Luminous Numinous

What is the relationship between shamanism and the numinous? What role do tryptamine-containing plant sacraments play in shamanism and how do these psychedelic substances help us to access our own inner divinity and to connect with the numinous Ground of All Being?  Was psychedelic shamanism the original way that our species connected to Gaia, to Spirit, to the vital force of the Earth and of the Cosmos? If so, is psychedelic shamanism an important pre-modern piece of the post-post modern Integral puzzle?  

I decided to sit down with the late, great Terence McKenna. I pored  over his books and constructed this posthumous Q & A. All of the “answers” to my questions are direct quotes taken from Terence’s books. References are included. Let us all be thankful that Terence was here with us today–in word and in Spirt.

LN: Does pre-modern shamanism really have any relevance in our post/modern world?

TM: The numinous motifs of shamanism can have relevance to modern humans…through understanding the fascinating and alien figure of the shaman, we can draw somewhat nearer to that numinous, archetypal living mystery that dwells within each of us. (IL, p.18)

LN: Shamanism seems a lot like mysticism in that the goal of each is to connect to the numinous within. How can the figure of the shaman help us to do this?

TM: The shaman is able to act as an intermediary between the society and the supernatural, or to put it in Jungian terms, he is an intermediary to the collective unconscious. Through the office of the shaman, the society at large is brought into close and frequent encounter with the numinous archetypal symbols of the collective unconscious. These symbols retain their numinosity, immediacy, and reality through their constant reaffirmation in shamanic ritual. (IL, 1975, p.12)

LN: The shaman is an artist insomuch as he’s a storyteller, he’s a healer insofar as he’s a psychotherapist, and he’s a priest because he brings people into contact with Spirit. Sounds like quite a bit to juggle. Who can become a shaman…what are the job qualifications?

TM: The shaman must indeed be possessed of of a superior flexibility and constitution, for not only must he attend to the needs of his patients in this world but he must also satisfy his spirits in the other. He is the technician of the numinous par excellence, and his vocation is a demanding one, consisting as it does of maintaining a constant equilibrium between ordinary reality and the supernatural realm. (IL, p.26)

LN: Getting back to the relevance of shamanism in the modern world, we have doctors and psychotherapists to heal us. Are there really ailments that a pre-modern shaman can address more effectively  than a modern psychiatrist? I mean, with all that we know about the physical mechanism of the brain, you’d think that we would be the happiest people in history, no?

TM: There appears to be occurring in modern life a progressive alienation from the numinous archetypal contents of the collective unconscious, which has engendered a gradually encroaching sense of collective despair and anxiety. (IL, p.16)

LN:  How exactly has this “progressive alienation from the numinous…” contributed to wide-scale fear and sadness in the human population?

TM: The alienation of modern humans from the numinous ground of their beings has engendered the existentialist ethic and the pre-occupation with the immediate historical situation.  Humans are regarded as leading a wholly profane existence within a wholly profane time, that is, within history; the reality of the sacred is denied or reduced to the level of psychology. In non-Western cultures, in “primitive” cultures particularly, humans are not conscious of living in historical time, but regard themselves as inhabiting a numinous sacral time. (IL, p. 17)

LN: So, specifically because he is a “primitive” or pre-modern figure, the shaman can bring our modern minds back into contact with ancient wisdom. It’s as though we have, in our ascent into modern and post-modern ideologies, thrown the pre-modern baby out with the bath water, right? So… while there are many important and valuable aspects of modernity, the fall into history and linear time–the “existential ethic” (the Orange vmeme?) has imprisoned us to an extent and shamans and shamanism can help us to make contact with “the kingdom of heaven,” with “dreamtime,” with eternity, which is not a really long period of time, but is actually a temporal dimension set apart from time entirely? Again, shamanism sounds a lot like mysticism in its philosophical premises. Terence, a lot has been said about the relationship between shamanism, psychedelics, and schizophrenia. Obviously you and your brother have a great deal of experience with the first two of these…What are your thoughts about the possible parallels?

TM: In each of these situations, experimental tryptamine psychosis and shamanic trance, what is involved are alterations and inhibitions of normal amine levels in the brain. The shaman manipulates this bizarre region for culturally valid reasons and with techniques of proven efficacy. The schizophrenic is an unwilling victim, a traveler through what, to him is a terrifying landscape.

LM: You say “the shaman manipulates this bizarre region for culturally valid reasons and with techniques of proven efficacy.”  It sounds like, in a sense, shamanism is a science. I wonder: is that how you and Dennis see yourselves…as shamanic scientists investigating shamanism and psychosis from the inside?

TM: Using analytical premises and…operational constructs, we [my brother and I] sought to carry ourselves, as modern humans, into the same numinous landscape [inhabited by shamans and schizophrenics] and to offer a report of interest to empirical investigators. (IL, p. 107)

LN: So you were rational about your sojourns into non-rational realms! I wonder how much of that was you attempting to culturally validate your proven, efficacious techniques…integrating pre-modern sacraments with modern rationalism. That brings up an interesting point. There is a lot of talk about being “integral” or “holistic” these days and there is a strong developmental-evolutionary current running through contemporary consciousness studies communities. Are we, in fact, evolving spiritually as a species….and if we are, what is the next step? How do we become “Integral” or “cosmo-centric”?

TM: The next step toward a planetary holism is the partial merging of the technologically transformed human world with the archaic matrix of the vegetable intelligence that is the Overmind of this planet. I hesitate to call this dawning awareness “religious,” yet that is surely what it is (AR, p. 136).

LN: So an important aspect of consciousness evolution will be integrating the positive aspects of the modern, industrial, technological world with certain truths of the primitive world–panpsychism, panvitalism, a connection to Gaia–via pre-modern or ancient techniques and methods. What, specifically would this involve?

TM: It will involve a full exploration of the dimensions revealed by plant hallucinogens, especially those structurally related to neurotransmitters already present in the brain. Careful exploration of the plant hallucinogens will probe the most archaic and sensitive level of the drama of the emergence of consciousness: the plant-human quasi-symbiotic relationship that characterized archaic society and religion and through which the numinous mystery was originally experienced (AR, p. 136).

LN: That’s interesting; you think that tryptamine alkaloids found in plant hallucinogens provided the initial impetus for the religious impulse…and you think they were responsible for the advent of human consciousness as such. That would mean that psychedelics are literally “second nature” to humans as a species. So, in part, what you are suggesting is that  perhaps what’s wrong with the modern world is not so much the existence or presence of technological advancements like nuclear energy…or television….or industrial agriculture,  which are often much maligned by retro-romantics, but the absence or lack of inclusion of ancient psychedelic plant “technologies,” which were used by aboriginal peoples circumglobally to connect to the numinous Overmind of Mother Nature?

TM: The abandonment of the original catalyst for the emergence of self-reflection and language, the  Stropharia cubensis psilocybin-containing mushroom, has been a process with…stages. Each stage represents a further dilution of awareness of the power and the numinous meaning resident in the mystery. (FOG, p. 121)

LN: I see.  When people stopped using ayahuasca, morning glories, moldy rye, mushrooms, and other tryptamine-rich plants as sacraments they lost their contact to the numinous, to the Divine Ground, to what you call the Overmind? It’s as though the development of the rational separate ego, marvelous and necessary as that evolutionary advancement is, has cut us off from non-rational, non-egoic, experiences of union. Well what exactly happens during a mystical or psychedelic or shamanic experience that corrects this?

TM: The Overmind breaks through the oppressive screen thrown around it and comes to meet the individual. It is like an interview with an angel or a demon. It is laden with intense psychological resonances for the person experiencing it; it is a profoundly numinous experience (AR, p. 65).

LN: But how can psychedelic experiences help people to make contact or re-connect with what is holy, sacred, or divine?  Wouldn’t it be much safer and more real to experience the divine through more traditional methods–through liturgies and rituals and sacraments that do not contain drugs? Aren’t psychedelic experiences just bizarre, subjective, hallucinatory, delusional states induced by intoxication?

TM: Certainly these states are strange–they are not mere phantasms drifting before our closed eyes, but complete immersions in higher topological manifolds and experiences potentially incomprehensible or frightening. Individuals may take power to themselves by boldly, even recklessly, exploring these dimensions. But even though these places are the heart and soul of shamanism, they are too numinous and energy-laden to be accessible through a tradition. Instead they must be personally discovered in the depths of the psychedelically intoxicated soul. (AR, p.136)

LN: Thank you, Terence, for  helping us to get a better  handle on the relationship between tryptamines, shamanism, and the numinous. May you frolic freely in “The Devil’s Paradise.”

(In references, “IL” is The Invisible Landscape; “FOG” is Food of the Gods; and  ”AR ” is The Archaic Revival.)

Yogi Bhajan, Yogi Bhajan, everywhere I turn it’s Yogi Bhajan. I’m kicking it with my best friend Alyne Rose–who studied to be a teacher of Kundalini Yoga– and who’s she yammering on and on about? Yogi Bhajan. I’m following up on one of my favorite books of the last few years—Rational Mysticism by John Horgan. I’m on the author’s webpage reading chapters that were left out of the book. And who does he say is the most enlightened person he’s ever met? It’s not Huston Smith or Stan Grof. It sure as hell isn’t Ken Wilber. It’s not even the late, great Terrence McKenna. Nope. Who is the one person that this Columbia educated journalist and former science writer for Time, Newsweek, Scientific American and the New York Times says might have been a fully realized human? You guessed it: Yogi Freakin’ Bhajan!

That’s not all. Oh no, there’s more. So, I’m researching Eugene, Oregon. I’m thinking about moving up there. I’ve applied to a doctoral program at the U of O. I’m reading up on Eugene, learning about the local flavor and culture. It seems that Eugene’s a hotbed for gurus and cult leaders. There was Ken Kesey with his acid tests and band of Merry Pranksters. Then you’ve got “anarcho-primitivist,” John Zirzan editor of Green Anarchy magazine. He lives in Eugene. But you want to guess what guru made the biggest splash in Eugene and still has a huge following there? Well I’ll be damned if it’s not that son of a gun, Yogi Bhajan.

Look, let me be clear. I have no problem with what Yogi Bhajan preaches or teaches. I have no problem with Sikhs (except for the guy  in the Fast Stop Market in Val Verde….and the guy who owns the Subway in Madera Ranchos; they’re assholes). I’m sure Kundalini Yoga is all that it’s cracked up to be and more. And I take no issue with Yogi Bhajan’s personal character in general or with his deeds and actions. I’m sure, on the whole, he was a a solid guy who did a lot of people a lot of good. No, my beef is with his name, “Yogi Bhajan.”  I think it’s manipulative. I think it’s a lingual gimmick to get Americans to trust in him and to buy into what he’s saying. By calling himself Yogi Bhajan, this character was tapping into the heart of what is sacred in America: baseball and cartoons. With this carefully chosen moniker, this Yogi Bhajan cat was neurolinguistically programming us to think that he was talented, witty, and loveable like the great Yogi Berra, arguably the best—and certainly the most quotable–catcher in this history of major league baseball. At the same time, the Yogi Bhajan pseudonym also triggers semantic centers in the brain that force us to consider him as being “smarter than the average” member of his species just like the great Yogi Bear, arguably the smartest Ursidae ever to steal a pick-a-nic basket in Jellystone National Park.

Look, you and I may know that the Yankees are a bunch of cheaters. We know all about the Kansas City pipeline that sent all of the best Athletics players to the Big Apple in ludicrously lopsided trades. We know how this put the Yankees on top financially. We know that, since there is no salary cap in baseball, that the rich, cheating Yankees have, in turn, been able to use their unfairly earned economic advantage to lure all the best players to New York (and force them to stay in New York. See: CC Sebathia) and thus, the Yankees stay on top forever. Sure, we might know this, but the average American loves the damn Yankees. They’re America’s team. Hell Americans are even referred to as Yankees. The Yankees stand for everything America stands for. They stand for capitalism and Wall Street. With those sharp pinstripes stretching vertically upward like Manhattan skyscrapers, the Yankees stand for industry and growth. Like America, they stand not for the dark horse, but for the frontrunner; not for the long shot, but for the sure thing. America stands for conquest and winning at all costs. America will napalm a village full of children if that’s what it takes to win, and the Yankees, too, would drop an atom bomb on Fenway Park, Citi Field, or Dodger Stadium if they thought they could get away with it. The Yankees, with their swastika-like logo stand not for the underdog, but for exterminating the under-dog.

But the common man is uniformed; he loves the Yankees because their winning is predictable. It’s something he can count on in a chaotic world. And because he loves the Yankees, the average Joe loves Yogi Berra. The average man understands the paradoxical poignancy, the non-dual knowing of Yogi Berra’s bromides. Berra uttered such wise witticisms as “It aint over til it’s over” and “baseball is 90 % mental and the other half is physical.” But Berra’s most quick-witted quote was surely “I really didn’t say everything I said.” Yogi was a Yoda amongst Jabas.

By playing on the first two syllables (and the third consonant sound) of Yo-gi B-erra, Yo-gi B-hajan is re-routing our neurocircuits and re-wiring our synapses to think that he, too, is so powerfully and poetically insightful. But that’s only half of his conniving scheme.

You and I may know that Yogi Bear isn’t “real.” But that doesn’t matter to the Kelly Bundys of the world (and there are more of them than you might think.) Yogi Bear exists as part of the noösphere, part of the collective unconscious; Yogi Bear has left an indelible morphogenetic imprint on our minds that, if Nick at Night has anything to say about it, may never be eroded. By utilizing the first two syllables (and the third consonant sound) of Yogi Bear in his alias, Yogi Bhajan is telling us that he is a bear that can outsmart humans! Since Yogi Bhajan is a human, we are only left with the natural conclusion that this is some sort of metaphor. In this analogy , are we not supposed to surmise that bears represent humans and humans therefore represent gods? Pick-a-nic baskets must stand for sacred secrets, don’t you see? Isn’t it clear to you that Yogi Bhajan is trying to tell us that he can steal secrets from the gods just as easily as Yogi Bear stole pick-a-nic baskets from Jellystone’s tourists? Well, even if it’s not clear to you, it’s clear to me.

Well, I’ve had enough, damn it. Why does it always have to be Yogi Bhajan all the freakin’ time? What about me? I want people to think that I am special. I want them to think that I am a mystic master. What does this Yogi Bhajan dude have on me? What’s he got that I don’t? What’s that you say? A clever, manipulative name that triggers people’s mental and emotional fondness for both the Yankees and the Cartoon Network? Well, hold your horses. Two can play at that game!

Henceforth and forever, I shall be known as…Mickey Mhajan! (I had considered going with “The Maha-Mickey-Mantle-Mahesh-Mouse,”  but decided that was a bit much.) That’s right, I, too, can play on the average man’s love for the Yankees and, at the same time,  his love for cartoons!

By borrowing the first two syllables (and the third consonant sound) from Mickey Mantle’s name, I am sending the message that I am a psycho-spiritual winner. I’m saying that I am not only a VIP, but the MVP. My new name says that I am a mystical hard-hitter; the hardest in fact. Not only can I “knock it out of the park,” yogically speaking, I can knock it 734 feet, baby. That’s enough to, tantrically, knock it out of two parks! My new name says that when the guru game is on the line and you need somebody to hit a walk-away homer, that I am the best in the business, bitches.

But I’m also stealing the first two syllables (and the third consonant sound) from that most recognizable of all anthropomorphic rodents—Mickey Mouse, who is more than a cartoon; he’s an icon. By choosing a name that sonically seduces your psyche with the first five sounds and seven letters of Mickey Mouse, I am programming you to think that I, Mickey Mhajan, am humble, happy, high-spirited, and even heroic.

And let’s not forget that Mickey Mouse is mighty mighty; he’s a much mightier mouse than, say, Mighty mouse. Mickey’s dominance resonates with the message I want to send as Mickey Mhajan: power!  As the mascot and trademark of the almost omnipotent Disney Corporation, Mickey Mouse, like Mickey Mhajan, is a force to be reckoned with. For, Disney, like the Yankees, like all great American corporations, and like America herself, isn’t afraid to play dirty in order to dominate. 

This article is playfully and apologetically dedicated to Yogi Bhajan, a truly great man with a great sense of humor; and to John Horgan;  Alyne Rose Keller;  Lyle Williams;  and Sgt. Jay Soccoccio, all of whom have, in different ways, served as my teachers.

To actually learn something useful about the venerable Yogi Bhajan or about Kundalini Yoga, click here.

 

 

 

 

These days it seems that everybody practices “tantric sex.” People who otherwise seem rather narcissistic and ego-contracted are pronounced as gurus because they can put their legs behind their ears during coitus or because they can direct their ejaculations inwardly or orgasm without losing their erections. In a country where yoga tends to be synonymous with calisthenics, I suppose it’s not surprising that tantra would be reduced to pornographic parlor tricks. The real meaning of tantric sex, as I see it (I’m earning a Graduate Certificate in Buddhist Psychology from John F. Kennedy University) is sex that awakens, enlivens, respects, and heals the whole person.

Infinette, a fellow Integral Psychology student who has been involved with the S.F. group One Taste,  and I were discussing the notion of sexual healing. She had asked me if I thought that sex and orgasm were predominantly second chakra affairs. My response was that sex and sexual touch could potentially heal at any and all of the chakras.

At the 1st chakra, you think, “Hey, sweet! There is an ‘I,’ which is a separate, independent subject who can experience OTHER subjects as pleasurable objects AND who can, myself, be experienced as a pleasurable object by OTHER subjects.”

At the 2nd chakra, sexual touch heals because you think, “Hey, sweet! As weird as I sometimes feel, I am a human. Half of all humans have genitals roughly like mine. And anyone who is familiar with these will have an idea of how to play with ME. And my genitals and fingers and mouth fit lock-and-key with the fingers and mouths and genitals of other humans.”

At the 3rd chakra, sex and orgasm have the potential to heal because you think, “Hey,  I am good at getting off, good at getting other people off,  and I am good at getting other people to WANT to get me off, and good at getting them to want to get off WITH me… Sweet!” The third chakra is the first chakra at which giving becomes at least as important as getting, but the giving could still be rooted in an achievement-based egotism.

At  the 4th chakra, it dawns on you that, “Hey, the separate you in there is ‘the same’ as the separate me in here… so we are not really totally separate after all.” I would argue that sex is possible at the first three chakras, but that “making love” necessitates the opening and activating of the heart chakra.  At any of the first three chakras, it is possible to be merely having sex with a body. At the fourth chakra, you are having sex with a person.

5th chakra sex, which I think is fairly rare, incorporartes communicating freely and spontaneously at each of the four lower chakras, which are all fully activated and integrated into a kind of erotic symphony. Fifth chakra sex is art.

6th chakra sex is some pretty trippy shit. I have had full-blown, full-scale sixth chakra sex only once, personally. Two very interesting things took place. First, I was able to see through my lover’s skin–as though I had x-ray vision–to her vascular system, her muscular system, her circulatory system, and her skeletal system. This was all a year or two before I’d seen my first Alex Grey artwork (the cover to Nirvana’s In Utero notwithstanding). I was blown away, not just by Grey’s talent (he may well be the smartest guy on the planet), but by the fact that he was painting something I’d actually seen! I later heard (with this particular lover present) Alex say that he considers it the highest of compliments when people tell him that they have seen the very things he paints. Later during my sixth chakra lovemaking session, I saw my lover morph into all sorts of various people, whom I interpreted to be her past incarnations even though I didn’t really believe in reincarnation before. If you see the Richard Linklater film, A Scanner Darkly, based on the novel by Phillip K. Dick, which I also saw with the the same lover in the theater some years later, Keanu Reeves wears  a “scramble suit” which causes his appearance to continuously morph from one identity into another. The scramble suit is eerily close to what I saw taking place with my girlfriend.

If sexual communion with another being activates the 7th chakra, the individuals involved begin to pour not just into each other’s souls but into the soul of the whole cosmos, into the Divine Ground of All Being; and, indeed, the whole cosmos pours into them. I think that the moment of orgasm is almost always–albeit an ephemeral one–a seventh chakra experience. There is a reason why orgasm is referred to as “la petite mort,” the little death. Orgasm is the closest most people will come to previewing the cosmic dissolution that occurs at death while they are still alive.

In any psychospiritual path, the important thing is to be present to reality just as it is. In the words of cult guru Adi Da Samraj, “reality is all the God there is.” Ram Dass has said that the most important aspect of conscious sex is that you are present to your partner and that you have no expectations at all. While five hour erections and acrobatic flexibility and vaginal contractions that can turn coal into diamond (like Superman’s fist in Superman III) are all impressive things to boast about at bars, real tantra is first and foremost about mindfulness (paying attention) and equanimity (going with the flow and not being judgmental).

I can’t stress enough how little tantric sex necessitates contortionistic positions (you don’t have to be Prince) or hours upon hours of delayed ejaculation (you don’t have to be Sting, either). One of the most powerful tantric sex practices doesn’t even involve touch! You can generate an enormous amount of powerful sensual energy by merely breathing into each of your lover’s chakras. You start with a form of tonglen. As you breathe in, you remind yourself that the plant world is part of your greater body. The trees and the algae of the sea are part of your respiratory system. You take note of the fact that the Earth loves you enough to breathe for you. As you exhale, you take note of the fact that you, in turn, are part of nature’s lungs and your breath nourishes the plant kingdom. Then you sit very near your lover and you do some gazing. Look deep into their eyes and send your breath, and with it your love, to their third eye. Then you move from chakra to chakra sending your breath and your love to the crown of their head, to their throat, to their heart, to their navel, to their genitals, and to their sphincter. You send a different kind of love to each chakra. To the anus, you send love and appreciation for their physical being. To their genitals you send thanks and appreciation for their sensual and reproductive aspects. To their navel, you send gratitude and admiration for their being a part of your clan, a member of your tribe. To their heart, you send your love in communion with their love. To their throat you send thanks for their ability to communicate with you…in person…on the phone…..via email and text message….you rejoice in their ability to reach out to you through words. To their third eye, you give thanks for their intellect. You send love to the part of them that thinks and plans and daydreams and imagines. Even those of us with more modest minds are geniuses of the animal kingdom. Our brains perform a million minute tasks every minute. To the very top of their skull, you send thanks and love for their soul. You recognize that they are a piece of the divine fabric of the cosmos, a spark of the firelight of God. These little prayers that you send to each chakra can be merely thought silently, your intention sent with the breath, or you can speak to their chakras. You can whisper or even sing to them, humming and using the pranic power of sound to stimulate them. Use your imagination!

I would like to begin a new series of posts that looks at the issue of Ken Wilber, Integral (writ large), and the AQAL model from a perspective that both honors the brilliance of Wilber and his work, while also critically analyzing what needs to be refined, elaborated, fixed, or jettisoned as the integral community moves forward.

Ken will not be with us forever. When Ken has shuffled off the mortal coil of his earthly body, it will be up to us to decide how “his” ideas will evolve.

I don’t presume, by any means, to be the first person or for this to be the first website which attempts a balance or middle ground between Wilberphilia and Wilberphobia. In point of fact, I am quite sure that every site dedicated to Wilber and his work sees itself as fair and balanced. No doubt.

And yet, most of the sites, in the end, do tend to fall into one dualistic category or the other: those who think Wilber is wrong and those who think he is right.

What I would like to do here is create a forum for people across the spectrum to respectfully dialogue.

Because I am an Integral Psychology and Integral Theory student at John F. Kennedy University, I have the privilege of knowing a great many people who are familiar with Ken and his work. These people cover the entire spectrum from extreme Wilberphilia to extreme Wilberphobia.

But if we are, in the end, integralists, synthesizers, and integrators, then surely we must try to create a working synthesis of Wilberphilia and Wilberphobia. We must honor the truths evident in each perspective and work to create a meta-perspective that weaves these truths together. That is what Integral should be all about.

And so, rather than getting into all the muddy details myself, I would simply like to start with a few premises that I think are more or less given or self-evident. And then let’s collectively see where we go from there.

My first premise is that Wilber is necessary. To attempt to create an Integral philosophy that ignores or refutes Wilber’s work and ideas wholesale would be seriously misguided. There are simply too many treasures in the AQAL model for us to throw the baby out with the bathwater: the clarification of the differentiation between lines, levels, and states;  Integral Methodological Pluralism and the refinement of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person perspectives and  the novel introduction of  zones; and the differentiation between “pre-” and “trans-”  in terms of conventionality, rationality, archetypes, and absorption.

My second premise is that Wilber is insufficient. It is not enough to take Wilber’s ideas as gospel truth. If we are truly advocates of consciousness evolution, then clearly we must aim for a Trans-Wilberian perspective, a Post-Wilberian perspective–even if such a lofty goal is unattainable in the next, say, five minutes or so. It could and should be our eventual goal. Because brilliant though he is, I think we can all intuit that Ken has something less than the “complete package.”

Restated, my first premise is that a great deal of Wilber’s thinking must be included in any Trans-Wilberian model or system of Consciousness Studies.

My second premise could be reworded thus: Wilber’s work must be transcended. Evolution is not stagnant. The Cosmos is always in flux. Ken is a far cry from the end-all-be-all. He is neither alpha nor omega (though one gets the impression sometimes that he’d like us to believe otherwise). He is merely an interesting and beautiful stop on the road from non-verbal caveman to the angelic superhumans into which we can only hope Nature is evolving us.

The greatest homage we can pay to Ken is not to follow in his footsteps, but to seek what he sought. And on the other hand, the greatest defeat you could hand him would be to one-up him by fitting his ideas into an even more complete model.

So love him or hate him, your goal should be the same.

What would Ken Wilber do if he met Ken Wilber on the road? He would synthesize him. Just as he has with all of his heroes–Habermaas, Aurobindo, Baldwin, James, Watts, Maslow, etc.

And so let us do likewise.

Let us synthesize. Let us dialogue.

How is Wilber necessary? What must we include?

How is Wilber insufficient? What must we transcend?

On your marks, get set, go!

Do you identify as a mystic (Zen Buddhist, Vedantist Hindu, Gnostic Christian, Kabbalistic Jew, Islamic Sufi)? Does the Perennial Philosophy speak to you?

Are you an advocate for the responsible use of psychedelics to achieve creative solutions to problems and to reach “peak” zones or states?

Are you an advocate of consciousness evolution, cognitive development, and transcendence?

If so, now that the NBA playoffs are upon us, I hope you are rooting for The Los Angeles Lakers. Because, and you may not realize this, the Lakers stand for LSD, mysticism, and self-realization.

Let’s look at the LSD connection first. Even if you’re not into basketball, you probably know the name of the Laker’s head coach, since Phil Jackson, a.k.a. the “Zen Master” is the most famous coach in all of sports. Phil has the highest winning percentage of any coach in the history of the NBA (both in the regular season and in the playoffs). He has more playoff wins than any other coach in history and is tied (for the time being) with Red Auerbach for the most championships of any NBA coach, having won it all an incredible 9 times (out of 11 trips to the Finals)–6 with Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls and 3 with Kobe Bryant and the L.A. Lakers. To further put Phil’s greatness in perspective, out of the last 18 years, Phil has won 50 % of the championships. And if not for injuries to Karl Malone and Andrew Bynum, Phil might have as many as eleven championships during those 18 years. All speculation aside, if the Lakers win this year (and they just might), Phil will have won MOST of the last 19 championships. That is truly astounding.

Phil admitted, in print, that an LSD-induced vision helped him to see basketball in a new way. While tripping, Phil envisioned a new brand of basketball where the players were more versatile and the positions more inter-changeable. Phil realized that, since players often have to switch on defense, you would want tall, strong guards, and active, skilled centers. On offense, too, it helps if your centers can pass and shoot and if your guards can post up and play with their backs to the basket.

Phil would later become the most famous advocate of Tex Winter’s Texas Triangle Offense for just these reasons. (Tex is a consulting coach for the Lakers.)

There is an LSD connection on the roster, too. Lakers Forward Luke Walton has a Grateful Dead tatoo, and he’s the son of UCLA legend and NBA standout Bill Walton, a long-time, vocal advocate of LSD use. You do the math.

And let us not forget the acid head watching the game from center court near the visitor’s bench, heckling the opposing players and working the refs during all important games (and most of the trivial ones, too). For if the Lakers have the most famous coach in all of sports, they certainly also have the most famous enthusiast. No team in all of sports has a marquis fan even remotely like Jack. Jack Nicholson has been sitting courtside at Lakers games for decades.

Jack is quite possibly the most beloved actor in the history of cinema. Even bad impersonations of Nicholson are instantly identifiable by their nasal tone, slowed rate of utterance, and flattened vowel sounds. Jack is so famous that people commonly refer to him by his first name alone.

How did Jack become so famous? Well, to begin with, he wrote a screenplay for a B movie that was directed by Roger Corman. Jacko’s script was called The Trip and it’s about…you guessed it…an LSD trip. The Trip put Jack on the map in Hollywood, but as a writer, not as an actor.

However, when Rip Torn was fired from Easy Rider, after getting in a heated argument with Dennis Hopper, Jack took his place and rose to stardom soon after. Easy Rider, which is flat out one of the best films ever made (it won the palm d’Or–the most prestigious award in all of film–at the 1969 Festival de Canne), is largely about drugs of course. The two protagonists pick up a hitch-hiking hippie who gives them 4 strong doses of LSD for their kindness. The protagonists end up eating the LSD in a cemetery in New Orleans with a couple of hookers. Their acid trip is one of the most avante-garde scenes in the history of American cinema.

But the movie that really made Jack famous was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Jack won his first of 3 oscars (Jack’s 3 acting oscars, including 2 for “Best Actor,” are most among male performers–only Katherine Hepburn has more). Cuckoo’s Nest was written by Jack’s friend, Ken Kesey.

Kesey of course was one of the original LSD advocates. His psychedelic beginnings are most interesting. While in graduate school as a creative writing student at Stanford University, Kesey had volunteered to take part in a CIA experiment called MK-ULTRA at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital. The CIA was trying to find an ideal mind control mechanism (the CIA would later conclude that the best mind control mechanism was television). As a participant in the study, Kesey was given an array of psychedelics: LSD, psyllocybin, mescaline, and even DMT. While the experiment proved a failure for the CIA (because psychedelics make the idea of authority ridiculous and even hilarious, they are not great mind control drugs), the experiments were very fruitful for Kesey, who quite liked expanding his mind with chemicals and continued using LSD and other entheogens illicitly long after MK-ULTRA had concluded. Kesey and his acid-eating cronies became famous as the “Merry Pranksters” and their antics were documented in Tom Wolfe’s classic The Electric Cool-Aid Acid Test. The “acid tests” were simple. If you had a good time and “turned on” after drinking the dosed cool-aid, you were alright; you were hip. But if you freaked out and panicked, then you were wound too tight; you were a square.

My point in mentioning The Trip, Easy Rider and Cuckoos Nest, which were Jack’s three most important early projects, and all of which relate to acid in one way or another, is that connecting Jack Nicholson to LSD is about as difficult as connecting Kevin Bacon to other movie stars (like Jack for instance….let’s see…A few Good Men…. I got it in one!)

I can’t prove that Lakers owner Dr. Jerry Buss has taken acid, but he earned his PhD in CHEMISTRY when he was only 24, just as the psychedelic sixties were about to explode. Again, you do the math.

But the Lakers don’t just stand for acid. They stand for Eastern religion and mysticism.

Kareem Abdul Jabbar, long-time Lakers center and current centers coach, is a Muslim.

Phil Jackson self-identifies as a Zen Buddhist.

Phil was the first coach in major sports to have his players meditate and do hatha yoga. He also has them do positive visualizations. The results are hard to argue with, given that Phil’s record is unparalleled in history.

But beyond acid and Eastern spirituality, the Lakers stand for self-realization, cognitive development, and transcendence.

Owner Dr. Jerry Buss is a master strategist. A self-made man, Buss started off with a $1000 real estate investment and steadily parlayed his dividends into millions.

Buss’ strategic mind manifests not only in basketball and real estate, but in tournament poker. Buss has previously come in 2nd and 3rd in the World Series of Poker, no small feat by any means.

Kareem, too, is a genius.

Kareem Abdul Jabbar was arguably the most dominant basketball player ever. Kareem was always in motion. He always kept you one step behind. If you favored toward his right, he’d beat you with his left, He kept you fighting for position so that when he went up for a shot, you had no chance of measuring it or accurately timing a block because you were still trying to stand your ground when he took to the air. And even if you did measure or time his shot–and you couldn’t but if you did–it didn’t matter because his infamous sky-hook was indefensible. Even Wilt Chamberlain couldn’t block the skyhook and Kareem could hit his silky smooth signature shot out to twelve feet. Kareem scored an incredible 38,387 points during his tenure in the NBA; that’s more points scored than by any other player in history. Kareem also won three rings in college with legendary coach John Wooden at UCLA, winning an astounding 88 games and losing only twice. Even Kareem’s high school team once won 71 straight games.

A standout scholar at UCLA, Kareem was highly regarded as an essayist by his English and History professors. Kareem is, like Phil Jackson, a published author, having written an impressive scholarly history of the 761st Tank Batallion in WWII, called Brothers in Arms.

Kareem’s stardom extended beyond the Hollywood hardwood to the silver screen. He appeared in Fletch with Chevy Chase and also in Stephen King’s apocalyptic mini-series, The Stand. However, Kareem is most famous for his classic roles in the comedy Airplane! and as the antagonist in the epic Bruce Lee film, Game of Death.

To return to the Eastern Philosophy/Spirituality thread, Kareem is a devout muslim as his name quite obviously implies. But what you may not know is that he’s also an expert in Shaolin Kung Fu. He learned Kung Fu at UCLA in order to keep his arms and legs strong. Not only do the Lakers have the only Buddhist head coach in major sports, they have the only muslim coach in the NBA in Kareem, their center’s coach and mentor to Pau Gasol and young Andrew Bynum.

Lastly, a word or two needs to be said about Kobe Bryant. Kobe is not a Sufi or a Mahayana Buddhist as far as I know (although he practices concentration and insight meditation). But With Jackson as his coach and with a chemist who came of age in the sixties as his owner, anything’s possible. And I can’t connect Kobe to acid, although one wonders when he sinks 62 consecutive free throws (he had a separate streak of 50) or goes apeshit and hits an NBA record 12 three pointers in a single  game!

(There is, after all, a basis for such theorizing in sport’s history. You will recall that Dock Ellis pitched a no-hitter while tripping on Acid in 1970.)

People argue, but there has never been a perimeter player as talented as Kobe in the history of the game. No one has ever been as transcendent at putting the ball in the basket from anywhere (and everywhere) on the court. Say what you want about Michael Jordan, MJ never had to play against (”illegal”) zone defenses and quadruple teams! And he still never scored anywhere near 81 freaking points in a game.

My friends Jay and Alexis and I once saw, in person, Kobe score 62 points in only 3 quarters of an NBA game! That’s simply unheard of. No one else has ever scored 62 points in a whole game at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. (This year Kobe also set a new record at Madison Suare Garden in NYC with 61 points) and Kobe scored his 62 in 3 against a Dallas Mavericks team that was the best in the NBA that year. The Mavs had the best record in the league that year, went to the Finals, and got jobbed by the refs who were told by commissioner David Stern to hand the series to the Miami Heat on a silver platter as reported by whistle blower (double entendre fully intended) Tim Donaghy. Can you wrap your head around that? 62 in 3 against the Western Conference Champs (and the League MVP, Nowitski)?

I tell you that everyone in the building was in awe. Defenders would be frozen in astonishment, watching as though they, too, were merely fans in attendance. Even Mavs fans, at a certain point, began chanting “Kobe” (like the Russians chanting “Rocky” in Part IV), hoping and knowing that each shot was going in, because they too were witnessing a miracle and becoming a part of history.

The player assigned to guard Kobe that night, more than embarrassed or shamed, was also awed. Following the game, he asked Kobe for his shoes. Kobe happily took off his sneakers and signed them. Can you imagine: a professional athlete who makes millions of dollars a year asking another player, who had just bested him, for his autographed sweaty sneakers? Rather than being humiliated, Kobe’s rival just wanted to be able to give his own son a piece of memorabilia signed by Kobe. That’s amazing.

Talk to anyone who has seen a game like Kobe’s 81 against the Raptors or 62 in 3 against Dallas and they will all tell you that witnessing such greatness is almost spiritual; it’s trans-personal, transcendent, numinous.

Take it to the bank, no perimeter player will ever score 81 again. And if someone does, it will be Kobe himself.

NBA stats analyst John Hollinger says that the three most impressive basketball games ever played by a single player are, in descending order, 1.) Kobe’s 62 through 3; 2.) Kobe’s 81 against (triple and quadruple teams in) Toronto; and 3.) Wilt Chamberlain’s 100 point game in Hershey, Pennsylvania.

Hollinger has taken into account each game’s pace, the number of possessions, and so forth. In Chamberlain’s day, there was no zone D, there was a much faster pace, and there were many more baskets scored at both ends of the court. And don’t forget that Chamberlain was HUGE and was playing two feet from the basket, not launching 32-footers like Kobe and leaping over people 7 inches taller than himself to dunk on them. Keep in mind Hollinger is an admitted San Antonio Spurs fan and no Kobe-lover. He’s just a mathematician who calls it like he calculates it.

Love or hate Kobe, he is the most transcendent scorer in the game’s history, Kareem is #2, Wilt Chamberlain is #3 and Michael Jordan, sorry, is #4. But either way, is it merely coincidence that both Bryant and Jordan are meditators, yoga practitioners, and students of acid-head Jackson–The Zen Master?

Again, maybe you don’t really care about basketball. Or maybe you root for some ordinary team that, like almost all sports teams everywhere, stands for……I don’t know…sitting on couches, gorging yourself on beer and potato chips…or the military industrial complex….or just sad, boring, overweight white people in bland mid-western towns passionate and angry because they have nothing else in their lives to cheer for. Go ahead and root for mediocrity. I can respect that.

But me, I’m rooting for LSD. I’m rooting for meditation and mysticism. I’m rooting for transcendence. I’m rooting for self-realization. I’m rooting for greatness. I’m rooting for the L.A. Lakers.

This post is respectfully dedicated to Sgt. Jay Soccoccio, to the vivacious Vivian Garcia, to Joey “The Toad” Genitti, to Ed Lee, to Lil Abner and Joel Navar, to Michael Sopko, to Geoff Robertson, to Dr. Syd Gris of Opulent Temple, and to Alexis Forni who has purple and gold in her veins even in India. Go Lakers!!!

The whole war on drugs is a linguistic war–a semantic war. We wouldn’t have a war on “metabolites.” That would be nonsensical. We would quickly perish. So we break up the category of “metabolites” into subsets.

This is always how the dualistic mind works. We take THE ONE that, alone, is and we break it up into parts–good and bad being the second distinction we learn as humans, and this distinction derives from the first, yes and no. (”No” is the most common first word children say even as “Mama” and “Dada” are inculcated into their poor little minds). And so we break metabolites down (we metabolize them?) in our minds; we break the superset down into manageable bits–some we call “food.” Others we call “medicine” and still others we call “poison.”

The word “drug” used to merely mean “medicine.” Even now the primary definition of drug is “A substance used in the diagnosis, treatment, or prevention of a disease or as a component of a medication.” Yet at some point, “drug” began to mean “poison” more than medicine. Hence we have drug dealers and drug addicts and a War on Drugs.

One of the first people to realize that the War on Drugs was a semantic war was (surprise, surprise) Dr. Timothy Leary. Leary realized that no one was going to just sanction the widespread use of “poison.” So Leary figured he’d market LSD as medicine. But none of the medical people were interested (at Harvard as concerned Leary anyway). Leary made the point in Design For Dying that, in the 80s or 90s or especially now, you might be able to market psychedelics as vitamins–another buzzword for a certain (artificially and arbitrarily delineated?) subset of “metabolites.” Is LSD a brain vitamin like Ginko Biloba (only far more affective and much less toxic to the liver)?

 

 

 

The only people interested in Leary’s vitamins were, however, the people at the Harvard Divinity School. They tested the usefulness of Psilocybin as yet another kind of metabolite–a sacrament. And the results were amazing. Something like 90% of the people who were given the psychedelic (literally: soul-revealing) communion had a “mystical experience” (i.e., they actually did commune with the numinous, with the divine). Harper’s magazine reported that to this day 90% of those original 90% STILL consider their Good Friday Mass at Boston University’s Marsh chapel to be one of the three most meaningful experiences of their lives. Apparently Rick Doblin tracked down the original members of the study for his doctoral thesis at Harvard. Many were married, had children, lost parents, and so on and yet, I reiterate, the mushroom sacrament produced an experience that remained, for the vast majority, one of the three most meaningful experiences of their lives. It is also interesting to note that one of the people who received psilocybin in the experiment was  a graduate student by the name of Huston Smith, who had a full-blown mystical experience and went on to become the most famous Religious Studies professor in the history of the world and one of the Twentieth Century’s leading advocates of the perennial philosophy!

And so Leary marketed his vitamins as a sacrament, advocated “Do-it-yourself theology,” and started the League for Spiritual Discovery (you can figure out the three-letter acronym without my help). And so the fight to re-classify psychedelics began.

Today, we need to use a two-pronged attack. Because there are two main enemies to the responsible use of plant entheogens: Science and Religion. Those are the two most closed-minded groups of people. The scientific, scientistic, objectivist, logical positivist, materialistic doubters and the puritanical, fundamentalist, doctrinaire, superstitious believers. Those are always the two groups of people causing all the trouble: the silly theists and the sillier atheists. (But I digress, and the silliness of both theists and atheists deserves its own post.)

The point is that if you want to convince the religious morons that a metabolite is good, you’ve got to call it a sacrament and establish it as such. Now, irony of ironies, the original sacraments WERE psychedelics on almost every continent–Iboga in Africa; Ayahuasca and Mescaline (Peruvian Torch) in South America; Liberty Cap (Little Brown) Mushrooms in Europe. Ergot in other parts of Europe; Daturas, Mandrake, Belladonna and other Deadly Nightshades in still other parts of Europe; Amanita Muscaria mushrroms in Siberia; Lysergic Acid-containing Morning Glories in Hawaii and Meso-America; Salvia in Meso-America; Peyote in Meso-America; Mushrooms in Meso-America; Hell, mushrooms everywhere and everyTHING in Meso-America!

Nowadays, our sacraments are useless. Wafers in Catholicism. Torn up pieces of day-old discount Wonderbread, bleached of all nutrients, are the sacrament in Mormonism. I know. I used to prepare these breadcrumbs as a Teacher (at 14) , bless them as a Priest (at 16), and administer them as a Deacon within the Mormon Church (at 12).

It’s funny now that we have to convince the people with fake sacramental substitutes that the real sacraments are really sacraments. It’s an absurd world as the existentialists (and I suppose the absurdists) would say.

The other prong of the attack is to convince those crazy physical scientists who are even more afraid of the meta-physical than superstitious religious zealots are of the demonic. To convince the scientists (who, like the religious freaks haven’t discovered post-modern post-structuralism yet) that the metabolites in question aren’t bad you have to call them medicine.

And so that’s how we do this. We demonstrate that each psychedelic is a sacrament (which they all are) and that each psychedelic is a medicine (which they also are).

“But aren’t some drugs–even some psychedelics–poison?” you ask. Sure, just as enough water can drown you or enough Vitamin C can cause kidney stones. Penicillin is a wonderful antibiotic but no one would suggest that it’s wise to pop them like tic-tacs when you’re not sick. (Hell, it’s probably not wise to pop tic-tacs like tic-tacs.) It’s all about content and context–dose, set, and setting as Leary was fond of saying. In these next posts, lets discuss the ways in which the plant teachers ARE and CAN BE sacraments. Then we’ll look at how they are and can be Medicines.

I was helping my friend Jolie, who is getting her MA in Philosophy from San Diego State, prepare for a paper and a presentation that she was working on. She asked me about the “problem of evil.” She wanted to know if I believed in “evil.” Is there such a thing? One of my (two) responses was that evil is a developmental issue. Using the chakras as developmental stage-structures, I argued that there are different perspectives on evil from each level as follows:

At the first Chakra, evil is anything that hurts or harms my physical body. If I have a headache, the headache is evil. If I am getting rained on and don’t like it, then the rain is evil.

At the second chakra, evil is anyone who has sex with (or tries to have sex with) my girlfriend/wife or boyfriend/husband. Evil is my sexual competitors.

At the third chakra, evil is anyone who has different membership values or explanatory myths than I. If I am Catholic, Protestants are evil. If I’m an Israeli, Palestinians are evil. If I’m a Democrat, then Republicans are evil. If I like the Lakers, then the Celtics are evil.

At the fourth chakra no ONE is evil. (Hitler needs a hug). Only power structures are evil; and they all are!

At the fifth chakra, evil is a linguistic construct that exists (only) in relation to other linguistic, cultural, and inter-subjective constructs.

At the 6th chakra, I can SEE (literally envision, but within my mind’s eye) that evil and good come from the same wellspring.

At the 7th chakra, evil IS good IS chaos is order is creator is creature/creation is evolution is destruction is Brahman, Buddhamind, Abraxis, is the I AM is the Clear Light is The Bright is the Luminous Numinous….all dualities collapse in the singularity of the Void.