The far off land

We are told that, in those moments immediately preceding death, the world of our earliest infancy frequently opens up to us. We are also assured that senile reason passes readily into a state of second childhood, wherein the light of rationality is obscured by the resurrected past, experienced as fully as if the intervening years had rolled away. Normal adults occasionally dream of long-forgotten events, which have otherwise passed into oblivion. These facts, together with Freud’s rediscovery of the unconscious mind, suggest that within each of us the past slumbers on, occasionally reasserting itself in the fragments of a sudden recollection, the perception of some haunting perfume, or the unexplained appearance of an ancient face in our dreams. Most striking, however, is the fact that it is this earliest layer of the human memory that persists to the moment of death, even after the adult memory and its powers of reason are gone. Knowledge recently gained disappears, while that mysterious world of the long forgotten is reawakened, showing that our earliest experiences indeed have vitality that rational intelligence does not possess. The strange discovery in recent years of certain drugs that can open up this buried world at will seems to me to be worthy of our best romances, wherein men have ever dreamed of piercing the veil of memory in search of the ultimate secrets of Being. I can scarcely describe the excitement that possessed me when I first held in my hand a tiny vial of whitish powder, extracted from the sacred cactus, Eric Hendrickson 2 which the ancestors of the Aztecs worshipped millennia ago, when men believed in the Mysteries of Existence, now laid open to the dead knife of scientific analysis. Before me, in a heap of delicate needles, lay the divine power, which the ancient Indians identified with life itself, a supernatural and invisible force pervading the visible world, referred to by anthropologists as mana. Modern Indians says that God has sent His Holy Spirit in the form of the peyote plant, and he who eats thereof may take into himself this Power; he will see visions, obtain hidden knowledge, and be led to the Truth that evades his grasp. Even stranger claims have been made for the sacred mushroom, Teonanacatl, which can extend man’s vision to the future, to the past, or to remote occurrences of the present. Today, a third such chemical has emerged from the synthetic laboratory derived artificially from the ergot fungus. All three substances have one thing in common: the power to penetrate that deepest layer of the human mind, that mysterious realm that lies beyond the veil of ordinary perception. The green tea with which Le Fanu’s Rev. Jennings obtained glimpses of the celestial arcana, the tincture that dissolved for Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll the “primitive duality of man,” or the prophetic vapors that issued from the earth beneath the oracular tripod at Delphi could scarcely have been more marvelous than these drugs we now possess, which are in fact mysterious keys to the inner soul of Man. The existence of man’s subconscious has been known for countless ages. Oriental psychology recognized it long before Dr. Freud redirected our attention to it. It has also been pointed out by the school of Jung that this subconscious operates through recurrent patterns of memory that are imposed upon our waking knowledge. Plato’s “ideas,” Swedenborg’s “correspondences” (derived in turn from the medieval correspondentia), or Kant’s “categories of reason” are but older varieties of this idea that human life is a reflection of some prior kind of knowledge, a knowledge that antedates the world of rational experience. Poets have longingly searched for this otherworld; whole races have created myths symbolizing their shadowy recollections of it. Men throughout history have employed in their sacred mysteries such drugs and intoxicants as they possessed, with the hope that they might regain a fleeting glimpse of the beyond. So universal is the human longing for the “otherworldly” that it constitutes an archetypal experience in itself. Whether or not it reflects the memory of the race, as Jung has suggested, or is merely the result of our cultural experience is immaterial. The fact alone The Far-Off Land 3 explains how, in passing from life, the dying man finds the well of his childhood opened up once more . . . how, at death, he attains the Unknown by way of his earliest existence, an existence that is shown to be present during every moment of life; for if this were not the case, its persistence unto the very end would be impossible.