The spiritual/psychedelic thing was an inevitable product of a consumer culture, a means by which we can 'have it now' without all the bothersome effort necessary to achieve 'it' by normal means.
To paraphrase Taylor, why spend years training when you can just alter your brain chemistry directly, by taking psychedelics?
I don't know the balance between those who attained some insight, and those who suffered a complete breakdown. Peter Green, the genius guitarist of — forgive this old fart — the real Fleetwood Mac (by real I mean a proper blues band and yes, I admit it, I've got a copy of Rumours somewhere!). Sadly, our neighbour's kid dropped a tab, nothing happened so he dropped two more and went on to suffer a psychosis. I wish I'd had the chance to speak to him before the second tab. 'Wait ... just wait a little longer ...' (I nearly did the same thing my first time round, but luckily my mates, more experienced, talked me out of it.)
Don't start me on the rant of how the hue-and-cry media has strangled any sensible discussion, debate and information on the recreational use of drugs. That my daughters were told the same kind of bull that I was as a teenager really annoyed me, it's criminal irresponsibility. That I had to brief a group of teenagers about to embark on a school trip to Amsterdam (?!) on the downside effects of cannabis, especially my girls who've inherited their mother's low blood sugar ...
... anyway.
To paraphrase Taylor again: So, what the 60s seem to show was that regular LSD usage was as likely to generate psychological breakdown as spiritual awakening. And many, like Timothy Leary himself, who originally used LSD as a way of expanding consciousness soon used it purely hedonistically, as a way of escaping boredom and discord, after the ‘chemical enlightenment’ project failed.
Tune in, turn on and drop out ... if ever there was the mantra of the antichrist, that was it.
Taylor says:
I don’t think there is any doubt that psychedelics can generate temporary higher states of consciousness (or ‘awakening experiences’, as I prefer to call them). Some writers on mysticism – usually from a religious background – have argued that psychedelic awakening experiences can’t be ‘genuine,’ because they are artificially induced. But this is surely short-sighted and prejudiced. Psychedelic awakening experiences feature many of the same characteristics of other awakening experiences – intensified perception of one’s surroundings, a sense of connection or oneness to the world and revelations about the nature of reality, and so on.
I agree. What I might suggest is a dialogue to discern the difference, if indeed there is one, between a higher state of consciousness/awakening experience and a spiritual/mystical state ...
But although psychedelics can bring temporary awakening experiences, I think it’s very unlikely that they can lead to a permanent higher state of consciousness – that is, a state of ‘enlightenment,’ or in my preferred term, ‘wakefulness.’ The reason for this is that psychedelics are basically dissolutive – that is, they achieve their effect by dissolving away our normal mental structures, and putting our normal psychological mechanisms out of action... When the normal self-system dissolves away, our sense of boundary disappears, so that we no longer experience separateness. Our normal concepts of ourselves and of reality fade away too, so that we feel we’re looking at the world and ourselves in a completely new way. The contents of our subconscious mind may open up into our conscious mind, as the boundary between them fades away as well. (my emphasis)
And here's the salient comment:
This is fine for temporary awakening experiences, but permanent wakefulness can only occur if there is a new self-system to replace the normal one. It’s not enough to dissolve the sense of self – a new self has to replace it.
This is the major difference between prolonged spiritual practice and psychedelics. Prolonged spiritual practice (such as regular meditation or the following of a path such as the eightfold path of Buddhism, or the eight-limbed path of yoga) will gradually form a new self which will slowly supplant your old self – a self-system with much softer boundaries, a much less powerful sense of individuality and separateness, intensified perception, much reduced associational ‘thought-chatter’ and so on. This self-system may be so subtle and integrated within the whole of our being that you might not even notice that it’s there.
In other words, spiritual practice is basically constructive – it gradually changes the structures of consciousness, re-moulding our self-system into a higher functioning form. But psychedelics don’t facilitate the emergence of a new self-system. With the regular use of psychedelics, the danger is that the structures of the normal self-system will completely dissolve way, and without another self-system to supplant it, there will simply be a psychic vacuum, which equates with a state of psychosis. And unfortunately there have been many cases of this. In fact, you could say that this is really the only permanent psychological change which the regular use of psychedelics can bring: not awakening, but psychosis.
There's a further aspect to this though: psychedelics can be transformative in the sense that they can show us an expanded reality, and make us realise that the normal world we perceive is just part of the story. And once we've become aware of this expanded reality, it can change our outlook and our values. It can also awaken an impulse to return to the expanded reality in a more reliable, organic way...
This is where the psychedelics actually score. It's not about spiritual insight or experience, it's just about seeing a bigger picture, if you like. A residual thing. But as Taylor says, it's dissolutive, not constructive, and in that sense not true enlightenment ...
Anyway ... I'm off to Glastonbury next week, so the week after that you might find guru Tom gracing these threads, or it might be gloomy Tom, or it might just be the usual me ...
