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PLAYING ON THE CAROUSEL OF THE MIND |
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by "Ernesto"
by "Ernesto" In Playing on the Carousel of the Mind – The Risks and Rewards of Using Psychoactive Substances INTRODUCTION BY AMERICAN BUDDHA Disclaimer Nothing said herein is meant to encourage you to break laws that are made for your own protection. There is no doubt that the current atmosphere of drug laws in the United States is hostile to psychedelic experimentation, and the wisest approach for those determined to engage in it is to do so only in a jurisdiction where no laws proscribe it. Nevertheless, in the interests of recording human knowledge and protecting the free speech right to discuss any subject without restriction, this little discussion of psychoactive substance use is posted. The Source of this Article Mind-altering substances have a long history with human beings, and there have been some books theorizing that psychoactive substances in the diet of our genetic ancestors catalyzed the evolution of human intelligence. The fact that we can’t reject this idea out of hand establishes how deep the relationship is between people and the plants that get them high. American-Buddha managed to garner this manuscript from a wandering minstrel who was willing to offer some guidance to those intrepid souls who wish to explore the psychedelic frontier. The ideas presented herein are not necessarily those of American-Buddha, and are shared in the spirit of free discussion as to all matters. Getting High I am all for the vernacular when talking about matters of common experience, and most people take psychoactive substances to get high. I grew up in a large city in the southwestern US that is hotter than hell and plumb full of motels with people doing drug deals in them, a fact that became known to me fairly early in life. White Blotter, Windowpane, Orange Sunshine (as well as yellow and blue), Yellow Creampuff, and Purple Microdot were all familiar brands of LSD with signature effect. White Blotter was a legendary train wreck of a trip, Windowpane was maybe a bit mellower, Orange Sunshine kicked you in the ass with a little taste of speed, Yellow Sunshine packed a super whammy from a mysterious additive, and Yellow Creampuff would turn you into an A student with its easy dose of acid and abundant taste of speed. I never got any good microdot. Also available was organically-derived mescaline, peyote buttons, kilos of marijuana at low, low prices, very pure methamphetamine and heroin, and Christ, what else do you need? What was interesting was that no one wanted the meth or the heroin, which seemed to either make you a nuisance or a vegetable, neither of which were very amusing. And above all, we went for being amusing. It was very amusing when we would pile into a car and score some psychedelics and consume them and ride out into the dark desert in a jumble of youthful limbs and bodies, laughing and dissolving borders between ourselves, burning incense and cigarettes, drinking sodas and eating candy. As we rolled down the road, the dark night flowing in through the windows would become velvety, and the velvet would glow with a fine dust of gold, and from the gold would form patterns of lovely dark colors that hypnotized and ran through your body and those of everyone. Magic dawned. Arriving at our destination when the driver declared he could no longer discern the location of the road, we’d pile out into the night and onto the sand, laughing, liquid, injected with life, watching our movements in the moonlight shimmering patterns of intensely vibrant color. Walking through the dark, we explored our private landscapes, each to ourselves, and all together. We asked each other questions, trying to understand the mystery that suddenly broke open in front of us, multicolored, many-faceted, rich and expanding. And all questions phrased in the present tense, “Do you see that?” Questioning, wondering, laughing up a river of energy that followed the rhythms of our breath and blood, flowing without our knowledge or control. Seeing the omni-directional circulation of energy that surged through all of our senses. We didn’t understand it, we couldn’t understand it, but we saw, and what we beheld was glorious. The next day was always bigger than the day before, with a sense of unknowing pervading everything, and a world stripped of solid definitions. Nothing was clear anymore. Suddenly, surprisingly, the ship of ordinariness seemed to run aground. We were beached on a new land no one had told us about. Existence rang with an unfamiliar portent. Something mattered that hadn’t before, but we weren’t quite sure what it was. Magic indeed had dawned, but what day would it reveal? Magic and Its Surrogates There is such a thing as real magic, and sometimes it manifests with the help of powerful plants and other substances. Sometimes it arises all by itself, especially among children and with people in love. Sometimes after long hardship or privation, when hope has been taxed and worn to a thread, and life somehow grants its blessings again, this is also magic. The search for magic can be stimulated by contact with a powerful helper. If you eat a special mushroom, or cactus, or other special substance, you may feel different. The mind will reset itself along a different template or pattern, one with which you are unfamiliar. You may find that exploring the new pattern is very interesting, intriguing, stimulating. For example, your visual perception might become very acute. You might find that your attention easily rests in one place for a long time. You might find that the things you are seeing are quite different from what you usually see. For example, wispy clouds might start to extend further tendrils, and further tendrils, dropping like milk in water, expanding in your visual field in a continuous flow. You may be surprised when these images just continue to proliferate, expanding without limitation. You may be astonished when you find, that after performing all these Photoshop maneuvers on your imagery, it all just hangs there and keeps appearing to your astonished eyes. What is magic is the sense of wonder. Once you experience this sense of wonder, you may want to explore it further. If you do, you may become a psychonaut. The psychonaut is devoted to exploring all that lies outside the ordinary experience of life. It is without doubt, an avocation that may lead to taking great risks, because the ordinary experience of life is the safe place to stay. To devote yourself to exploring all that lies outside of the safe place means exposing yourself to danger. The danger comes from the lack of socially-recognized symbols of meaning. A psychonaut will quickly collect a plethora of experiences for which explanations and symbols are lacking. Mystical experiences may dawn in the mind, and disappear just as quickly when no vessel to contain the experience can be found. Magic is an ephemeral vehicle, and just as it teases one into the dance, it can leave one dancing like a fool, naked, all alone in a place without meaning. To keep dancing in that place may lead to wisdom, may lead to madness, may lead nowhere. Magic is a dangerous mistress. The surrogates for magic are numerous. Poets aspire to magical insights, and like Edna St. Vincent Millay, set themselves afire at both ends, hoping not to last the night. Religion beckons for those who wish to package the magical fire in a domestically acceptable form. Music always has its train of devotees, and dance draws many along in the flow of movement and desire. The arts in every form provide a surrogate for magic, which is so difficult to coax into existence that we formulate a great many displays in the hope that some of us, somewhere, sometime, will experience the spark that makes life more than life. Magical users of psychoactive substances have left their stories for your examination. Many end in tragedy. Jim Morrison’s use of alcohol destroyed a beautiful talent in its early bloom. The death of Jimi Hendrix, far more psychedelic in his magical style that Morrsion, was another accident that didn’t need to happen. The story of Kesey and his Merry Pranksters is another on the edge tale of magical use with some good outcomes and some scary ones. And of course The Diary of a Drug Fiend by Aleister Crowley is a lovely whirlwind tale about how to blow an inheritance, a marriage, and your own mind in a little less than a year with the aid of cocaine and heroin. These paths are worth noting primarily so as not to follow them. While Blake did say that the path of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, his own life showed little signs of excess beyond abundant inspiration, prolific artistic productivity, and a vast love of humanity. Indeed, profligate substance use in pursuit of magic seems often to produce false magic primarily. To make real magic requires skill and experience in some chosen field of endeavor. To simply add psychoactive substances to your usual strivings will not necessarily aid the development of superior skills, or open you to magical experiences. There are rules for our guidance, and a wild, uncontrolled program of self-experimentation with drugs has repeatedly been shown to be a lurid path to self-destruction. I do not recommend it. Modern Curanderos There are many who seek to accomplish serious purposes with psychedelic substances. They are the modern curanderos, the ones who want to use these substances for more than getting high or playing in the fields of magic. They want to help humanity evolve, or heal the individuals who suffer from painful mental states. Timothy Leary is the godfather of all of these people. Claudio Naranjo, author of “The Healing Journey,” did fascinating clinical experiments with a number of substances that other experimenters had not previously used, such as harmaline, MDA, MDMA and MMDA. John Lilly, author of “The Center of the Cyclone,” combined LSD with isolation tank sensory deprivation to give descriptions of other universes that leapt from hypothesis to perceivable reality, leading him to write another book called “Simulations of God.” Some authors have produced fiction that proselytizes for psychedelics, including Aldous Huxley’s “Island,” and Norman Sprinrad’s “Child of Fortune.” Stanislas Grof, the Czech who wrote “LSD Psychotherapy,” operated in a very clinical mode, and is the one I’d like to discuss first. Then, I’ll take a look at Leary’s approach, and briefly consider the subject from the broader perspective of “modern curanderos.” Stan Grof and High-Dose LSD Therapy LSD Psychotherapy is a labor of love by a man who has stood at the crossroads and confronted the abyss with many a person, and looked into the maw of madness, and convinced that person to jump. The greatest barriers, Grof’s work makes clear, are the thoughts that tie us in knots and force us to live in closed compartments of past experience. Our personality develops scar tissue, dead areas without feeling that mute the flow of experience, slowing our reactions and depriving us of spontaneous response. LSD forces living energy back into those dead areas, riling up areas of the psyche that have refused to allow entrance to live experience for so long that the apertures of experience have atrophied. The opening of these places to the light of present experience is potentially agonizing, potentially liberating, and potentially no big deal. Human beings are complicated! Wow, you’ll see that if you ever look inside yourself with the hyperexcited senses of the psychedelicized mind. When you see the complexity of the thought programs you are running, and the challenges you daily rise to using the basic elements of your awareness, including blood pressure, breathing, muscle tone, visual acuity, instant retrieval of information from memory and all that kind of stuff, you realize you are not just some minor phenomenon. And balancing yourself, operating your own being, is a full-time occupation. Reading Stan Grof is fun, but as a practical matter, his psychedelic methods are risky. He recommended high-dose treatments of LSD (300 micrograms) to raze the structure of the neurotic mind, with the hope of propelling people through a rebirthing process into a peak experience that would alter their perspective on life forever. The beauty of his method is its ambitiousness. A classic expression of hope in a “cure” for the malaise of personality. Doctors have always loved the concept of a purge, and Dr. Grof was no exception. The problem with psychoactive substances is, fundamentally, fear. Grof took the classic confrontational approach. Confront the fear in its scariest form, look it in the face, let it do its worst, and transcend when you realize that nothing is ever as bad as it looks when you’re having a bad acid trip. Emerge dripping from the womb of your own mind, eyes and mouth filled with the tears of innumerable births, not just yours, but those of all beings, in all time. Breathe in that first amazing breath again, bathe in the river of original purity, and emerge as a winged creature after dark aeons in chrysalis. This is easy to describe, hard to attain. Just bulking up on the micrograms doesn’t guarantee any kind of ultimate revelation. Grof used high doses of LSD in a special set and setting. He required his subjects to lie down, wearing headphones, listening to a playlist of classical music chosen in special sequence to enhance the particular stage of the LSD experience from liftoff through ascent to peak and return to earth orbit and reentry. He did this for the specific purpose of amplifying the feedback in the psyche, projecting them into an intense interlude of acute introspection, realizing that people would very likely experience extreme physical symptoms, fears of death and dread, the sense of overwhelming cosmic chaos threatening to destroy them, the need to battle against that threat, and an ultimate breakthrough when realizing the meaninglessness of the great battle. Grof’s system of liberating the self is premised upon his belief that the human mind develops what he calls “co-ex systems” that grow like conceptual scar tissue or unnecessary mental ligaments that bind the mind into avenues of perception and self-awareness based on old traumas. Grof had fascinating results in administering psychedelic drugs to thousands of people for therapeutic purposes, including very impressive results in reducing or even completely eliminating acute pain in people dying of cancer. Since using LSD and other psychedelics like DMT, mescaline and psilocybin, was outlawed, Grof has developed a system for working through the same process using special breathing exercises. But one can hardly presume that breathing techniques are going to compare with the intensity of an LSD experience. The bottom line for those who want to have the breakthrough LSD experience Grof offered is simple – you could try it yourself, but since Stan Grof won’t be there to hold your hand, who you gonna call? Tim Leary’s Psychedelic Prayers Tim Leary provides a friendlier approach than Stan Grof. A lover of youth and beauty, an incurable optimist with enough moxie to actually break out of federal prison and take up residence in Algeria for several years, Leary felt constrained by the sort of clinical approach with which Grof was comfortable. Rather than coming up with a new theory of psychoanalysis, Leary formulated a psychedelic gospel, a “good news” approach that deified psychedelic substances, virtually guaranteeing great results whenever a proper “set and setting” were provided for the tripper. “Set” refers to mindset. To have a positive mindset about psychedelics means primarily to be free of paranoia or dread about the effects of the drug, and to have some basic positive expectations about the experience. “Setting” refers to the environment. His book, “Psychedelic Prayers” uses the philosophy and imagery of the Taoist classic, the Tao The Ching, to create a sort of liturgy that in itself establishes the proper set and setting. The book is divided into seven sections of prayers corresponding to the phases of a psychedelic trip. The first section, Preparatory Prayers, are for reading to be read before the trip begins, and this one, called “Let There Be Simple Natural Things During the Session,” provides an excellent example of how to establish proper set and setting: Let there be simple, natural things Leary’s prayers attempt to lead the psychonaut through the temporary dissolution of familiar conceptual structures with poems entitled “Falling Free” and “Please Do Not Clutch at The Gossamer Web.” These poems do indeed provide very helpful guideposts for persons experiencing the vertigo that hits when one’s perceptions begin to feed new and unusual information to the perceiver. As thoughts begin to echo, as images begin to replicate, as sounds assume strange new dimensions, it is very helpful to have a reminder to loosen up, let it flow, and allow the experience to unfold. The problem that one might have with trying to structure an entire trip around these prayers would probably be that, without a trip guide to impose the discipline of reading appropriate prayers during each stage of the trip, the tripper would just never get it together. You still need a hand-holder to get through the process. Additionally, some of the material might trigger resistance in the minds of some trippers, because Leary did in fact have his own agenda. Even so, it is valuable to read through the book carefully to consider how each phase of the trip can in fact be utilized for a contemplative purpose by the discerning psychonaut. It is valuable to consider the dynamics of the trip, such as when it is best to be still and inward directed, and when it is good to expand, take a swim, take a bit of food, take a walk, etc. Leary’s approach can be used with all types of dosage levels, but I think may work best with a moderate dose of around 100 micrograms of LSD, or eight to ten peyote buttons, or a couple of good-sized Cubensis psilocybin mushrooms. This is basically a life-affirming approach, using the psychedelically-sensitized mind to recontact sources of inspiration and vitality that we have lost touch with due to our daily routines. We can all benefit from experiencing moments of peace, awe, wonder, joy, and laughter, and from overcoming the transient fears and anxieties that inevitably arise in the course of many people’s trips. Other Models for Modern Curandero-Practice There are plenty of other models for modern curandero practice. We can look at the peyote rituals of the Native American Church, in which set and setting are very powerfully arranged. Inside a large tent, a blazing fire is kindled, and to the continuous accompaniment of drumming and the singing of special peyote songs, people are encouragement to consume as much “medicine” as they feel they need, and to unburden themselves of whatever sorrows afflict them. Purging of the spirit occurs when the medicine has its well-known emetic effect. Grace descends when the medicine supplies the blessing of the psychedelic state. People stay together in the tent, sharing an intense experience of continuous human effort to receive the lessons and wisdom that they need. When the ritual is over, people eat together and then resume their daily routine. The ayahuasceros of the Amazon use a psychedelic binary drug called Ayahuasca, created by boiling together the yage vine (Banisteropsis Caapi) and leaves of chagrapanga (Psychotria Viridis) to form an orally effective brew that contains of harmaline, harmine and dimethyltryptamine. The resulting four to six hour trip is the central source of religious inspiration for members of the Sante Daime sect of Brazil, which has tens of thousands of members in that country, and a growing number of adherents in the US and Europe. The set and setting for the trip are also strongly controlled for the user, with the drug being taken in a group, in a semi-darkened environment, to the accompaniment of traditional magical songs known as “icaros.” More examples could be found, including the psislocibe rituals of the Mazatec Indians, which also center ‘round special songs sung by the group leader, conducting the session in darkened rooms, and similar elements. The Huichol Indians of central mexico have similar practices with respect to peyote. And of course the Tarahumara Indians of Chihuahua, Mexico, who use their peyote to fuel marathon running expeditions in which individuals may run well over a hundred kilometers without rest or sleep, may in fact provide a model that Western overachievers could really “get behind!” Psychedelic Experiences in the Modern World The good news for people who want to try a psychedelic experience is that there are plenty of models to show us how to safely go there without great risk. I’m just assuming here that you are doing a serious trip. I’m not opposed to people eating a mushroom and going to a picnic. If people want to do that, they can have a great time. That’s called getting high, and we discussed that earlier. But now we’re talking serious stuff – modern curandero stuff for grownups, people with real problems, real families, real jobs, and a real desire to do something more with their minds. This doesn’t have so much to do with dosage level as with intention. Personally, I give no advice on how to conduct the process of getting high. People don’t seem to need it or want it. But if we’re talking about growing psychically, I have some opinions. With organic substances like ayahuasca increasingly available from lawful sources (do a little research on your own here), and reliable sources of psilocybin-containing mushrooms not difficult to find, the neophyte psychonaut should be able to obtain effective substances that will in fact alter consciousness. Having obtained the sacrament, one is ready to develop your own liturgy. Developing Your Own Liturgy For Optimal Use Of Psychoactive Substances Here, it’s up to you, using the basic rules of set and setting. First, look at when you’re going to do the trip. It is essential to be free of time pressure. It is unwise to take a psychedelic when some big task is looming ahead of you, or you have substantial worries weighing on your head. Unless you are ready to confront these anxieties in a larger-than-life format, you should try to find a time when you are really on holiday. Don’t look for psychedelics to lift your spirits or ease your fears. They generally won’t, and often will do quite the reverse. Try to set aside a three-day period. One day to let the issues of daily life subside into perspective. One day for the experience. One day to digest the experience and get back up to speed with ordinary life. Second, where will you do the trip. Getting out of town is good, but beware of popular public parks where interactions with strangers and authorities could be forced upon you. For a first trip, a nice little house with a pretty garden and homey, comfortable rooms can be very nice. On the other hand, a nice peyote hike through a beautiful forest or canyon can be a wonderful nature activity. Just make sure you know where you’re going. Third, who will you trip with. You certainly can trip alone, but I wouldn’t advise it for your first few times. Like Leary says, it’s nice to have a warm hand to hold. Your first trip should probably be with somebody who likes you, but I’d think twice before doing a first trip with a lover or someone with whom I’m romantically involved. Frankly, a tremendous amount of dishonesty exists between many lovers, and you may not want to confront that on your first few trips. Indeed, you will be happiest if you are with someone you can be totally honest with. Fourth, what will you do during your trip.
Generally, I think the Psychedelic Prayers provide an excellent set of
suggestions. I’ll outline the stages and suggested activities:
What about the Risks? Some people might say I’ve understated the risks here. There are risks, including overdosing, consuming toxic substances passed off as mind-alterants, and experiencing acute dysphoria (the legendary bad trip). But frankly, these are not the primary risks I see. If you consume modest amounts of naturally-available substances on an occasional schedule every other weekend or so, for a period of months, you are running few physical risks. If you have a bad trip you will very likely come back down promptly, and just like some people don’t like roller coasters and stay off them, you’ll stay away from psychoactive substances. Let’s face it, they are definitely not for everyone, and no one should be made to feel guilty about not wanting to have a challenging mental experience. There is absolutely no virtue in daring or humiliating someone into taking a psychedelic trip, and if someone tries to do it to you or someone you know, you should feel free to reject their advice and company. With organic substances of known wholesomeness pretty widely available, the primary risk of bad trips comes from not understanding set and setting. And I think those have been set forth here carefully.
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