‘Writing on Drugs’ by Sadie Plant was originally published in 1999. The book is a dense examination on how drugs have influenced contemporary culture through the medium of literature. She uses a wide variety of sources and employs several post-structuralist theorists in her technique.
Barthes’ ‘death of the author’ is oddly implicit in ‘Writing on Drugs’. Sadie Plant is almost totally invisible throughout the text (rather than those she examines.) Her academic style is thick in quotations and references but often lacks cohesion and direction; the result is a bewildering tour of culture through drugs that lacks originality. Nearly the whole book is regurgitation and the manner of its construction, although seemingly thorough, tends to obscure any possible original meaning.
“To write on drugs is to plunge into a world where nothing is as simple or as stable as it seems. Everything about it shimmers and mutates as you try to hold its gaze. Facts and figures dance around each other; lines of enquiry scatter like expensive dust.” [PLANT:1999;248] There is a strange post-modern twist to this quote in that it is impossible to decipher whether Plant is talking about drug literature in general or her own experience of doing so; or indeed both, or neither.
Plant’s investment in time on pre-counter-culture texts, like De Quincey and Coleridge, traps her stylistically. Her own review of drug literature is of alienation, psychosis, division – something that simultaneously destroys and creates an individual against the backdrop of historicism. Needless to say that this style, though fitting for the earliest works of drug literature, falls far short of the post-counter-culture mark.
She falls into a trap of understanding that belongs to a more aged ideology when discussing later drug literature. That is, she frames it in the US’s overly discussed ‘war on drugs’. She almost reproduces directly the words of many other drug-lit writers – never differentiating psychedelic literature – to the point where one is really only reading a reference library. Is it a useful library? Arguably the bibliography makes for better reading.
“Psilocybin mushrooms have the same sense of personality, and all the tryptamines introduce the elfin, cartoon characters described as ‘the machine elves of cyber space’ by Terence McKenna, who has published a number of influential discussions of DMT and its relatives.” [PLANT:1999;141]This is the extent of Plant’s words on McKenna; slightly short of the mark when it comes to the influence of this writer who often spoke of “self-transforming machine elves.” She even misquotes the meaning of psychedelic.
It seems to me that the only thing Sadie Plant has offered the genre of drug literature are some old, worn analytical models. She manages, with the use of some flimsy quotes, to connect all drug literature as being about “swirling colours and shapes”, as if a single banner makes the understanding of these texts more palatable. The fact that there exists a different temperance, in different texts, on different drugs is woefully ignored.
Of course, it is the way drug literature has shaped modern culture that is the books pretence to exist – even though at times it feels like she’s doing the very opposite – but even in this sphere Plant is really only asserting the standard understandings. It is ultimately a work of creative non-fiction, wherein the creativity has lost all sense originality. Well worth a read if you’re one of the few people not to realise that Coca-Cola was originally made from the Coca plant and you like your writing impersonal, stodgy and often ill-informed.
I will leave you with a lie that has been printed on the back of my edition; a quote from Geoff Dyer of the Book Forum who clearly knows how to sell a book but not necessarily how to read one:
“She’s a Nietzschean free spirit, as hip to what is happening now as was Sontag in her pomp… what is being examined here is nothing less than the history of the modern mind as refracted through the weird prism of narcotics.” Maybe he means the Nietzsche of the 1890s?
‘The Joyous Cosmology – Adventures in Chemical Consciousness’, by British born philosopher Alan Watts, was originally published in 1962. Watts takes a variety of his psychedelic drug experiences and creates a single stream of consciousness that works together as if a single trip. The style is engaging, thoughtful and well constructed and retains much of his Zen influence.
In part, the book is a homage to Aldous Huxley’s ‘Doors of Perception’. However, the intervening years had proved fruitful for scientific research in psychedelics and Watts wass keen to extend the philosophical elements that Huxley had started exploring in light of these advances.
“While I cannot hope to surpass Aldous Huxley as a master of English prose, I feel that the time is ripe for an account of some of the deeper, or higher, levels of insight that can be reached through these consciousness-changing ‘drugs’.” Though there is a strong sense of ‘each to their own expertise’, Watts certainly attempts, in his own very personal style, to emulate and possibly surpass Huxley’s mescaline account.
The book, which runs to about 100 pages, is split into three distinct sections. A prologue, the account of the subjective experience and an epilogue. The prologue opens with a broad philosophical discussion that frames the later subjective accounts, wherein he argues against Cartesian mind/body dualism and attempts to recast ‘mind’ as the formation of awareness/perception, not a ‘ghost in the machine’ as it were.
“Except where I am describing visions before closed eyes, and this is always specified, none of these experiences are hallucinations. They are simply changed ways of seeing, interpreting , and reacting to actual persons and events in the world of ‘public reality.’” Essentially, Watts is demonstrating a subjective change, (the awareness has shifted through a change of perception,) the object (“public reality”) remains unchanged in itself and no illusion is obscuring its nature; only opening it.
Unlike Aldous Huxley, who placed a lot of emphasis on the idea of space within his text, Watts’ preference is initially an examination with time; especially in his descriptions of the ‘onset of a drug’. The move from ‘clock time’ to ‘biological time’ is a shift in modality that resonates with Timothy Leary’s writings on consciousness from the same period. It might be best described as the move from an external account of time to an interior one; an idea heavily influenced by Zen.
Watts retains a good deal of Huxley’s model narrative but the language he employs is certainly indicative of his own influences: “In the type of experience I am describing, it seems that the superconscious method of thinking becomes conscious. We see the world as the whole body sees it, and for this very reason there is the greatest difficulty in attempting to translate this mode of vision into a form of language that is based in contrast and contradiction.”
Interestingly, whilst “mind-at-large” has become “superconscious”, the form is essentially the same idea/construct as Huxley used when he wrote about “opening the antipodes”; the filter of the senses.
There’s a constant recourse to ‘the psychedelic experience’ being an activity one is thrown into; thrust from an ‘ordinary reality’; the over-objectified and narrow awareness of the everyday: “The manners and mores of Western civilisation force this perpetual sanity upon us to an extreme degree, for there is no accepted corner in our lives for the art of pure nonsense.”
Like Leary’s model of the psychedelic experience, this throwness becomes at first an anxiety that one most overcome, an idea that is vital for spiritual constructs in 1960s texts because of its association with the ‘mystical experience’. The society of ‘normal awareness’ is repeatedly cited as the ultimate source for this anxiety – as a state of alienation and restriction, the delimitation of “Being”.
‘The Joyous Cosmology – Adventures in Chemical Consciousness’ is both a wonderfully written subjective account of the ‘psychedelic experience’, by a very articulate individual and also a very interesting vehicle for Watt’s philosophical, spiritual and religious understandings. Well worth a read from a number of standpoints and certainly a fine example of a psychedelic counter-culture text.
Originally published in 2000 ‘DMT: The Spirit Molecule’, by Rick Strassman, has quickly become one of the leading books in psychedelic literature. Strassman presents a genuine attempt to tie up the esoteric and the scientific in a manner perhaps unrivalled in the genre. Powerfully written, the book contains elements of autobiography, scientific research and psychedelic speculation and Strassman’s skill in maintaining an objective outlook throughout creates an engaging narrative.
DMT: The Spirit Molecule
Since the counter-culture fall out, there had been 20 years where human testing with psychedelics vanished from the scientific radar. It wasn’t until Rick Strassman, after a lengthy bureaucratic battle that is described in detail in the book, was given permission to study DMT that the curtains began to lift. For five years, between 1990 – 1995, Strassman gave approx. 400 doses of DMT to experienced and stable psychonauts in order to examine the ‘mystical experience’.
Strassman’s working hypothesis is that DMT, which is naturally found in the body, is produced by the pineal gland within the brain. During near-death experiences he postulates that the gland releases DMT and results in a partial detachment of the mind from the body. In order to test the theory, he administers, via injection, DMT to his volunteers and examines both their physical and subjective response in relation to ‘naturally occurring’ mystical states.
Interestingly, there are two assumptions that Strassman works from. Firstly, that the pineal gland produces DMT and secondly that DMT is the most likely candidate for the ‘spirit molecule’. The existence of the spirit molecule is the alchemical gold, which, if it exists, provides science with its first measurable insight into the ‘mystical experience’, the world of otherness and pure consciousness. This bridge, or trigger, lays the foundation for a good deal of psychedelic speculation and what makes Strassman’s style so engaging is his ability to contextualise possibility.
“Keep in mind that a spirit molecule is not spiritual in and of itself. It is a tool, or a vehicle. Think of it as a tugboat, a chariot, a scout on horseback, something to which we can fix our consciousness – A spirit molecule also leads us into spiritual realms. These worlds are usually invisible to us and our instruments and are not accessible using our normal state of consciousness.”
The book has a typical psy-lit structure. There is the usual dose of history, which for Strassman largely focuses on the chemical understanding but does also lend to the cultural as well. There are well written outlines examining the science involved and the autobiographical element of his own beliefs. The processes of gaining permission to experiment, conducting and analyzing results are also explored in depth. The book is, in one sense, a palatable scientific paper and, in another, it exemplifies the social prejudice that psychedelics still maintain among the general populous and institutions; this is the constant discourse that fuels the narrative.
There are several chapters dedicated to examining the experience of the volunteers and these are perhaps among the most interesting I’ve read. Strassman divides DMT experience into roughly three categories; ‘personal’, ‘transpersonal’ and ‘invisible’. The ‘personal’ experience is a sort of self-reflective psycho-analysis, wherein one engages with the structures of normal consciousness. The ‘transpersonal’ relates distinctly to the ‘mystical experience’, or what Leary might call the ‘ego-loss’, or what psy-lit generally categorizes as the ‘white light’.
The third type, the ‘invisible’ was, for Strassman, the most difficult to evaluate. Touched upon by Terence McKenna when he described his meetings with ‘self-transforming machine elves’, the experience involves contact ‘cross-dimensionally’. “Beyond our own loss of control, some volunteers felt another ‘intelligence’ or ‘force’ directing their minds in an interactive manner. This was especially common in cases of contact with ‘beings’.” These experiences took on an almost science-fiction like quality and proved to be fertile ground for speculation.
In the end, I felt the most important element of the book was the contextualization of the questions most important in psychedelic research. Strassman keenly recognizes and extrapolates the areas that appear to be most vital in the further study and theory of psychedelics. For example, the hypothesis that the pineal gland produces DMT remains only a hypothesis; for our understanding to move on, science needs to turn its attention to these speculations and Strassman constantly reiterates the need for an objective framework.
The book also lends further credence to the “set and setting” understanding that Leary et al developed in the 1960s: “The spirit molecule is neither good nor bad, beneficial or harmful, in and of itself. Rather, set and setting establish the context and the quality of experiences to which DMT leads us. Who we are and what we bring to the sessions and to our lives ultimately mean more than the drug experience itself.”
Drawing a line between the subjective and objective understanding is perhaps the biggest challenge facing psychedelia, if it is in fact an obstacle at all – Quantum Theory undertones, which may become the vital component in psychedelic theory, are always too garbled. Unlike McKenna, who felt that experience was primary, Strassman seems a little more reluctant in his appraisal.
Published in 1999 ‘Food of the Gods’, written by psychedelic grandmaster Terence Mckenna, was part of a small host of books the author released in the late 1990s. It expands on the foundations of earlier works like ‘The Archaic Revival’, introduces a number of Terence’s theories and is, ultimately, a call for radical social change.
The Archaic Revival
I haven’t felt that I’ve had to annotate a book so much for a long time, this is largely because of the massive variety of topics, which McKenna puts under the psychedelic microscope; history, evolution, botany, social theory, literature, environmentalism and the list goes on. Upon finishing it I couldn’t help but think that there lay many of the seeds from which many of today’s green shoots have risen.
Generally speaking, the book follows a track from the earliest ‘Hominoids’ to the present day, during which Terence places not only psychedelics, but also drugs ranging from sugar to heroin, under the light of social analysis. The Archaic Revival is a theory that modern culture will return to what Terence describes as the ‘Partnership Society’, from our earliest conscious days.
“The next great step toward a planetary holism is the partial merging of the technologically transformed human world with the archaic matrix of vegetable intelligence that is the transcendent other.”
Before exploring the “vegetable intelligence” and the “transcendent other” it is necessary to say a few more words on the “Partnership Society” and that which superseded it, and is still with us today, the “Dominator Culture”.
McKenna’s “stoned-ape theory” says that mushrooms helped guide our evolution into self-aware conscious beings: “Once having experienced the state of consciousness induced by the mushrooms, foraging humans would return to them repeatedly, in order to re-experience their bewitching novelty. This process would create what C.H. Waddington called a “creode”, a pathway of developmental activity, which we call a habit.”
Accordingly then, early hominoids continued to explore the ‘powers’ of the mushroom religiously and habitually (in a walk-to-work, not junk sense) with the outcome of an improved body of language. (Language and its connection with ontology in McKenna’s work is an absolute key into understanding his conceptions of the psychedelic experience – something I will return to in later reviews.) These Partnership societies are described by McKenna as being a trinity of sorts: The Great Goddess Cult, the Cattle Cult and, of course, the mushroom. It is feminine, environmental and psychedelic.
Eventually, separately evolved cultures of humans, who had in some way lost, or never had, the ‘powers’ of the mushroom – the Dominator Culture – came to all but eradicate the Partnership Society. (The values of both cultures are extensively explored and speculated upon throughout the book.)
What follows is a long history of an alienation of sorts from ourselves and the planet, which Terence explores with his usual zeal: “Our estrangement from nature and the unconscious became entrenched roughly 2000 years ago, during the shift from the age of the Great God Pan to that of Pisces that occurred with the suppression of the pagan mysteries and the rise of Christianity.”
What is it that we’ve been alienated from? – The “vegetable intelligence” and the “transcendent other”. They represent an “alien” intelligence in which we had access, lost it and are arguably coming back into communication with as the 21st century roles on. This “Other” is of course the vital component in psychedelic literature, it provides the ground for epistemological and metaphysical exploration in psychedelia; something, post-McKenna, which has begun to take off more seriously in psychedelic literature – especially in light of McKenna’s understanding of the DMT experience.
This book has a more social premise however: “The chief lesson to be learned from the psychedelic experience is the degree to which unexamined cultural values and limitations of language have made us the unwitting prisoners of our own assumptions.”
In the end McKenna’s ‘Food of the Gods’ is essentially a call to social action in much the same way as Timothy Leary, from some 20 years before. The difference is in how this call has been formulated, far from the seemingly empty façade of Leary’s radicalism, McKenna is considered, focussed and all the more powerful for its broad intellectual touch.
Through a twist of synchronicity, I found Alfred Douglas’ ‘Oracle of Change: How to consult the I Ching’ in a local second-hand book store, just hours after finishing ‘The Invisible Landscape’ by the McKenna brothers. It seems right then to do a short review in light of its recent appearance and the fact that one of psychedelic literature’s principle texts leans so heavily on it.
First published in 1971, ‘The Oracle of Change: How to consult the I Ching’, has gone through several reprints and in its popularity has become an important English-language introduction to the Chinese divinatory tool; the I Ching. I’ve worked from the 1974 Penguin edition.
Douglas has provided a very simple and informative structure to the book that is divided into two parts. Firstly, the introduction, which includes some history, contextualization, short analysis of prevalent ideas contained within the text and, of course, the methods of consulting the I Ching. He also offers advice in how one should read the results (though I should add personal, subjective analysis is at ground the vital component of consultation.)
According to Douglas: “The philosophies of both major Chinese religions, Taoism and Confucianism, are to be found with the I Ching’s pages” (P.16) and that “the Chinese Oracle enables us to glimpse something of these mysterious rhythms, and to realign our lives so that we are living more in harmony with the laws of nature.” (P.15)
As far as esoteric, Eastern wisdom goes, the I Ching represents one of the most important extant ancient texts; indeed arguably for the history of esoteric literature. Elements of the method are thought to date back to before 2000 B.C. and with a series of historical commentaries on the hexagrams, one begins to see an evolving intellectual history.
The second part is the translated text of the I Ching. It includes all 64 Hexagrams, the King Wen sequence (as used by Terence McKenna,) the later Confucian commentaries (the Decision,) the Image (Hsiang,) the Yao (the Duke of Chou interpretations) and the Duke of Chou’s commentary on the moving lines. The book is relatively comprehensive.
I’ve read slightly differing opinions on the quality of the translation and taking into account advancement in Chinese translation, my guess is it might be a little dated but certainly adequate in both learning the methods and beginning your own understanding of the diviner’s knowledge.
There are three methods of consulting the I Ching that Douglas examines. Firstly, there is the traditional and surest method, which entails casting yarrow sticks. Secondly, throwing three coins and lastly, the six wands method (although this last method doesn’t include ‘moving lines’ so renders some of the Duke of Chou commentary useless.)
According to Douglas, and having tried myself, you may find it easier to begin with the six wands method and move you way up to the more complex yarrow stick method. I found that it gave me time to get a feel for the text and the way in which it works and I’ve found words of use in all three techniques.
‘The Oracle of Change’ is neither for the scholar nor the experienced mystic. It is a layman’s introduction to the I Ching but it does provide a thorough grounding from which to explore new avenues. The practical element is, in itself, very well communicated and you can begin to experiment with them very quickly. If you have a growing interest in the I Ching and Eastern Mysticism then this is a wonderful place to begin your journey.
Castaneda's Journey
‘Castaneda’s Journey: The power and the allegory’ by Richard de Mille was originally published in 1976. This review was based on the 1978 edition. Richard de Mille is a scholar and writer whose study of philosophy, religion and science drew him to Castaneda’s books (as well as his daughter who provided copies of the first four books and urged him to read them.)
De Mille’s goal in writing the book was to debunk some of the non-fiction authenticity claims of Castaneda (and what was a growing army of devout followers at the time) and to examine possible academic sources that Castaneda had leant on for material. In de Mille’s own words:
“Castaneda laboured 49 years to become the complicated, superficially inconsistent, deeply constant man who wrote Tales of Power. I have laboured one year to unfold him. Where I have gone astray, others will stay on the path. Where I have hit the nail on the head, many whose thumbs are throbbing will stoically deny it” (1978: P.25)
Throughout the analysis, which is structured in a pseudo-epic manner (no doubt in order to reflect Castaneda’s own taste for grandiose themes,) de Mille displays the ability to slip easily between more serious insights and “witty” conclusions. The overall effect is very engaging but it does work against him when tackling some of the more complicated issues; like metaphysics. He is also restricted somewhat in his analysis by exacerbating the authenticity point.
Having said this, he uses some very interesting techniques to examine both the books and the man. Immediately, de Mille declares that he will be using the names “Carlos” and “Castaneda” to mean two different people. When he ascertains facts pertaining to the author then they belong to Castaneda. When the facts are provided in conjunction with the literary works then they belong to Carlos.
Using this dual-character method he quickly identifies how very little is known concretely about the author and how timelines between the his real life and literary life are not always in sync. De Mille does maintain however, that the timeline in the books, though confusing sometimes, are consistent with one another. But his primary goal remains authenticity and by using this method he brings to light contradictions, which provide damning evidence against them being pure works of non-fiction.
What gives “Castaneda’s journey” some credence as important periphery reading for psychedelic literature is de Mille’s examination of not what is true in the strictest historically objective sense but what is true, or original, in the world of ideas. Writing at a time when Castaneda’s books had found an audience with the new-age and spiritual movements he needed to confront truth as a subjective coherence.
“The words that come out of his mouth or typewriter are charged with an essence that makes things happen in both separate and boss realities. Some of these things may be beneficial. He is not lying, we can say, because the meaning we get from his allegory is more important than his secret preparations.” (1978: P.169)
Although de Mille, who states that he is a scholar interested in philosophy, science and religion, pays service to the truth as allegory; he’s reluctant to tackle Castaneda from a religious perspective and instead concentrates on, firstly, questioning how the academic foundation of the books arose and secondly, examines the subjective truth through the goggles of analytic philosophy.
Whilst I believe he was successful in extrapolating ideas from Castaneda, he was less successful in applying them; largely due to his philosophical approach. A continental analysis would have been more applicable and would certainly have reaped more academic reward. He is though, if nothing else, consistent with the text – especially in his reading of the metaphysics of nagualism:
“The tonal is what happens when the nagual gives birth. The tonal is what exists. More properly, it is people’s perception or imagination of things. The idea of the nagual is part of the tonal, but the nagual itself is not part of the tonal. Everybody has a tonal but the nagual has everybody. When something ceases to exist – like an ocean wave, a life, or a tonal – it returns to its potential state in the nagual..” (1978: P.138)
In his analysis of sources there is a constant recourse to Wittgenstein and his magnum opus – Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Though this fits into the popular trends of Anglo-saxon philosophy at the time (and still nowadays) it lacks the methodological equipment to engage with much of Castaneda’s ontology. Though slightly hampered by this, de Mille still manages to point towards several interesting insights and lay the foundations for future philosophical discourse though.
Overall, this is a very worthwhile read for anyone interested in the underpinnings of both Castaneda’s work and psychedelic literature in general. De Mille manages to put both the author and his works through a clear looking-glass and although his academic contextualization is limited, it is none-the-less valuable.
Several years later, in an effort to further condemn the beliefs of those people who understood Castaneda’s education by don Juan as pure non-fiction, he wrote a second book on the subject. Titled ‘The don Juan papers: Further Castaneda controversies’ I hope to review this work in the near future.
Blog by Robert Dickins originally appeared in the Fallyrag editorials
Do you remember Charlie Chalk? You might have been lucky enough to see the 80’s cartoon, or perhaps you might have caught a glimpse of this psychedelic clown at a certain restaurant chain a few years back. If not, after you’ve read this, at least go and listen to the theme song. Dare I say? I do. Classic.
Even in the most macho, sledge-hammering moments of my life, I’ve been caught singing: “Charlie Chalk, Charlie Chalk, he’s got a funny way of walking and a wacky way of chalking, Charlie Chalk.” As you can imagine then, it was with a child-like excitement that I popped on the complete DVD, before posting it to my niece for her birthday. If you’ll believe that.
I was in awe, ready to see Charlie in action again, in full flip, leap and spring, across the TV screen. I braced myself to re-enter my childhood for an hour or two, losing myself in mindless innocence and blushing, virginal unreality. How naïve I still am. Like my recent Hobbit regress; the creative impression was far from innocent.
Slightly inebriated and watching through my thick adult peepers, Charlie’s adventures began to take on the semblance of a very sinister struggle; his slow resignation to the familiar.
The story unfolded anew.
Charlie woke up, adrift a strange island called Merrytwit after a long ontological sleep; he’d only gone sailing to do “a little fishin’” and “a little sleepin’”.
Undeterred by his predicament, he ventured forth and met a host of ego-derived archetypes. The lazy ape and the pedant duck, the anal captain and of course, the pièce de résistance, the clumsy, chicken-shit pink elephant. All of them offering crappy advice to the newly stranded sailor of the mind – Charlie Chalk the psychonaut.
Charlie was a hero though. He knew how to handle himself. He took the whole experience head on, always with a smile and a mellow scratch of his noggin’. The archetypes couldn’t organize a party in a brewery. They needed Charlie. He not only focused them, pulling the island together as a functioning whole but he gave them reason – something not even the bossy Captain Mildred could do.
You see, all the flipping and leaping was just the façade of a working clown; like his hands he carried it with him wherever he went. You see, that noggin’ scratch was the key, the key that allowed Charlie to overcome the trials and tribulations of the bizarre state-of-mind that was Merrytwit. Whether it was finding the perfect spot for his home or dealing with a moaning mountain; Charlie thrived on tackling the basic problems of existence.
The equipment with which to tackle every problem was always to be found somewhere on Merrytwit, waiting to be found and utilized. When in doubt, Charlie could even go to Trader Jones’s outpost – no money accepted, trade only – and dip into its wealth of tools. Trader Jones even had a cure for chronic sneezing – a veritable green and bubbling broth served in a cup and saucer.
Now, you might be wondering why I called his adventures sinister. I mean, it’s not as if I thought like that twenty years ago but it’s different now. “You’re lost Charlie! What about the circus?” I’d shouted at the television. He never seemed to care though. Then, in the last episode, he finally decided to leave because of a savage bout of home-sickness.
I was relieved; the psychonaut was sailing again… only to fall once more into a deep ontological sleep. Once again he unwittingly stranded himself on Merrytwit, with the archetypes of the ego. He decided, with the ironic cheer of a clown, to remain there. The sinister resignation of the familiar, which had formed from the very first episode, had finally come to fruition. In the end, Charlie happily resigned himself to the idyll.
Breaking Open the Head
Post McKenna & Leary, as time ticked through the millennium a new psychedelic writer began to emerge onto the scene – Daniel Pinchbeck. His first literary offering is the subject of this review: ‘Breaking Open the Head’, originally published in 2002 by Broadway Books.
Reading ‘Breaking Open the Head’ completed a cycle of investigation I’d unconsciously started over two years before. There was a patient anticipation in wanting to read it.
Perhaps it was symptomatic of an inherited respect for Daniel Pinchbeck’s writing, which I’d acquired unwittingly from a close and trusted friend. She’d read a few short but tantalizing passages to me and the effect had been the flicking of a new literary interest in my mind.
Two years ago, the passages had the effect of gestating my understanding of the psychedelic genre as a larger framework; they pieced together odd other bits of other psy-literature I’d read into a more coherent whole. I withdrew to 1953 and Aldous Huxley then moved chronologically forward. I needed to see the foundations of psychedelic literature being put up before grasping the nature of the contemporary conception.
In a similar respect, a historicism of psy-lit is one of the tasks Daniel sets himself in this book and I enjoyed learning about several of his influences who I’d yet to come into much contact with, like Walter Benjamin. At other times though, I was reading slightly adrift of Daniel’s threads as though we’d received totally different messages from the same author.
Daniel’s approach is ‘classically psychedelic’ in its structure – psychonaut & psychedelics – but to a post-modern extreme, where the topical threads are thickly layered and the referencing seems almost arbitrary in its recurrence. There is, however, some wonderful synthesis of ideas throughout.
The book’s tagline has changed from the first edition to the 2004 copy I have just read. Originally the tag was ‘A Journey into Contemporary Shamanism’ however, the 2004 edition says ‘A Chemical Adventure’, which makes it appear as if it’s cashing in on the psychedelic classic ‘PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story’. I was willing to put this aside though and brush the dust of the publishing industry away from it.
The threads of the book – Daniel’s own ‘awakening’, historicism of psychedelia, contemporary understanding and mystical awakening – are found across the genre to differing degrees in different writers. To begin with, the book is rather jarring in its methods of synthesising the different ideas but, in credit to its writer, by the end there is a very clear gnosis, which really wraps the book up as a whole.
The experimentation elements with Ibogaine, DMT and alike came across as the strongest parts of the journey. They were very engaging and treated with a respect by Daniel, who at no point laboured the experiences. Their effect was to create the lucidity of the story, though this often battled the laboured referencing of other writers and thinkers; where perhaps Daniel’s voice would have been ample.
Throughout, the main objective seems to be a mirroring between the author’s spiritual awakening and the spiritual closing of modern society. A jarring dualism between materialism and the esoteric that drives the narrative throughout. It consistently engages the reader to re-reflect on the world around them, as it slowly ‘breaks open the head’. The result of which though, is a further embedding of dualistic, Platonic conceptions.
“I now think of the brain (as distinct from the mind) as a kind of radio. With “normative” levels of serotonin, the brain is tunes to the “consensual reality” – something like the local pop or talk radio station.” (2004: P.36)
Science is both a friend and an enemy of psychedelia in this book. A friend as far as it is the modern psychonaut’s tool in synthesising chemicals. A foe in so far as it is rigidly empiricist and materialistic. Daniel never quite introduces the idea of a ‘dogmatic science’, partly I think because it seems to stand against what science is by action, that is non-dogmatic. But there is certainly a distrust of sciences foundations being taken as culture gospel.
“Modern culture, devoted to mercantilism, industrialism, and scientific progress, enforced a sharp distinction between sleep and waking, idleness and productivity, childhood and adulthood, human consciousness and the non-sentient world of nature. The existence of numerous orders of conscious beings – beings that could show themselves on occasion, but most often appeared in certain ecstatic states or in dreams – was adamantly denied by both church and State.” (2004: P.67)
This departure is most clearly depicted in regard to Timothy Leary’s approach. Not the popular flair approach but his scientific understanding. In talking about general shamanic traits across the world:
“The candidate, while he is undergoing shamanic initiation, receives a “massive influx” of the sacred. That temporary unleashing of supernatural forces that the initiate must learn to control can be dangerous to those close to him” – Later on he quotes William Irwin Thompson “the shaman is transformer who takes in powerful energies…” (2004: P.71) –
This is in stark contrast to Leary’s belief, which proposed a change in personal perspective under psychedelics i.e. the power is not external, it is simply a change in consciousness, the internal. Daniel however examines the forces of externality as something other that opens up between the internal and external under psychedelics.
There are many interesting avenues of ideas and beliefs in ‘Breaking Open the Head’, to many for this review to incorporate. Suffice to say, this is an invaluable book for anyone interested in self-awareness and the possibilities of experience. Not, as Uncut described it ‘anyone interested in drugs will find this book worthwhile’ – I think this is perhaps the antithesis of the final messages Daniel writes and it surprises me that they chose the quote for the cover of the 2004 edition.
The Invisible Landscape
When this book was first published in 1975 it remained for a long time an obscure and little known pseudo-scientific oddity. In psychedelic circles however it gained an increasingly mythical status and as rumour of this rare book spread, alongside an increasingly vocal Terence McKenna, the pressures for a re-publication finally broke in 1993, when HarperCollins took the job on.
Written by two brothers, Dennis and Terence McKenna, ‘The Invisible Landscape’ attempts to do two quite different approaches as far as psychedelic literature goes. The book is split into two major sections: Part 1, entitled ‘Mind, Molecules and Magic’, is largely the work of Dennis and part 2, entitled ‘Time, Change and Becoming’ is Terence’s half of the book. I will briefly say a little about both and how they fit into the larger schema of psychedelic literature.
Part 1 investigates, analyses and speculates on several areas that have already been touched upon by the genre. For example, schizophrenia, which in many respects is a continuation of work like the essay “Psychosis: “experimental” and real” by Joe K. Adams that appeared in the Psychedelic Review in the early 1960s. However, the framework of the investigation has moved on slightly to reflect the specific entry into psychedelic knowledge that the McKenna’s experienced during their famous mushroom trip in La Chorrea. (See ‘True Hallucinations’)
Primarily, what their experience in La Chorrea gave the McKenna’s was a geographically new background, i.e. South America and more specifically, a historical entry of inquiry via the shamanic use of psychedelics and their place within ‘primitive’ societies. Dennis uses these entries points to create an academic conception of the ideas that surrounded their ‘experiment in La Chorrea.’
“Shamanism and the experiment at La Chorrea are not merely theoretical aberrations but are precursors of the ways and means by which consciousness will eventually organize its dominants to overthrow the modern ontology of reductionism and arise reborn in an atemporalized and holistic mode of understanding.” (1993: P.208)
The book isn’t purely a socio-historical evaluation. One needs to bare in mind that Dennis was a scientist, so therefore we also see an attempt “toward a holographic theory of mind”. How successful he was, is perhaps not the remit of this literary review but suffice to say that it provides ‘The Invisible Landscape’ and psychedelic literature in general with a (pseudo) scientific basis, which arguably it had lost through Timothy Leary.
Part 2, ‘Time, Change and Becoming’, is a very different prospect however. It is no merely a “towards a theory” premise, it is the extrapolation of what Terence McKenna believed to be a working mathematical theory of time, history and a concept he introduces called “novelty”. It not only provides a historical link, within psychedelic literature, between Eastern and South American influences but also began the manifestation of psychedelic literature’s interest in the date 2012, which is so prevalent nowadays.
The ‘Novelty Theory’ is the information, or psychedelic knowledge if you will, that came out as a consequence of the experiment at La Chorrea but also, more importantly, from Terence’s dealings with the ancient Chinese divinatory tool, the I Ching. Built from 64 lined hexagrams, the method only became widely known to the West less than 100 years before this time, though it had existed since before 2000 BC, in various forms, in China. The King Wen sequence, a specific form, was developed in around 1150 BC and it is this specific sequence that Terence uses in his calculations.
“The I Ching, through its concern with detailing the dynamics of change and process, may hold the key to modelling the temporal dimension that metabolism creates for organisms, the temporal dimension without which mind could not manifest” (1993: P.121)
The key cross-reference point for Terence was astrological timing and through a series of mathematical calculations (which have since been questioned by several mathematicians) he arrived at what he believed was a chart of “novelty” throughout history. This chart, or map and its calculations were fed through a computer and the program was named Timewave Zero.
“Novelty” itself is perhaps best described as akin to ‘originality’ and Timewave Zero plotted the extent to which originality fluctuated over history. In examining the chart there are many uncanny matches between spikes/dips in the chart and important historical events, which ultimately led to “novelty” disappearing off the chart on 21st December 2012. This also happened to be the end date of the Mayan calendar.
The second important investigation in this process to note was an understanding of time through ‘fractals’. This however, is a rather large topic, which I have no room to extrapolate in this review but will be doing a specific analysis of at a later date. Suffice to say, the “novelty” in time is increasing mathematically up to 21st December 2012. As Terence himself notes though, this is uncanny and although he believes his own work may not itself hit the nail on the head, there is certainly something odd at play in the results of the theory.
There are some wonderful linguistic nods in Carlos Castaneda’s direction where Terence uses terms like “crack between world” and “nonordinary reality”, which rubber stamp the move between the I Ching of the East and the shamanic understanding of the Americas. In the end it is these cultural collaborations that the genre of psychedelic literature needed in order to give it a new lease of life and ever since the genre has begun to snowball in the popular sense. Arguably, this is a great work of creative non-fiction but in the end it will be judged on the outcome of the 21st December 2012.
What a strange and un-nerving presence Timothy Leary’s writings have in this post-psychedelic era. The remnants of a highly charged socio-political and quasi-religious philosophy, which not only erupted against the established norms of external power structures but which also celebrated the right to our internal freedom, is today, a spectre-like memory.
Many of the important themes in Leary’s work, like mystical experience and sensual exploration, are now widely regarded as irrational and untestable. There remains, however, many external, political parallels between Leary’s and the 21st century’s social struggle for freedom.
When Leary wrote, in the 1960’s, that ‘the number of pot smokers worldwide is larger than the population of the United States of America’ and that they out-number the moral middle-class to the measure that there is, practically speaking, a dictatorship of the minority, I think we can all agree that nothing much has changed.
Our fight has become an increasingly political battle over the last thirty years. The idealist values of personal exploration, religious rite and the morality of ‘one love’ are the tools of a forgotten ‘tuned in’ and ‘dropped out’ generation. They’re defunct methods as we pursue our freedom politically. But by losing the ‘hippy’ the game is played out on the ground of the moral minority, in their comfort zone, by their rules, from their dominant perspective.
Playing the political game in Britain has created a nightmare cannabis culture. The bartering for inches of law, the mis-analysis of barely related-statistics, the bad science and an acute institutional ambivalence have plunged Britain into a post-psychedelic depression. Marijuana is being concreted into a criminal framework at the expense of the once peaceful psychonaut.
The ‘holy sacrament’ is now provided by criminal gangs, poisoning us with money-laundering additives and we are ‘turned on’, not by our trusted friends but by the twin educational paranoia’s of ASBO degenerates and pier-pressure. The middle-aged, once safe growing and smoking in the privacy of their own homes are now potential terrorists who have the right to be watched, searched and defiled.
Worst of all? That inner sanctum, the internal freedom that Leary fought so hard to protect, is now the reason for our subjugation. We are ‘unstable, mentally deficient and potential criminals’ because we use Cannabis.
There was always two sides of the same coin in Leary’s psychedelic revolution. On the one hand, the necessary change in our socio-political culture that would come, according to Leary, from our new, growing psychedelic perspective. On the other, there was the knowledge that one needed to protect and harness the personal, the internal and our spiritual morality as the necessary centre of strength in our external lives.
Take for example Leary’s essay ‘The magical mystery trip’ in which he extols the virtues of the British, not only as the leading cultural light in the internal psychedelic movement but also, surprisingly, in the external attitudes of our politicians. He transcribes a Commons debate from the 1960’s in which questions are raised about the disillusionment of the youth and the prevailing alienation within British society. But what’s happened?
Today, there is no public debate, there is no public vote and the advice of experts is disregarded out-of-hand; regardless of the fact that tokers now use medical and socio-political arguments. But then, the post-psychedelic fight has lost one half of it’s strength. It’s no longer about our internal freedom, it is solely driven by the rights of our external freedom and is thus alienating us from our personal experience, our high. After all, the experience of smoking of pot is not a political game. It’s not about finance and the categorical control of external power.
Leary was always eager to understand the possible socio-political ramifications of his research and he acutely recognized the dangers of the pre-existing external systems, and this is why he remained mystic. He remained, in all his speculation, true to the internal experience. Fighting the cause from his own ground, his own centre of knowledge and his own, personal, belief.
It is now, in the current climate, where some of the so called crack-pot ideas of Leary are finding new premise. We may not be quite starting our own religion, as Leary asked us to, but we are getting together in small tribes in order to grow and smoke cannabis in safety and peace. Just look at the underground medical marijuana scene.
We’ve been driven into the old ideas because the external world won’t have us and because we reject the criminal world that we are labelled with. We grow and share in a safe circle of trusted friends. It is not, as many politicians would have you believe, a degenerate sub-culture of Britain. It is a counter-culture and it breaths the morality of internal freedom.
Leary was responsible enough to recognize the need for safe guidance in using more powerful psychedelics. Skunk is a prime example; it has the potency to elevate you to a very different experience of life (a right we each have to explore within ourselves) yet today, ‘the guide’ is a dealer; and the dealer is defined by a long prison sentence. Once again, the space that was frequented by the spiritual and which has been ignored, is now the realm of the criminal.
Tokers come from all walks of life – this is the division given to us by society. To be heard as this sub-culture is to be drowned in empty rhetoric, funnelled through media and dogmatic concepts and to be lost in a cacophony of bureaucracy. But to be heard as a clear single voice, a fresh perspective that slices through pre-conceptions; this is to be counter-culture. Tokers all enjoy exploring their consciousness – this is what unifies us. Our strength, Leary makes clear, is in our internal unification – not the external division that is defined by those who wish us silenced.
The seeds of change, for culture and society, lie in natural growth and evolution; not in discourse and game-playing – these are merely masks of power. If we restrict ourselves to politics then we deny ourselves our culture. Leary showed us, above all, that change is fed internally. To change the current dogmatic discourse, which is leading to a further recession of our external rights, there needs to be a re-opening of the old front – the internal battle. As Leary might have said; playing politics is copping out, not dropping out.
