Luminous Numinous

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.