Mortality, Death and Psychedelia
No more dynamic current has passed through my being than that catalysed by LSD
The following article by Rod Read was originally published in the Psychedelic Press journal (Issue XXXVI). Subscribe to future print issues here.
It is now a commonplace in psychedelic circles and serious ‘psychedelic renaissance’ commentating, that if there is one thing predictable about the consequences of getting psychedelic/entheogenic compounds into your brain it is that they alter your perspective on things. And not just simply once, but serially, over and over again even after returning to ‘normality’.
Just when you think you are a central experiencing ‘I’ (or eye) during such altered experience it all turns turtle and there is no you, and out there is in here—and elsewhere too, to provide just one example. It is guaranteed to be confusing, even to quite experienced ‘trippers’ or psychonauts, as every journey presents novelties.
‘Things’ as used above is an umbrella term for what is ‘out there’, also called ‘reality’ i.e. everyday experiencing; among which is a usually ignored little trifle called mortality. We are not talking here of a death rate, a usage to which we have recently become accustomed in the coronavirus crisis, but to what the reference books say is ‘certainty to die’, the condition of being certain to die… eventually… or whenever!
Finding differing and different perspectives occurs as a matter of course when you have been sensitised by psychedelics or by other upheavals in life experience, perhaps traumatic events. All these major challenges to the system alter and enlarge your versions of ‘things’ and how they matter. It then comes as no surprise to find alternative connotations or interpretations of what mortality means; yes, we are all going to die but how we conceive of that inevitability varies. From our upbringing we see from the get-go it is distinct for each one us. We are born, and with speech and dawning rationality we question that astonishing event, initially ‘Where did I come from Mummy?’ to be followed by ‘And where do we go?’
Already, we are dealing with the existential questions. And your own view of mortality certainly alters of its own accord, especially with encounters along the way; a brush with death, or due to the passage of time itself as in simply aging, or experiencing sickness. The nearer the hypothetical brink of the abyss one gets, then the greater the saliency and often morbidity becomes. In brief, we fear approaching death.
But what does that mean?
All human societies, as anthropologists show, develop cultures throughout time which theorise, speculate, and grapple with this challenge to our existential understanding. Entire belief systems erected upon this question have evolved into religions, cults, beliefs and practices. Some of these become culturally embedded, systematised, and transmitted internationally, strongly felt and bitterly defended taboos flourish, and sacramental activities rise and fall, spread and colonise, finding a flowering and decay.
‘All things must pass…’ sang George Harrison after the Beatles explored answers in Eastern and Hindu traditions, post LSD mind expansion. For the mind that perceives more widely removes some of what the poet and mystic William Blake[1] designated as ‘mind-forged manacles’. Searching more extensively and profoundly requires you to come up with new answers to the old questions of life, death and meaning. These have historically been largely left to religious discourse, it being thought a subject unavailable to heuristic approaches. With our new mind-altering compounds however, it now is, so let investigations commence!
My own psychedelicised mind, through university courses, discovered another William, William James, a turn of last century Harvard psychologist and author of The Principles of Psychology a standard enough textbook, but he brought his mind to bear on how religions work. He placed himself at the crossroads of psychology and religion to articulate an approach to religious experience that, at the beginning of the 20th century, would help liberate the American mind from its puritan restrictions (from its manacles?), advancing a pluralistic view of belief inspired by American traditions of tolerance. He was also obsessed by the problem of expressing individual consciousness through language; a problem encountered by all writers on psychedelia, and this is one of the principal themes of The Varieties of Religious Experience. A Study in Human Nature[2]; the still much referenced seminal work of his I am interested in here. It is mostly religious pronouncements that have historically framed our thinking about our mortality and eventual certain death, and James pursues their roots in our psychological make up.
His father, Henry Snr, was, like the famous analytical psychologist Carl Jung, a disciple of the cult mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, who promoted the idea that all citizens were equally and independently close to God. William James shared this conviction that religious experience should not become confined within the narrow prison of a denomination. This irreverence towards categories encouraged James to adopt a high-low style that gives his writing a fresh and populist character. Though they are dense his writings are still entertaining today.
In his book James establishes the importance of abstract ideas of the mind having real world consequences. I was taught the same in sociology that imaginary abstractions with no basis in the real world, such as superstitions, could nevertheless be very real in their consequences. Inaccurate or unvalidated ideas about racial or religious and cultural inferiority were used as examples: violence, injustice, prejudice, pogroms and wars are real world results. ‘What a piece of work is man’ indeed, as Hamlet had it, how noble in reason, but how silly to create beliefs which—to use a modern idiom— ‘blowback’ and consume him.
I grew up in a social world where a slow weakening in the importance of religious belief was assumed, however the sudden revival through the violence of the ‘Irish Problem’ in ‘the troubles’ during the later Sixties, plus the international friction around Israel and surrounding Arab nations put an end to that. Those ‘mind-forged manacles’ endure, not least when contemplating death.
As a non-believing psychonaut the most fascinating section of James’ far reaching and eclectic inquiries is that on Mysticism. He sees it as foundational to religions; it includes trance states which bear a remarkable stable of similarities to psychedelic states. He quotes individuals’ spontaneous experience as below but also pays attention ‘to its methodical cultivation as an element of the religious life’ particularly in Eastern traditions and that ‘In India training in mystical insight has been known from time immemorial under the name of yoga.’
On the first page of his Mysticism chapter he states plainly:
One may say truly, I think, that personal religious experience has its roots and centre in mystical states of consciousness; so for us, who in these lectures are treating personal experience as the exclusive subject of our study, such states of consciousness ought to form the vital chapter from which the other chapters get their light.
He records the experience of Canadian psychiatrist Dr RM Bucke who writes from personal experience about ‘cosmic consciousness’:
For an instant I thought of fire… Directly afterward there came upon me a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe. Among other things, I did not merely come to believe, but I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence; I became conscious in myself of eternal life. It was not a conviction that I would have eternal life, but a consciousness that I possessed eternal life then; I saw that all men are immortal… that the foundation principle of the world, of all the worlds, is what we call love…
This was seventy years before The Beatles broadcast the same belief musically to a ‘turned on’ generational counterculture, ‘All you need is…’
For Bucke,
The vision lasted a few seconds and was gone; but the memory of it and the sense of the reality of what it taught has remained during the quarter century which has since elapsed. I knew that what the vision showed was true. I had attained to a point of view from which I saw that it must be true.
Without the beneficial stimulus of psychedelics/entheogens others like him have attained this elevated viewpoint, a higher perspective.
Alexander Shulgin, the most prolific psychedelic chemist in history says in the introduction (p.xvi) to PIHKAL, his unusually acronymically titled book:[3]
the urge to become aware is always present, and it increases in intensity as one grows older. One day, looking into the face of a new-born grandchild, you find yourself thinking that her birth has made a seamless tapestry of time as it flows from yesterday to tomorrow…
The psychedelic drugs allow exploration of this interior world and insights into its nature.
John Horgan was researching his 2003 book Rational Mysticism when he interviewed Shulgin and his wife and co-researcher Ann at their home in California in 1999[4]. So what about that title? Is rational mysticism an oxymoron or what? Is it an oxymoron revealing a paradox like ‘living death’? It delightfully summarises our difficulty in dealing with a topic like death which none of us have experienced and then returned to tell the tale.
Interestingly Ann and Sasha disagree on mortality and death. Horgan says,
Ann has much she wants to accomplish before she dies, but otherwise she does not fear death.
‘I’ve never believed there was nothing on the other side,’ she says. ‘It doesn't make any sense. We are continuing streams of energy. Now the form you take afterwards, the form of the consciousness, that's open to some question. But I have a feeling that we all know, because we all have the unconscious memory of having gone through it many times before. I think it is really a going home. I think it will be familiar as soon as you get to the door.’
Whereas:
Sasha says his view of death keeps evolving. As a young man, he believed that when you die, that's it; your consciousness is extinguished. In middle age, his fear of death became so acute that it complicated his research on psychedelics.
Now, at the age of 74, he does not exactly look forward to death, but he no longer fears it. Speaking quietly, calmly, Sasha says he views death as ‘another transition, another state of consciousness. Admittedly it's one I've not explored, but then again, any new drug is one you've not explored.
This meditation on mortality commenced for me through taking our dog on a regular walk down our country lane in the evening of each day and reflecting on how it was not only the evening of this day, with this sunset, but the evening of my days, at 76.