2nd – 3rd April, 2011. University of Kent at Canterbury. Confirmed speakers include Luis Eduardo Luna, Paul Devereux, Mike Jay, Rick Doblin, Andy Roberts, Amanda Fielding, Andy Letcher. Plus films and music.

It’s a good number of years since the UK has seen a psychedelics-oriented conference like this, and it’s sure to be an intensely stimulating gathering. See you there?

Facebook, plus more details and registration.

Apologies for the late heads-up, but yesterday I posted my first contribution to Dorian Cope’s brilliant On This Deity blog.

November 16th saw the birth of Terence McKenna, the death of Alan Watts, and—just last year—the death of Pablo Amaringo. As if to confirm the wyrdness of this psychedelic confluence of anniversaries, the date also happens to be when LSD-25 was first synthesized. So, this was the topic of my November 16th post.

Erik Davis just posted a glowing review of a new book on ayahuasca: Singing to the Plants by Steve Beyer. While Erik makes the book sound like a must-read, it’s just out and for now is only in pricey hardcover. However, I’ve just been browsing Beyer’s blog, and I’ve quickly become impressed enough to be here pushing you his way.

Since discovering James Hillman’s work, I’ve had a very strong notion that, despite his total avoidance of psychedelics and “altered states”, his approach to psychology has a great deal to offer the modern psychedelic community. The non-Western influences on psychedelic culture have been diverse and profound, with Oriental notions of “enlightenment”, “gurus”, etc. perhaps outweighing the imports from shamanic societies. I’ve no wish to brush these influences aside with a snort of post-colonial disgust—they’re far from unproblematic, but they’re an integral part of our attempts to absorb the impact of these dimensions being unleashed on our barren religious landscape.

But Hillman presents a perspective firmly rooted in the Greek soil that much of our culture is also rooted in, giving it a particular resonance for Westerners (though of course he draws from the sidelines of our history, the Neoplatonists and Romantics). And his core opposition to “developmental psychology”, and the utilitarian narrowness of the quest for a “cure” or linear “growth”, exposes the vanities in our expectations of meditation, psychedelics and magic as much as it critiques modern psychotherapies. Psychedelic culture usually has problems at the other end of the scale from being fixated on a “goal”, too—sometimes it wanders too much. It strikes me that the discipline and diligence in Hillman’s approach to “following the image” is a valuable adjunct to the boundary-corrosion of hallucinogens, a useful position mediating between focus and drift.

Reading Beyer’s account of DMT researcher Rick Strassman’s story, his final paragraph seemed thoroughly Hillmanian to me. Discussing the fact that Strassman was disillusioned that not many of his research subjects seemed to “really change” after their initial rushes of revelation, Beyer remarks:

But is long-term personal change what DMT is even about? With his own preexisting biases, both Buddhist and countercultural, Strassman thought that spiritual transformation was the endpoint of the hallucinogenic experience; he was personally surprised and disoriented by the frequently reported contact with other-dimensional beings. Perhaps the hospital setting was less important than Strassman’s own unmet expectations. Perhaps DMT—like ayahuasca itself—is not a psychotherapist but a teacher, leading where it intends—not to some sort of enlightenment, not to self-improvement, not to community volunteer work; but into the dark and luminous realm of the spirits.

Then, sure enough, Hillman pops up. Beyer’s recent post on the collective unconscious is a brilliant critical summary of the history behind and the issues involved with Jung’s famous notion, which concludes using Hillman’s typically astute assessment of the “archetype” concept.

It’s great to see Hillman embraced within an intelligently psychedelic context. Perhaps not surprising that it’s around ayahuasca. The complex of traditions around this brew are saturated with animism, a perspective that, while Hillman largely avoids terminology that will associate his ideas with indigenous cultures, also saturates his work.

My other highlight so far from the blog is the great little summary of Pierre Clastres‘ work, with some interesting additional notes on the role that sorcery might play in the context of Clastres’ vision of primitive society dispersing itself to avoid the coagulation of the State.

Informed, eloquent and clearly possessing a great depth of experience: this is who we need writing about the boundaries between consciousness and nature.

Former police chief constable David Blakey, of the UK Drug Policy Commission, said enforcement agencies tended to be judged by the amount they had managed to capture.

“This is a pity as it is very difficult to show that increasing drug seizures actually leads to less drug-related harm,” he added.

But he later said asking whether the money spent on enforcement was wasted was “more of a moot question”.

“This is against the law and the law needs to be enforced so whether or not we are actually driving drugs down and making drugs disappear – which I think would be asking too much of any country – there is an element of law enforcement which should and must continue,” he told the BBC.

Don’t try to follow the logic here too closely—this kind of insanity can be contagious.

Consciousness Change: A Challenge for the 21st Century

a review by Gyrus

• Event date: 21st-24th March 2008
• Venue: Congress Centre, Basel, Switzerland

The LSD symposium two years ago, commemorating Albert Hofmann‘s 100th birthday, was, it seems, successful enough to generate some healthy momentum. Catching a relatively quiet, but extremely significant wave of resurgence in scientific psychedelic research, this forum capitalized well on the attention garnered by the father of LSD’s centenary, bringing people from around the world to discuss psychedelics of all descriptions in the location of the notorious first ever acid trip.

Over 1500 people filled the Congress Centre in the peacefully stimulating city of Basel over Easter weekend. With official endorsements from Swiss International Air Lines and Basel Kantonalbank, this sort of event is a slight culture shock for the British or Americans. We may not have embraced psychedelics in the way the enthusiasts of the early ’60s might have envisioned, but their hopes are alive and well.

At the forefront of said wave of research are MAPS and The Beckley Foundation. I caught MAPS‘ Rick Doblin on the first afternoon, introducing Swiss psychotherapists who have been conducting trials investigating the therapeutic potentials of MDMA and LSD.

MDMA is now being studied in several places for its beneficial role in treating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Its famed ability to enable contemplation of deeply negative memories without their imprinted, paralyzing associations, makes it a good candidate for success in this field. Peter Oehen (of the Swiss Association for Psycholytic Therapy) made some interesting observations on his experience with MDMA therapy, such as the arc of experience he has repeatedly seen in sessions: first, relaxation; then, the appearance of physical symptoms; then, as these somatic knots are worked with and through, the welling up of conceptual and emotional insights. Evidently MDMA resonates strongly with the work of people like Wilhelm Reich, in which trauma is seen to be bound up in the body.

Juraj Styk then introduced some general principles from psychedelic therapy, plainly building on the solid foundations of Stanislav Grof‘s work. (Grof was a ubiquitous presence at the forum, but I know his work so well I missed his presentations in favour of less familiar grounds. Anyone not aware of his work, however, is strongly urged to get to know his pioneering research.)

Also, at one of the “Rising Researchers” panels, I caught Sameet Kumar reporting on new research in Florida into how psilocybin may help terminal cancer patients reconcile themselves (and thus their loved ones) with their approaching demise. In commenting a couple of years ago on a recent book by Stan Grof, who made good headway with this kind of psychedelic research with Walter Pahnke in the early ’70s, I remarked:

There are very good cases to be made for psychedelic therapy in any number of situations. But, as Grof notes, the idea that it’s still difficult to license it for terminal patients who are deemed beyond medical help, is both ridiculous and revealing. It shows clearly that our culture’s problem with the issue has little to do with the idea that psychedelics might mess people’s lives up in some way, and much more to do with an unwillingness to do what [Grof and Pahnke's subjects] want to do: face death consciously.

The fact that this sort of research is proceeding again—along with all the other sanctioned psychedelic experiments now underway—is exciting, heartening news. Indeed, being so soaked in the broad, speculative end of psychedelic culture myself, I found these presentations much more thrilling and inspiring than many of the rallying cries for psychedelics to “save the world”. Not to dismiss such rhetoric entirely; it’s just a different, more tangible buzz for me to hear of individuals in genuine need having distress alleviated. This is the agenda of MAPS in action; more power to them.

The Beckley Foundation, headed by longtime advocate of consciousness research Amanda Fielding, was present at the forum as the proud sponsors of the first study in over thirty years of LSD use in humans. Our understanding of the brain has surged forwards since the last legitimate scientific LSD research took place, and this study hopes to use modern neuroimaging techniques to gain a high-res understanding of the interactions between this still-fascinating substance and human neurochemistry.

At the forum, Fielding presented her theory on the link between human consciousness and blood supply to the brain. Essentially, she thinks evolution has left us with an insufficient supply, leaving us susceptible to various mental disorders, and that through the ages healthy societies have been those who have found ways of compensating for this. It’s one of those perspectives that can persuade the open mind to an extent, but its very simplicity makes one wary of reductionism. Certainly, it’s another option in our increasing range of ways to understand consciousness, and deserves more research.

Jeremy Narby

The Saturday saw a splendid line-up of ideas, research, passion and art. Jeremy Narby delivered an erudite and stimulating talk on his ongoing quest to find spaces where science and shamanism can agree to disagree on points where they clash, to leave room for the tantalizing overlaps. Following his experiment of taking Western molecular biologists through ayahuasca sessions in the Amazon to see if they could gain accurate biochemical information from their visions (detailed in the excellent Shamans Through Time), he took on a more passive role in facilitating a cultural-scientific exchange between an American tuberculosis researcher and a Peruvian shaman. The shaman discovered, through his ayahuasca visions, a plant with great success in treating tuberculosis. Exactly where these tentative cross-pollinating missions are heading is uncertain; that they are happening at all, though, is hugely encouraging.

Dale Pendell – photo by Mark Pilkington

Dale Pendell was a great discovery for me. Just that morning I had remarked to a friend how discussion of magic and the occult was lacking from proceedings. Pendell more than made up for this with his trip through the “mythopoetic roots of psychedelic practice in the Western Tradition”. With Milton’s Eve as the first curandera, and Plato’s ambivalent pharmakon as a guiding principle for the “poison path” of plant medicine, Pendell rooted the mythology and philosophy of psychedelics right into west Eurasian soil. Through Faust, he pinpointed the West’s quintessential magical operation as that of conjuration, giving form to spirits. Commercial incorporation, he emphasized, is plainly a most dangerous form of magic, giving legal reality to an abstraction whose prime motive is gain and profit. The spirit is conjured, with no circle of containment; “hungry ghosts” empowered and turned loose on the world. ‘Nuff said.

(You can download an MP3 (65MB) of Pendell’s post-talk discussion from the Sunday, and read the transcript. See also my review of his book of walking and talking with legendary intellectual Norman O. Brown.)

Kathleen Harrison

Kathleen Harrison has been known to me for a while as the former wife of Terence McKenna. Her presentation on her long-term fieldwork with indigenous Mazatec people in Mexico neither substituted for, nor paled in comparison with McKenna’s unique presence. Harrison was perhaps the most outspoken and coherent voice for animism (or, as she phrased it, “inter-species drama”). The Mazatecs, famed via María Sabina for their use of psilocybin mushrooms, and as the lone guardians of the odd psychedelic Salvia divinorum, are evidently a treasure trove for ethnobotanists, and it’s fantastic that such a sensitive and dedicated researcher as Harrison is working with them.

In discussing how careful Mazatec shamans are when sourcing their plant medicines—wanting to know that no one saw them being picked, and so on, purely for animistic reasons of respect for the plants’ spirits—Harrison mentioned a little rite of observance for urban psychonauts. She said that every psychedelic session she has that involves substances that have placed people at risk to get them to her, she offers thanks to them, and remembers all those whose freedom has been taken from them. (Applause greeted this, echoing the earlier support showed for the call from Kajuyali Tsamani—a Kogi shaman from Columbia—to boycott all cocaine use, on account of the inordinate suffering it causes in the regions where it’s produced.)

Harrison’s talk was bursting with tips for pragmatic, conscious engagement with plants, ancestors, the whole realm of spirits. It was very edifying to hear someone so obviously versed in the extremes of visionary information downloads, that while responses to questions asked of ancestors inevitably come with persistence, they are “never quite verbal”. She feels these answers arise at the subtle levels of instinct and spontaneous impulse. A cautionary note against the showy verbiage of many methods of “contacting the dead”, and a reminder that animism is really a perpetual refining process, learning through direct experience how to hear the quieter voices around and within us.

She ended with a statement of belief in the value of research into consciousness, religion and healing that was all the more pointed and rousing for her acknowledgement that its worth lies in the ongoing importance of such work in any situation—not just the possibility of it effecting some large-scale world-saving miracle. Kat Harrison reminded us all why we were there.

A showing of Jan Kounen’s excellent documentary, The Other World, on ayahuasca use among the Shipibo-Conibo Indian of the Peruvian Amazon, rounded off a thoroughly engrossing day.

I sadly missed the bulk of Sunday’s presentations in a haze of tiredness and networking. Monday saw some juicy para-forum extras: seminars and workshops with illustrious folk such as Stan Grof, Ralph Metzner, and Alex & Allyson Grey beckoned. I opted for the coach trip to the HR Giger museum.

We got a brief but energetic tour around the current exhibition of visionary art there from Claudia Müller-Ebeling, including wine and cheese. (The museum is in Gruyères, the home of my favourite cheese; eating it right there while viewing psychedelic art was a genuine treat!) Naturally Giger’s own work was wondrous to behold, especially in a setting where every detail is crafted in his style, right down to biomechanical patterns on the paving outside and spinal column handrails on the steps.

The short trip ended magnificently with a swift beer in the Giger Bar, just opposite. Arched spines vaulted the roof, skeletal alien chairs supported the locals chatting against the bar, and incongruous smoky jazz drifted around. More than a few comparisons to the Star Wars cantina were bandied around to describe the atmosphere. Do pop in if you pass through Switzerland.

In all, a resounding success. We felt the lack of more diverse after-hours social events—these being apparently limited to the customary trance and techno gatherings. But the balance between the tangible encouragements of hard science and more mercurial expressions of the psychedelic world worked well. Most importantly, it was easy to see a proliferation of new connections between individuals sparkling around the place. There’s an important cultural flame to be tended and maintained here, and Basel in 2008 saw it flare up with healthy enthusiasm.

Photo by Mark Pilkington

A discussion with Dale Pendell

[Question about who taught DP about the occult in Los Angeles.]

Dale Pendell: His name’s not really important. He kind of hid his traces, because he insisted on being without credentials. Anytime I would look for credentials, like, “Where did you get your Zen training, Carl?” “Why do you ask? Is that gonna make you believe something I say?” So he would never tell me. But he had a personal teacher. What he taught was the importance of a personal teacher. His personal teacher was a woman named Mary. And that’s as far back as I know the transmission. But I get a sense of high knowledge being passed on that way: through personal relationships, with some occult structure overt.

I don’t know, he was able to walk in and out of Zen temples like he belonged there. He was an artist, and sat with Suzuki, Roshi in San Francisco, and they palled around like old friends. When Trungpa came to town, they palled around like old friends—he was his driver for a while. Every place he went, he liberated people; he gave people permission. He constantly violated expected behaviour, and laughed a lot. I still consider him my true teacher. I would like to be able to give people permission the way he did.

So, I can’t speak for any occult tradition. I just know there are transmissions of higher knowledge.

[Question about what specific traditions or techniques of magical practice DP uses.]

Very eclectic. But I certainly look to general magical theory, magical dynamics and magical laws. So I would look to… I mean I read Crowley, and Lévi… I mean, it was harder to find stuff, back in the sixties. From the poetic tradition, like the charming song tradition of the Inuits, where charms are like spells. They had different kinds of songs; one group of songs you sing just for the joy of seeing the sun rise, or fresh snow on the ground or something. And then there’s the songs of derision that you sing to make fun of somebody. And they would share all these songs. But one class of songs they wouldn’t share at the “songfest”, and those were charming songs. Charming songs were meant to change, like change the weather, renew luck.

So I kind of combine those any way I can. I kind of feel my way into it, sensing, trying to feel or see, sense the presence someplace.

I have a favourite story. An anthropologist was talking to his Native American informant at the edge of a field, and he said, “So, I suppose you think that all of these rocks out there in the field are alive?” And his informant goes, “No… But some of them are!” The art is in the “some of them”, and figuring out which ones.

Working with charms, and remembering that if you use magic, you are vulnerable to it… It’s very delicate work. Like María Sabina said, relations with the mushrooms are muy delicado—very delicate.

[Mention of DP's characterization, in his talk, of tobacco as a "diplomat".]

Tobacco is good. It brings up certain questions. That is, we’re all kind of rational, educated. What difference could it really make to the world to leave a tobacco offering at the base of a plant? What difference could it make to say grace before a meal? How is that really going to change the world in any way? In fact, maybe you can just skip the whole meal, and just swallow a pill or something, and get on with what’s really important.

There is perhaps some step of faith here. That doing something beautiful, something proper, that seems to put the world in balance, is a worthwhile thing to do, and makes a change in the universe.

I have a poem on this subject. In poetry and literary criticism, they have something called the “pathetic fallacy”. Pathetic fallacy is when you say, “The sky was weeping.” Giving human emotions to inanimate things. I think they haven’t gone far enough. So I’m for what I call the cosmic fallacy. This is called ‘Last Specimen’, it’s about plant collecting, pressing [????] specimens.

In the bank of a gravely wash
A mile from the road in Saline Valley
I found the desert paintbrush.
Not a rare plant
Just one I didn’t have in my collection.
The brilliant scarlet-tipped bracks of the inflorescence
Were still enfolded.
Kneeling down, I gently pulled them open
To inspect the corolla
And then saw, still a child.
It’s not that anyone else would come by here
But that you live to blossom
Alone, here, beneath an empty sky
Does mean that somewhere a soldier won’t die
Or that on a dried planet somewhere in Cygnus
It will rain.
And I return with an empty press.

And all the people who have lived close to the earth for a long time seem to respect these rites and rituals. They feel a sense of gratitude. God, even Nietzsche said, “A sense of gratitude is seemly.” Our existence here rests on many lives who have gone before us, generations of people. And not only people; all sorts of beings that have lived, and suffered, and died, and micro-organisms creating even the air that we breathe, and the topsoil, and all of it. So every day of our lives is a gift of countless generations that have provided it, for our benefit. So a sense of gratitude is right, and it is good to give something back. It’s good to take a moment to place an offering, or a word or something. Ultimately I don’t think we can prove this. But I say, the other side can’t prove their way either. It comes down to a wager. And I put my wager on a green square, and to do these things, to find a way to move in beauty ourselves, does change the world. It’s the only way we can change the world.

So, that’s a long way of saying that that’s the ultimate basis of my magic. [laughs]

[A question about Zen, psychedelics, koans and healing.]

I’ll come back to that. I have one more thought on magic, another kind of magic that I dabble in. And that’s charms to change things. I call it demon work. Principles of working with demons, getting to know them. It all revolves around this business of diplomacy. So, give them a place to go. You can make a little shrine for your demons, and it’s good if you can name them. I have one called “She’ll Be Hurt” that’s stopped me from doing all kinds of things that had nothing to do with “she” or “her”[?]. Then I learned she had a big sister called “She’ll Be Angry”. [laughter]

In that way I invoke a being I call “The Great Fuck-You Bodhisattva”. The Great Fuck-You Bodhisattva sits with his middle finger up, and he looks like an ape. I made a clay model of him, he’s got big nails sticking out of his head, and I have this shrine with this incense for him. Anybody who has a worse inner critic than I have has either quit writing, committed suicide-or both! So when I get the voices saying, “You’re not good enough to do that”, I get to where I can recognize it, and go “Aha!” I go over to the Great Fuck-You Bodhisattva, put a stick of incense in, and get on about my business.

I even made a scourge at one point, very wicked-looking. Magic has to with changing reality, so you do physical manipulations. So I made a scourge, a cat o’ nine tails with these leather thongs and twisted, very wicked-looking pieces of wire on them, and wrote all kinds of stuff on it (in blood actually), like, “Bring it to the surface”; or “You’re doing it to yourself anyway”. And when I would get a critic attack, all these voices saying, “You’re kind of fucked up” or “You can’t do it”… “Aha!” I would go get the scourge. And go, “Right! I get it! Thank you!” [mimes hitting himself over the back]

I look on all those operations as magical operations. It’s a wonderful field to be creative in. All good art is magic. All the best art is magic. So you can use aesthetic criteria to help find your way.

[A question about precautions necessary in "unbinding magic".]

I’m not sure it’s a problem with unbinding. Unbinding is not really… You’re not asking for something for yourself. It’s like releasing a bird. I think the dangerous magic is when you’re trying to get something for yourself; that’s a binding magic. Or trying to hurt somebody else. Any of those things, the vibration, the colour of it is so different, you can feel it right away. The best unbinding magic is invisible, there’s nothing there that anything can catch on; you can draw teasel through it. That’s the goal, and we come as close to it as we can. We usually end up with something that things still catch on, cling to; but that’s the ideal.

[Questioner remarks that in unbinding there is sometimes resistance, that things seem to prefer to stay bound.]

[sighs] Yeah. [long pause] The ocean is salty because of Kwan Yin‘s tears, when she realized she could not really save any beings. That’s what I heard. Any being at all.

[A return to the question of koans and healing, advice on koan practice.]

Sure, I’ll be bad. Go right into koan practice. Why not accept several hundred obstructions right away? [laughs] They help you get unobstructed! Koans are quite wonderful, there’s a lot of misconceptions about koan practice. Like, some people think, they don’t really have answers, you just have to do something spontaneous, or they have strange ideas about the answers. But there’s hundreds of them, and many of them are quite specific. Some actually have particular presentations. Maybe you’ll come up with a variation or something, and your teacher will say, [uncommitted, slightly dismissive tone] “Yeah, that gets the point.” Then he’ll say, “But the traditional answer is so-and-so.” And you always go, “Ah yes, that hits it right on the head.”

They’re kind of like brain candy. Very seductive. They’re meant to absorb your whole power of thought and mind, attention. Doesn’t that sound like fun? [laughs]

Not all Zen schools use them. The Soto schools don’t really use them, but in Rinzai Zen and some of [????], there’s a transmission.

[Questioner asks about koans and tripping.]

Like, my intention for that trip is to solve a koan? I don’t know of any rules. If you’re working with a teacher, he gives you a koan. You go back to your cushion… “OK, OK, sound of one hand, what’s that?” You go back to the teacher, and you present your answer. And he’ll probably go, “Hmmm, back to the cushion. Sit with this some more.”

Some of the great teachers worked on the first koan for years. One was about to kill himself, he worked on it for seven years. All of his friends had already solved it, you know, they were all whipped off to be Buddhists someplace. He was about to jump off a balcony or something… when he got it. He went on to be the great Mumon.

It becomes so all-encompassing. It should be, good practice; to where it’s all you think about, all the time, it’s what you’re thinking about. That’s good, that’s the way it should be.

So, tripping at such a time… I don’t know. It wasn’t my way. Maybe some people have gotten answers that way. Salvia divinorum has the best shot, I think. But the best is just going back and focusing on it, on your cushion. But one never knows, and there’s no rules on this-so, whatever works. It’s probably wise to try the way that people have been doing it for a long time.

Laura Pendell: Or it’s like the story you told about Gary [Snyder]. He came up with the perfect answer…

DP: Yeah, he came up with the perfect answer, that’s what it usually seems… Marijuana seems to do that, too. You get “perfect answers”—but it’s not the point of the koan.

Go work on this some more. [sly laugh]

[Question about the use of psychoactives in Buddhist history.]

Tea. They made an early alliance. In fact, tea is even said to be Bodhidharma’s eyelids. He fell asleep, and he was so upset that he ripped his eyelids off so he wouldn’t fall asleep again. He threw them behind him and they grew into the first tea plants.

[Someone thanks DP for his books introducing them to the pleasures of tea.]

The interesting thing is that all the major religions have abandoned whatever use of entheogenic substances that they once had. Sometimes I’ll think about why… Going back and reading early accounts of psychedelic administration, even Oscar Janiger, who collected hundreds and hundreds of accounts, made a point of giving LSD to people for the first time without them knowing anything about it, without them knowing what to expect, because he was collecting information. Almost everybody felt positive about it. About a third of them had bad trips… I don’t know, it’s very time-consuming, it goes all over the place. So we find lots of traces of entheogenic substances at the origins of religion, and in tribal religions, shamanic religions. All of the cosmopolitan schools have abandoned them, except for the saddhus. Who else?

[A woman in the group talks about finding motivation, about having interest in psychology and writing and helping the world, but feeling lost and directionless. She starts crying halfway through, telling DP she feels she trusts him. She has to support her family but nothing seems to have sense, the world doesn't need her help.]

Maybe try some of this magic stuff? Leaving a little flower offering, or tobacco offering at four cardinal points, or by your door every day. It doesn’t take much, some of the old ones said, to push the world over into the right direction. It just needs a little help, from you. There’s nothing you have to write[?]. Just leave a little offering; something that makes the world a little more beautiful. If we can get out without making the world worse, we have succeeded. That’s all we need to do, is find a way not to make things worse. That’s good enough.

Add a little bit of beauty someplace. You will see. It is OK to be in this state; it’s a very good place. A very good place. It’s very open, you’re kind of stretching out this open moment. Spiritual teachers have a word for that, they call it acedia. It’s like the “dark night of the soul”, it’s this point of not recognizing your own way, your own worth, just where you are in the spiritual process. But it’s a very pregnant and rich point. So, stretching that out is… painful. But it’s very good. Something very good, something very good is going to happen to you. Lay out a nice offering; invite the good spirits in: “Here’s some flowers for you. Here’s some hazelnuts.” I don’t know.

[An American woman says, "You think the world doesn't need your help? I live in a country that needs a lot of help."]

[A question about the relationship of the psychoactive effects of the poppy to Zen practice.]

Wow. That’s a very esoteric question! I’ll have to think about it to make a connection; I’m sure there’s a way to do it… What I think of with the hallucinogenic effects of poppies is Greek healing, and the temple of Apuleius, where with a drink from the poppy, sick people would go in to have dreams-and the dream would reveal to them why they were sick.

If you approach it right-you know, you have to walk through the door the right way, you don’t want to offend the gods. Again, it’s a matter of ritual propriety. Confucius made a big deal of ritual propriety—what’s the Chinese word, li? I think so. It’s one of the foundations of his whole system, you can almost feel that it’s a carry-over from the older animistic traditions. Ritual propriety. Keeping everything clean with the spirits—that’s what you want to do. That’s the basic magical law.

María Sabina with the leaves, and Eve in Paradise Lost, that’s ritual propriety. With the Salvia leaves, it becomes almost palpable. If you have stems with some parts that are left over, you wouldn’t just throw them out anywhere, that would be shocking, you know? The great Japanese flower masters would dig graves, dig a little hole in a special place to put the old flowers in. You don’t just put them anywhere. And this matter of ritual propriety is much neglected by our culture. There’s no sense of presence… In the animistic world there are spirits that live in streams and trees and rocks and places, little nooks, this little nook has its spirit. People who’ve lived close to the earth for a long time all seem to have some sense of the presences around, and recognition that they do not want to offend that presence. It would be a desecration. Our culture kind of moved all that, had it taken out of the environment and boxed up in the Kirche, in the church, where it’s clear, that’s a sacred space and you wouldn’t think of throwing trash on the ground in the church. That’s pretty clear. We have it all boxed into this special place, but it’s in all of Earth’s places around us. This matter of presences is again one of the fundamental principles of all shamanic magic. You can kind of build the whole system up pretty much from that. Recognizing that there’s presences, you don’t want to offend them, you want to keep them in balance, and trying to find propriety.

If you don’t always know, you need to come up with some means of divination. Divination is another neglected art, it’s a kind of hazy area. It’s still a big part of our world, but we pretend that it’s… We flip a coin at sporting events-who goes first? That was to get the will of the gods. What do the gods have to say about this? Now we call it “chance”.

When you talk about using tobacco, how do you use it? Offering, or smoking?

You don’t have to smoke it. Tobacco offerings are very traditional; tobacco moved around the world very quickly after Columbus.

[A question about the tobacco industry and chemical additives.]

Well, you can’t look to me for purity. [laughter] I do grow tobacco, and it’s very good to grow one’s own magical plants. Kat [Harrison] made the point in her talk [on her fieldwork with the Mazatec Indians in Mexico] that with sacred medicines, any shaman wants to know who’s touched them, where they came from, their history. And making magical objects, the materials, and the history of the materials is all very important. You don’t want to get boorish on this, but the more you can refine that, the further you can trace that out, the more powerful the magic is gonna be, and it’ll probably be better art, also.

[Question about tobacco as an offering.]

Yeah, and you can use it as a purifier. Smoke some, burn some on charcoal and you can clean things. It’s very famously used as a cleaner. You can clean bad vibes off something with tobacco.

Something else I’ve found is good for cleaning bad vibes I learned from the Chinese, which is firecrackers. Wanna get the bad spirits out? That’ll work. Whole strings of them, let ‘em off all at once!

There’s a great wealth of lore, ways different peoples dealt with things for a long time. Much of it is neglected, but we can still find these very useful things.

And if magical thinking goes against your grain because you’re educated, and you don’t want to be superstitious, look at it as art, use aesthetic principles. Look at it as art and theatre, and you can do the same thing that way.

[Question about magical propriety and sacred space in dense urban environments.]

It is more challenging, yeah, but you can use all the same principles. I’m kind of “seat of the pants”, so I started hanging yarrow in the door. Something like that. In the sixties we all made these gods’ eyes. I still have one—shows how bad I am. I’m sure there are lots of people who do stuff like that. Over huge parts of the world people have all these charms and amulets as protection against the Evil Eye. So yeah, start with charms and amulets. I like yarrow, that’s good.

I don’t know what to do about sound. You’ll think of something. [laughs]

I’m very excited, and damnably lucky, to have been granted a press pass for this year’s World Psychedelic Forum in Basel, Switzerland (21st to 24th March). I’ll be interviewing a number of the luminaries and “rising researchers” there, and using these interviews as the basis for an in-depth feature for Dreamflesh Journal (as well as posting the full interviews here).

I’m looking forward to seeing for the first time Stanislav Grof, Dennis McKenna and Ralph Metzner. Hopefully I’ll get round to interviewing Jeremy Narby, after nearly doing so a couple of times. And if Christian Rätsch rustles up anything approaching his impression of himself turning into a panther on his first acid trip that he did at Bath in 2004, I’ll be more than content.

Of course, as with all conferences, the real gems will be found hidden away in unexpected encounters between scheduled events, buried deep in late-night conviviality, and crystallized out of nowhere by the cumulative force of the ideas surrounding you.

I know of the people behind the event, the Gaia Media Foundation, from back in the ’90s—they used to stock Towards 2012. It’s great that they’re still going, stronger than ever, and putting together such catalytic gatherings.

Anthony Seldon, the biographer of Blair who recently introduced “Happiness Classes” to the public school he heads, has popped up in the news saying that drugs are “too sinister” to tolerate. He goes on:

They are so evil, massively evil – even cannabis. … I heard the other day about an adult who smoked a joint—his first joint—and he lost his mind for six months. … You can just be unlucky. You can have this predisposition which can tip you into psychotic disorder and malfunction which can be cataclysmic and from which some people can never recover their baseline sanity.

BBC News, 4/10/07

The foolish demonisation of drugs by authorities is dangerous because drugs are simply not 100% dangerous (let alone “massively evil”). Once kids discover there are pleasures and treasures in drug use, they more often than not reject the wild warnings of their elders—including any sane cautionary notes.

I wonder whether, in people like Seldon, who seems to be reacting against the “lenient” or “soft” attitudes of recent times, we are at least partially seeing a rebound effect going the other way. Even though cannabis, in itself, is drastically less dangerous than portrayed by the media and government, are people like Seldon reacting to the excesses of pro-cannabis campaigners? Maybe they once questioned the authorities’ line on it, but in the face of seeing real problems involving the drug, they turn away from the idea that “cannabis is harmless” all-too-drastically, swinging back to the Manichean rhetoric of unthinking tabloids.

An interesting thought, maybe. But it doesn’t seem to hold much water. For one thing, the basic point about demonisation by the powers-that-be looks at the dynamics of trust between adults and children, and the obvious damage done to that dynamic if adults deceive kids (and maybe themselves) about life’s dangers. Seldon’s an adult, not a kid. He should be able to take any over-enthused declarations of cannabis’ harmlessness with a pinch of salt to keep a balanced view. Instead, he’s ranting like an ill-informed bigot.

There’s an important distinction to be made here, and that is that Seldon’s prime concern is the use of cannabis at school by pupils. For adults, once the horrors of the black market are removed, it’s largely a victimless act; any problems it entails are generally medical or mental health issues to be treated appropriately. For kids, of course, drug use should be strongly discouraged.

But Seldon’s rhetoric—as with many like him—casually veers towards a more general social condemnation, with the ridiculous background logic that adults should be barred from doing what is dangerous for kids to do.

There’s some very interesting and admirable thinking in some of Seldon’s views. He favours a more rounded approach to education. He “wants to end the culture of exam results, league tables and narrow academic learning”; he believes “we all have seven intelligences, and schools focus on only two: linguistic and logical-mathematical intelligence, ‘and even those we do in a dull, unimaginative way’. The other intelligences—personal, social, artistic, physical, spiritual/moral—are largely neglected.” His “Happiness Classes” seem a little glib from the outside, but they’re surely a step towards truly paying attention to what education should be to encourage a good, rather than merely functional and prosperous, life.

But for all his challenges to the educational system, he’s content to leave other basic mistakes of our status quo in place, and nurture them.

What is the point of schools if they do not help children to learn how to live their lives to the full, how to enjoy themselves and be happy, and how to live intelligently? Drugs are not intelligent living. Alcohol is part of intelligent life for many, and with older school children the art is to help them to realise that drink, properly used, can be a significant enhancement to life. With drugs, there is no half-way position. Everyone—government, the media and schools—needs to give the same message: “No.”

The Independent, 15/4/07

The preposterous nature of his position is pretty clear from these statements. If he’s intent on overturning received wisdom in enlarging and enriching our concept of education, why would he slavishly align with our culture’s silly notion that, approached sensibly, alcohol can enhance life, but that other drugs are impossible to approach sensibly, or that they fundamentally degrade rather than potentially enhance life?

Of course it’s difficult to approach drugs other than alcohol sensibly when they’re illegal and are talked about in the way Seldon chooses to. This is a tricky conundrum; but it’s not one that will go away by ignoring it. On the contrary, just pushing it away will only empower it to drag us further in.

Are there any other reasons why Seldon might have a bee in his bonnet about cannabis?

I had a very bad experience when I was 18. I don’t want to talk about it. I’ve been too nervous, too aware of the fragile state of my own mental equilibrium to want to put an unknown chemical into my head.

Education Guardian, 29/5/07

I never like reductionism, pinning a complex issue on a single cause. To say Seldon’s position stems entirely from his own inability to negotiate the changes to consciousness that cannabis induces would be as silly as his belief that cannabis was the single significant causative factor in an adult allegedly losing their mind for six months. But his admission casts a little doubt on his objectivity in the matter.

He has some valid objections to cannabis:

One reason I have always loathed cannabis is it makes people so boring. Not boring to themselves maybe, but boring to others. The drug induces apathy, self-centredness and a lack of engagement with others and the world at large. It is the very opposite of what true life is all about.

The Independent, 15/4/07

Well, Jello Biafra had pretty much the same abhorrence of stoner culture (which only bolstered the strength and honesty of his pro-legalization position). It’s hard to deny that excessive cannabis use can take the shine out of someone.

But… boring, apathetic, self-centered, unengaged with the world at large? Ignoring for a moment the vibrant, life-affirming, joyous and even religious experiences that cannabis can trigger in the right setting, ask yourself: do these negative qualities strike you as exclusive to cannabis users? Do they not strike you as a pretty good summary of the worst aspects of advanced consumerist societies? Could cannabis use be a mild and insignificant exaggerator of what is fostered by the very mainstream of our culture? Could—shock fucking horror—illegal drugs be being assigned the role of scapegoat here, easier to point the finger at than the more challenging, prevalent and destructive dangers of capitalism’s disintegration of community, social responsibility and ecological health?

It would be a little hypocritical of me to move straight from decrying “easy finger-pointing” to looking at Seldon’s father, the deeply influential economist Arthur Seldon. But it’s interesting that Seldon’s father, joint founder president of the free-market think tank The Institute of Economic Affairs, “was one of a small band who, in effect, launched what eventually came to be known as the Thatcherite revolution.” (Guardian obituary) The increasing social inequity and disintegration fostered by Thatcherism, and its development and mutation in Blair’s policies has created a depressing and debilitating cultural atmosphere. I’m not surprised that expanding your consciousness in such circumstances can put some fragile people at risk of psychosis.

I welcome the highlighting of the downsides of drugs. If Seldon embraced the wider context of the problems being faced as we address “the drugs issue”, he might be a productive part of the debate rather than a cartoonish demagogue.

By the way, for any regular readers, I’ll hopefully be back to more frequent posts soon. A revamped dreamflesh.com, and a book of my essays, are imminent—watch this space!

Naturally, there are myriad questions. Most stories like this with simplistic causal models – people doing X also have Y, therefore X causes Y – leave me wondering about the actual complexities involved. What else was going on in these people’s lives? Was cannabis really a direct cause? Was it more of a catalyst for something simmering away due to other factors? How many people out there would be driven crazy by their jobs if it weren’t for them being able to wind down with a spliff in the evening?

There’s no doubt – and cannabis users know this better than any sober politician – that any psychoactive drug, when misused, can cause mental problems. Just as a builder’s tools can, when misused, cause a house to fall down. But leaping from this to questions of legality is more insane than any drug-induced delusion. As Timothy Leary said of LSD, psychoactive drugs can cause psychosis in people who haven’t taken them.

Let’s be charitable to these mentally unsound politicians, and humour them a little, try to calm them down a bit. Let’s say that in a small minority of people, cannabis can actually cause psychosis (even though there’s no evidence for that at all). Let’s also consider the slightly less deluded (but equally susceptible to gross media spin) idea that people with latent mental problems can have them triggered by – among other things – cannabis use.

Then, I ask: how are these poor people served by being criminalized and locked up? I’ve never seen any evidence that persecution and prison helps out with mental fragility.

And then, just as importantly, what about everyone else smoking cannabis, people who really like it and have no resulting mental problems – possibly even positive benefits. I wonder: how are these people served by being criminalized and locked up?

You see, when we talk these things through, it becomes a little clearer doesn’t it?

Bill Hicks

In almost all years, the total number of people worldwide who die at the hands of international terrorists anywhere in the world is not much more than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States.

John Mueller, ‘A False Sense of Insecurity?’

Via WorldChanging.com, I just read this report (PDF) by John Mueller, just published by the “market libertarian” thinktank, The Cato Institute. The fact that it’s basically saying the same thing about our collective over-estimation of the “terrorist threat” as Michael Moore and Adam Curtis reveals how right/left political distinctions are often hazy, shows that people can acknowledge important common ground, and gives me a little hope.

Whether more people will pay attention just because someone who also thinks the free market is the bee’s knees is saying it, is another matter.

The report makes use of statistics such as that quoted above to highlight to trivial overall threat posed by terrorism. It may be the case—given that the Cato Institute “holds regular briefings on global warming with known ‘climate skeptics’ as panelists”—that Mueller thinks there’s nothing that warrants the level of concern we invest in this threat. However, in his post about the report, Alex Steffen makes the obvious point that our society’s lack of sustainability threatens all that is claimed for terrorism: the end of our “way of life”, high death tolls, political instability, etc. It seems to be an obvious large-scale irrational diversionary tactic, conscious or unconscious. Rather than face real threats, fantasy threats are obsessed over to the point of paralysis in facing reality.

Why did I call this post “Drugs and terrorism”? To be crassly sensationalist, of course. Still, it was interesting to read in Mueller’s report that “risk analyst Paul Slovic points out that people tend greatly to overestimate the chances of dramatic or sensational causes of death”. The classic comparison, used extensively by Mueller, is car deaths: 3 million in America in the 20th century, and no one mourns. Mueller refers to transportation researchers Michael Sivak and Michael Flannagan, from the University of Michigan, who analyzed “how many airliners would have to crash before flying becomes as dangerous as driving the same distance in an automobile.” The result? “There would have to be one set of September 11 crashes a month for the risks to balance out.”

This strongly reminds me of the “drug war”. Between 1997 and 2001, how many died from alcohol and tobacco in England and Wales? Up to three-quarters of a million. Cocaine, speed and ecstasy combined? 857. Opiates? 5,188. No prizes for guessing the gruesome toll from cannabis, mushrooms and acid: zero.

All this seems to show—via truly, truly dispiriting distortions in our society—how powerful and unavoidable the imagination is. Has the gradual sidelining of imaginative activity in our culture pushed it down, and out, into places where it probably shouldn’t play too prominent a role, like national security and national health policy?

I recently spent some time looking into the single recent “mushroom death”. In 2005 a man in Manchester ate some mushrooms and—wait for it—leaped to his death out of his 23rd floor flat. Never mind that he had been out on the town drinking heavily as well—the story fed straight into the debate about the legal status of mushrooms.

The idea of someone getting really drunk and getting run over, or crashing their car—it doesn’t seem to bother people, even though it happens many times, every day. Yet the idea of taking mushrooms and being confused enough to jump out a window scares the shit out of people. There is the element of mushrooms generally being an unknown experience for most people, and hence surrounded by fear; but I’m not sure this explains it. Neither does the fact that they’re illegal, with all the fear that entails for many “normal” people (the mushrooms were legal when that guy died). I wonder if it’s people’s involuntary imaginations at work. Somewhere they are aware that the effects of mushrooms make you more aware, too aware sometimes. People involuntarily place themselves in the mind of the deceased, and find a painful consciousness of death (never mind what the deceased actually experienced—I’m speculating about the imaginations of the living here). This would also explain the relative lack of fear and hysteria in the face of alcohol deaths. Aside from “being used to them”, we know at the back of our minds that being pissed probably blunts the violence of death a little.

People not only “overestimate the chances of dramatic or sensational causes of death”, we respond to them differently when they happen. We’re unnerved by our conscious or unconscious imaginative participation in the death. Part of this is probably natural; but I wonder how much it’s exacerbated by our generally undramatic, numbed day-to-day lives.

As Mark Pauline of Survival Research Laboratories said, “I don’t think people get many visceral experiences these days. Humans are made to have extreme experiences. They are landmarks in your life.” Cast adrift without these landmarks, their spectre looms for us in their most extreme, fearful form. They become barely imaginable; but imaginable enough to drive us collectively mad with fear.