The Far Off Land: An Attempt At a Philosophical Evaluation... (An Attempt At a Philosophical Evaluation of the Hallucinogenic Drug Experience

The Far Off Land: An Attempt At a Philosophical Evaluation of the Hallucinogenic Drug

Eugene Seaich

1959

Ich weiss nicht, was soil es bedeuten,

Dass ich so traurig bin;

Ein Maerchen aus alten Zeiten,

Das koramt nir nicht aus dem Sinn . . . .

(I know not the meaning of this melancholy,

A legend from long ago

Keeps running through my mind . . . .)

(German Folksong)

. . . need I dread from thee

harsh judgments, if the song be loth to

quit

Those recollected hours that have the charm

of visionary things, those lovely forms

and sweet sensations that throw back our life,

and almost make remotest infancy

A visible scene, on which the sun is shinin

(Wordsworth, The Prelude)

vi

Und nach so leidgetrSnkten Jahren

Die so vieles uns zerstttrt,

V/ird der Welt, die wir einst waren,

Sage imraer noch pehbrt.

Ihre Runen werden bleicher,

Ihre Tone fern und zart,

Doch sie hat in zauberreicher

Anmut ewige Gepenwart.

And after years of suffering

Which destroyed so much in us,

There will always sound the legend

Of a world which once we knew.

Its runes are pale and faded,

Its music faint and far;

Yet its presence lives forever

With eternal magic charm.

(“Hermann Hesse,” Spate Gedichte)

vii

J’ai longtemps habite sous de vastes portiques

Que les soleils marins teignaient de mille feux,

Et que leurs grands piliers, droits et majesteuex,

Rendaient pareils, le soir, aux grottes basaltiques.

Les houles, en roulant les images des cleux,

Melaient d’une fapon solennelle et mystique

Aux couleurs du couchant reflete par mes yeux.

C’est la que j’ai vecu dans les voluptes calmes,

Au milieu de l’azur, des vagues, des splendeurs

Et des esclaves nus, tout impregnes d’odeurs,

Qui me rafralchissaient le front avec des palmes,

Et dont l’unique soin etait d’approfondir

Le secret douloureux qui me faisait languir.

(Once on a time I lived in might vaults

which ocean suns stained with a thousand gleams;

their straight majestic columns made them seem

as evening deep grottoes of basalt.

The billows, tossing images of skies,

mingled in a solemn mystic mode

their music’s powerful harmonies which glowed

with their sunset hues reflected to my eyes.

And there I dwelt among voluptuous calms,

in the midst of azure, splendor, and the waves,

and the heavy perfumes of the naked slaves

who cooled my forehead with slow fronds of palm,

and whose only duty was to seek

the hidden sorrows that had made me sick.)

(“Baudelaire,” La Vie Anterieure, A Former Life)

ix

Introduction

When the Spaniards entered Mexico in the early sixteenth

century, they found the natives using a family of strange new

drugs, unlike any they had known before. The Aztecs had given one

of them the name, Teonanacatl (“The Flesh of the God”) in honor

of its miraculous properties, which enabled one to see visions, to

foretell the future, and to obtain supernatural revelation. Farther

north, the Conquistadors discovered a cult surrounding a mysterious,

turnip-shaped cactus, almost indistinguishable from the stones of the

desert, which enabled its users to behold the secrets of the universe.

Duly noting the properties of these drugs, the Spaniards succeeded

in stamping out their use. Through the centuries, they remained

all but forgotten, until in the last century settlers in the American

Southwest observed that the cult of the peyote cactus still survived

among certain Indians, although in an altered form. As they became

converted to Christianity, these tribes adapted their worship of the

magic plant to its celebration as a Sacrament; in its new form, the

cult spread as far north as Canada and is today incorporated as the

Native American Church of the United States.

Men of letters learned of peyote after the middle of the nineteenth

century. Its properties were exploded by cultured Europeans,

such as Havelock Ellis and Alexandre Rouhier, who discovered

for themselves the marvelous visions that the drug produced. The

German pharmacologist A. Heffter finally isolated an active chemical

from the plant, which was called mescaline.

x

In the meantime, confusion reigned among historians regarding

the descriptions of the other Aztec drugs. In 1923, Dr. Blas Pablo

Reko discovered that the sacred mushroom, Teonanacatl, was still

employed by Indians deep in the mountains of Oaxaca. Subsequent

investigators established the identity of the ololiuqui, or the seeds of a

narcotic bindweed, employed by the Mazatec tribe.

In 1943, a Swiss chemist, Albert Hoffman, accidentally absorbed

through his fingers a minute quantity of a powerful synthetic

substance, which caused him to behold the same sort of visions

produced by the ancient American drugs. It received the designation

LSD-25 (for d-Lysergic acid diethylamide, the twenty-fifth of a

series of chemicals being investigated). Since that time, a number

of other synthetic drugs, capable of producing hallucinations, have

been created, including DMT (diethyl tryptamine), T-9 (diethyl

tryptamine), and adrenolutin, which closely resembles the metabolic

hormones of the human body. In 1959, the sacred mushroom yielded

its secret in the form of the drug psilocybin, a relative of the tryptamines

mentioned above, and its psychogenic ally active precursor psilocin.

Most recently (1960), the ololiuqui has been found to contain an

isomeric form of lysergic acid, isolysergic acid amide, which possesses

the same properties as LSD.

Ever since mescaline became available, the close resemblance

between its effects and the symptoms of schizophrenia has been

noted. In a classic study of the “mescaline psychosis,” Tayleur

Stockings (1940) observed that both “paranoia” and “catatonia”

can be produced by administration of the drug. Psychiatrists and

pharmacological researchers have accordingly suggested that

mescaline, LSD, and related chemicals might provide a clue to the

nature of insanity. Many studies have been made, and continue to

be made, in hopes that an ultimate cure for mental illness might be

found.

But, other studies of the human mind await the application of

hallucinogenic tools, studies that might prove even stranger and

more illuminating than those of the pharmacological laboratory.

Deep within each of us, the past slumbers on. All of the patterns

of our understanding lie buried in the unconscious memory, shaping

our desires, our inspirations, and our dreams. It is these ancient

memories, particularly those at the deepest level of the organism,

that perpetually appear as haunting suggestions of a prior existence,

or a higher reality, which prefigures our picture of human life. This

vast residue of mental experience is what the Greeks recognized as

the daimon, or the sense of destiny that drives our conscious energies

xi

toward their necessary fulfillment. As an active repository of intuitive

knowledge, it integrates and guides our understanding of reality;

whatever we know, or feel, or hope to attain is rooted in its primal

soil.

It has seemed to me that the well-established properties of the

hallucinogenic drugs might be well employed to enable us to explore

this far-off land, which is in effect our subconscious mind. Were we

to learn its secrets, we would better understand our own desires

and the motives that drive us through life. Still better, the secrets of

human history would perhaps be discovered as the eternal patterns

of imagination that have shaped our spiritual existence. But, perhaps

most important of all, to penetrate the well of the past might restore

to us that visionary perception that we think we once possessed.

Legend and myth are curiously persistent in their suggestion that

the human race formerly enjoyed the delights of paradise; actually, I

believe that this paradise has been fashioned perennially by each of

us from his own recollection of life’s initial innocence, and therefore

awaits recreation from the depths of primal memory. If this is true,

the strange drugs that the Indians left to us might prove to be the

very Hermetic Secret sought after by the alchemists.

In the study that follows, I have attempted solely to analyze

my own experiences with two of these drugs, LSD and mescaline. I

have not avoided treating them subjectively, since this aspect of the

experience especially reveals what is operative beneath the surface of

the mind when hallucinogenically stimulated. A cardinal principle

has guided my observations: The human mind stands behind all

phenomena, organizing, integrating, and interpreting; the nature

of its “abreaction” to experience reveals its inner functions, just as

our tastes and prejudices reveal our personalities. This principle is

not proposed in an extreme Berkelean sense as a denial of objective

existence, but as recognition of the essential role played by our

total past in experiencing “reality,” according to the image we bear

within us. Nor does the private nature of my experiments preclude

a general application, since each of us is an expression of our race

and culture; any study of literature or philosophy will show that

the same motifs appear continuously in history, illustrating basic

insights that we inherit from life: insights both universal and

timeless because of the existential problems faced by all. Quite

obviously, the hallucinogenic experience is not stereotyped by a

single type of personality; the details that follow are only suggestive

of certain imaginative processes involved, rather than their necessary

psychogenic form. Thus, one might comprehend in them a picture

xii

of human consciousness in general; for the deeper one penetrates

the subconscious mind, the more impersonal it becomes and the

closer one approaches the state that existed before conceptual

egotism drove us into our separate worlds. There are, indeed,

sufficient similarities between the experiences investigated here and

those recorded in both psychological journals and the world’s great

literature to suggest an essential agreement between all subconscious

memories. Accordingly, the present study attempts to discover

the broader realities that lie behind psychogenic phenomena and

to seek a pattern that would explain the longing of human beings

for the Beyond, for the otherworldly substance of their intuition.

Whether or not we are successful, it is hoped that fruitful directions

for further investigation will be perceived, and the use of our new

hallucinogenic tools will be extended to much broader fields than

is presently the case.

1

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We are told that, in those moments immediately preceding

death, the world of our earliest infancy frequently opens up

to us. We are also assured that senile reason passes readily into a state

of second childhood, wherein the light of rationality is obscured by

the resurrected past, experienced as fully as if the intervening years

had rolled away. Normal adults occasionally dream of long-forgotten

events, which have otherwise passed into oblivion. These facts,

together with Freud’s rediscovery of the unconscious mind, suggest

that within each of us the past slumbers on, occasionally reasserting

itself in the fragments of a sudden recollection, the perception of

some haunting perfume, or the unexplained appearance of an ancient

face in our dreams. Most striking, however, is the fact that it is this

earliest layer of the human memory that persists to the moment of

death, even after the adult memory and its powers of reason are

gone. Knowledge recently gained disappears, while that mysterious

world of the long forgotten is reawakened, showing that our earliest

experiences indeed have a vitality that rational intelligence does not

possess.

The strange discovery in recent years of certain drugs that can

open up this buried world at will seems to me to be worthy of our

best romances, wherein men have ever dreamed of piercing the veil

of memory in search of the ultimate secrets of Being. I can scarcely

describe the excitement that possessed me when I first held in my

hand a tiny vial of whitish powder, extracted from the sacred cactus,

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which the ancestors of the Aztecs worshipped millennia ago, when

men believed in the Mysteries of Existence, now laid open to the

dead knife of scientific analysis. Before me, in a heap of delicate

needles, lay the divine power, which the ancient Indians identified

with life itself, a supernatural and invisible force pervading the visible

world, referred to by anthropologists as mana. Modern Indians says

that God has sent His Holy Spirit in the form of the peyote plant,

and he who eats thereof may take into himself this Power; he will

see visions, obtain hidden knowledge, and be led to the Truth that

evades his grasp. Even stranger claims have been made for the sacred

mushroom, Teonanacatl, which can extend man’s vision to the

future, to the past, or to remote occurrences of the present. Today,

a third such chemical has emerged from the synthetic laboratory

derived artificially from the ergot fungus. All three substances have

one thing in common: the power to penetrate that deepest layer of

the human mind, that mysterious realm that lies beyond the veil

of ordinary perception. The green tea with which Le Fanu’s Rev.

Jennings obtained glimpses of the celestial arcana, the tincture that

dissolved for Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll the “primitive duality of man,”

or the prophetic vapors that issued from the earth beneath the

oracular tripod at Delphi could scarcely have been more marvelous

than these drugs we now possess, which are in fact mysterious keys

to the inner soul of Man.

The existence of man’s subconscious has been known for

countless ages. Oriental psychology recognized it long before Dr.

Freud redirected our attention to it. It has also been pointed out by

the school of Jung that this subconscious operates through recurrent

patterns of memory that are imposed upon our waking knowledge.

Plato’s “ideas,” Swedenborg’s “correspondences” (derived in turn

from the medieval correspondentia), or Kant’s “categories of reason”

are but older varieties of this idea that human life is a reflection

of some prior kind of knowledge, a knowledge that antedates the

world of rational experience. Poets have longingly searched for

this otherworld; whole races have created myths symbolizing their

shadowy recollections of it. Men throughout history have employed

in their sacred mysteries such drugs and intoxicants as they possessed,

with the hope that they might regain a fleeting glimpse of the

beyond. So universal is the human longing for the “otherworldly”

that it constitutes an archetypal experience in itself. Whether or not

it reflects the memory of the race, as Jung has suggested, or is merely

the result of our cultural experience is immaterial. The fact alone

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3

explains how, in passing from life, the dying man finds the well of

his childhood opened up once more . . . how, at death, he attains the

Unknown by way of his earliest existence, an existence that is shown

to be present during every moment of life; for if this were not the

case, its persistence unto the very end would be impossible.

4

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Childhood is our first experience with life; it will therefore be

obvious that our deepest attitudes are the product of a childlike

intellect. This earliest vision is the one against which we must

inevitably compare our present situation. Far back into the distance,

a furtive memory stretches, like a far-off land, visible chiefly through

the haunting suggestions of dreams. This labyrinth of half-forgotten

existence is opened to us by a variety of methods, mostly gratuitous.

In those strange moments when unexpected sights and sounds

suggest past memories; when the bosom of nature seems to recall

some childhood knowledge of flowers, trees, and clouds; or when a

dream reawakens some ancient experience from out of the past, we

feel as if life indeed posessed another dimension, a deeper level of

prior existence, perhaps more real than the one that we ordinarily

inhabit. Most importantly, the powerful charm of such a suggestion,

complete with its memories of freedom from the burdens of adult

necessity, invests this “otherworld” with the qualities of a primal

paradise. The formative years of our lives are the ones most devoid

of responsibility, watched over by parental authority suspended, as

it were, in time and space, scarcely aware of the laws of causality.

Something always rebels in the sensitive individual against the ugly

demands of material life because the unconscious memory suggests

a previous stage of effortless happiness. I am convinced that this

experience lies at the root of the universal myth of lost Paradise,

wherein perfection is equated with innocence, and good and evil

The Far-Off Land

5

are deemed to be penalties of adult knowledge. Such legends are

found amongst all peoples: The Gaels dream of the lost Isle in the

West, Tir-na-n-Og, the land of Eternal Youth, called Avalon by the

Brythonic Celts. According to the Taost symbolism of the Golden

Flower, the beginning of things to which the soul longs to return

is a state of perfect oneness, unconscious of the opposition of good

and evil, located in a sea of primal life-force, comparable to the

Waters of Life that flowed forth from Eden. I would like to point

out what may well be the real meaning of the Sumerian, Babylonian,

and Hebrew myths of Paradise: Here again we find in poetic form a

representation of our universal memory of lost perfection, fashioned

from dim recollections of innocence, now obscured by analytical

adult knowledge, i.e., the “knowledge of good and evil.” What we

once enjoyed as a simple experience, we are now compelled to analyze

in light of complex social, philosophical, ethical, commercial, and

scientific values, thus destroying the primal enjoyment of childhood’s

mysterious world. As Byron’s Manfred tragically observed, “The tree

of knowledge is not that of life.” Consequently, history has witnessed

the ubiquitous appearance of mysticism, which seeks to repair these

shattered opposites of conceptual thought with the whole cloth

of direct experience. Mahayana Buddhism, for example, describes

this need for reintegration as follows: The superficial concepts of

the causally oriented ego must be extinguished (Nirvana), so that

pristine existence can again be experienced. Ultimate reality is what

has always existed, be it only perceived without the compulsive

anxieties of the worldly mind (Sangsara):

Only let your mind dwell

In the realm of Nothingness,

And you shall see not far off

Hakoya’s Transcendent Hills.

(Manyoshu, xvi, 3851)

Again, Christ likened the kingdom of Heaven unto the mind

of childhood; this was not because children are easily beguiled, as

orthodox religion would have it, but because Christ understood the

world with which children are conversant. Children alone are capable

of pure innocence, that they might consider the lilies of the field, which

to the poetic mind are clothed in such beauty that “even Solomon

in all his Glory was not arrayed like one of these.” Thus, in the dim

memory of some more harmonious stage of development, poets and

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philosophers have universally reconstructed the buried traces of a

Lost Paradise, a stage of pure experience that haunts the memory of

all sensitive men, whether in death, in dreams, or in moments of rare

attunement to some forgotten splendor of existence.

7

-3-

Such an image, persisting up to death, strong enough to finally

replace all other memories, explains the sense of immanent

mystery that surrounds our waking consciousness. Once we have

perceived this mystery, all that life has to show becomes suggestive of

an ultimate secret, the desire for which is tantamount to promise of

attainment in the future. This accounts for the traditional obsession

of man with states of “otherness” (alterations of consciousness)

and his determination to recover by any means the “otherworldly”

reflection of his inmost memory. “Otherness,” whether induced or

gratuitous, and the notion of immortality are both rooted in the

archetypal recollection of paradise, since in each of us there operates

at once a longing for its return and a psychological assurance of

success. Theology generally states that salvation must begin with

“re-birth,” affirming the innate belief in something that has had

a prior existence. In this sense, the idea of eternity itself, at least

insofar as we are capable of visualizing it, is fashioned from the

half-remembered world that we occasionally perceive in moments

of “otherness.” It is scarcely surprising that the re-creation of a state

wherein the persistent image is momentarily regained should have

played an important role throughout human history, since it is in

such instants of transport that we are directly assured of the truth of

our poetic beliefs.

The employment of drugs to bring about the required alterations

of everyday consciousness is an ancient one, as old as men’s reverence

for prophetic trances, clairvoyance, and related visionary powers.

Eric Hendrickson

8

The Greeks acknowledged wine to have divine attributes, which

were revealed by Dionysus, the son of Zeus himself. Through

the intoxication of alcohol, knowledge of a transcendent sort was

vouchsafed the partaker—hence, the institution of the sacred

Dionysian, out of which evolved the art of drama. The Latin proverb

“in vino veritas” expresses the same veneration for wine’s intuitive

gifts, gained by transcending the limits of lifeless, analytical thought.

Cocaine, which produces hallucinations, was believed by the Incas to

be of sacred origin, since it produced even more intense alterations

of perception than alcohol, thus finding its way into the religious

ceremonies of the Ancient Peruvians. Opium is likewise said to have

played a part in the religion of Ceres, the Roman goddess of agricultural

fertility. Since time immemorial, the poppy has symbolized for poets

and visionaries the gifts of transport and dream. It is also well known

that the followers of Hassan-I-Sabba employed cannabis in order to

attain glimpses of the Mohammedan paradise, whence was derived

the name hashish, by which the drug is also known. Whether it be

the ibogaine of Gabonese Africa, the little-known Ayahuasca of the

Colombian Amazon, the ololuiqui seeds of the Mexican Mazatecs, or

the legendary soma of the Hindus, chemical means of peering into

the contents of the inner mind have been universally prized as divine

exordia in man’s quest for the beyond, and as such have well deserved

the hieratic awe extended to them, before the coarseness of utilitarian

minds reduced them to the status of “dope.” Duly recognizing the

power possessed by such drugs, their employers looked upon them

with sacramental veneration. Indeed, their sacred origin alone

generally protected them from secular abuse, since the mysteries that

they revealed to the Initiate would have otherwise been profaned,

as the Peyotists maintain today. As ever, the result of uncontrolled

expenditure was diminishing returns, a fact that distinguishes

the modern addict from the believer in poetic truth. Significantly

enough, the materialist habitué of the present employs his intoxicant

or euphoriant as an escape from pragmatic commonplace, rather

than as a means to positive experience. Lacking the faith that naive

imagination possesses, the exclusively practical mind is aware only

of the empirical facts that it sees in a situation. Nothing of the inner

meaning that poetic belief creates can be revealed to it. Such a mind is

forever denied the experience of “otherness”—hence cannot appreciate

the deeper dimensions of man’s spiritual life. The human content of

experience is subsequently reduced to the level of commonness, and

the religious sense, to dreary causality.

The Far-Off Land

9

Perhaps a new significance can now be attached to the recent

discovery of the hallucinogenic alkaloids, one of which I frankly feel

has been overlooked by the prosaic pharmacological mind. Medical

men have widely heralded the possible uses of mescaline, LSD, or

psilocybin in elucidating the etiology of mental disease; researchers

hope to shed new light upon the workings of the sick mind with

the fact that such drugs can mimic various aspects of schizophrenia,

thus suggesting a connection between the subtle chemistry of the

body and psychic phenomena. But, the empirical limitations of the

medical scientist have caused him to virtually ignore the deeper

connection between man’s archetypal being and the forms assumed

by mental illness, since it must follow that every manifestation of

the human mind, whether “normal” or bizarre, is but a reflection of

its inner contents. Hence, it would seem that the empirical study of

mere histological, neurological, and physiological effects produced

by hallucinogenic drugs is much too narrow to reveal anything

ultimately significant in this field, any more than the discovery of

normal metabolic mechanisms could explain the meaning of ordinary

human experience. If what we have suggested is true, it would

follow that the psychic revelation of the drug-experience might be

investigated to increase our knowledge of the subconscious, and

not merely of neural hormones or metabolic disturbances. A very

few scientific men have perceived this possibility, including Dr. Karl

Menninger, who suggested at a symposium on LSD and mescaline

(1955) that the ideological importance of the peyote experience be

further investigated and that some scientific analogue of the mystic

rituals of Southwestern Indians be sought. Generally speaking, only

non-pharmacological men like Dr. Jung or Aldous Huxley have shown

any interest for the philosophical aspects of mental behavior because

their colleagues are restrained by lack of cultural background from

taking imaginative steps not adequately defined by the disciplines

of their field. Very few investigators have even the imagination to

experiment personally with such drugs or to carry their findings

beyond the notation of blood pressure, serotonin level, pupil size, or

vague references to “patient anxiety.” This is all the more stultifying

because it is the subjective activity of the mind alone that reveals

the significant patterns underlying human history. Rather than

suggest that we ignore the physiological research of pharmacology, I

am urging that anthropological and philosophical attention be also

given to the revelations of the hallucinogenic experience, since this

elemental encounter with the primal memory can provide us cultural

Eric Hendrickson

10

evidence of the secrets hidden within the human soul, secrets that

may someday help explain the very meaning of human existence.

The line that divides the sane and the psychotic is indeed a

tenuous one. That which passes for “normal” in one culture may

appear as “abnormal” in another. Religious ecstasy, for example,

widely accepted in previous ages, seems to the pragmatic modern

world as a symptom of hysteria, although the experience lives on in

the curiously split personality of Western tradition. Modern culture

being the result of historic processes, we can find many such anomalies

manifest at various levels of experience. Since life is never reducible

to a simple consistency, the many facets of its meaning can scarcely

be integrated into a single attitude or a simple personal relationship

with the world. Many of its undertones are anachronistic, yet at the

same time emotionally appealing. Hence, the conscious ego faces

the problem of ordering its experiences into an arbitrary system

of rational and emotional categories, the former being integrated

with the outer world and the latter more or less confined to the

subconscious, where it nevertheless continues to function in its own

imperious way. Insanity, broadly considered, is a breakdown in this

integrative process. The individual, as a rationally differentiated

organism, maintains a clear definition of its relationship with the

outer world. Under emotional stress, the conscious ego may become

depersonalized, allowing its primal store of archetypal material to

emerge more freely. In such a pre-rational state, the processes of

objective equilibrium are relaxed in favor of the subconscious world

of the individual, providing us with a means of understanding the

nature of the mind itself. Ancient history intuitively understood the

value of the insights thus gained into the pre-rational depths of human

consciousness. Now that we are capable of synthetically recalling the

subjective images that lurk behind the veil of our intelligible world,

it would be most unfortunate if proper use were not made of these

means of carrying our search for human understanding still deeper

into the darkness of man’s primordial being.

11

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This phenomenon of return to pre-rational existence has many

archetypal parallels in human history. Myth and philosophy have

universally alluded to the Primal Chaos out of which the forms of being

evolve. Our late discoveries are merely restatements of such ancient

notions of the Tantric Darma Kaya, the uncreated Eternal, which

externalizes itself in the plastic forms of the universe, or of Nietzsche’s

Dionysian Will, which dreams itself into the Apollonian world of

beauty and order. Perhaps these are themselves archetypal memories

of man’s development from the interior world of childhood to adult

objectivity, where dreams must become directed activity. Viewed

against the practical necessities of work-a-day reality, this memory

appears as an opposite pole of our consciousness, asserting itself in

the shape of the mysterious or the uncreated. Since its domain is prior

to the rational intellect (although the intellect alone can translate it

into art), it can be experienced at its fullest only by re-creating some

state of irrationality—hence, the persistence throughout history

of the longing for pure, non-conceptual experience that, I believe,

explains the Romantic tyranny of chaos over life, of death-wishes

over reality. It explains man’s perennial desire to transcend the limits

of reason, to recapture the state before the encounter with the Tree

of Knowledge, before the imposition of rational forms upon purely

existent phenomena. Like Goethe’s Faust, who descended into

primordial chaos to obtain the secret of life, the sensitive being must

keep alive the dark, fertile dreams within him, in order to remain

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12

creative; otherwise, the balance of his two worlds may swing over to

the mere objective and result in sterility.

A possibly new kind of psychoanalysis might also be suggested

by the revelations of psychotropic medicine, leading to a more

fundamental view of human experience than Freudian psychology has

hitherto supplied. The anxiety and rootlessness of modern life will be

seen to be the result of inner barrenness, created by the frustration of

our subconscious needs in a predominantly rational society. Empty

utilitarianism, deprived of poetic faith, forces the sensitive being to

reject reality, since reality is devoid of the emotional appeal that it

formerly enjoyed. Man is a creature whose necessity is to dream;

when the individual, or the race as a whole, is frustrated of its inner

vision, it must suffer as when deprived of material health. Human

beings are nostalgic for the fulfillment of their primordial Life. Their

anxiety is not the result of fear, since modern life is more secure than

ever before, but of the loss of inner destiny, of the devitalization of the

illusions revealed in the yearnings of myth and poetry. Man’s sense of

“otherness” has largely been extinguished, along with the power to

transcend the naked world. But, even if the individual can no longer

look to his old religions for belief, he can be helped to achieve some

kind of existential re-integration with life, by being made aware of his

forgotten resources, by re-examining the validity of material existence

as it appears in the images of his primal memory. Hence, the greatest

problem of mental hygiene is to bring modern consciousness once

again into contact with the older layers of the human psyche. Life

must once more become a ritual encounter with the poetic values of

the far off land; the vast archetypal world beyond the threshold of

waking consciousness must be reawakened and celebrated anew in

the universe about us.

This task of rediscovering our lost eidetic powers is the goal of

human wisdom. To transform the work-a-day into what existence

signified on the morning of life’s innocence is perhaps the ultimate

accomplishment in life, for life’s greatest offering is life itself, i.e.,

experience—hence, the more acute our experience, the more real

existence will become. During the hallucinogenic intoxication, such

intensified perception is generally encountered, for which reason

primitive peoples have prized the experience as a periodic process

of renewal, restoring in turn the significance of ordinary life. I do

not think that this contradicts the aim of modern psychiatry, which

is to dispel irrational anxiety through self-understanding, but rather

complements it. Life must not be merely rational and free from

malfunctioning, but meaningful in itself; it must have intrinsic

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worth for the mere living of it, and this demands the restoration of

the poetic vision that first created our sense of life’s inherent values.

Those values, I believe, can readily be deduced from the myths

and symbols of mankind, from the suggestive patterns of mental

illness, and now from the archetypal experiences of the psychotropic

hallucination. Hopefully, the immense background of anthropology,

literature, comparative religion, and philosophy can someday be

brought together with psychotropic knowledge to restore our sense

of religious encounter, which coarse utilitarian existence lacks. Reality

depends upon the inner meaningfulness of things, not upon their

physical proximity; since meaning arises in the heart of man, the way

to make the world most vividly real is to re-encounter the values

of the heart in the objects of material experience. By making the

external world synonymous with the world of primal vision, life can

be helped to achieve its primordial fulfillment. No other solution will

satisfy the emotional need of man, nor answer the endless questions

about the “meaning” of ultimate reality.

14

-5-

Religion has been defined as the “finite become infinite” (R. K.

Blythe, Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics). Albert

Einstein described it as the sense of awe and mystery attaching to

our contemplation of life. Both descriptions suggest that pure

experience is made more vast by our emotional identification with

it, evolving the aura of infinitude that is the essence of real religious

feeling. Religion, far from being merely the belief in supernaturalism,

is the ultimate dimension perceived in reality, the transformation of

the indifferent into the meaningful. No matter what the nature of

metaphysical “reality,” it can have no intelligible content without

final reference to the objects of experience; hence, all concepts of

reality, spiritual or material, aim at realization in the objective world.

The ultimate meaning of existence is to be found in the glorified

forms of our experience, elevated to the religious through sharpened

emotional focus. This process is described in William Blake’s famous

quatrain:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour . . .

(Auguries of Innocence)

A striking paradox thus presents itself: The deepest spiritual

awareness results in the purest sort of affirmative materialism; on

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15

the other hand, the greatest folly is abstract materialism devitalized

by idealism.

American “materialism” is in actual fact a form of idealism,

which seeks to make commerce and gadgetry a spiritual achievement.

It avers that life has somehow become more meaningful because of

the perfection of our machines. Such an ideal, however, is an ultimate

denial of life, for machines can only implement the prior values that

life itself possesses. Therefore, to equate life with mechanical progress

is to abstract experience into a kind of intellectual propaganda.

Material advantages, elevated to mental symbols, become spiritual

objectives, insidiously usurping the genuine values of the blood

and soil. Ironically, material objects are no longer regarded by the

“materialist” as pristine material objects, but are transformed into

philosophical, moral, social, or mental values. Experience becomes

entangled in concepts, and man is enslaved by a misguided,

machine-oriented idealism.

All we have gained the machine threatens, so long

As it makes bold to exist in the spirit instead of obeying.

(Rilke, The Sonnets to Orpheus)

The only way to assert our authority over matter is to reject

the intellectual slogans of this pseudo-materialism and to return to

the original materialism of our primal memory, where the objects of

experience stand forth in their own natural light, perceived as sheer,

potential existence, as surfaces, textures, shapes, and elemental forms,

electrically acute with the mystery of naked Being. D. H. Lawrence

described this natural materialism—which can also be detected in

Christ’s reference to the lilies of the field, in the Buddhism of China

and Japan, or in a thousand other poetic guises—as follows:

It was a vast old religion, greater than anything we know:

more starkly and nakedly religious. There is no God, no

conception of a god. All is god. But it is not the pantheism

we are accustomed to, which expresses itself as “God is

everywhere, God is in everything.” In the oldest religion,

everything was alive, not super naturally but naturally

alive. There were only deeper and deeper streams of life,

vibrations of life more and more vast. So rocks were alive,

but a mountain had a deeper, vaster life than a rock, and

it was much harder for a man to bring his spirit, or his

energy, into contact with the life of the mountain, and so

Eric Hendrickson

16

draw strength from the mountain, as from a great standing

well of life, than it was to come into contact with the rock.

And he had to put forth a great religious effort. For the

whole life effort of man was to get his life into contact with

the elemental life of the cosmos, mountain-life, cloud-life,

thunder-life, air-life, earth-life, sun-life. To come into

immediate felt contact, and so derive energy, power, and a

dark sort of joy intermediary or mediator, This sheer naked

contact, without an intermediary or mediator, is the root

meaning of religion . . . a terrible cumulative effort . . . to

come at last into naked contact with the very life of the air,

which is the life of the clouds, and so of the rain.

(New Mexico)

Nature has here become a religious experience through some

deep, visceral encounter with matter. Freed from cerebral propaganda,

the nakedness of childlike perception has grasped the inherent

fascination of things in themselves, which is a projection of our own

primal vitality. All Life is sensed to be ultimately related, and the

same deep forces that operate within the blood are reflected in the

sensuous proximity of the objects about us. We must remember that

children possess a strong psycho-sexual curiosity, as Freud pointed

out, and their experience is by no means abstract or idealistic. Our

own appreciation of things is but an extension of this early ability

to be impressed by the sensuousness of life, felt electrically within

the flesh. Having realized the ancient thrill of this primal awareness,

surfaces again become tangibly rich, shapes become manifest beauty,

and natural functions become awesome mysteries. This transfiguring

significance is repeatedly described in mystical literature. The precise

terminology is variable, since the author’s philosophical training

may tend toward a “spiritual” interpretation on the one hand or

a materially “concrete” one on the other. But, in either case, the

experiential palpability of the sensation inevitably transforms the

world of objects that we inhabit, as in the case of medieval ecstatics,

who imagined the putrefying excrescence of their wounds to have the

odor of perfume, or in the subjects of Japanese haiku poetry, which

sees transcendent beauty in the commonest scenes:

Beside a well

of foul water

flowers of the plum

(Issa)

The Far-Off Land

17

This special awareness, which is the essence of all poetry, is

unquestionably the most striking feature of the LSD or mescaline

experience. Aldous Huxley afterward spoke of the “miracle of naked

existence” that presented itself to him, laden with intrinsic, increased

significance; yet, the miracle consisted not of some external or ideal

quality, but of perfectly contained concreteness. Indian philosophy

calls this ultimate reality tathata, which may be interpreted as

“suchness” or “thatness,” indicating that the acuteness of existent

forms is such that their own actuality conveys their total meaning.

One might reasonably question whether or not some chemical means

can arouse a genuine awareness of tathata, but if what we have earlier

stated is true, our understanding of reality is but a product of all

earlier experience and may be recalled from the depths of memory by

various means. The problem of reality and the drug experience is not

the moral one that Baudelaire raised in his Les paradis artificiels, for

we are not attempting to obtain godly powers from beyond, but to

merely reawaken what we already possess. It avails nothing to raise

philosophical objections to the resulting vision, which unquestionably

exists, and is afterward preserved in the memory, where “dreams”

and “reality” have the same value. Neither is there anything of the

dreamlike intangibility in the hallucinogenic experience that we

associate with a narcotic intoxication. The material world is never

more concrete, nor its “meaning” more clear in the fullest sense

of the word; the archetypal splendors of our far-off land are quite

unexpectedly recaptured in a blaze of pure presence, beyond which

the human imagination has never projected itself.

18

-6-

Afew moments after ingesting a suitable dose of LSD or

mescaline, one suddenly and unexpectedly notes that familiar

objects in the room have acquired strange qualities. Without altering

their appearance, they begin to suggest new facets of meaning that

elude analysis: invisible as electricity, yet irresistibly real. The sense

of “otherness” that we earlier described begins to unfold, revealing

forgotten glimpses of adventure and mystery. A calm, euphoric

tranquility pervades the mind, which suddenly discovers that it is

gazing on pure, timeless reality.

Things are no longer fragments of some metaphysical system,

but primal objects whose beauty is integral with their essence, as

is the blue of the sky or the wetness of water. All the values that

have been previously taken for granted are suddenly impressed upon

the beholder as palpable notions, such as the quality of straightness

inherent in lines, the smoothness of surfaces, or the symmetry of some

design. These geometric archetypes, which are the basis of the plastic

arts, are revealed with such tangible acuteness that a fresh, vital aspect

of matter is disclosed, corresponding to the suggestions of myth and

legend. One is overwhelmed by the supreme fact that a wall is flat

or that a line is straight; these are no longer abstract categories of

geometry and space, but splendid actualities to be contemplated with

endless satisfaction.

Colors and textures are even more strikingly revealed; the sheer

quality of redness or whiteness seems to carry in itself the ultimate

meaning of Being, which is seen as shining existence, above and

The Far-Off Land

19

beyond all theory. While gazing upon the surfaces of an ordinary

room, one realizes that the noontide splendor of creation is no less

expressed in the humblest aspect of a common rug, wallpaper, or

piece of furniture, now transformed into the gold of celestial vision,

palpitating with undivided significance, as the fairest petals of a rose

or the flesh of a beloved. The richness of these preternatural hues

assumes a quality of physical density; the idea of color is no longer

a function of apperception, but a concrete substance, which can be

touched and felt. The simplest texture is suddenly drenched with the

kind of poetic significance that has always tantalized the dreams of

our greatest painters. One gazes upon a newly discovered world of

wood-grains, fabrics, lacquers, glazes, and fragile transparencies all

cloudless and pellucid as the beauties of Paradise, when first beheld

in childlike wonder. The remains of food on a soiled plate are more

miraculous than the colors of a Van Gogh masterpiece, and the

mystery of a colored button lying on a white tile drain surpasses the

whole Arabian Nights.

A certain Colonel Blood, whose visionary experience under

ether is recorded by William James, summed up his enlightenment

as follows: “The universe has no opposite.” As meaningless as this

drug-inspired sentence might seem, it actually expresses the very

“suchness” that is described in Buddhist teaching. For there are no

symbols in the psychotropic vision; reality is pure, illimitable, and

non-contingent; and only ideas have their contradictions, whereas

actuality simply is. As the acuteness of this psychotropic perception

increases, conceptual experience diminishes, allowing the necessary

conditions for experiencing this incomprehensible simplicity to unfold

of themselves to the extent that the rational ego is inhibited; that

state of childlike understanding which Christ likened unto Heaven

remains, confronted with the primal objects of man’s lost Paradise. It

is thus that the inner light of the mind is able to perceive once more

what memory compels it to recognize in its transient existence; out of

the far-off land there begins to shine the distant reflection of infinity,

reawakened from the rudiments of primal experience, emanating as

it were from the inmost heart of transfigured matter.

20

-7-

Since the dawn of history, this visionary process has been attended

with supernatural light; almost without exception, religious

experiences of the supra-mundane sort are accompanied by brilliant

luminescence, such as the English mystic, Henry Vaughan describes

in his poem, “The World:”

I saw Eternity the other night

Like a great Ring of pure and endless light

All calm, as it was bright . . .

Sun worship, the endless day of the Apocalypse, the veneration

of jewels and bright metals, the flaming rose of the Unio Mystica,

or the overpowering light experienced by Mohammed and St. Paul,

all have their basis in some mysterious process, which is now set in

action by the hallucinogenic drug. The colors that have already been

seen in their Eden-like purity begin to glow like subtle neon, pulsing

with intrinsic inner brightness; a Kodachrome-spectacle of intense

brilliance transforms the humblest shapes of experience into vessels

of Heracletian fire. The world of mythology and ecstatic vision

suddenly opens up to the perceiver, who begins to experience for

himself what history has restricted to a fabled few. Man’s instinctive

awe before the mystery of light is reawakened by the spectacle of

cosmic luminescence, noumenously shining in every surface or

exploding like millions of Milky Ways in his field of vision.

The Far-Off Land

21

Our identification with the miracle of consciousness has long

been symbolized by the phenomenon of light. Poetry and language

abound in metaphors such as “illumination” and “enlightenment”

when referring to higher forms of knowledge, while darkness is

always associated with chaos, negativism, and death. Goethe’s dying

words, “More light!” were the last request of one who instinctively

clung to the vanishing embers of existence. Not only our respect

for the sun, which is the source of our life, but also the peculiar

organization of our brain, which invariably provides the “supernatural”

brilliance seen in extreme moments of “otherness”, accounts for the

traditional association between luminescence and the Divine. From

pre-Socratic Greece to modern physics, with its equation of matter

and energy, philosophers have repeatedly ascribed characteristics of

fire to Ultimate Reality. Tibetan texts on Tantra claim that Being is

essentially a clear, timeless Light, in which waves of mentation create

patterns of phenomenal perception. To see this perfect Light involves

a mystical discipline not unrelated to our experience of “otherness”,

whether initiated by esoteric training or the pre-rational mechanism

of psychotropic drugs. Indeed, Hindu mythology alludes to such a

legendary substance that enabled the partaker to enter into the Vedic

world of Ultimate Light:

We’ve quaffed the soma bright,

And are immortal grown;

We’ve entered into light,

And all the gods have known.

(Rig Veda)

It is not surprising that the Indo-European races as a whole

identified their gods with luminosity. The Indo-European root *dijeus

referred to the sky, from whence was derived the Sanskrit noun dyauh;

this term, combined with the word for “father”, gave the Vedic name

of Pita dyauh, the “Sky-Father”, who was also cognate with the

Greek father of the gods, Zeu pater (Zeus). In Latin, his name was

Juppiter, similarly derived from dies pater, (“day” or “sky-father”). All

of these related words express the same ineffable longing that human

imagination has connected with the light of day, especially when it is

seen at sundown, disappearing in the distance, as a final reflection of

the far-off land. According to the legends of many races, Eternity lay

in the West, where the eye could no longer follow, as it watched the

last faint colors of day recede into darkness. The effect upon the poetic

imagination of this last brilliance, like fire behind the already black

Eric Hendrickson

22

silhouette of some elevated horizon, can easily be appreciated. Yet,

through the means of psychotropic perception, this experience may

be expanded to a level of transcendent sublimity. I have thus watched

the disappearing light of evening, spread out as a rosy mist upon the

mysterious mountains and distances of my own desert. Perched on

some high hill, it seemed to me that the magic of that realm, which

we see symbolized in light, was itself a glimpse of the Unattainable,

transforming material space into a suggestion of the Infinite. This

sum of all beyonds, transparent and luminous, like a remote prospect

of harmony or a recollection of ancient paradise, carried the mind

to the limits of its conceptual powers, as if the very secret of the

universe were to be perceived in the mystery of those last gleams,

returning to the ultimate Home of all things. This utmost nostalgia,

coupled with fear of the oncoming darkness, must have compelled

our ancestors to recognize the reflection of their own interior vision

in the unfathomable light that they daily beheld, withdrawing by

evening to its primal source and again reborn each morning. Indeed,

the whole archetypal meaning of the “otherworldly” seems to reveal

itself in those magic distances, illuminated by the departing rays of

the sun.

Yet, how miraculous to behold this same light during moments

of visionary attunement, pouring forth in the inner eye of the soul!

All of those who have encountered the “otherworldly” in mystical

or morbid states have spoken of the brilliance in their optical field;

the identification of one’s own vital force with the external light

of infinity would be a scarcely illogical reaction to this similarity

between microcosm and macrocosm. In fact, with the help of LSD

and mescaline, one may actually re-experience this metaphysical

insight—not intellectually, but directly, as it must have happened

in the intuitive subconsciousness of the race. The archetypal basis

for this universal notion becomes accordingly apparent from the

information released by our cerebral mechanism, revealing the

identical sources of our memory and the haunting suggestions

perceived in nature. As in the sun itself, this light of interior vision

is a world of burnings, of seething fire and creative force, flowing

incessantly from one luminescent form into the next. With eyes

closed, this inner fire becomes a series of kaleidoscopic scintillations,

varying from geometric forms of surpassing loveliness to images of

utmost sublimity, all perfused with uniform brightness, reminding

one of the solid gold backgrounds of Byzantine art, which attempted

to portray the kingdom of God with shining metal. In the deeper

states of hallucination, matter itself becomes a play of pure energy,

The Far-Off Land

23

curiously identical with the view of modern physics. The nervous

system actually feels this electric force feeding the forms of perception,

congealing into substance, and then reconverting itself into a sort of

luminescent élan vitale. Visionaries have experienced this equivalence

of matter and energy since ancient times, as recorded, for example,

by Zen adepts during the state of satori:

The “God of Matter” has just taken off his mask of

glacial immobility, and, behold, is transformed into

a prodigiously moving, fluid, impalpable energy. His

countenance, which once appeared sombre and dull, is

now lit up with ever more dazzling clarity. The silent

fairyland of light, perpetually unfolding in the heart of

the smallest grain of sand, far exceeds in splendor the

most brilliant fireworks we could ever hope to see.

(Robert Linssen, Living Zen)

Modern scientists will dismiss this vision as an illusory coincidence;

yet, they would do well to remember that the contents of the human

mind have remained consistent throughout history, being merely

adapted to the language and conceptual methods of various ages. The

present results of the experimental laboratory are only meaningful

according to the subjective framework of our empirical age. It is

still the “hypothesis”, representing the accumulated imagination of

the race, which guides even material science, since the experimental

method has nothing to work with until marshaled into the service of

some subjective idea. If its practitioners prefer to smile at the mystic

who arrives at certain identical notions, they should reflect that

physics today has merely modified the insights of ancient times to

its own subjective understanding, and atomistic ideas, coupled with

theories of vital force, have enjoyed an uninterrupted vogue right up

to our own time. Each successive age has recast them according to the

methods of reason it employs. It would seem, then, that the primal

ideas themselves, with their organic significance in the human mind,

are more deserving of attention than the transient terminologies used

to frame them. Indeed, one might seriously question whether or not

modern physics would have ever conceived of the forms it employs

in describing “reality” had they not existed as a cultural heritage all

along.

Only the ignorant are unaware of how great a role the past plays

in their every thought. Perhaps the greatest significance of the deeper

stages of mescaline or LSD perception is that the subject now stands

Eric Hendrickson

24

face to face with this integrative bedrock of memory. Even more

meaningful than the brilliant visual phantasmagoria are the ideational

processes that they reveal, processes that are in fact the basic content

of human experience. Unlocked by some mysterious power of the

drug, an unbelievable profusion of ancient symbols pours forth.

Ideas underlying the oldest myths appear with eidetic clarity; the

spectacle of light and motion becomes an absolute experience of the

Oneness of being; pantheism and indwelling Divine Energy may

alternate with a spectacle of the atomic force pulsing through one’s

body, projecting itself through the vastness of space into shining

galaxies. The Eternal Flux is succeeded by the changeless majesty of

Platonic Ideas; one is no longer bound by space and time, but senses

his identity with Life itself, perceived as a timeless moment, without

beginning or end. Relativity, the Harmony of the Spheres, of the

Infinite, of the Infinite are seen, not as their external representations,

but as the ageless impulses that gave them birth. A descent into the

womb draws one back onto the primal slime of creation, glistening

and palpitating with visceral wetness like a red, cavernous swamp.

Hosts of sperm-like animals swim upward into the translucent glow

of some prehistoric springtime, aglow with the force of creation,

oozing up through the roots and trunks of rank vegetation. Legendary

creatures peer out of the jungles of unconscious memory; sexual

phantasmagoria dissolves into mythical spectacles of reincarnation,

driving the Round of Existence with an electric rhythm of immense

carnal lewdness. Human bodies tumble past, emanating their sheer

suggestion of blood and instinct, charged with the fullness of every

poetic feeling that man has experienced since the origin of his race.

Love, exaltation, joy, and suffering pour out of the well of time in

images of shining clarity, succeeding one another as threads in a living

tapestry, wherein are woven the patterns of primordial meaning that

form the heart of human consciousness. Within this iridescent sea

of archetypal pictures, the secrets of the mandala, the Rebirth from

water, the phallic serpent, the Eternal Feminine, the uterine caves

of the Venusberg, and the beasts that appear to us in nightmare, all

unfold in their turn. Whatever mysteries man has projected into the

wandering clouds, the heart of the atom, or the wisdom of philosophy

await discovery in the depths of the soul that gave them birth. This is

the ultimate exploration that can ever be undertaken.

In addition to these collective and archetypal memories, which

should prove of immense value to anthropology and philosophy, the

personal past of the individual returns with amazing total recall. It

is this particular phenomenon that currently makes LSD of use to

The Far-Off Land

25

psychiatrists, who experimentally employ the drug as an analytical

aid in uncovering suppressed material from the subconscious mind.

The occasionally claimed validity of memories prior to birth must

be questioned, since the embryo, even if possessed of the ability

to record its experiences in the womb, would certainly not have

formed the conceptual mechanisms that adult memory attributes to

these prenatal events. Yet, the unexplained clarity of long-forgotten

scenes from very early childhood raises the question whether or not

some primitive mental process indeed might be active in the fetal

consciousness, which later stimulates the universal occurrence of

uterine and birth fantasies in the dreams or hallucinations of various

races. I am disinclined to believe that such fantasies can be direct

memories; nevertheless, the continuity of human consciousness

from the present moment back to an undetermined point in the past

suggests that there may well exist some psychic record of a diffuse

sort, beginning even before the neonatal state.

Imagination certainly plays its part in these fantasies, as is proven

by the immense creative power of the mind under hallucinogenic

stimulation. Daydreaming can lead from one arbitrary picture to

another, devised quite at random and under the complete control

of the will. Yet, the eidetic power of the memory is at the same time

so strong that actual events are recaptured with the concreteness of

direct experience. Tastes, odors, minute visual details, and attending

emotions are present in perfect clarity, as fresh as at the moment

of their actual occurrence. This absolute ability to transport oneself

back into the scenes of former life mimics possession of supernatural

power, which explains why certain peoples even today employ

hallucinogenic drugs in practicing clairvoyance and communication

with the spirit world.

The basic anthropological connection between memory, the

world of the beyond, and the existence of ghosts becomes obvious

through the juxtaposition of past and present, which LSD or

mescaline projects upon the screen of inner vision, where a thousand

scenes from bygone years appear as if the movement of time were

indeed an illusion. What imagination attributes to the state of

innocence, the intellect can examine directly as a re-established fact,

here and now. To actually relive a phase of life wherein the clouds,

the green boughs of secret trees, the scent of ripening apples, or the

cry of a distant bird seems more important than the margin of profit

shown in dusty bankbooks is not merely an esthetic experience,

but direct evidence for our hopes of a simpler, more golden-rich

existence amongst the basic things of blood and earth. For some

Eric Hendrickson

26

years I had in my papers a youthful attempt to record the almost

visionary impression that a summer afternoon on Clapham Common

once made upon my boyish mind. From the viewpoint of practical

reason, such powers of perception seemed more romantic than real,

yet a capsule of mescaline one day restored not only the memory

of that vanished poetry, but also the tangible experience itself,

which irrefutably transcended any preconceived imagination. Such

gratuitous return of lost energies, even temporarily, is like the sight of

a distant beacon, redirecting the conscious mind toward the image of

reality slumbering within. Our unexplained dreams and preferences

we thus understand to be reflections of our far-off land. Amongst the

symbols and archetypes of cultural life, the entirety of our past lies

root-active, waiting through the years of intellectual distraction to be

reawakened in adult experience. Buried in this store of memory are

the patterns of all the perceptions that we experience as reality; for

this very reason, the psychogenic reencounter with our primal vitality

can reveal the meaning of whatever ordinary existence has to offer of

genuine significance and fulfillment of inner destiny.

27

-8-

Many of the symbols of various cultures can be traced back to

the nature of the childhood experience, stored in the primal

memory of the race. Language betrays the universal idealization of

the past (“innocent as a child”, “the young at heart”, “sleeping like

a babe”, etc.). Literature and legend record the endless obsession of

mankind with eternal youth, the poetic perceptions of childhood,

and the open-eyed appreciation of youth for the mystery of life; the

motifs of the Wandering Jew, the aged Faust who sells his soul for

recaptured vitality, the Hesperidins Isles of perpetual springtime,

the ageless figures of occidental and eastern mythology, and the

endless longing of poetry for the youthful prelude to life, all show

that existence is enjoyed more in retrospect than in actual fulfillment.

Even our dreams of the future are an optimistic appraisal of our

ability to someday construct the ideal situation that memory suggests.

The adult necessities of the present are viewed against the idea,

real or imaginary, that we once possessed gifts that are temporarily

submerged underneath the burdens of responsibility:

And yet I know, were’er I go

That there hath past away a glory from the earth . . .

(Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortal)

Human existence is experienced as a widening circle, whose

interior is the accumulated past and whose periphery is the line that

we call the present. As it expands, reality is stored in the memory, and

Eric Hendrickson

28

the tasks ahead are seen as challenges to our continuing labor. Time

thus begins to exercise its tyranny over life; the painful consciousness

that the present cannot be permanently secured, any more than

quicksilver running through the fingers, generates the disease of

human anxiety. Past memories mock the possibility of future failures.

In learning to savor memories, we are inevitably confronted with

the problem of maintaining their imagined intensity in the face of

fleeting powers. The need to continually test these powers creates

a kind of self-consciousness that is tantamount to psychic onanism,

or the obsession with self, and the need to continually sustain the

enjoyment of one’s own existence.

This anxiousness regarding life’s imagined limitations is an

outgrowth of an exaggerated ego-differentiation process, which

gradually destroys life’s spontaneity through self-consciousness.

This explains the profound significance of the Biblical dictum: “For

whosoever will save his life shall lose it”. For, in worrying over much

about the self, one exhausts one’s vital energy and inhibits all normal

activity. True “selflessness” is not to be construed as mere maudlin

“charity” or the so-called “love of others” (which is more often than

not a piously concealed means of glorifying the self); it is rather the

complete forgetfulness of self-consciousness and its accompanying

anxiety, which permits one to act with natural innocence and

efficiency.

The goal of true wisdom is to act in harmony with nature and

develop one’s gifts without compulsion or anxiety. This sort of natural

life is what Taoist writings call wu wei, or “non-striving action”, which

is much like the swimmer who allows the current to bear him to his

destination, rather than fighting it to his own destruction. But, the

intellect, as an ego-differentiating mechanism, will ever rationalize

its own motives, defending its own interpretation of reality against

the inexorabilities of the world; the childlike mind, on the other

hand, which as yet makes no distinction between the self and the

world, senses only pure existence, which is undisturbed by mental

preconception. This freedom from psychological dishonesty was

held by Socrates to be a necessary condition for true knowledge and

virtue. Memory and mental habits, he taught, interfere with direct

insight because through them the ego projects itself upon the world

and is once again entangled in its own pretensions and motives. The

more direct knowledge is, the freer it is from egoistic coloration and

distortion.

One might question here whether or not the childlike mentality

is actually free of egotism; it may be objected that the child seeks only

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29

to satisfy its own needs, free of concern for others. We may hold,

nevertheless, that without some definite awareness of the relationship

between the ego and the outer world, there can be no true sense

of self, since there is no definition of the distinction that places

self above one’s fellow man. This simple existence is still innocent

of the motives that create the artifices of individual and selfhood.

Both Christ and Buddha showed that bondage to such relationships

destroyed such selflessness, by creating attachments to the objects of

one’s own ego:

Love not anything;

Hate and envy arise from this same love.

He who loves nothing hates nothing,

Is free from all evil bonds.

(Dhammapada)

If any man come to me and hate not

his father and mother and wife and

children and brethren and sisters,

yea, and his own life also,

he cannot be my disciple.

(Luke 14:26)

The distinction between “thou” and “me”, sustained by the frail

yoke of human desire, pitilessly outlines the nakedness of the self,

tortured by its own anxieties, entangled in the subtleties of its own

rationalizing. The opposite ideal may be difficult or impossible to

attain, yet it necessarily persists in the memory, from whence it finds

perennial expression in the teachings of mystics and philosophers,

pointing back to the original state before the rational intellect and its

self-consciousness. It is most suggestive that the word “rationalize” is

derived from the Latin ratio (intellect) since that is exactly the function

of the mind, i.e., to reckon with its own assumptions and produce

agreement between “reality” and its own mode of understanding.

Since these assumptions are preserved as mental habits, which

subordinate the present to the past, they become entangled in the

tyranny of time, thereby contrasting the image of the anxious self

with the insufficiencies of its ephemeral existence.

During the hallucinogenic experience, one is frequently obliged

to undergo such an encounter with the naked soul, robbed of its

“outer-directed” pretensions and driven by the need to rationally cope

with the material released from the inner consciousness. The nature

of this encounter necessarily varies with the subject, but since one’s

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visions are but projections of the self, the self is inevitably forced to

evaluate its own image, resulting in varying degrees of apprehension.

Anxieties, fears, practiced deceits, and neurotic habits, all emerge

under a powerful magnifying lens, along with the illusions that

constitute one’s appraisal of reality. To be brought face to face with

one’s own defects may be a terrifying experience, but the truthfulness

of LSD and mescaline is such that it does not spare the beholder

unpleasant facts regarding himself.

During subsequent experiments with the drugs, one notes

a growing tendency to anticipate their visionary content; these

preconceptions result in a sort of spurious experience that is partly

an attempt to rationalize involvement with some a priori anxiety,

similar to that which drives us into the sangsaric contradictions of life

described by Eastern religions. The first hallucinogenic experience

is free from such anticipation, however, and is always a genuine

adventure, leading to unknown explorations:

Mais les vrais voyageurs sont ceux-la seuls

qui partent pour partir . . . (but the true travelers

are those who go just to be going . . .)

(Baudelaire, Le Voyage)

But, invariably, the sophistication of advancing knowledge

begins to gnaw at the innocent pleasure that one obtains from his

view of paradise. One begins to sense that he is involved not with the

splendors of the primal world, but with the shadows and souvenirs of

his own will, carrying him around in an aimless circle of self-deceit.

Repeated dosages create an obsession with result. The victim

becomes anxious lest each experiment will not be as rewarding as the

last. He learns by object lesson that he is in search of the essentially

unattainable, for the value of an illusion lies in its very unreachableness.

He learns the masturbatory pleasure of intensifying desire by means

of self-imposed obstructions to its realization. For him, Rimbaud’s

complaint becomes an obsession: “Real life is elsewhere!” Reality is

not here; it is an image burled in the imagination, clothed in romantic

symbols of death, the ineffable, and the beyond. The drug-taker or

the poet who seeks a temporary taste of the infinite in his inverted

world of self-indulgence earns but fleeting freedom from banal reality.

The very strain of the deception inevitably collapses in anxiety and

disillusionment.

This tragedy of Weltschmerz derives from the fact that knowledge

destroys illusion, and such a reaction is irreversible. Once attained,

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31

knowledge cannot be gotten rid of. What charm life possesses is

beyond logic, and thus incommunicable. Every great man undergoes

a purgatorial descent into himself, only to learn that what can be

told is not the truth and that truth is what cannot be expressed.

Such a confession is not an account of knowledge, but of the

paradox encountered in the nakedness of his soul. For that which we

understand has lost its charm, like toys that have been dismantled to

reveal their secrets. This progressive exposure of life’s basic paradox

leaves us alone and uncomforted; the sacredness of the primal world,

with its authority and tradition, survives only as an unconscious

search for our archetypal symbols, enigmatically pointing to some

lost world. Doubt destroys our capacities to experience beauty; soon

we are able to love, to feel, and to express ourselves. Anxiety, lack of

meaning, and the sense of rootlessness increase our impotence, so

that the fear of not finding pleasure obliterates our ability to do so.

Life’s meaning is reduced by the loss of spontaneous vision; finally,

the bright colors of paradise are faded into dull shades of grey, and

the light of perception is hidden in shadow

This schizophrenic interlude during the psychogenic experience

plunges one into absolute limbo of zero-nothingness. Where the

casements of eternity once shone with unbelievable splendor, one now

sees only cold, dead matter, totally divested of significance, neither

joyful nor tragic, but characterized by complete lack of emotion. No

one who has experienced this hollow world of vacuity can fail to

understand the lusterless existence of schizophrenic withdrawal or

its genesis in the cosmic dilemma. Robbed of its illusions, the naked

soul stands dead and alone. Hallucination may continue, but the

external world is utterly empty. Denuded of their authority, beyond

all contact with one’s exhausted energies, the earth’s primordial

beauties are fled; its physical presence becomes sepulcher. Here, in

complete negativity, not even pain is possible; having once reached

the bottom of the psychic abyss, the mind has spanned the full circle

from sheer affirmation to limitless nothing.

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Perhaps the most remarkable property of mescaline and LSD is

The Far-Off Land: An Attempt at a Philosophical Evaluation of the Hallucinogenic Drug-Experience