We must start with one undisputed fact: that human beings long for a spiritual connection to something larger than themselves. Science has acknowledged as much with concepts like "the God gene". Neuroscientists like Michael Persinger and Andrew Newberg have even created a new sub-discipline of neuroscience called neurotheology, where science is beginning to tackle this important attribute of the human brain. For now, however, most of the scientific world clings to the idea that mystical and spiritual states of consciousness are nothing more than imaginary manifestations of electrochemical processes in the brain. Eminent scientists like Richard Dawkins and philosophers of science like Daniel Dennett lead the assault on the idea that these states are anything more.
Nevertheless, while scientists debate these issues, the entire cognitive history of humanity has been guided by these extraordinary states. For tens of thousands of years, shamans around the world brought sustenance and healing to their people using visions and guidance brought about by these visionary realms. Even the four "great" religions of the modern world all had their origins in mystical states said to have been experienced by Moses, Jesus, Mohamed and Buddha.
Unfortunately, the larger these groups got, the farther removed they became from their mystical origins. Except for perhaps Buddhism, it is only within smaller subgroups of these religions does the quest for these states still exist. Within Judaism, Qabalah and Hasidism seek to attain personal mystical experiences. Within Islam, the Sufis use special techniques for attaining mystical states. And while mysticism within Christianity was not encouraged or taught, certain protestant groups like the Anabaptists and the Quakers sought divine states.
Having grown up Roman Catholic, the great mystics of my religion like St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila, Hildegard of Bingen , Meister Eckhart and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin were spoken of only in advanced theology classes; never in parochial school. For Christians are taught to believe that the intercession of a priest or minister is required to contact God.
Personal "union" with God--at least for Catholics--only happens with Holy Communion, and only after the priest has completed his bit of magic called transubstantiation, where the little wafer of bread is believed to actually turn into the body and blood of Christ.
This certainly seems like a powerful idea and one could expect Communion to be a sure path to a mystical union with Jesus. Yet I've never heard of anyone who has been so moved by Holy Communion that they've gone into a truly mystical state, although I wouldn't be so presumptive to believe that this hasn't happened to some individuals. But the truth of the matter is that for hundreds of millions of Catholics around the world, this sacrament has no more spiritual effect than making the sign of the cross.
Yet isn't that what religion is supposed to do--touch our souls; to take us out of our everyday reality and into a divine realm where powerful changes can take place within us?
For over forty thousand years, some very special people have been able to do this simply by their own will or by virtual of having had near-death experiences, being struck by lightning, having epilepsy or even by being schizophrenic. Obviously, some of these methods are less desirable than others, yet the "reality" of these altered states of consciousness all exhibit a power and quality that can't be duplicated in the vast majority of human beings in our ordinary state of consciousness.
Early on, however, it was found that there were plants with which one could experience these extraordinary states for a brief time and then return to normal awareness; often having learned much about how to heal the body and the soul of traumas that occur during his or her physical lifetime.
Shamans were people who could attain these states in the service of their tribe or community. Shamans persisted in many cultures--in Europe they were called witches--from the earliest times until about the 3rd or 4th century A.D. when the Catholic Church began to exert its hegemony over a larger and larger swath of Europe and the Middle East. Pagan religions and practices were abolished wherever the Holy Roman Empire was established. Personal contact with god by means of psychedelic plants became anathema to the power structure of the Church and users of these substances were exterminated whenever and wherever they were discovered. Even the accusation of being a witch was tantamount to a death sentence.
This was because the higher members of the priestly class were gaining great wealth and enormous political power. Soon the inevitable evil of power such as this resulted in the institution of a police force called the Inquisition that would seek to eradicate any threat to the Church's power and its control over the citizens of the Catholic Empire. This meant the destruction of anyone deemed pagan or heretical. Witches, healers, shamans, were all destroyed.
An interesting side note here. Michael Harner, anthropologist and shamanic expert, claims that some 95% of all shamanic cultures around the world use drumming to help enter the shamanic mystical worlds. Yet only in far northern Scandanavia with the Sami--or Lapps--is drumming to help enter these world found in Europe. Harner believes that this is because of the Church's extreme oppression of shamanism for the past 2000 years. Yet some people still practiced the old ways, but had to do it surreptitiously. One non-drumming method was by using psychedelic substances. These substances were believed to have been used in witches' "flying" ointments and potions.
Still, mystics and mysticism couldn't be wiped out completely in the West. There were, of course, Christian mystics throughout the era. But also, in literature there were the transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, in art could be found visionaries like Hieronymous Bosch and William Blake. In philosophy were people like William James and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Even scientists have occasionally been given a glimpse of the "eternal"; some by accident rather than design.
This is what happened to Albert Hofmann in 1943, when he first took LSD-25 after synthesizing it in his lab. I've written about his experience in my previous post. But for this scientist, the experience recalled for him an earlier numinous experiences he'd had with Nature as a child. And it was his genius that allowed Albert Hofmann to know that this chemical offered humanity a way to experience something it had not been allowed to experience for some 2000 years.
Thus began the Golden Age of psychedelic research; a time when artists, writers, philosophers, academics, psychiatrists, psychotherapists, the sick and dying, the mentally ill and even children were given this "wonder drug"; the results of which resulted in such astonishing and successful results in the lives of these people that LSD portended an incredible new world of the mind, the body and the soul.
The book I've been reading, "Higher Wisdom: eminent elders explore the continuing impact of psychedelics", is a compendium of those years as told through the people who were there are the beginning. As I read their interviews, I can only shake my head in disbelief at the tragedy and stupidity of the United States government in the 60's when they ended all funding for psychedelic research. What's more, they created laws that outlawed all psychedelic substances known at the time...and would go on to outlaw any new one that came along.
Perhaps the most detrimental result of this ban for society at large is illustrated by this excerpt from the book, "Higher Wisdom".
"In the late 1950's and early 1960's, Bill Wilson [founder of Alcoholics Anonymous] volunteered to become a research subject for Sidney Cohen...one of the world's leading medical psychedelic researchers. After several profound and transformative LSD experiences...Wilson proposed to the Board of Directors of Alcoholics Anonymous that the psychedelic treatment model be incorporated into the AA approach. Wilson claimed that his LSD experiences were similar in content to the spiritual epiphany he had had while undergoing alcohol withdrawal-induced delerium tremens many years earlier, yet without the medical risk posed by DTs. Therefore, he asserted that psychedelics offered as safe and efficacious pathway to recovery from alcohol addiction. By the time of his proposal to the board of AA, however, disturbing reports had begun to filter out about Timothy Leary's activities at Harvard as well as of similar adventurers elsewhere, and it had become clear that this unusual class of drugs was developing a rather tarnished reputation. Consequently, t he AA board instructed Wilson to cease being a proponent of the psychedelic treatment model for alcoholics, or else face expulsion from the organization he had founded. Wilson, perceiving the futility of his efforts, abandoned his goal of bringing psychedelics into the Alcoholics Anonymous fold."I can't even begin to imagine how many minds, careers, families and lives have been destroyed over the last 50 years by the scourge of alcoholism that might have saved had this effective method for overcoming this--and other--addictions been freely available. In my own family, alcoholism has been a dark shadow that has descended over multiple generations.
And while alcoholism is certainly one of society's major ills, psychedelic research in the golden age was shown to be just as effective in the treatment of other difficult-to-treat symptoms of the human condition.
Pioneer psychedelic researcher and psychiatrist, Gary Fisher, worked with psychotic children at a hospital in Southern California in the late 50's. The first patient he treated with LSD was an eleven-year-old girl who was so ill that she was incapable of assimilating nutrients that would keep her alive. She was literally wasting away and was so suicidal that she had to be in 24-hour restraints or she would batter herself abominably. She was totally uncommunicative and it was apparent that she would probably die soon. The idea was that Dr. Fisher had nothing to lose on that young girl. From the book "Higher Wisdom":
"During the session she started wailing like a wounded animal--it was the most chilling sound. Then she started screaming, and the pitch would increase and increase. We tried everything to make contact with her, to no avail.He had broken through to the wounded child inside. Now that she was speaking, he was able to work with her more effectively. She was soon able to be left without restraints and her powerful and obstinate personality came to the fore. She had some 18 or 19 more LSD sessions and each one was productive. She no longer hurt herself and although she remained in the hospital, she got well enough to attend school.
"After about seven or eight hours I was exhausted, and so frustrated that I just yelled at her, 'Nancy! When are you going to stop screaming! I can't stand it anymore!' She stopped and looked at me. This was the first time she had made eye contact with anybody, and said 'I have a long way to go, so just stay out of my way.' That was the first thing she had ever said to anybody. Then she went back to screaming. That was our session."
Dr. Fisher, buoyed by Nancy's success, went on to treat a number of other extremely disturbed and totally unmanageable children with LSD. He found that older schizophrenic children responded the best to this treatment method, while the least responsive were very young children, although he says that he did treat one three-year-old child successfully with LSD.
I feel great sorrow and compassion for children who are mentally ill and exist in such hellish netherworlds. How can society wantonly ignore treatment methods that could help them escape from their hells?
Another entire class of children who exist in their own kinds of hell are those who suffer from one or more of the triumvirate of abuses: sexual, physical and psychological. More often than not, these children suffer in silence, while their souls bear the scars of their abuse. These scars run so deep and remain for so long that traditional psychotherapy barely exposes them. Yet here too, psychedelic therapy was found to hold great promise.
Dr. Stanislav Grof, probably the best known psychedelic therapist has written a number of books detailing how effective psychedelic (and his subsequent Holotropic Breathing) therapy can allow patients to work through their history of abuse. What's more, he found that traumas arising before and during the birth process itself can manifest in many psychosomatic illnesses. I've written about Dr. Grof's amazing work in my posting "The Breath of Lives".
There is a great divide in the West between the mind and the Spirit. It is an artificial divide, yet our culture has cut itself off from all that Spirit manifests such as Nature and Soul.
When we look at our violent, greedy, wasteful, aggressive, materialistic culture and realize that all of this comes at the expense of our Earth, our environment and billions of other humans, I have to wonder if anything short of near-total destruction can turn it around. Sadly, we might not have long to wait to find out.
Our Earth can't long sustain the abuse being heaped on it. When an unimaginably huge island of floating garbage can be found in the middle of the Pacific Ocean; when the life-sustaining oxygen factory known as the Amazon Basin (up to 20% of the earth's oxygen comes from here) is being destroyed at a rate that could see the end of this magnificent and vital ecosystem within forty years; when greenhouse gases continue to raise the planet's temperature while worldwide glaciers are melting at an alarming rate, the current generation that has had a chance to do something about this will probably not live to see the damage we have wrought. But it seems fairly certain that our children and our children's children will bear the brunt of our ignorance and negligence.
We certainly cannot ignore the fact that there are many, many people and groups around the world who are concerned about these things. However, the battle these people must wage against a capitalist system that has become so powerful is daunting. Another factor is that the vast majority of people in the West exist in a spiritual "dead zone".
While psychedelics aren't a cure-all for the ills of our society, they have been shown--when used within the correct "set and setting"--to help people break through the cultural brainwashing and see the truly important relationships that exist between humanity and Nature; between mind and spirit and between body and soul.
One last account by Dr. Fisher of his work with cancer patients.
"There were many cancer patients at Cedars [Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Los Angeles] who had intractable pain. The head of the psychiatry department asked me if I would conduct some LSD sessions to see if this would be effective in pain management.. And of course I did. I didn't really tell them my rationale, because it wouldn't have made any sense to the oncologists. I suspect they thought that LSD would simply reduce the pain. But I thought that if the patients had some insight into what their cancer was all about, and made peace with themselves and with their world, then the overlay of pain--which is psychic pain--would be reduced and they would have an easier death. And that's exactly what happened.
"The head of oncology was very disturbed by the results. To give you an example, one of the first people we treated was a neurotic and demanding lady who had invasive cancer. She had an amazing LSD experience. She got into all her internal conflict and her dysfunctional relationship with her family. When we saw her the next day, she had refused her pain medication. The head of oncology came to see why and she said, 'Well, I'm not having any pain.' He got quite flustered and said, 'Well, you must be having pain. I can show you on your X-rays where your cancer is, and it causes pain. You're lying to me.' She replied, 'I don't need pain medication right now. Maybe I'll need it down the line, but right now I don't need it, and I don't want to take it because of the side effects. Why should I take it if I don't need it? I'm handling everything okay.' He said, 'You either take this pain medication or I'll discharge you.' She wouldn't take it and so he discharged her.
"The physician thought we were making these people psychotic, because they didn't believe they had pain. It was a real mess. I continued to see and treat other people, but he was very obstreperous about my treating his patients. He couldn't understand what was happening, but he didn't want to know."
That story to me is a perfect definition of irony. If we look at our world and our culture, we know that it is insane; how we treat each other and how we allow ourselves to be treated by the culture is insane. Yet there may be chemical tools that can help us gain insight into ourselves and therefore into our world. And these are viewed as dangers to society.
But thanks to the persistance of many of the people interviewed for this book and especially to MAPS, there is a real hope for the renewal of research into these important psychedelic states.
The next few years could see a great leap forward in how society views these substances. I don't foresee a day soon where the average person would be able to experience psychedelic states; even under expert guidance. But as research into the benefits of psychedelics for healing purposes becomes more acceptable to the public at large, I believe that it will only be a matter of time before the general public will be allowed to freely explore their own counsciousnesses...again.