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THIS DREAM AGAIN, DEJA VU!
THE HISTORY OF PSYCHEDELIA
In his work on the Hell’s Angels, Hunter S. Thompson remarks on a case wherein under the tutelage of the Merry Pranksters, an angel undergoes an all-night ordeal under the influence of LSD, howling at the stars, thrown out of his mind by a rather large dose. His presence becomes to the party almost ghostly, at the edges of the celebrations, far beyond the comforts of beer and pussy the rest of them hold onto so dearly. In a similar vein, in Beyond the Wall of Sleep Lovecraft writes of a dysgenic white man named Joe Slater who is thrown into similar fits of mystic delirium, possessed to great awakenings through his dreams, leaping in hysterics at the stars, possessed with the utter limit of the human body’s strength.
The horror of Joe Slater’s story is often lost on modern readers for the banality of his experience - we are not unfamiliar with such cases, that of being seized beyond all control with these experiences of the beyond, yet it shows a startling new dimension to the mystic experience, one that Lovecraft himself properly recognized for the intensity that it is.
Consider the way a similar primitive was given LSD, in the case of Ricky Kasso. A near-homeless petty criminal and drug dealer, he had come to LSD as adjacent to any other substance, and let it take to him with an incredible intensity. He soon became totally occupied in the pursuit of what the drug gave him, stealing off into the woods to conduct seances with Satan, who he claimed came to him while under the influence of the drug in the form of a golden tree rising from the Earth. Eventually, Kasso’s life came to an end as he used the drug to conduct a sacrifice, him and several friends murdering another of their friends while under the influence of the drug. Kasso hung himself in prison shortly afterwards.
For a great deal of history, these sorts of experiences were rare. There’s no ease in inducing a mystic experience, with any number of difficult methods - drugs, fasting, sensory deprivation, breathing techniques - all having their own associated tradeoffs and ordeals, yet there’s no question that the barrier to entry for the user has been dramatically lowered.
This was the opening shot that LSD allowed for. Though psilocybin is theoretically easier to produce, it was not so before LSD came about. At the center of the 20th century, psilocybin was a historical tidbit - the chemical found (though not identified as such) in rare central American mushrooms known as “teonanacatl” and promoted by a handful of overzealous anthropologists. Even in its heyday in medieval Mesoamerica, was no easy feat to acquire, having elaborate rituals involving lengthy search parties and group partakings to experience. It was only after LSD’s popularity that these mushrooms warranted a second look and the rather difficult work of cultivating and breeding these mushrooms began, with the mass cultivation through distribution of “grow kits” not taking off until quite some time later. Similar drugs came with similar problems - the absurdly long growing period of peyote cacti, the enormous geographic and cultural obscurity of DMT, the weakness and sickness that comes with morning glory vines and their oft-misunderstood concoction of lower-tier lysergamides, the lack of appreciation for very large oral doses of THC - at this point, any other technique traditionally used was easier.
LSD’s revolution was in proliferation. For the first time, the ability to induce a mystic experience became distributable. LSD could be made from a starting point of knowledge and precursors and with a skillset that was markedly more common than the skillset required to find, return home with, and cultivate in captivity a rare central American mushroom. Though the difficulty is considerable - the equipment required is a great initial investment and requires considerable education in the more advanced niches of organic chemistry, as well as a number of rare and obviously identifiable precursors, yet the payoff is considerable in comparison the effort required. The dosages being absolutely minute compared to the quantity produced from the average reaction leads to an exponential proliferation from a single lab. Only a handful of individuals were producing LSD during its peak of fashionability (mostly rich kids in the Northeast and West Coast, who dovetailed being educated enough to perform the synthesis as well as moneyed enough to set up a laboratory), yet through these handfuls of individuals came an utter saturation of the substance through the drug market.
It could only be after this period of mass proliferation that a widespread interest could be birthed. A mystic experience is impossible to understand until it’s been had, and then it becomes impossible to unstick it from the mind. The effort required to domesticate psilocybin mushrooms or popularize DMT or even developing modern efficiencies for recreating the older methods, such as John C. Lilly’s float tanks, comes with a zeal that’s only possible when it’s been seeded far and wide for an enormous percentage of the population to experience this once rare phenomena.
It’s this more than anything, that leads to the explosion and trial of psychedelia. The reckless zeal of groups like the Merry Pranksters is often looked upon with disdain and for good reason - Joe Slater’s gibbering flailings towards the heavens, despite the truth of the experience, is not a path that will lead to anything but the madness of a Lovecraft protagonist, a mind overwhelmed with something it was never prepared to confront nor capable of processing. Yet this history, of the widespread proliferation of these experiences, the ensuing madness, and the very lack of control around the substance, is precisely what led to the staying power of pursuit of such things. Such is the failure of Timothy Leary’s vision - while he is correct in saying that psychedelics should only be done in solitary, controlled conditions, in states of meditation with lengthy processing times following, and while Leary’s followers were even moreso correct in the lot of them making the choice to leave drugs beyond for more traditional meditation practices, this is a failure on a practical level as it fails to recognize the utility of this madness. Psychedelia spreads like a fungal growth, and only a controlled cultivation of this growth can lead to that very initiation - that taking the place of the old mystery cults having their sensory deprivation chambers and fasting rituals, we come upon a confederated structure of initiation through an affinity with this madness - one existing through a chaotic underworld, like Lovecraft’s cosmic experiences, a secret madness brewing beneath the surface which calls to the rare few who can attune to its frequency.
Christopher Bache writes, in his memoir on his lifelong LSD practice, that the work he underwent was the continual process of death and rebirth, one made all the more accelerated and intensified by the fact that his tool of choice (dozens of very high dose LSD experiences), led to an occasional experience of extreme death and rebirth, rather than a more gradual rhythm. That this is a rhythm, a cycle he compares to the combustion cycle of an engine, is the vital element to what this process entails. Bache describes in laborious detail every trip he took, and with good cause - the work done via his tripping is the work of an onward marching purification process through this continual dipping into the well of death and rebirth.
The truth of the mystic experience as such a state is recognized again and again. It’s trite to say even, to point out that the ur-example of the states of being reached when various traditions speak of what one encounters while intoxicated on drugs or fasting or sensory deprivation, is that state of being reached in near death experiences. To point out the dramatic DMT release, the personality change afterwards, the sensations of lights through tunnels, karmic resolutions, purifying…
It’s routine at this point, that a tripper will often panic at sensations of their own death. Indeed, parts of the nervous system seem to think such, with the body physiologically excited as though it were preparing for its own demise. Similarly, the fact that the trip is so often experience in this way, the feeling one has been reborn at its conclusion, speaks to this proximity. A motif of this can be seen when the bible speaks of the visionary experiences of the greater prophets. To look directly upon the glory of God leads to death, and yet the prophet can only achieve their gnosis via partial immersion in this light. They kneel, blind themselves, only viewing God’s messengers. The same light is a lesser descendent of the same light which should bring them beyond. The distinction here is one of degree, that speaks to the core of the experience.
To die is to enter the beyond. The Augustinian perspective on what’s been bastardized as “Heaven” and “Hell” is one of total unity or exclusion. To be saved is to be totally immersed within the divine light, as to be damned is to be totally excluded. From here, the period of purgatory comes in - the divinity in its pure form is so beyond the soul, that it’s experienced as a scourging pain for eons, before the soul has all of its darkness singed off it by this holy fire.
Similarly, the nature of the afterlife is one of dissolution, and here is the same experience which forms the backbone of the mystic experiences. In death, one dissolves away, all forms of separation and division are lost. The negations and distinctions which allow for unity to be disrupted, “the ten thousand things” as Laozi would say, all fall apart. Such is the experience of light so often spoken of - the divine light of all things is experienced thusly. This however, can only be experienced in its totality in death. This is the origin of the partial experience spoken of the bible. The prophets are shown the face of God, yet it can only be shown in a partial form to them, as to experience its full totality would require the total purging of divisions - not only divinity, but divinity beyond purgatory. The mystic experience immerses one, like Ezekial or Isaiah before the angels, in a partial experience of this unity, a lesser window into something the experience of reality which lies beyond the separations that only death can penetrate.
Lovecraft writes of this in Ex Oblivione, where he details a man who journeys to a locked garden, and ventures to see what lies beyond it, permanently. A drug is finally procured and the phantasmagoria is unleashed, before shortly withdrawing. All colors blend, like a rainbow reversed, and the beyond is revealed to be an infinite abyss of purity, into which he merges, finding his life to be a brief and pointless dream. Bache similarly, writes of this state of mind towards the end of his memoir. Remarking, in his mind, that he achieved what zen refers to as “satori”, the state of total unity and blissful nothingness, to which all roads led.
So we see the interest in the dying process as being the foundation here. The phantasmagorias and visions are ultimately the journey to the destination, which is as close as possible to the total unity of Heaven - we can only know such a word through blinkered depictions of fluffy clouds and putti, just as we can only know Heaven in mystic frenzies through long dream-journeys across our memories, across the worlds of time and space, across all we’ve ever known, ever could know - a journey ultimately, of drawing these strands to a close and unifying all things. We can identify the mystic journey here with purgatory - the light was always there, and many speak of the light emerging as the product of a sort of realization, wherein one identifies oneself, the surroundings, the hallucinatory reverie they’re within, as all being part of a unitary substance, leading to an undiluted experience of that substance. Such is the position in the afterlife, of the world being processed of its divisions, shadows, darknesses, and differentiation reversing. In a sense, entropy reverses, and creation is brought back to unity.
Bibliography
Hell’s Angels - Hunter S. Thompson
The Acid King - Jesse P. Pollack
Beyond the Wall of Sleep - H.P. Lovecraft
Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream - Jay Stevens
The True Story of the Penis Envy Mushroom - Hamilton Morris (interviewing Richard Guttierez)
Drugs and Mysticism - Walter N. Pahnke
Caves and the Ancient Greek Mind - Yulia Ustinova
LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven - Christopher M. Bache
Ex Oblivione - H.P. Lovecraft