Promiscuous Neurotheologist, vol. 6 or 7-ish: Alan Watts

My brother has a Theology degree and seems so much more sophisticated about Christiantity than I am that I will always defer to his statements on any subject within that realm.

There was a time when we disagreed so strikingly about this version of the monotheisms that I'd end up being a wise-ass jerk and he'd get sick of even trying to talk to me. Things have gotten wildly better since then, thank-Goddess.

His interpretation of Christianity has evolved. I think in the Darwinian sense of "evolve": not toward some Ultimate Form, but simply: cybernetic feedback from society/continuous thinking about his faith/exposure to evermore innovative and nuanced thinkers/and an active neuroplasticity, all of this from within an ecological niche of politics, economics, and other factors. He has an open mind, and it's capacious.

As I perceive it, his faith (as some of you may know, my only faith is in some sort of change) seems avant-Left, and I never see or even hear Christians in electronic corporate media who sound like him: not on radio, or TV, or even in film. Suffice: even if you're an atheist, you might not be aware of the very many varieties of interpretations of Christianity out there, now. His - if indeed he still even categorizes himself as "Christian" - is marked by compassion for the poor, the sick, and anyone downtrodden. He renders unto Caesar what's Caesar's, and it's a nuisance. He's accepting of gays, muslims...anyone that might get picked on in today's Unistat. He's in this world and is a sensualist, with the most sophisticated beer palate I've ever known, and an inscrutably detailed sense of guitar-sound textures. There's a pained sense of alienation from previous allies and alliances in Christian faith, and, because he doesn't evangelize at all, I must infer many of his intellectual and emotional stances toward aspects of the Transcendent, much like an astrophysicist infers there must be moons around a recently detected exoplanet: secondary effects. People who constantly talk about their religion? We've all known one or a few. Those who we know have very deep, nuanced and extensive knowledge of a certain religion but hardly ever talk about it? These people will interest us, no?

                                       Alan Watts: artwork by Randal Roberts

So, his birthday comes along and I didn't know what to get him, so I thought of my favorite theology book, The Wisdom of Insecurity, by Alan Watts, which came out in 1951. I hope to learn something from my brother's comments, if he offers them. (He emailed me after receiving the book in the mail, "I hardly know anything about Buddhism. Cool!")

I read Watts's book every few years and it always seems "new" to me, although the part that seems "old" is the basic message: sciences are about knowledge of the past - observations and experiments - and its ability to predict the future; but "now" - this very moment - is religious, and we aren't in the now if we're thinking about being in the now. The core of true religion is experience, not citing chapter and verse. We know we've recently been in the moment, but now that we're thinking about that, we're probably not in It. The key is to just be in the moment. Watts never totally lets on, but this is stealth-zen. I love the idea of always being in the moment, but find it very difficult to accomplish.

(I find the idea of laughing at the idea that you're not in the moment precisely because you're thinking about "being in the moment" hilarious, and so: being-in-the-moment.)

And if you "try" that's not going to work. Trying seems one of the most counterproductive things to do if you want to be in my moment: 'tis far better to just go ahead and do or be.

As readers of the OG know: I have pronounced neurotic tendencies. Which have to do with worry (living in the future) and some regret (living in the past).

Still: I'm sure this book has somehow allowed me to have a higher quantity of "moments." Or at least it seems so. The book does seem to function reliably - por moi - as a short-term anti-anxiety Pill. The endgame (<---Ha!) does seem to set the bar fairly high, though. Which is cool...

It occurs to me that in our non-ordinary "realities" we seem to be more conducive to being-in-the-moment, possibly because our primary realities seem a tad too "well-known"?

It's for me an uncanny book: as I read it, I think, "Alan Watts is right about all this...how did he do it? How does he make it all sound so logically coherent?" (An olde classic: Wordworth's "The World Is Too Much With Us")

I also find myself thinking "This is one of the best Sophists ever," and I actually enjoy most of the Sophists we encounter in Plato. (Forget Thrasymachus, who seems to me the barking Id of every Pentagon Death Cult thinker we've ever had. Add to this "might makes right" dude: Callicles and Hippias. What a trio of a-holes.)

I know when we read Plato we're always supposed to be on Socrates's side, and I love the old pederast as much as the next Philosophy student, but some of his interlocutors are even more interesting. Gorgias the rhetorician must have seemed like a whigged-out weirdo thinker in his time, but he probably ends up as an underrated progenitor of trippy Neoplatonism. A case has been made that Gorgias is proto-Derrida.

Protagoras was the Clarence Darrow of his day: he said there's gotta be at least two versions of everything, and was really good at making the weaker account sound better than the stronger; he also said: you can have the gods, but I say they're unknowable and furthermore: humans are the measure of all things. Antiphon reminds me of a billionaire libertarian who wants unlimited pleasure, life, comfort...and pesky laws and other people's meddling just get in his way. Antiphon thought Protagoras was a dick. I don't like this Antiphon guy very much, but he's not boring and I feel like I know him: Antiphon Lives!

Socrates quite often pales (according to my own evaluations) when engaged in dialectic with these rock-star talkers and thinkers in Athens. Anyway...

Back to Alan Watts's The Wisdom of Insecurity: it's also Beatnik philosophy nonpareil. Watts was doing what Aldous Huxley was doing for open-minded Protestant and quasi-lapsed Catholic thinkers in the West at the time: arguing point after metaphysical point and then citing passages from the Bible juxtaposed with quotes from Buddhism, Taoism, and the Vedas and showing how much they had in common. That Old-Time Human Ecumenism. I go for that, as a person who really never went to church. I strongly suspect even the most rabid atheists out there desire transcendent experience. (Hell: I know they do.)

Watts has also always seemed fantastically entertaining to me: playful Trickster-Guru, erudite, absurd, wonderfully frank, heretical. With marvelous British elocution. This might be the key to a good theologian in the 21st century ("good" according to my own hierarchy of values): be a philosophical entertainer. (Aye: Philosophers could stand to be more "entertaining." Or, failing that, at least drop most of the post-1945 jargon. It's decadent!) Here's a decent line I just found in Watts's essay, "Psychotherapy and Eastern Religion":

Now, I'm a philosopher, and as a philosopher I am grateful to some of the great pioneers in psychotherapy like Freud, Jung and Adler for pointing out to us philosophers the unconscious emotional forces which underlie our opinions. In a way, I'm also a theologian, but not a partisan theologian. I don't belong to any particular religion because I don't consider that to be intellectually respectable.

20 years ago, when I read that, I realized, "Okay, I previously discounted all theologians as pernicious dinosaurs, but I must consider any that say such a thing as this!"

Later, when I stumbled onto my favorite writer, Robert Anton Wilson, I found that RAW's wife Arlen had turned him onto Watts. In turn, Watts became a sort of mentor to Wilson, telling him there were some very interesting Harvard professors investigating psychedelic drugs in the context of religious experience. (RAW and Leary became friends and intellectual collaborators from the mid-1960s to Leary's death in 1996.) At another meeting, Watts told RAW he'd just read a fantastic book by Israel Regardie, about Aleister Crowley. RAW went on to become one of the world's most erudite explainers of Crowley, and indeed an Adept himself. At another time, Watts said that the biggest error in history books is the idea that the Roman Empire "fell." It never ended. This became a riff repeated in RAW's and Philip K. Dick's books. Watts turned RAW on to zen, and even though Watts quit smoking cannabis by 1959, the notion of zen and being awake in-the-moment has always struck many of us lovers of Mary Jane Warner as an easy way in to a simulation of zen...for reasons I'll go into in some further blogspew...

Watts was alcoholic and a sensualist. He was an ordained Anglican priest, taught at Harvard, was an editor, broadcaster, a dean, a consultant at psychiatric hospitals, and one of the West's great exponents of Comparative Religion. He wrote one of the first books on psychedelics and religion, The Joyous Cosmology. By late 1959/early 1960s he'd found his calling as self-described "philosopher-entertainer," a religious virtuoso who was "in show biz" and was a "genuine fake." When RAW met him, Watts had left his wife Dorothy and their four kids, with a fifth on the way. He was not perfect.

I remember a talk Watts gave on Pacifica Radio in which he said the numbers for outcomes in traditional psychotherapy were: 1/3 get get better, 1/3 get worse, and 1/3 stay the same. That floored me. He foresaw a "Zerowork" society as far back as the 1950s. He was very well-read in the sciences, and in one of the few quotations from The Wisdom of Insecurity we get, in a footnote, a quote from the uber-cyberneticist Norbert Wiener, who seemed to be aware that our rationality and machines might kill us...in a book from 1951.

He was friends with Huxley and an influence on Leary. All three of those men and Wilson influenced me to learn to use my own brain, to think for myself, to acknowledge that I might be one of those weirdo-thinkers who may have to do it outside of The Academy. Against "rugged" American egotist individualism, we as a culture need as complement: transpersonal intersubjectivity and a non-intellectual public meeting of limbic minds.

Watts's most famous abode was probably his houseboat at Sausalito just north of San Francisco. It was on his boat that a much-written-about meeting ("Houseboat Summit"of 1967) of 1960s guru-minds was held. The problem? Do we forget about politics - because it's hopeless - and "drop out" and continue to "turn on" to our own thing? Or do we engage in politics, trying to bring what we've learned from esoterica and psychedelia to the table? Or something in-between? On the boat that day: Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Leary. In this same year, Watts began championing Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan. The Summer of Love was happening (or is it capital aitch Happening?) a few minutes down the way, in the Haight-Ashbury district.

In his Introduction to Dark Destiny: Proprietors of Fate, a book of short stories about the "world of darkness" which is an apt title to happen upon as I write this, nearing the Witching Hour on Halloween, RAW, in an eldritch mood, writes:

Emerson's Brahma, who says"I am the slayer and the slain," presumably enjoys the slaying even if He-She-It also suffers the pain of the victim. This view really implies a cosmos consisting only of a god playing with itself (Transcendental Masturbation) or playing hide-and-seek with itself (the view of Alan Watts and all Gnostic conspiracy buffs in the Phil Dick tradition). 

When I first read this passage, I had never thought Watts a gnostic, but then realized: that's probably right. The idea that Rome never fell seems one of the main riffs in modern gnosticism. Further: one easily gets the feeling, reading or listening to Watts, that he had "sight of Proteus rising from the sea." And besides: RAW knew Alan Watts.

                                                  कलाकार: बॉब कैम्पबेल

Bob Dylan Wins Nobel Prize For Lit

Well, that was a surprise. Those Erisian Swedes! In the quantum universe next door, my main pick, Thomas Pynchon, won. Finally! He has not appeared in public to say anything. Of course. There are rumors he'll send Jon Stewart to Stockholm in his stead. (When Pynchon won the National Book Award in 1973, he sent zany Professor Irwin Corey to accept on his behalf.) Pynchon's publisher has given a very short press conference, saying Pynch has already given the award money away, to be divided up among Black Lives Matter, the 9/11 First Responders who still need medical relief, Doctors Without Borders, and John Perry Barlow, who, the press release reads, is a "member of the loyal opposition who needs it."

Since it was announced, I've caught myself thinking more and more about Dylan and my associated mental relationships to him. My mom had Dylan's LP Nashville Skyline playing when I was a a pre-teen. I remember looking at the cover and reading his name as "Bob dye-LAN." I loved my mom's Beatles records more than the Dylan. Hell, I loved her Carly Simon record, No Secrets, more than the Dylan, but maybe it's because Carly's braless look was jacking up the baud rate on my boy-organism.

                               believe it or not, this is really Dylan and not Cate Blanchett
                                             

Speaking of the Beatles, Dylan in 1964 was shocked to meet the lads and find out they hadn't tried weed. He turned them on, and there's a wonderfully drawn-out piece on this historical moment in George Case's book Out of Our Heads: Rock 'n' Roll Before the Drugs Wore Off.

A passage from Harry Shapiro's Waiting For the Man: The Story of Drugs and Popular Music:

In 1964, Dylan refused a request from Ginsberg to lead a peace rally at Berkeley and earned the unbending enmity of singer Phil Ochs, who called him "LSD on stage." Dylan reported that Ochs was writing bullshit because politics were absurd and the world was unreal. Dylan took his personal drug-inspired research for freedom and escape through "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "Highway 61 Revisited," to the ego-dissolution of "Like A Rolling Stone" and Blonde On Blonde. Nevertheless, claims that all references to "railways" and "tracks" and capitalised H's on lyric sheets demonstrate that Dylan was a heroin addict or that "Blowin In The Wind" was secretly a song about the wonders of cocaine are probably best led in the more extreme realms of Dylanology.

In the early sixties, sharing the experiences of marijuana and LSD between creative spirits had a missionary zeal about it. Rock writer Al Aronowitz turned both Ginsberg and Dylan on to marijuana; Dylan in turn introduced dope-smoking to the Beatles. They met him on their first tour of America. Dylan was "anti-chemical" at the time, probably due to a surfeit of amphetamine, and suggested that the Beatles try something more natural. Dylan rolled the first joint and passed it to Lennon, who, too scared to try, passed it on to Ringo. The episode ended with everyone rolling round the floor in hysterics. (pp.116-117)

Sociologists who made a study of the "Woodstock Generation" found that, of the 1000 respondents, 43% believed most of the music of the sixties could only be understood by someone who had undergone the marijuana and psychedelic drug experience. This study was done in 1977-78, and the majority said their first pot experience was in a college dorm, with either Dylan or Led Zeppelin playing in the background. (Let us take: people who went to Woodstock who were age 20-25: they were born between 1944 and 1949: the first Boomers.)

Which brings me to Dylan's 1965 Newport Folk Festival "outrage."

Dylan appeared there playing an electric guitar, and much of the audience was famously outraged. It's difficult to gauge, in reading multiple sources, the extent of the disapproval, but when I learned about this historical moment, I was deep into playing Black Sabbath, Rush, and Deep Purple guitar solos on my electric guitar. I had always noted any overt response between what a person thought about the acoustic guitar versus the electric. I now think Steve Waksman's book Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience is the finest explication of the social construction of acoustic vs. electric. I also think the fascinating aspect of timbre and its cultural and existential-phenomenal impact is worth delving into, if it's your kinda thing. Dylan's move to electric illuminated the extent of culture's hidden ideologies surrounding electric vs. acoustic, and maybe he deserves a Nobel for just this....

Oh, but the Nobel was for Dylan as literature. Right. I got off-topic. Oh, well...

I consider "Subterranean Homesick Blues" to be proto-Jewish rap from the sixties.

One of my favorite bloggers, Tom Jackson, wrote a bit on Dylan's Nobel HERE.

"Acid isn't for the groovy people. Acid is for the president and people like that. The groovy people don't need to take acid." - Dylan in 1967, found on p.24 of R.U. Sirius's Everybody Must Get Stoned: Rock Stars on Drugs

A funny conversation about Dylan's win.

I like this passage from a June 1984 Rolling Stone interview. Kurt Loder had asked Dylan a question about starting out on guitar and Dylan gives the rundown from his first Sears Silvertone guitar to hearing Woody Guthrie. "And when I heard Woody Guthrie, that was it, it was all over."

Loder: What struck you about him?

Dylan: Well, I heard them old records, where he sings with Cisco Houston and Sonny [Terry] and Brownie [McGhee] and stuff like that, and then his own songs. And he really struck me as an independent character. But no one ever talked about him. So I went through all his records I could find and picked all that up by any means I could. And when I arrived in New York, I was mostly singin' his songs and folk songs. At that time I was runnin' into people who were playing the same kind of thing, but I was combining elements of Southern mountain music with bluegrass stuff, English ballad-stuff. I could hear a song once and know it. (found pp.424-425 of 20 Years of Rolling Stone: What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been)

Dylan led me back to Woody Guthrie. Point: Dylan.

Paul Krassner writes about a moment when Dylan was taking Hebrew lessons:

"When I asked why he was taking Hebrew lessons he said, 'I can't speak it.' Now I pointed an imaginary microphone at him and asked, 'So how do you feel about the six millions Jews who were killed in Nazi Germany?' His answer: 'I resented it.'" - Confessions of a Raving Unconfined Nut, first ed, p.182

Mercurial Dylan Nobel Prize winner. Folk hero, beatnik, hippie, iconoclast, non-joiner, born-again Xtian, Jew, proto-rapper, proto-punk, oracle for a generation, influence on my god Hendrix, altered history by getting the Beatles stoned, enigmatic forever. I love Pynchon, but I'm okay with Dylan winning it.

                               s'il vous plaît voir M. Bob Campbell à propos de plus psychédélisme
graphique

The Drug Report: Life Extension, LSD, Oddities, Sundries

I didn't do a drug report last month, so you might say I've been "clean" for at least a month. Add to that: I haven't smoked any pot for at least 20 minutes, as of this writing. Sooo: two and a half cheers for moi?

On with it...

Possible Life Extension Drug: Metformin
If you're the sorta dreamer I am, you long for the day when you swallow one or what the hell: a handful of pills and they:

1. Stop your telomeres from fraying while continuing to do what they did when you were 15
2. Wipe out any and all cancers forming while not throwing your hardy-yet-delicate immunological systems out of orbit
3. Erase all plaques that gum up your aorta and arteries and that crap that leads to Alzheimer's
4. Level the playing fields of life by making you really pretty and attractive to possible sex partners
5. Laughs: life will be full of 'em with this/these new drugs

Those of you trained in cryptanalysis and steganography might notice the first letters of my five here spell out SWELL. Yea, it would be real swell if we had drugs that did this stuff, but no matter how optimistic/hedonistic/giddy or just plain stoned we are, let's get real.

As I handicap a bevy of life extension drugs over the past three years, a diabetes drug called Metformin looks fairly promising. And I confess the older I get and the more I accumulate readings of articles about the Possible Miracle Drug For Everything, the less sanguine I've become. But Metformin has about 60 years of safety. For Type 2 diabetics it suppresses the liver's glucose production and increases sensitivity to insulin. It's increased the lifespan in worms and mice. Researchers think there's a physiological basis in this diabetes drug that delays the aging that gives rise to diseases. Ones even worse than diabetes, like dementia, cancer and heart disease.

Here's the crux: doctors and researchers need to convince regulators and research funding agencies to give 'em the money to test this. What are they gonna test? How long will it take? Will I be dead by the time it hits the market? Probably not: under the TAME (Targeting Aging With Metformin) clinical trial they'll take over 3000 70-80 year old folks who have one or two of these lovely maladies: cancer, heart disease, or cognitive impairment, give them Metformin, then see if it forestalls these septuagenarians and octogenarians from getting those other brutal disease they don't already have.

It'll take five to seven years and cost $50 million.

I know, I know: this is not what you wanted to read about. But you tell me what's out there that's more robust and promises more in the way of longevity.

The horrible truth is, if you have dementia but don't already have cancer or heart disease, you're gonna get one or both of those others before you kick off for the Big Dirt Nap. Talk about a reality sandwich!

Researchers caution: this is not an "immortality" drug! (As if they needed to tell us, after what you've just read.) The big deal here seems to be: Metformin is a well-accepted drug for Type 2 diabetes. But: the TAME study, if it pans out, will establish Metformin as a drug that delays aging. And aging is statistically linked with nasty-ass degenerative diseases, which have already been named in this article, no need to give them more press here. The Unistat FDA says they are open to the study. Researchers want merely to "extend a person's healthy years by slowing down processes that underlie common diseases of aging."

So, in closing I must confess what I know about myself. I read this stuff and one part of my brain - the part that I associate with non-magical thinking and statistics, knowledge of inherent human biases, and appreciation of ever-changing information about the complexity of systems - this part thinks "this seems pretty realistic and at least it's something." But I also know I will wake up tomorrow, and sometime after lunch, catch myself dreaming of the True Wonder Pills, the ones that will do the SWELL stuff. Am I the only one?

Instead of Exercise, Take a Pill? (Just: Not Yet)
I confess I love exercise, sweating, stretching, getting all breathless, even if it has nothing to do with sex. I do yoga and cycle, love hiking, but Cross-Fit seems vaguely fascistic to me, but I digress...

So, a welter of exercise physiologists have determined that, when we're exercising - not doggin' it, but really working up a sweat and approaching oxygen debt - we experience over 1000 molecular changes in our skeletal muscles. And who knew? What's going on at that level rarely crosses my mind as I approach a 1500 foot uphill climb on my bike. My thinking's more along the lines of, "If my heart explodes and they find me dead and my bike in the middle of the road here, after a cement truck and school bus run my body over, it's good I brought my ID with me so they can notify next-of-kin, but at least I can say I wore a helmet if I wasn't already dead" or "this ascent looks like a mutha; just think of the endorphin buzz I'll cop about 40 minutes after I summit." Stuff like that.

But: if we know the 1000 molecular changes that happen, maybe we can just mimic those in a pill! It's all just biochemistry, isn't it? Hey yea: they're working on it. For reals! (Or they're fucking with science writers and the public, hoping for more funding to do far less romantic research, but I don't want to be a bummer, especially after that take on Metformin.)

There are a lot of people who can't exercise, so this would really help them. It would be a godsend for the obese, for people with diabetes, heart disease, etc. One article I read on this research said it would be really great for people who already exercise. That sounded gluttonous to me.

The sobering news here: it's gonna be at least ten years, as one researcher said, "before a pill could conceivably be available." Let's hope the Metformin we'll be able to take will get us there at a young enough state that...oh hell: I need a drink.


Maurice Mikkers: Microscopy and Drugs = Art
If you have the time, check out the gorgeous colors and lines in drugs. This link begins with what Mikkers calls "party drugs" but I really only think of GHB and MDMA/Ecstasy and maybe amphetamine as drugs to "party" with. DMT, 2C-B, and LSD should be used in the proper set and setting, which often is NOT a "party" in the sense most of us think of parties. But aside from that, who knew these drugs were so beautiful, under the microscope, enlarged 40x-400x?

The MDMA/Ecstasy was breathtaking to me. Of course Ecstasy would do that.

Check out Mikkers's website for tonnes of astonishing photography, especially if you need a contact high.

Also, nota bene: it's officially been declared, by the International Moral Credit League ("Oh yea, the IMCL? Great buncha people...") that if you just "take a languid gander" at an "exhibit" - that's the way I see how Mikkers has laid out his wares online here - then you get "credit" for not going to the actual brick and marble Museum this month. I mean, what it'll cost you here? 12 minutes? Think about it. This offer only good through April of 2016; after that you must feel vaguely guilty again on May 1st until you go to the museum or talk or poetry reading. Just floatin' that out there. Hey, facts are facts.

                                            Robin Cahart-Harris, PhD

Recent LSD Research
Just in time for April 19th/AKA "Bicycle Day" and I'm no doubt writing yet another Epistle to the Converts, but what the hell, I just have to mention it. The Beckley Institute crowd-funded a study on LSD and got some stellar drug researchers from Imperial College in London to conduct it. The eminent Dr. David Nutt was the study's lead author, and Robin Cahart-Harris led the study. These are not lightweights. What did they find?

After giving 20 healthy volunteers injections of 75 micrograms of LSD (and others got a lousy placebo, but it was FOR SCIENCE!), the trippers had their brains imaged three ways: with fMRI, something called "arterial spin labelling" (don't ask), and magnetoencephalography. The study said the LSD users tripped for "six hours."

Aside: every LSD trip I've done was at minimum 200 mikes, but always on blotter. And it always lasted at least 10 hours. This Imperial College London stuff Nutt got must have been really righteous! Moving on...

So: there are numerous reports on this study, but the finding that most intrigued me: neural networks in the adult brain normally "talk" to closely-connected networks nearby. It's about specialized function. To rehash basic developmental neuroscience, we have way more neurons as babies, but they get pruned away with experience in the world, which we can call "learning." The stuff that's not pruned gets reinforced and the connections get stronger. We develop neural pathways that "know" how to do millions of things. Neurons are use-it or lose it: what's not recruited in learning/experience in the world gets flushed, literally. Eventually, we develop a sense of our "self" and some sort of "ego," hopefully a relatively healthy one.

What this study did was show how LSD gets the brain to "talk" and connect to other areas it usually doesn't, and therefore it was likened to a return to a "childhood" sense of wonder and imagination. It also reduced the "normal" connectivity we usually experience. What it taketh away it more than giveth backeth in spadeths.

In the past 30 years, neuroscience has continually found more fascinating aspects of how "plastic" the brain can be, even in adults, in the right circumstances. This is termed "neuroplasticity" and is the main reason why even stodgy old farts can still learn a thing or two.

As I read the articles about this study, certain lines jumped out. LSD and presumably other psychedelics "might help some users return to a childlike sense of wonder and imagination." (Most of these quotes are from Cahart-Harris or David Nutt.) When I read this, I think my first reaction was, "I wonder how many church-goers privately think, "This ain't working for me, but it's what's expected...I need to show up at least..." Well, what you REALLY want is a return to a childlike sense of awe and wonder, where parts of your brain get to know other parts for the first time, then you'll know what true religion is. But here of course I'm biased.

In a repetition of research with psilocybin over the past five years (or more), it was observed that the users experienced "improvements in well-being" after the effects of the drug wore off. Psilocybin research showed that one trip significantly changed people towards more openness for the rest of their lives. I know it's an olde riff, but if we could only get this stuff in the punchbowl at the Republican National Convention, amirite?

Cahart-Harris: "This experience is sometimes framed in a religious or spiritual way, and seems to be associated with improvements in well-being after the drug's effects have subsided." Yes, and it's once again suggested by people with actual PhDs from high-ranking universities - actual scientists, not assholes like Ted Cruz or some raging right wing pastor who thinks Jesus needs more nuclear missiles so we get to live out the book Revelation.

But Cahart-Harris also addresses a point I blogged on a few weeks ago: why must psychedelic experience use religious language? I recently read Dennis McKenna's book Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss and here's a PhD psychonaut of impeccable credentials who has managed to develop a vocabulary to talk about psychedelic experience that's drawn from cosmology, phenomenological philosophy, science fiction, and the arcana of alchemy.

We have our work cut out for us, friends.

Once again, hard-core researchers are suggesting these drugs might or can or should be used for depression, addiction and - presumably if Metformin and the exercise pill never get here in time - for end-of-life anxiety.

I will close with a quote from the estimable British drug researcher, Dave Nutt, talking about this latest LSD research:

This is to neuroscience what the Higgs boson was to particle physics.

And with that, I bid you all a fondue.

17 Disparate Riffs on Science Fiction

Disparate in the book-drunk weed-sodden time-jog of my mind, at least...

My blogging colleague Tom Jackson has posted on the Prometheus Awards finalists, with nice summaries of all kinds of books that sound fascinating, none of which I've gotten around to reading yet. The last post the OG received comments about science fiction fans and conventions and how SF writers tend to be - some - more open to meeting their fans. Sooo...

1. I recently read about Hong Kong roboticist Ricky Ma making his first prototype robot that looks very very much like Unistatian bombshell actress Scarlett Johansson. He used 3-D printing and it cost about $50,000. He'll no doubt make "better" versions. Aside from what we think about his project (I wonder what "Scarjo" makes of it?), it reminded me of SF writer Ray Faraday Nelson's 1978 book Revolt of the Unemployables, which pointed out that his collaborator and friend Philip K. Dick was the first SF writer to realize the purpose of making robots look like people. Eventually we meatware beings will have an ontological problem distinguishing what it means to be human. And these robots are going to get better and better, obviously...and the aesthetic behind the assertion of "better" of course means: "more like us." In a book of interviews with Philip K. Dick, What If Our World Is Their Heaven? PKD asserts that the android that thinks it's human idea is his own unique contribution to SF, since 1953's "Imposter."

2. William Gibson said that "What interested me most in the sci-fi of The Sixties was the investigation of the politics of perception, some of which, I imagine, could now be seen in retrospect as having been approached through various and variously evolving ideas of the cyborg." - Distrust That Particular Flavor, p. 248 (Maybe worthsomewhiles: Do yourself a favor and nonchalantly drop "the politics of perception" into your next dinner-party conversation. Note any and all reactions. I've noticed the phrase has legs: watch it be interpreted in many different ways. "Is" perception "political"? My gawd, how can it not be? And yet this topic only seems to get discussed among weirdos like us. - OG)

3. Thomas Pynchon has influenced many SF writers, but had the idea, in his introductory piece to his old essays in Slow Learner that SF evades the issue of mortality. Or it had as of the writing of that Intro, c.1984. It's an interesting idea...and ideas are, it seems to me, what make SF cool. It's as if Pynchon went looking for a possible Achilles Heel of SF and came up with the riff on mortality. Is it true? I don't know. Pynchon for me belongs along with SF books in the Novels of Ideas.

4. In Dennis McKenna's memoir Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss he writes about how he and his famous brother Terence loved SF - especially Heinlein, Asimov, Blish, Sturgeon, and Arthur C. Clarke. Later: PKD. As I read Dennis's book I made notes on all the sources he cited that he and Terence filled their imaginations and knowledge banks with, because I knew Dennis's account of the Experiment at La Chorrera was coming up. At one point he reproduces his own field notes, written while he was in a monthlong quasi-para-schizophrenic break from "reality" due to constant heroic doses of psilocybin mushrooms and DMT and incessant pot smoking, add to that being with three other people, in the Amazon, missing sleep for days, and doing ceremonial magic on top of this. It's one of the great insane travelogue accounts. 41 years later Dennis says his alchemical science-y sounding "attempt" to "trigger an end to history, throw open the gates of a paradise out of time and invite humanity to walk in," was acting "on our obsessions to an appalling degree." (p.285) Of the science fiction books that possibly subconsciously framed the McKenna Brothers' experience, Dennis admits of a "mash-up" of Arthur C. Clarke and PKD. (p.286) I'll say! I'd say add heaps of Jung, alchemy, cosmology, their own rejected Catholic upbringing in a stultifying small town, and a high school music teacher who taught Dennis about sympathetic vibrations of strings. At minimum.

5. Writing about the time before La Chorrera (reading about or listening to Terence recount this epically gonzo drug experiment always gives me a major contact high), Dennis writes, "Science fiction is good for the mind. It keeps one open to possibilities and, more than any other fictional genre, helps one to anticipate and prepare for the future. In fact, science fiction creates the future, by articulating a vision of what we as a culture imagine for ourselves." (p.119, op.cit) He then goes on to list a handful of SF predictions that came true, some that didn't, and some science fiction-y things that did come true, although maybe never predicted in SF, coming to the conclusion that "reality" is stranger than fiction.

In John Higgs's recent history of the 20th century, Stranger Than We Can Imagine, he traces science fiction as a clue to individual, then collective longing for something fantastic. SF is an "early warning system" and points to collective minds in our future. How can this not be? (see op cit, pp. 129-143)

6. My favorite writer about drugs is Dale Pendell. In his Pharmako Gnosis he has an entire chapter on DMT, "The Topology of the Between: DMT," pp. 227-240. Along with Dr. Rick Strassman and the greatest 20th century alchemist, Sasha Shulgin, DMT is still probably most associated with the McKennas, and probably Terence more than Dennis, probably owing to Terence's legendary poetic gifts and mesmerizing idiolect. Pendell spends four pages comparing written accounts of various truly otherworldly DMT trips, and notes how science fiction and DMT trip reports seem quite similar. The "contact" with machine-like alien beings who want to teach the tripper something very important is a very common part of the DMT experience. Of DMT-inspired art, Pendell writes, "There are transparent bubbles and pods and extraterrestrial landscapes. Dendritic forms are common, as is x-ray vision. Crystals are also frequent. Much of the art is illustrative, has a commercial feel to it, and finds its way onto book and album covers. And, of course, movies - DMT can have a cartoon quality. Science fiction themes are common. Sometimes visionary artists are able to capture the movement and churning of DMT experience." Here's a choice quote from Terence McKenna, about DMT:

Under the influence of DMT, the world becomes an Arabian labyrinth, a palace, a more than possible Martian jewel, vast with motifs that flood the gaping mind with complex and wordless awe. Color and the sense of a reality-unlocking secret nearby pervade the experience. There is a sense of other times, and of one's own infancy, and of wonder, wonder and more wonder. It is an audience with an alien nuncio. In the midst of this experience, apparently at the end of human history, guarding gates that seem surely to open on the howling maelstrom of the unspeakable emptiness between the stars, is the Aeon. - from Food of the Gods (Pendell: p. 232; Food of the Gods p.258)

7. I was introduced to the idea of the history of cultural anthropology and "first contact" by a great Anthropology professor named Sam Sandt. Some of us had our imaginations captured by the idea that there really were "first contacts" between European and American "first world" people and people still living in rain forests or deserts or other marginalized areas of the Earth. And once you read about one, you want to read others. Professor Sandt told me there's a cross-over between Cultural Anthropology and ethnographies and science fiction, which often features human contact with peoples or other humanoids who seem Wholly Other. So I guess what I'm saying is you DMT smokers might enjoy reading Anthropology, and those Anthropology majors who still haven't tried DMT...read science fiction to prepare? What am I saying? I see from my diffuse notes on this topic that Harlan Ellison once placed Carlos Castaneda's books "among the preeminent in the genre," of SF. - Wake Up Down There!: The Excluded Middle Anthology, p.226

See also, maybe?:
First Contact: New Guinea's Highlanders Encounter the Outside World (thrilling)
Recreating First Contact: Expeditions, Anthropology and Popular Culture

8. In 1948 a writer sometimes considered to "be" SF wrote about a future dystopia in which there was "Thoughtcrime." Only eight years later, PKD coined "pre-crime" and it's been with us now for at least 10 years in "reality." One of the main problems with the urgent need for police reform in Unistat is to keep the police from surveilling the poor - especially African-Americans - in anticipation of crime. PKD minted "pre-crime" in 1956's relatively short piece "Minority Report." I recall telling a friend who didn't like SF that it was an important genre that is all about ideas. Then we went to see Spielberg's 2002 film of PKD's Minority Report. I thought the "pre-crime" aspect was probably just around the corner as something we'd actually have to contend with; my friend thought it far-fetched. I think this speaks to Dennis McKenna's argument that SF helps us prepare for the future.

9. Science fiction has a relationship with new religions that's obvious, and we can go down any number of tributaries here. Writing in the neo-pagan magazine Green Egg on April 4, 1975, Robert Anton Wilson (influential in more new religions than perhaps anyone else in the Roaring 20th century) argued that all new religions need to be science fiction-y. Earlier he'd given talks in which he deliberately provoked old New York-type intellectuals by asserting that the only literature that's current is James Joyce and science fiction. (At the time, SF was still part of what William Gibson called the "Golden Ghetto": it made money for its publishers and writers, but wasn't taken seriously at all by mainstream intellectuals.) A scholar of new religions, Prof. Carolyn Cusack, notes, "Both Aiden Kelly and Isaac Bonewits, key figures in the Pagan revival, attribute their personal wholeness to the reading of science fiction. They view it as a moral literature and argue that 'the only authors who are coping with the complexity of modern reality are those who are changing the way people perceive reality, and these are authors who are tied in with science fiction.'" (Cusack, Invented Religions, pp.78-79; quote about Kelly/Bonewits from Margot Adler, Drawing Down The Moon)

10. The pessimistic intellectual Morris Berman has been writing books about how Western civilization is entering a "new dark age" and he's got hundreds of reality sandwich reasons why. It's dark stuff, and horribly compelling to me. Those of us who love reading books and making things? We need to do things like the Irish monks did in the Dark Ages: preserve our cultural heritage until a new dawn, which we will not be there to see. We are like intellectual "preppers" it seems, with none of the Mad Max struggle to survive visions. Berman would call us New Monastics. He thinks SF is valuable preparation from the new dark ages to come, and cites as preparatory texts A Canticle For Liebowitz, Fahrenheit 451, and This Perfect Day. I was surprised at first to see that Berman liked SF. He values its counterfactual speculation and alternative histories, like PKD's The Man In The High Castle. Here's a line from Berman's Twilight of American Culture: "The 'mind' of the 21st century, for most people, will be a weird hybrid of Bill Gates and Walt Disney, as so-called cyberpunk novelists such as William Gibson [Neuromancer] or Neal Stephenson [Snow Crash] have already recognized." (p.54)

11. It's been clear to me for around 20 years now - maybe 23 to be precise - that the acceleration of technology and its dizzyingly diverse effects on human nervous systems, the biosphere and the world economy - that we inhabit a science fiction world, right where you are sitting now. If you don't often frame it this way for yourself - especially if you've never looked at your current "reality" this way - I urge you to do an experiment and "see" your world this way for seven days. I now teach guitar to some young people who know it's true but think it's sorta weird that people my age once lived in a world in which you couldn't carry the Internet around in your back pocket. Frankly, this fact staggers me every single day. I'm getting a chill right now, just watching what I'm writing...

12. If you read widely, you will note some people like to claim a very ancient history for science fiction. I remember having a nasty flu, with a temperature high enough to give me "fever dreams." Once I started to recover, I had my girlfriend take a trip to the library for me to pick up a bunch of classic literature for my recovery. One thing was Voltaire's short piece from 1752, Micromegas, and it was asserted in an introduction by a 20th century person that this was a science fiction piece. At the time, I thought SF came in with Jules Verne, maybe Mary Shelley. But yea: a 23 mile high being from one of the planets that orbited Sirius? Pretty wild stuff. "Sirius" and "23" meant nothing to me as reference at the time; I was too young. Later...

13. Marshall McLuhan looked at his fellow Wild Catholic, the French Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin, and saw him as a science fiction thinker. Teilhard (d.1955) had a theory about our electrical technology, which was destined to envelop the Earth (it did, he died long before the World Wide Web was a glimmer in Berners-Lee's eye). This envelopment was an aspect of the "Christic force" and would lead to parousia, the Second Coming of Christ. McLuhan's media theories have much ado about how we are externalizing our nervous system in electricity and electrical gadgets, and this was leading to a re-tribalization of humans, away from codex-reading, solitary, Gutenbergian individuals. Away from people like myself, it seems. (O, I have a SmartPhone: you have to in Unistat, April, 2016!) Around 1968 McLuhan was talking of the computerized Logos, and seemed for awhile perpelexed about how to "probe" this new idea. Eventually he saw Teilhard as "science fiction" but he didn't mean this in a positive sense; for McLuhan a science fiction writer was probably a futurist with little insight, or as one of his biographers, Philip Marchand wrote, "devoid of genuine perception." How odd that McLuhan survives as a SF thinker himself, on the cover of the first copy of Wired, Terence McKenna constantly riffing off McLuhan's insights, etc. I see this as "odd" in an ironic sort of science fiction-like narrative sense. (see Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger, pp.216-217)

14. Regarding SF as the epicenter of the Novel of Ideas since around the end of WWII, and as propaedeutic for our living in the future (or now): around 1980 Robert Anton Wilson was asked by Dr. Jeffrey Eliot, "Are you concerned that your work have didactic value, that people learn from it?"

Here's RAW's answer:
Absolutely! Didactic literature is very much out of style these days; if one is suspected of having a message, it's almost regarded as some kind of secret vice. I think, however, that all first-rate literature leans toward  the didactic. The classic Greeks regarded Homer as didactic and allegorical to boot. Dante seems didactic. Shakespeare seems didactic. Melville seems didactic. Science fiction is the most didactic literature around; that's why I enjoy it so much. 

All writers function as teachers, whether they're conscious of it or not, or whether they'll admit it or not. For example, take Mickey Spillane. He used to give interviews in which he said he only wrote books for money. However, if you look at his work, he has strong beliefs. He's always pitching them to the reader. They're rather fascist beliefs, but they're beliefs nonetheless, and he's a teacher, just like every other writer. Unfortunately, he's only teaching a violent, fascist morality. - collected in Email To The Universe, p.217

Were there ever more thrilling teachers for young introverts in the 20th century than people like Asimov or HG Wells?

15. Revisiting Voltaire and Father Teilhard de Chardin: in John Glassie's book on the 17th century Jesuit weirdo intellectual Athanasius Kircher, Man of Misconceptions, the last man to Know Everything, Kircher, is placed by Glassie as a writer of proto-science fiction with his book Ecstatic Journey. Johannes Kepler wrote an SF-like book, Somnium/The Dream, and Glassie even says Cicero's The Dream of Scipio qualifies here. Meanwhile, when I read the Bible's book Revelation it seems like proto-HP Lovecraft, or a really bad mushroom trip. In Jennifer Hecht's book Doubt: A History SF is traced back to rhetorician/satirist/Syrian Lucian, who died around 180 CE. Hecht links Lucian to the agnosticism/skepticism/atheism/doubt of the whole (well, most?) history of science fiction. Of course, if we allow Cicero in here, he wins as oldest SF by dying in 43BCE. And what a death. Bernard Field, in his History of Science Fiction, agrees that Cicero wrote a forerunner to SF. (Yea, but what about Plato's conjuring Atlantis?)

16. I don't see much mention of Olaf Stapledon these days. Here's a science fiction writer of enormous erudition, who combined aspects of the historical novel approach to the novel of ideas with science. In 1989 Robert Anton Wilson told Rebecca McClen and David Jay Brown, "I'm a mystical agnostic, or an agnostic mystic. That phrase was coined by Olaf Stapledon, my favorite science fiction writer. When I first read it, it didn't mean anything to me, but over the years I've gradually realized that "agnostic mystic" describes me better than any words I've found anywhere else." (Mavericks of the Mind, p.114) In piece collected in The Next 50 Years, Sir Martin Rees says that "Many Worlds Hypothesis" in quantum mechanics originated with Stapledon. Wikipedia credits Stapledon with the idea of "swarm intelligence," which now resonates with "crowdsourcing."

17. Dr. John Lilly, one of the 20th century's great multidisciplinarians, who wrote an essay at age 16 about how the human mind can be rendered sufficiently objective in order to study itself, studied neurophysiology at CalTech, trained as a medical doctor, studied aeronautics and cybernetics in the Air Force, became a cetologist, and became known as a dolphin expert. He was also one of the great self-experimenters in history, including psychedelic research. So he may have some insight into the McKenna Brothers' experiences. He refused to accept science as "better" than religion, because they pertain to different domains of human thought. Religion has to do with out greatest desires, as Lilly saw it. Both science and religion were "meta-theoretical" positions on knowledge. However, if we were to encounter "real organisms with greater wisdom, greater intellect, greater minds than any single man..." we must be "open, unbiased, sensitive, general purpose, and dispassionate. Our needs for fantasies must be analyzed and seen for what they are and are not or we will be in even graver troubles than we are today." (Programming The Human Biocomputer, pp. 74-75.) Superior beings encountered are usually written off by scientists as, as best religious weirdness, at worst, as "superstitions" or "psychotic beliefs." "Other persons present these beliefs in the writings called 'science fiction.'" Lilly says most scientists will say the human biocomputer generates these visions - all the phenomena - by itself. Having had experiences like the McKennas, Lilly seeks to remain agnostic. This is eventually what Robert Anton Wilson did after having numerous bizarre contact-experiences with superintelligences from Sirius, or...something like that. Philip K. Dick had overwhelmingly strange experience with Something Other too, and tried to be agnostic, but it seems he mostly gave over to this experience's an ontological status close to "real." Possibly more real than "real." I don't know what "really" happened at La Chorrera, but tens of thousands of other humans have had similar experiences. I wonder how I'd react if I had a similar experience. I simply don't know. And I'm not ready to debunk anyone else's wild phenomenological experience.

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!

Metaphors in Literature, Philosophy and Science: Divagations

"It's an instrument," Machine Gun Kelly said. "Play it." [1]

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Lately I've been studying ideas about influence, coercion, advertising, hypnosis, and ideas about "mind control," particularly what is usually called "conspiracy theory" ideation. I'll just leave it at that.

Well...no. Let me add one thing: I have come to a tentative conclusion about that last item: Yes, some conspiracy theories about "mind control" seem to have varying degrees of validity, if not soundness. Others seem batshit crazy to me. But for those C-theorists with more scholarly minds - or even those who have attained reading levels of a bright 15 year old - I think the richest depths to plumb are in the study of 1.) Rhetoric, and 2.) Metaphor. You wanna learn how to control minds? Find out everything you can about both of those areas. You won't be drilling in a dry hole.

                                Can Chinatown be a metaphor? Who for? Why?

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In a prescient essay from 1996, "Farewell To The Information Age," UC Berkeley linguist Geoffrey Nunberg quotes John Perry Barlow, Ted Nelson and Michael Benedikt about how digitization wipes everything clean and is totally revolutionary. Barlow said something to the effect, "We thought we were in the wine business but it turns out we're in the bottling business." Nunberg riffs off this - in 1996! - by writing, "We are breaking the banks and hoping still to have the river." (If I recall correctly Nunberg is quoting Paul Duguid.)

No divagation here. Make up your own!

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"You can only cruise the boulevards of regret so far, and then you've got to get back on the freeway again." [2]

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"I am completely convinced that there is a wealth of information built into us, with miles of intuitive knowledge tucked away in the genetic material of every one of our cells. Something akin to a library containing uncountable reference volumes, but without any obvious route of entry. And, without some means of access, there is no way to even begin to guess at the extent and quality of what is there. The psychedelic drugs allow exploration of this interior world, and insights into its nature."
-Alexander Shulgin, PIHKAL p.xvi

Do you like to find out new things every day? The pleasure of learning a new thing gives you a bit of a dopamine buzz. Because you're learning. And possibly from books. Now: what if you already have the most marvelous stash of novelty-in-form-ation ensconced in your genes? Too bad you don't have a key to that library. Well, who is this Shulgin guy? Does he know of which he speaks? If he's right, what are some of the barriers to keep you/me from accessing the stupendously wondrous texts held within?

A friend of Ted Nelson - Jaron Lanier - thinks the idea that all it will take is another thirty or fifty years of Moore's Law and our computers/AI will outrun Nature? Probably wrong, even though widely accepted among his fellow Internet-inventors. And, because I love metaphors around books, Jaron says this:

"Wire and protocol-limited mid-twentieth-century computer science has dominated the cultural metaphors of both computation and living systems. For instance, Jorge Luis Borges described an imaginary library that would include all the books that ever were or might possibly be written. If you were lucky enough to live in a universe big enough to contain it (and we aren't), you'd need to invest the lives of endless generations of people, who would always wither away on starships trying to get to the right shelf. It would be far less work learning to write good books in the traditional way. Similarly, Richard Dawkins has proposed an infinite library of possible animals. He imagines the invisible and blind hand of evolution gradually browsing through this library, finding the optimal creature for each ecological niche. In both cases, the authors have been infected by the inadequate computer science metaphors of the twentieth century. While an alternative computer science is not yet formulated, it is at least possible to speculate about its likely qualities." - The Next Fifty Years (2002)

First off: are there any Borges experts out there? I wonder how much Borges was influenced by computer science in his marvelous "Library of Babel" versus notions of infinity he'd read about in kabbalah, Renaissance magicians, and sufism. Still, I guess Jaron's point holds regardless. And he's been trying to re-imagine a computer science for quite awhile now, given the quick advent and obvious problems of inequality and surveillance.

The codex-book as metaphor seems so potent to literate minds. When I read Borges's famous short story, then read Lanier's literal interpretation, I realize I visualize the Library of Babel as something along Chomsky's "discrete infinity." I mean, I don't want to board a starship, but I do hazily recall many days of spending timeless hours in the stacks of very large libraries or used book stores, finding endlessly marvelous things, actually looking at books written in Chinese - completely mysterious and yet wondrous - and the Babel branch is like that, only it goes on forever. The place closes at 10 PM, and I realize I never ate dinner. And now that you mention it, I don't see any EXIT signs anywhere. How long have I been in here? How do I get back to the register?

However, psychedelic drugs as accessing experiential book-like knowledge? I don't know. One often reads in visionary works the problem of our "clouded lenses" - flawed vision as metaphor. In Erik Davis's Nomad Codes there's a metaphor around psychedelic drugs as keys that can open doors previously kept locked. Earlier (c.1976), Dr. Leary gave us the metaphor of DNA as text: "The DNA code contains the entire life blueprint - the history of the past and the forecast of the future. The intelligent use of the brain is to imprint the DNA code." - Info-Psychology, p.59 As an exercize, unpack all the metaphors there!

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Speaking of kabbalah: Joseph Dan discusses the structural argument of the Zohar: "Historical events, the phases of human life, the rituals of the Jewish sabbath, and the festivals are all integrated into this vast picture. Everything is a metaphor for everything else." - Kabbalah: A Very Short Introduction, p.33

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"The history of consciousness is the history of words, " Joyce said immediately. "Shelley was justified in his bloody unbearable arrogance, when he wrote that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Those whose words make new metaphors that sink into the public consciousness, create new ways of knowing ourselves and others." [3]

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Along the above lines, one of my favorite passages in Lit about the poet's magickal imaginative powers to alter reality comes from a passage in A Midsummer Night's Dream, where Theseus says the "poet's eye" works on "the forms unknown" and:

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothings
A local habitation and a name.

You've probably seen this quote used to bolster all sorts of arguments in contemporary thought. There seem to "be" things "out there" as yet undiscovered OR: people experience something but have no words to label these "things" in experience. The neologist, the meme-propagator, the master rhetorician, the re-framing metaphor user who alters minds: these all seem to fit Theseus's poet's magickal workings.

In a delightful book on the neuroscience of music, Daniel J. Levitin discusses our need to categorize from an evolutionary standpoint. "Categorization entails treating objects that are different as of the same kind. A red apple may look different from a green apple, but they are both still apples. My mother and father may look very different, but they are both caregivers, to be trusted in an emergency [...] Leonard Meyer notes that classification is essential to enable composers, performers, and listeners to internalize the norms governing musical relationships, and consequently, to comprehend the implications of patterns, and experience deviations from stylistic norms." Then Levitin quotes The Bard's lines from above. - This Is Your Brain On Music, p.147

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There may be one reader (I'm looking at YOU!) who has wondered, "Is this dude gonna address all the 'the brain is a computer' metaphors?" No. Because there's too much written about it. I swim in those waters. (Are you, by chance feeling hyper-aware of metaphors right now? Hyperaware of the so-called "tacit dimension"?) One of my favorite lines about "the brain is a computer" comes from some book I don't even remember reading, but it's in my notes. The brain is NOT a computer, but it is a Chinese restaurant: crowded, chaotic, lots of people running around, and yet stuff gets done. I apparently got this metaphor from Welcome To Your Brain, by Aamodt and Wang.

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George Lakoff admits his empirical research on metaphor (of which I am a major amateur reader) had been preceded by Ernst Cassirer, I.A. Richards, Kenneth Burke, Benjamin Lee Whorf and a few others. The oldest thinker he names is Vico, who died in 1744. Lakoff argues strongly and convincingly that metaphor is not some fancy part of speech, as most of us were taught. It's deeply embedded in everything we say and do. I once wrote him that he never mentions Norman O. Brown, who said, "All that is, is metaphor." Lakoff wrote back and said NOB wasn't "empirical." Anyway, check out these lines from a guy who died in 1592 (if Vico was allowed, why not this guy?):

"To hear men talk of metonomies, metaphors and allegories, and other grammar words, would not one think that they signified some rare and exotic form of speaking? And yet they are phrases that are no better than the chatter of my chambermaid." - Montaigne "On the Vanity of Words"

Okay, maybe it's a stretch. Montaigne seems to not be arguing that metaphor is basic to our speech - as Vico did - but he seems to be rather unimpressed by the talk of metaphors. And yet, he's using metaphors in every sentence. If Montaigne were here to find this out, I suspect he'd find it all quite marvelous.

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A.) I recall Joseph Campbell talk about a lecture he gave on gods, goddesses, heroes, etc. And a young man rose up and said these things didn't exist; they're lies. Campbell replied they were metaphors. After a slightly rancorous exchange, Campbell suddenly realized the young man didn't know what a metaphor was. Campbell told him it's when you say something IS something else. 

B.) Alfred Korzybski argued that humans suffer for taking literally what he called "The Is of Identity" and "The Is of Predication." If I say, "Cate Blanchet is the greatest actress alive now," (And I might if you were here, just for fun, but for now that would be missing the point entirely) I'm predicating/identifying/making the same "Best Actress In The World" and "Cate Blanchet." But who knows how to logically prove my assessment? And even if I could prove - an impossibility, in my metaphysics - that Cate "really is" equal to the term "best actress in the world," Cate's so much more than that. I'm hypnotizing myself or you or both of us by leaving out Cate as a mother, Aussie, masturbator, gardner, philanthropist, a person with a rich private memory, as prankster, etc, etc, etc, etc. 

How do we square A with B? And what about font size?

1. From the Hemingway-inspired short story by William S. Burroughs, "Where He Was Going," from Tornado Alley

2. Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon

3. Masks of the Illuminati, Robert Anton Wilson

                                          OG logo by Bobby Campbell

The Drug Report: "Morality" Pills

Going through some odd drug articles I stopped and re-read two from 2012, both addressing the idea of improving ourselves morally via neuropharmacology.

The first one was by Peter Singer (who in 2014 was the Swiss think tank Gottlieb Duttweller Institute's 3rd most important thinker in the world), and Agata Sagan, an independent researcher living in Warsaw, last I checked. She is very concerned about victims of repression and the idea of affective altruism. (See the article here, so you know I'm on the level.)

They address public acts of massive indifference to human suffering and why some people risk their lives to save strangers from things like burning buildings. The 1970s studies by Milgram and Zimbardo get mentioned, as do the seminary student experiments: on the way to give a sermon on the Good Samaritan, if the student was feeling rushed for time, they didn't stop to help a person lying on the ground, moaning. Demonstrations of empathy in rats? Yes. Then it gets good.

Singer and Sagan think we're getting to know about the brain to such a critical point that we might come up with a pill that will make us act with the better angels of our inner beings. We'd care more about others with this posited drug. We might not even have "free will" - they actually say this at the end of the piece - but we do need to think about the ethics of such a posited wonder drug: do we give violent criminals a chance to take it before locking them up? Do we - presumably the Police State apparatus now ready to lock in to pedal-to-the-metal Delirium Mode - monitor "pre-crime"? Do we go all out Gitmo-Dick Cheney-Clockwork Orange with those who some law and order types deem "potentially dangerous"? Would we implant a time-release device in the brains of psychopaths (like Dick Cheney?) to keep them from burning down the village for kicks? And if this miracle drug were good enough, would we still need religion?

Okay, here's the thing with great thinkers like Singer and Sagan: they're often far too straight. I mean, haven't they heard of Ecstasy? When the cops in Murrka found out about it, they made it a Schedule I drug (no known effective use, no known legitimate positive use, no research allowed without kissing our ass first). This despite a welter of scientific gnostics like Alexander Shulgin, Thomas and June Riedlinger, and Dave Nichols, testifying to its human benefit. The DEA's Administrative Law judge, Francis Young, agreed that it wasn't all that dangerous and in a 90 page decision, recommended Schedule III for MDMA/Ecstasy/Adam/E, etc. The DEA itself said "Fuck that shit: we're shutting it down: Schedule I." So much for sanity...

In my worst moments I fantasize about registered supporters of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump being forced to take an Ecstasy suppository, but then I'm just weird. Poetry made me that way. Blame it on, uhh...poetry. Yea.

To quote the great scholar of drugs, Dale Pendell, on this issue of outlawing Ecstasy due to bad information and scare tactics:

The clear message from the Drug Warriors is that they are not interested in peace, citizenship, or even tolerance. - PharmakoDynamis, p.216

Side Note: Israel and Palestine issues make me meshugenah and majnoon, respectively. It looks like there's no hope for a two-state solution, and the Israelis keep building the settlements. There seems enough people on both sides who want peace, but all it takes is some small percentage of bad actors. Or...what happened in Ireland between the Protestants in No. Ireland and the IRA? From Dale Pendell: "Ecstasy clubs in Northern Ireland were the first venue where Protestant and Catholic youths danced together. When footballers in England began taking ecstasy, violence plummeted. Everywhere it has gone ecstasy has been a catalyst for peace."

And no one was forcing it on 'em. Just let nature take its course. But first: get it out of the hands of the cops, and into the hands of researchers.

With the cannabis wars turning to the side of human decency (finally!), some of us might start reading up and getting in gear to re-legalize MDMA.

Now, also in 2012, I read this article from J. Hughes, the Executive Director for the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. Not nearly the luminary that Singer the Utilitarian is, but this article from later the same year seems more down-to-earth. Hughes - a bioethicist and sociologist - knows how oxytocin and testosterone and dopamine and serotonin work in studies having to do with antisocial behavior, crime, empathy, and religious ideation. It's a tad longer than Singer-Sagan, but well worth the read.

My favorite part was when he took on Jonathan Haidt's sociobiological intuitive morality ideas. Haidt claims to have been a liberal but now he's not, because of his research, which yield five human instinctual moral behaviors:

1. Don't hurt people
2. Don't cheat
3. Defer to authority
4. Favor your family/tribe over the Others
5. Stay sacred, avoid that which spiritually pollutes

I read Haidt's book The Righteous Mind and he's way up there on my list of the most overrated thinkers today. PBS did a documentary of Edward O. Wilson not long ago, and they repeatedly used Haidt to sing EOW's greatness, which I found nauseating. I think of Haidt as the real-life proponent of the mind behind the situation in Shirley Jackson's great and horrifying short story, "The Lottery." Haidt says fear unites us. Built into Haidt's bullshit evolutionary psychology of "morality" is this: well of course I don't like what he's saying; that's because I'm a liberal and liberals are blind to the last three of those five listed above. Not blind. We just don't place those values very highly at all. So: damn straight we seem "blind" to the natural goodness of racism, nationalism, deference to authority figures simply because of their authority, and we think homosexuals deserve equal rights, and women should be able to control their own bodies. If that's blindness so be it. I'm not having any of Haidt's crap.

(I've blogged on Haidt before, for instance HERE and HERE.)

And neither is J. Hughes, who sees "defer to authority" as anathema to progressive thought. Favoring your family/tribe can be re-worded as "racism, nationalism and nepotism are true, good and natural!" I take the avoidance of "spiritual pollution" to be akin to having a stick up your ass over other people's weird (and therefore "wrong") sexual proclivities.

For Hughes, any drug (or practice) that would improve our abilities to feel empathy/see ourselves in others and let go of the need to control others: liberal and voluntary. Why? Because the liberal approach to moral enhancement seems inherently minimal compared to the Haidt-people. Think of a politically powerful group who adhered quite strictly to Haidt's five above: do you think they'd endorse anything like Ecstasy?

That's a trick question, of course: we've obviously had those people in power, for a long time. Especially in the DEA. And look at how great we're doing!