part0026

The works of C. G. Jung played a crucial role in our developing thought—or escalating delusion, as some might have uncharitably described it. Terence encountered Jung shortly after moving to California and soon shared the experience with me. Before the 1960s, Jung’s ideas were considered radical; the reigning paradigm of human consciousness could be traced to Freud, Jung’s mentor and eventual rival. By the mid-sixties, however, Jung’s ideas were gaining credibility. About the time we were exploring Jung, so were many psychologists, as the deficiencies of the Freudian model of mind were becoming more apparent.

Though it’s long been held that Jung never used psychedelics, he was aware of them, or at least aware of the American physician Weir Mitchell’s experiments with mescaline. Jung’s Liber Novus , a work long suppressed by his heirs, suggests that Jung may have been more directly involved with psychedelics than previously thought. Published in 2009, the Red Book , as it is known, was a journal that Jung began in 1914 shortly after breaking with Freud and then worked on for more than a decade. The iconography of the Red Book, which Jung wrote and illustrated by hand, is certainly psychedelic, though overt allusions to plants or mushrooms are absent. For Jung as well as Freud, dreams were the portals to the unconscious. It’s reasonable to suppose that had Jung’s career peaked a few decades later, he would have probably used LSD or some other substance as an exploratory tool. Indeed, he may have done so in secret, fearing he’d be discredited for venturing beyond accepted practice if word of that got out.

But whether Jung used psychedelics or relied on his own remarkable talent for deep introspection, he was undeniably a pioneer in exploring the unconscious realm. Many of the areas that he investigated early in his career—alchemy, the I Ching , archetypes, synchronicity, and personality integration—found new resonance in the 1960s, not only among psychologists, but also among those who today we call “psychonauts.” For them, Jung’s worked provided a framework for understanding psychedelic experiences. States that before could only be accessed through dreams, meditation, or certain other spiritual disciplines could now be attained through drugs. That did not make the territory any less fascinating, confusing, or terrifying. Like R. E. Schultes in his trailblazing studies of psychedelic plants, Jung explored the terra incognita of the unconscious and returned with some of the earliest reliable maps.

For Terence and me, discovering Jung was a revelation. We were aware of psychedelics by then, of course, and deeply interested in what qualified as a cultural phenomenon. If cosmology was the lens through which we learned to view the universe at large, Jungian psychology became our cosmology for the universe within. Buried in every person’s neural tissue was a dimension at least as vast and fascinating as that of the stars and galaxies. We knew the cosmic frontier would, for now, remain beyond our reach; humanity had to contemplate and construct its models of that from afar. The universe of the unconscious was different, being right there for exploration; and psychedelics were the chemical starships for bearing us inward. It wasn’t for nothing that the psychedelic experience was called a “trip.” With such drugs suddenly available, many of our generation opted to take the journey.

Jungian thought forms a fertile environment for any student of the mind, or anyone wanting to make sense of their psychedelic experiences. For Terence and me, there were certain key Jungian concepts that proved indispensable in grappling with what we eventually encountered at La Chorrera. Jung was one of the few Western scholars who had looked at Eastern spiritual traditions for their insights on the nature of mind and consciousness.

Consider the I Ching , the ancient Chinese oracle based on sixty-four hexagrams that became the basis for Terence’s Timewave Zero theory. Jung’s understanding of the I Ching was tied to his idea of “synchronicity,” or the occurrence of two events that are somehow related but not in terms of cause and effect. He also referred to this notion as an “acausal connecting principle” or “meaningful parallellism.” Synchronicity is not just random coincidence; rather, it is a phenomenon that expresses both in the mind and in the outer world, in a way that reveals a meaningful but not causal tie between these expressions. The concept provides a rationale for the apparent effectiveness of oracles and other divinatory systems, like the Tarot and astrology. The hexagram patterns derived from the I Ching in response to a question are meaningful (usually) because they resonate with something that pre-exists in the mind, below conscious awareness. The I Ching clarifies that relationship and triggers an “ah-ha” moment. Or one’s horoscope is meaningful, not because the stars and planets control human destiny, but because the archetypal processes they symbolically reflect correspond to subjective interpretations of character. In this respect, the notion of synchronicity is quite profound, in that it asserts a correspondence between the mind and the external world—the so-called “real” world. The Hermetic philosophers said it well: As above, so below.

This mirroring of inner consciousness and the outer world still poses a conundrum for neuroscience and most Western philosophy. Why, and how, do external events meaningfully relate to inner, psychic events? It’s as if consciousness, or mind, forms the primary ground of being, while the physical world is secondary—a construct created by the mind. Any Eastern spiritual tradition or philosophy will tell you this is the case. Western thought, with its emphasis on materialism, is uncomfortable with that notion. I’m not aware of any finding in current neuroscience that resolves this question, at least not yet; but we do know enough about brain function to say with fair confidence that, to some extent, the world we call “reality” is a construct of our brains. The brain assembles a coherent story (more or less) by combining sensory experience with memories, associations, interpretations, and intuitions, then presenting the result as the movie, or perhaps more accurately the hallucination, we inhabit. If psychedelics teach us anything, it’s how fragile this constructed reality is, and how profoundly it can be distorted.

Jung’s idea of synchronicity compels us to think about the correspondences between the inner and outer world, and to ponder our experience of time. The other major elements of his model are his ideas about archetypes and the collective unconscious. For Jung, it is as if the mind is a real place, a realm populated by archetypes that reside in some lower psychic stratum all humans share. This is the collective unconscious. In such a view, the idea that each of us is a separate individual is an illusion. We are like an archipelago rising from the sea; on the surface we appear to be separate islands, but underneath we are all connected by a common substrate. This is the best conceptualization I have found of the collective unconscious; oddly enough, it comes not from Jung but from Arthur C. Clarke in Childhood’s End . I would like to think that Clarke had read some Jung in his day. Archetypes swim in the surrounding psychic ocean—symbolic constructs shared by all humanity as a result of our common genetics, physiology, evolution, and brain architecture. Jung’s archetypes are closely akin to Platonic ideals in that they are never apprehended directly; we see, in effect, the shadows they cast. But because archetypes are shared elements of the collective unconscious, they are expressed in every culture, albeit “tarted up” with historic and mythic trappings that may be unique to each. Whatever the superficial differences in expression, there are universal archetypes at play just below. The figures of the wise old man, the wise old woman, the demon, the trickster, the hero, the child—all are common archetypes expressed in different but recognizable forms.

And not all archetypes are people. The world tree is an archetype, for instance, as is the mountain, the lake, the abyss, the dragon, and so forth. Almost every symbolic construct derives its meaning from its archetypal roots. One archetype of great interest to Jung was the mandala. A mandala is a four-part, usually circular but sometimes quadrangular design that Jung equated to the archetype of the individuated self. Mandalas are universal in human cultures; examples are the equilateral cross, Buddhist thangkas, Tibetan sand paintings, Sioux dreamcatchers, and Celtic knots. In Jungian psychology, individuation is the therapeutic goal, the outcome of balancing and integrating the four primary qualities of personality (intuition, sensation, emotion, cognition) with one’s male and female aspects (the anima and animus) and the elements of the unconscious (the shadow). The individuated person is a fully realized person, aware of both the personal and the collective aspects of the self. Individuation is pursued, though rarely achieved, through a lifetime of discipline and self-actualization.

In this regard, two other Jungian concepts exerted undue influence on Terence and me, or at least figured prominently in our experiences at La Chorrera. One was Jung’s speculation that flying saucers were contemporary expressions of the mandala form and its inner meaning. Steeped as we were in science fiction, cosmology, and psychedelics, Terence and I were quite taken by this theory, which Jung presented in Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies , first published in German in 1958. A 1959 English translation was later included in Volume Ten of Jung’s Collected Works, Civilization in Transition (1964. ) Jung argued that flying saucers weren’t from outer space, but inner space. He proposed that UFOs, those circular, mandalic symbols of wholeness, were shared hallucinations generated by an increasingly desperate collective unconscious seeking our attention in a world on the brink of nuclear catastrophe. Jung didn’t dismiss these sightings; he felt they carried an important message—humanity needed to wake up and get its act together in order to avoid destroying the planet.

Interestingly, and oddly, many people, myself among them, have gotten a similar message from their experiences with “plant teachers” like ayahuasca. Whether this has always been the lesson of such substances or a more recent phenomenon is unclear—in fact, that would make an interesting study. But I digress. As to whether flying saucers might be actual objects, Jung didn’t really say. By artfully dodging the question, he seemed to hold out the remote possibility that maybe, just maybe, they were physically real. (I wonder what Jung would have made of crop circles, had he been around to see them.) In leaving the door ajar, he implicitly acknowledged the connection between mind and matter, and the primacy of mind. He may have thought that under some circumstances flying saucers could physically manifest. They were not extraterrestrial ships, but something material that the mind created.

Needless to say, this notion held great fascination for us; it suggested that it might be possible to build such an object, perhaps by transforming one’s body into something like a UFO. And there were plenty of hints about how this might be done in both Western and Eastern traditions. In esoteric Christianity, the idea of the “resurrection body,” the physically transformed body after resurrection, was something almost like a cyborg UFO; indeed, in some depictions it is portrayed as circular. Many other esoteric traditions allude to something similar. Though they differ in the particulars, they share the notion that a lifetime of spiritual discipline, usually including physical practices such as yoga, can result not only in an enlightened mind but a transformed body. In the East, this concept is variously represented in Taoism, Sufism, Hermeticism, and certain schools of Buddhism. Many shamanic traditions have developed similar concepts; shamanic initiation entails the novice being torn asunder and reassembled, often with magical objects such as crystals or darts incorporated into the new, more powerful body.

These upgrades function as technology; they are the basis of the shaman’s new powers. In all these traditions, we find hints, even explicit instructions, regarding such biophysical technology, a set of techniques that can transform the body into something transcendent, immortal, and endowed with superhuman abilities. These concepts were extremely numinous for Terence and me, and very much in play at La Chorrera. Someone stumbling on an account of our “experiment” there could be excused for thinking we were completely delusional, and we may have been. But we shared that delusion with a long line of spiritual masters.

Alchemy was the other one of Jung’s preoccupations that captivated us. The alchemist is generally regarded as a medieval precursor to the modern chemist, a figure engaged in the ultimately futile business of smelting, purifying, or otherwise turning various substances into gold. In fact, many early alchemists subjected all sorts of matter—plants, metals, minerals, even feces and bodily fluids—to a bewildering variety of bizarre manipulations. Over time, they mastered many chemical transformations and learned a great deal about matter, almost accidentally laying the foundations of modern chemistry in the process. But as Jung portrayed alchemy, it had very little to do with chemistry. Rather, it was yet another technique for spiritual transformation and achieving individuation. The alchemists often used a set of allegorical symbols and iconography drawn from their nascent grasp of chemistry, concepts like firing, hardening, purification, condensation, and distillation. But Jung insisted that the significance of these procedures was primarily symbolic. The chemical transmutations effected in the alembic were reflections of psychic processes, transformations taking place in the spirit, or soul, of the alchemist. But here again, some of their writings hinted at techniques for physical perfection, not unlike those texts associated with concepts akin to the resurrection body. In other words, the pursuits of physical and spiritual refinement were alloyed.

Jung asserts that alchemy had nothing to do with transmuting lead into gold; that notion was almost a deliberate obfuscation of what was really going on. The bigger prize was the “philosopher’s stone.” The philosopher’s stone was not simply a lump of alchemical gold; it was a technological artifact of some sort. In fact, the substance in question was the ultimate technological artifact, because it could “do” anything that could be imagined. In this, the stone has much in common with other imagined super-technologies such as flying saucers, starships, time machines, crystal balls, magic mirrors, and so on. All are conceived as artifacts, invented (or conjured) by man that can do things we normally regard as impossible. Only in an era familiar with nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and quantum technologies, can we now contemplate actually building devices whose power approaches that attributed to the philosopher’s stone.

Does the enduring allure of concepts like the resurrection body and the philosopher’s stone suggest they might be more than just delusions? Terence would say they were anticipations of future events, a potent shock wave resonating back through history, beckoning us, luring us, toward their inevitable invention or discovery. (The question of whether one “invents” or “discovers” something like a philosopher’s stone is one we’ll leave unexamined for now.) Perhaps someday we will produce our own. The fact that we now live in an age where we might actually diagram such a thing says something profound, and perhaps disturbing, about human imagination—and hubris.

This discussion of alchemy requires a further comment. At La Chorrera, Terence and I thought we could build the philosopher’s stone (the flying saucer, the time machine, the eschaton, insert your preference here) out of our own bodies, literally singing it into existence through a superconducting fusion of our own DNA with that of a mushroom. In the sober light of today, four decades later, this seems like an utterly crazy notion; but considered in the context of alchemy and other esoteric traditions, the notion is completely in line, though expressed in modern terms. Crazy we may have been; but again, if so, we were in the company of many great visionaries and spiritual masters throughout history.

Alchemists, or many of them, used an essentially empirical approach to pursue their art. Perhaps not fully aware of what they were doing, they mixed and melded matter, then observed the results, interpreting what they saw as reflections of inner, psychological processes. But given that their raw materials—the prima materia— were often derived from plants and animals, could they have accidentally (or deliberately, once trial and error had yielded some result) succeeded in isolating or concentrating psychedelic substances? And having ingested their handiwork, wouldn’t they have interpreted the effect as a complete success? Even now, with all our sophistication about chemistry and pharmacology, who cannot be impressed with Albert Hofmann’s “accidental” discovery of LSD, or the marvelous molecules invented by Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin? In a sense, their finds, or creations, exemplify the union of spirit and matter that the alchemists sought. By that measure at least, they might be called the alchemists of their day.

The tryptamine-based psychedelics are widespread in plant and animal life, as a result of the tryptamine molecule’s close relationship to tryptophan, which is universally distributed in organisms. Tryptamines are alkaloids and thus relatively easy to isolate using simple chemical techniques that would have been available to the early alchemists—just look at any issue of The Entheogen Review ( now defunct but available online) or visit the Erowid library (erowid.org) to find the methods devised by their modern counterparts! Given the array of materials and manipulations used by alchemists in the past, it strikes me as plausible that a few may have stumbled onto these substances. We have no proof, of course, though there are many bizarre depictions of animals and plants in alchemical iconography. Even these are mere hints, not explicit depictions.

Alchemy was an esoteric practice, after all. Its practitioners were not interested in divulging their secrets, and often went to great lengths to obfuscate them. I am no expert on such illustration, but the closest example I have seen to an explicit visual reference to psychedelics is a remarkable woodcut in Johann Daniel Mylius’s Philosophia Reformata , a text from 1622. The four women depicted represent the four stages of the alchemical transformation process; the patterns of the folds of their dresses appear to be a taxonomically accurate representation of Psilocybe semilanceata , known as liberty caps among mushroom enthusiasts. This species is tiny, potent, and common in pastures throughout Europe and the British Isles, and there’s no reason to think it hasn’t grown there for centuries.

Perhaps some people understood the mushroom’s properties and used such imagery as a way of alluding to their secret knowledge. (One of my students astutely noted that the women’s headdresses might represent the seed capsules of the opium poppy, another possibility.) Granted, one must be aware of the tendency to see what one wants to see in ancient iconography—a tendency that appears to be particularly strong among those with a special interest in mushrooms, as the author Andy Letcher points out in Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom . Nevertheless, the resemblance is remarkable, and readers may draw their own conclusions.

Before leaving Jung, it’s worth noting that he considered his work to be scientific. He made a point of insisting that his theories were objectively drawn, based on scientific observation. Indeed, Jungian psychology began as an effort to provide an interpretative structure for what he and others had learned by observing themselves as well as their patients. As he argued, the West devalues inner experience; only what is external, material, and outside the self can qualify as real. But in Eastern thought the opposite is true. The real world in Hinduism, for example, is the inner world; the external world, the material world, is maya , illusion. To illustrate the reality of the universe within, Jung noted how often our actions in the external world stem from interior motivations and ideas. This is an important point, particularly when interpreting inner states, including psychedelic states, which are easily dismissed as not real. Jung would vehemently disagree with such appraisals. As he pointed out, inner experiences are often more profound and significant than external events, in terms of their influence on human activities and institutions.