How to Become One With the Universe
Trying psychedelics, sex, politics, and whatever else sticks to the wall
“I just wanna go home.”
This is how one friend of mine explained the appeal of psychedelic mushrooms. It’s an arresting phrase.
Of course, I have had plenty of friends attempt a similar explanation for their attraction to hallucinogens: mushrooms, marijuana, LSD, and even other drugs “so designer they’re not even illegal yet” (that one was back in the days of Silk Road — they’d come to our apartment through the USPS). But none of my friends’ descriptions captured it in a way so profound and yet so simple as this one — as the desire to “go home.”
Hallucinogens, of course, aren’t the only way people try to get home. Nor is “going home” the only reason to use hallucinogens. People use them just to see what happens, to have fun, to escape misery, even to improve their mental focus and creativity. But these are all relatively shallow reasons, and will lead, if followed with enthusiasm, to this more profound one.
What does it mean, then, “to go home”?
Home is Where Time Stops
Home is where you belong. Not because the people back home have shared interests like a club (though they may), not because of shared beliefs like a church (though they may have those too), but because of a shared origin. It’s where you started. And we are a restless people; people who most certainly do not feel at home.
So we search for our origins — to return to the source. We wonder if we can find a cure for restlessness with politics, if only we can re-found the original political community. We try to find a cure with love, if only we can return to our literal origin. Or we turn to drugs. Why? What are we looking for when we look for home?
Well, what is it about conscious, waking life that makes it feel like not-home? Let’s look first at psychedelics. What gets stripped away by the hallucinogenic trip? Psychedelics are able to peel back two especially alien aspects of normal life, to make you feel finally “at home” (and these two aspects are probably so intertwined as to be inextricable): the experiences of time and of self-consciousness. The effect is, as my friend put it, “a temporary peeling back of rationality, an induction of enchantment. A return to Eden, to man’s natural state of religious intoxication.”
That’s what it means to go home. To return to what we can sense — in our bones — we were made for. In a word, ecstasy, from the Greek, “to put out of place.” Out of place, that is, from this alienating, foreign world, into the natural and innocent world you’re meant for. By the very act of taking drugs in order to escape the prison of waking consciousness, the drug user makes a startling acknowledgment, one which he may not even be aware he is making. He acknowledges that this world is not a proper home. It’s why the world feels so alien to us. Because we are aliens in it.
But what of this Edenic world, this true home, to which we belong and for which we long? I’m tempted to call it “supernatural,” but it’s probably better expressed not as above the natural, but as radically natural, more natural than what we think of as “nature,” at the very base of naturalness itself. Injecting you into ecstatic hyper-naturalness — that is the power of psychedelics. It is also what makes them a portal to evil, to be avoided at any cost.
Devilish Invitation
How could this be? Why is it that a return to Eden, our true home, the escape from both self-consciousness and the experience of time, could be a portal to evil? Are dreams, then, a portal to evil since they do much the same thing? That dreams act as portals is hard to dispute — stories abound of visions of angels, of prophecies, of supernatural insight in a dreaming state. Dreams, however, are a side effect of sleep. They are not, like administering yourself a drug, a deliberate act. And it is in the deliberate administration of the drug that the invitation resides — the invitation to malevolent, chthonic forces.
What is the nature of the invitation? It is an invitation to confusion. You are not, after all, actually back in Eden when you are tripping. To think that drugs could get you there is to make a mistake about what Eden is and why we got exiled in the first place. More on that below. On the other hand, let us be clear: It is not a mistake to want to return home. If your instinct is to scoff at this hope, it is better for you to hold your tongue.
For anyone who fails to take seriously that elusive sense of fullness, that desire for Eden, that desire to go home, is not himself worth taking seriously. Because the desire itself is good. It is, after all, a desire for total presentness — for eternal presentness even — and for complete, uninhibited sharing. As we’ve said above, there are many ways of grasping at this, besides hallucinogens. What, after all, is the experience of love if not one, firstly, of time “standing still,” and secondly, one of sharing everything, including your own body?
The Body Problem
Especially your body. It is the problem of bodies, after all, that ejected us from Eden — and it keeps us out even still (and assures us that simulacra like hallucinogens will never get us back there).
What happened in the expulsion from Eden? Our naked bodies were clothed. The expulsion from Eden was the birth of privacy. Not only did our genitals become private parts, but we also began having private thoughts (“I know what’s good and evil for myself”) and hence, private desires. What then, is the problem with privacy? It is best illustrated politically.
After drugs and love, the most common guise that the attempted return to Eden takes is politics. Political utopianism is an assault on the barred gates of Eden. What we cannot achieve in love or in our minds we attempt politically: to thrust the world into the ideal time, and to make all goods infinitely shareable. It is, however, an impossible task.
That said, digital technology, more than anything previous in history, seems poised to deliver on the promise of infinitely shareable goods. But digital tech still bumps up inexorably against the stubborn “mine” and “yours” of bodies. The world, mediated digitally, might indeed be shareable far beyond anything previously imagined, but digital fails to make the final crucial step, because ultimately it pretends bodies don’t really exist. My pain is only my pain — not yours; my pleasure is only my pleasure — not yours; and finally, my blood is still only my blood, and not the blood of any other. My hallucinogen-obsessed friends in high school had this right when they quoted Donnie Darko: “Every creature on this earth dies alone.”
What does this mean? It means that we all are, digital or not, rivals. And if rivals, enemies. After all, I learn to want, to desire, by watching you and seeing what it is that you want. The toddler wants the food from his parent’s plate, not from his own. Everyone at school wants to date whichever girl the quarterback is dating. I style my wardrobe after my boss’s style, or maybe I wear suits sans tie like Andrew Yang, or I fashion myself after the insane outfits NBA stars wear to the arena. If you have it, I want it. Seeing your pleasure, I want to make it my pleasure. And if I am to take it from you, I will turn it into your pain. If you bleed, it is only your blood that spills on the ground — not mine. We cannot help being enemies.
If weak men are content to be slaves, and lie to themselves that they prefer mud and are enemies of none, so be it, but any man who receives the spirit of Caesar will proclaim with him: “I could not bear Magnus ruling the world of Rome with me: Ptolemy, shall I bear you, then? Uselessly have we embroiled the nations in civil warfare if in this world there is any other power than Caesar, if any land belongs to two.” No man wants to share his wife — the ones who do are not men. In the same way, men of spirit do not want to share their glory.
So, even if we were to find the gates of Eden themselves, and to find a ram strong enough to knock them down, that splendid Garden would disappear before our eyes like so much morning mist. Eden is not a place. Nor is it a mindset, even. It is that plane of existence in which “mine” and “yours” become “ours,” where all rivalry ceases, not by decree or by artifice, but organically and truly. We should not be surprised then, that political utopianism, which attempts this by force and by fraud, is inevitably stultifying and oppressive: corruptio optimi pessima. Utopians attempt the best of all things, and when they fail, as they always do, they become the worst of all. So our political Edens go.
What utopias are to our politics, hallucinogens are to the mind. Pursuit of the former serves as an invitation to monstrous men to create hell on earth. Ingesting the latter serves as an invitation to supernatural monsters to create hell in your mind.
Hallucinogens may transport the perceptions to Eden, but they are ultimately an agent of confusion, because Eden isn’t a matter of mere perception. Yes, you feel like you’re in Eden, for a time. The drugs transport the perceptions out of ugliness into the ecstatic beauty you long for, but they do nothing about the actual ugliness in which you very much remain. Their effect is then an achievement purely of fraud, just like the Philosopher-Kings who tell the laboring class that they’re made of bronze and thus destined for labor. Except here, the drug is the king and you are the slave — happily accepting mud pies in the slum as if they’re the same as a vacation at the sea.
The drugs cannot actually render your body — much less any other bodies — infinitely shareable. They don’t fix the ugliness at the root of our alienation. They do not fix the problem of privacy, that is, of private knowledge of good and evil, and hence our private pains and private pleasures, which ejected us from Eden, and which bar us still. Shared ceremonial ayahuasca trips are no exception, even though “shared.” Confusion shared is not any less confusion for its multiplication.
A deliberate invitation to confusion is one thing — an effort to confuse oneself in order to grasp at sublime mysteries from which we’ve been banished is another. If the negative political principle that the corruption of the best is the worst of all holds true for the operations of the rational mind, then we can see that hallucinogens truly are an invitation to demons. We cannot walk with the angels in Eden, but in our attempt to commune with them through delusion, we may be summoning forth the fallen angels who are more than happy to play the part, until they turn on us to accomplish their malign end — the permanent destruction of mind.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night-Howl, Allen Ginsberg
Perhaps it seems overwrought to warn the lost boys mired in drug experimentation, whose hallucinations do little beyond distracting them from boredom, that they are playing with infernal fire. But the shackling of a feeble, passive mind is no great feat for demonic power. This can be set in motion in an afternoon. And what practical difference will it make for a man who has already given up to welcome in demons? Would you even notice the difference? It is the prospect of destroying a truly great mind that makes the demons salivate. And if they can do so through a clandestine government psyop and derail an entire culture at the same time, all the better.
The Promises of Eros
Can we then ever go home? If the way is barred — politics deliver us up to oppressors, drugs deliver us up to demons — can anything get us there? Suppose we were to set at the root of the tree: privacy itself? We were naked, after all, in Eden. Privacy had not yet imposed its bloody reign upon us. But nudism, as a tactic for recovering Eden, is an exercise in mistaking a sign, or a consequence, for a cause. It is a charade, though one that comes perilously close to disclosing the reality and meaning of human existence. How so? Because there is, in fact, one venue in which we habitually find ourselves nude: when we make love. (You are not nude when bathing or dressing — nudity necessarily entails some sort of display. Then, you are merely unclothed and alone, and in a purely functional manner.)
While making love, you disrobe so that you might arouse your beloved, that your body might be her pleasure, and that her body might become your pleasure. In this moment, the private parts are no longer private — they are shared. Our bodies, veiled in the expulsion from Eden, are suddenly unveiled. In this moment, we experience something very much resembling what my friend called “A return to Eden, to man’s natural state of religious intoxication.” Is sex, then, the long-looked-for return home?
Alas, no. For in the moment when the conscious limits of your body begin to dissolve in union with your beloved and time itself flees away (remember, self-consciousness and time being the two alien aspects of the world), your body betrays you. The waxing of the ecstatic, like an ocean wave rushing in to swamp the puny sand castle of your individual being — it disappears, rushing back out to sea. The sand castle of self-consciousness stands, craggy and stubborn, not like sand at all but a hoary reef of coral, immovable and unchanged despite the lashing of the tide.
Her pleasure, in the end, is not your pleasure. Your body is yours; her body is hers. And you lie back, eyes up at the ceiling. Work tomorrow.
Making love comes very close indeed to the Garden. A political assault on Eden is much too crude — your armies will not come within a thousand yards of the gates. But making love carries you close enough to catch a whiff of flowers otherwise unknown to exiled men — enough of a whiff, alas, to make us pine all the more for what we have lost.
Follow your nose. What about making love gets you close enough to the garden wall to smell the aroma of Eden?
It is not the pleasure, really, for it’s also the pleasure that betrays you. Or if it’s the pleasure, then the sensation of pleasure isn’t the actual cause — there must be something deeper, some other thing that transmutes the lead of pleasurable sensation into the gold of supernatural visitation.
Whatever this other thing is, this mystery that beckons you home, it will be something that enables bodies to be shared totally. Not fleetingly like two lovers exhausted by their own fleeting pleasure nor like a drug-induced illusion, but permanently and truly without force or fraud. It will unlock the gates of privacy forever, turn political community into true human communion, and redeem us for Eden.
This other thing, if we find it, would look something like an ancient lawgiver of old, but an undying one, not constrained like Solon or Moses by the dead letter of the law, but still among us, administering justice as a king, by right and not by the lies or bloodshed of the utopians. Thus our private knowledge of good and evil would be overcome by one shared knowledge received whole and entire from the lawgiver-king. But shared knowledge alone does not suffice to dissolve the self-conscious veil of privacy.
This other thing, if we find it, would also have to make our pains and pleasures shared, by giving us a common bloodline thicker even than the blood a father passes down to his son. He would have to give us, like a lover, his own blood, so that, all of us sharing in his pleasures and pains, we would share each others’ pleasures and pains, neutralizing the rivalry and violence of desire.
If only this other thing could somehow give himself in the form of body and of blood, that we might consume him. Rather than administering to ourselves a drug which transports the perceptions and confuses the mind, we could consume the flesh of the undying king and drink his blood and thus let our bodies be remade into his body, our mind renewed with his mind, and finally, we could come home. That is, in fact, what the Eucharist is.
