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.

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

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

BBC News, 4/10/07

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Independent, 15/4/07

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

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

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

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

Education Guardian, 29/5/07

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

He has some valid objections to cannabis:

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

The Independent, 15/4/07

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bill Hicks

I recently read Stanislav Grof’s Psychology of the Future: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research. It’s basically a summary of his life’s work: from LSD psychotherapy in Prague during the fallout from World War II, to Holotropic breathwork in the States, taking in psychosomatic traumas, psychedelic mysticism, spontaneous psychic crises, death & dying… all revolving around Grof’s fascination with the information about intra-uterine experience that seems to sprout from all these arenas.

This isn’t the place for a detailed exposition of his theories. Suffice it to say that his basic premise—that the foetus registers the experience of the womb and birth, and that bringing these deep impressions into consciousness can reveal their potent role in shaping our lives—remains both convincing to anyone with an open mind prepared to read his evidence, and radically unaccepted by mainstream psychology and popular opinion.

He can seem reductionist; this was always my main point of contention with his theories. Perhaps in this summing-up he’s aware of that, and takes pains to stress that he’s merely trying to bring another dimension into our map of the psyche. I’ve a lot of sympathy for people in this position. When your discoveries are so curiously neglected by the mainstream, the act of shouting louder to get yourself heard often forces you to be more strident and reductionist than you might otherwise have been. Wilhelm Reich‘s brilliant theories suffered greatly on this account; Grof seems to have kept his balance admirably.

His model of “COEX systems” (systems of COndensed EXperience) is, to my mind, his best guard against reductionism. He sees various intense experiences—reaching through adulthood and childhood traumas and joys, back through birth and the womb, and beyond into the transpersonal realm of past lives and karma—as all hanging together, grouped by common resonance into a single multi-faceted system. Any reductionism here seems to be a necessary relic of linear time, where birth necessarily precedes life; but linear time, of course, loses some of its monolithic grip when your means of investigation are altered states (what Grof calls “holotropic consciousness”, i.e. consciousness moving towards wholeness).

The most persuasive case study presented in this book is that of Joan, a middle-aged woman dying from stomach cancer. Her description of her LSD experiences, as part of the project at Spring Grove in Baltimore that Grof headed with Walter Pahnke in 1971, are moving in the extreme. There are very good cases to be made for psychedelic therapy in any number of situations. But, as Grof notes, the idea that it’s still difficult to license it for terminal patients who are deemed beyond medical help, is both ridiculous and revealing. It shows clearly that our culture’s problem with the issue has little to do with the idea that psychedelics might mess people’s lives up in some way, and much more to do with an unwillingness to do what Joan and people like her want to do: face death consciously.

Regarding Grof’s theories on the crucial role that womb experience has to play in shaping our lives, it was interesting to read a couple of related news stories today.

There’s the catchy headline ‘Womb experience makes men gay’, reporting on a study that seems to show a correlation between male homosexuality and being the younger of several brothers. I’d not heard about this one, but apparently there is a correlation; and what’s more, it doesn’t seem to hold if the brothers are adopted step-siblings. The theory from this is an intriguing and blatantly charged one: “A woman’s body may see a male foetus as ‘foreign’ [...] prompting an immune reaction which may grow progressively stronger with each male child. The antibodies created may affect the developing male brain.” Talk about sex war!

Then there’s a report on the rise of obesity in the developing world. The theory here is that an infant gestating in the womb of a woman in rural India will be primed, through its connection to the mother’s metabolism, for a certain type of diet—certain foods, certain patterns of eating or, crucially, not eating. If this child grows up and “makes good”, moves to the city, gets an office job and a good salary, their relative inactivity and rich diet can play havoc with their womb-inspired metabolic habits, and leave them with a big ass of lard.

Both stories are notable, in relation to Grof’s work, in that they are wholly materialist, biochemical theories about the role of womb experience. Naturally this aspect is highly important, and Grof would be the first person to acknowledge that. But this can only be the thin end of the wedge for science. With the cognitive sciences amassing more and more evidence for the psyche’s profoundly deep relationship to the body, purely biochemical theories will have to rely more and more on dogma and ignorance to keep psychological elements at bay.

In the refusal to embrace evidence for pre- and perinatal psychological experience, science betrays itself. I think we’re dealing here with the same issue that is revealed in the curious fact that even though Darwinian evolution sees humans as part of a continuum with animals, science habitually carries on the sharp Christian-Cartesian distinction between self-aware human agents and ‘mere animals’ (although there’s evidence of movement in that situation). Similarly, it’s habitual to believe that the roots of consciousness only extend out, to the social sphere in which we’re enmeshed, and not in or down to the inarticulate world of the womb. Or rather, the downward roots are seen to be beyond the pale for consciousness itself, anchored to genetic realms that we can only contact via the abstractions and instrumentations of experimental science. This habitual view may be a self-justifying avoidance of conscious access to these roots as much as it is a rational methodology.

In the face of the evidence from neuropsychology and holotropic research, these habits must wither. All I can say is we had better reflect on the abortion debate in light of this. “Pro-lifers” aren’t, at root, killing abortion doctors to defend inarticulate life because of a belief in the reality of womb experiences. No; they kill in the name of the atomistic personal soul, a wholly inorganic and abstract notion. Such simple-minded concepts need to be killed, but, in the face of extensive evidence from Grof and others, without sacrificing the probability that there is a form of foetal consciousness.

There’s the danger that the work of people like Grof may be held up as evidence—presumably against his will—for the “pro-life” position. We must be clear that yes, some form of experience is going on in the womb; but no, this doesn’t detract in the slightest from the conscious choice that should be given to women about what happens to their bodies. The clarity of the bottom line here shouldn’t detract from the complexity of the issue, nor vice versa.

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.

While I concur with the spirit of this attack on essentialism, there’s a particular aspect of Dvorsky’s post that is a transhumanist refrain that always makes me stop in my tracks, suddenly conscious of questions that don’t seem to be raised:

Fukuyama describes transhumanism as "a strange liberation movement" that wants "nothing less than to liberate the human race from its biological constraints." He goes on to state his usual argument, which is that suffering and other negative aspects of humanity is necessary in order for us to retain our human "essence" and properly function as individuals in society. He believes that without aggression, for example, that people wouldn’t be able to fend for themselves, or that without jealousy there could be no love.

As I said, I’m no essentialist. And I’m not sure about Fukuyama’s specific examples of "positive negatives". But I baulk at the casual dismissal of suffering. I have to tread very carefully here—precisely because it’s other’s refusal to tread carefully that concerns me. I agree with neither Fukuyama nor Dvorsky, and their debate seems to me to be polarised into the inevitable abstractions of theoretical polemics. As I put one foot forward, I may be attacked by transhumanists; the next step may draw fire from "bioconservatives"; it requires focus to just use both feet and walk.

So, why caution at the dismissal of suffering? Isn’t this what we’re all after from cradle to grave? Am I a masochist? A sadist? Stupid?

I was talking last night in Cambridge to a friend whose depression has been greatly helped by Prozac. Hell, one of my ex-girlfriends was one of the UK’s earliest trial subjects for Prozac use—her condition was deemed severe enough to override the early concerns regarding side-effects. Needless to say, I wholeheartedly support both the right of these wonderful people to alleviate their suffering using chemical technology, and their act of doing so.

On the other hand, I’ve never chosen to take such drugs for depression, and I’m glad I haven’t. Frankly, while I’ve slipped into some pretty vile pits of torment, I don’t think these periods have been quite debilitating enough to warrant chemical intervention. But further, while pleasure, too, has moved my life on in astonishing ways, suffering has often been the furnace in which awareness and health have been forged in my life.

The crux here is that I think the term "suffering" should be complexified. There isn’t some universal pool of categorisable emotions and feelings that can be labelled "suffering", and emptied by smiling technophiles, or solemnly guarded by narrow-minded Luddites. There are forms of suffering that are inimical to life; forms that are to pleasure as dark is to light—defining counterbalances that give pleasure meaning and, indeed, make pleasure possible; and there are forms that shift between the two, now in danger of crushing vitality, now creating possibilities for its rebirth. Delineating these forms is, I believe, part of an ongoing debate in the evolution of sentience—a crucially important debate, but equally an open-ended, probably unresolvable one. I feel that termination of the debate, proclamation of absolutist victory by any party involved, can only lead to stagnation of life.

Dvorsky dismisses Fukuyama’s appeal to the "uses" of negative emotions and traits as "flowery mumbo-jumbo". Easy phrases such as this may well have bubbled up for you as you read the last paragraph. I’ve got no stats, I’m expressing my feelings, or my feeling-toned thoughts that have crystallised through experience. Luckily, I’m not hoping to convince any governments or institutions here; I can indulge in this ineffectual little corner of the blogosphere.

However, this Stats vs. Feelings opposition brings me to what I feel is a key underlying issue. The cartoonish polarisation (which unfortunately actually forms the backdrop for real debates on these issues) goes something like this: the Transhumanist Techno-Rationalists think our intellects are perfectly fine arbiters of what forms and directions our bodies, emotions, and other "lower" functions should take; the BioLuddite, Deep Ecology folk don’t trust humanity as far as they could through all six billion of them, and insist that we bow down before the superior wisdom of Nature.

I have to confess I have a bias towards the latter, given such a two-dimensional system of choices. But the system of choices that reality gives us has quite a few more dimensions. I do have some form of reverence for nature. How could you not, given the discoveries of science? As Alan Watts always patiently points out, the incredibly subtle operations of the body, from the complex, as yet ill-understood rhythms of the heart, to the digestion of food and wonderfully sophisticated structure of the brain, are all coordinated by some level of unconscious somatic intelligence that the conscious mind has no part in. The simple fact of our existence, and further, our ability to reflect upon it, is testament to the immense complexity, durability and adaptive intelligence of nature. After a couple of millennia of science, we’re only beginning to fully comprehend the complexity of natural systems, let alone comprehend the systems themselves.

It’s a mistake, though, to allow this concession, this necessary admission of nature’s long-term superiority, to bring our intellect to its knees in impotent awe. Our intelligence is nature’s latest development, and we would be treasonous in the extreme to castrate it. It seems silly to assume that this "rational mind" department, with its R & D timeline measured in hundreds of thousands of years at best, should really be given executive power over the whole company, which has amassed an immensely rich array of creations in its four billion year history. But which company ignores its R & D department? What is needed is communication, dialogue.

The crucial line of research, from this vantage point, seems to be the investigation of the continuities—and of the importance of these continuities—between non-organic and organic matter, and between non-sentient and sentient organisms. When we say "suffering", are we referring to something that is a tragic aberration, a "fall" concurrent with the flowering of such a delicate flower as sentience? Or is it the conscious successor to part of the processes of creation and destruction that have evolved in non-conscious life and lifeless matter to enable evolution itself? (I’ll leave the question of consciousness in inorganic nature for another time, though I should note that I think it’s worth asking.)

A while back I read an interesting article by an anonymous author, ‘Utopian Surgery: Early arguments against anaesthesia in surgery, dentistry and childbirth‘. The most significant of these arguments was the contention that the fact that we suffered pain obviously reflected God’s intentions, and to circumvent this distress was to go against God. The argument is easily demolished, and it’s hard to not chip in unless—whatever your "beliefs"—you’re prepared to forgo anaesthesia for the rest of your life. I’m not. But, replace "God" with "Nature/Evolution", and physical pain with emotional pain, and my contention that some emotional suffering may be necessary to emotional evolution seems to be in danger of a similar demolition. Or: it would if I was erecting an absolutist edifice, and not a provisional, pragmatic foundation.

Alongside dialogue, between the logic of the intellect and the maturity of nature, I would add choice as a necessary part of any sane future. Most transhumanists—certainly the democratic ones—would agree with the importance of choice. I would point out to them the significance of this. It’s an admission that you might not be right, and as such should feed back into your beliefs, and help you weed out any fundamentalisms. Many people gain deep insight from intensely painful practices such as ritual scarification—and they may well see no contradiction in getting a general anaesthetic when they have major surgery. Equally, the right to use anti-depressants to combat truly debilitating conditions must be weighed against the necessity of leaving the neural gates open to allow ourselves to fall through emotionally purgative holes. Such experiences, certainly repugnant to the upstart intellect, seem to have evolved to strip away dead and dying feelings in a way that unintegrated chemical intrusions can’t hope to emulate.

It seems quite short-sighted to view pain and suffering to be as monolithic as Christian beliefs are monotheistic, and to bind the two together in history, the inevitable collapse of the latter taken as a sign of the need for the abolition of the former. If your only experiences of suffering are inseparable from those slavish monotheistic experiences of passivity, subservience and conservatism, all I can say is that your experiences are impoverished.

An Interview with Dave Lee

by Gyrus

Starting out

Gyrus: What were your early experiences that led you into magick?

Dave: The older I get, and the more experienced in magick I get, the more experiences there seem to be in the past. It’s as if history comes into focus. I think the things that precipitated me into a magickal universe, with no doubt that it was happening, were early psychedelic experiences in my late teens. When I took on a magickal paradigm later in life, in my twenties, I did start to remember things from childhood that were magickal experiences. But at the time, as a child, they didn’t take me off the path of rational thought, and attraction to science, which was also one of my main things from childhood.

Gyrus: You studied science as a degree?

Dave: Yes, I did a science degree.

Gyrus: Were you bringing science and magick together back then in your thinking?

Dave: Towards the end of my undergraduate years I did start to look into the philosophy behind science, the philosophy underpinning science, and realized it was far more flimsy than I’d previously assumed. And that it was built upon an abyss of ignorance, and that there were ways of apprehending reality other than science. I took up some magickal practices, meditation and so forth, starting to explore what the mind could do.

Gyrus: What were the magickal traditions and writers inspired you early on?

Dave: Well, when I first got into magick as a subject, actually read about it, there were early experiences I had with the I Ching. I found myself in possession of a copy of the I Ching when I was about 18 or 19, and when I used it, it had a peculiar sense of rightness about it. I must say I didn’t really use it in any rigorous sense for divination like I would now. It was more for general advice about life. It was the beginning, obviously, of an acceptance of synchronicity, an acceptance of the connectedness of things which goes beyond ordinary materialist reductionism—this is implied in using the I Ching.

But the first actual magickal writers I got into… well one of the main ones of course was Crowley. In the late 70′s there wasn’t much else around that was as wide-ranging and genuinely exploratory—and, at its best, non-dogmatic.

Gyrus: I suppose the fact that he tried to combine science and magick in one framework appealed to you.

Dave: Yes, there’s an element of that. His writing is often very overblown and pompous, and quite difficult to get any sense out of, but as I say it was more or less the only thing that was around. It wasn’t very long before I collided with the emerging current that later became called Chaos Magick—Pete Carroll’s first book Liber Null came out in the late seventies.

Gyrus: What did you feel around that time—that it was a condensation of something that had been welling up in magick for a while, or that it was quite a surprise emergence?

Dave: There was a refreshing sense about that book, Liber Null, like a breeze blowing through things. A sense of "Yes! I’m glad somebody’s saying this!". Of course it was written by somebody who had a far more systematic experience of magick than I had; therefore I didn’t understand everything in it, because you can only understand magick by looking at experience of magick. Having said that, the bits I did understand had a certain sense of familiarity about them, as if I was waiting for a magickal philosophy of that kind—and a rigorous approach to practical magick.

Gyrus: Did you follow any one tradition, and train yourself rigorously in that before the idea of combining traditions, picking and choosing, came along?

Dave: When I first decided to do some practical magickal work, within a tradition, it was because I’d met two guys who were really into Qabala. They taught me a few of the basics, the Golden Dawn and post-Golden Dawn, Crowley/Dion Fortune, styles of Qabalistic work—the Middle Pillar meditation, the Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, that kind of thing. I started doing pathworkings, where you work from the bottom of the Tree of Life upwards, climbing through the different symbolic levels, and having sometimes unremarkable experiences, and sometimes very vivid and intense experiences, with a real degree of mythic seizure in there. There’s no sorcery in that system, but there’s a lot of good self-transformational magick. So I learnt basic Qabala, I learnt my way round the Tree of Life and the paths on it—that is, the kind of Qabala that is mediated by the Golden Dawn, which is obviously very different from the Qabala of the rabbinical tradition. But what was called the Western Esoteric tradition, which has a lot of Qabala in it, that was the first system and tradition that I studied.

Then, being introduced to Chaos Magick, I studied bits of other systems; but I didn’t really educate myself in other systems until much later.

Gyrus: So was Chaos Magick an impetus to look at other systems, like the runes? And did you feel in Qabalism a lack of relevance to where you were living, the culture you were living in, and that culture’s history?

Dave: I think my eventual disappointment with Golden Dawn-style Qabala was the fact that you can’t really do sorcery with it. It’s all about self-transformational magick. Of course you can do sorcery with it, but it doesn’t encourage it, it’s not easy to get sorcery out of it. For instance, in the four-levels Qabala that the Golden Dawn taught, the lower-level spirits are the ones that actually go out and do the business. But you have to address them through the angels, and address them through the archangels, and address them through the gods. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with that system, it’s just that it isn’t designed for doing results magick, for doing sorcery?

Gyrus: A bit bureaucratic…

Dave: It is a bit bureaucratic! The Northern Tradition, of course, is very different; it’s applicable in a very vivid way, both for self-transformational magick and for sorcery, but it wasn’t until much later that I got into that. I think Chaos Magick initially stimulated me to be a bit of a squirrel, running around gathering bits from all sorts of different traditions, from whatever attracted me. I had some successes, and also got into some blind alleys; when you’re investigating any subject that tends to happen. I learned a little bit about Voudon, a little bit about everything, really… No, a little bit about a few things, to be fair. It wasn’t until rather later that I got into the Northern Mysteries; and to me that became a much more complete paradigm. It wasn’t that Chaos Magick pushed me in that direction; it was that for me Chaos Magick was the exploration of a lot of different directions. And eventually the one that I stuck with the longest was the Northern Tradition.

So there isn’t some sort of equinamity towards all traditions—Chaos Magick is a way of loosening up and exploring traditions you might not have thought about normally.

There’s no reason why people should study the tradition of the country they live in, or study any tradition for any specific reason—other than that they’re truly attracted to it, or other than that they’re investigating it to find out how attracted to it they are. For the purpose of doing basic sorcery, you can more or less start anywhere. Or, of course, you can take the more purist approach that Chaos Magick started off as, which is taking the Austin Spare-type approach, where you devise your own system. Very few people actually consciously and deliberately do that, very few magickians. But a lot of magickians have learnt a tremendous amount from Spare’s notion of throwing out tradition, and looking at the essentials of what the magickal process is. And, of course, if you read Spare in the original rather than just in context, you realise there’s mystical elements to him as well. But there’s a very strong practical current, and that is one of things that coloured Chaos Magick, and it’s one of the things that Chaos Magick has brought back into focus—and influenced other magickal traditions thereby.

Sorcery, class & religion

Gyrus: Sorcery is very stigmatised in a lot of magickal traditions, even if it’s just by down-playing it. What do you think sorcery essentially is, and why has it’s gained this reputation?

Dave: Well sorcery can mean a lot of different things, of course—most words can—but sorcery is a word that is used very differently by different people. In this context, I’m generally meaning ‘results magick’. I’m meaning magick that has some effect on consensus reality, rather than a purely internal, psychological effect, or some more subtle spiritual kind of effect.

As to why it’s been stigmatised or anathematised, I think that’s got a lot to do with Christianity, and the way that Christianity itself has influenced magick. Oddly enough, even though many people still think of Aleister Crowley as "the Wickedest Man in the World", he, in many respects, was very much a Right-Hand Path magickian—or at least he liked to think he was. He said things like, "Any magick that isn’t done with the intention of attaining Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel is black magick." Maybe from some perspectives that’s true—but what does he mean by black magick? And so forth. But phrases like that certainly put a lot of people off doing sorcery. You can hardly overestimate how influential the man was, and his writings were in this century’s occultism. Similarly, Dion Fortune seemed to have the attitude that it was a bit ‘naughty’ to do results magick. A lot of magickal organisations that have evolved either from Dion Fortune or Aleister Crowley do still have those attitudes. And a lot of the magickal tradition of the western world comes through those very organisations, and through that very influence.

Gyrus: There must be a misconception about sorcery or results magick that it’s bad because it’s about gaining worldly things, and is an ‘unenlightened’ short-cut to ‘mere hedonism’. But presumably after most people practice results magick for a while they realise it’s not quite as simple as that!

Dave: If it was just about hedonism, you could see how the Right-Hand Path and religious people would object to it. But really it’s got a lot to do with money; it’s got a lot to do with the fact that both Crowley and Fortune were wealthy people. Well, Fortune I’m not so sure about, but Crowley was very wealthy—he got rid of his fortune of course. He basically was brought up with the sense of always having enough. Fortune I’m not so sure about; she certainly wasn’t working class, she certainly never experienced poverty for very long, and wasn’t brought up in that condition. Objections to sorcery, practical magick, are almost invariably made by people who are materially very secure.

Gyrus: So you think there’s a class element to it?

Dave: Not universally; but it seems that there has been in the history of British occultism, certainly. Let me think of another example where that might not be the case… Perhaps in India, where the Right-Hand Path saddhus don’t like magick very much, it’s a distraction from the path of ‘illumination’. But I don’t know, maybe they’re Brahmins—maybe that’s worth looking into, as to what the objections are. Of course I don’t necessarily mean that all Left-Hand Path sorcerors are from a lower caste or class. I very much doubt that that’s the case, in fact, because they tend to be highly educated people as well. But there is a basic attitude that the universe is provided for you, a basic trust in the universe in the Right-Hand Path philosophy. Whereas the Left-Hand Path philosophy is a sense of basic trust in your own will, your "might and mane", as they used to say in the northern lands.

Gyrus: Referring to your comment about the influence of Christianity, it must especially be Protestantism that has influenced attitudes to sorcery. It’s based on the idea that nothing you do in this world will lead you towards a state of grace or salvation; it’s purely an internal, intangible exercise of faith. Besides Christianity’s basic prejudice against magick, that’s a huge prejudice against part of the spiritual path being in this world, and your interactions with it.

Dave: There is this curious connection of sorcery with Catholicism of course. For instance the artworks of a chap I know, Snakes—’Automatic Prayer Machines and Divinity Selectors’—strange bits of post-technological art that contain in them numerous tiny things from the Spanish religion and sorcery industry, Santiago, where he found places where you can buy all sorts of spell-kits, essentially, for using in the church. And this has been going on for centuries. People are allowed to do sorcery, as long as it’s thought of as ‘prayer’.

I suppose a lot of the Middle and South American traditions containing sorcery, which managed to graft with invading Catholicism to an extent, to form various syncretist religions, may have had a harder time of holding onto fragments of their traditions if they were invaded by Protestants…

Out & about

Gyrus: In its connection to the everyday world, Chaos Magick popularly, if that’s the right word, has a very ‘urban’ feel to it. Well I know you’ve done quite a few treks into nature to do magick—what are your experiences of that?

Dave: The second Chaos Magick group that I was ever in, which was the group that became known after it had ended as the Circle of Chaos, for want of a better name—it was ‘The Group’ at the time—was in West Yorkshire in the mid-eighties. We worked eight rituals a year, on the old festivals—the quarters and the cross-quarters, the Celtic festivals. We worked seven or all eight of them each year out of doors. We sometimes worked Yule indoors because it seemed like an indoors kind of thing. But the rest we worked out of doors. And I loved it. Putting a certain amount of effort into certain types of magick enhances it—prolonged concentration, prolonged focus. Walking for, say, a mile through woods at night, in silence, with no torches—because it’s actually easier to walk at night without torches in the woods than it is with them, you get selectively blinded if you’ve got a source of light. We used to do it in silence, and just thread along in a chain—or otherwise we’d go in smaller groups of two or three, and meet up somewhere. You’d have to actually find other people in the woods, at certain sites where we’d meet. And then maybe build a fire in silence. And with the awesomeness of the night, after the couple of hours that it took to get all this together, you’d be in an interesting and wonderful altered state.

Gyrus: I heard that in one of Yorkshire’s witch covens, one of their initiations was to walk around very craggy, dangerous wooded areas at night with no lighting. It’s a very intense way of extending your sensitivity towards what’s around you, in a practical as well as magickal sense.

Dave: One rite we did involved splitting up and all going off in different directions to explore the moor top, at least over from Sunnydale up to Ilkley Moor, those miles of bleak moorland. Obviously we were doing it in the summer, but it was still very much a survival night. That was very intense. ‘Stalking Power’, we called it.

Gyrus: Did what’s known as ‘earth mysteries’ feed into the stuff you were doing outdoors?

Dave: For me it did. I’ve always had a real fondness for the study of earth mysteries, and for some of the people who write about them, their work. I must say that most people I know on the Chaos Magick scene don’t really get that far into that sort of stuff, but I love it. I’ve had some extraordinary experiences at Avebury, for instance. Around there the energies to me are really amazing for particular types of deep transformational magick. Ilkley Moor is another example—that’s a very different type of current. Other places, too. I’m deeply curious about the way that people lived in these landscapes that nowadays are often bleak and uninviting, like Rombald’s Moor, the Ilkley Moor complex…

Gyrus: It was covered in trees…

Dave: Exactly, it was more wooded at the time. And the carvings that are left up there on Rombald’s Moor, the Badger Stone and the Swastika Stone for instance—who knows how old these things are? There are theories about it, but they could be completely wrong, they could be much older. There’s a sense of the tracks of a people who were maybe only just settling down from nomadism, or maybe still nomadic. We have a very old phenomena here, some very old magick. I went to a talk by a chap called Brian Larkman back in the old Leeds University Union Occult Society days, back in the early to mid-eighties. He showed slides of cup-and-ring marks, and noted how the swirling concentric patterns, and looped joins between them, are very similar to those that were found on Aboriginal initiatory shields, which young men carved after, I believe, they’d had their particular major Dreamtime experiences. And these things appeared to be maps of the landscape, from a subjective point of view, a magickal point view. I wonder whether there was a culture rather similar to that living on Rombald’s Moor at one time.

Gyrus: Did any of these ideas feed into your ‘Stalking Power’ experiences?

Dave: They did for me. I found myself, on that particular night I was referring to, walking miles up the moor top, bright moonlight… kind of looking for a line of connection between things. I never found it, actually, but had some very interesting experiences. I was looking for a way of walking up to one of the stone circles up there; intuitively that was the way I wanted to go. So it did feed in, yeah.

Gyrus: From what I know, it seems that the Aboriginal mythical maps of their landscape are all bound together with songs. Obviously, the lyrics would change from tribe to tribe, through different languages; but the rhythm and the melody would be the same right the way across the continent. The ‘texture’ of the music actually describes the nature of the land, so you can use songs as a navigational tool. If you’re walking a certain distance along a ‘songline’ joining sacred sites, you can sing the song as you go, and you’d know through the structure of the song where certain landmarks are.

Dave: That makes so much sense, for a nomadic or semi-nomadic people to have an oral tradition which is intimately concerned with knowledge of the landscape.

Gyrus: Did you do any vocal experiments during the time you’re talking about?

Dave: No, I didn’t actually. Not that I remember, no.

Gyrus: But you’re quite into that now—vocal techniques, chanting and so on?

Dave: Yes. I’ve not used them much at specific sites, for particularly connecting in to landscape energies or whatever. But I do a lot of magickal work with what’s called galdr, a northern tradition which basically means both ‘sorcery’ and ‘song’, ‘magick’ and ‘song’. It involves the chanting of runic formulas as a means of sorcery and divination.

Psychedelics & magick vs. mysticism

Gyrus: Not many magickal writers seem to go into psychedelics much, and vice versa; all the big psychedelic writers brush past magick. Again it’s this mysticism/magick duality. Was it natural for you, when you came across both, to put them together?

Dave: Absolutely. As I said, much of my direct experience of being immersed in a magickal universe came from early psychedelic experiences. At the time, most of the stuff written about psychedelics, back in the late ’60s, early ’70s, was by people who were heavily influenced by Oriental mysticism. I’m not knocking that, that’s fine; but it was very one-sided. Much of the writings carried over the contempt for, or fear of, practical magick and sorcery. Perhaps Casteneda was the exception. I did find his work quite intriguing, but it seemed to relate to a tradition that was very hard to come to terms with in urban UK at that time.

Essentially, for me what’s happened is that I’ve had to grow up enough to write my own manuals, that I wish I’d had when I was 19; to write the fusion of magick and psychedelics that is my own experience. I suppose some people who do psychedelics do end up being attracted to a path which is essentially Right-Hand Path, because it’s to do with the annihilation of the personal self—eventually. It’s to do with dissolution. Whereas the Left-Hand Path is to do with individuation, and the emulation of godhood. I think that’s intimately connected to psychedelics, but I can see how—maybe it’s a cultural thing—there’s this separation between magick and psychedelia, inasmuchas the manuals for the connection weren’t written a couple of decades ago. Or maybe it’s to do with the fact that different people are normally attracted to each of those approaches. I happen to be one of those strange people who’s attracted to both!

Gyrus: It’s curious, because from what we know of existing primitive tribes, much aboriginal use of psychedelics was part-and-parcel of the ‘sorceric’ aspects of shamanism—using psychedelic trips to look for animals to hunt, to find lost objects. It’s odd that as both sorcery and psychedelics were repressed by monotheism, they diverged into ‘magick’ and ‘mysticism’.

Dave: Psychedelics, in their recent reincarnation since the ’50s, either developed a kind of ‘high culture’ position, like Aldous Huxley, which is essentially non-magickal and mystical—he’s very intriguing, his writings are great; very, very good in my opinion—Leary’s a little bit like that, although there’s more Left-Hand Path elements in Leary—or they went in the Ken Kesey ‘pop’ acid direction, which was almost Christian.

Gyrus: Like the Jesus Army?!

Dave: Oh, I don’t know about them! I wouldn’t even like to speak the names of Kesey and the hippies and the Jesus Army in the same breath! Terrifying…

Gyrus: I just had this image of Kesey’s brightly coloured bus and those Jesus Army buses! A totally fanciful connection…

Dave: No, that’s horrible! But there’s a tendency that is pretty near to Christianity in a lot of Kesey’s philosophy. It influenced an enormous number of people who became known as hippies. That’s pretty much a Right-Hand Path philosophy.

Gyrus: What exactly is the connection you see between that sort of promotion of psychedelics and Christianity?

Dave: I think people who take a really staggeringly large amount of psychedelics—even, it might be fair to say, a little too much—get to a kind of state which is sometimes known in the trade as ‘gnostic burn-out’; where really, what they want to do most is come down. Some people developed actual paradigms for ‘coming down’. And I think one of them was Kesey’s notion of going ‘beyond acid’; which, for him, didn’t mean getting into magick—which was what it meant for me, getting into the Left-Hand Path of magick—what it meant for him was getting back into the Earth, and community… doing things together collectively, being a good neighbour… all those good things which are to do with the building of communities. But they’re just half the story, they’re part of the ‘way of the household’. Even then, it’s not the full way of the household, if the householder is truly a magickian. The person who is a strong and significant member of the community may be on a path that is Left-Hand Path also. Like in Voudon, they talk about "serving with both hands". Which means that you both serve the community and you serve yourself. Whereas there was a complete repudiation of any magickal exploration in much of what Kesey said and wrote. This is as an example; I’m not particularly trying to pick on Kesey, I think he was splendid in many ways. But he’s an extraordinarily influential man; he was responsible for most of hippiedom. Leary was far more ‘high culture’. Leary was far more at the sci-fi end of it, rather than at the ‘nice country people giving each other peace signs’ end of it.

I think the fact that all that needed to come down into something is the connection. Fourth Circuit, basically… it’s to do with having your mind blown out into the Eighth Circuit. It seems that where Kesey landed was Fourth—which is essentially to do with morality, and pair-bonding, and the tunnel-vision of any given society.

Left hand, right hand

Gyrus: I was thinking there of the traditional idea of the Left-Hand Path being the eschewing of the Right-Hand Path’s ‘steady progression’. It’s a ‘short-cut’, not meant with any negative connotation. Some people took psychedelics as a short-cut, and went so far out that they elastically ‘snapped back’, to channel it all into Earth-bound community-building. But your opposition to that seems to be to do with an on-going integration of far-out states into a balance, serving with both hands.

Dave: There’s a spectrum here. The kind of example I’m using is an almost ideal example, of the community priests of Voudon, the houngans, who are very powerful members of the local community—businessmen, farmers, whatever—professional people. A lot of people—rather like an extended family, the village or part thereof, like an extended kinship grouping—a lot of people depend on that person. They’re very much in the position of being a leader, a spiritual and business leader of that community. They will do the birth and marriage ceremonies, they will put on all the very expensive events that require the hiring of places, paying drummers, all that stuff.

The reason I’m using Voudon as an example is that there isn’t really an equivalent in England, or in Europe—there’s no precise equivalent of that type of integration into the community of magickal service with magickal selfishness, the importance of one’s own development. At the extreme of the Left-Hand Path is the kind of sorceror who’s become an outlaw; either because he’s a bit out of order and has been rejected, or because the community does naturally reject sorcerors, which is usually the case anyway. In the old northern lands there were people who became outlaws who were sorcerors, who lived by their own might and mane. There were also priests of Odin, who were members of the local community, and were probably only a priest as far as their own extended kinship group was concerned—again, rather like the houngans. But of course these men and women would also be serving their own ends, they would also be evolving along the lonely path of the Left-Hand Path.

By the way, it’s interesting too that you mentioned the notion that the Left-Hand Path is the short but dangerous one, all that. This is something that I came across way back at the beginning of my magickal career, maybe even earlier. I think some Indian writers, or yogic writers, have it that way—I’ve heard that in a lot of different ways. And I think it is a particular bit of nonsense. It’s absolutely nothing to do with speed of development—although of course you do go a lot faster on the Left-Hand Path because it is development truly into magickal individuation, whereas the Right-Hand Path is not.

It might appear that a priest who is serving with both hands is a jolly good chap who’s on the Right-Hand Path. But we must remember the Norse myth of Tir, who has his hand bitten off by the wolf. He sacrifices his hand in defence of the community, against forces of chaos and night. But in so doing, he himself is on a very lonely journey. There’s a lot of connections between leadership, the myth of Tir, and the notion of serving with both hands—interestingly enough in this instance for a god who’s only got one. The appearance from the outside might be that he leads, that he gives to his community, and serves, and is therefore on the Right-Hand Path; but in his own heart, he’s on the Left-Hand Path.

Gyrus: I’ve never thought about the connection before, but there seems to be some similarity between Tir and Odin, who loses one eye; there’s the idea that he has one eye pointing out to the world, and the ‘missing’ eye points inwards. There’s that same balance.

Chemical tools, chemical intent

Gyrus: How do you relate to the different psychedelics? A lot of people have preferences, and very different conceptions of, especially, man-made and natural psychedelics.

Dave: It’s a complex question. I tilt slightly in favour of natural psychedelics; but I do make an exception for acid, which I think is an extremely valuable substance. Some of the other synthetic psychedelics I’m not as interested in.

Gyrus: Do your preferences relate to how you find them suitable for magickal work?

Dave: Well in my experience, LSD is very valuable for healing. In the right hands, of course, under the right conditions, the right guidance. For self-healing or healing of others, it can be an extraordinary catalyst.

I’ve never known anybody find a use for DMT. DMT is a thing in itself. Enough said!

Gyrus: Obviously you’re talking in terms of smoking synthetic DMT?

Dave: Yes—well, it might not be synthetic, but yes, in terms of the usual administration of it in this culture, which of course is smoked. Mushroom is in some ways the vastest and weirdest of them all. You can control it quite easily sometimes, other times it completely takes you over. Sometimes you can use it for sorcery, sometimes it’s much more mystical. That’s perhaps the most challenging.

Gyrus: What do you think about different attitudes towards intention and psychedelics? John Lilly once said that the absolute worst thing you can do when taking acid is go in with preconceptions or intentions. But of course magick is more about control and having very clear intentions. Do you have a general principle between these two approaches, or do you use one sometimes and the other at other times?

Dave: I think with Lilly you do have bear very, very strongly in mind that with a lot of the things reported as being said about acid, he was in fact talking about ketamine. At the time he wasn’t allowed by his publishers to mention ketamine, for some reason. I’m not sure why—maybe they just didn’t want to start people thinking about yet another drug that sends you crazy, with the LSD scare on. But apparently during that era he was completely wiped out on ketamine all the time. I think on a high dose of ketamine, particularly in sensory isolation, it’s absolutely impossible to do anything, in terms of guidance of the experience. I’ve very limited experienced in this area, but I’m astonished that Lilly has got so many brain cells left if he used that much, frankly. I don’t think it’s a particularly benign substance.

Having said that, I think I agree with him that it’s not a good idea to go in with any preconceptions; but I think it’s a very good idea to go in with intentions, even if they’re broad ones, and totally mystical. It doesn’t have to be sorcery—you don’t have to go, "Right! I’m gonna do this acid and do a spell to get myself a new job!" I think that’d actually be rather silly. But if you say, "Right, I’m gonna do some LSD and heal a particular aspect of myself, confront a particular demon and sort it out…" Under the right conditions of course—don’t do this at home, kids! Your unconscious will give you all the experiences you require to lock into that intention. But of course you have to flow with the details. It’s not a good idea to have preconceptions about the actual details of what will happen. You will be taken on a journey, and you’ll find yourself coming out the other end of it with a good result. You can’t force each stage of the journey, but you can put an overall intention in there. In fact, I would say that a lot of time, the problems people have with psychedelics are to do with the fact that they don’t have any intention at all. That doesn’t matter with low doses, recreational doses. But when you take a high dose, a truly psychedelic dose, if you don’t have any intention whatsoever, you can get locked into confusion until your psyche actually goes to a deep enough, sometimes dark enough level to find an intention. The intention might be as general as to have a good time, it might be as general as to feel a taste of oceanic bliss.

London

Gyrus: What attracts you to London, in a magickal sense?

Dave: I love this town. My present phase is spending more time and creative energy in writing, not just technical magickal stuff but fiction as well. London is a great city, it’s full of stories. Since I’ve been down here I’ve plugged right back into it, so many stories are happening.

It’s very much a place for reinventing yourself, a place for finding yourself in the right social scene, or the right creative environment, to move on a stage—that’s what it’s been for me.

Gyrus: How do you relate to the city magickally? Are there any tinges of adapting ideas about landscape and the environment in nature? Do you go for any of the urban psychogeography?

Dave: Yeah, I think London is absolutely thick with power-places, extraordinary power-places. I think that’s why it’s such a sprawling city, and so much of it’s a bit of a mess, and overpopulated, and all the other problems we associate with it. People have come here because it’s magickal. It is an extraordinary bit of land, for various reasons—the practical always links with the impractical in these things. I always have a personal, mythic sense of where I live. I’ve developed that over the years, and enjoy it. I like to find out about where I live. Just the other day I bought a second-hand copy of the London Encyclopaedia; I look places up, and learn a little bit about them—very gratifying. It’s part of the layers of my magickal world. One of the stories I’m currently working on is provisionally entitled ‘The London Web’, and it has some reflections on the power of London in it… the way that people’s lives get entangled in this city.

Gyrus: Do you do much venturing out from here, or do you find London sufficient in itself?

Dave: No, I really love the area around Avebury—the Ridgeway, bits of the southwest, which is like my ancestral home, as it were. I love to get out to Avebury, West Kennet, a couple of times a year at least. I go up north and visit friends up there. I’d like to get around more, really.

Healing currents

Gyrus: Healing, especially interpersonal healing, seems to be neglected in the Chaos current. I was trying to think of a reason for this, and the strong association of healing with the New Age movement sprang to mind.

Dave: I think you may be partially right. There’s this tendency for people who think of themselves as ‘hard sorcerors’ to think of healing as… puff’s magick!

Gyrus: Perhaps it’s renamed and thought of as ‘self-transformation’…

Dave: I think there’s a lot of credulous people on the New Age healing fringes who are punters for various techniques, that may sometimes work, but are often expressed in ways which are really to do with dragging more credulous punters in. So some magickians might turn their noses up at perfectly valid techniques that have got that particular marketing surrounding them.

I think that the techniques of healing are a little bit different to the other techniques of magick. In some ways there are more techniques of healing than there are techniques of magick. You can cast a sigil for healing, like you can cast a sigil to get more money, or find a lover, or to defend yourself against someone, or whatever. All the basic sorcery techniques apply to healing as they do to other areas. But there’s also a sense in which healing is a very special kind of magick that’s actually easier to do. There’s more ways of doing healing. In some ways it’s an easier type of magick to do. I think it’s a cliché, but it’s probably true that everybody has the ability because I suspect that everybody heals themselves anyway. As long as one actually makes it out of infancy, there’s probably some ability to heal oneself. And I think all healing is ultimately self-healing; and a healer is someone who tricks you into healing yourself.

Gyrus: I was thinking that the neglect of healing in the Left-Hand Path is odd, what with its emphasis on results in the material world. But then healing is probably on the borderlines; most healing traditions take some sort of psychosomatic approach to illness, so it’s on that borderline between inner and outer work.

Dave: It’s one of the things that people most often want when they come to some form of occult practitioner—a fringe practitioner, or sorceror, or shaman or whatever in the tribe. Healing is one of the things they most commonly want.

It’s an ingress point into magick for a lot of people, I think, if they get successfully healed. In a sense what you’ve got is an internal environment that you’re acting upon; it’s an environment that can be objectively studied, the human body, to some extent. But it’s internal, it actually belongs to you; you’re in it, and you can do things within it. So you’ve potentially got far more power over it than you’ve got over many things in life. Which is why healing, in a certain respect, is a lot easier. And as I said, it’s also an ingress point for a lot of people because of that feature of it. I’ve had, and seen, some of the most spectacular results of any magick I’ve done, in the area of healing—so-called incurable diseases healed, things like that. Quite extraordinary, massive, rapid changes in people under magickal conditions; crises averted; lives saved, I believe. I think it’s a tremendously heartening aspect of magick, getting such good results.

The other thing is the fact that if you actually set yourself up as a healer, you’re going to have a lot of people knocking at your door. And if you’re not comfortable about mixing your wyrd up with strangers, mixing the threads of your life up with those of strangers, or even those of people you don’t know very well, then healing, professionally, is just not an option. Because it does mix up your wyrd with that of other people, it connects you with other people. It was quite late in my career that I discovered I was quite good at healing; it was because a friend of mine that I worked with magickally insisted that I do healing on him. I discovered I could; it worked. But I’m just not prepared to tangle the threads of my life up with those of loads of strangers, at that kind of intimate level. Maybe other magickians feel that in some way, either clearly or vaguely, as well.

But the techniques of healing are enormously valuable; and even if you only use them on your nearest and dearest, they should be a very important part of any magickian’s bag of tricks.

Sex magick

Gyrus: What do you think are the biggest misconceptions about sexual magick, and what do you think are the most important things about it?

Dave: I think that sex is so intrinsically enjoyable that in a lot of instances, people, even magickians, just enjoy it and don’t do much with it. Once you start to have the frame of mind where you’re doing something with the energies of sex, that’s not always appropriate to the relationship you’re in; it may very well be appropriate, it may very well not be. I think, for instance, that in a lot of cases, regular couples who have been together for years, very happy with each other—relatively happy, anyway—that’s not usually the best type of relationship for doing the most wonderful forms of sex magick in. So much of the energy of sex seems to go towards the maintenance of the relationship itself, whereas sometimes the explosive energy of a new relationship, or a relationship that doesn’t actually last very long but is incredibly intense, can be an amazing source of energy.

I don’t like using sexual magick for what I would think of as relatively trivial or unconnected ends. For instance, I would never use sexual magick in any aggressive or cursing mode, because I don’t want to mix up that aspect of my psyche with my sexuality. Similarly, anything that didn’t feel right, on a gut level, as a spell, I wouldn’t do using a sexual gnosis. That still leaves plenty of stuff that does work, though. Some sexual magick is best done on your own—because you don’t have to concentrate on anything else, except your own arousal and focus of consciousness.

What Crowley said about sex magick, in some respects, still stands. He essentially wrote about two gnostic states: energised enthusiasm and eroto-comatose lucidity. Energised enthusiasm is just what it says, that wonderful state of energised bliss, which is nonetheless highly conscious and has a good deal of focus—potentially, or actually—that can be used for sorcery, or for self-transformation. Eroto-comatose lucidity is the state of translucency that’s produced by sexual exhaustion, where the more divinatory and passive forms of magick can be undertaken. (Tape pauses for a roll-up break) …you just mentioned Katon Shual talking about the emotional side of the relationship being more important than the magickal side or whatever—is that roughly it?

Gyrus: I think he was talking about preconceptions, probably arising from Crowley’s accounts of just using women for his magickal purposes. I know there’s an aspect of that in traditional Tantra, where the goddess is revered in the form of a woman. But it’s sometimes subtly repressive towards women, because she’s just a vessel for the tantrika’s magick.

Dave: I don’t think that technique in itself is necessarily repressive. In the context of some patriarchal, male-dominated magickal organisation it could be, certainly. But the technique of objectification is one which occurs right across the sexual spectrum. In some instances, sex is better when the other person’s objectified; in other dimensions it isn’t. I think emotional closeness is enormously important; but in the course of sexual play, it’s sometimes desirable to achieve a state where the other person is the vessel of female or male sexuality—the sexuality that you’re attracted to. A pure, impersonal vessel, of that force. That in itself is something of a cosmic vision.

Basically, I don’t actually do very much sexual magick, in terms of sexual sorcery, because it doesn’t always fit in with my actual enjoyment of sex. Sometimes magickal operations fit perfectly; not many, though… I’ve gone back on what I was saying earlier in a sense, when I said that there were still plenty of magickal operations which I would use sex magick for. But there actually aren’t that many, when I think about it. A lot of the time, sex creates a loop of ecstasy, which does all sorts of transformative things that I allow to happen, but don’t direct very much with my will. I might have an overall intention at the beginning, but it’s not like I think sex is better if you draw sigils all over your partner and gaze at them.

I think there are two types of sexual arousal in any case. There’s sexual arousal which is aiming towards fairly rapid gratification, what I’ve called in my book Chaotopia! ‘the quickie orgasm’. This is the kind of thing the Crowley was doing, by and large, with prostitutes in New York—the basis of Rex De Arte Regia and his other notes on sex magick. With Crowley of course, things are rather different, because he was actually doing some sorcery, for a change. He didn’t actually do very much sorcery. But in terms of the quality of the sexual relationship, obviously it was pretty minimal… a fun kind of thing I suppose, but there are deeper forms of sex that rely on the generation of the ‘internal bliss-wave’, as it’s been known. What I think of as Fifth Circuit consciousness, or higher. That does involve opening up to the partner a good deal more, and taking more time over it.

Gyrus: So you think sex is often ‘useless’, in terms of magick, in the same way that DMT is, but for different reasons?

Dave: An interesting analogy!

Gyrus: It’s not that you’re too far out, it’s just that there are so many other things going on, particularly emotionally, that it’s just not applicable.

Dave: Yeah. Sex, to me, is just one of the best things in life, and I don’t want to necessarily always force it into the Procrustean bed of practical sorcery. Sometimes I’d rather just let it be sex. Which nonetheless, at its best, can sometimes go into a kind of mysticism. As the sex gets better, you reach higher and higher states of consciousness, and you find that you’re in a state which is rather like sex—but not as we know it, Captain! That’s another game entirely from the quickie orgasm; it’s another game entirely from practical sorcery.

Millennial culture

Gyrus: When I was talking to Amodali [of Mother Destruction], I realized for the first time—I suppose entering the final year of the decade has something to do with it—that the 90′s is the first decade in the last half of this century not to have thrown up some sort of distinctive youth movement. What do you think is going on here? Is culture now too chaotic for anything like rave or punk to just spring up?

Dave: I think we’re in the afterglow of the rave subculture…

Gyrus: It’s lasted so long though!

Dave: It has lasted so long; I think it’s been a particularly successful subculture. And that’s why it’s gone on for 10 years! I knew little about it in ’87, when most people date it from; it’s more of a ’90s thing from my experience. Being a bit older, I missed out on some of the rawest and newest aspects of youth subcultures as they came along. A lot has come out of the rave culture. To me it’s been the most significant youth culture since the 60′s. My 90′s has been coloured by a sense that here is a bunch of young people, dancing and doing MDMA and so forth, and then getting a bit more sophisticated, some of them going into psychedelics and into magick. And in parallel with a load of older people like myself who remember the late 60′s, early 70′s, before it became that completely commercialised glitz of 70′s culture, which was then smashed by punk. The late 60′s thing was so naïve and primitive, compared to the sophistication of the rave culture generation. Of course that generation built upon earlier experience, which is why I think it’s stabilised, as a subculture, more than most. It’s had a longer shelf life, even though of course it did become commercial. In terms of music styles, everybody thinks techno’s old hat now. There doesn’t seem to be any youth culture accompanying the most advanced forms of dance music now. Basically I suppose drum and bass and hip-hop are the cutting edge of dance culture now. That doesn’t have the same youth culture, doesn’t have a revolutionary youth culture attached to it; it has more of a clubby, hedonistic…

Gyrus: There have been musical revolutions, but they’ve kept within the bounds of music, and the culture that surrounds that, rather than any wider social culture.

Dave: I really don’t know where it’s going next. Lionell Snell always had interesting notions about micro-aeonics. I’ve got my own theories, but his were more prediction-based than mine. He was actually trying to use astrological, or quasi-astrological models to predict the next stages of mass fashion. I think his cycle was Science, Religion, Art and Magick. I think when he was talking in ’93 he was talking about us going into a Religion phase—or was it coming out of a Religious phase? I can’t remember now. I don’t know his astrological gnosis well enough to be able to comment and add it to my own notion of micro-aeonics.

Gyrus: Was it anything to do with solar cycles?

Dave: Pete Carroll’s very much into the sunspot cycles… Was it a 19-year cycle or was it 11 years?

Gyrus: I came across the 11-year sunspot cycle in Iain Spence’s article in Towards 2012 part III. He related this cycle to the Transactional Analysis grid, relating youth subcultures to the four ‘personality types’. I think he pinned the hippies to ’66, punk to ’77, rave to ’88, and of course ’99 was the next big one.

Dave: Ah, well it’s all been warped by the millennium, hasn’t it? We’ve got a massive cultural log-jam happening which is called the millennium! After the millennium, when people sober up around January 30th or something next year, they’re going to realise of course that nothing in itself has changed, unless they want it to change. The economy might well take a bit of a dip, after all the partying, until new things take hold. I’m inclined to think that the 2012 concept will actually go mass after the millennium. When people get disappointed by the millennium, they’ll be looking for the next ‘millennial’ change; and 12 years is a nice sort of period. I think there’ll be something of a mass culture to do with the 2012 phenomenon.

Gyrus: I’d never considered that…

Dave: Yeah, look out for that late next year, or by next summer perhaps.

Gyrus: I think I have a blind-spot past the millennium. Obviously it’s like a big New Year, and I have this every winter, coming up towards Christmas and New Year. You have all your Yule plans laid out, and you probably have plans for January, but they don’t seem as ‘real’ as plans for a month or two ahead do normally. It’s a big version of that. A psychological block, I suppose.

Dave: When I was a youth, I would have laughed at the notion that I would have survived this long! So it’s like free time in a way, it’s great!

I think there may be an increase in the sort of ‘whizz-bang’ technology factor… or perhaps ‘gee whizz’ technology factor would be a better expression. An absolute awe of technology, almost a kind of religion of hi-tech. But we are developing an increasingly fragmented society in some ways; although there’s a lot of communication, there’s a lot of little subcultures going on, even the youth subculture. Maybe because it’s lasted so long since rave, a lot of the rave generation have said, well, what’s happened is that loads of people from different scenes used to dance together—now they dance in different clubs. Totally different scenes, taking different substances to enhance their evenings, and they have different subcultural values. Maybe that will continue, maybe new forms of that will come along. But a mass youth culture… I wouldn’t like to predict one, but I think the 2012 thing is going to be part of it.

Gyrus: What do you think are the drives behind the human yearnings for, and fears of, apocalypse? I’ve thought of it as collective coming to terms with personal death; then there’s Immanuel Velikovsky’s ideas of race memories of vast catastrophes, comets impacting in prehistory. Like the Celts who told the Romans that the only thing they feared was the sky falling…

Dave: ‘Cos it’d happened to their ancestors! Yeah, it really had, in my belief. And I think that quite a few mainstreamers are beginning to accept certain aspects of Velikovsky’s notions. Maybe not exactly as phrased; but the idea of there being cyclic catastrophes that have wiped out whole civilisations, I think is highly probable. I think the conventional, old-fashioned notion of history as being a continual rise of civilisation from people walking around with clubs a few tens of thousands of years ago, up to the present marvellous things we’ve got, is probably nonsense. I very much doubt that there’s been a civilisation that has had our sort of technology before, but I think there have been civilisations before where people lived in cities, had very highly organised and stratified social systems, and a class which was able to enjoy the best of everything that was produced—a leisured aristocratic class, what we normally call ‘civilisation’. I do think that there probably are race memories of great catastrophes. This is becoming a theme in sci-fi, I’ve noticed, probably because of the gradual bleed-through of Velikovskian kind of notions into popular culture. And also because of the millennium—even though people don’t pay much attention to Christianity these days, by and large, we still have that culture within us. The very fact that our calendar is constructed in this way tends to make us think that something bloody amazing, or awful is gonna happen—maybe not this year, but maybe in 10 or 20 years’ time. There’s the general sense that in our lifetime something big might happen. And it could be an asteroid crashing into the Earth; it’s improbable that that’s going to happen in our lifetimes, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

I think another level of it is simply that people want to tidy their lives up, want to see life in a more simple fashion than it is. Fundamentalist Christians are an obvious example. They love the apocalypse, because it means that all the people they disagree with are gonna get murdered by God, and that they’re going to live forever in a sort of suburban paradise. This is an extreme example of the way that people use the notion of apocalypse to tidy up life, which is a messy and intricate system, a set of interlocking systems that can’t be reduced to a single truth.

Gyrus: There’s obviously a lot of cynicism about the year 2000 because it can be seen as just an arbitrary date on the calendar. But do you think there’s a leftover yearning from cultures that had cyclic calendars which scaled time up from years to aeons? A leftover need for large-scale renewal festivals or phases, in spite of the millennium being used by corrupt systems like the State and the Church to glossily ‘renew’ their waning powers?

Dave: I think there is, actually. I think it helps when there are people in a culture with a much vaster sense of timespans operating. I do try to avoid politics most of the time, but the way that politics works is incredibly short-sighted. It just makes me tear my hair out if I look at it too closely. The whole short-term fix, the whole mentality of politics… it’s probably no different to what it’s always been, but there’s no sense of the larger picture, no sense of the important features of what makes human life. Culture absolutely needs much longer-term perspectives embedded within it. Usually those are provided by religion. Hopefully we’re moving out of the large scale of the excesses of religion, and there might be a fairly mass-scale wisdom about larger timescales evolving. I’d like to hope so.

Ad astra

Gyrus: Do you think you’ll see affordable space travel in your lifetime?

Dave: Within my lifetime and my income bracket, those two things? I think that’s a great question, a fun question! Well, as to whether it’ll come within my lifetime and my income bracket depends on one of the parts of the old Leary S.M.I².L.E. formula, Life Extension. I could be dead tonight or I could live another 200 years! But I think it’s highly probable that we will see people going on holiday on Earth orbits, as a sort of jaunt; and maybe a bit further into the future going to the Lunar Hilton. Or an orbital space station might be more likely as a first stage. I mean the Japanese have commercial space station projects on the go, I think some of the Japanese companies have got…

Gyrus: People are paid up?

Dave: I think part of their long-term corporate strategies is to get a proper decent space station up there that people can go and visit. I think it’s definitely going to happen.

Gyrus: Has space travel ever obsessed you?

Dave: When I was a kid it did—I wanted to go into space when I was a kid, absolutely!

Gyrus: It’s strange that for a lot of kids growing up after World War II it was an obsession—"What do you want to be?" "I want to be an astronaut!" But it seemed fade out after the space programs didn’t progress as fast as we thought they would. And now it’s resurging because the idea of adults being able to consider going on holidays in space has come over the horizon. It’s finally gonna happen within the next 30 years or so.

Dave: Well like the invention of the printing press, it’s not something that happens overnight. There was a steady linear increase in the number of people who could read and the number of books in homes, or even in libraries for that matter. But it did mean that after decades, centuries there was noticeable change. We’re now in a zone of more rapid change, but there’s still gonna be ups and downs in space exploration, I think.

Gyrus: How do you think magick will function in terms of living in space? Magick originated in nature-based paganism, and now thrives in cities—as it’s probably done in the past, but more noticeably now. Perhaps the whole idea of cities is preparation for leaving the Earth, to learn to build mythologies and so on, totally separate from the land?

Dave: Skyscrapers look like rocket ships… What will happen is that if you’ve got an ecologically self-sustaining space station, what you would have is a capsule of what Earth was about—a semi-stable ecological system, a little capsule of Earth-life in our space stations. And no doubt people would not only use that to grow fruit and vegetables, but they would also go and sit in there with the trees, because part of our genes is tuned in to all that, it’s very much part of us. If we didn’t have that, it would drive us a little bit mad, I think—it would be difficult. If you thought you were never going to see green growing things again, it’d be very difficult.

Of course there are other levels of nature which are out there. You can think in terms of being inside the body of the star goddess Nuit; you’ve got the primal fire of suns as tiny points within the body of the goddess. There’ll be mysticisms and religions based upon the experience of space travel; and there necessarily will have to be, because space is such an uncomfortable… you can’t just go there without a capsule to be in, because it’s nearly absolute zero, it’s fucking freezing. There’s no life as we know it out there. It seems like a very hostile place, so we’d have to develop new myths to deal with living in space. But we’ll also have to take with us encapsulated forms of the old Earth mythos.

Gyrus: I’ve just read The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick. He presents a really bleak view of space travel, or colonising other worlds. The colonists on Mars live in tiny communities in a very barren, poisonous landscape that they’re in the slow process of terraforming. What they do to cope with this is they have what I suppose are doll’s houses, with a version of Barbie and Ken living in them. They chew this hallucinogen, and all the women are transported into the female doll, all the men into the male doll. It’s seen in very religious terms by the colonists. But instead of having far-out psychedelic trips, what they do is just ‘commune’ with this doll’s environment, this microcosm of Earth life, just going around doing everyday things, like going for a drive to the beach. I suppose it’s like people escaping from their lives on a Friday night by getting pissed or doing an E, but in a very powerful, focused way. It’s quite a melancholy view of nostalgia for Earth.

Dave: Imagine if you’re living in a very small community, maybe there’s only a few hundred of you in an expeditionary community on Mars or something, terraforming it. It’s gonna be ages before you get any results. You’d all get really fed up with each other! You’d have to live in virtual universes to be able to bear such an environment, I think. You wouldn’t be able to get away from other humans very easily. It wouldn’t be like there’s a city you can go out and party in from time to time, to get that sort of release of meeting new people and being put in different situations. You would need some form of virtual reality, like that story, which would probably be based on, certainly for the first generations, on Earth. It sounds like a soap opera, that!

Gyrus: It is portrayed as being like plugging into a soap opera.

Dave: An interactive VR soap opera!

Gyrus: Just to get a taste of ‘back home’…

Dave: It seems like a reasonable kind of direction.

Gyrus: Maybe the cultures that arose from the first colonists would have a Garden of Eden-type myth about Earth?

Dave: There’ll be a Golden Age thing somewhere in the past, there always is.

Gyrus: Do you think that’ll persist wherever we spread, or will there be opportunities for ‘clean breaks’ in space?

Dave: I think it will persist, because people do need a sense of continuity and race memory; so that’s naturally going to produce nostalgias for other conditions. Which, particularly in moments of hardship in your present life, will always seem to be superior. Maybe there was a community… this book [From Ashes To Angels by Andrew Collins] argues there was a very advanced community up in the hills of Kurdistan, 10,500 years ago, which was Eden. An excellent book, actually.

Gyrus: Is it related to any of McKenna’s theories about an African Eden?

Dave: Not really. But on another level, we’re remembering oceanic consciousness in the womb. If you take Stanislav Grof’s model of consciousness, the perinatal matrix of oceanic consciousness, the part of your nervous system that was programmed in the womb, picks up a whole gestalt of related feelings and myths that occur to you throughout your life—as you become conscious, as you become mythically aware, as you become culturally aware, and as you have various accidents and incidents in the course of your childhood and adult life. Those certain types of myth and experience will aggregate at that first perinatal matrix, which is to do with oceanic bliss, and the disturbance thereof. Being forced out of Eden, all that. So there’s a lot of levels on which this might work; and I’m inclined to think that it will continue, this sense of a Golden Age.

The word

Gyrus: What are your current obsessions?

Dave: One of the areas that I’m getting into with magick at the moment is story-telling as magick. The authorship of stories, or the telling of them as a magickal act. I’ve enjoyed writing short stories for a while, but I’d never done much with them until recently. One of the things that’s stopped me short from writing stories before is that I’ve always been intensely aware of my degree of identification with protagonists in stories, and having to be very, very careful of what I make happen to the protagonist. Because I really feel like I’m writing my own life-script. I did at a certain point start to realise that I was doing this, and writing other people’s life-scripts. That responsibility implies power, and power implies responsibility. I’m fascinated at the moment by fiction as a tool of magick, both of sorcery and of self-transformation; and the way that a story can be a complex series of enchantments which produces new truths for me as a writer, and produces new objective circumstances around me.

Gyrus: There’s a lot of mythology around writing in terms of ‘telling it as it is’. Perhaps I’m thinking of Burroughs’ bit in Naked Lunch saying that a writer can only write about what is happening at the moment of writing. Obviously this wasn’t literally meant, but he seemed to be eschewing the idea of ‘artistically imposed’ structure and meaning. But then his cut-up ideas often cross the border from prophecy to sorcery…

Dave: Well one of my main influences over the course of my years in magick has been William Burroughs’ work. He didn’t declare himself upfront, most of the time, as a magickian, but he wrote as such. His notions of the magick of writing are very profound, I think. I bet that thing about the writer being a ‘passive recorder’ was an exploration, with a certain degree of irony, of that position. What is the writer writing down as he apparently passively records? He’s actually writing down his own thought-stream. He may tweak it, and maybe even cut it up and rearrange it later, to make it serve his purposes of communication. But Burroughs wasn’t a camera. He was a living consciousness, selecting certain aspects of the reality in which he found himself, and applying enormous skill, and experience, and concentration, to put them in a certain order. He wasn’t just a ‘mere recorder’ of what’s happening. He was shaping reality by selecting bits of it—very vividly so.

I’m going to be doing a talk at the World Rune Gild meeting in November, hopefully, in the States, on story-telling and magick—that’s my theme for this year—and I’m going to read bits of stuff there. It fits perfectly with my Norse paradigm, because Odin is very much a god of story-telling; he’s a god of pure intelligence that manipulates… he’s the arch-manipulator, he’s the arch-control freak, and does it by creating reality. He’s the arch-magickian, because magickians are control freaks; that’s another level of the whole difference between magickians and mystics, and between magickians and people who’ve—up until now anyway—been into psychedelics. Magickians sometimes have a real problem in letting go. I’ve had to work on that—bodywork has been one of the ways through for me, Vivation breathing and so forth. To actually learn to let go sufficiently to achieve integration. There’s a point beyond which magickians, people of the Left-Hand Path don’t want to let go, because you don’t want to let go into annihilation, ultimately. So you train yourself to resist annihilation. But on the other hand, to let go into the deeper levels of trance is what seidr is about, as opposed to galdr, which is more intellectual and focused—willed.

Gyrus: So galdr isn’t just the vocal tradition, it was a whole?

Dave: It meant ‘magick’, to a large extent, it meant the magick that was acceptable. The thing is, Germanic magick goes back into the mists of time, but we know most about the Viking age because there’s a lot of literature from there—these people were great story-tellers—and a lot of artifacts have survived to give us an idea of what the culture was like. It was only a particular phase of northwest European culture; it was probably very different a few centuries before that. But that particular political and cultural phase produced a society in which galdr was kind of acceptable, but seidr was a bit naughty. Seidr practitioners are always accused of y’know, taking it up the arse, being unmanly, being dirty and all this kind of thing—it’s there in the Norse literature. There was a sense that galdr was masculine magick, and seidr was feminine magick. Seidr was supposed to have been taught to Odin by Freya. She was the Vanic witch, the sorceress of the old Earth cults of the Vanir, whereas Odin represented the Aesir—in a sense, more of an intellectual tradition.

Gyrus: Warrior-based.

Dave: Later, I think, yes; not necessarily earlier. The roots of the name ‘Odin’, or ‘Woden’, seem to be to do with ecstasy. So it goes into an almost shamanic mode. Again, the form of the story-teller as an ecstatic intelligence applied to the creation of reality—that’s what the story-teller was doing around some campfire half a million years ago!

by Gyrus

I recently gave up smoking, after 3 years of 20-a-day and 2 years of 10-a-day, interspersed with sporadic attempts at quitting. As the joke goes, giving up smoking is easy… I’ve done it loads of times.

I decided about a year and a half ago that I needed to quit. I had developed symptomatic asthma, had numerous chest infections, and wasn’t exactly rolling in cash. But I didn’t want to give up. I liked smoking. Then, when I did want to quit, it was fucking difficult.

In the spring of ’95 I gave up after getting out of breath at a rave. This habit no longer gives me pleasure, thought I, it snatches my pleasure from me. So I quit. But I knew from previous experience that it’s nigh on impossible to just stop—you have to use a technique. All the nicotine patches and gums seemed to be a rip-off, and very easily ‘misused’, so I steered clear of them, and I couldn’t afford a hypnotist.

So, being a regular meditator, I decided to use a meditation, detailed by chaoist Phil Hine. Using the Indian god-form Ganesha, who fights and overcomes obsessional demons, the meditation is very simple and brief. I won’t go into details, but the essence of the exercise is to consciously build up the craving feelings, and to intensify them to a crescendo—at which point one ‘relaxes’ into the sensations, transforming them into feelings of pleasure and power, at the same time as ‘receiving’ a word of power from Ganesha. This word is used in everyday life to reinvoke the transformation of cravings. For me, it worked like a treat.

They call it demon-morphing.

My first real test came when I went to the pub with a friend I hadn’t seen in a long time—a situation I knew would test me. On the way to the pub, I started having those thoughts and rationalizations… I know, if I just smoke one, and then not smoke any more, then I’ll really prove I’ve given up, and show that I’m not just slavishly avoiding cigarettes because I fear them… No! That’s the demon talking… Oh, go on…

When we sat down with our drinks, the first thing my friend did was to offer me a cigarette (the demon assumes many masks…). I took hold of one, my whole world narrowing down to this singular action. My friend realized I was not supposed to be smoking, and he started laughing at the situation. I held the cigarette in my fingers—for a few seconds, I was going to light it. Then I just held it there. I told my friend about my "I’ll just have one" rationalizations, but I actually spoke to the cigarette, addressing the demon. And then I said, "But that’s just a rationalization." And put it back in the pack. Tremendous release… great surges of power and freedom.

Later that night, I was offered a spliff at a party. What the hell, I thought. I’ve shown myself that I’ve truly conquered the tobacco demon—it’s not the tobacco that I’d be smoking the spliff for… and I smoked it, relaxing into my triumph.

I smoked spliffs on and off for the next few weeks. I even cadged some tobacco to roll my own… After all, it wasn’t the tobacco I was after.

On the night of the summer solstice, in a pub, I started smoking again.

Giving up this time, I knew the score. The only way to give up smoking tobacco is to stop smoking tobacco. PERIOD. I used the Ganesha meditation again, until cravings were not very strong, and then started using it again whenever cravings got stronger. Now they’ve virtually disappeared.

But this piece isn’t just an advert for Phil Hine’s work, or a hymn of praise to Ganesha. I’d like to share what I think is a reason why so many people smoke, why it’s so hard to give up, why it’s associated with certain fatal diseases. I’m not offering this as gospel—merely an observation of mine that I think holds some validity, which I haven’t seen expressed anywhere, and may help others trying to quit.

When I gave up in the spring, I soon felt the familiar ‘irritability’ and nervous tension. But this time I began to perceive it as what I now believe it to be. The release of emotion, pure emotion. I started having feelings which seemed odd, but were actually very familiar and evocative. Strange things happened—it seemed as if my experiences were being engineered to put me through the most stressful situations, which would in turn evoke the most painful ‘forgotten’ emotions. I believe this can be seen as the smoke demon steering you into situations where it stands a better chance of gaining control of you once more. Going through stressful situations after quitting smoking, you feel at a loss, with nothing to do with your hands. Also important, I believe, is the knowledge that smoking a few cigarettes will automatically quench the unnerving torrents of feeling. I succumbed to smoking tobacco again, not through a crisis situation where I ‘cracked’ (which had happened many times before—this time I ‘rode’ the stress immediately following stopping), but by being lulled into a false sense of triumph and security. The demon reasserted itself surreptitiously, catching me with my guard lowered so far down that I didn’t recognize a rationalization when one came along.

At the time I was working with various Reichian techniques, as well as meditating. Anyone involved in meditation, or interested in Wilhelm Reich, will know that breathing is intimately connected to mind and emotions. Reichian therapists watch the depth of their patients’ breathing very closely, which usually becomes very shallow when sensitive material is brought up. By reminding the patient to breath deeply, a stronger emotional response is elicited, a deeper connection to the painful processes in the patients’ bodymind.

In short: Shallow breathing suppresses emotions.

Most people will at least have had the experience of having to ‘catch their breath’ and consciously breath deeper when relating stressful events to a friend. Making breathing shallower is an unconscious mechanism to keep those repressed emotions at bay. Now, what else makes breathing shallower? Oh yeah, smoking. This seems to explain the paradox of smoking due to stress. Non-smokers scoff at this, pointing out that nicotine is actually a stimulant. True, but the smoke and the tar and all the crap in cigarettes constricts the lungs’ passages, and, even if you fill your lungs to capacity with air, makes breathing shallower, because the capacity is reduced. So smoking can be useful—an emotional brake-pad.

But though smoking may help some people through a particularly stressful period of their life, it’s strictly a short-term pay-off. With longer range effects like cancer and death, there must be wisdom in finding better ways of coping with stress. On the other hand, I don’t think that smoking ’causes’ cancer or heart disease. Many people smoke throughout their lives and don’t get ‘a second for every fag’ taken off their lives. So there must be another factor involved.

It’s my bet that it’s the secondary effect of smoking—repression of breath and hence emotions. Again, those familiar with Reich will know of his claim that cancer and heart disease are, at root, caused by crippled emotions.1 Maybe those millions of smokers who don’t get cancer just have less stressful lives, or never had severe emotional problems in the first place. Of course, emotional instability may be a prime cause for starting smoking, because of its short-term effects of easing tides of feeling. So smoking may not necessarily be a sole cause of any disease, it may be just pulled into the equation by the real causes.

If you don’t want to give up smoking, don’t. Enjoy it. You’ll cause more damage if you punish yourself for not giving up.

If you want to, and have maybe tried before and failed, realizing the connections I’ve made above may just help. Knowing that stopping smoking releases previously suppressed emotions, try to use this release for self-development. See smoking to be a demon intent on depleting your natural streams of fresh psycho-biological energy. Plunge yourself into an integrative practice you’ve always wanted to use, but have never got round to before, whether it’s based on ritual, dreams, therapy, meditation, or just plain living life.

Go carefully, but relish the purity of the emotions, be they ‘good’ or ‘bad’. You soon realize that there aren’t really any ‘bad’ emotions—the whole spectrum is necessary to life; anger, joy, fear, love, sadness… Feel grateful for the experience as they rush through your body, affirming your life and vitality.

Take it from Blake: "Energy is the only life… Energy is Eternal Delight."

Postscript, 2002

Of all the stuff I’ve written, ‘The Smoke Demon’ probably got the most positive feedback, from countless people who thought I’d touched on something no one else had expressed, but that they’d sensed, and not been able to put their finger on. I suppose there’s no greater compliment for a writer.

My ego deflated quickly, though, when they caught me puffing away at a roll-up. Yes; 8 months after I "successfully" quit smoking, as described above, I started again. You know, my woman left me, blah blah blah. Of course I made a lot of the fact that I’d built myself a little get-out clause into the article: "If you don’t want to give up smoking, don’t. Enjoy it." Which can be deftly twisted to also mean: "If you want to start again, go for it!"

The following 3 years were peppered by ever more attempts at giving up, but the weight of having done it, then failing, was too much. One summer I coughed some blood. And carried on smoking. I would wake up in the night unable to breathe. Then have a roll-up first thing in the morning, before getting out of bed. Can anyone say "self-destruction"?

For most of 1998-99, I plotted my escape from urban life in Yorkshire, to go and live somewhere in the west of Ireland, or to go travelling in Australia. Some big shift, away from Tobacco Culture, where I could make the break.

In the summer of 1999 a friend in London emailed me and asked if I wanted a job where he was working, building websites. It seemed crazy, to move to the Big Smoke… But after 2 days of literally pacing up and down, it seemed crazily right, and two weeks later I was living and working in London.

Naturally, having some spare cash, I decided to go a check out something I’d always considered: acupuncture. Nearly every person I’d met hitching who had given up smoking had used it. Well, it wasn’t easy-going, but I’ve not smoked since that course of Chinese needles in 1999.

Of course it’s hard to pin something like this down. It wasn’t just the acupuncture. That was the right thing at the right time. But the right time came after literally years of total despair about the issue, and—all through those countless, dismal, failed attempts at quitting—not even the concept of quitting for good being a possible reality.

All that despair was… preparation.

Yes, changing your external circumstances is a golden chance for inner change, with much more potential than many people credit it with. But, in the end: PERSISTENCE IS ALL.

Footnotes

1. This argument is the subject of fierce debate. A key objection is that it seems to blame the patient for the disease. “It’s your fault—you should have expressed your emotions.” But if it’s granted that most emotional repression is due to traumatic childhood experience—who’s going to blame someone for what happened to them as children? What this psychosomatic position does is confronts the cause of the disease embedded in the person’s lifestyle and character—and points the way to fundamentally altering these, instead of ‘patching up’ the body and leaving the causes to fester. [back to text]