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.)

It’s that time of year again. All across temperate regions of the western United States–and in the central and southern regions of the most populous state, California, in particular–the Jimson Weed is in full bloom. Datura Inoxia. Angel Trumpet. Stinkweed. Thornapple. Hell’s Bells.

Yeah, yeah, I know: technically, Jimson weed, which gets its name from the Jamestown settlement, where early arrivers to America were poisoned by ingesting the plant, is actually Datura Stramonium. But the more famous Datura is Datura Inoxia, nacazcul, toloache, the sacred Datura of the Aztecs and the Datura of Don Juan lore made famous by the writings of Carlos Castenada (Go Bruins.)

Every year a handful of bored, adventurous, and foolhardy teenage boys will get sick or even die from overdosing on the poisonous alkaloids in Datura. And it seems like every year the editors of magazines such as High Times and Heads have to write another series of polemic articles admonishing us that there is absolutely no safe and effective way to get high off of this most infamous of psychoactive plants.

It’s true, no doubt, that the conventional way of using Datura (making tea from the seeds) is stupid at best and lunatic at worst. It’s also true that the method of using the plant described in the Castaneda texts (making a tea of the root bark) is ineffectual; it’s bullshit; it doesn’t work. But are we throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Is there a way to use Datura that is more effective than making a tea of the roots (which does NOTHING) and safer than ingesting the highly toxic seeds (which are either chewed or, again, made into a tea)? My personal experience says “yes!”

“Hunter S. Thompson used the stuff,” I (my id?) tell myself. “Yeah, but Thompson would have ingested chlorine bleach if he thought it would have gotten him high,” another part of me (my super-ego?) responds. I’m out in the field, harvesting various parts of the plant to ingest. All in all, I spent the better part of a year fooling around with Datura. I’ve ingested every conceivable part of the plant: the roots, the rootbark, the leaves, the seeds, the shells of the seedpods, and each and every part of the flowers. Usually, the most I got was a headache (from elevated blood pressure) and cottonmouth. But I did figure out a way to put the stuff to good use. Eventually.

Datura is a fickle plant. Castaneda got that part right. Allegedly, Don Juan taught that some plant allies have dependable, loyal “male” spirits, while other plant teachers are highly potent but highly capricious–even coquettish. These spirits are (you feminists are going to have a field day with this) described as “female.” Datura is the quintessential female plant teacher. To borrow phraseology from the famous Faces song, Don Juan more or less thinks that Datura will “come on strong and it aint too long before [she'll] make you feel a man. But love is blind and you soon will find you’re just a boy again.” This is why Don Juan warns against Datura: she gives you too much power too quickly and then rends it back from you when you least expect it.

Cocaine would be another hallmark example of a female ally. White as a vestal virgin–just like Datura– cocaine has a whorish side, to be sure. The white lady will fuck you over in the end, despite Clapton’s crooning contention that “She don’t lie, she don’t lie, she don’t lie.”*

So Datura is demonized even in the Castaneda books that are most responsible for their use. (It’s interesting to note that the mythic relationship between femininity, evil, and mind-altering plants goes all the way back to Genesis and the Garden of Eden.)*

But when I say Datura is fickle, I, for one, do not mean to describe her as evil. What I mean is that she displays herself in an array of ways to different people. And she changes chimerically throughout the season and even throughout the course of the day. Her fragrance, for instance, ranges from the ambrosially aromatic to the pungently putrid. I have joked to friends that Jimson weed can smell like “Jasmine Weed” (with a fragrance resembling freesias, gardenias, or honeysuckle) or “Jism weed” (I swear to god that on its worser days, the plant smells exactly like stale semen), depending on when you smell her blossoms. This is why the plant is sometimes called “Stinkweed.” And, while I am no expert in Latin, I would wager that the “Inoxia” in “Datura Inoxia” is related to the English word, “noxious.”

And then there is her appearance. Some find her beauty mesmerizing; others find it menacing. The plant is commonly referred to as “Angel Trumpet” on the one hand, owing to her beautiful, long tubular blossoms of bright white which dilate as the seasons (and hours of the day) become increasingly warmer.

But, on the other hand, the same plant is also known by more sinister names, such as “Devil’s Weed,” and “Hell’s Bells,” a name synechdochically applied to the whole plant because of the minatory appearance of the spiky seed pods which are vaguely reminiscent of Pinhead from the Hellraiser movies.

And indeed the plant’s twofold nature, invoking metaphors of heaven and hell, has at least as much to do with her neurological effects as it does with her aesthetic attributes. The plant provides a passport to either beatific or demonic astral realms depending on dose, set, and setting.

Personal experiences and interviews with psychonaut friends have led me to the conclusion that making a tea out of 50-300 seeds is suicidally stupid. DON’T DO IT. You may well have fucked-up visions of ghosts, goblins, and ghouls. But you are more likely to just have fucked-up vision. In particular, everything takes on a bright hazy halo, making it very difficult to navigate through the world. One close friend who drank a tincture made from about 200 seeds told me that he had trouble reading for a few weeks! Another well documented optical delusion stems from the fact that the alkaloids in the plant seem to affect the way the eye focuses light. Objects are shifted upward, downward, to the left, or to the right. When you go to reach for a glass of water, you are unable to grab it because it appears to be somewhere in space other than where it actually is. If you do drink the tea and are lucky enough to survive, you will find yourself itching and scratching your skin and running to the urinal every fifteen minutes as your overloaded kidneys struggle against failure to purge your body of the potent toxins.

The eye thing is important to take note of. While traditional psychedelics (the phenethylamines and tryptamines) affect the brain’s level of neurotransmitters like seratonin and dopamine, altering the way that sensory data is interpreted, deleriants like Salvia and Datura affect the body in less subtle ways. After smoking Salvia a dozen or so times, including a hellish experience with some home-grown, re-concentrated 60x (that may well have been more like 100x) and after having witnessed someone on Salvia go into some sort of epileptic seizure where her eyes rolled back into her head and her tongue shot out and spasmed about like an eel out of water, I think that Salvia directly effects the nerves. I would describe the effects of a fullblown Salvia experience as sort of like a migrainesque MSG-overdose multiplied by one million. I’m told that chewing Salvia, as the natives do, is the way to go. All I know is that smoking strong salvinorum-crystal-covored extracts is like a ticket to hell. It’s only purpose is to show you what hell is like. Or maybe it would serve as the world’s worst fraternity prank. Give it to someone and tell them it’s weed. After they’ve taken a bongload, they’ll end up running around the room like a chicken with its head cut off, or more aptly, a body with its soul cut off. This, again, would be the most fucked-up prank ever.

A deleriant, It seems clear that Datura, also, does not so much affect neurotransmitter chemistry (although it reportedly does increase acetylcholine levels) as it does the actual physical mechanism of the optic nerve. That Datura affects the eye is well known to medical doctors. Scopalomine, one of the principal alkaloids in Datura, is used by optomotrists–in those yellow eyedrops–to dilate the pupil. And belladonna, the plant from which all belladonna alkaloids get their names, gets its name in turn from the Italian words for pretty (bella) and lady (donna). Belladonna is named “pretty lady” because miniscule amounts of the plant were used in ancient times by Italian women to dilate their pupils–large pupils being considered beautiful. So while psychedelics are non-neuro-toxic, and seem subjectively to affect subtle aspects of the brain and to transform the “mind” and even “soul” or “Spirit,” deleriants like Datura are actually and most definitely fucking with your body! This is especially true if you make a tea of 50 or more seeds. DON’T DO IT. Anything could happen.

And, as mentioned before, if you make a tea of the root bark, you can expect the opposite to happen: that is, nothing at all will happen. Don’t do it.

And then there is the balm method. Supposedly the powerful belladonna alkaloids in plants like Mandrake and Deadly Nightshade and Datura can be made into lotions that are rubbed on the skin. If you are extremely brave, the most effective method of transport for the alkaloids is to rub the balm on your temples. Some scholars (I took a seminar at UCLA from this cool feminist professor from Cambridge called “The History of Science and Gender.” Awesome class.) think that witches may have used these alkaloids to “fly” by rubbing the balms on broomsticks and then rubbing the broomsticks on, or inserting them in, their vaginas. This, some have even claimed, is the secret to witches being able to–astrally at least–fly. My advice is to avoid balms and lotions altogether. I’ve heard too many horror stories. Don’t do it.

The middle path, as I see it, is smoking the flower, specifically its pistils. And to achieve maximal effects, you’ll want to harvest the pistils at the right time of the year. And note that different flowers on the same bush may ripen weeks apart.

I have no biochemistry to back this, but anecdotally, here is what I have discovered (and many of these discoveries are really those of my good friend and amateur shaman, Blake). You want to harvest the pistils from the inside of the flower when they are maximally covered in resin. There are several clues that a flower’s psitils are ready for harvesting. For one, flowers that smell like Jasmine–and not Jism!–are best.

Next, you’ll want to find a flower that has a faint purplish hue highlighting its more obvious whiteness. You’ll want to find a flower that is partly open. A blossom that has not yet opened is premature and one that is completely opened is over-ripe. Lastly, a flower that has insect holes on it has already been pillaged by bugs, but a blossom that has an insect or two on it or in it AS you harvest it, is likely perfect. The bugs seem to know just when the pollen is at an optimum.

If smoked, the pollen produces some rather interesting effects. The first and most noteworthy is that all Datura plants in your field of vision appear to glow. I am sure there are any number of positivist explanations for this, but I am more of a sheep than a goat and I can’t help but finding it odd that Datura plants in particular seem to be haloed in a luminous, silver silhouette when you are under the influence of the plant. Other plants and animals also seem to glow, particularly humans, but not as pronouncedly as Datura plants. Living things are much more visually distinguishable from non-living things than when looking with non-altered vision.

One EXTREMELY bizarre effect is that photographs of humans take on a very magical air. The people in posters and  pictures seem to glow, to have auras, and to stand out in a more 3-D way. Gazing meditation with puja tables replete with pictures of saints and swamis (Jim Morrison, Jimmi Hendrix) is significantly enhanced by smoking Datura. In fact, the effects are so compelling, that I began to wonder if my eye was responsible for them. I knew my ocular vision was altered, that much was certain,  but it seemed that my subjective way of seeing had been transformed, too.

The psychic affects are subtle, but profound. Natural beauty is enhanced, but man-made objects take on a preternatural ugliness. One friend remarked that he had never noticed all the power lines in a meadow near Santa Clarita, California before. Suddenly aware of their imposition, he said, giggling, that someone ought to cut them all down. That is one thing I noticed about Datura. It seemed to inspire anarchistic, eco-terrorist sentiments. While marijuana makes you want to hide from the great and terrible machine, Datura gives you the mischievous confidence to try to thwart it.

At this point, I need to come forth with my most whacked-out observation of all. Datura seems to thrive under and around man-made infrastructure. I never noticed it before I smoked Datura, but under its influence, I noticed that populations of the plant seemed to congregate under and around power lines, street lamps, transformers, and (to a lesser extent) in straight lines running parallel to roads and fences. Again, I am sure that there is a rational explanation for this. Perhaps high-energy electromagnetic fields prompt seeds lying dormant in the soil to sprout. But again, I am a bit of a believer and a mystic, and under the influence of the plant, I had the intuitive feeling that the plants were some sort of antibodies, macrophages, immunoglobulins shot up from the earth to absorb the bad juju of encroaching suburban sprawl. While my suppositions are so unscientific that Carl Sagan is squirming in his grave as I write this, the hypothesis that Datura grows in greater abundance near strong EMFs is eminently testable or what Karl Popper called, “falsifiable.” Look for yourself and you will see. A giant Datura bush under a street lamp. Four Datura plants at each inside corner of the base of a transformer or lined up, linear as a light beam, underneath a power cable or phone line.

Please remember that harvesting and ingesting Datura remains illegal in most places. And please remember that the alkaloids are highly poisonous. But if you’re Hell’s-bells-bent on trying the stuff (and you probably shouldn’t), I beseech you to experiment with small doses of smoked pollen rather than large doses of the seeds (including teas and tinctures thereof). Taking a birth as a human is a rare and blessed cosmic happening. Don’t throw your life away.

*A less sexist way of labeling the drugs on either side of the dualistic, dichotomous borderline demarcating “good” from “bad” is Terrence McKenna’s. Rather than calling the “good” drugs “male” and the “bad” ones “female,” the all-wise Terrence talks about drugs of liberation (the psychedelics) vs. drugs of enslavement. Enslaving drugs have a tendency to enslave at both the individual and societal levels and would include caffeine (from coffee beans and cola berries), alcohol and sugar (which are kissing cousins), tobacco, and, of course, cocaine. While I believe that the ephedra alkaloids are positive spirits, it is clear that crystal methamphetamine is a drug of enslavement–perhaps the worst to hit the streets since television. Psychedelics have the potential at least to be liberating on both the individual and societal levels. The Anti-war, civil rights, and women’s lib movements all were arguably propelled forward by the psychedelic revolution.

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.

If you’ve experimented with tryptamine indole psychedelics enough, then it’s happened to you: “The little dose that could.” The little dose that could catapult you into hyperspace; could drop you down the rabbit hole into wonderland; could convince you that you’ve already died and that the Earth is a gothic-themed hell realm. It happens.

On one such occasion, I swallowed maybe 1.5 grams of powdered, encapsulated psilocybe mushrooms. A modest dose to be sure. And yet the mushrooms have an entelechy of their own that defies weights and measures. I had experimented previously with much stronger doses of this particular batch. Yet this time, I was transported to a nightmarish realm and “shown” horrible visions.

Most of my trips are very spiritual. I have lots of Buddha themed trips and Native American flavored trips, but this was markedly extra-terrestrial.

I was shown a world of giant insects. I saw as they did, with multiple eyes and with the ability to visually perceive electromagnetic frequencies extending into the ultra-violet.

These insects looked like praying mantises, but also somewhat like grasshoppers (locusts) or crickets. There was a hierarchy and some insects were slaves. The mantis creatures that were in charge were infinitely more evolved than humans. They could read my mind and could control my body and my emotions with sound waves. They could, with their voice boxes, instantaneously cause limb paralysis, anxiety, sexual arousal, feelings of being in the presence of the divine, or total existential terror simply by uttering the correct vibration, as though my whole bodymind were nothing more than a kazoo in the hands of master flautists.

I was also psychically “taught” several things.

1.) I was taught that our world leaders are controlled by these extraterrestrial or interdimensional insects.
2.) I was taught that our terrestrial, garden variety insects play a more pivotal role in the web of life on this planet than we do—by far.
3.) I was taught that humans shoud eat insects rather than mammals, birds, and reptiles to fulfill our protein needs as much as possible.
4.) I learned that sound can be used as a weapon.
5.) I learned that much of modern electronic music is extraterrestrial in origin.
6.) And I learned that Burning Man is slowly evolving into a festival in which the mantis creatures are worshiped!

When I came down from my trip, I did some research and found some interesting things. I found that our government has been using “USWs” or Ultrasonic Weapons for about a decade now. The government can cause panic attacks, paralysis, and even death (at close enough range) with USWs.

I also learned that insects are a totally viable, more humane, and less gruesome souce of protein.

And while I didn’t find anything like conclusive evidence for the existence of large, super-intelligent mantis creatures, I was SHOCKED by the frequency with which psychonauts report encounters with such creatures—usually on mushrooms or DMT.

And I also learned a number of interesting things about mantises at Burning Man.

For one, mantises are a perennially prevalent art theme on the playa. I had only been once and was not aware of this.

Secondly, I was astounded to learn that mantises are one of only several living organisms (that are large enough to be visible to the naked eye) that are ever found on the playa. Apparently, the mantises are blown to the playa from a frog pond several miles away. I hadn’t known this prior to my “vision” either.

Lastly, I was especially disturbed to see this poster advertising the 2007 San Francisco Decompression. Look how mantis-like “The Man” is! Check out its eyes and “wings!” And what are we to make of this mantis symbolically towering over a scorched Earth? Does Larry Harvey worship interdimensional mantises? Has he duped 40,000 Bay Area hippies into inadvertently worshiping extraterrestrial locusts? Are these beings to be our overlords?

It’s hard to say for certain.

What is certain is that I will be on the playa every year until I give up the ghost …or the mother ship comes. Either way, I have an ominous feeling that I’ll encounter the mantises again.