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.)

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.