On Psychedelic Frames and Peter Bebergal

I've just finished Peter Bebergal's 2011 memoir, Too Much To Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood and found it gripping because much of it seemed to speak directly to my own boyhood. Bebergal grew up in a suburb of Boston around the same time I was "growing up" (for some reason that term suddenly felt alien to me, ergo the quotation marks) in the sprawling 'burbs of Los Angeles.

A huge difference between Bebergal and me: here, in Bebergal, is once again a subspecies of character structure that I'm fascinated in and love to read about, but which seems alien to me: Bebergal is a "god intoxicated" person. All his forays into dropout punk culture (hilariously, he gets into 1960s-70s "psychedelic rock" after his punk phase), hanging out with street people and smoking pot, doing LSD (a couple of bad trips are rendered very well here), alcohol, cocaine, etc. Trying to "know" god or the Ultimate Transcendent Whatsit and chasing it with drugs and a fierce autodidacticism. Bebergal grew up in what looks like a non-observant rationalist Jewish home; I grew up in a non-theist, broken home. From the most rudimentary ideas in world religion, I had to teach myself what all the fuss was about. It wasn't discussed and my parents didn't bring my brothers and I up in any faith and we never went to church. I asked my father about this many years later and he said that he and mom had a talk about this: they'd seen far too much damage done to their friends and families in the name of religion than anything that might be considered uplifting. I was most decidedly not god-intoxicated, but I did want the gnosis, although it would be many years before I ever encountered the term.

                                  Peter Bebergal (photo: Andrea Shea/WBUR)

Throughout, Bebergal wants that gnosis, he wants direct experience of life-shattering knowledge of The Transcendent. I think I was looking for whatever blew my mind and made me think. I confess I seem to have not changed much since then, which may explain the quotation marks used above under "growing up."

Eventually, Bebergal crashes hard, gets into AA, and realizes he's an addict. He's been "clean" for 20+ years now, has a family, works at M.I.T., and also wrote a wonderful book on the underrated influence of occult ideas on the history of rock and roll, briefly reviewed by my colleague Tom Jackson.

Here's a short passage that gives us the tone of yearning in Bebergal's late adolescence:

Staying connected to even an idea of some transcendent reality without devolving into the psychedelic dreamspace was a challenge, and one I was not convinced I had to let go of. How to make it work without being lured back to the drugs themselves? Could I have a psychedelic experience - or even a shadow one - sober from my head to my toes, in my brain and in my blood?
-pp.160-161

In the final quarter of the book, Bebergal shifts his tone. He's straight but still wanting to unite with the transcendent. His tone turns scholarly, he goes to Divinity School, he reads like mad about magic, mysticism and illumination. After a marvelous observance about Hermes in his own life, he writes, "The difference between ecstasy and illumination is the same as that difference between magic and mysticism. Magic is often about instant results. Mysticism, while often characterized by dramatic singular moments, is about the long haul. In the same way I mistook magic for mysticism, I mistook ecstasy for illumination." (pp.191-192)

Problem With The Psychedelic Frame
Bebergal begins following the work of Strassman with DMT and other (resurgent) experiments done by academics and doctors with psychedelics and healing. After most of the book's peripatetic and picaresque episodes of a bright young god-seeking loveable fuckup, we see Bebergal, sober, as the thoughtful intellectual who knows his stuff. I did not know that, in 2000, two guys named Pickard and Apperson got busted for making probably 70% of the LSD used at raves in Unistat. Pickard got two concurrent life sentences. Bebergal discusses Rick Doblin, Dr. Strassman, Leary, William James, Aldous Huxley. He addresses why psychedelic researchers started using the term "entheogen" over "psychedelic" (too much cultural baggage) and "hallucinogen" (too misleading).

Then, the famous Johns Hopkins double-blind, active-placebo-controlled psilocybin experiments done under Dr. Roland Griffiths. (The active placebo here was Ritalin.) In effect, this was a chance to confirm the Harvard "Good Friday"experiment done at Marsh Chapel by Walter Pahnke under the auspices of Timothy Leary, in which divinity school students who did receive the psychedelic said many years later it was one of, if not the most important experiences in their lives. The same thing happened under Griffiths and Robert Jesse. One of those who received the psilocybin was a Psychologist and self-described "Zen Catholic" named John Hayes, who had never taken a psychedelic drug but who said he had had mystical experiences:

"It was like, 'Alright, what's the big deal?' Then, ba-boom!" he says. "There was a sense of moving in some sort of astral space with stars whizzing by me. It was like getting the big picture."

Hayes tried to describe his psilocybin trip, using "elusive" and "dream" and like he'd experienced something from another space-time dimension. Then, he fell back on his religious vocabulary. Here's where it got really interesting to me, and the book is worth reading if only for this final stretch: the problem of psychedelic experience and inadequate language. Culture - especially religious culture and its terminology - will lead to a sort of Heisenbergian Uncertainty Principle: there is no unmediated mystical or psychedelic experience. Our culture flows through us. Metaphors and framing are in the very air we breathe. And we don't know - can't know?, objectively? - if your experience is the same as mine when we walk through the forest on that Perfect Day, or ingest 2 1/2 grams of psilocybe cubensis. It's in the realm of qualia, no?

At Johns Hopkins the researchers took great care to prevent "expectancy": when someone doesn't know a thing about psychedelics, they tried to keep others who did know from using language or metaphors that might subconsciously alter the expectations of a subject who might not get the placebo. But Bebergal says there's nothing to do about the "deep pop-cultural language or preconceptions that most of us share. It is easy to imagine someone signing up to be a participant in the research and then immediately going home and googling all the associated terms, reading about Marsh Chapel and the studies of the past, even watching movies on YouTube of Timothy Leary describing his psychedelic breakthroughs." (p.179)

The language used in the questionnaires furthered this contamination of expectancy. Internal unity, God, transcendence of time and space, ineffability, awe, noetic qualities: from which area of world culture do these terms seem to emanate? Berkeley professor of East Asian languages and culture Robert Sharf had a problem with the language in the experiment, saying religious experiences can't be reduced to a "supposedly value-neutral, empirical, scientific kind of domain." Bebergal reminds us the late great scholar of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem, said there was no such thing as a generic mystical experience, there is only Hindu mysticism, Jewish mysticism and Christian mysticism. (Bebergal studied the Sufis too, so probably would have wanted to argue with Scholem there was an Islamic mysticism, or so I'd guess he would've.)

It seems that Dennis McKenna - whose framing about psychedelic experiences seems quite different from his more famous brother Terence - had the most articulate arguments for Bebergal about why psychedelics have too much religious language baggage around them. Foremost these substances are "tools to explain consciousness" and that when the experience is described in spiritual terms this is merely an interpretation. (My emphasis...to draw us back to Bebergal's most active god, Hermes, who gave us Hermeneutics.) Dennis McKenna also thinks we give too much power to shamanic experts and other guides, because "Ultimately, the experience is yours." McKenna says that for people without a grounding in a spiritual tradition (this was me in my late adolescence), psychedelics can be used to solve problems, gain insight into natural phenomena, "or simply explore what human consciousness is capable of." It was with that last one that I received the message, and have since hung up. (For now.) McKenna says the experience can be so mindblowing that people want to share it through language and they create a context and try to get others to buy into that context.

Do we have a non-religious vocabulary to describe non-church-related ineffable experience? Is it in poetry? Blake? Ginsberg? Wordsworth? Rumi? Pound?

Talk About Cultural Baggage!
This week, meditating and reading, I happened upon a news story: one of our best writers on the War On Certain People Who Use The Wrong Drugs, Dan Baum, had interviewed John Ehrlichman, one of Nixon's right-hand men. Ehrlichman told Baum in an interview that the advent of the all-out War on Drugs (1971) began as a way to marginalize and imprison Nixon's enemies: hippies and blacks. ("Oh you're such a conspiracy monger, OG!") This way, every night on the TV news, Nixon's "silent majority" would see what scum all those weirded-out blacks and hippies were, with their pot and their LSD, etc. It worked. Enough of our fellow citizens bought it. It seems to me profoundly criminal that this was done. Also, I bet few reading this blog think this is all that "newsworthy" because of course this was how it was done. And furthermore, we've been trying to call attention to it for 40 years. Talk about cultural baggage and imagery that infects minds about certain drugs Control doesn't want used in the population...

Too Much To Dream was put out by one of my favorite publishing houses, Soft Skull Press, and I have not done the book justice. Bebergal has some terrific insights on music and psychedelic phenomenology, among other things. Read it!