding the same motifs in the fantastic speculations of the alchemists and in the dreams of his patients was strong support for his theory of the collective unconscious and its universal generic archetypes. In the course of his alchemical studies, Jung encountered the accounts of the cabiri, the fairylike, alchemical children whose appearance, or felt presence, is a part of the late stages of the alchemical opus. These alchemical children are similar to the small helping spirits that the shaman calls to his aid. Jung saw them as autonomous portions of the psyche that have temporarily escaped from the control of the ego. Unfortunately, the explanation that these alchemical genii are "autonomous portions of the psyche" is no explanation at all. It is as if we were to describe an elf as a small nonphysical person of uncertain parentage. Such explanations only evade the need to confront the deeper nature of experience itself. Science has not been helpful in the matter of elusive human contacts with other intelligences. It prefers to direct its attention elsewhere, with the comment that subjective experiences, however peculiar, are not its province. What a pity, since subjective experience is all that any of us ever has. Anyhow, the largely subjective nature of the so-called objective universe has now been secured by that most objective of the sciences, physics. The new physics has the subjective observer inextricably tangled with the phenomena observed. Ironically, this is a return to the shamanic point of view. The real intellectual legacy of quantum physics may be the new respectability and primacy that it gives to subjectivity. Recentering ourselves in our subjectivity means a tremendous new reempowering of language, for language is the stuff of which the subjective world is made.
Through psychedelics we are learning that God is not an idea, God is a lost continent in the human mind. That continent has been rediscovered in a time of great peril for ourselves and our world. Is this coincidence, synchronicity, or a cruelly meaningless juxtaposition of hope and ruin? Years ago I directed my life's work toward understanding the mystery at the center of the experience induced by tryptamine hallucinogens. It is not, ultimately, a mystery that science can elucidate. Of course I am aware that one's obsessions expand to fill all space. But in the climactic events surrounding the emergence of pastoralism and language in human beings, I found the ancient echo of the things that I had personally felt and witnessed. Now the answer sought and found must be faced. Flickering before us is a dimension so huge that its outlines can barely be brought into focus in the human frame of reference. Our animal existence, our planetary existence, is ending. In geological time that end is now only moments away. A great dying, a great extinction of many species, has been occurring since at least the pinnacle of the partnership society in prehistoric Africa. Our future lies in the mind; our weary planet's only hope of survival is that we find our- selves in the mind and make of it a friend that can reunite us with the earth while simultaneously carrying us to the stars. Change, more radical by magnitudes than anything that has gone before, looms immediately ahead. Shamans have kept the gnosis of the accessibility of the Other for millennia; now it is global knowledge. The consequences of this situation have only begun to unfold.
Naturally I do not expect my words to be taken at face value. Nevertheless, these conclusions are based on an experience available to anyone who will but take the time to investigate DMT. The experience itself lasts less than fifteen minutes. I do not anticipate criticism from people who have not taken the trouble to conduct this simple and definitive experiment. After all, how seriously can critics be engaged with the problem if they are unwilling to invest a few minutes of their time to experience the phenomena firsthand? The deep psychedelic experience does not simply hold out the possibility of a world of sane people living in balance with the earth and one another. It also promises high adventure, engagement with something completely unexpected—a nearby alien universe teeming with life and beauty. Don't ask where; at the present moment we can only say, not here and not there. We have still to admit our ignorance concerning the nature of mind and how precisely the world comes to be and what it is. For more than several millennia our dream has been to understand these matters, and we are defeated. Defeated unless we remember the other possibility—the possibility of the wholly Other.
Some misguided souls scan the heavens for friendly flying saucers that will intervene in profane history and carry us to paradise; others preach redemption at the feet of various rishis, roshis, geysheys, and gurus. Searchers are better advised to look to the work of the botanists, anthropologists, and chemists who have located, identified, and characterized the shamanic hallucinogens. Through them, we have had placed into our hands a tool for the redemption of the human enterprise. It is a great tool, but it is a tool that must be used. Our addictions down through the ages, from sugar to cocaine and television, have been a restless search for the thing torn from us in paradise. The answer has been found. It is no longer something to be sought. It has been found.
RECOVERING OUR ORIGINS
Using plants such as those described above will help us understand the precious gift of plant partnership that was lost at the dawn of time. Many people yearn to be introduced to the facts concerning their true identity. This essential identity is explicitly addressed by a plant hallucinogen. Not to know one's true identity is to be a mad, disensouled thing — a golem. And, indeed, this image, sick-eningly Orwellian, applies to the mass of human beings now living in the high-tech industrial democracies. Their authenticity lies in their ability to obey and follow mass style changes that are conveyed through the media. Immersed in junk food, trash media, and cryp-tofascist politics, they are condemned to toxic lives of low awareness. Sedated by the prescripted daily television fix, they are a living dead, lost to all but the act of consuming.
I believe that the failure of our civilization to come to terms with the issue of drugs and habitual destructive behavior is a legacy of unhappiness for us all. But if we sufficiently reconstructed our image of self and world, we could make out of psychopharmacology the stuff of our grandest hopes and dreams. Instead, pharmacology has become the demonic handmaiden of an unchecked descent into regimentation and erosion of civil liberties. Most people are addicted to some substance and, more important, all people are addicted to patterns of behavior. Attempting to distinguish between habits and addictions does damage to the indissoluble confluence of mental and physical energies that shapes the behavior of each of us. People not involved in a relationship with food/drug stimulation are rare and by their preference for dogma and deliberately self-limited horizons must be judged to have failed to create a viable alternative to substance involvement. I have attempted here to examine our biological history and our more recent cultural history with an eye to something that may have been missed. My theme was human arrangements with plants, made and broken over the millennia. These relationships have shaped every aspect of our identities as self-reflecting beings — our languages, our cultural values, our sexual behavior, what we remember and what we forget about our own past. Plants are the missing link in the search to understand the human mind and its place in nature.
THE FUNDAMENTALIST CONTRIBUTION
In the United States, the federal government's zeal to appear to wish to eradicate drugs is directly linked to the degree to which the government has been co-opted by the values of fundamentalist Christianity. We entertain the illusion of the constitutional separation of church and state in the United States. But in fact the federal government, when it acted to prohibit alcohol during Prohibition, when it interferes with rights to reproductive freedom, or with the use of peyote in Native American religious rituals, and when it attempts unreasonably to regulate foods and substances, is acting as the enforcing arm for the values of right-wing fundamentalism. Eventually the right to determine our own food and drug preferences will be seen as a natural consequence of human dignity, as long as it is done in a way that does not limit the rights of others. The signing of the Magna Carta, the abolition of slavery, the enfranchisement of women—these are instances in which the evolving definition of what constituted fairness swept away ossified social structures that had come to rely more and more on a "fundamen- talist" reading of their own first principles. The war on drugs is schizophrenically waged by governments that deplore the drug trade and yet are also the major guarantors and patrons of the international drug cartels. Such an approach is doomed to failure.
The war on drugs was never meant to be won. Instead, it will be prolonged as long as possible in order to allow various intelligence operations to wring the last few hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit profits from the global drug scam; then defeat will have to be declared. "Defeat" will mean, as it did in the case of the Vietnam War, that the media will correctly portray the true dimensions of the situation and the real players, and that public revulsion at the culpability, stupidity, and venality of the Establishment's role will force a policy review. In cynically manipulating nations and peoples with narcotics and stimulants, modern governments have associated themselves with an ethical disaster comparable to the eighteenth- century rebirth of the slave trade or the recently renounced excesses of Marxism-Leninism.
THE LEGALIZATION ISSUE
The conclusion seems obvious: only legalization can lay the basis for a sane drug policy. Indeed, this opinion has been reached by most disinterested commentators on the problem, although the political consequences of advocating legalization have made it slow to be considered. Most recently Arnold Trebach's thoughtful book, The Great Drug War, has marshaled persuasive arguments in favor of a revolution in drug policy: Another model for guidance in approaching the subject of drug abuse may be found in the manner with which America has historically dealt with conflicting religious creeds; virtually all are accepted as decent moral options that ought to be available for those people who believe in them. The subject of drugs should be approached in the same spirit—more like religion than science. My wish is that law and medicine recognize the personal and nonscien- tific nature of the drug-abuse arena by enacting some form of First Amendment guarantee of freedom to select a personal drug abuse doctrine, but limited somewhat by enlightened principles of medicine.
What Trebach does not discuss, indeed does not even mention, is the role to be played by hallucinogens in the postsuppression scenario. Indeed, psychedelics seem unimportant if the only measure of a drug's social impact is the estimate of the millions of dollars of street sales that may have taken place. Only LSD continues to be occasionally singled out among the psychedelics as a possible large-scale problem. However, estimates of the amount of psy- chedelics produced and used in the United States have been politicized and hence are unreliable and meaningless. But another measure of the social importance of a substance argues that we are remiss in not at least beginning to discuss the social impact of psychedelic use when we contemplate legalization of drugs. A clue to that other measure is the interest the CIA and military intelligence gave to psychedelics during the sixties through projects such as MK (for mind control) and MK-ULTRA. The widespread belief that the conclusion of these studies was that television was the drug of choice for mass hypnosis, while reasonable, should not be taken at face value. I believe that, once drugs are legalized, the fear that there will be a vast epidemic of cocaine or heroin addiction will be proven groundless. I also believe that there will be increased interest in and use of psychedelics, and that this possibility is of great concern to the Establishment. This new interest in psychedelics should be anticipated and provided for. If use of psychedelics makes it easier to recapture the social attitudes and assumptions of the original partnership cultures, then eventually educational institutions may wish to encourage this awareness. A new global consensus appears to be building. What was previously inchoate and unconscious is now becoming conscious and at the same time structured. The collapse of the Marxist alternative to media-dense, high-tech democratic consumerism has been swift and complete. For the first time in planetary history, a defined, albeit dimly defined, consensus exists for "democratic values." This trend will encounter real resistance from various forms of monotheistic religious fundamentalism during the 1990s. It is a phenomenon of expanded consciousness driven by the information explosion. Democracy is an articulation of the Archaic notion of the nomadic egalitarian group. In its purest expression it is thoroughly psychedelic and its triumph seems ultimately certain.
The "drug problem" runs against the tendency toward global expansion of consciousness through spread of democratic values. There is no question that a society that sets out to control its citizens' use of drugs sets out on the slippery path to totalitarianism. No amount of police power, surveillance, and intrusion into people's lives can be expected to affect "the drug problem." Hence there is no limit to the amount of repression that frightened institutions and their brainwashed populations may call for.
A MODEST PROPOSAL
A drug policy respectful of democratic values would aim to educate people to make informed choices based on their own needs and ideals. Such a simple prescription is necessary and sadly overdue. A master plan for seriously seeking to come to terms with America's drug problems might explore a number of options, including the following.
1. A 200 percent federal tax should be imposed on tobacco and alcohol. All government subsidies for tobacco production should be ended. Warnings on packaging should be strengthened. A 20 percent federal sales tax should be levied on sugar and sugar substitutes, and all supports for sugar production should be ended. Sugar packages should also carry warnings, and sugar should be a mandatory topic in school nutrition curricula.
2. All forms of cannabis should be legalized and a 200 percent federal sales tax imposed on cannabis products. Information as to the THC content of the product and current conclusions regarding its impact on health should be printed on the packaging.
3. International Monetary Fund and World Bank lending should be withdrawn from countries that produce hard drugs. Only international inspection and certification that a country is in compliance would restore loan eligibility.
4. Strict gun control must apply to both manufacture and possession. It is the unrestricted availability of firearms that has made violent crime and the drug abuse problem so intertwined.
5. The legality of nature must be recognized, so that all plants are legal to grow and possess.
6. Psychedelic therapy should be made legal and insurance coverage extended to include it.
7. Currency and banking regulations need to be strengthened. Presently bank collusion with criminal cartels allows large-scale money laundering to take place.
8. There is an immediate need for massive support for scientific research into all aspects of substance use and abuse and an equally massive commitment to public education.
9. One year after implementation of the above, all drugs still illegal in the United States should be decrimi- nalized. The middleman is eliminated, the government can sell drugs at cost plus 200 percent, and those monies can be placed in a special fund to pay the social, medical, and educational costs of the legalization program. Money from taxes on alcohol, tobacco, sugar, and can-nabis can also be placed in this fund. Also following this one-year period, pardons should be given to all offenders in drug cases that did not involve firearms or felonious assault. If these proposals seem radical, it is only because we have drifted so far from the ideals that were originally most American. At the foundation of the American theory of social polity is the notion that our inalienable rights include "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." To pretend that the right to the pursuit of happiness does not include the right to experiment with psychoactive plants and substances is to make an argument that is at best narrow and at worst ignorant and primitive. The only religions that are anything more than the traditionally sanctioned moral codes are religions of trance, dance ecstasy, and intoxication by hallucinogens. The living fact of the mystery of being is there, and it is an inalienable religious right to be able to approach it on one's own terms. A civilized society would enshrine that principle in law.
EPILOGUE: LOOKING OUTWARD AND INWARD TO A SEA OF STARS
We have arrived at the point in our story where history merges with the political energies of the moment. The current controversies that have use and abuse of substances as their theme must share the stage with other issues of equal import: poverty and overpopulation, environmental destruction, and unmet political expectations. These phenomena are the inevitable by-products of the dominator culture. In struggling with these social problems we must remember that the roots of our humanness lie elsewhere, in the cascade of mental abilities that were unleashed within our species many tens of millennia ago—the ability to name, to classify, to compare, and to remember. These functions all can be traced back to the quasi-symbiotic relationship that we enjoyed with psilocybin mushrooms in the African partnership society of prehistory. Our breach of faith with the symbiotic relationship to the plant hallucinogens has made us susceptible to an ever more neurotic response to each other and the world around us. Several thousand years of such bereavement have left us the nearly psychotic inheritors of a planet festering with the toxic by-products of scientific industrialism.
IF NOT IF NOT US, WHO? NOW, WHEN?
It is time for us to undertake a dialogue based on an objective assessment of what our culture does and means. Another hundred years of business as usual is inconceivable. Dogma and ideology have become obsolete; their poisonous assumptions allow us to close our eyes to our hideous destructiveness and to loot even those resources that properly belong to our children and grandchildren. Our toys do not satisfy; our religions are no more than manias; our political systems are a grotesque aping of what we intended them to be. How can we hope to do better? Although fears of nuclear confrontation have diminished with the recent changes in the Eastern bloc, the world is still plagued by hunger, overpopulation, racism, sexism, and religious and political fundamentalism. We have the capacity—industrial, scientific, and financial—to change the world. The question is, do we have the capacity to change ourselves, to change our minds? I believe that the answer to this must be yes but not without help from nature. If mere preaching of virtue could provide the answer, then we would have arrived at the threshold of angelic existence some time ago. If mere legislation of virtue were an answer, we would have learned that a long time ago. Help from nature means recognizing that the satisfaction of the religious impulse comes not from ritual, and still less from dogma, but rather, from a fundamental kind of experience—the experience of symbiosis with hallucinogenic plants and, through them, symbiosis with the whole of planetary life. Radical as this proposal may appear, it has been anticipated in the work of no less a sober observer of Western culture than Arthur Koestler: Nature has let us down, God seems to have left the receiver off the hook, and time is running out. To hope for salvation to be synthesized in the laboratory may seem materialistic, crankish, or naive; but, to tell the truth, there is a Jungian twist to it—for it reflects the ancient alchemist's dream to concoct the elixir vitae. What we expect from it, however, is not eternal life, nor the transformation of base metal into gold, but the transformation of homo maniacus into homo sapiens. When man decides to take his fate into his own hands, that possibility will be within reach. Koestler concludes from his examination of our history of institutionalized violence as a species that some form of pharmacological intervention will be necessary before we can be at peace with one another. He proceeds to make an argument for conscious and scientifically managed psychopharmacological intervention in the life of society that has grave implications for the preservation of ideals of human independence and liberty. Koestler was apparently un- aware of the shamanic tradition or of the richness of the psychedelic experience. Hence he was not aware that the task of managing a global human population into a state of balance and happiness could involve introducing the experience of an internal horizon of transcendence into people's lives.
FINDING THE WAY OUT
Without the escape hatch into the transcendental and transpersonal realm that is provided by plant-based indole hallucinogens, the human future would be bleak indeed. We have lost the ability to be swayed by the power of myths, and our history should convince us of the fallacy of dogma. What we require is a new dimension of self-experience that individually and collectively authenticates democratic social forms and our stewardship of this small part of the larger universe. Discovery of such a dimension will mean risk and opportunity. Seeking the answer is the stance of the ingenue, the preinitiate, and the fool. We must now have done with such posturing; it is for us to face the answer. Facing the answer means recognizing that the world we have prepared to hand on to the generations of the future is no more than a mess of broken pottage. It is not the dispossessed people of the ruined rain forests who are pathetic, it is not the stoic opium farmers of tribal Burma who menace distant hopes and populations—it is ourselves.
FROM THE GRASSLANDS TO THE STARSHIP
Human history has been a fifteen-thousand-year dash from the equilibrium of the African cradle to the twentieth-century apotheosis of delusion, devaluation, and mass death. Now we stand on the brink of star flight, virtual reality technologies, and a revivified shamanism that heralds the abandonment of the monkey body and tribal group that has always been our context. The age of the imagination is dawning. The shamanic plants and the worlds that they reveal are the worlds from which we imagine that we came long ago, worlds of light and power and beauty that in some form or another lie behind the eschatological visions of all of the world's great religions. We can claim this prodigal legacy only as quickly as we can remake our language and ourselves. Remaking our language means rejecting the image of ourselves inherited from dominator culture—that of a creature guilty of sin and hence deserving of exclusion from paradise. Paradise is our birthright and can be claimed by any one of us. Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored. Shamanism has always known this, and shamanism has always, in its most authentic expressions, taught that the path required allies. These allies are the hallucinogenic plants and the mysterious teaching entities, luminous and transcendental, that reside in that nearby dimension of ecstatic beauty and understanding that we have denied until it is now nearly too late.
WE AWAIT OURSELVES WITHIN THE VISION
We can now move toward a new vision of ourselves and our role in nature. We are the omni- adaptable species, we are the thinkers, the makers, and the solvers of problems. These great gifts that are ours alone and which come out of the evolutionary matrix of the planet are not for us—our convenience, our satisfaction, our greater glory. They are for life; they are the special qualities that we can contribute to the great community of organic being, if we are to become the care giver, the gardener, and the mother of our mother, which is the living earth. Here there is great mystery. In the middle of the slow-moving desert of unreflecting nature we come upon ourselves and perhaps see ourselves for the first time. We are colorful, cantankerous, and alive with hopes and dreams that, so far as we know, are unique in the universe. We have been too long asleep and shackled by the power we have ceded to the least noble parts of ourselves and the least noble among us. It is time that we stood up and faced the fact that we must and can change our minds. The long night of human history is drawing at last to its conclusion. Now the air is hushed and the east is streaked with the rosy blush of dawn. Yet in the world we have always known evening grows deeper and the shadows lengthen toward a night that will know no end. One way or another the story of the foolish monkey is nearly forever over. Our destiny is to turn without regret from what has been, to face ourselves, our parents, lovers, and children, to gather our tool kits, our animals, and the old, old dreams, so that we may move out across the visionary landscape of ever-deeper understanding. Hopefully there, where we have always been most comfortable, most ourselves, we will find glory and triumph in the search for meaning in the endless life of the imagination, at play at last in the fields of an Eden refound.
