On On Drugs V

Psychedelic therapy culture

[W]hile the extraction of attention remains the basis of the new internet economy, the cultivation of individual attention amounts to a form of hard-won resistance against this economy.

— Justin Smith-Ruiu, The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is (2022)

But all you have to do is be quiet in order to discern, beneath all the realities, the only irreducible one, that of existence.

— Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart (1943)

Dear Justin,

Mazel tov on your Substack coming-of-age! Since we conversed live here on Substack, I’ve been reflecting on how strongly you wanted to distance yourself from any association with the so-called “wellness” industry (on or off Substack, presumably), despite certain similarities between the narrative arc in On Drugs and the promises made by various wellness practitioners to help us heal from trauma etc. You also admitted that you are well aware that you could have been much more popular on Substack were it not for the standards that you felt obliged to keep. Not standards of rigour, you were quick to add. Of course I agree with you that standards must be maintained! But how, once we’ve abandoned rigour for unnecessarily cramping our style, do we identify which standards are worth maintaining?

Digging deep

I initially intended to write about my own experiences with an “underground” psychedelic guide (There was something witchy about K, with her with her long black hair and her flowing black dresses...) but then I started reading TIINWYTII and I asked myself what I was trying to achieve by turning experiences about which I still felt rather ambivalent into content for Substack.com. Was I trying to do that thing whereby I ostensibly critique therapy culture while secretly wishing to derive some therapeutic benefit from such self-analysis and disclosure?

Fortunately, as I mentioned in Part I of this already drawn-out series, we have a veritable trove of accounts of psychedelic experiences, therapeutic and otherwise.¹ Consider the case of Peter, recalled by Dr. Stanislav Grof in The Holotropic Mind to explain his concept of “systems of condensed experience” or “COEX systems”, which I understand to be similar to what Jung called psychological complexes:

Each COEX system consists of emotionally charged memories from different periods of our lives; the common denominator that brings them together is that they share the same emotional quality or physical sensation. Each COEX may have many layers, each permeated by its central theme, sensations, and emotional qualities. Many times we can identify individual layers according to the different periods of the person’s life.

Poor Peter came to Dr. Grof in dire straits:

At the time we began with the experiential sessions, Peter could hardly function in his everyday life. He was obsessed with the idea of finding a man of a certain physical appearance, preferably clad in black. He wanted to befriend this man and tell him of his urgent desire to be locked in a dark cellar and exposed to physical and mental torture. Often unable to concentrate on anything else, he wandered aimlessly through the city, visiting public parks, lavatories, bars, and railroad stations in search of the “right man.”

He succeeded on several occasions in persuading or bribing men who met his criteria to carry out his wishes. Having a special gift for finding people with sadistic traits, he was twice almost killed, seriously hurt several times, and once robbed of all his money. On those occasions when he was successful in achieving the experience he craved, he was extremely frightened and genuinely disliked the torture he underwent. Peter suffered from suicidal depressions, sexual impotence, and occasional epileptic seizures.

As we went over his personal history, I discovered that his problems started at the time of his compulsory employment in Germany during World War II. As the citizen of a Nazi occupied territory, he was forced into what amounted to slave labor, performing very dangerous work. During this period of his life, two SS officers forced him at gunpoint to engage in their homosexual practices. When the war was over and Peter was finally released, he found that he continued to seek homosexual intercourse in the passive role. This eventually included fetishism for black clothes and finally evolved into the full scenario of the obsession already described.

Peter underwent fifteen consecutive sessions of psychedelic therapy, going deeper and deeper into his trauma:

In the most superficial layers of this particular COEX, we predictably discovered Peter’s more recent traumatic experiences with his sadistic partners. A deeper layer of the same COEX system contained Peter’s memories from the Third Reich. In his experiential sessions he relived his terrifying ordeals with the SS officers and was able to begin resolving the many complex feelings surrounding those events.

So far, this sounds like the kind of story Michael Pollan could use in a Netflix documentary. But the therapy didn’t stop there. Dr. Grof encouraged Peter to go even deeper into his unconscious (known by some indigenous cultures as “the dreamworld”):

Following these revelations, Peter entered an even deeper layer of this COEX system where he began re-experiencing scenes from his childhood. He had often been brutally punished by his parents, particularly by his alcoholic father who became violent when he was drunk, often beating Peter with a large leather strap. His mother often punished him by locking him in a dark cellar without food or water for hours at a time. Peter could not remember her wearing anything but black dresses.

Trauma response or erotic liberation?

Is it just me, or does the detail about the black dresses come across as a little, shall we say, novelistic, as if Peter’s acid-drenched mind is desperately grasping for an explanation to make sense of things. Undeterred, Dr. Grof sent Peter ever deeper downwards:

Peter’s experiential exploration of his key COEX system continued. He relived his own birth trauma. Vivid memories of this time—once again focused on biological brutality—revealed themselves to him as the basic pattern, or model, for all those elements of sadistic experience that seemed to predominate in his life thereafter.

After these harrowing sessions, Dr. Grof is pleased to report, Peter was fully cured from his masochistic obsessions.² Assuming we’ve shrugged off the yoke of Big Materialism, how seriously should we take claims such as these, not only that reliving one’s own birth trauma is something that one is able to experience, but that it is the kind of experience that can, as it were, offer one a key to one’s own personal mythology? At some point, I feel, we shade into “healing fiction”, although we might differ on where exactly where we’d draw the line.

Tea with a Four-Year-Old

In How to Change Your Mind, Pollan quotes Alison Gopnik, “a developmental psychologist and philosopher who happens to be a colleague”:

“If you want to understand what an expanded consciousness looks like, all you have to do is have tea with a four-year-old.” Or drop a tab of LSD. Gopnik told me she has been struck by the similarities between the phenomenology of the LSD experience and her understanding of the consciousness of children: hotter searches, diffused attention, more mental noise (or entropy), magical thinking, and little sense of a self that is continuous over time. “The short summary is, babies and children are basically tripping all the time.”

Now there may be good reasons to become like a child again (e.g. Matthew 18:3), but at some point you start to wonder, what will happen, what has perhaps already happened, when there are no adults left in the room?

I’ll defer to Noah Kumin on the significance of the butterfly imagery.

2 + 2 = ?

Depends on who’s asking.

I am grateful to Brother Pistelli³ for his continuous reckless citation of my favourite authors, sending me back to the source texts to reassure myself that I haven’t totally lost the plot.⁴ I’ve previously taken good-friend-of-the-blog Henry Begler to task for appropriating William Blake for the German-American Romantic tradition, not because I object to appropriation per se (what am «I», Mary Jane Eyre, but cultural appropriation?) but because a slap dash appropriation risks being every bit as reductive as the rationalist tyranny that Fratello Pistelli fears, or pretends to fear, for didactic purposes, or for laughs, to avoid sinking into torpor, or more to the point, as reductive as looking at Blake’s depiction of the marriage of Heaven and Hell and seeing in it primarily a political vision, as John Higgs does in William Blake Now: Why He Matters More Than Ever, published in 2019 to coincide with a large retrospective at the Tate Britain, the tenor of which was masterfully summed up by Alan Jacobs for Harper’s Magazine:

Blake would have found the account of his work given by the Tate’s curators lamentably attentive to what is “perishing” while oblivious to the imperishable. But nothing about that description would have surprised him, because he was accustomed to being misunderstood. One may think Blake mistaken in his passions, or even mad—many of his contemporaries, including William Wordsworth, thought him mad—but it is worth knowing what he actually thought. Once he wrote to a friend, “What it will be Questioned When the Sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty.”

That is why my first rule for visiting an art exhibition is never read the wall text. I will read names of art works, artists and countries and I will read dates, but I will not read what some nineteen-year-old nonbinary Maoist wrote to tell me how I should feel about Blake’s A Vision of the Last Judgement. Respectfully, I will experience the work for myself,⁵ which I, or at least an alter ego of mine, Mary Jane Eyre not having at the time, in a technical sense, existed, did, on cannabis, if that’s relevant, which I guess it is, since this is, after all, a post in a series of posts about a book about how drugs can alter our perception of the nature of reality. I don’t know which has done more to alter my perception of reality: Blake or cannabis, but I can tell you, the two in combination has been a potent, perhaps too potent, combination.⁶ Even if you’re not stoned, though, I would still advise against reading the wall text. Don’t get mad at how patronising it is, about how pointless it is to spoil your enjoyment of an Impressionistic portrait of a peach by offering you a gentle reminder that the aunt of the painter of that juicy-looking peach had once visited Belgium and that the King of Belgium, King Leopold, had, personally and vicariously, committed the most horrible atrocities in the Congo. Just ignore it. Just look at the art.

Say what you want about camp icon Susan Sontag, but nobody has refuted Against Interpretation.

What always strikes me about seeing Blake’s visionary images face-to-face is how small they are. The same with Van Gogh. There is perhaps some metaphorical lesson to be found in the fact that projecting The Starry Night onto the Burj Khalifa just doesn’t have the same effect as seeing the tiny brush strokes up close and personal.

Anyway, back to Blake. To state the bleeding obvious, All Religions Are One, first published in 1788, is not merely an aesthetic manifesto. Here is the first line of The Argument:

As the true method of Knowledge is Experiment, the true faculty of knowing must be the faculty which experiences.

Giving the left their due, Blake’s ecumenicalism wasn’t merely a foreshadowing of American JewBus and RadCaths, it was also a political statement. After all, it was almost a century before the the Universities Test Act of 1871 abolished all religious tests at Oxford and Cambridge colleges.

As for the Big D, looking up the notorious equation in Notes From The Underground (1864), I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it is adjacent to one of my favourite descriptions of human folly:

And who knows (there is no saying with certainty), perhaps the only goal on earth to which mankind is striving lies in this incessant process of attaining, in other words, in life itself, and not in the thing to be attained, which must always be expressed as a formula, as positive as twice two makes four, and such positiveness is not life, gentlemen, but is the beginning of death. Anyway, man has always been afraid of this mathematical certainty, and I am afraid of it now. Granted that man does nothing but seek that mathematical certainty, he traverses oceans, sacrifices his life in the quest, but to succeed, really to find it, dreads, I assure you. He feels that when he has found it there will be nothing for him to look for. When workmen have finished their work they do at least receive their pay, they go to the tavern, then they are taken to the police-station--and there is occupation for a week. But where can man go?

It pairs well with Demian’s wry observation in Hesse’s eponymous novel of 1919:

There’s certainly something very pleasing about it—intoxication, bacchanalian orgies! But I find, with most people who frequent public houses, this sense of abandon is lost. It seems to me there is something typically Philistine, bourgeois, in the public house habit. Of course, for just one night, with burning torches, to have a proper orgy and drunken revel. But to do the same thing over and over again, drinking one glass after another—that’s hardly the real thing. Can you imagine Faust sitting evening after evening drinking at the same table?⁷

Psychedelic dance therapy

Let’s be real: when most people take drugs, they don’t want to speculate about the ontology of being, they wanna dance, preferably with somebody, more preferably still with somebody who loves them, but they might settle for somebody, any body, to love. Although, to be fair, dancing is just one of the things that the girls and boys of Girls wanna do in the third episode of the second season, when a commissioning editor of an Internet publication encourages Hannah to “do cocaine” for the first time so that she can “write about the experience”.⁸ It could be argued that snorting lines of ultra-processed and adulterated street cocaine in a club bathroom pales in comparison to the experience of placidly chewing cocoa leaves in a traditional setting, but I maintain that getting high with a group of people, in a dingy night club, or perhaps in a patch of forest behind an Ikea, dancing to dirty techno or to acid house, is the closet thing to indigenous experiences of communal ecstasy that secular meta-modernity has to offer. As Dr. Grof might have said: music can be a great medium for COEX travel.

Perhaps my most pointed criticism of On Drugs is that it faults “analytic philosophy” for not taking altered states of conscious more seriously while at the same time remaining very circumspect about which aspects of such experiences are worthy of serious contemplation. I can understand wanting to stay clear of the gnarlier aspects of the Eat, Pray, Love journey, but then why call the book On Drugs: Psychedelics, Philosophy and the Nature of Reality, rather than, say, On God: Philosophy, Psychedelics and the End of Nature? I feel I can no longer ignore the divine elephant in the room, so to bring this series to a close, I will once and for all solve the God complex.

Inshallah,

Mary Jane Eyre

1. Here is a fresh example of the genre.

2. Would such a therapeutic practice nowadays be considered “conversion therapy”? A “high calibre philosopher” has argued that kink is a sexuality on par with homo/bi/hetero.

3. I refuse to call him “Daddy”, as I’ve seen at least one Substacker do.

Even a reply gal has her limits.

4. It is literary gaslighting, Your Honour, and I won’t stand for it!

5. ni déesse ni maîtrise!

6. It might not have been the kind of religious experience that St. Paul or Simone Weil would approve of, but I’d argue that looking at Blake’s engravings while on drugs was a kind of religious experience.

Jonathan Franzen’s underappreciated Crossroads (2021) includes a hilarious and surprisingly profound exploration of the intersections between chemical and religious ecstasy.

You don’t have to be DFW to be deep.

7. You don’t need to read Goethe to learn about Mephistopheles.

8. I’ve been introducing my gen z boyfriend to the true peak of prestige TV.