Naturally I’ll post updates here as publication approaches (early 2012 a good estimate), but I’ve also kicked off a website for the project with a sign-up for a special mailing list dedicated to the book. The book’s title isn’t confirmed, but the site is named with rough aptness ‘Polar Cosmology‘.

For now, I’m glad to offer everyone who couldn’t make it both an MP3 download of the talk (with thanks to Mark Pilkington for tech duties), and a slidecast. This is a version of the slideshow I did, synched with the audio recording—which has come out pretty well.

If anyone’s interested in me doing this presentation in their neighbourhood, or in doing an interview on the subject, do get in touch.

Coming up fast, over the last week of March, is the next Metageum conference. The last one was a fascinating event in Malta; this time, we’re in the slightly less megalith-rich, but hopefully more humanly hectic environs of London. Specifically, at the ever-conducive venue, Treadwell’s.

Speakers so far include Paul Devereux, Peter Lloyd, David Luke, Lydia Oukhaneva, Toni Perrott, Peter Knight, Donal Ruane and Deborah Marshall-Warren.

And me. I’m on March 28th at 1.30pm—sign up and I’ll see you there!

My talk has changed slightly from the blurb currently posted there. Here’s the latest version:

Darwin, Rock Art, and the Human Animal

Commemorating this year’s double anniversary (of Darwin’s birth and the publication of The Origin of Species), this talk will delve into the complex influence of evolutionary theory on both the study of prehistoric rock art in particular, and modern attitudes to “primitive” man in general. From the surprising origins of the myth of “the noble savage” in Victorian ethnology to Stephen Pinker’s contentions about prehistoric violence; from Terence McKenna’s mycological speculations to recent archaeological controversies about shamans and visions. This will be a wide-ranging trip through our varying perspectives on the prehistoric mind, what it means to be an animal with imagination, and the bearing of these stories on the ecological crisis we find ourselves in.

I’ve decided to have another go with Christopher Hyatt’s excellent book of Sufi-Reichian-Zen exercizes, Undoing Yourself With Energized Meditation.

Not that it didn’t work first time. Back in ’95 the book helped propel me into what is probably my most intense, sustained period of “alteration” thus far in my life. But, despite Robert Anton Wilson’s revelation of a Secret of the Illuminati, his 23rd Law, in the preface (“Do it every day”), I only kept the routine up for several months. Every day—but only for several months.

It’s shocking for me to read now. The accompanying text—Gurdjieffian incitements, Learyesque evolutionary cheerleading and post-Nietzschean social critique—is calculated, in a fine tradition of roguish spirituality, to shock. But what’s shocking to me now isn’t how challenging it is to my unthinking reality-tunnels; rather, it’s how clearly I can perceive the book’s own reality-tunnels.

My recent reading of James Hillman and John Gray has deeply challenged the utopian euphoria that threaded its way through my ’90s education in radical thought. Terence McKenna, Norman O. Brown, Robert Anton Wilson and others all expressed a form of millennial, evolutionary hope that resonated deeply for me at the time. Hillman, Gray, and others, are equally radical and challenging in their attitude and approach, but their conclusions about human nature and the prospects of a revolutionary break in history are a deal more sobering.

To be sure, there’s a certain geopsychological element in there. Despite McKenna’s globe-trotting, Brown’s English origins and Wilson’s extended residence in Ireland, all were fine exponents of the American Dreaming, that utopian westward march which, despite all the bitter betrayals, still resonates for many radicals. Future-orientation, can-do pragmatism and an unshakable faith in progress.

Gray is very, very English. Hillman is American, but spent nearly three decades in Europe at the Jung Institute in Zurich. Gray’s sense of pagan cyclicity in history, his repeated deference to human foibles and limitations is matched by Hillman’s psychomythical allegiance to Classical Greek culture, and his sense of the way archetypes define and delimit human psychology and pathology.

The blinkered, booming ’90s were a fertile ground for the smooth rush of the American millennial vibe; post-9/11 finds me—and others I’m sure—a little more keenly aware of a more European sense of the messy ups and downs of history’s meanderings.

The core myth behind this sort of negotiation of historical movement, the archetypal scene that is so embedded in our culture that we define ourselves against it whether we like it or not, is of course the Garden of Eden and the Fall of Man.

In the countercultural atmosphere I’ve grown up in, it has always seemed that the doctrine of “original sin” is one of the most pernicious myths possible. Magicians and activists alike usually agree that the Christian idea that we’re irrevocably fucked up is one of the most potent tools of psychological oppression going.

While there are many exponents of this view, Wilhelm Reich always seems to bubble up in my mind as a representative of it. Don’t get me wrong, Reich’s work is very important to me, and I think it’s still got a lot of relevance. His earthy, no-nonsense approach to sexuality and his commitment to the idea of openness and vulnerability as positive qualities have as much to contribute to our mass-mediated age of pseudo-liberation as they did to his time, where sexual and psychological liberation of any kind were just beginning to blossom.

But Reich’s model of the human has both potential for liberation and potential for delusion. It involved three “layers”. Here’s Danny Lowe’s explanation of Reich’s model:

The first of these is a “social” layer, a veneer of good behaviour and politeness with which we interact in the social world. If we see this layer as partially a product of armouring and learnt restraint, we can see that underneath it might lie a second layer—of frustration, anti-social impulses, rage and so on. Where Reich really showed his insight was that he posited another layer beneath this, a part of us which is open, loving and vulnerable. Reich argued that this “core” is naturally decent and moral.

Opposing “original sin” ostensibly involves the idea that we are inherently, at bottom, good. All that we consider evil or fucked up is the result of secondary, not primary, factors—society, civilization, etc.

I still have a certain amount of time for this view. I do think that agricultural and then industrial civilization entailed a “Fall” into history that, by most qualitative measures, worsened the lot of the human individual. This is a kind of primitivist reading of the Genesis myth, which has a lot going for it. Adam and Eve are expelled from the garden idyll of gathering and horticulture into the agricultural vale of woe, the world of Abel, the “keeper of sheep”, and Cain, “a tiller of the ground”.

The problem here is that the Genesis story is delusional. Transposing the Edenic paradise onto the prehistoric condition of human society does an immense disservice to any attempt to criticize agricultural and industrial civilization, setting up a fantasy realm free of suffering that can easily itself be criticized.

Eden is “a myth” in both senses of the word. Of course it’s a story used to make sense of the world; but because of Christianity’s literalism, and how this and its myths have infected our culture, it’s important for once to stress that Eden is also a falsehood. I don’t deny modes of feeling and existence where all seems perfect; but even though these experiences almost inherently carry a sense of eternity, an almost unshakable atmosphere of reality and permanence… they are transitory. I don’t mean they’re illusory, as I take all aspects of reality as transitory. I do mean that the anxious attempt to cling to this sense of eternal, fundamental perfection, when translated into the realm of living nature and society, is ironically the source of vast amounts of suffering.

The most pernicious part of the Genesis story isn’t the “sin”; it’s the fantasy of an original state of perfection. The “sin” follows from this; Eden requires the Fall, if this origin myth is to have any relevance to the world we actually live in.

The fact that the “sin” has been widely interpreted as sexual or lustful in nature has of course had catastrophic consequences for planetary health. But the existence of the pre-Fall paradise seems to undermine the supposedly fundamental nature of “original” sin. What is original, primary, in this myth is—as in Reich’s model of the human character—perfection and contentment. The Fall may have been used by Christian social controllers as a way of oppressing people’s spontaneous impulses of enjoyment; but equally, that lingering sense that things were, once upon a time, absolutely fucking fine, no problems in sight, has fuelled the eschatological fires in Christianity. Eden requires the Fall, and then creates the longing for Apocalypse—a return to paradise as cataclysmic as our expulsion.

As John Gray has shown (most recently in Black Mass), the utopian belief that human nature can be remade, and that history can be culminated in a pseudo-spiritual state of perfection, has led to unimaginable suffering. Stalin’s Soviet Union, the Nazi Holocaust, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, all the horrors of the 20th century were emphatically not nihilistic in intent; they were all motivated by a fervent belief that a better, if not ideal world is possible. And what price wouldn’t you pay for the attainment of paradise on Earth?

The idea that humans are fundamentally flawed and imperfectible seems to me these days to be mere common sense. It’s vital, though, to separate this observation from our attitude towards it. I think it’s a Christian legacy for us, our feeling that this fact is “a downer”: bound up with our anxiety at Adam and Eve having supposedly screwed up their chances of eternal bliss, with us inheriting their guilt, and being burdened with the thirst for salvation and a return to this primal state of perfection. When the idea that we are fundamentally flawed is labelled “pessimistic” or “depressing”, you can be sure there’s some lingering fantasy of Eden lurking there, casting its unbearable shadow over the mortal world.

Think of the most open and honest conversations you’ve had with friends and lovers at points of despair. When our world has fallen apart and we try to hold each other together, we don’t tell ourselves that “one day everything will be wonderful”, or “everything’s OK”. Well, we do; but we understand this is a gesture, not a fact. Telling someone “everything’ll be fine” is a verbal comfort, a gentle, generous hug translated as best we can manage into clumsy words. Refusing this comfort with rational arguments about how obvious it is that not everything’s OK is to confuse fragile, temporary, yet life-sustaining moments of personal contact with abstract opinions about “reality”.

But generally, these conversations lead us to bear our suffering by accepting our flawed nature. “No one’s perfect,” we say, allowing ourselves some humility, some realism that isn’t grim and bitter, but open and accepting.

Christianity’s childish obsession with perfection, virginity, purity and innocence is, in the face of lived life, a cruel, bitter, and ultimately lethal inheritance. Life entails frailty, suffering and what are generally called “hard truths”. To collapse into pessimism on account of this is the weakness of those who have, on some level, bought into the myth of original perfection, not original sin.

We need an optimism that doesn’t depend on everything turning out OK, and I think this starts with humility, an openness to pleasure and pain that doesn’t try to impose some fevered vision of utopia on the world. And despite the apparently bullish positivity of Hyatt’s book, I think ultimately his exercises do help open this capacity up. The clue is in the book’s title: this work isn’t about constructing, building, making; it’s about undoing.

Bristol’s Festival of Ideas kicked off today with a short lecture by social philosopher Steve Fuller, which I popped along to. A flaky friend didn’t show, so you, my dear readers, get what would have been my post-lecture pub ramblings.

Before we get the first round in (mine’s a pint), let me say I’ve not yet read any of Steve Fuller’s fascinating-looking books. An hour or so of listening to the guy talk and respond to questions gives a good impression, but I’ve probably missed some of his subtleties.

Fuller seems to be doing what I’ve always thought should be done, and only recently, through this lecture, realised is being done: he applies the principles of sociology and anthropology to science itself. He studies our own science in the way we might curiously observe the beliefs of a foreign tribe. Obviously this ruffles his colleague’s feathers, especially when the relativism that this stance necessitates sees him standing in defence of “Intelligent Design” (in court, no less). ID, according to almost anyone who hates fundamentalist Christianity, is a contemporary ruse with which to smuggle Creationism into classrooms. Fuller is much more generous towards ID – too generous, many would say.

Given the ludicrously limited choice of neo-Darwinism and Creationism, I side with Dawkins & co. as the lesser of two evils. ID, Creationist links notwithstanding, tries to hold out the promise of a “third option”. I’m not sure it wholly fulfills this role, but it’s the most publicly visible concept that has the potential to complexify the standard face-off between scientists whose concepts of science’s bounds have become worryingly fuzzy, and monotheists whose rationality has suffered a similar fate.

Fuller’s great contribution here seems to be to use ID as a tool for critiquing the calcified strata of belief that often underpin the dazzling commitment to objectivity in science. He contends that belief in a designer actually initiated and fertilized much, if not most, of the origins to modern science.

OK, so Newtonian tradition (if not Newton himself) has God as some great rational designer of an artifact universe; but why should the beliefs that got science off the ground not be shed, like scaffolding, when they outlive their usefulness?

Indeed, says Fuller. He took the work of Kenneth Miller, a biology professor at Brown University, who stood against ID in the court case where Fuller stood in defence of it, and who Fuller regards as the bee’s knees when it comes to the orthodox anti-ID evolutionary position. Tracing most of the arguments that Miller rallies back to the Journal of Molecular Biology, he decided to look at what is really being said about evolution by hard-nosed scientists. Not in their pop science titles where expressions implying a “designer” at work might be forgiven as convenient metaphors, but in their own technical periodicals, where their language is free to be as tediously bereft of such needless personifications as it wants to be.

Well, Fuller claims to have discovered that every step of the way, the concept of a “designer” at work is at least implied in the language of the discussions in this austere journal. This, he says, marks the Darwinists as disingenuous folk trying to have something both ways, with ID at least coming clean and trying to grapple with the issue as it can be conceptualized.

This is where he lost me. It’s an interesting take, perhaps, but it’s more than a little specious. He did, at least, come clean himself; he confessed that he personally can’t conceive of “design” without a “designer”. Suddenly I saw that he’s probably not as well qualified for the job he’s got as one might hope. How can someone so fundamentally trapped within a specific (if currently widespread) model of the world hope to offer useful meta-critiques of science itself?

Perhaps he addresses this in his books, but he made no mention this evening of Chinese thought. Alan Watts, in a lecture I was listening to a few nights ago, remarks that the Chinese ideogram for “nature” literally translates as “that which happens by itself”. Clearly, the Taoist appreciation of spontaneous order affirms that “design without a designer” is a humanly possible conception, even if it might be an effort to grasp from within a culture not used to the idea. Taoism, I feel, has a lot to offer the frustrating, explosive debate between science and religion in the arena of creation and evolution. Indeed, it’s no coincidence that John Gray‘s biting Darwinian attack on secular humanism, Straw Dogs, takes its title and opening quotation from Lao Tzu (“Heaven and earth are ruthless, and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs”).

What is more, post-Darwinian Western science is home to another legitimate current of conceptions of spontaneous order: Chaos theory. Are Darwinians really being dishonest? If science is able to coherently formulate theories of spontaneous order arising in matter, surely the fact that writers in the Journal of Molecular Biology aren’t able to avoid language that implies an active “designer” simply begs questions about the limitations of our language? Our verbs may all need subjects, but does every action need an actor? Are we perhaps projecting limitations of our language onto the world? Fuller, at least, seems to be.

In all, an engaging and important thinker. But he may be more effective after a long meditational retreat.

I must finish here with another take on “spontaneous order”. Last night I found Adam Curtis’ most recent documentary, The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom, on Google Video (you might have to click around for the 2nd and 3rd parts). Not as wholly gripping as The Power of Nightmares and The Century of the Self (also to be found on the net for free viewing), but essential if you’re interested in the arguments he built up in those works. At heart it is a critique of post-World War II laissez-faire social and economic policies, and has some good analysis of the failures of the theory that “spontaneous order” arises when the state apparatus is dismantled (a la Reagan & Thatcher, Blair & Clinton).

My favourite part was near the end, and reminded me of that wise adage, “Economics is a form of brain damage.”

In economics, the whole idea that the free market is an efficient system is coming under serious attack. Over the past five years, many of the Nobel Prizes for Economics have been awarded for studies that show that markets do not create stability or order; that what Adam Smith called “the Invisible Hand” is invisible because it isn’t actually there; and politicians do have a powerful role to play in controlling the markets.

And a new discpline, called Behavioural Economics, has been studying whether people really do behave as the simplified model says they do. They show that only two groups in society actually behave in a rational, self-interested way in all experimental situations: one is economists themselves; the other is psychopaths.

Curtis believes that simple models of reality (here, John Nash’s game theory and classical economics) have been taken too literally, and in the process of applying them to society, people have been subtly moulded to conform to the image of people required by the model. The economic theory that people are rational, self-interested agents who behave in a roughly mechanical way is held at least partly responsible for creating a world where people are cut off from their non-rational feelings and altruistic empathies.

This all resonates strongly with David Kidner’s contention in Nature & Psyche that industrialism’s minimal conception of the natural world has led, through the forceful application of industrialism, to the literal reduction and destruction of much of the natural world. A simple model is enacted, and the world, like the taller guests of Procrustes, is violently made to conform to the model.

My vote for Curtis’ next project would be a dramatic exposition of Kidner’s thesis. So far Curtis has delineated the crucial issues at stake in politics, business and society; with ecological awareness bearing down as the weightiest contemporary issue, it would be fantastic to see his documentary series extend to our relationship with the natural world.

by Gyrus

In this culture, in this age, ego death can be slow and painful.

The Out of Order Order, Liber 111-111 (=000)

Experience

Glastonbury Festival, June 1993. I had finished my final degree exams, and was standing on the edge of a cliff. Behind me lay the rocky certainty of passage through the educational system; ahead lay the uncharted depths of the ocean commonly known as the Real World. At university I had been initiated into illicit drug use, and had fallen foul of a nervous breakdown precipitated by a broken relationship, and the subtle slip into drug abuse that sometimes follows initial ecstatic experiences. Here, among the hallowed hills of Somerset, the residues of this breakdown were to culminate in my facing Death.

The first days were quite uneventful, measured on the scale of the festival’s notoriously hectic hedonism — doughnuts, dope, blazing sunshine and glowing campfires. I ate little, slept little, and danced abundantly. I felt curiously disturbed by the appearance of a raving acid casualty, a girl who bounced around the stage area in the aftermath of The Orb’s appearance, burbling out an incomprehensible gush of verbal torrents that obviously served to help her precariously hang on to some reality among the shifting states she seemed lost in. “Trippy! Trippy! Trippy!” she would exclaim, obviously elated, making a small leap with each word, before degenerating into a disturbing paranoid rant. She eventually vanished into the darkness, and I bumped into a friend and temporarily forgot the incident.

Sunday was the final blow-out. Constant consumption of dope in the Jazz Field, and then preparation for the final night’s festivities — amphetamines, a pill which I hoped contained at least some MDMA, and a pure grass & hash joint. As I dabbed the speed in my tent, a companion poked his head around the zip flap and made a jokey comment about speed being deadly — I laughed it off, having happily ingested far greater quantities at other times, with only good effects.

I dropped the ecstasy before Porno for Pyros, and tried my best to thrash around in the sunset, surrounded as I was by drunken stoned people looking on dumbly at Perry Farrell’s antics. They finished, and I passed the joint around my friends in the dim twilight. Spiritualized took to the stage, which at once erupted into a blaze of searing white light and sculptured white noise. I felt instantly uncomfortable, but my love for the music and my conviction that I WAS going to enjoy myself kept me there for several tracks. Being outside, my glowing sunburn exposed to the chilly onset of night, didn’t help; neither did the fact that it’s impossible to dance to the mono-drone of Spiritualized, so I was unable to release any of the energy that I felt surging up inside me. Most significantly, I was quickly aware of very uncomfortable blocks in the energy flow around certain areas of my body. My left arm gradually passed from electrical tingling to numbness. My heart was beating rapidly, and its seemingly irregular pounding echoed around my body. I felt painful knots of muscles in my upper left back, and vainly tried to massage them out. I sensed that my entire left half, defined in an alarmingly precise way, was either tingling uncomfortably or numb. I feared a heart attack.

On top of this, I realised that I was standing in the same area as the acid girl had been in the night before. I fancied that her disequilibrium and general freaked-outness was seeping into me and not finding its way out.

I remember it vividly. The track being played was ‘Medication’ (a synchronistic irony which added to that of the band’s name, in relation to what was about to happen). The intensely bewildering white lighting, strobes and search-lights, began to seem disturbing, vaguely menacing. I crouched on the floor, partly to avoid the light and dull the sound, and partly to ‘steady’ myself. Rather than look at someone’s backside, I closed my eyes, but found that I could still perceive the forest of legs around me. And mingling with the muffled sound of the band (which was also carried through vibrations in the earth) was a sinister babble of whispering, all the conversations in the field floating around below head-level. Looking up, and opening my eyes, I saw an incredible thing in the sky, which I actually enjoyed watching for a moment, such was its spectacle. The band’s light show, reflected from the night’s clouds and shaped by my altered perceptions, smoothly coalesced into a vast, swirling vortex of light above me, rotating madly like a whirlpool into infinity. I decided to stand up… and after my body had straightened out to full height, I, my consciousness, felt as if I was continuing to rise. I felt as if the point of perception that is essentially me was rising up my spine and threatening to escape out the back of the crown of my skull, towards the vortex in the sky. My thought processes rocketed, and I felt absolutely positive that I was going to die. NOW. Or rather, I had the option — I could fight it off if I wanted to live strongly enough. My responses to this became a rapid oscillation between positive and negative, “Yes!” and “No!”, flitting insanely back and forth like a strobe. I eventually hung on to the positive long enough to decide to walk away.

I asked my friends to take me to the medical centre, which they managed to do with admirable efficiency under the circumstances. I was ferried across the site in an ambulance, and was examined at the medical centre… there I was told that my heart was fine and I was in no danger at all. I ranted for a bit about how E should be legalized so it could have guaranteed purity, and how they (the docs) should give me something to calm my metabolism down; but I was finally shown to a stone barn that served as a medical ‘chill-out’ zone. I found it very difficult to chill out in a brightly lit room full of fellow freak-outs, some crying uncontrollably, one occasionally pointing at me with a quivering hand and an expression of wide-eyed horror. I eventually wandered back to my tent with my friends, and watched the sunrise with a sense of gratitude I had never before experienced.

The months that followed were peppered with other, less intense, death-fear panics; usually, though not always, occurring after smoking cannabis. I would catch glimpses of that feeling I experienced at Glastonbury, of staring into the void of Death, contemplating with clarity and fear the black emptiness that would result from my experience of Life simply ceasing to exist. I was once accidentally given a coffee full of dope, and panicked severely on taking the last sip and discovering the huge flakes of slate at the bottom. Seeking shelter at a friend’s house, I found myself sat behind a television, listening with growing fear to the programme that was on, a hospital drama — the blip-blip of a heart monitor levelling out to a high-pitched tone amidst the sound of panicking doctors. A paranoid, synchronistic mind-media feedback loop often accompanied the death-fear syndrome.

I only began to feel release from the recurring death-fear after a particularly intense dream experience, several months after Glastonbury. As I drifted off to sleep, I heard hypnagogic chants and voices, and slipped imperceptibly into a dream set in the same room as I was sleeping in. All my teeth fell out. I began to feel my blood flow clogging up. The friend who was sleeping in the same bed as me called an ambulance (it was the same friend who had guided me to the medical centre at Glastonbury), and hugged me Goodbye. A crowd had gathered outside when the ambulance arrived, and they cheered me incongruously as I clambered in, apparently praising my degree results. At the hospital, I walked into a tatty, yellowish room lined with mirrors, full of decaying medical equipment and bustling nursing staff. My perceptions were distorted, giving everything the grimy, too-real appearance common on rough acid come-downs. Am I dying or tripping? Or both? If I’m tripping, how can I tell these doctors, who seem to be in a different world, to get me some thorazine? I looked at myself in one of the mirrors, and the instant that I saw my reflection, stark horror in my eyes and blood running from my toothless mouth, time slowed down and made all movements syrupy. I began to fall down to the floor, infinitely slowly, always staring fixedly at my reflection. I quickly remembered a tip a friend had given me for coping with Bad Trips — to place the palms flat on the front and back of the head, and to imagine a beam of blue light linking them. I did this, and everything grew instantly brighter… and brighter… and brighter… and brighter, until it reached a peak intensity, and all I could see was searing white light. I had finally died.

And then I woke up.

Maps & Models

After this dream, I began to intensively research areas that may shed light on my experiences — psychology, religion, shamanism, magick, dreamwork, meditation techniques. I slowly realised that my spontaneous experiences, uninformed at the time by anything save the barest inklings of these various bodies of thought, appeared to resonate with human mythologies and experiences that reached back into the prehistory of our species.

It may be tempting for many people to pass my experiences off as mere aberrations brought about by the careless use of chemical compounds. I cannot (perhaps of necessity). Extensive experience of altered states of consciousness, drug-induced and otherwise, has taught me that such monumentous experiences as these cannot, and should not, be sheltered from analysis and deeper understanding by the cosy blanket of reductionism. I believe my drug use enhanced and intensified my experience of processes that were already present in my situation. Although I ran the danger of mental and/or physiological damage, perhaps such an experience was necessary for certain ways of thinking, certain perceptions, to burst through the rigid layers of my social conditioning. And despite the fact that I acknowledge the stupidity in my abuse of chemicals, I believe that this stupidity stemmed largely from the society and culture that I was raised in — where potentially beneficial substances are criminalized indiscriminately, leading to misinformation and ignorance about their benefits and dangers. The same obsessional behaviour that taboos against sexuality lead to may also manifest in drug use when these substances are banned, and thus closed off from informed debate. For myself, it took an experience like this to shock me into self-discipline with regard to drug use, and to open me up to an intensive, experiential awareness of my own mortality — an awareness that can paralyse one into passive fear, or goad one into a more vital appreciation of the living of Life.

I never have one model. I always have at least seven models for anything.

Robert Anton Wilson

What I intend to do here is to summarise my research and intuitions about this experience, and its possible implications for myself and others in this culture. I’m trying to write what I would have liked to have read two years ago. I will make specific references to my own experiences to clarify the relevance of certain analogies, but I will leave much of the comparison work up to the reader. There is no overall ‘structure’ intended, although there are many resonances between separate sections. However, underlying all the different perspectives and traditions through which this raw data of experience may be filtered, there are several basic assumptions. These are the assumptions I hold now, after my research, and are, like all assumptions, expedient.

• The experiences I have described are not, in their essence, idiosyncratic aberrations; nor are they necessarily universal.
• My delusion that I was about to die was due to ‘crossed connections’ in my mental circuits. An impending dissolution (death) of a set of mental patterns (ego) was misperceived as the impending death of myself as a biological organism.1
• The processes involved in my experiences are intimately connected to ‘initiatory’ processes — both those natural to an organism’s socio-biologic evolution and those rituals found in tribal societies and esoteric mystery schools.

Throughout, I shall refer to the core process that I feel underlies my experiences as IF (Initiatory Fear), for reasons that I hope will become clear.

Shamanism

The most ancient models for IF processes lie in shamanism, which Mircea Éliade has defined precisely as techniques of ecstasy.2 Shamanism is not a religion — the set of techniques that define it exist within many mythological and religious traditions. However, investigations into surviving tribal cultures (in which shamanic practices have survived in their least diluted forms since their origins in human pre-history) have revealed some key, almost universal, mythological motifs in shamanic practices.

Of prime importance here is the initiatory ritual of death and resurrection. A shaman enters his vocation in one of several ways, usually through inheritance or through a spontaneous ‘call’. This often takes the form of an initiatory sickness, which may be an illness, an accidental brush with death (e.g. being struck by lightning) or a general breakdown.

The shamanic cosmos consists of three worlds: this world, the earthly realm; the underworld, populated by ancestral spirits and demons; and the upper world, where gods and celestial beings dwell. This cosmos is usually represented by the symbol of the World Tree; the underworld in its roots, the celestial realms in its branches, and this world where the trunk meets the ground. During hir initiatory sickness, the shaman’s soul travels down into the underworld, and is torn apart by spirits. The mutilated pieces of the shaman’s body are then brought back together, usually in a large cauldron, or in a blacksmith’s furnace. Often an extra organ or magical stone is included in the body as it is re-forged. This is followed by an ascent into the celestial realms, where the shaman meets the tribes’ gods. SHe then returns to this world, healed (often hir body has been lying prone, unconscious, in a tent or hut for several days while hir soul voyaged to the underworld). It is the fact that the shaman has healed hirself, through hir ecstatic journeys to the other worlds, that grants hir the power to heal others (one of the many social functions of the shaman). In healing others, the shaman induces in hirself an ecstatic trance, through drumming, dancing or hallucinogenic plants, which enables hir to journey again to the underworld, to battle with the spirits that have caused the illness, and to recover the client’s lost soul. The shaman also uses hir powers for divination, finding lost objects (or people), and for conducting the souls of the recently deceased to their place in the underworld.

From the reports gathered, it seems that the shaman’s perception of hir soul-body being ripped apart by spirits has a very literal character — many accounts convey an extremely gruesome event. Often, the shaman is decapitated so that sHe may witness hir own dismemberment. Here, while the physical body lies in a tent on the earthly plane, the shaman experiences hir mental and spiritual reconfiguration in a drastically physical way. If the death and resurrection motif of shamanic initiation is seen as a hypernormal ego deconstruction/reconstruction process, the misperception of ego-death as biological death in my own IF experiences can be seen to have strong historical precedents. Of course, my own experiences are more diffuse and distorted — they lack the ritualized focus and mythological structure of true shamanic initiation.

A final analogy is from a less traditional source of shamanic experience. In True Hallucinations, Terence McKenna describes his journey with his brother, Dennis, and several others to the Amazon basin, where they conduct an experiment in consciousness expansion using indigenous psychoactive mushrooms. 24 hours after their key experiment, during the night, Dennis went on a wild ramble in the surrounding jungle; or at least he believed that he did — nobody saw him go or return. Whatever the reality-status of the experience, he had wandered into the jungle and found an especially tall tree.

On impulse, he had climbed it, aware as he did that the ascent of the world tree is the central motif of the Siberian shamanic journey. As he climbed the tree, he felt the flickering polarities of many archetypes, and as he reached the highest point of his ascent, something that he called “the vortex” opened ahead of him — a swirling, enormous doorway into time. He could see the Cyclopean megaliths of Stonehenge and beyond them, revolving at a different speed and at a higher plane, the outlines of the pyramids, gleaming and marble-faceted as they have not been since the days of pharaonic Egypt. And yet further into the turbulent mass of the vortex he saw mysteries that were ancient long before the advent of man — titanic archetypal forms on worlds unimagined by us, the arcane machineries of sentient agencies that swept through this part of the galaxy when our planet was young and its surface barely cooled. This machinery, these gibbering abysses, touched with the cold of interstellar space and aeon-consuming time, rushed down upon him. He fainted, and time — who can say how much time — passed by him.

Again, the parallels are vague and diffuse, but nevertheless there. This account seems to indicate some of the experiences that the “vortex” phenomena may yield when the ego can be released from its painfully desperate attempts to maintain its mastery.

Esoteric Yoga

The most curious aspect of the peak of my Glastonbury death-panic was the sensation of my consciousness threatening to rise above my physical body, out of the top of my skull. There is an obvious connection here with the onset of a near-death experience, but the fact that I do not believe I was actually near physical death, only ego-death, causes me to look for other models (despite the fact that near-death experiences may parallel certain aspects of ego-death).

There is a striking similarity between the anatomical location of my consciousness’ near-escape route and the processes described in the ancient Indian esoteric practice of Kundalini Yoga. This is based around the theory of the chakra system in the human body. Briefly, there are seven separate chakras, or energy centres, each relating to different manifestations of energy in the human organism. They are located in the base of the spine, the genital area, the solar plexus, the heart, the throat, the ‘third eye’ (between the eyebrows) and in the crown of the skull. Each is related, due to its location, to different forces in human life, e.g. the base of the spine is associated with basic survival instincts, and the ‘third eye’ is associated with psychic perceptions. In addition, there is (in certain traditions, and in the correspondences of Leary & Wilson’s Eight-Circuit Brain model) an eighth chakra, located above the head, which is associated with out-of-body experiences. The Kundalini power is envisaged as a snake of energy, or life-force, that lies coiled in the base chakra. If it is activated, through yogic practices, it will surge up through the successive chakras. However, if there is a ‘block’ in any of the chakras above it, the Kundalini snake will rebound downwards, and manifest as a powerfully distorted force in the energy centre immediately below. But if all the chakras are functioning smoothly in their processing of energy, the snake will be experienced as a glowing fiery power that surges up through the spine and out of the top of the skull. Certain energy blockages probably caused the knotted muscles in my back, but the Kundalini seems to have burst through all the chakras to an extent, only to be prevented from free release by terrified ego-mechanisms.

Also, Antero Alli has made an interesting observation with regard to Kundalini experiences:

The activation of Kundalini does not always occur from practising Kundalini Yoga, etc. … It has been known to erupt spontaneously in those people on the verge of major spiritual breakthroughs, regardless of their ideas of how enlightened they are.

However, as my own experience showed, lack of preparation in this process may cause considerable panic, and false, potentially destructive perceptions.

The Dark Night of the Soul / Chapel Perilous

The sixteenth century Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross, wrote his treatise The Dark Night of the Soul in the years following his escape from prison at Toledo. In it, he describes the Dark Night as a “passive purgation”, a necessary period of spiritual dryness and despair through which every soul must pass on it journey towards God. In his introduction to the treatise, Rev. Benedict Zimmerman describes this process as the wilting collapse that follows the finite’s brush with the infinite: “There is one other reason why the soul should pass through the trials of the Dark Night. Its ultimate destiny is union with God. Now the soul is finite, and God is infinite. The disproportion between the two is so enormous (being, in fact, infinite in itself) that the mere comparison must have a crushing effect upon the finite being. … When the finite comes into contact with the infinite it realises its utter nothingness; it is humbled to the ground. The contrast causes it the most intense pain.” Stripped of the Christian theology, I find this to be a nice model to look at the vortex/void experience with. An experiential perception of the void (which is by definition infinite) shatters the puny ego with its incomprehensible vastness, and the ego vainly struggles and claws to hold on to itself — tearing at and cramping the natural psycho-biological flow of energy in the process.

Following in St. John’s footsteps, Robert Anton Wilson renamed this joyless phase of individual evolution ‘Chapel Perilous’. Antero Alli elucidates this idea in great depth in his Angel Tech. He feels that the cause of a soul’s entry into Chapel Perilous is a tremendous SHOCK. The soul, unable to deal with this, migrates from the body, leaving the individual in a barren, literally ‘soulless’ state.

This conception is strongly shamanic. An article I read on the Internet, long since lost in cyberspace, tied up the shamanic idea of soul-loss with modern psychotherapeutic methods of re-experiencing trauma. The combined theory suggests that when someone experiences a traumatic shock to their system, part of the psyche or soul is ‘frozen’ or ‘trapped’ at that precise intersection point in the space-time continuum. The modern model of recovery from this is that the individual has to vividly ‘relive’ that moment in time, and to fully feel the pain and shock that was repressed the first time around — thus ‘thawing out’ the trapped part of the psyche. The shamanic model sees this process as the recovery of the soul; the shaman travels into the underworld (which underpins the space-time continuum) and, after struggling with the evil spirits that kidnapped the soul from its owner in the first place (‘trapping’ it), brings the soul back to hir client, and restores it in its proper place.

Alli explains the process thus:

…[shock] often produces a sense of Limbo, floating feelings and an overall disconnectedness.3 Depending on how traumatic the shock is, we’ll enter into anything from ‘spaciness’ to the Permanent Vocation of Psychosis. Shock temporarily disconnects the soul from the body and sends it to CHAPEL PERILOUS to learn the lesson of the sermon. This process of returning to ourselves … will be referred to as INITIATION.

The initiatory nature of the Dark Night is now explicit. Alli sees the actual initiation in the rebirth aspect of the process. The death aspect occurs when the soul flees the body, and the individual is ‘reborn’ when the soul is recovered.

Initiation is a creative response to the shock of the unknown. Since SHOCK disconnects us, how do we reconnect and where do we begin? One creative way to respond to shock is by reconnecting ourselves to new habits and routines which increase our intelligence and make us happy. During the phase of our disconnection, we are perhaps most vulnerable to impressions and suggestions from ourselves and others. It is during this time that new directions may be initiated and crystallized when the ‘gap of our death’ eventually closes down again and we stabilize. … If we are naive to this effect and don’t reconnect ourselves creatively, we lapse back even deeper into our previous habits… like them or not. (Alli)

The Chaos Paradigm

A key influence on the conception of initiatory processes in this article has been ‘The Cycles of Chaos: Deconstructing Initiation’ by Kalkinath & Vishvanath. The impetus behind Chaos Magic,4 to strip dogma and glamour away to reveal the bare bones of magickal structures (and then to use glamours as tools) has been applied here to recognise that ‘initiation’ is not necessarily a cut-and-dried event that occurs once and instantly reveals great secrets, or ushers one on to an authentic ‘path’.

Initiation is described here as a “threshold of change”, and Kalkinath & Vishvanath make clear three important points about what I have termed IF processes:

• Initiations are processes. They may take many different forms, and vary in scope and impact. Here, the process of initiation is divided into three cycles — (a) peaks (initiatory crises), which can take the form of intense over-load experiences, crushing breakdowns or accidents/illnesses; (b) troughs, in other words Dark Nights of the Soul, dryness of spirit and an oppressive sense of emptiness; and (c) plateaux, where “nothing much seems to be going on”.
• Initiatory processes are fractal. Here, they are described in terms of Macroscopic and Microscopic initiations. That is, Big Ones and Little Ones; different scales of process which share a basic similarity in structure, and which often contain elements, motifs or archetypes that resonate across space and time.
• The key to dealing with initiatory cycles is recognition. Through examining your own experiences, you can become consciously aware of the particular process you are moving through. Kalkinath & Vishvanath’s method for dealing consciously with IF processes is the A PIE formula: Assess — stop and realise you are at a turning point, examine possibilities open to you, use option lists, divinatory techniques, “be vulnerable to the forces of change.”; Plan — decide what you need to do, gather resources necessary for its implementation; Implement — do it! Follow things through, do not give in to inertia; Evaluate — assimilate your experiences into your Self, real-ize the lessons you have learnt.

In line with a major practical technique in the Chaos tradition, the inevitable fear associated with these processes is not seen as something to be avoided and suppressed. Rather, full awareness is maintained; the fear is fully experienced, and transformed into wonder or excitation. “Transform fear into fuel” — a redirection of energy flow.5

Psychedelic Research

Ego-Death

In the mid 1960s, ex-Harvard professor Timothy Leary collaborated with colleagues Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner on a re-vision of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, renamed The Psychedelic Experience. Their central thesis in this new interpretation is highly relevant to the general ideas presented here in relation to IF processes. The Book was traditionally seen as a guide-book for the dead, to be read to the dying or recently deceased in order to guide them through the successive realms, or bardos, of the Tibetan Buddhist model of the afterlife — and to enable them to successfully find a nice new body to be reincarnated in. With the guidance of Tibetan Buddhist Lamas, Leary revealed that this was merely the exoteric reading of the Book. Its hidden, esoteric meaning was that it was designed to guide people through the death/rebirth initiation rites of Tibetan mystery schools.

So, with the intention of providing Americans with a safe guide to turning on, he and his friends re-wrote the Book in modern psychedelic parlance. In a journey directly analogous to that supposedly taken by the departed soul between the end of one life and the beginning of the next, the tripper is guided through the death of hir old ego (resulting in the classic ‘merging with the Clear Light’), and, on the come-down, advised regarding creative choice of new ego patterns, more flexible ‘game routines’.

Speaking of the difficulties often encountered by those new to intense psychedelic experiences, the book confirms my own intuition regarding the misperception of ego-death:

…another impasse is the imposition of physical symptom games onto the biological flow. The new somatic sensations may be interpreted as symptoms. If it is new, it must be bad. Any organ of the body may be selected as the focus of the ‘illness’. … All physical symptoms are created by the mind. Bodily sickness is a sign that the ego is fighting to maintain or regain its hold over the outpouring of feeling, over a dissolution of emotional boundaries.6

Perinatal Matrices

As we venture [on LSD] beyond the biographical events of early childhood, we enter into a realm of experience associated with the trauma of biological birth. Entering this new territory, we start experiencing emotions and physical sensations of great intensity, often surpassing anything we might consider humanly possible. Here we encounter emotions at two polar extremes, a strange intertwining of birth and death, as if these two aspects of the human experience were somehow one. Along with a sense of life-threatening confinement comes a determined struggle to free oneself and survive.7

Stanislav Grof is a pioneer in the application of the psychedelic experience to clinical psychiatry, and in the mapping of the human psyche. His principal contribution to human psychology seems to be his research into how our experiences in the womb, and during the birth process, affect our life experiences as adults.

During many LSD sessions, involving both himself and patients, he noticed that most people eventually spontaneously re-lived their pre-birth experiences — even back to being a sperm struggling towards its goal, at the same time as being the egg waiting for the triumphant sperm. Their fusing would be experienced as a titanic explosion of creative energy, followed by the mysterious differentiation of cells that forms the foetus. Many experiences of foetal life and birth related by patients in psychedelic therapy were later confirmed objectively by medical records, parents and adults present at the birth. Without prior knowledge, people established through LSD sessions very specific details about their mother’s lives while pregnant and various events or complications surrounding their birth.

Grof discovered profound connections between the physical experiences of the womb and of birth, and later manifestations of aberrant behaviour and psychology, as well as intense spiritual experiences. He called the complex emotional constellations that threaded through the key experiences of an individual’s life COEX systems (for “systems of COndensed EXperience”). An individual will usually have several COEX systems in their unconscious mind, each one dominated by a major theme, e.g. humiliation, claustrophobia, or rejection (there are also positive COEX systems, however). As a result of his research, covering both LSD experiences and physical birth processes, he concluded that a major, possibly fundamental, part of each COEX system is a corresponding stage in foetal development and birth. He called the residues of these experiences Basic Perinatal Matrices (BPMs).8 He hypothesizes that many traumatic or ecstatic life experiences involve a re-invocation of BPMs whose dominant themes resonate with the specific experience. More radically, he suggests that certain compulsive or obsessive traits (e.g. the repetitive seeking-out of humiliating experiences) are governed by BPMs — we search, consciously or not, for situations that re-invoke certain birth processes, which consequently augment the corresponding COEX system. He feels it is necessary to fully re-experience, and integrate, such BPMs in order to resolve the conflict patterns they have engendered.

He divides the BPMs into four successive stages, each one representing a specific constellation of motifs (represented on LSD by vivid hallucinations and emotions), each one a basis for an ongoing COEX system. I shall briefly describe his definitions of these stages, and add comments regarding their relevance to this essay as appropriate.

• BPM I — The Amniotic Universe: Often associated with the passive, oceanic ecstasy of classical mysticism; every need being instantly fulfilled, floating in a warm, comfortable aquatic environment. However, recollections of various toxins in the mother’s body (alcohol, cigarettes, spicy foods, ‘toxic’ emotions like anger or bitterness) can manifest as feelings of suffocation, agonizing physical pains, muscular spasms, the felt presence of insidious evil entities or alien intrusions.
• BPM II — Cosmic Engulfment & No Exit: Finds its basis in the onset of the birth process, the realisation that the bliss of the Amniotic Universe is about to end, but without any idea of what will follow. The uterine cervix is still closed, but contractions have begun, and various hormonal and chemical changes are taking place. “The contractions, closed cervix, and the unfavorable chemical changes combine to create a painful and life-threatening environment from which the fetus can sense no possibility of escape. It is no wonder the death and birth are so closely related in this matrix.” Grof relates the common occurrence of paranoid ideas during the reliving of this matrix (radiation, evil forces, secret organizations, extraterrestrial influences) to the chemical changes of the onset of contractions, which may be perceived by the unborn child as disease or intoxication. He also relates the pessimism of the existentialists to this process, noting that Sartre called one of his most famous theatrical statements of crushing anxiety No Exit.
  There are two specific quotes here that may shed light on the key experiential themes of this essay:

  As these threatening experiences continue and deepen, the person may have a vision of a gigantic whirlpool and feel in the middle of it, being drawn relentlessly to its center.9

  Experiences of BPM II are best characterized by the triad: fear of death, fear of never coming back, and fear of going crazy. I have already discussed the predominance of the theme of death; this often includes the sense that one’s own life is seriously threatened. Once this feeling is present, the mind is capable of fabricating any number of stories that provide a rational ‘explanation’ of why this is happening — an impending heart attack or stroke, an ‘overdose’ when a psychedelic drug is involved, or many others. The cellular memory of birth can emerge into present consciousness with such a force that the person believes beyond any doubt that real biological death is possible and actually imminent.10

  And, echoing Kalkinath & Vishnvanath’s advice about ‘relaxing into the fear’, Grof states: “Paradoxically, the fastest way out of this situation is to fully accept the hopelessness of the predicament, which really means conscious acceptance of the original feelings of the fetus.”

• BPM III — The Death-Rebirth Struggle: A continuance of the above process, although now there is a little ‘light at the end of the tunnel’, as the very apt cliché goes. “In the previous matrix, the cervix was closed; now it is open, allowing the fetus to move through the birth canal. Although the fight for survival continues, there is now a sense of hope, a belief that there will be an end to the struggle.” Reliving this process involves a titanic experience of pressure (due to the vast pressure of the pelvic opening on the child’s head and body), and the intense physical proximity between the child and the mother often results in an oscillating identification between the child and the mother. This frequently involves intense sexual arousal, due to the involvement of the genital area. Grof believes this to be a stage of violently merging contradictions, where death is intertwined with sexuality, pleasure with pain, aggression with love — he terms this experience “Dionysian” or “volcanic” ecstasy, as opposed to the passive bliss of BPM I.
• BPM IV — The Death-Rebirth Experience: A traumatic yet triumphant culmination of previous sufferings and struggles, resulting in an experience of total ego annihilation. Their is an intense purgation that bursts through the pits of despair and violence of BPMs II & III. There follows a sense of deep relaxation, serenity and quiet excitement. Grof warns that an incomplete re-experiencing of this stage, due to complications in BPM III, may result in a hyperactive mania; the cosmic insights and feelings of triumph at this stage can manifest in people wildly proclaiming their revelations to others and making grandiose plans to change the world.

Although Grof occasionally runs dangerously close to a reductionist position (intense emotional experiences in adult life are nothing but the re-emergence of perinatal matrices), the primal nature of the birth process does indicate that experiences of it may be of great importance in assessing and understanding many archetypal human experiences of death-rebirth.

Individuation, Culture, and Awareness of Mortality

In surveying the neo-Jungian literature dealing with the different stages of human life, and the transitional phases/crises between them, I was struck by the fact that the crisis provoked by an encroaching awareness of self-mortality is placed categorically in the mid-life crisis transition. In his wide-ranging study, The Seasons of a Man’s Life, Daniel J. Levinson acknowledges that the concept of death does play a role in all the various transitional phases:

Some preoccupation with death — fearing it, being drawn to it, seeking to transcend it — is not uncommon in all transitions, since the process of termination-initiation evokes the imagery of death and rebirth.

However, Levinson says that “…the experience of one’s mortality is at the core of the mid-life crisis.” Why? In this standard model of the human life-structure, the biological and social imperatives come first: the crisis of the early adult transition (approx. 17-22) is focused around entering the adult world, with the primary aims of getting married, raising a family, and getting a job (and social status) to facilitate this. When these duties are accomplished, and the person in question is rendered redundant in terms of their biological service to the species; then sHe will begin to realise the horrible fact of mortality.

Although I have not found any statement backing this up, Levinson’s assertions about the awareness of death in the mid-life crisis seem to contain an implicit commentary on Jung’s conception of how cultural evolution is carried out:

Man has two aims. The first is the natural aim, the begetting of children and the business of protecting the brood; to this belongs the acquisition of money and social position. When this aim has been reached a new phase begins: the cultural aim.11

A young person has not yet acquired a past, therefore has no present either. He does not create culture, he merely exists. It is the privilege and task of maturer people, who have passed the meridian of life, to create culture.12

It isn’t too wild an assumption to see a connection here between awareness of mortality and participation in the evolution of culture. Lust for some form of immortality (fired by awareness of death) has often been cited as the drive responsible for culture in the first place. Jolande Jacobi has elucidated Jung’s philosophy further with a quote from Schopenhauer:

Life may be compared to a piece of embroidery, of which, during the first half of his time, a man gets a sight of the right side, and during the second half, of the wrong. The wrong side is not so pretty as the right, but it is more instructive; it shows the way in which the threads have been worked together.13

I don’t think that Jung’s and Schopenhauer’s views here stem from some youth-hating bigotry. This model of the individual’s relation to culture was probably quite valid for their respective eras. However, as most people reading this must know, it is no longer just over-40s who create all the culture that surrounds us and permeates our existence. Since World War II, the progressive emergence of specific youth sub-cultures has created zones of autonomy in which young people can manifest their own cultural environments: beatnik, hippy, punk, mod, goth, industrial, rave, cyberpunk… These radiate outwards into mainstream culture, where they are usually assimilated and emasculated; but the continuing existence of thriving sub-cultures keeps the young one step ahead of the mainstream. Jung and Schopenhauer would have had to radically remodel their ideas if they had been zapped into the future and taken to a rave festival in the backwoods of rural England.

The DIY ethic of all the most radical elements of today’s youth cultures is a conscious rejection of the model of cultural evolution that seems to have existed from the beginning of settled civilisations until about fifty years ago.

A Stab in the Dark Night

What follows is just one model in which to place IF processes in relation to human evolution in general. I’ve only found this one so far — I’d be interested to hear of others. I’ve taken the step of making quite a wild generalization, extending from my own personal experiences out into cultural evolution theory for two reasons: (i) The fact that most people I know have experienced some form of breakdown (at least) or confrontation with Death (at most) in their early twenties. Several cases have borne vivid similarities; and (ii) it’s a possibility, so I’ll throw it out there for it to be ripped apart and analysed by others, and to pass or fail the test of time.

It seems that in the context of my own (and many other peoples’) experiences, the awareness-of-death crisis, that traditionally hits you when your brood have flown from their nest, has been shoved backwards down the ladder of life to become the focus of the early adult transition crisis. It is true that many of the ‘confrontations with Death’ I spoke of above involved assorted hallucinogens, or pseudo-hallucinogenic cocktails of other substances. Firstly, beware of reductionism, of ‘explaining away’. Secondly, it may well be that in certain sections of the population the awareness of mortality is being shoved backwards because of the widespread use of psychedelics. The intimate connections that have been traced between the explosion of psychedelic usage in the sixties and the parallel emergence of youth culture seems to confirm that these compounds have played a great part in the toppling of the Jungian model of culture.14 Of course, psychedelics make you aware of more than just your own death — but this seems to be a glaringly powerful factor in the hypothesis that is emerging here.

Jacobi acknowledges that there have always been those freak individuals who end up looking at the wrong side of Schopenhauer’s embroidery in the first half of their life cycle. He describes these as “the introverted, the seekers, the quiet and reflective ones.” He sees this as a tragedy — they supposedly spend the first half of their life moaning about how screwed up the world is, and then mourn the missed opportunities of youth in their old age. This seems to be a completely illogical way of looking at things. To go back to Schopenhauer’s analogy — surely the woMan who looks naively at the ‘right’ side in youth, then sees the thread structures in middle age and starts trying to add hir own contribution, surely sHe will be pretty frustrated that sHe has realized the pattern can be re-made — after hir youthful energy has passed hir by. Surely we should look at the ‘wrong’ side as soon as possible, try to improve it, or re-thread it, as best we can. Then we can relax as we approach old age, enjoy the fruits of our labours, and watch the new generation with pride as they valiantly add their own improvements to life’s embroidery.

It seems that youth culture in the late 20th century holds at its core this very idea, of looking at the wiring under the board and re-engineering, long before one is ‘supposed’ to. Perhaps we have been forced to do this, such is the blatancy of the toxic mess our ancestors have made of our culture and the planet we inhabit. And, on surveying the writings of Arthur Koestler, it can be seen that this lowering of the age of cultural participants has possible evolutionary implications.

Paedomorphosis, or Juvenilization, is an evolutionary strategy much lauded by Koestler.15 Although it has gained credence from the work of biologists such as Garstang, Hardy, de Beer, Koltsov, Takhtajan and Julian Huxley, it is not an established argument in the study of biological evolution. But, as we shall see, it is of undeniable importance in cultural evolution.

In general, paedomorphosis is seen as an evolutionary strategy for the escape from the dead-ends of over-specialization:

It indicates that at certain critical stages evolution can retrace its steps, as it were, along the path which lead to the dead end and make a fresh start in a new, more promising direction. The crucial event in this process is the appearance at the foetal, larval or juvenile stage of some useful evolutionary novelty which is carried over into the adult stage of the organism’s progeny.

An example given by Koestler of this process in biology is that of the sea cucumber. This creature ordinarily sits on the sea bed like an inert sausage. However, its larvae float about in the ocean, like a plant’s seeds in the wind. These larvae show features, like a ciliary band (a forerunner of the nervous system), that make them closer to fish than the adult cucumber. It is hypothesised that some of these larvae, subjected to stronger selective pressures than the adults as they drifted in the oceanic currents, gradually became more fish-like, and eventually some reached sexual maturity while still in the larval state — “…thus giving rise to a new type of animal which never settled on the bottom at all, and altogether eliminated the senile, sedentary cucumber stage from its life history.”16 Paedomorphosis “involves a retreat from specialized adult forms to earlier, less committed and more plastic stages in the development of organisms — followed by a sudden advance in a new direction … In biological evolution the escape is brought about by a retreat from the adult to a juvenile stage as the starting point for a new line; in mental evolution by a temporary regression to more primitive modes of ideation, followed by the creative leap forward.” Thus, biological juvenilization finds its parallel in cultural evolution.

Now, perhaps, the ‘archaic revival’ proposed by Terence McKenna, and the term ‘modern primitive’ popularized by the Re/Search body art manual, can be seen in an evolutionary context. The prime characteristics of rave culture — the use of psychedelics, the utilisation of percussive music for altering consciousness, its neo-tribal structure, the rise in nomadic lifestyles, the popularity of body-piercing and tattooing — may be seen as a cultural return to a more primitive model. From this point, having regressed back beyond the cultural and social blind alleys of recent human history, a “creative leap forward” may be made to escape WoMan’s over-specialization.

Hopefully, out of this quaggy mire of pop science, the reader will have already dredged up my main argument, relating to IF processes. It is probable that our culture has reached a dead end. The intense selective pressures that today’s young face, adrift during their larval phase in overloaded media landscapes and societal breakdowns,17 may be dramatically collapsing the awareness-of-death crisis back to the point at which the security of the parental/educational nest is left behind — and often even further. The breakdown-restructuring process that this awareness necessitates, when experienced in the “more plastic” stages of adolescence/early adulthood, will enable some to restructure themselves, and eventually their culture, into more viable, less destructive phenomena.

Koestler also talks about the process of regeneration in relation to paedomorphosis. Apparently, in animals that are able to regenerate lost limbs or organs, like amphibians, the “magic [of regeneration] is performed according to the undoing-redoing formula; the tissue cells near the amputation stump de-differentiate and regress to a quasi-embryonic state, then re-differentiate and re-specialize to form the regenerated structure.” Koestler’s examples progress up the evolutionary tree to rats, whose brain tissues can similarly de-specialize then re-specialize if their optical cortex is removed.

Lastly, in our own species, the ability to regenerate body structures is reduced to a minimum, but compensated by man’s unique power to re-mould his patterns of thought and behaviour — to meet critical challenges by creative responses. And thus we have come full circle through biological evolution back to the various manifestations of human creativity, based on the undoing-redoing pattern, which runs as a leit-motif from paedomorphosis to the revolutionary turning points in science and art; to the mental regeneration at which the regressive techniques in psychotherapy are aimed; and finally to the archetypes of death-and-resurrection, withdrawal and return which recur in all mythologies.

And we have come full circle, back to the shamanic initiatory theme.

It is fascinating to note the connection between a culture’s provision of initiation rites for its young (shamanic or otherwise) and the level of crime and mental illness in that culture. Jungians never tire of pointing out our lack of culturally sanctioned rites of passage, and its connection to retarded personal development. But what do WE have to be initiated INTO? In tribal societies, a youth undergoes severe ordeals as part of hir initiation into adulthood, and “During the heightened suggestibility of this state, he is instructed in tribal lore, myth, secrets, traditions and the arcane wisdom of the ancestors.”18 What if the culture doesn’t work anymore? What if the majority of the ‘elders’ are as ignorant of the (toxic) culture they live in as they are of the (toxic) air they breathe? They are then in no position to initiate anyone into anything. But the initiatory process will not just fade away — “…although our culture no longer provides rites of initiation, there persists in all of us . . . an archetypal need to be initiated.“19

What I am proposing here is that we may be seeing the emergence in certain individuals of spontaneous initiation, into the culture that the individual chooses to help create.20 Please read the previous sentence again and think about it. The forces of cultural evolution may be thrusting vastly traumatic, and potentially highly creative, mental breakdowns upon young people; unprompted and unasked-for initiatory crises that lack a rigid formula for the re-structuring phase… and hence burst open the vertiginous possibility of a radically new vision of human culture and society.21

Appendix

What follows is a compilation of extracts from letters received from an individual who has had a similar set of experiences to the myself. His account is interesting in that he seems to have facilitated a return to the death-panic state, and actually ‘went through’. It should be borne in mind that these words were never intended, originally, for publication. My grateful thanks to (you know who you are) for allowing this account to be published, and for helping me put my own experiences into perspective.

I had the same type of experience (the opening up of the universe and a type of vortex pulling me up) about 9 years ago. I had been smoking hash and drinking most of the night. I suddenly began seeing (I was in a pub) that my life could stay exactly like it was, and that I would be like the other people in the pub, just sitting around wasting their lives. I left the pub, and as I began walking down the road, my mental universe seemed to give way. The ‘vortex’ type effect came and I knew I had the choice to live or die. My heart began beating so loud and fast that it dominated my consciousness. Something inside me knew it was going to pack out. I also knew that I had to go forward (upward) and die, but oh, oh, oh, what fear and panic. I didn’t want to make the choice, and so I collapsed on the floor (luckily no one was about or I would have felt a right turkey).

After this experience I was no longer capable of living the life I had been living, but also couldn’t go forward and work out where I was going next — I had a great sense that I had failed the experience and should have died. After a lot of anguish and lack of direction, I was eventually born onto the Magickal Path, i.e. I read a few Crowley books and felt these may lead to an understanding of the experience. I began practising various magickal and yogic methods, which served as a good discipline. I had slight rumbles of the life/death/panic experience, but nothing so heavy as the first one for about 7 years or so.

Then, late in ’92, I again had the experience, the whole bloody “I’m going to die” panic. I managed to control it this time, but on my birthday I was again there. I really knew I was going to die. I was sobbing and shaking. My heart was again going crazy, time seemed to have slowed down, so each moment was an eternity, every thought seemed to have infinite significance. My girlfriend eventually called a doctor, and I was told it was a ‘panic attack’. I had these ‘panic attacks’ (although not as intense) for quite a few months after this. Every time I went through them it was always a choice of life or death, Death a forward decision and Life a backward decision. And I always came away from them with a sense of failure. On the early morning of 6.7.93, I had another. This time I used all of my discipline (from yoga/magick work) and rode the panic. I rode it all the way up. I lost all consciousness of my body and material surroundings. I came to the point where I knew I would die or not. I knew to back out would somehow lead to failure. I knew I had to die. It was the end of my life. It was a type of block that separated life from death. I then pushed forward and surrendered to death. All I can say after this is that I later started ‘coming down’, knowing I was ‘reborn’ (horrible Xtian-type word) and that I had completed my life/self.

Since that day I have been able to ride the ‘vortex of light’ without the Pan-ic, and had been riding it the night before I got your letter. I think the experience is linked to the Greeks’ Pan concepts, Pan being the all-begetter, all-destroyer; death, all and not. Thus the Pan-ic felt when the life/death choice comes. This is just one map I have since found that seems to describe this experience. Another is that the vortex equals Kundalini, and the ‘death leap’ equals the reaching of Nirvana. They all seem to fit the experience, using different symbolism. As I was saying, I now seem to be able to ride the vortex without the same Pan-ic. I can do this by mixing yoga and hashish, although I now find that the ‘Great Leap’ is impossible for me, as it seems to be a one-off experience — you can only die twice!

I found it very interesting to read in your letter how after your Glastonbury experience you occasionally felt the vortex opening up again. I too had (and still have occasionally) the same feeling. It’s as if the near-death experience cuts you free of gravity, and at any moment you can be sucked up into infinity. Incidentally, I was reading a ‘Women’s Own’ type magazine a few weeks ago, and came across an article about the increasing occurrence of ‘panic attacks’ amongst the population recently. It seems from the article that doctors aren’t really sure why this is, or what can be done about it. Reading this, I came to the theory that they (the ‘panic attacks’) could be some kind of evolutionary mutation, brought on perhaps by the increase in information and a growing awareness of there being no one basic reality. Thus the person’s sense of security is weakened, opening up the ‘fear-vortex’.

Footnotes

1. If I drop dead of a cardiac arrest tomorrow, I don’t believe it would invalidate my ideas here. The fact that I am writing this now proves that my fear of imminent death at Glastonbury was unfounded. Also, several medical check-ups since then have shown that my heart is perfectly healthy. This is one of the reasons I have interpreted my experience as a transference of a mind-based process onto the physical aspect of my organism. [back to text]
2. The word ‘ecstasy’ is not used here in the standard narrow definition of ‘rapturous joy’. Its roots lay in the Greek word ekstasis, literally ‘to stand outside oneself’. Overwhelming joy may be experienced, but shamanic ecstasy, soul-travel, is not confined to one emotion, or even standard conceptions of emotion. [back to text]
3. Both myself and my correspondent (see Appendix, above) experienced this sense of weightlessness. I felt it as a very worrying sense of insubstantiality, of not being ‘grounded’ in any way. [back to text]
4. For more information on Chaos Magic, see Liber Null & Psychonaut by Peter Carroll, and Prime Chaos and Condensed Chaos by Phil Hine. [back to text]
5. John C. Lilly has expressed this view in an interview in Mavericks of the Mind. Asked what he thought the purpose of fear is, he replied, “From Orthonoia to Metanoia through Paranoia. Orthonoia is the way most people think; they’re creating simulations that everyone accepts. Metanoia is where you leave all that and you’re experiencing higher intelligence. But the first time you do this, you’re scared shitless. On my first acid trip in the [flotation] tank, I panicked. Suddenly I saw the memorandum from the National Institute of Mental Health: ‘Never Take Acid Alone.’ That’s all I could think of. Luckily, I was scared shitless, had no idea what was going to happen, and boy, that was rocket fuel if ever there was one! I went further out in the universe than I’ve ever been since. So the Paranoia is rocket fuel to get you into Metanoia.” Incidentally, Lilly’s concept of metaprogramming in his books The Human Biocomputer and Centre of the Cyclone precisely anticipated the basic principles of Chaos Magic (as exemplified in Pete Carroll and Phil Hine’s work), which came along about 10 years later. [back to text]
6. A note here on the fears that are abound about ‘the end of the world’. To put it glibly… equate, if you will, the individual ego with the collective consciousness, and individual biological organism with the biosphere. Is it not possible that, just as impending ego-death may be experienced in the distorted form of the terror-inspiring feeling that Death is approaching, humanity’s fears of an ‘apocalypse’ may be just a (potentially dangerous) mass misperception of an impending release from our petty collective ego? [back to text]
7. The Holotropic Mind, p.28 [back to text]
8. Perinatal means near or around childbirth. [back to text]
9. The Holotropic Mind, p.48. In correspondence, Margaret Andreas commented on my ‘vortex’ experience, “Surrender to the Void. The Void is the Womb from which we will be reborn.” [back to text]
10. The Holotropic Mind, p.51 [back to text]
11. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, par. 114 [back to text]
12. ‘Women in Europe’ in Civilization in Transition, p. 132 [back to text]
13. Essays from the Parerga and Parelipomena, p. 102 [back to text]
14. See Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream by Jay Stevens. [back to text]
15. And Timothy Leary. At a Nova Convention in the late 70s, Leary, with his customary jovial hyperbole, described paedomorphosis as “the hottest issue in evolution, the number one tactic that the DNA code has always used.” Leary’s application of the idea of paedomorphosis to sixties youth culture has greatly influenced my ideas. [back to text]
16. Koestler also puts forward the tentative hypothesis that the ‘missing link’ between ape and man may be the ape embryo. He quotes numerous examples showing that the ape embryo resembles the human form more strongly than does the adult ape – for instance, lack of body hair, lighter skin, less protrusive eyebrow ridges, larger cranium, and numerous other structural similarities. In a highly speculative mode, it is fascinating to take on board the idea that the foetal form of an organism prefigures, to some extent, its next stage in evolution. The re-connection with foetal life in Grof’s psychedelic therapy may be seen as personal, micro-scale paedomorphosis – as may shamanic initiation. Also, it is interesting to look at the human embryo with this concept in mind. Here we have an even larger cranium, in relation to total body mass, possibly indicating greater mental capacities in our future evolution. Finally, compare the human embryo form to popular representations of advanced extraterrestrials (developed from supposed contactee eyewitness reports) – their bodily forms possess an uncanny embryonic or foetal quality. [back to text]
17. See also notes in Appendix, above. [back to text]
18. On Jung by Anthony Stevens, p. 128 [back to text]
19. On Jung by Anthony Stevens, p. 130. Perhaps modern WoMan’s endemic fear and denial of death (and hir consequent susceptibility to manipulation by cynical priests and advertisers) stems from this very lack of initiation rites. A living relationship with the death and resurrection archetype that lies at the heart of all initiations would probably go some way towards enabling individuals to deal better with the prospect of biological death. The acceptance of death as a natural stage of life in tribal and shamanic cultures seems to confirm this. [back to text]
20. Alternatively: “Our initiation is more OUT OF the society than INTO it.” (Margaret Andreas) [back to text]
21. Margaret Andreas notes that the real meaning of the word ‘radical’ is ‘from the root’, which places it closely in relation to paedomorphosis, regression to womb life, and to the thematic core of the death-rebirth motif. [back to text]

Bibliography

• Gneurosis #2, published by The Out of Order Order
• Mavericks of the Mind, edited by David Jay Brown & Rebecca McClen Novick
• Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, by Mircea Eliade
• The Death & Resurrection Show, by Rogan Taylor
• True Hallucinations, by Terence McKenna
• Angel Tech, by Antero Alli
• SSOTBME, by Ramsey Dukes
• Thundersqueak, by Liz Angerford & Ambrose Lea
• The Dark Night of the Soul, by Saint John of the Cross
• ‘The Cycles of Chaos: Deconstructing Initiation’ by Kalkinath & Vishvanath, in Chaos International no. 16
• Character Analysis, by Wilhelm Reich
• The Psychedelic Experience, by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner & Richard Alpert
• Flashbacks, by Timothy Leary
• The Holotropic Mind, by Stansislav Grof
• On Jung, by Anthony Stevens
• The Way of Individuation, by Jolande Jacobi
• Civilization in Transition (CW, Vol. 10), by Carl G. Jung
• Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (CW, Vol. 7), by Jung
• The Seasons of a Man’s Life, by Daniel J. Levinson
• The Psychology of Death, by Robert Kastenbaum & Ruth Aisenberg
• Janus: A Summing Up, by Arthur Koestler

However, rubbernecker that I am, I just spent a short time reading about this extreme right-wing American media figure, just to see what the score is, after noticing a reference on the BBC site about her appearance on Newsnight:

Some bloggers—from that objective demographic of extreme right-wing, sexually frustrated males—thought she “beat Paxman”. One, a BNP member, throws in a classic Coulter quote:

If you don’t leave liberals in a sputtering impotent rage, you’re not talking to them right.

Of course Paxman is not quite a “liberal” (this side of the Atlantic, that is), but his muted, bemused response to her in the interview shows his class as much as any browbeating of British politicians. He obviously just can’t believe she’s serious. He smiles wryly at the end, and all but turns to the camera and shrugs his shoulders. Where else to go when someone seems like a vicious satire of themselves?

Well, dear Henry Rollins has found one other valid take on the matter:

It’s highly curious to me that I agree with some of her points, in their most basic form. Apparently her new book Godless: The Church of Liberalism accuses modern Darwinians of effectively being, despite their professed opposition to religion, creatures of faith themselves. I recently read Mary Midgley’s fascinating book Evolution As A Religion, which proposed the same argument. A more diverse pair of women than Coulter and Midgley you will not find, however, and Coulter’s take on the view is slightly less nuanced than Midgley’s. (In the same way that Cliff Richard is slightly less funky than Bootsy Collins.)

I’ve seen it a few times recently: right-wingers—presumably rabid free market types who shed not a tear for the underprivileged—decrying Darwinism as the invention of liberals. Oh, sorry, it’s fine if you wrongly apply this “wrong” theory to economics and society, but in the name of Jesus, can we all stop applying it to contentious areas such as biological evolution!

In any case, I paid a short, sweet visit to her official website, and clicked straight away on her “Reading for Right-Wingers”. I had to take a screengrab. Obviously it’s a server screw-up that might be fixed sometime, but it provided a crude visual joke for me to finish this on:

It’s an attractive, reassuring view, and I’m not really here now to debate its pros and cons. I’m just noting the fact that in my web reading today I’ve happened upon pages about two people who’ve influenced my thinking—Terence McKenna and Pierre Clastres—that made me realise that there’s a resonance between their models and this broad kind of Gnosticism, one I hadn’t really seen before. Again, I’ve not much to say past that; file this under “notes” rather than “opinions”.

Being currently interested to find out if anyone has followed up McKenna’s theories about mushrooms and human evolution since his death, I happened across this useful (though slightly dated) collection of links on the “stoned ape” theory. In a quote from an interview here we find McKenna summing up his model of psilocybin’s impact on human history:

The primate tendency to form dominance hierarchies was temporarily interrupted for about 100,000 years by the psilocybin in the paleolithic diet. This behavioral style of male dominance was chemically interrupted by psilocybin in the diet, so it allowed the style of social organization called partnership to emerge, and that that occurred during the period when language, altruism, planning, moral values, aesthetics, music and so forth—everything associated with humanness—emerged during that period. About 12,000 years ago, the mushrooms left the human diet because they were no longer available, due to climatological change and the previous tendency to form dominance hierarchies re-emerged.

It’s kind of contrary to the Reichian view, but equally simplistic and attractive. He’s basically saying that our genetic line naturally tends towards male dominance and aggression, and that only mushrooms can mellow us out significantly.

Compare Wikipedia’s entry on Clastres’ work:

[Clastres] criticizes both the evolutionist notion that the state would be the ultimate destiny of all societies, and the Rousseauian notion of man’s natural state of innocence (the myth of the noble savage). Knowledge of power is innate in any society, thus the natural state for humans wanting to preserve autonomy is a society structured by a complex set of customs which actively avert the rise of despotic power. The state is seen as but a specific constellation of hierarchical power peculiar only to societies who have failed to maintain these mechanisms which prevent separation from happening.

Both kind of suggest that the Genesis story should be rewritten to find the Garden of Eden as a rather brutish place that Adam and Eve managed to learn how to subdue, how to weed it effectively and actively encourage the right plants (notably, McKenna would say, magic mushrooms). They weren’t expelled; they had to leave when it became too overgrown after they’d lazily stopped tending to it.

Obviously neither theorist aligns with the simplistic conclusion that nature itself is wholly brutish and without harmonising tendencies. But both are often seen as subscribing to the “noble savage” myth, the idea that we just need to cast off civilisation and things will sort themselves out. Plainly this isn’t the case. The message is: we have to work at it, all the time. Or, as we know usually know the sentiment: the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

by Gyrus

In brief: Is suffering necessary?

In full: Given the possibilities raised by genetic engineering, pharmacology, neural augmentation, and other "transhuman" future technologies, do you think it’s possible or desirable to abolish suffering from the human experience? Do we need pain to feel pleasure? Do you think our evolutionary inheritance, the physical and emotional responses that served us well on the African savannah, could be usefully updated with modern technology? Is suffering an intrinsic part of the dynamics of evolution, personal and collective, or is it an outdated hangover from a brutal past?

Amodali

On the issue of eliminating emotional pain, aside from whether this is desirable or not the Point is we already have chemical technologies that can heal suffering in the form of psychedelic substances. I have no idea if these have any place in a transhumanist agenda but any research into chemical augmentation of our nervous systems cannot afford to ignore the body of knowledge associated with these substances. If the mechanisms of psychedelics and supporting esoteric healing systems are not incorporated within the debate then it’s hard to see how any purely scientific developments in the near future could result in genuine healing and transformation.

Generally speaking I just think it’s far too early in this stage in our evolution to think about ‘editing’ any parts of our physical/emotional responses. Neither scientific nor esoteric communities, nor any movement in which both of these are beginning to cohere could begin to claim there is nothing left to explore here. If coherence does blossom over the next decades I feel that we will be less inclined to interfere with the unutterably sophisticated transformative responses we already have. A rather utopian and naïve perspective I guess but I believe we can’t short-circuit our evolution by assuming intellectual superiority over our bodies. A hugely significant part of our salvation lies in the untapped knowledge within our flesh and magickal practitioners need to urgently focus on articulating this on every level. As a race I don’t think we can move on or contemplate the kind of technologically enhanced transformations that human potential movements aspire to until we have truly absorbed the mysteries of our physical manifestation.

Is suffering necessary? Again on a psychological level it’s the price we pay for emotional sensitivity. Depression is now one of the most common illnesses, we need to examine why many are so unhappy with their lives rather than looking for ‘magic bullets’ to treat the symptoms. I don’t think our emotional responses are outmoded, people generally have good reasons for their pain. It’s insulting to the integrity of Individuals to think that manipulating emotional responses is any real solution. (I’m not including here any psychological illness that has a physiological basis, that’s another area of the debate).

On a more esoteric level magickians/shaman/artists are often predisposed to extreme emotional/psychological sensitivity which is a curse/blessing in equal measure. Most would consider it a vital and precious aspect of their consciousness, a great source of mana, despite the trauma it can bring.

I don’t feel there is any intrinsic nobility to suffering as part of magickal self development. Obviously there are well-known traditions within magick and shamanism in particular where physical/mental suffering is actively invoked as part of a transformational process. This is perfectly valid, but in my own work and experience I have found sex magickal/trance techniques to be a more powerful catalyst for entering into extremes of magickal consciousness and creative work.

Daniel Waterman

I personally don’t believe in the possibility of banishing all pain from human existence. Its just not technically feasible. Even if it were possible to remove all physically unpleasant sensations, which is what heroin can do, we still have to face the biggy, ‘existential’ pain.

There is no drug on earth that can permanently remove that pain; in fact heroin is completely useless for it in the long run. Pain and suffering are part of the human parcel. Without pain and suffering we would not be able to enjoy a release from them, one would expect to die of boredom in such circumstances. There is one ray of hope though, by accepting pain and becoming truly compassionate people, we can maintain a certain sense of proportions with regards to pain. Now to your question: is suffering necessary? No, suffering is not necessary but neither can it be avoided. Living beings need a stimulus to do things, hunger to go out and find food, cold to find a warm place.

Without such sensations we would simply have become extinct. There is nothing wrong with extinction though, plenty of species have done it more painlessly than we are going to.

Dave Lee

Three things lead me to posit that it is:

1. Society and culture seems to get better at exactly the same rate as they get worse, overall. The horrors of the monotheistic era are no worse than, just different to, those of the urban technological era.
2. Extinction happens anyway; the pain of that is inconsolable. Relative immortality is no immortality at all.
3. Does anyone know of any culture or individual who created wonderful things without suffering? The Swiss and cuckoo clocks.

David Jay Brown

Interesting question. This is actually something that I’ve thought about quite a bit. I certainly think that we should do everything possible to eliminate, avoid, and reduce suffering on this planet. I think that we should use every technological and pharmacological tool at our disposal to help accomplish this, and that we should view ecstasy as the goal of life. With that said, I don’t think it’s actually possible to completely eliminate suffering, nor am I sure that this would even be a good idea.

I think that to be embodied in a flesh and blood form—with all the limitations and conflicting or unfulfilled desires that come with that, and from living in a world defined by duality—leads to inevitable suffering. Also, I’m not sure that we would be better human beings if we didn’t suffer, as I think that suffering has the potential to teach us compassion.

Jason Louv

I think that people already have a built-in system for looping around suffering with words and editing its thorns away. It consists of saying the following thing: "It happened for a reason." Narrative is our best painkiller; the ability to recontextualize is our greatest adaptive strategy and tends to be the last thing standing between us and the dirt. Is suffering necessary? There’s no real reason that it should be, but until we do abolish it (whatever that means), we’re going to have to believe that it is.

Mogg Morgan

Is suffering necessary—not sure i’d put it that way—perhaps inevitable—as in the Buddhist sense that it goes with the territory—i.e. of incarnation. When the Buddha said, in his first sermon, that ‘everything is suffering’ I do not think he meant that it was necessary, merely that it was a fact of life—and indeed the means to remove it were also manifest in medicine. The Buddha was active at a challenging time when a whole new crop of diseases had just hit humanity as a result of growing population and urbanisation. I’m not too convinced by notions that medical intervention can end suffering of this kind—although the quest for physical immortality has always been an very productive quest. But in the end I find myself agreeing with the ideas of Ivan Illich, where he says there are limits to medicine.

When you talk of African savannah I guess you have in mind the first humans, with their mutated brains, more than up to the task of surviving in such a simple environment—things could only go down hill. Currently I’m thinking about another African savannah, the one that once bloomed in the Egyptian desert on what is now the Sudanese/Egyptian border. This was the locus for a very early experiment in social living—which later transferred itself to the Nile valley and the peaceful, communalist settlements that worshipped the hidden god Seth. I think that may have been one of those golden ages—quickly overwhelmed by the cult of the king, and the growth of the nation state. Perhaps the cycle has come full circle now and we can see that we lost something of value when we abandoned our African savannah.

Paul Devereux

We are heading into a future that will ultimately be posthuman, in the sense that there will be hybrid cyberhumans. Some developments towards this are already afoot, and I reckon we will become fully posthuman within this century. I’m not sure what I feel about the prospect. In some sense, I have to feel happy if it reduces human suffering which I think it will do in a physical way, but it may be that psychological and spiritual suffering increases proportionally.

Every person needs to experience a measure of suffering in order to know themselves and to develop empathy and humanity. Without any personal suffering an individual could all too easily be incapable of understanding the suffering of others. Also, without suffering a person does not know their own limits. Without suffering, there would be no worthwhile music, art, writing, philosophy. Without suffering there would be less of a spur to scientific and technological endeavour. However, I think some of the excessive sufferings (pain, starvation, mental illness, and so forth) too many human beings have to endure is not necessary, and should be alleviated where possible. As Heller more or less said in his book Catch-22, you don’t need pain to know that something has been injured or gone wrong in the body—a second-rate juke-box manufacturer could come up with something better, like a neon tube on the forehead that started flashing instead of us feeling agony…

Peter Meyer

Suffering is of many sorts, from pain to ennui. Where suffering has a biophysical origin, as does pain, we can already relieve this greatly by the use of opiates, in particular heroin. There is thus already no reason for anyone to die in pain; people do so still only because of the fear of supporting the use of opiates in a social environment corrupted by the evil of the "war on drugs".

This does not mean that all pain should be eliminated. Pain exists presumably because it is useful for survival, since it is a sign that some damage has been done and has to be dealt with before more is done.

As for varieties of suffering other than pain, suffering of a more psychological kind, this can never be removed from human experience because humans often fail in what they try to do, and when they fail they feel bad about it. Naturally enough.

Suffering is also often associated with love, as when someone we love acts in ways harmful to us or to themselves, or worse, dies. Maybe in heaven the objects of our love are eternal, but not in this physical world. Coming to terms with this, and with other causes of human suffering, is part of becoming fully human, or as fully human as possible within the context of the socio-historical situation into which we are born.

As for using the discoveries of materialist science to make a new human, I suspect that is an illusion. Humans did not design themselves and so cannot redesign themselves. Collectively we know very little about how things really are, and such wisdom as we have accumulated over millennia has largely been destroyed by the effects of materialism, miseducation, market economics and social enslavement. Rather than anticipating the development of a new and improved version of the species humans may consider themselves fortunate if they manage to avoid causing themselves to become extinct in the near future.

I missed a clarification of my thoughts on anti-depressants. Just as I think that anaesthetics are a valuable, if possibly ambivalent, tool in the upkeep of our physical aspects, anti-depressants and related mood drugs are surely at least useful, at times, for some people, in maintaining good mental health. The crucial point to bear in mind seems to be the fact that anaesthetics would be positively dangerous to our physical being if they could be instantiated as permanent alterations to our capacities. Nineteenth century opponents of anaesthesia claimed that pain was an essential aid to diagnosis: however unpleasant the sensation, it’s nice to know when part of your body has fucked up and needs urgent attention. Equally, the pharmacological or genetic elimination of our capacity for emotional pain would have disastrous consequences, as we blundered around unwittingly harbouring nascent neuroses, and blindly riding roughshod over the feelings of others that hadn’t registered on our one-dimensional emotional radar. But still, just as the pain of surgery is unnecessary for the success of surgery, there may be times when we would benefit greatly from the artificial dampening of emotional pain.

The author of ‘Utopian Surgery‘ is prudent enough to address these obvious issues. The gist of their response is to distinguish between the functional role of pain and suffering, and their "textures"—the actual feelings associated with them. There seems to be a reasonable point here. Its roots lay in the view that biological evolution works on slow enough time scales for our basic capacities as organisms don’t significantly differ from those of our remote ancestors. The human genome was thrashed out on the African savannah over the two million or so years from Homo habilis to Homo sapiens. However, culture, and its ever-complexifying impact on the environment and our technological "exoskeleton" of habitation and vehicles, has catapulted us along some dizzying paths. The differences between these paths and the situation of early hominids in Africa can be overestimated, but is certainly crucial in debating the issues raised by transhumanism.

In short: do we really need to feel all the pain we feel, given our current situation? Do the sensations generated by our nervous systems, evolved to enable small bands of hunter-gatherers to thrive on open grasslands, do their job of alerting us to physical or emotional hiccups just as well in our current, densely urbanised, technologically advanced situation? Or might they be doing their jobs a little too well, potentially hindering the evolution of human culture?

The information-theoretic role of our nastier emotions (jealousy, spite, etc) can in principle be replicated without their current sinister textures as bequeathed by evolution—though it may be wondered whether the "functional role" of modules mediating some of our baser feelings can’t be discarded altogether along with their vicious "raw feels". It’s hard to see what jealousy is good for beyond its tendency to maximise the inclusive fitness of our genes in the ancestral environment of adaptation. Our descendants may make the judgment that neither its texture nor functional role have any redeeming value; and may therefore elect to discard both.

It’s easy to see that, once you’re on the way to Accident & Emergency with your badly broken leg, there’s very little functional purpose for the pain—and anyone standing up for their non-functional "texture" is apt to seem a little odd to say the least. It’s harder to draw the line with emotions, I think. Maybe our social fabric is under undue strain due to outdated emotional responses; maybe an impoverished consciousness of these responses is holding us back from a healthier society. I suspect there are elements of both. The question is, who will stand up and say they fully comprehend human emotional life not only within the individual, but across its whole range of cumulative interactions in the social sphere?

It’s a truism that life is inherently insecure, and any step into the future involves risk. Transhumanists—as the people most passionately concerned with our position on the brink of self-directed evolution—should be the first people to assess and outline the risks involved in this leap. They shouldn’t defensively react to fear-mongers and end up as cheerleaders for things they don’t fully understand. Rationalism is at the heart of the transhuman agenda, and a fully rational approach would involve extensive risk assessment. In terms of the manipulation of emotional suffering, this would involve a full and honest appraisal of whether we have a genuinely rounded knowledge of this loaded, potent landscape. What of those who have consciously plumbed its depths for useable tools, the shamans? Is their alliance with the demons of human suffering purely an expedient, contigent upon their brutal environment? Or is it evidence of a very sophisticated understanding of the nature of consciousness, as the echoes of the shaman’s death and resurrection in alchemy’s solve et coagula seem to testify? Let’s bring in the experts and see what they say.

As it is, I think the transhumanist’s agenda may be pushed forward not only by rich people terrified of death, and hedonist tech-heads, but by the pressing need for drastic measures in the face of social meltdown—caused not necessarily by obsolete neural structures, but by the devastating impact of ecological catastrophes and resource depletion. There may not be time for a full risk assessment if we are to make it through the evolutionary bottleneck that such (very likely) events would create. Even outside this scenario, a "full risk assessment" may not be possible. Transhumanism, for all its rationalism, may inevitably involve leaps of faith as lacking in evidence of likely success as any shaman’s plunge into unchartered depths of consciousness. Once again I say we need dialogue: between transhumanists and those who have most thoroughly explored humanity (shamans, poets, depth psychologists, anthropologists); between rationalists and those who are still mapping the other 90% of existence; between the upstart intellect and the absurdly experienced body and ecosystem.