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   ARTICLES : DRUGS : FROM TRIP6
Psychedelic Culture: One or Many?

Erik Davis

What I'd like to do here is paint a picture of psychedelic culture and how it relates to the larger world that we're in. There are a lot of interesting angles with which people approach psychedelic culture. Of course there've always been very different models of how psychedelics influence the greater culture - how they should influence it, and how they do influence it. If you go back to the Sixties, sometimes we have a simplistic idea that the counterculture was one great wave of psychedelic experience that was united in its ethos, in its ways of thinking about what way the world should go. That's not really the case. There were a lot of very different subsets of people, even at that time. You had people driven very much by a kind of psychotherapeutic approach - how is this going to help in dealing with individual psychology, and the psychology of groups. You had the sort of elitist perennialism of Aldous Huxley and his school. On the other side of it, you had the Prankster approach, which was far more anarchic - let's throw it all out there and see what happens, let's spread it wide, let's bring it all down. You had the great tensions between, especially in the Seventies, Timothy Leary and Ram Dass. At some point in the Sixties, Leary was often seen as sort of a semi-guru guy, but at a certain point he really very strongly turned away from that model, from the custard mush of Hindu spirituality, and became much more invested in a kind of proto-extropian, highly technological view of the future of humanity. Whereas on the other hand, you had his former colleague, Richard Alpert, really keeping the connections between psychedelic experience and a variety of mystical and spiritual traditions very closely bound.

So even if we look at the background of where we've come from, we see a lot of divergence. And today we also have a great deal of divergence. You have people who are very scientifically oriented and in many ways quite skeptical of the kinds of claims you can make about the worlds of experience that psychedelics open up. On the other hand, you have a very strong pull towards religion and/or spirituality in certain kinds of forms; there's the idea that there are certain spirits behind these experiences, that they have a kind of collective message, and that by engaging in this we're learning a certain kind of truth which is organized often by certain institutions or groups. This divergence of course is extremely productive. It's very dynamic; it's very open-ended. The best aspect of psychedelic culture in terms of what it presents to the larger culture is this open-endedness, a lack of resolution, a constant dynamic interplay between matter and spirit, science and experience, subjectivity and chemistry. That tension of constantly moving relationships is in many ways what makes this such a productive and fascinating part of our culture.

But what does "psychedelic culture" mean? In the broader respects, in many ways you can look outside and say that psychedelics won. If you look at advertising, if you look at MTV, if you look at computer graphics, if you look at a lot of things inside of the emerging cybersphere, you will find traces and sometimes overt quotations of psychedelic experience and psychedelic culture. I'm sure if you took some of the advertisements you see for soda pop and international financial institutions back to 1967 and said, "Check this out," they'd say, "Wow, that's the stuff." And that's a fascinating tale. If we ever know - and I do hope someday we know -the extent of the influence of psychedelics on the computer industry, I'm sure it's remarkable. And we know some of what that is, but for obvious reasons, it's a story that remains untold. I was talking to Lawrence Hagerty [author of "The Spirit of the Internet: Speculations on the Evolution of Global Consciousness"] who was talking about how Sun Microsystems is beating the pants off some of the other monsters out there, and Sun is one major corporation out there that doesn't do drug testing. Very interesting [applause]

So clearly the ideas and experiences of this culture are trickling out and they have all sorts of influences that are hard to trace. What really interests me is how this psychedelic experience and psychedelic thinking can engage with the world that we're moving into, a much broader and very strange and rapidly changing world.

SHAMANISM

What's a nice, traditional, solid model of the function of psychedelics within a larger culture? We have the great image of the shaman, a very romanticized image, very overwritten in many ways, used to mean many different things outside of its original ethnographic context. I'm not going to go into any specifics about particular shamanic cultures, but I would like to draw sort of a general picture to point out something I think is very important about psychedelic culture. One thing you can say about the shaman or witch is that she lives on the edge of cultural maps. The shaman can be seen as a kind of interface between the specific human culture of a particular tribal group and the world outside, a world that we can think of not only as nature, of course, but the cosmic, the spiritual. The witch lives at the edge of the village as we start to move into the wild. And that's a very potent way of thinking about that relationship of being a transfer point between the outside and the inside of specific human cultures. One of those interesting paradoxes of shamanism is that, on the one hand, it is very technological, very savvy, full of knowledge in almost a modern sense of knowledge, like scientific knowledge. And yet the worlds that are being produced and performed are extremely cultural, spiritual, mythological. Look at a healing ceremony, and think about what exactly is happening in a healing ceremony. Let's say that the illness is healed through the use of quartz crystals being pulled out of the body. What's happening there? What's really going on?

One way of looking at it is that the shaman is playing a two-fold game. On the one hand, he knows very well what he's actually doing, that he's pirated a little quartz crystal in his palm, that he's using very specific plants which have very specific properties which engaged together can produce effects, both specifically related to health and in larger psychoactive issues as well. There's a tremendous amount of knowledge there. And yet, what does the shaman do in the actual situation of the healing? She performs. And what she performs is a whole cultural embeddedness of those knowledges, not simply as in our modern science - "take this pill, it'll work out for you." The knowledge is kept on the inside. And what the person perceives is a cultural story, of the illness being removed from the body. So it's not that the shaman is a skeptical trickster just playing games with quartz crystals. It's that the shaman understands some of the technology of producing cultural knowledge and transformation within that cultural matrix, and is willing to perform it as if it were fully engaged. We're realizing now that the placebo effect plays a tremendous role in healing of all sorts. And so to artfully produce the placebo effect is of course an incredibly valuable activity.

But again, what is the function here? The shaman takes a sort of liminal role. Liminality is a concept in anthropology that describes, again, a place on the edge of cultural maps, a place between the wild and the culture, between hot and cold, between different villages. A place of tremendous liminal power in the ancient world were crossroads. Crossroads were where people from different cultures would encounter each other. And there's a whole mythology of trickster figures - Hermes, Coyote, these kinds of characters - are figures that model this relationship between inside and out. Liminality is a very important way of approaching what function, what role, what space in the whole overall cultural environment psychedelics take up.

So if you look at this model, it's a very exciting model. Of course, many people in attempting to really take advantage of psychedelic drugs in the modern world have looked to the model of shaman healer. It's an exciting model to try to emulate in some fashion or another. But there's one very important distinction, I believe, between the world view of the traditional shaman healer and what we are faced with, which is that we do not have a coherent, contained world view. We no longer have a specific cultural story that can be performed in that mythological sense. We're at this very strange juncture in history when all these cultures are smashing into each other, we have globalization, we have fragmentation, it's a very open-ended situation. I think sometimes if there's an error in the shamanic interpretation of modern psychedelic culture, it's a kind of romanticism that wants to reconstruct or re-embody some fully coherent mythological world view. I don't want to say that in a way that undercuts the power of ancient myths and ancient knowledge. Of course one of the things that composes modern psychedelic culture is knowledges, is reception of stories, practices from the world over, and those things inform our evolving picture or cultural story about what we're doing, because that cultural story helps make the reality of experience come to be. But I think that sometimes there's a desire or a tendency to want that story to be fully realized, so that we know that actually what we're doing is engaging the mind of the planet, and the planet is telling us something. And I think in some ways those are very valuable stories, but at the same time, I think it's very important to recognize that, at the moment, we are still part of this tremendous, bizarre, horrible and fascinating process of technological modernity. We can see it breaking apart. We can see its horrible claws, its absences, and there's a desire to overcome these things quickly, or overcome them fully or entirely, leave that framework entirely in order to enter into a different kind of re-enchanted world. That desire to re-enchant the world is a profound thing that we're all feeling. It's incredibly legitimate. And yet, I think that the way in which we move forward with that is not by recovering simply a kind of mythological world view. We must keep up our relationship with those aspects of modernity that are part of psychedelic culture.

SCIENCE

One of the more obvious models, of course, is science. And one of the paradoxes if you approach psychedelics from a scientific point of view is that on the one hand, obviously we're dealing with material substances. Obviously we're dealing with chemistry. We're dealing with tiny little objects that we can describe in the institutionalized, image-free language of science. And yet, these compounds open up worlds which seem to pull the rug out from under a more limited view of science. And yet, and yet, we cannot fully inhabit the magical, open-ended world, because we are also very much aware of the fact that they are material compounds, produced through material means that are playing all sorts of games and fascinating tricks on our neural systems. So it's a kind of Möbius strip, where the trigger opens up the space that pulls out the rug from under the whole world of triggers, the whole world of mechanism. And yet, we can't entirely resolve that, we can't leave the world where we're still acknowledging the tremendous complexity and marvels of natural science. So that's why psychedelics, more than most regions of the culture, are a place for getting very close to this magic line, where it's almost a tight rope walk between these different world views.

Another very important aspect about psychedelics, from the perspective of more materialist and scientific ways of looking at the world, is the question it poses about consciousness, and whether first-person perspectives have any value in our attempts to understand what consciousness is. There's a tremendous amount of energy amongst the people who are doing the most work to describe what's happening in consciousness from the perspective of the brain. There's a tremendous tendency in that world to deny first-person experience as a valid way of understanding what's happening in consciousness; we can only really talk about it from a third-person perspective. Someone like Daniel Dennett is a great example of this, where any sort of internal information you get from meditation, from drugs, etc., it's just not really worth very much because we can't really capture it entirely in the kinds of frameworks that science prefers. But that's what makes it so powerful and so productive, because it's like we're opening up a gate inside of the scientific worldview, but what comes in that gate cannot be captured by it entirely. We see the same kinds of things happening now, as there's more discussion of a sort of neurology of mysticism or spiritualism, like the cover of Newsweek recently on "God and the brain." It's again a very similar kind of topic. Interestingly, they did not raise the issue of psychedelics at all. But they were approaching this odd point where we're beginning to get pretty good at a third-person description of a lot of what's going on with some of the most exalted and powerful states that human beings can achieve. And yet, there's something sort of obvious: if we're getting so close to it from this third-person perspective, how can we possibly not include a first-person perspective?

But then it actually feeds into an aspect of our culture that is very frightening, which is a certain tendency towards control, towards the idea that what causes human beings to be the way they are are a whole set of factors that can be controlled from the outside, for the interests of this kind of way of thinking. You find it in government, you find it in science, you find it in psychotherapy, you find it in motivational speaking, you find it in all sorts of places, this tendency to say, "Well, all you have to do is trigger human beings a certain way and they will be happy or they will be productive in a capitalist sense." And so the tendency to think about consciousness from a strictly third-person point of view also plays very much into the hands of the people who believe they can use third-person perspectives in order to organize such activity. Whereas if you stepped across that line and said, "This is absurd, of course I'm going to plunge in with my own individual consciousness and make inferences, make discoveries, explore myself, explore social interaction from the perspective of these new states," you're already just in that investigation making a claim for the primary importance of subjective experience as a place to instruct, to understand, and to relate to the world. So that's another way in which psychedelics have a very interesting trickiness, because even from the perspective of hard core third-person scientists, they're inevitably fascinated by these compounds on some level or another. And yet, the closer you get to these substances, the more they pull you into a very different kind of world. It becomes more difficult to account for the phenomenon from that perspective. So it's sort of eating in and eroding some of the more regressive and reductive tendencies inside of brain science.

SET & SETTING

These compounds pull the rug out from under from simple mechanistic cosmology. We all know about set and setting. Set and setting have a tremendously powerful role in producing experience. But set and setting are not mechanistic activities. They're cultural elements. They're narrative elements. They have to do with meaning. So by going into a psychedelic experience, even from a skeptical point of view, anyone who's really investigating the phenomenon will recognize that your own mind frame, and your own physical setting, will help produce the different qualities of the events. So there's no way to fully account for that from the perspective of brain science alone. You have to go to culture. You have to go to the shaman's performance, the fact that it looks like I'm pulling a quartz crystal out of your body at some point or another. So it opens up this whole problem or issue of self-programming, programming environment, intentionality. And all of those elements, especially intentionality, are precisely the elements that are extremely vital for us to keep at the center of our vision as we move into what I often fear is a fairly concerted attack on certain kinds of individual liberties and the liberties of consciousness itself.

But again, there's kind of an interesting problem, which is the same thing that I talked about with the shamanic worldview. If we were in a traditional society, the framework, the intention, the set and setting would be a given. We are brought up in it, we already know to some extent what's going on, what's going to happen with these experiences, and they are organized and explained and integrate us, because we already have that map. We've grown up into it, it's in the background, and maybe the shaman is a technician of culture, aware of how to maintain that cultural reality to some degree, using things that are maybe not included in that cultural reality, even using tricks to maintain that perception for the tribe. But we don't have that option any more. So what do we do? What is our intention? What is the frame? What is the set and setting that we organize? These are very big questions.

THE CORPORATE STATE

How does the liminal role of psychedelics fit into our world in terms of policy, in terms of the law? It's interesting to look at the role of psychedelic culture within the larger picture of drugs as constructed by the state, or by the concurrent consensus reality. What interests me is that in some ways, it's not a bad thing. And I don't mean that to say that it's not bad that people are being incarcerated and having their lives ruined. Obviously major suffering goes down and I'm not talking about that. What I'm trying to say is that nonetheless, it puts psychedelic culture in a very curious place inside the larger cultural framework. It has some very productive qualities to it.

One of those is that it avoids some of the traps that occur with any sort of mainstream or corporate or state-oriented recuperation of psychoactive substances. This really came to me in an interesting way. I'm not entirely sure I believe myself on this one, but I do think it's an interesting issue to raise. When Rick Doblin [founder and president of MAPS] was talking about his plan to get MDMA made legal [at the Lindesmith Center-Drug Policy Foundation's "The State of Ecstasy" conference], it was a very sophisticated, very interesting plan. But when he was presenting it, at the end of his presentation he was casting his vision of these "Ecstasy clinics," where people would go and they would be legitimate, and you'd have nice paintings and everything would be set up, and you'd have these kind people who'd be helping you through these sorts of experiences. I kind of had this weird feeling inside. I had this little strange kind of shiver, of like, "Okay, but I don't know that that's all of it." And the reason I say that is that one of the things I think is going to happen - it's already happening, you see it all over the place - is this transformation of the corporate culture of psychoactivity and psychoactive drugs. If you look at Prozac, if you look at Ritalin, you see that there is a willingness inside of civilization or whatever you want to call this particular monster, to willingly use powerful psychoactive drugs in order to restore certain models of normal behavior, certain models of happiness, certain models of satisfaction. And there's nothing wrong with happiness or satisfaction. There's nothing wrong with recognizing profoundly dysfunctional behaviors and finding ways, even very technological ways, of overcoming those behaviors. Nonetheless, there is something that happens when those activities and those possibilities become incorporated into the state. And by the state, I don't just mean the government. I mean the kind of large corporate state that we live in. And so there's a profound difference between decriminalization and legalization. And we're not anywhere near a point where we're going to be able to deal with these things. At the moment, people are suffering and we have to fight that battle, and again I'm not talking about keeping things the way they are. But what I am talking about is that I don't think it's an accident that psychedelics occupy this curious position

MDMA is a very different category in a lot of ways. MDMA is operating again in a very liminal space, between the crazy world of psychedelics that must be suppressed - those wild and crazy kids, those nuts from California - and Prozac. So you start to see mainstream media going, "This stuff's not so bad!" The New York Times, Time magazine: "Hmm, you know, it's not that different from the serotonin-based SSRIs and such." But one of the things about that is because Ecstasy by itself, though incredibly productive and marvelous in so many ways, does not puncture consensus reality the way psychedelics puncture consensus reality. And so I don't think it's an accident that it's in this zone, because in some ways you can imagine a reorganization of our current environment in which Ecstasy is somehow integrated. That's not necessarily a bad thing. It's just that as soon as you start to integrate it, then it becomes manipulated by that cultural machine, which has agendas that have nothing to do necessarily with you feeling better, with you discovering more love and intimacy in your life. It becomes a regulatory mechanism, a way of managing human subjectivity in an increasingly dense and chaotic and open-ended social environment.

So in some ways, psychedelics have a very interesting place because they're not integrated into that world. And for me, one of the things that is the most productive and full of potential about them is that they're going to puncture your consensus reality. They're going to knock you out of whatever that structure is, even in terms of your models of healing, even in terms of your models of deeper interconnection with nature. You think you're going to get the great earth momma embracing you in some kind of jaguar-rich forest, and you get sucked into some sort of interdimensional wormhole built by malevolent-looking insectoid creatures, and you go, "Man, I was going for the nature vibe sort of thing!" That's great. It's that pulling the rug out from under you. And so it's very interesting to look at the difference between MDMA and psychedelic culture in that sense.

RELIGION & SPIRITUALITY

The final zone I want to talk about in terms of this liminality is religion or spirituality. A good example of something analogous to where we are in terms of the role of psychedelics in our spiritual/religious quest today from history is to look at the mystery religions of late antiquity. Many people have drawn what I think are very valid connections between the last few centuries of the Roman Empire, and our world now. You have a potentially globalized environment full of huge varieties of different kinds of people, a sort of mechanized state that is very efficient but utterly corrupt at the top. You have a very urban environment, in which many different kinds of people are coming together, and people are pulled out of their tribal connections to the places they come from. There's a lot more movement in the empire. And it's in this environment that you see the rise of the mystery religions. Not particularly the famous mystery religion of Eleusis, which is a very important part of our psychedelic story, but was actually much older than most of these mystery religions. But it was more the sense that the way to serve this spiritual hunger was to enter into these cult sects, where at the heart of the whole operation was an experience, an otherworldly experience. And they were not by any means all produced by psychoactive substances; in fact, I don't think you necessarily need very much psychoactive substances involved in the production of these kinds of mystical experiences in order for them to be very heavy and transformative. And yet there was a desire for this kind of experience, for a sense of the self that went beyond the body, that was very similar to now.

So it's interesting to think about how we relate to this model of the mystery religions. I see an unfortunate reductive tendency of some psychedelic research, particularly the historical stuff, to find behind all of these vast mysteries of religions across the globe some kind of substance that's "actually" producing things. We know there's something going on with soma, we know there's something going on with Eleusis, we know that stuff is going on, and there's little fragments of it here and there, and we want to reconstruct what is actually going on. In this way, we're very modern still. We're still looking for the mechanism. We're still looking for the actual substance that allows these things to be. It's my belief that once you take into account the way that cultural reality can program or set up a certain set of expectations, a certain set of experiences, then you actually don't need many chemicals thrown into the mix in order to produce a tremendously powerful experience, and I always find it unfortunate when in some psychedelic historiography, it's almost saying, "Real spirituality is the psychedelic experience, and everything else we see is a pale reflection of it, some attempt to recapture it using some longer, slower, more painful method, or leaving aside the methods, you just have some crusty, dogmatic ideology that is the leftover of this living spiritual experience." I mean, in some ways I think that's probably an accurate description in a lot of respects, but I think it also misses a lot, and one of the things it does is it cuts against our willingness to look at what those cultural frameworks are, what the stories are that are embedded in these experiences. By overly emphasizing the "secret mushroom" behind all of the iconography or all of the lore, I think we tend to undercut the role of meaning, the role of our ongoing cultural frameworks in producing these experiences.

Another issue that's raised by the mystery religions is the larger question about what is the role of experience spiritually in the first place? There's a fairly consensus idea that we have spirituality over here, we have religion over there, and they kind of overlap. Spirituality on whatever level is about your experiences: what's actually happening, how you're becoming more integrated, your mystical experiences, the real deal, the immediacy of spirit. Whereas religion we tend to associate very justly with institutional frameworks, with collective stories, with power relations, with manifest social relationships. And there's this curious sort of balance between the two. What you have with a traditional mystery religion is that at the heart of it, there is something like gnosis. Maybe it's produced through a substance, maybe not. But there is an experience, a profound experience of the divine, of the otherworldly. And yet, again, it is embedded in this whole set of stories and frameworks, which a) help produce the shape of those experiences, and b) even more importantly, help integrate the residue of those experiences into ordinary life.

So there's a tendency, a very strong one and very understandable, inside of psychedelic spirituality, to say, "This stuff is getting us to the goods, now we can skip all that 'religion' stuff and get right to the heart of it. We can go spiritual, we don't need religion in the broadest and most positive sense of the word." But I'm not entirely sure that that sums up the issue, because again I think without a certain kind of framework for understanding and integrating, then the spiritual experience, even the most profound state of gnosis, can become a kind of wacky hedonism. Nothing wrong with hedonism. But you probably people know people like this, or you can see it in the culture very much, where any kind of substance that you're taking in a de-mythologized environment where you're buying a piece of blotter or you're taking a pill, however you try to frame it, it can become just a mechanistic repetition. It can lose any edge of genuine openness and integration.

But I don't have an answer for this, because I don't know what these frames are. I don't know what the big maps are. I tend to be very distrustful of people who know what the big map is. They "know" what the story is that's organizing these experiences. We can see, for example, if you look at some Brazilian ayahuasca sects, there are some very interesting things that are happening there from a religious anthropology perspective. And yet, it doesn't take much interaction with them to see things that at least from a Western perspective are difficult: institutional hierarchies, ways of saying what's a good experience, what's a bad experience, what is the meaning of all this, and answering those questions beforehand becomes somewhat authoritarian in a traditional religious way. So it can have a great deal of social power and actually aid people in a lot of ways, and yet I think a lot of us in psychedelic culture are uncomfortable with that. So once again this is that "in betwixt, in between": we know there are frames, we know that by accepting and creating a spiritual environment, a spiritual story, the experiences themselves will have a much greater richness. (I mean, sometimes they'll just come in and do whatever they're going to do anyway, but that is very much a part of it.) And yet, what is our frame? What really is the story we're telling ourselves? I don't have an answer for that, but it fascinates me very much that there is something to the need to produce these cultural frameworks.

And I'm not sure whether the kinds of frameworks that we have so far are sufficient. If you look at them, what are the two main ones you can talk about? One of them is the therapeutic model. Again, incredibly productive, and yet I'm not always so sure whether that is getting at the real heart of the spiritual potential of these molecules. Another example is rave culture. That's probably the best example of a kind of mass movement with a great deal of cultural power, within which people are having tremendous psychoactive experiences, and which is organized in a certain way to produce trance effects, to suggest certain kinds of images which are keying off archetypes, the drugs really plug into the music and the music plugs into the drugs, as an example of the way that technology and the drug states are really mirroring each other and as they evolve, they sort of co-create these environments. Again, they're incredibly rich and productive in some ways, and yet in other ways I don't think you have to be too much of a worrywart to look at some aspects of rave culture, and wonder, what are they doing? What is this for? What's going on here? There's always that tendency, particularly in our culture, to have things turned into a form of entertainment or a form of numbing yourself.

And so the question I always ask myself is: How can you communicate the best aspects of "psychedelic values"? There are certain kinds of psychedelic values that many people develop after a long apprenticeship with these things. I mean, I know I've met individuals from older generations, and there's just certain things you pick up, a certain kind of openness, a certain kind of tolerance, a certain kind of sweetness, a certain kind of mirth that really strikes me as part of these values. They're almost unspoken. How do you transmit these? Is there a way to transmit them? Is it all just out of control? As soon as you start to try to control it, then you make it more like religion, you make it more like "this is the right way and this is the wrong way." And yet, in some ways the chaotic effects of introducing these things at an increasingly mass level are worrying.

So again, I don't have a lot of answers. But I really just wanted to paint a big picture, throwing out some questions that I know will be approached from a variety of different ways within our culture. Of course, one of the good things about the old mystery religions and that kind of model is that they're esoteric. There's levels of secrecy. And so in order to work yourself up to the encounter, the experience, you have to go through a lot of social machinery, a lot of preparation, a lot of preparing yourself for not really necessarily knowing what goes on. And that structure also allows the production of wisdom people, whether you call them shamans, whether you call them masters, whatever you want to call people who know their stuff, who know these worlds inside and out, but there's a way that that knowledge passes on. There's apprentices, and those apprentices are able to reproduce those environments, changing them always slightly as the culture itself transforms. Now we're in an information environment, where that kind of hermeticism still goes on, and it's vital that it does go on - most secret elite pockets are vital to the continual creation of this culture and its encounters with psychoactives. But it's also the case that the genie is seriously out of the bottle. It's much easier in some senses to "get" things, to pluck on the information networks and come up with a lot of very powerful information, that in a more traditional society would be highly guarded by the wacky alchemists, the witch at the edge of the village. Now it's all open. That raises some really interesting ethical issues.


Tags : psychedelic
Rating : Teen - Drugs
Posted on: 2002-06-07 00:00:00