The Far-Off Land
An attempt at a philosophical evaluation of the hallucinogenic
drug-experience.
1959
Ich weiss nicht, was soil es bedeuten, Dass ich so traurig bin;
Ein Maerchen aus alten Zeiten, Das koramt nir nicht aus dem Sinn....
(I know not the meaning of this melancholy, A legend from long ago
Keeps running through my mind....) (German Folksong)
...need I dread from thee
harsh judgments, if the song be loth to quit
Those recollected hours that have the charm of visionary things, those lovely forms
and sweet sensations that throw back our life, and almost make remotest infancy
A visible scene, on which the sun is shinin
(Wordsworth, The Prelude)
Its runes are pale and fadeAnd after years of suffering
Which destroyed so much in us,
There will always sound the legend
Of a world which once we knew.
Its runes are pale and faded,
Its music faint and far;
Yet its presence lives forever
With eternal magic charm.
(“Hermann Hesse,” Spate Gedichted, Its music faint and far
;(Once on a time I lived in might vaults
which ocean suns stained with a thousand gleams;
their straight majestic columns made them seem as evening deep grottoes of basalt.
The billows, tossing images of skies, mingled in a solemn mystic mode
their music’s powerful harmonies which glowed with their sunset hues reflected to my eyes.
And there I dwelt among voluptuous calms,
in the midst of azure, splendor, and the waves, and the heavy perfumes of the naked slaves
who cooled my forehead with slow fronds of palm, and whose only duty was to seek
the hidden sorrows that had made me sick.) (“Baudelaire,” La Vie Anterieure, A Former Life)
\ Introduction
When the Spaniards entered Mexico in the early sixteenth century, they found the natives using a
family of strange new drugs, unlike any they had known before. The Aztecs had given one of them the name, Teonanacatl (“The Flesh of the God”) in honor of its miraculous properties, which enabled one to see visions, to foretell the future, and to obtain supernatural revelation. Farther
north, the Conquistadors discovered a cult surrounding a mysterious, turnip- shaped cactus, almost indistinguishable from the stones of the desert, which enabled its users to behold the secrets of the universe. Duly noting the properties of these drugs, the Spaniards succeeded in stamping out their use. Through the centuries, they remained all but forgotten, until in the last century
settlers in the American Southwest observed that the cult of the peyote cactus still survived
among certain Indians, although in an altered form. As they became converted to Christianity,
these tribes adapted their worship of the magic plant to its celebration as a Sacrament; in its new
form, the cult spread as far north as Canada and is today incorporated as the Native American
Church of the United States. Men of letters learned of peyote after the middle of the nineteenth century. Its properties were exploded by cultured Europeans, such as Havelock Ellis and Alexandre Rouhier, who discovered for themselves the marvelous visions that the drug produced. The German pharmacologist A. Heffter finally isolated an active chemical from the plant, which was called mescaline.In the meantime, confusion reigned among historians regarding the descriptions of the other Aztec drugs. In 1923, Dr. Blas Pablo Reko discovered that the sacred mushroom, Teonanacatl, was still employed by Indians deep in the mountains of Oaxaca. Subsequent investigators established the identity of the ololiuqui, or the seeds of a narcotic bindweed, employed by the Mazatec tribe.
In 1943, a Swiss chemist, Albert Hoffman, accidentally absorbed through his fingers a minute quantity of a powerful synthetic substance, which caused him to behold the same sort of visions produced by the ancient American drugs. It received the designation LSD -25 (for d-Lysergic acid diethylamide, the twenty-fifth of a series of chemicals being investigated). Since that time, a number of other synthetic drugs, capable of producing hallucinations, have been created, including DMT (diethyl tryptamine), T-9 (diethyl tryptamine), and adrenolutin, which
closely resembles the metabolic hormones of the human body. In 1959, the sacred mushroom
yielded its secret in the form of the drug psilocybin, a relative of the tryptamines mentioned
above, and its psy- chogenic ally active precursor psilocin. Most recently (1960), the ololiuqui
has been found to contain an isomeric form of lysergic acid, isolysergic acid amide, which
possesses the same properties as LSD.
Ever since mescaline became available, the close resemblance between its effects and the symptoms
of schizophrenia has been noted. In a classic study of the “mescaline psychosis,” Tayleur
Stockings (1940) observed that both “paranoia” and “catatonia” can be produced by
administration of the drug. Psychiatrists and pharmacological researchers have accordingly
suggested that mescaline, LSD, and related chemicals might provide a clue to the nature of
insanity. Many studies have been made, and continue to be made, in hopes that an ultimate cure for mental illness might be found.
But, other studies of the human mind await the application of hallucino- genic tools, studies that
might prove even stranger and more illuminating than those of the pharmacological laboratory.
Deep within each of us, the past slumbers on. All of the patterns of our understanding lie buried
in the unconscious memory, shaping our desires, our inspirations, and our dreams. It is these
ancient memories, particularly those at the deepest level of the organism, that perpetually
appear as haunting sug- gestions of a prior existence, or a higher reality, which prefigures our
picture of human life. This vast residue of mental experience is what the Greeks rec- ognized as
the daimon, or the sense of destiny that drives our conscious ener- gies toward their necessary
fulfillment. As an active repository of intuitive knowledge, it integrates and guides our
understanding of reality; whatever we know, or feel, or hope to attain is rooted in its primal
soil.
It has seemed to me that the well-established properties of the hallucino- genic drugs might be
well employed to enable us to explore this far-off land, which is in effect our subconscious mind.
Were we to learn its secrets, we would better understand our own desires and the motives
that drive us through life. Still better, the secrets of human history would perhaps be dis-
covered as the eternal patterns of imagination that have shaped our spiritual existence. But,
perhaps most important of all, to penetrate the well of the past might restore to us that visionary
perception that we think we once possessed. Legend and myth are curiously persistent in their
suggestion that the human race formerly enjoyed the delights of paradise; actually, I believe that
this par- adise has been fashioned perennially by each of us from his own recollection of life’s
initial innocence, and therefore awaits recreation from the depths of primal memory. If this is true, the strange drugs that the Indians left to us might prove to be
the very Hermetic Secret sought after by the alchemists.
In the study that follows, I have attempted solely to analyze my own ex- periences with two of
these drugs, LSD and mescaline. I have not avoided treating them subjectively, since this aspect
of the experience especially reveals what is operative beneath the surface of the mind when
hallucinogenically stimulated. A cardinal principle has guided my observations: The human mind stands behind all phenomena, organizing, integrating, and interpreting; the nature of its
“abreaction” to experience reveals its inner functions, just as our tastes and prejudices reveal
our personalities. This principle is not proposed in an extreme Berkelean sense as a denial of
objective existence, but as recogni- tion of the essential role played by our total past in
experiencing “reality,” ac- cording to the image we bear within us. Nor does the private nature
of my experiments preclude a general application, since each of us is an expression of our race and culture; any study of literature or philosophy will show that the same motifs appear continuously in history, illustrating basic insights that we inherit from life: insights both universal and timeless because of the existen- tial problems faced by all. Quite obviously, the hallucinogenic experience is not stereotyped by a single type of personality; the details that follow are only suggestive of certain imaginative processes involved, rather than their neces- sary psychogenic form. Thus, one might comprehend in them a picture of human consciousness in general; for the deeper one penetrates the subcon- scious mind, the more impersonal it becomes and the closer one approaches the state that existed before conceptual egotism drove us into our separate worlds. There are, indeed, sufficient similarities between the experiences in- vestigated here and those recorded in both psychological journals and the world’s great literature to suggest an essential agreement between all subcon- scious memories. Accordingly, the present study attempts to discover the broader realities that lie behind psychogenic phenomena and to seek a pattern that would explain the longing of human beings for the Beyond, for the oth- erworldly substance of their intuition. Whether or not we are successful, it is hoped that fruitful directions for further investigation will be perceived, and the use of our new hallucinogenic tools will be extended to much broader fields than is presently the case.
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