part0027

Terence and I found another important “virtual mentor” in the writer and philosopher Mircea Eliade. Born in Romania in 1907, Eliade attended the University of Bucharest and spent several years studying in Calcutta, India. His early work included journalism, novels, and essays, some of which were later criticized for espousing anti-Semitic and extreme right-wing views. After Romania became a Communist country in 1945, Eliade lived for a time in Paris before moving to the United States. From 1964 until his death in 1986, he was a professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago.

Eliade’s vast output ranged from fantasy fiction to scholarly works to what might be called armchair anthropology. Neither Terence nor I made much of a dent in all that; the books that stood out for us were Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1964) and Yoga: Immortality and Freedom (1958). We also were familiar with The Myth of the Eternal Return: Or, Cosmos and History (1954) and The Sacred and the Profane: the Nature of Religion (1959). We weren’t aware of his early, unsavory political opinions, let alone the debate over how those may have influenced his later work. Indeed, much of that critique had yet to be articulated. We were aware that many of his ideas fit in well with those of Jung, whose works we managed to explore more extensively.

Jung and Eliade met in 1950, at the Eranos Conference, a yearly lecture series in Switzerland, and the two subsequently collaborated as colleagues and friends. By the time Terence and I discovered Eliade’s writings, we were both steeped in the ideas of transcendence and self-transformation, and his thoughts on yoga and shamanism complemented our interests. Originally published in French, and as early as the 1930s in the case of his yoga studies, these works were (and still are) important scholarly contributions, although they are now a bit dated. For example, Eliade asserted, without evidence, that a shamanic tradition that relied on “narcotics” (meaning “psychedelics,” a term not yet coined) was a “degenerate” tradition born of an earlier, more pristine practice that had become corrupted. Our own experiences with psychedelics obviously led us to disagree.

Since then, research on what is now known to be the worldwide phenomenon of shamanism has further discredited his assertion. Though certainly not all shamans use psychoactive substances, those who do use them cannot be regarded as “degenerate.” The antiquity and prevalence of these substances would indicate that they are the sine qua non of shamanic practice, at least in the New World. That might be true of Old World shamanism as well, though the knowledge may have been lost much earlier there. This would account for the greater use of psychedelic, or hallucinogenic, plants in the New World compared to the Old, a topic about which Schultes and others have written. One could actually argue that shamanic traditions that do not use psychedelics are “degenerate,” representing, as they may, the loss of earlier knowledge—namely, the identity of the shamanic plants and the methods of their preparation. But here we should be careful not to commit the error Eliade made when he dismissed “narcotic” shamanic traditions. We may speculate that some traditions lost this knowledge, as suggested by, for example, soma, a drink of unknown composition mentioned in certain Indian texts and elsewhere. But concrete evidence is hard to come by.

Eliade’s writings on yoga and shamanism as techniques of spiritual and perhaps physical transformation added to what we’d learned from Jung, supplying us with specific details from different traditions—the ethnographic backstory. We were also drawn to what Eliade saw as the archaic distinction between the “sacred” and the “profane,” as applied to both space (places) and time (events). Many spiritual traditions postulate separate or parallel worlds. There is the mundane, ordinary world we inhabit while alive, which Eliade termed the “profane” realm. Adjacent to this world are other “sacred” realms that are normally unseen and inaccessible to ordinary people, but which are reachable by shamans and other spiritual practitioners. These sacred realms may be the dwelling place of souls awaiting incarnation, or where souls go following death—for example, “heaven” in the Christian mythos. In many cultures, the world is understood to have a three-layered structure. The middle layer is the material world, which lies below a celestial realm inhabited by gods and advanced beings, and above an underworld inhabited by demons or other malevolent entities. While this lower realm may be infernal, it is nonetheless viewed as sacred in its separation from the world of everyday life.

In many cosmologies, these realms are linked by an axis mundi, which is often depicted as a world tree. The concept is also portrayed at times as a mushroom in Siberian shamanic traditions that use the fly agaric (Amanita muscaria) , or as the ladder-like ayahuasca vine familiar to shamans in the Amazon Basin. In all such traditions, the shaman can access the upper and lower realms, either by using a psychoactive substance to induce an altered state or relying on other “techniques of ecstasy,” as Eliade describes them. In the ecstatic condition, the shaman might ascend the axis mundi to propitiate the gods or entities in the upper realm, or descend to the lower realm, often to do battle with malevolent entities, retrieve the souls of the sick, or otherwise intervene on behalf of individuals or the tribal community. The key concept here is that both upper and lower realms are intimately linked with the mundane human realm, and can be accessed by people with the right training (shamans) and the right tools (often, drugs). I might add that these realms, which amount to other dimensions, are just as “real” as the material world, but the term would be useless in this context.

Just as there is sacred space, so there is sacred time—another idea that influenced our thinking. Sacred time is a time out of time, the time of ritual. Sacred time and sacred space are closely linked, because rituals performed in sacred spaces, as they are in most traditions, similarly sacralize time. In an archetypal sense, sacred space is not simply a consecrated or special place; rather, ritual transforms an ordinary place into the actual cosmic center, a place outside profane space. Similarly, when a culture engages in a rebirth ceremony or reenacts its creation myth, it doesn’t simply emulate events that took place at the beginning of time; these rituals return their participants to that moment when the cosmos was born. The event is literal, not metaphorical. A sacred ritual accomplishes what Eliade calls a “revalorization” of the sacred space-time of the cosmos in which the culture dwells. It is literally a renewal, a rebirth, the beginning of a new cycle of birth, evolution, and death. Sacred time is cyclical, not linear; and cultures that dwell in sacred time do not live in historical time, or indeed in mundane geography. They inhabit ahistorical time, in a place that is at the center of space and yet also removed from it. The cosmos is constantly being born, evolving, and dying, a cycle of “eternal return” that is the antithesis of our Western concept of historical time.

The distinctions between sacred and profane have profoundly influenced the Western worldview, especially as seen through the lens of the Judeo-Christian tradition. The realm where God dwells is a sacred cosmos, a place and time outside of history and location. It is, in fact, the place that we inhabited before the fall, the human expulsion from Eden. That moment can be understood as the fall into history. We ate the forbidden fruit of knowledge and came to understand our own mortality, our own death.

Such knowledge is not possible in cyclical time; it depends critically on linear time, which by definition has a beginning, middle, and an end. Linear time is a prison in which humanity is entrapped; salvation consists of an escape from history, a return to an eternal, timeless moment, an eternity spent in blissful contemplation of the Godhead. We are like a starship poised on the threshold of a black hole’s event horizon; at that exact point in space-time one is neither in this continuum nor out of it, but rather exists in an eternal moment in which time is literally stopped. Death is indefinitely postponed, as is birth, or any other kind of change. It’s a pretty boring place, but not really, because for it to be boring, time must pass, and it does not. I find it extremely strange that black holes, or that region near to black holes known as the event horizon, are actually physical manifestations of this “mythical” concept of a sacred, timeless, space-less point. Perhaps the old cosmological myths were closer to the truth than we might think.

This notion, of an escape from history being the equivalent of salvation, is the whole story of Christianity in a nutshell. Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge and fell into history, into mortality. Christ, the shamanic psychopomp, had to separate himself from the father and descend into history. He had to take on death itself. In dying, he died for all of humanity, and in being reborn he defeated death for all of humanity. Our lives still unfold in history, in linear time, of course; but at the end, if we die in a state of grace, we can return to that sacred space-time point that is, literally, the instant of creation and that is, literally, the center of the universe (because at the moment of creation the universe is a point, as our cosmological physicists insist).

Thanks to Christ’s descent from heaven to defeat death, the Christian is liberated from the prison of history, because the collective curse, the original sin that was cast upon humanity and led to expulsion from the Garden of Eden, has been absolved by Christ’s death. In the Roman Catholic tradition, the sacrament of confession gives a person the chance to do on a small, individual scale what Christ did for all humanity: descend into history and return to the beginning, to a pristine, renewed, reborn state in which all the baggage of our history (our sins) is washed away and forgotten. Inevitably, however, we repeat the primal mistake that Adam and Eve made and descend again into memory and historical time.

It’s a pretty profound myth, actually. It is “true” in that metaphysical sense in which all myths are true. And it has greatly impacted the way that we in the West view history and the “profane,” everyday world in which we live out history, personal and otherwise. Christianity encourages, nay demands, that in order to achieve salvation, good Christians should keep their sights set firmly on eternity, on the hoped-for moment of eternal bliss that is beyond death, beyond time. In exchange, we are expected to devalue and even reject the physical world in which we inhabit a body and experience all the suffering and pleasure that bodies can experience. We are told that we should not indulge in too much sex, too much eating, too many pleasures of the flesh, because to do so will make us forget that eternal bodiless state of bliss that we long for. We are encouraged to devalue this world, even disrespect it, because it is historical and must end someday. In fact, the sooner it ends the better, in the Christian worldview, because that will mark the return of Christ to Earth, the Final Days, and the crossing of the threshold into the post-historical eternity, the eschaton, the end of the world.

As a myth, this is all very well. Who doesn’t long for an escape from history, for immortality and eternal bliss? The problem with the Christian mythos, among other belief systems, is that it can lead to a denial of biology, and a rejection of all that is good about being a living organism. After all, despite its terrible problems, the world is a marvelous place, and being alive is a marvelous state. For 2,000 years, the church has foisted what amounts to a Ponzi scheme on the frightened masses, bidding them to forego satisfaction now in exchange for a greater fulfillment after death. If, that is, they’ve toed the line as defined by the church and what Terence called its “beastly little priestlies.” Locating the purpose of life somewhere beyond it is a dangerous form of thought, especially in an age when some not only want to end history, but also could attain the technology to do so. It’s also irresponsible to indulge such conceits on a planet whose seven billion human inhabitants are depleting most of its resources and poisoning what remains.

And yet such thinking seems justified to many political leaders, some of whom, being fundamentalist zealots themselves, see no reason to preserve nature or maintain global stability. Freedom of religious belief is a constitutional right, and people are free to believe in whatever delusions they want. But when it comes to forging national policies based on those delusions (for instance, the denial of climate change) then thinking citizens must stand up and denounce such ignorance. The sad thing is there are fewer and fewer thinking citizens, or so it appears. A frightened populace just wants to be told what to think and do, and the ideologues are more than happy to oblige them. One result is a trend in the public sphere toward the glorification of a willful shallow-mindedness. In the private sphere, that often manifests itself as a conscious refusal to acknowledge the mind’s unconscious depths.

One antidote to both that refusal and to irrational religiosity might be psychedelics. There’s reason to believe these substances played a role in the origin of religion—not a particular religion, but the religious impulse itself, the experience of the transcendent. That’s why these substances are considered dangerous and their usage so often suppressed. For the religious powers that be, psychedelics are dangerous, not because of any toxicity or physiological threat, but because they so often demonstrate the superfluity of faith. To have faith is to believe in something despite the absence of evidence. All religions demand faith from their followers; unquestioning, irrational belief is the tool by which hierarchical religions control their adherents.

No wonder psychedelics are threatening to an authoritarian religious hierarchy. You don’t need faith to benefit from a psychedelic experience, let alone a priest or even a shaman to interpret it. What you need is courage—courage to drink the brew, eat the mushroom, or whatever it is, and then to pay attention, and make of it what you will. Suddenly, the tools for direct contact with the transcendent other (whether you call it God or something else) is taken from the hands of an anointed elite and given to the individual seeker. The psychedelic experience is nothing if not intensely personal. Many will be quite willing to interpret it for you, of course; psychedelic spirituality is hardly immune to “guruism.” This is not the fault of psychedelics, but of the human impulse to seize upon anything numinous and use it to gain power. That’s what the early church fathers did with the original, numinous experiences that form the historical precedents of Christianity (and which may well have been psychedelically triggered). Certain demagogues are doing the same today when they frighten their followers into embracing agendas that threaten not only their individual interests, but that all of earthly life.

Many will discover that the take-home lesson from their brush with the numinous is a celebration, not a rejection, of biology. Psychedelics are drugs ; they do what they do because we are made of drugs . You can’t get more biological than that! Psychedelic experiences are usually not about visiting some transcendent realm of angels and demons (though that does happen); more often than not, they are about experiencing the here and now in a very intense way. Be here now, this timeless moment: These phrases are so much associated with psychedelic experiences they’ve become clichés. But they well describe what profound psychedelic experiences are like: an immersion in the moment and a sense of “oceanic boundlessness,” a sense of being one with nature, connected to all of nature and all other beings.

It’s quite unlikely one would return from that experience compelled to reject nature and biology, much less one’s own body. Rather, the outcome is an enhanced reverence for nature and our place in that scheme, a feeling that as part of it, we must love it, and learn to nurture it. The psychedelic revelation is the exact opposite of the fundamentalist, apocalyptic view that we should long for release from this “vale of tears” and ascend into some anticipated post-historical eternity, which our religious authorities tell us is waiting for us following death. What psychedelics teach us is that we are already in paradise, as manifested in earthly life. Having learned that lesson, we then must assume the responsibility of protecting nature, the only paradise we are certain we’ll ever know.

While the worldview that Terence and I shared certainly owed much to Jung and Eliade, there were of course other influences. During a period of intense interest in philosophy, I read most of Plato’s dialogues, some of Aristotle, a good deal of St. Augustine, and a smattering of Locke, Descartes, Kant, and other dead white men. I briefly aspired to study classics at Trinity College in Dublin, but after struggling to learn Greek in my first semester at the University of Colorado in Boulder, I gave that up. In any case, by then I’d already begun to find science and anthropology more interesting.

During his first year in the experimental college, Terence discovered phenomenology through the works of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty—then brought their ideas home to me. I found them exotic and challenging but quite compatible with Jung’s assertion that inner experiences should not be dismissed as “unreal” simply because they were immaterial. Anything consciously experienced was “real” in the sense that it could be experienced, even if it had no connection to anything beyond the subjective realm. Like Jung, these thinkers were attempting to bring objectivity to the study of those aspects of consciousness that are usually regarded as subjective, such as dreams, emotions, and intuitions.

Phenomenology is the study of “lived experience” and is rooted in the concept of “intentionality,” sometimes called “aboutness.” Consciousness is always consciousness of something. Intentionality represents an alternative to the representational theory of consciousness, which holds that no thing can be experienced directly; only the representation of that thing in the mind can be experienced. Phenomenology turns this thought on its head and asserts that there is nothing but direct experience; whatever is presented to the mind is the grist of experience. Husserl argued that consciousness is not “in” the mind but rather is “of” the intentional object. Consciousness amounts to what is experienced, whether that is a solid, material object or a figment of the imagination. The phenomenological method relies on the description of phenomena as they are given to consciousness in their immediacy, without making judgments about whether they are subjective or not.

The preceding paragraph is a simplistic synopsis of some difficult concepts I don’t pretend to completely understand. I won’t clumsily attempt to explicate them at greater length; the present description is clumsy enough. The point is that, together with Jung and Eliade, phenomenology was an appealing perspective from which to approach the “phenomena” experienced in psychedelic states. Those experiences may seem implausible, indeed impossible, but that doesn’t matter—anything that can be experienced is real and should be approached on its own terms.

So much for the artists and thinkers that led us to the upper Amazon and helped prepare us for the strange events we encountered there. Awakened as kids to the mysteries of the cosmos, we convinced ourselves as teenagers that we might possibly solve them; a few years later we found ourselves in the Colombian jungle believing we actually had. Upon our return, Terence and I began exploring a new set of thinkers and concepts as we struggled to make sense of our experiences. One important influence would be the work of the mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. His concept of how “novelty” enters and transfigures nature would play a role in shaping our journey’s most prominent artifact: Terence’s Timewave Zero theory. Terence’s effort to chart the structure of time would lead him to predict a series of dates for the end of time, including one famously slated for the winter solstice in 2012. Our thinking would eventually diverge on certain issues, the timewave among them, but those developments lay beyond La Chorrera, as we shall see.