No, Psy-Drugs Are Not the Keys to the Kingdom
There is a simple reason why I oppose the assertions(s) that psychedelic drugs:
a: Are good.
b: Educate you
c: Make you more creative
d: Are a doorway to enlightenment or wisdom
e: Connect you to nonhuman intelligence
f: Are the actual sources of language and knowledge
g: Are the real source of religion(s)
h: Are ‘a shaman’s power medicine’
The reason is that these are lies.
In human minds and experiences, associations are absolutely crucial to understanding and awareness. The association of intoxication with ‘matters of spirituality’ is a catastrophic one, and leads to a nightmarish plethora of deadly, and often stupidfying suppositions, theories, assumptions… and associations. It also leads directly to developmental damage, health damage, and… very regularly, a wide range of mental problems including psychosis and para-schizoid delusions.
Perhaps more urgently, however, the deep experience of waking-world, active spirituality — the experiences from which this term originates… exceed the entire available range of drug experiences so explosively, that associating the two is like pretending that moldy wrapping paper… is divine food. Anyone who has had direct experience of ‘ordinary spirituality’ — by which I mean direct contact with nature, each other and our origins — would scoff at the idea that drugs are even interesting, let alone ‘useful’ or ‘good’.
Lacking this direct experience of our nature and of the nature of our origins, drug experiences set up dangerously self-falsifying precedents and examples, and these are, in general, the results of alienation and absence, not presence and enaction in true relation, which is the root and fountain of all we too easily tar with the modern epithet ‘spiritual’. The problem is not unlike exposure to video games or pornography; we are trained by exposure to require extremely bizarre circumstances and environments in order to feel or sense anything at all.
Children who are regularly exposed to electronic stimulation via devices, suffer rapid degradation of their ordinary sensory and developmental faculties. This effectively inhibits their ability to connect with or develop the plethora of actually available senses and abilities that are the endowments of their human nature and birth. Though some such children (or adults) can, in the right environments and with careful encouragement, be brought back into a sense of their human nature and abilities, the vast majority of them will suffer permanent relational, sensory, cognitive, emotional and physical damage.
In general this damage is aggressively progressive, and continues to deepen and isolate them over their usually shortened lifespans. In this sense, we are all children; our brains and bodies learn ‘what the world is and is about’ by direct experience of exposure to stimuli, and where these are false, intoxicating, electronic or otherwise anogranic, the results are, most often, damage cascades that continue and become more compelling as the processes involved gain an ever-more compelling grip on our thoughts, actions and expectations.
I will now respond in detail to each of the common misapprehensions related to drug use and, particularly, the use of psychedelic drugs.
a: “Drugs are good.”
Sudden metabolic and/or cognitive shock is only rarely reasonably understood as ‘good’, and can have catastrophic effects on the developmental future of the person in question. While there may exist some limited situations in which these drugs can be used efficaciously for a positive purpose, the common idea that they are ‘just good’ or ‘something you should do to expand your mind’ is both wrong and dangerous… because the idea that one should consume a drug in order to have experiences that can (must) be exceeded by ordinary (nonordinary) experiences is a dangerous ‘replacement’ con. The goal is to replace something we already posses, with something more compelling but actually toxic — and far less vital and useful. In other words, to dehumanize us through prosthetic ‘extension’ by chemical shock.
b: “Drugs educate you.”
Well, anything qualifies here. Being hit by a car will also educate you. Frankly, the kind of education that generally occurs with drug use is almost inevitably destabilizing, confusing, and will tend to cause various forms of emotional and relational damage. One common problem is that people tend to ‘want to belong’, we are born with an almost innate desire to experience membership in groups — but the groups that drugs generally connect us to tend to be extremely toxic and oriented by nonsensical ideas, agendas, paradigms … and people. This isn’t the kind of education anyone should sign up for, and the exceptions are extremely rare, and still, in general, dangerously misguided.
c: “Drugs make you more creative.”
Again, lots of unwanted experiences can contribute to creativity; this is not a good reason to seek them out. Moreover, creativity is a relationship with oneself and one’s imagination and skill. Basing this on drug use, or associating drug use with this relatively sacred aspect of our human experience is catastrophically wrong-minded, and leads to situations where creativity depends upon intoxication. This is a lethal habit that should never be formed, let alone celebrated.
Mental illness can make you more creative. Cancer. More creative doesn’t necessarily equate with a desirable state. And, again, a pill or similar prosthesis (i.e. herb, etc.) is both unnecessary and sets a dangerous precedent (i.e: things go better with drugs).
d: “Drugs are a doorway to enlightenment or wisdom.”
No. Frankly, this is and has been true for nearly no one, ever. The few people who suggest this, people like Terrence McKenna, Timothy Leary, and so on… were people of profoundly unusual intelligence and creativity prior to being exposed to drugs. Psychedelic drugs ordinarily deliver projections from the psyche that encounters them. This is not only not enlightening, but sets a precedent of mimicry: that is, the false is accepted as the true, and the shadows are taken for the being that would otherwise cast them. The whole idea that drugs lead to enlightenment is entirely wrongminded, and leads people to believe that ‘the answer is in intoxication’, an idea nearly nowhere supported or encouraged.
McKenna, fascinating though he was, was also catastrophically stupid in advising whole generations to go looking for new frontiers in hallucinogen-land. What you want is what you are carrying, and this is not delivered via intoxication. It is obscured and mimicked by it. Wrong road.
As a side note, although I have heard thousands of people making and mimicking this assertion, I have never known even one individual that was capable of demonstrating anything resembling enlightenment or wisdom due to drug experiences. In fact, most of what these people do is simply repeat nonsense they have acquired in the associated subcultures, and, in general, not only is this unenlightened and unwise… it is actively stupidifying.
e: “Drugs connect you to nonhuman intelligences.”
There is a difference between that which masquerades as nonhuman intelligence, delivering little or nothing of actually nonhuman character (or intelligence), and that which is and demonstrates such intelligence. Having heard endless claims of this and seen not even a single convincing demonstration, whilst having seen endless such demonstrations by those unintoxicated, I am inclined to doubt the common efficacy of hallucinogens for this purpose. Most of what drugs ‘connect you to’ is para-psychotic, and if one’s first experiences are mimetic (that is, they mimic something they cannot deliver) this has catastrophic results for one’s expectations and developmental opportunities. The reasons are simple: if we introduce people to junk food prior to introducing them to real food, they soon acclimate to enjoy and expect poison. Same problem with drugs.
f: “Drugs are the actual sources of language and knowledge.”
The actual origins of language and knowledge are still available within ourselves, and we ourselves acquired language in childhood. Neither of these indicate the intervention of psychedelic drugs. What is involved is a series of events and relationships too astonishing for us to admit, but it is not ‘we ate some mushroom, saw gods, and began to babble’. We saw gods all the time. No mushroom required. We still do, given the proper contexts.
g: “Drugs are the actual sources of human religions.”
As above. And language and religion are essentially a single topic, since they emerged together in our cognitive evolution… in any case, as with language and knowledge, the direct experiences and faculties that gave rise to the religions of the world are born with us; the use of drugs will practically guarantee that we will neither discover nor become aware of our capacities to relate with them if we are first exposed to psychedelia and the openly nonsensical cultures that are associated with it.
h: “Drugs are the Shaman’s power medicine.”
This one makes me the most upset. I want to clearly state that no drugs are required for anything the Shaman does. The fact that certain shamans employ some plants (occasionally) as an expedient… is so vastly misunderstood that millions equate psychedelic drugs with a sacrament. This is absolutely wrong, and horribly dangerous. The intimate relationship between yourself, nature and origin is the sacrament, and for nearly all westernized people, drugs represent a lethally dangerous precedent. For an experienced holy person, or medicine person, drugs are an uncommonly desired and rarely used expedient. Though there are a few exceptions in specific indigenous cultures, these cultures and their traditions are always obliterated by exposure to Western culture. Why? Because exposure to Western culture, technology, object-relations and language obliterates the context in which indigenous cultures exist and thrive.
In every case, what you brought with you, uninhibited and unoccluded, to your human birth, was everything you needed. No secret or power is hidden in a drug that is even interesting compared to you. The idea that a drug gives you powers or abilities you are not already carrying far more than is a dangerous idea that inhibits our natural relational and intellectual development… and creates false projections of enlightenment and reality which enthrall and delude countless millions of people… and whose popular promulgation destroy both lives and minds.
In appropriate contexts, and with the clear understanding that we are carrying more than such drugs can invoke or deliver and that we must awaken these capacities ourselves, psychedelic drugs can provide powerful and useful experiences. But they also set dangerous precedents, and this is too often ignored by those who sing their praises as a universal panacea of wisdom, enlightenment, and learning.
They are not now and have never been this. If they were, the evidence would be staggering. They would, indeed, have saved us and our minds a long time ago. They didn’t. They won’t. They can’t. They are simply not endowed with the aura of divinity we too easily associate with them.
We, however, are.
I am insatiably curious about the nature of living beings, intelligence, language, and nearly everything else. I hope my work may contribute to our ability to assemble the authentic sources of what our modern cultures are but the broken remnants and falsified costumes of. Together. With and for each other and our world.
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