The Joyous Cosmology

Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness

Alan W. Watts Foreword by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert

"To the People of Druid Heights"

Contents

Foreword Preface Prologue The Joyous Cosmology Epilog

The Joyous Cosmology  ©1962 by Pantheon Books, a division of Random

House.

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Foreword

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The Joyous Cosmology is a brilliant arrangement of words describing

experiences for which our language has no vocabulary. To understand

this wonderful but difficult book it is useful to make the artificial

distinction between the external and the internal. This is, of course,

exactly the distinction which Alan Watts wants us to transcend. But Mr.

Watts is playing the verbal game in a Western language, and his reader

can be excused for following along with conventional dichotomous

models.

External and internal. Behavior and consciousness. Changing the

external world has been the genius and the obsession of our

civilization. In the last two centuries the Western monotheistic

cultures have faced outward and moved objects about with astonishing

efficiency. In more recent years, however, our culture has become aware

of a disturbing imbalance. We have become aware of the undiscovered

universe within, of the uncharted regions of consciousness.

This dialectic trend is not new. The cycle has occurred in the lives of

many cultures and individuals. External material success is followed by

disillusion and the basic "why" questions, and then by the discovery of

the world within---a world infinitely more complex and rich than the

artifactual structures of the outer world, which after all are, in

origin, projections of human imagination. Eventually, the logical

conceptual mind turns on itself, recognizes the foolish inadequacy of

the flimsy systems it imposes on the world, suspends its own rigid

control, and overthrows the domination of cognitive experience.

We speak here (and Alan Watts speaks in this book) about the politics

of the nervous system---certainly as complicated and certainly as

important as external politics. The politics of the nervous system

involves the mind against the brain, the tyrannical verbal brain

disassociating itself from the organism and world of which it is a

part, censoring, alerting, evaluating.

Thus appears the fifth freedom---freedom from the learned, cultural

mind. The freedom to expand one's consciousness beyond artifactual

cultural knowledge. The freedom to move from constant preoccupation

with the verbal games---the social games, the game of self---to the

joyous unity of what exists beyond.

We are dealing here with an issue that is not new, an issue that has

been considered for centuries by mystics, by philosophers of the

religious experience, by those rare and truly great scientists who have

been able to move in and then out beyond the limits of the science

game. It was seen and described clearly by the great American

psychologist William James:

. . . our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we

call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it,

parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of

consciousness entirely different.. We may go through life without

suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a

touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of

mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and

adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final

which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How

to regard them is the question,-for they are so discontinuous with

ordinary consciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they

cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a

map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with

reality. Looking back on my own experiences, they all converge toward a

kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical

significance.

But what are the stimuli necessary and sufficient to overthrow the

domination of the conceptual and to open up the "potential forms of

consciousness"? There are many. Indian philosophers have described

hundreds of methods. So have the Japanese Buddhists. The monastics of

our Western religions provide more examples. Mexican healers and

religious leaders from South and North American Indian groups have for

centuries utilized sacred plants to trigger off the expansion of

consciousness. Recently our Western science has provided, in the form

of chemicals, the most direct techniques for opening new realms of

awareness.

William James used nitrous oxide and ether to "stimulate the mystical

consciousness in an extraordinary degree." Today the attention of

psychologists, philosophers, and theologians is centering on the

effects of three synthetic substances---mescaline, lysergic acid, and

psilocybin.

What are these substances? Medicines or drugs or sacramental foods? It

is easier to say what they are not. They are not narcotics, nor

intoxicants, nor energizers, nor anaesthetics, nor tranquilizers. They

are, rather, biochemical keys which unlock experiences shatteringly new

to most Westerners.

For the last two years, staff members of the Center for Research in

Personality at Harvard University have engaged in systematic

experiments with these substances. Our first inquiry into the

biochemical expansion of consciousness has been a study of the

reactions of Americans in a supportive, comfortable naturalistic

setting. We have had the opportunity of participating in over one

thousand individual administrations. From our observations, from

interviews and reports, from analysis of questionnaire data, and from

pre- and postexperimental differences in personality test results,

certain conclusions have emerged. (I) These substances do alter

consciousness. There is no dispute on this score. (2) It is meaningless

to talk more specifically about the "effect of the drug." Set and

setting, expectation, and atmosphere account for all specificity of

reaction. There is no "drug reaction" but always setting-plus-drug. (3)

In talking about potentialities it is useful to consider not just the

setting-plus-drug but rather the potentialities of the human cortex to

create images and experiences far beyond the narrow limitations of

words and concepts. Those of us on this research project spend a good

share of our working hours listening to people talk about the effect

and use of consciousness-altering drugs. If we substitute the words

human cortex for drug we can then agree with any statement made about

the potentialities---for good or evil, for helping or hurting, for

loving or fearing. Potentialities of the cortex, not of the drug. The

drug is just an instrument.

In analyzing and interpreting the results of our studies we looked

first to the conventional models of modern psychology---psychoanalytic,

behaviorist---and found these concepts quite inadequate to map the

richness and breadth of expanded consciousness. To understand our

findings we have finally been forced back on a language and point of

view quite alien to us who are trained in the traditions of mechanistic

objective psychology. We have had to return again and again to the

nondualistic conceptions of Eastern philosophy, a theory of mind made

more explicit and familiar in our Western world by Bergson, Aldous

Huxley, and Alan Watts. In the first part of this book Mr. Watts

presents with beautiful clarity this theory of consciousness, which we

have seen confirmed in the accounts of our research subjects---

philosophers, unlettered convicts, housewives, intellectuals,

alcoholics. The leap across entangling thickets of the verbal, to

identify with the totality of the experienced, is a phenomenon reported

over and over by these persons.

Alan Watts spells out in eloquent detail his drug-induced visionary

moments. He is, of course, attempting the impossible---to describe in

words (which always lie) that which is beyond words. But how well he

can do it!

Alan Watts is one of the great reporters of our times. He has an

intuitive sensitivity for news, for the crucial issues and events of

the century. And he has along with this the verbal equipment of a

poetic philosopher to teach and inform. Here he has given us perhaps

the best statement on the subject of space-age mysticism, more daring

than the two classic works of Aldous Huxley because Watts follows Mr.

Huxley's lead and pushes beyond. The recognition of the love aspects of

the mystical experience and the implications for new forms of social

communication are especially important.

You are holding in your hand a great human document. But unless you are

one of the few Westerners who have (accidentally or through chemical

good fortune) experienced a mystical minute of expanded awareness, you

will probably not understand what the author is saying. Too bad, but

still not a cause for surprise. The history of ideas reminds us that

new concepts and new visions have always been non-understood. We cannot

understand that for which we have no words. But Alan Watts is playing

the book game, the word game, and the reader is his contracted partner.

But listen. Be prepared. There are scores of great lines in this book.

Dozens of great ideas. Too many. Too compressed. They glide by too

quickly. Watch for them.

If you catch even n few of these ideas, you will find yourself asking

the questions which we ask ourselves as we look over our research data:

Where do we go from here? What is the application of these new wonder

medicines? Can they do more than provide memorable moments and

memorable books?

The answer will come from two directions. We must provide more and more

people with these experiences and have them tell us, as Alan Watts does

here, what they experienced. (There will hardly be a lack of volunteers

for this ecstatic voyage. Ninety-one percent of our subjects are eager

to repeat and to share the experience with their family and friends).

We must also encourage systematic objective research by scientists who

have taken the drug themselves and have come to know the difference

between inner and outer, between consciousness and behavior. Such

research should explore the application of these experiences to the

problems of modern living---in education, religion, creative industry,

creative arts.

There are many who believe that we stand at an important turning point

in man's power to control and expand his awareness. Our research

provides tentative grounds for such optimism. The Joyous Cosmology is

solid testimony for the same happy expectations.

Timothy Leary, Ph.D.---Richard Alpert, Ph.D.

Harvard University, January, 1962

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Preface

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In The Doors of Perception Aldous Huxley has given us a superbly

written account of the effects of mescaline upon a highly sensitive

person. It was a record of his first experience of this remarkable

transformation of consciousness, and by now, through subsequent

experiments, he knows that it can lead to far deeper insights than his

book described. While I cannot hope to surpass Aldous Huxley as a

master of English prose, I feel that the time is ripe for an account of

some of the deeper, or higher, levels of insight that can be reached

through these consciousness-changing "drugs" when accompanied with

sustained philosophical reflection by a person who is in search, not of

kicks, but of understanding. I should perhaps add that, for me,

philosophical reflection is barren when divorced from poetic

imagination, for we proceed to understanding of the world upon two

legs, not one.

It is now a commonplace that there is a serious lack of communication

between scientists and laymen on the theoretical level, for the layman

does not understand the mathematical language in which the scientist

thinks. For example, the concept of curved space cannot be represented

in any image that is intelligible to the senses. But I am still more

concerned with the gap between theoretical description and direct

experience among scientists themselves. Western science is now

delineating a new concept of man, not as a solitary ego within a wall

of flesh, but as an organism which is what it is by virtue of its

inseparability from the rest of the world. But with the rarest

exceptions even scientists do not feel themselves to exist in this way.

They, and almost all of us, retain a sense of personality which is

independent, isolated, insular, and estranged from the cosmos that

surrounds it. Somehow this gap must be closed, and among the varied

means whereby the closure may be initiated or achieved are medicines

which science itself has discovered, and which may prove to be the

sacraments of its religion.

For a long time we have been accustomed to the compartmentalization of

religion and science as if they were two quite different and basically

unrelated ways of seeing the world. I do not believe that this state of

doublethink can last. It must eventually be replaced by a view of the

world which is neither religious nor scientific but simply our view of

the world. More exactly, it must become a view of the world in which

the reports of science and religion are as concordant as those of the

eyes and the ears.

But the traditional roads to spiritual experience seldom appeal to

persons of scientific or skeptical temperament, for the vehicles that

ply them are rickety and piled with excess baggage. There is thus

little opportunity for the alert and critical thinker to share at first

hand in the modes of consciousness that seers and mystics are trying to

express-often in archaic and awkward symbolism. If the pharmacologist

can be of help in exploring this unknown world, he may be doing us the

extraordinary service of rescuing religious experience from the

obscurantists.

To make this book as complete an expression as possible of the quality

of consciousness which these drugs induce, I have included a number of

photographs which, in their vivid reflection of the patterns of nature,

give some suggestion of the rhythmic beauty of detail which the drugs

reveal in common things. For without losing their normal breadth of

vision the eyes seem to become a microscope through which the mind

delves deeper and deeper into the intricately dancing texture of our

world.

Alan W. Watts

San Francisco, 1962

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Prologue

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SLOWLY it becomes clear that one of the greatest of all superstitions

is the separation of the mind from the body. This does not mean that we

are being forced to admit that we are only bodies; it means that we are

forming an altogether new idea of the body. For the body considered as

separate from the mind is one thing---an animated corpse. But the body

considered as inseparable from the mind is another, and as yet we have

no proper word for a reality which is simultaneously mental and

physical. To call it mental-physical will not do at all, for this is

the very unsatisfactory joining of two concepts which have both been

impoverished by long separation and opposition. But we are at least

within sight of being able to discard altogether ideas of a stuff which

is mental and a stuff which is material. "Stuff" is a word which

describes the formless mush that we perceive when sense is not keen

enough to make out its pattern. The notion of material or mental stuff

is based on the false analogy that trees are made of wood, mountains of

stone, and minds of spirit in the same way that pots are made of clay.

"Inert" matter seems to require an external and intelligent energy to

give it form. But now we know that matter is not inert. Whether it is

organic or inorganic, we are learning to see matter as patterns of

energy---not of energy as if energy were a stuff, but as energetic

pattern, moving order, active intelligence.

The realization that mind and body, form and matter, are one is

blocked, however, by ages of semantic confusion and psychological

prejudice. For it is common sense that every pattern, shape, or

structure is a form of something as pots are forms of clay. It is hard

to see that this "something" is as dispensable as the ether in which

light was once supposed to travel, or as the fabulous tortoise upon

which the earth was once thought to be supported. Anyone who can really

grasp this point will experience a curiously exhilarating liberation,

for the burden of stuff will drop from him and he will walk less

heavily.

The dualism of mind and body arose, perhaps, as a clumsy way of

describing the power of an intelligent organism to control itself. It

seemed reasonable to think of the part controlled as one thing and the

part controlling as another. In this way the conscious will was opposed

to the involuntary appetites and reason to instinct. In due course we

learned to center our identity, our selfhood, in the controlling

part---the mind--- and increasingly to disown as a mere vehicle the

part controlled. It thus escaped our attention that the organism as a

whole, largely unconscious, was using consciousness and reason to

inform and control itself. We thought of our conscious intelligence as

descending from a higher realm to take possession of a physical

vehicle. We therefore failed to see it as an operation of the same

formative process as the structure of nerves, muscles, veins, and

bones---a structure so subtly ordered (that is, intelligent) that

conscious thought is as yet far from being able to describe it.

This radical separation of the part controlling from the part

controlled changed man from a self-controlling to a self- frustrating

organism, to the embodied conflict and self-contradiction that he has

been throughout his known history. Once the split occurred conscious

intelligence began to serve its own ends instead of those of the

organism that produced it. More exactly, it became the intention of the

conscious intelligence to work for its own, dissociated, purposes. But,

as we shall see, just as the separation of mind from body is an

illusion, so also is the subjection of the body to the independent

schemes of the mind. Meanwhile, however, the illusion is as real as the

hallucinations of hypnosis, and the organism of man is indeed

frustrating itself by patterns of behavior which move in the most

complex vicious circles. The culmination is a culture which ever more

serves the ends of mechanical order as distinct from those of organic

enjoyment, and which is bent on self-destruction against the instinct

of every one of its members.

We believe, then, that the mind controls the body, not that the body

controls itself through the mind. Hence the ingrained prejudice that

the mind should be independent of all physical aids to its

working---despite microscopes, telescopes, cameras, scales, computers,

books, works of art, alphabets, and all those physical tools apart from

which it is doubtful whether there would be any mental life at all. At

the same time there has always been at least an obscure awareness that

in feeling oneself to be a separate mind, soul, or ego there is

something wrong. Naturally, for a person who finds his identity in

something other than his full organism is less than half a man. He is

cut off from complete participation in nature. Instead of being a body

he "has" a body. Instead of living and loving he "has" instincts for

survival and copulation. Disowned, they drive him as if they were blind

furies or demons that possessed him.

The feeling that there is something wrong in all this revolves around a

contradiction characteristic of all civilizations. This is the

simultaneous compulsion to preserve oneself and to forget oneself. Here

is the vicious circle: if you feel separate from your organic life, you

feel driven to survive; survival---going on living---thus becomes a

duty and also a drag because you are not fully with it; because it does

not quite come up to expectations, you continue to hope that it will,

to crave for more time, to feel driven all the more to go on. What we

call self-consciousness is thus the sensation of the organism

obstructing itself, of not being with itself, of driving, so to say,

with accelerator and brake on at once. Naturally, this is a highly

unpleasant sensation, which most people want to forget.

The lowbrow way of forgetting oneself is to get drunk, to be diverted

with entertainments, or to exploit such natural means of

self-transcendence as sexual intercourse. The highbrow way is to throw

oneself into the pursuit of the arts, of social service, or of

religious mysticism. These measures are rarely successful because they

do not disclose the basic error of the split self. The highbrow ways

even aggravate the error to the extent that those who follow them take

pride in forgetting themselves by purely mental means---even though the

artist uses paints or sounds, the social idealist distributes material

wealth, and the religionist uses sacraments and rituals, or such other

physical means as fasting, yoga breathing, or dervish dancing. And

there is a sound instinct in the use of these physical aids, as in the

repeated insistence of mystics that to know about God is not enough:

transformation of the self is only through realizing or feeling God.

The hidden point is that man cannot function properly through changing

anything so superficial as the order of his thoughts, of his

dissociated mind. What has to change is the behavior of his organism;

it has to become self-controlling instead of self-frustrating.

How is this to be brought about? Clearly, nothing can be done by the

mind, by the conscious will, so long as this is felt to be something

apart from the total organism. But if it were felt otherwise, nothing

would need to be done! A very small number of Eastern gurus, or masters

of wisdom, and Western psychotherapists have found---rather

laborious---ways of tricking or coaxing the organism into integrating

itself---mostly by a kind of judo, or "gentle way," which overthrows

the process of self-frustration by carrying it to logical and absurd

extremes. This is pre-eminently the way of Zen, and occasionally that

of psychoanalysis. When these ways work it is quite obvious that

something more has happened to the student or patient than a change in

his way of thinking; he is also emotionally and physically different;

his whole being is operating in a new way.

For a long time it has been clear to me that certain forms of Eastern

"mysticism"---in particular Taoism and Zen Buddhism---do not presuppose

a universe divided into the spiritual and the material, and do not

culminate in a state of consciousness where the physical world vanishes

into some undifferentiated and bodiless luminescence. Taoism and Zen

are alike founded upon a philosophy of relativity, but this philosophy

is not merely speculative. It is a discipline in awareness as a result

of which the mutual interrelation of all things and all events becomes

a constant sensation. This sensation underlies and supports our normal

awareness of the world as a collection of separate and different

things---an awareness which, by itself, is called avidya (ignorance) in

Buddhist philosophy because, in paying exclusive attention to

differences, it ignores relationships. It does not see, for example,

that mind and form or shape and space are as inseparable as front and

back, nor that the individual is so interwoven with the universe that

he and it are one body.

This is a point of view which, unlike some other forms of mysticism,

does not deny physical distinctions but sees them as the plain

expression of unity. As one sees so clearly in Chinese painting, the

individual tree or rock is not on but with the space that forms its

background. The paper untouched by the brush is an integral part of the

picture and never mere backing. It is for this reason that when a Zen

master is asked about the universal or the ultimate, he replies with

the immediate and particular--- "The cypress tree in the yard!" Here,

then, we have what Robert Linssen has called a spiritual

materialism---a standpoint far closer to relativity and field theory in

modern science than to any religious supernaturalism. But whereas the

scientific comprehension of the relative universe is as yet largely

theoretical, these Eastern disciplines have made it a direct

experience. Potentially, then, they would seem to offer a marvelous

parallel to Western science, but on the level of our immediate

awareness of the world.

For science pursues the common-sense assumption that the natural world

is a multiplicity of individual things and events by attempting to

describe these units as accurately and minutely as possible. Because

science is above all analytic in its way of describing things, it seems

at first to disconnect them more than ever. Its experiments are the

study of carefully isolated situations, designed to exclude influences

that cannot be measured and controlled---as when one studies falling

bodies in a vacuum to cut out the friction of air. But for this reason

the scientist understands better than anyone else just how inseparable

things are. The more he tries to cut out external influences upon an

experimental situation, the more he discovers new ones, hitherto

unsuspected. The more carefully he describes, say, the motion of a

given particle, the more he finds himself describing also the space in

which it moves. The realization that all things are inseparably related

is in proportion to one's effort to make them clearly distinct. Science

therefore surpasses the common-sense point of view from which it

begins, coming to speak of things and events as properties of the

"fields" in which they occur. But this is simply a theoretical

description of a state of affairs which, in these forms of Eastern

Mysticism," is directly sensed. As soon as this is clear, we have a

sound basis for a meeting of minds between East and West which could be

remarkably fruitful.

The practical difficulty is that Taoism and Zen are so involved with

the forms of Far Eastern culture that it is a major problem to adapt

them to Western needs. For example, Eastern teachers work on the

esoteric and aristocratic principle that the student must learn the

hard way and find out almost everything for himself. Aside from

occasional hints, the teacher merely accepts or rejects the student's

attainments. But Western teachers work on the exoteric and democratic

principle that everything possible must be done to inform and assist

the student so as to make his mastery of the subject as easy as

possible. Does the latter approach, as purists insist, merely vulgarize

the discipline? The answer is that it depends upon the type of

discipline. If everyone learns enough mathematics to master quadratic

equations, the attainment will seem small in comparison with the much

rarer comprehension of the theory of numbers. But the transformation of

consciousness undertaken in Taoism and Zen is more like the correction

of faulty perception or the curing of a disease. It is not an

acquisitive process of learning more and more facts or greater and

greater skills, but rather an unlearning of wrong habits and opinions.

As Lao-tzu said, "The scholar gains every day, but the Taoist loses

every day."

The practice of Taoism or Zen in the Far East is therefore an

undertaking in which the Westerner will find himself confronted with

many barriers erected quite deliberately to discourage idle curiosity

or to nullify wrong views by inciting the student to proceed

systematically and consistently upon false assumptions to the reductio

ad absurdum. My own main interest in the study of comparative mysticism

has been to cut through these tangles and to identify the essential

psychological processes underlying those alterations of perception

which enable us to see ourselves and the world in their basic unity. I

have perhaps had some small measure of success in trying, Western

fashion, to make this type of experience more accessible. I am

therefore at once gratified and embarrassed by a development in Western

science which could possibly put this unitive vision of the world, by

almost shockingly easy means, within the reach of many who have thus

far sought it in vain by traditional methods.

Part of the genius of Western science is that it finds simpler and more

rational ways of doing things that were formerly chancy or laborious.

Like any inventive process, it does not always make these discoveries

systematically; often it just stumbles upon them, but then goes on to

work them into an intelligible order. In medicine, for example, science

isolates the essential drug from the former witch-doctor's brew of

salamanders, mugwort, powdered skulls, and dried blood. The purified

drug cures more surely, but---it does not perpetuate health. The

patient still has to change habits of life or diet which made him prone

to the disease.

Is it possible, then, that Western science could provide a medicine

which would at least give the human organism a start in releasing

itself from its chronic self-contradiction? The medicine might indeed

have to be supported by other procedures---psychotherapy, "spiritual"

disciplines, and basic changes in one's pattern of life---but every

diseased person seems to need some kind of initial lift to set him on

the way to health. The question is by no means absurd if it is true

that what afflicts us is a sickness not just of the mind but of the

organism, of the very functioning of the nervous system and the brain.

Is there, in short, a medicine which can give us temporarily the

sensation of being integrated, of being fully one with ourselves and

with nature as the biologist knows us, theoretically, to be? If so, the

experience might offer clues to whatever else must be done to bring

about full and continuous integration. It might be at least the tip of

an Ariadne's thread to lead us out of the maze in which all of us are

lost from our infancy.

Relatively recent research suggests that there are at least three such

medicines, though none is an infallible "specific." They work with some

people, and much depends upon the social and psychological context in

which they are given. Occasionally their effects may be harmful, but

such limitations do not deter us from using penicillin---often a far

more dangerous chemical than any of these three. I am speaking, of

course, of mescaline (the active ingredient of the peyote cactus),

lysergic acid diethylamide (a modified ergot alkaloid), and psilocybin

(a derivative of the mushroom Psilocybe mexicana).

The peyote cactus has long been used by the Indians of the Southwest

and Mexico as a means of communion with the divine world, and today the

eating of the dried buttons of the plant is the principal sacrament of

an Indian church known as the Native American Church of the United

States ---by all accounts a most respectable and Christian

organization. At the end of the nineteenth century its effects were

first described by Weir Mitchell and Havelock Ellis, and some years

later its active ingredient was identified as mescaline, a chemical of

the amine group which is quite easily synthesized.

Lysergic acid diethylamide was first discovered in 1938 by the Swiss

pharmacologist A. Hofmann in the course of studying the properties of

the ergot fungus. Quite by accident he absorbed a small amount of this

acid while making certain changes in its molecular structure, and

noticed its peculiar psychological effects. Further research proved

that he had hit upon the most powerful consciousness-changing drug now

known, for LSD-25 (as it is called for short) will produce its

characteristic results in so minute a dosage as 20 micrograms,

1/700,000,000 of an average man's weight.

Psilocybin is derived from another of the sacred plants of the Mexican

Indians---a type of mushroom known to them as teonanacatl, "the flesh

of God." Following Robert Weitlaner's discovery in 1936 that the cult

of "the sacred mushroom" was still prevalent in Oaxaca, a number of

mycologists, as specialists in mushrooms are known, began to make

studies of the mushrooms of this region. Three varieties were found to

be in use. In addition to Psilocybe mexicana there were also Psilocybe

aztecorum Heim and Psilocybe wassonii, named respectively after the

mycologists Roger Heim and Gordon and Valentina Wasson, who took part

in the ceremonies of the cult.

Despite a very considerable amount of research and speculation, little

is known of the exact physiological effect of these chemicals upon the

nervous system. The subjective effects of all three tend to be rather

similar, though LSD-25, perhaps because of the minute dosage required,

seldom produces the nauseous reactions so often associated with the

other two. All the scientific papers I have read seem to add up to the

vague impression that in some way these drugs suspend certain

inhibitory or selective processes in the nervous system so as to render

our sensory apparatus more open to impressions than is usual. Our

ignorance of the precise effect of these drugs is, of course, linked to

the still rather fumbling state of our knowledge of the brain. Such

ignorance obviously suggests great caution in their use, but thus far

there is no evidence that, in normal dosage, there is any likelihood of

physiological damage.*

In a very wide sense of the word, each of these substances is a drug,

but one must avoid the serious semantic error of confusing them with

drugs which induce physical craving for repeated use or which dull the

senses like alcohol or the sedatives. They are classed, officially, as

hallucinogens---an astonishingly inaccurate term, since they cause one

neither to hear voices nor to see visions such as might be confused

with physical reality. While they do indeed produce the most complex

and very obviously "hallucinatory" patterns before closed eyes, their

general effect is to sharpen the senses to a supernormal degree of

awareness. The standard dosage of each substance maintains its effects

for from five to eight hours, and the experience is often so deeply

revealing and moving that one hesitates to approach it again until it

has been thoroughly "digested," and this may be a matter of months.

The reaction of most cultured people to the idea of gaining any deep

psychological or philosophical insight through a drug is that it is

much too simple, too artificial, and even too banal to be seriously

considered. A wisdom which can be "turned on" like the switch of a lamp

seems to insult human dignity and degrade us to chemical automata. One

calls to mind pictures of a brave new world in which there is a class

of synthesized Buddhas, of people who have been "fixed" like the

lobotomized, the sterilized, or the hypnotized, only in another

direction---people who have somehow lost their humanity and with whom,

as with drunkards, one cannot really communicate. This is, however, a

somewhat ghoulish fantasy which has no relation to the facts or to the

experience itself. It belongs to the same kind of superstitious dread

which one feels for the unfamiliar, confusing it with the

unnatural---the way some people feel about Jews because they are

circumcised or even about Negroes because of their "alien" features and

color.

Despite the widespread and undiscriminating prejudice against drugs as

such, and despite the claims of certain religious disciplines to be the

sole means to genuine mystical insight, I can find no essential

difference between the experiences induced, under favorable conditions,

by these chemicals and the states of "cosmic consciousness" recorded by

R. M. Bucke, William James, Evelyn Underhill, Raynor Johnson, and other

investigators of mysticism. "Favorable conditions" means a setting

which is socially and physically congenial; ideally this would be some

sort of retreat house (not a hospital or sanitarium) supervised by

religiously oriented psychiatrists or psychologists. The atmosphere

should be homelike rather than clinical, and it is of the utmost

importance that the supervisor's attitude be supportive and

sympathetic. Under insecure, bizarre, or unfriendly circumstances the

experience can easily degenerate into a highly unpleasant paranoia. Two

days should be set aside---one for the experience itself, which lasts

for six or eight hours, and one for evaluation in the calm and relaxed

frame of mind that normally follows.

This is simply to say that the use of such powerful medicines is not to

be taken lightly, as one smokes a cigarette or tosses down a cocktail.

They should be approached as one approaches a sacrament, though not

with the peculiar inhibition of gaiety and humor that has become

customary in our religious rituals. It is a sound general rule that

there should always be present some qualified supervisor to provide a

point of contact with "reality" as it is socially defined. Ideally the

"qualified supervisor" should be a psychiatrist or clinical

psychologist who has himself experienced the effects of the drug,

though I have observed that many who are technically qualified have a

frightened awe of unusual states of consciousness which is apt to

communicate itself, to the detriment of the experience, to those under

their care. The most essential qualification of the supervisor is,

therefore, confidence in the situation---which is likewise "picked up"

by people in the state of acute sensitivity that the drugs induce.

The drugs in question are not aphrodisiacs, and when they are taken in

common by a small group the atmosphere is not in the least suggestive

of a drunken brawl nor of the communal torpor of an opium den. Members

of the group usually become open to each other with a high degree of

friendly affection, for in the mystical phase of the experience the

underlying unity or "belongingness" of the members can have all the

clarity of a physical sensation. Indeed the social situation may become

what religious bodies aim at, but all too rarely achieve, in their

rites of communion---a relationship of the most vivid understanding,

forgiveness, and love. Of course, this does not automatically become a

permanent feeling, but neither does the sense of fellowship sometimes

evoked in strictly religious gatherings. The experience corresponds

almost exactly to the theological concept of a sacrament or means of

grace---an unmerited gift of spiritual power whose lasting effects

depend upon the use made of it in subsequent action. Catholic theology

also recognizes those so-called "extraordinary" graces, often of

mystical insight, which descend spontaneously outside the ordinary or

regular means that the Church provides through the sacraments and the

disciplines of prayer. It seems to me that only special pleading can

maintain that the graces mediated through mushrooms, cactus plants, and

scientists are artificial and spurious in contrast with those which

come through religious discipline. Claims for the exclusive virtue of

one's own brand is, alas, as common in organized religion as in

commerce, coupled in the former instance with the puritan's sense of

guilt in enjoying anything for which he has not suffered.

When I wrote this book, I was well aware that LSD in particular might

become a public scandal, especially in the United States where we had

the precedents of Prohibition and of fantastically punitive laws

against the use of marijuana---laws passed with hardly a pretense of

scientific investigation of the drug, and amazingly foisted upon many

other nations. That was nine years ago ( 1961 ) and since then all that

I feared would happen has happened. I ask myself whether I should ever

have written this book, whether I was profaning the mysteries and

casting pearls before swine. I reasoned, however, that since Huxley and

others had already let the secret out, it was up to me to encourage a

positive, above-board, fearless, and intelligent approach to what are

now known as psychedelic chemicals.

But in vain. Thousands of young people, fed up with standard-brand

religions which provided nothing but talk, admonition, and (usually)

bad ritual, rushed immediately to LSD and other psychedelics in search

of some key to genuine religious experience. As might be expected,

there were accidents. A few potential psychotics were pushed over the

brink, usually because they took LSD in uncontrolled circumstances, in

excessive dosage, or in the arid and threatening atmosphere of hospital

research run by psychiatrists who imagined that they were investigating

artificially induced schizophrenia. Because most news is bad news,

these accidents received full coverage in the press, to the relative

exclusion of reports on the overwhelming majority of such splendid and

memorable experiences as I describe further on. A divorce is news; a

happy marriage isn't. There were even deliberately falsified stories in

the newspapers, as that several young men taking LSD stared at the sun

for so long that they became blind. Phychiatrists raised alarms about

"brain damage," for which no solid evidence was ever produced, and

warnings were issued about its destructive effect on the genes, which

was later shown to be insignificant and more or less the same as the

effects of coffee and aspirin.

In view of this public hysteria the Sandoz Company, which held a patent

on LSD, withdrew it from the market. At the same time the United States

government, having learned absolutely nothing from the disaster of

Prohibition, simply banned LSD ( allowing its use only in some few

research projects sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health

and by the Army, in its investigations of chemical warfare) and turned

over its control to the police.

Now a law against LSD is simply unenforceable because the substance is

tasteless and colorless, because effective dosages can be confined, in

vast amounts, to minute spaces, and because it can be disguised as

almost anything drinkable or eatable from gin to blotting paper. Thus

as soon as the reliable Sandoz material was withdrawn, amateur chemists

began to produce black-market LSD in immense quantities---LSD of

uncertain quality and dosage, often mixed with such other ingredients

as methedrine, belladonna, and heroin. Consequently the number of

psychotic episodes resulting from its use began to increase, aggravated

by the fact that, in improperly controlled situations and under threat

from the police, the LSD taker is an easy victim of extreme paranoia.

At the same time, some of these amateurs, mainly graduate students in

chemistry with a mission to "turn people on," produced some tolerably

good LSD. Thus there were still so many more positive experiences than

negative that fascination with this alchemy continued and expanded, and

though the general public associates its use with hippies and college

students, it has been very widely used by mature adults ---doctors,

lawyers, clergymen, artists, businessmen, professors, and levelheaded

housewives.

The blanket suppression of LSD and other psychedelics has been a

complete disaster in that ( 1 ) it has seriously hindered proper

research on these drugs; (2) it has created a profitable black market

by raising the price; (3) it has embarrassed the police with an

impossible assignment; (4) it has created the false fascination with

fruit that is forbidden; (5) it has seriously impeded the normal work

of courts of justice, and herded thousands of non-criminal types of

people into already overcrowded prisons, which, as everyone knows, are

schools for sodomy and for crime as a profession; ( 6 ) it has made

users of psychedelics more susceptible to paranoia than ever. **

What, then, are the true dangers of real LSD? Principally that it may

trigger a short- or long-term psychosis in anyone susceptible, and,

despite all our techniques for psychological and neurological testing,

we can never detect a potential psychotic with certainty. Anyone

contemplating the use of a psychedelic chemical should weigh this risk

carefully: there is a slight chance of becoming, at least temporarily,

insane. The risk is probably much greater than in traveling by a

commercial airline, but considerably less than in traveling by road.

Every household contains things of potential danger: electricity,

matches, gas, kitchen knives, carbon tetrachloride (cleaning fluid),

ammonia, aerosol sprayers, alcohol, slippery bathtubs, sliding rugs,

rifles, lawn mowers, axes, plate-glass doors, and swimming pools. There

are no laws against the sale and possession of such things, nor is one

prevented from cultivating Amanita pantherina (the most deceptive and

poisonous mushroom), deadly nightshade, laburnum, morning-glory, wood

rose, Scotch broom, and many other poisonous or psychedelic plants.

One of the most sensible tenets of Jewish and ( at least theoretically)

of Christian theology is that no substance or creature is, in itself,

evil. Evil arises only in its abuse---in killing someone with a knife,

committing arson with matches, or running down a pedestrian while

driving alcoholized. (But note that a highly depressed, anxious, or

angry driver is just as dangerous, for his attention is not on the

road. ) It seems to me a sound legal principle that people should be

prosecuted only for overt and clearly specifiable deeds, damaging or

clearly intended to damage life, limb, and property. Laws which

proscribe the mere sale, purchase, or possession of substances ( aside

from machine guns and bombs ) which might be used in some harmful way

invite the worst abuses of police power for political ends or for the

harassment of unpopular individuals. (How easy to plant some marijuana

on an unwanted competitor in business!) All such sumptuary laws

(regulating private morals and creating crimes without unwilling

victims ) are attempts to make personal freedom foolproof and without

risk, and thus to deprive the individual of responsibility for his own

life and of taking calculated risk for the achievement of political,

social, athletic, scientific, or religious objectives which he feels

well worth the dangers.

Adventurous and creative people have always been willing, and have

usually been encouraged, to take the most serious risks in the

exploration of the outer world and in the development of scientific and

technological skill. Many young people now feel that the time has come

to explore the inner world, and are willing to take the unfamiliar

risks which it involves. They, too, should be encouraged and also

assisted with all the care and wisdom at our disposal. Why permit the

purely athletic tour de force of climbing Everest (using oxygen) and

forbid the spiritual adventure of ascending Mount Sumeru, Mount Zion,

or Mount Analogue (using psychedelics)?

Superficially, the public and official fear of psychedelic drugs is

based on uninformed association with such addictive poisons as heroin,

amphetamines, and barbiturates. But drinking coffee or whisky is also

"using drugs," and this is allowed even though the effects may be

harmful and the creative results negligible. Psychedelic drugs are

feared, basically, for the same reason that mystical experience has

been feared, discouraged, and even condemned in the Catholic,

Protestant, and Islamic orthodoxies. It leads to disenchantment and

apathy toward the approved social rewards of status and success, to

chuckles at pretentiousness and pomposity, and, worse, to disbelief in

the Church-and-State dogma that we are all God's adopted orphans or

fluky little germs in a mechanical and mindless universe. No

authoritarian government, whether ecclesiastical or secular, can

tolerate the apprehension that each one of us is God in disguise, and

that our real inmost, outmost, and utmost Self cannot be killed. That's

why they had to do away with Jesus.

Thus the possibility that even a preliminary glimpse of this

apprehension is available through taking a pill or chewing a plant

threatens mystical experience for the millions---that is, masses of

people who will be difficult to rule by force of "authority." It is

even now being recognized in the United States that the real danger of

psychedelics is not so much neurological as political---that

"turned-on" people are not interested in serving the power games of the

present rulers. Looking at the successful men, they see completely

boring lives.

In the Epilogue I shall make it clear that psychedelic experience is

only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight, but a glimpse which can be

matured and deepened by the various ways of meditation in which drugs

are no longer necessary or useful. When you get the message, hang up

the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like

microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit

with eye permanently glued to the microscope; he goes away and works on

what he has seen.

Furthermore, speaking quite strictly, mystical insight is no more in

the chemical itself than biological knowledge is in the microscope.

There is no difference in principle between sharpening perception with

an external instrument, such as a microscope, and sharpening it with an

internal instrument, such as one of these three drugs. If they are an

affront to the dignity of the mind, the microscope is an affront to the

dignity of the eye and the telephone to the dignity of the ear.

Strictly speaking, these drugs do not impart wisdom at all, any more

than the microscope alone gives knowledge. They provide the raw

materials of wisdom, and are useful to the extent that the individual

can integrate what they reveal into the whole pattern of his behavior

and the whole system of his knowledge. As an escape, an isolated and

dissociated ecstasy, they may have the same sort of value as a rest

cure or a good entertainment. But this is like using a giant computer

to play tick-tack-toe, and the hours of heightened perception are

wasted unless occupied with sustained reflection or meditation upon

whatever themes may be suggested.

The nearest thing I know in literature to the reflective use of one of

these drugs is the so-called Bead Game in Hermann Hesse's Magister Ludi

(Das Glasperlenspiel). Hesse writes of a distant future in which an

order of scholar-mystics have discovered an ideographic language which

can relate all the branches of science and art, philosophy and

religion. The game consists in playing with the relationships between

configurations in these various fields in the same way that the

musician plays with harmonic and contrapuntal relationships. From such

elements as the design of a Chinese house, a Scarlatti sonata, a

topological formula, and a verse from the Upanishads, the players will

elucidate a common theme and develop its application in numerous

directions. No two games are the same, for not only do the elements

differ, but also there is no thought of attempting to force a static

and uniform order upon the world. The universal language facilitates

the perception of relationships but does not fix them, and is founded

upon a "musical" conception of the world in which order is as dynamic

and changing as the patterns of sound in a fugue.

Similarly, in my investigations of LSD or psilocybin, I usually started

with some such theme as polarity, transformation (as of food into

organism), competition for survival, the relation of the abstract to

the concrete, or of Logos to Eros, and then allowed my heightened

perception to elucidate the theme in terms of certain works of art or

music, of some natural object as a fern, a flower, or a sea shell, of a

religious or mythological archetype (it might be the Mass), and even of

personal relationships with those who happened to be with me at the

time. Or I would concentrate upon one of the senses and try, as it

were, to turn it back upon itself so as to see the process of seeing,

and from this move on to trying to know knowing, so approaching the

problem of my own identity.

From these reflections there arise intuitive insights of astonishing

clarity, and because there is little difficulty in remembering them

after the effects of the drug have ceased (especially if they are

recorded or written down at the time), the days or weeks following may

be used for testing them by the normal standards of logical, aesthetic,

philosophical, or scientific criticism. As might be expected, some

prove to be valid and others not. It is the same with the sudden

hunches that come to the artist or inventor in the ordinary way; they

are not always as true or as applicable as they seem to be in the

movement of illumination. The drugs appear to give an enormous impetus

to the creative intuition, and thus to be of more value for

constructive invention and research than for psychotherapy in the

ordinary sense of "adjusting" the disturbed personality. Their best

sphere of use is not the mental hospital but the studio and the

laboratory, or the institute of advanced studies.

The following pages make no attempt to be a scientific report on the

effects of these chemicals, with the usual details of dosage, time and

place, physical symptoms, and the like. Such documents exist by the

thousand, and, in view of our very rudimentary knowledge of the brain,

seem to me to have a rather limited value. As well try to understand a

book by dissolving it in solution and popping it into a centrifuge. My

object is rather to give some impression of the new world of

consciousness which these substances reveal. I do not believe that this

world is either a hallucination or an unimpeachable revelation of

truth. It is probably the way things appear when certain inhibitory

processes of the brain and senses are suspended, but this is a world in

some ways so unfamiliar that it is liable to misinterpretation. Our

first impressions may be as wide of the mark as those of the traveler

in an unfamiliar country or of astronomers taking their first look at

the galaxies beyond our own.

I have written this account as if the whole experience had happened on

one day in a single place, but it is in fact a composite of several

occasions. Except where I am describing visions before closed eyes, and

this is always specified, none of these experiences are hallucinations.

They are simply changed ways of seeing, interpreting, and reacting to

actual persons and events in the world of "public reality," which, for

purposes of this description, is a country estate on the West Coast of

America with garden. orchard, barns, and surrounding mountains---all

just as described, including the rattletrap car loaded with junk.

Consciousness-changing drugs are popularly associated with the

evocation of bizarre and fantastic images, but in my own experience

this happens only with closed eyes. Otherwise, it is simply that the

natural world is endowed with a richness of grace, color, significance,

and, sometimes, humor, for which our normal adjectives are

insufficient. The speed of thought and association is increased so

astonishingly that it is hard for words to keep pace with the flood of

ideas that come to mind. Passages that may strike the reader as

ordinary philosophical reflection are reports of what, at the time,

appear to be the most tangible certainties. So, too, images that appear

before closed eyes are not just figments of imagination, but patterns

and scenes so intense and autonomous that they seem to be physically

present. The latter have, however, proved of less interest to me than

one's transformed impression of the natural world and the heightened

speed of associative thought, and it is thus with these that the

following account is chiefly concerned.

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---

*Normal dosage for mescaline is 300 milligrams, for LSD-25 100

micrograms, and for psilocybin 20 milligrams. The general reader

interested in a more detailed account of consciousness-changing drugs

and the present state of research concerning them should consult Robert

S. de Ropp's Drugs and the Mind (Grove Press, New York, 1960). (back)

**For purposes of this summary I am including marijuana and hashish as

psychedelics, though they do not have the potency of LSD. (back)

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---

The Joyous Cosmology

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---

T0 BEGIN WITH, this world has a different kind of time. It is the time

of biological rhythm, not of the clock and all that goes with the

clock. There is no hurry. Our sense of time is notoriously subjective

and thus dependent upon the quality of our attention, whether of

interest or boredom, and upon the alignment of our behavior in terms of

routines, goals, and deadlines. Here the present is self-sufficient,

but it is not a static present. It is a dancing present---the unfolding

of a pattern which has no specific destination in the future but is

simply its own point. It leaves and arrives simultaneously, and the

seed is as much the goal as the flower. There is therefore time to

perceive every detail of the movement with infinitely greater richness

of articulation. Normally we do not so much look at things as overlook

them. The eye sees types and classes---flower, leaf, rock, bird,

fire---mental pictures of things rather than things, rough outlines

filled with flat color, always a little dusty and dim.

But here the depth of light and structure in a bursting bud go on

forever. There is time to see them, time for the whole intricacy of

veins and capillaries to develop in consciousness, time to see down and

down into the shape of greenness, which is not green at all, but a

whole spectrum generalizing itself as green---purple, gold, the sunlit

turquoise of the ocean, the intense luminescence of the emerald. I

cannot decide where shape ends and color begins. The bud has opened and

the fresh leaves fan out and curve back with a gesture which is

unmistakably communicative but does not say anything except, "Thus!"

And somehow that is quite satisfactory, even startlingly clear. The

meaning is transparent in the same way that the color and the texture

are transparent, with light which does not seem to fall upon surfaces

from above but to be right inside the structure and color. Which is of

course where it is, for light is an inseparable trinity of sun, object,

and eye, and the chemistry of the leaf is its color, its light.

But at the same time color and light are the gift of the eye to the

leaf and the sun. Transparency is the property of the eyeball,

projected outward as luminous space, interpreting quanta of energy in

terms of the gelatinous fibers in the head. I begin to feel that the

world is at once inside my head and outside it, and the two, inside and

outside, begin to include or "cap" one another like an infinite series

of concentric spheres. I am unusually aware that everything I am

sensing is also my body---that light, color, shape, sound, and texture

are terms and properties of the brain conferred upon the outside world.

I am not looking at the world, not confronting it; I am knowing it by a

continuous process of transforming it into myself, so that everything

around me, the whole globe of space, no longer feels away from me but

in the middle.

This is at first confusing. I am not quite sure of the direction from

which sounds come. The visual space seems to reverberate with them as

if it were a drum. The surrounding hills rumble with the sound of a

truck, and the rumble and the color-shape of the hills become one and

the same gesture. I use that word deliberately and shall use it again.

The hills are moving into their stillness. They mean something because

they are being transformed into my brain, and my brain is an organ of

meaning. The forests of redwood trees upon them look like green fire,

and the copper gold of the sun-dried grass heaves immensely into the

sky. Time is so slow as to be a kind of eternity, and the flavor of

eternity transfers itself to the hills---burnished mountains which I

seem to remember from an immeasurably distant past, at once so

unfamiliar as to be exotic and yet as familiar as my own hand. Thus

transformed into consciousness, into the electric, interior luminosity

of the nerves, the world seems vaguely insubstantial--- developed upon

a color film, resounding upon the skin of a drum, pressing, not with

weight, but with vibrations interpreted as weight. Solidity is a

neurological invention, and, I wonder, can the nerves be solid to

themselves? Where do we begin? Does the order of the brain create the

order of the world, or the order of the world the brain? The two seem

like egg and hen, or like back and front.

The physical world is vibration, quanta, but vibrations of what? To the

eye, form and color; to the ear, sound; to the nose, scent; to the

fingers, touch. But these are all different languages for the same

thing, different qualities of sensitivity, different dimensions of

consciousness. The question, "Of what are they differing forms?" seems

to have no meaning. What is light to the eye is sound to the ear. I

have the image of the senses being terms, forms, or dimensions not of

one thing common to all, but of each other, locked in a circle of

mutuality. Closely examined, shape becomes color, which becomes

vibration, which becomes sound, which becomes smell, which becomes

taste, and then touch, and then again shape. (One can see, for example,

that the shape of a leaf is its color. There is no outline around the

leaf; the outline is the limit where one colored surface becomes

another.) I see all these sensory dimensions as a round dance,

gesticulations of one pattern being transformed into gesticulations of

another. And these gesticulations are flowing through a space that has

still other dimensions, which I want to describe as tones of emotional

color, of light or sound being joyous or fearful, gold elated or lead

depressed. These, too, form a circle of reciprocity, a round spectrum

so polarized that we can only describe each in terms of the others.

Sometimes the image of the physical world is not so much a dance of

gestures as a woven texture. Light, sound, touch, taste, and smell

become a continuous warp, with the feeling that the whole dimension of

sensation is a single continuum or field. Crossing the warp is a woof

representing the dimension of meaning---moral and aesthetic values,

personal or individual uniqueness, logical significance, and expressive

form---and the two dimensions interpenetrate so as to make

distinguishable shapes seem like ripples in the water of sensation. The

warp and the woof stream together, for the weaving is neither flat nor

static but a many-directioned cross-flow of impulses filling the whole

volume of space. I feel that the world is on something in somewhat the

same way that a color photograph is on a film, underlying and

connecting the patches of color, though the film here is a dense rain

of energy. I see that what it is on is my brain---"that enchanted

loom," as Sherrington called it. Brain and world, warp of sense and

woof of meaning, seem to interpenetrate inseparably. They hold their

boundaries or limits in common in such a way as to define one another

and to be impossible without each other.

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---

I am listening to the music of an organ. As leaves seemed to gesture,

the organ seems quite literally to speak. There is no use of the vox

humana stop, but every sound seems to issue from a vast human throat,

moist with saliva. As, with the base pedals, the player moves slowly

down the scale, the sounds seem to blow forth in immense, gooey

spludges. As I listen more carefully, the spludges acquire

texture---expanding circles of vibration finely and evenly toothed like

combs, no longer moist and liquidinous like the living throat, but

mechanically discontinuous. The sound disintegrates into the

innumerable individual drrrits of vibration. Listening on, the gaps

close, or perhaps each individual drrrit becomes in its turn a spludge.

The liquid and the hard, the continuous and the discontinuous, the

gooey and the prickly, seem to be transformations of each other, or to

be different levels of magnification upon the same thing.

This theme recurs in a hundred different ways---the inseparable

polarity of opposites, or the mutuality and reciprocity of all the

possible contents of consciousness. It is easy to see theoretically

that all perception is of contrasts---figure and ground, light and

shadow, clear and vague, firm and weak. But normal attention seems to

have difficulty in taking in both at once. Both sensuously and

conceptually we seem to move serially from one to the other; we do not

seem to be able to attend to the figure without relative

unconsciousness of the ground. But in this new world the mutuality of

things is quite clear at every level. The human face, for example,

becomes clear in all its aspects---the total form together with each

single hair and wrinkle. Faces become all ages at once, for

characteristics that suggest age also suggest youth by implication; the

bony structure suggesting the skull evokes instantly the newborn

infant. The associative couplings of the brain seem to fire

simultaneously instead of one at a time, projecting a view of life

which may be terrifying in its ambiguity or joyous in its integrity.

Decision can be completely paralyzed by the sudden realization that

there is no way of having good without evil, or that it is impossible

to act upon reliable authority without choosing, from your own

inexperience, to do so. If sanity implies madness and faith doubt, am I

basically a psychotic pretending to be sane, a blithering terrified

idiot who manages, temporarily, to put on an act of being

self-possessed? I begin to see my whole life as a masterpiece of

duplicity---the confused, helpless, hungry, and hideously sensitive

little embryo at the root of me having learned, step by step, to

comply, placate, bully, wheedle, flatter, bluff, and cheat my way into

being taken for a person of competence and reliability. For when it

really comes down to it, what do any of us know?

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---

I am listening to a priest chanting the Mass and a choir of nuns

responding. His mature, cultivated voice rings with the serene

authority of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, of the

Faith once and for all delivered to the saints, and the nuns respond,

naively it seems, with childlike, utterly innocent devotion. But,

listening again, I can hear the priest "putting on" his voice, hear the

inflated, pompous balloon, the studiedly unctuous tones of a master

deceptionist who has the poor little nuns, kneeling in their stalls,

completely cowed. Listen deeper. The nuns are not cowed at all. They

are playing possum. With just a little stiffening, the limp gesture of

bowing turns into the gesture of the closing claw. With too few men to

go around, the nuns know what is good for them: how to bend and

survive.

But this profoundly cynical view of things is only an intermediate

stage. I begin to congratulate the priest on his gamesmanship, on the

sheer courage of being able to put up such a performance of authority

when he knows precisely nothing. Perhaps there is no other knowing than

the mere competence of the act. If, at the heart of one's being, there

is no real self to which one ought to be true, sincerity is simply

nerve; it lies in the unabashed vigor of the pretense.

But pretense is only pretense when it is assumed that the act is not

true to the agent. Find the agent. In the priest's voice I hear down at

the root the primordial howl of the beast in the jungle, but it has

been inflected, complicated, refined, and textured with centuries of

culture. Every new twist, every additional subtlety, was a fresh gambit

in the game of making the original howl more effective. At first, crude

and unconcealed, the cry for food or mate, or just noise for the fun of

it, making the rocks echo. Then rhythm to enchant. then changes of tone

to plead or threaten. Then words to specify the need, to promise and

bargain. And then, much later, the gambits of indirection. The feminine

stratagem of stooping to conquer, the claim to superior worth in

renouncing the world for the spirit, the cunning of weakness proving

stronger than the might of muscle---and the meek inheriting the earth.

As I listen, then, I can hear in that one voice the simultaneous

presence of all the levels of man's history, as of all the stages of

life before man. Every step in the game becomes as clear as the rings

in a severed tree. But this is an ascending hierarchy of maneuvers, of

stratagems capping stratagems, all symbolized in the overlays of

refinement beneath which the original howl is still sounding. Sometimes

the howl shifts from the mating call of the adult animal to the

helpless crying of the baby, and I feel all man's music---its pomp and

circumstance, its gaiety, its awe, its confident solemnity---as just so

much complication and concealment of baby wailing for mother. And as I

want to cry with pity, I know I am sorry for myself. I, as an adult, am

also back there alone in the dark, just as the primordial howl is still

present beneath the sublime modulations of the chant.

You poor baby! And yet---you selfish little bastard! As I try to find

the agent behind the act, the motivating force at the bottom of the

whole thing, I seem to see only an endless ambivalence. Behind the mask

of love I find my innate selfishness. What a predicament I am in if

someone asks, "Do you really love me?" I can't say yes without saying

no, for the only answer that will really satisfy is, "Yes, I love you

so much I could eat you! My love for you is identical with my love for

myself. I love you with the purest selfishness." No one wants to be

loved out of a sense of duty.

So I will be very frank. "Yes, I am pure, selfish desire and I love you

because you make me feel wonderful---at any rate for the time being."

But then I begin to wonder whether there isn't something a bit cunning

in this frankness. It is big of me to be so sincere, to make a play for

her by not pretending to be more than I am---unlike the other guys who

say they love her for herself. I see that there is always something

insincere about trying to be sincere, as if I were to say openly, "The

statement that I am now making is a lie." There seems to be something

phony about every attempt to define myself, to be totally honest. The

trouble is that I can't see the back, much less the inside, of my head.

I can't be honest because I don't fully know what I am. Consciousness

peers out from a center which it cannot see---and that is the root of

the matter.

Life seems to resolve itself down to a tiny germ or nipple of

sensitivity. I call it the Eenie-Weenie---a squiggling little nucleus

that is trying to make love to itself and can never quite get there.

The whole fabulous complexity of vegetable and animal life, as of human

civilization, is just a colossal elaboration of the Eenie-Weenie trying

to make the Eenie-Weenie. I am in love with myself, but cannot seek

myself without hiding myself. As I pursue my own tail, it runs away

from me. Does the amoeba split itself in two in an attempt to solve

this problem?

I try to go deeper, sinking thought and feeling down and down to their

ultimate beginnings. What do I mean by loving myself? In what form do I

know myself? Always, it seems, in the form of something other,

something strange. The landscape I am watching is also a state of

myself, of the neurons in my head. I feel the rock in my hand in terms

of my own fingers. And nothing is stranger than my own body---the

sensation of the pulse, the eye seen through a magnifying glass in the

mirror, the shock of realizing that oneself is something in the

external world. At root, there is simply no way of separating self from

other, self-love from other-love. All knowledge of self is knowledge of

other, and all knowledge of other knowledge of self. I begin to see

that self and other, the familiar and the strange, the internal and the

external, the predictable and the unpredictable imply each other. One

is seek and the other is hide, and the more I become aware of their

implying each other, the more I feel them to be one with each other. I

become curiously affectionate and intimate with all that seemed alien.

In the features of everything foreign, threatening, terrifying,

incomprehensible, and remote I begin to recognize myself. Yet this is a

"myself" which I seem to be remembering from long, long ago---not at

all my empirical ego of yesterday, not my specious personality.

The "myself" which I am beginning to recognize, which I had forgotten

but actually know better than anything else, goes far back beyond my

childhood, beyond the time when adults confused me and tried to tell me

that I was someone else; when, because they were bigger and stronger,

they could terrify me with their imaginary fears and bewilder and

outface me in the complicated game that I had not yet learned. (The

sadism of the teacher explaining the game and yet having to prove his

superiority in it.) Long before all that, long before I was an embryo

in my mother's womb, there looms the ever-so-familiar stranger, the

everything not me, which I recognize, with a joy immeasurably more

intense than a meeting of lovers separated by centuries, to be my

original self. The good old sonofabitch who got me involved in this

whole game.

At the same time everyone and everything around me takes on the feeling

of having been there always, and then forgotten, and then remembered

again. We are sitting in a garden surrounded in every direction by

uncultivated hills, a garden of fuchsias and hummingbirds in a valley

that leads down to the westernmost ocean, and where the gulls take

refuge in storms. At some time in the middle of the twentieth century,

upon an afternoon in the summer, we are sitting around a table on the

terrace, eating dark homemade bread and drinking white wine. And yet we

seem to have been there forever, for the people with me are no longer

the humdrum and harassed little personalities with names, addresses,

and social security numbers, the specifically dated mortals we are all

pretending to be. They appear rather as immortal archetypes of

themselves without, however, losing their humanity. It is just that

their differing characters seem, like the priest's voice, to contain

all history; they are at once unique and eternal, men and women but

also gods and goddesses. For now that we have time to look at each

other we become timeless. The human form becomes immeasurably precious

and, as if to symbolize this, the eyes become intelligent jewels, the

hair spun gold, and the flesh translucent ivory. Between those who

enter this world together there is also a love which is distinctly

eucharistic, an acceptance of each other's natures from the heights to

the depths.

Ella, who planted the garden, is a beneficent Circe---sorceress,

daughter of the moon, familiar of cats and snakes, herbalist and

healer---with the youngest old face one has ever seen, exquisitely

wrinkled, silver-black hair rippled like flames. Robert is a

manifestation of Pan, but a Pan of bulls instead of the Pan of goats,

with frizzled short hair tufted into blunt horns ---a man all sweating

muscle and body, incarnation of exuberant glee. Beryl, his wife, is a

nymph who has stepped out of the forest, a mermaid of the land with

swinging hair and a dancing body that seems to be naked even when

clothed. It is her bread that we are eating, and it tastes like the

Original Bread of which mother's own bread was a bungled imitation. And

then there is Mary, beloved in the usual, dusty world, but in this

world an embodiment of light and gold, daughter of the sun, with eyes

formed from the evening sky---a creature of all ages, baby, moppet,

maid, matron, crone, and corpse, evoking love of all ages.

I try to find words that will suggest the numinous, mythological

quality of these people. Yet at the same time they are as familiar as

if I had known them for centuries, or rather, as if I were recognizing

them again as lost friends whom I knew at the beginning of time, from a

country begotten before all worlds. This is of course bound up with the

recognition of my own most ancient identity, older by far than the

blind squiggling of the Eenie-Weenie, as if the highest form that

consciousness could take had somehow been present at the very beginning

of things. All of us look at each other knowingly, for the feeling that

we knew each other in that most distant past conceals something

else---tacit, awesome, almost unmentionable ---the realization that at

the deep center of a time perpendicular to ordinary time we are, and

always have been, one. We acknowledge the marvelously hidden plot, the

master illusion, whereby we appear to be different.

The shock of recognition. In the form of everything most other, alien,

and remote---the ever-receding galaxies, the mystery of death, the

terrors of disease and madness, the foreign- feeling, gooseflesh world

of sea monsters and spiders, the queasy labyrinth of my own

insides---in all these forms I have crept up on myself and yelled

"Boo!" I scare myself out of my wits, and, while out of my wits, cannot

remember just how it happened. Ordinarily I am lost in a maze. I don't

know how I got here, for I have lost the thread and forgotten the

intricately convoluted system of passages through which the game of

hide-and-seek was pursued. (Was it the path I followed in growing the

circuits of my brain?) But now the principle of the maze is clear. It

is the device of something turning back upon itself so as to seem to be

other, and the turns have been so many and so dizzyingly complex that I

am quite bewildered. The principle is that all dualities and opposites

are not disjoined but polar; they do not encounter and confront one

another from afar; they exfoliate from a common center. Ordinary

thinking conceals polarity and relativity because it employs terms, the

terminals or ends, the poles, neglecting what lies between them. The

difference of front and back, to be and not to be, hides their unity

and mutuality.

Now consciousness, sense perception, is always a sensation of

contrasts. It is a specialization in differences, in noticing, and

nothing is definable, classifiable, or noticeable except by contrast

with something else. But man does not live by consciousness alone, for

the linear, step-by-step, contrast-by-contrast procedure of attention

is quite inadequate for organizing anything so complex as a living

body. The body itself has an "omniscience" which is unconscious, or

superconscious, just because it deals with relation instead of

contrast, with harmonies rather than discords. It "thinks" or organizes

as a plant grows, not as a botanist describes its growth. This is why

Shiva has ten arms, for he represents the dance of life, the

omnipotence of being able to do innumerably many things at once.

In the type of experience I am describing, it seems that the

superconscious method of thinking becomes conscious. We see the world

as the whole body sees it, and for this very reason there is the

greatest difficulty in attempting to translate this mode of vision into

a form of language that is based on contrast and classification. To the

extent, then, that man has become a being centered in consciousness, he

has become centered in clash, conflict, and discord. He ignores, as

beneath notice, the astounding perfection of his organism as a whole,

and this is why, in most people, there is such a deplorable disparity

between the intelligent and marvelous order of their bodies and the

trivial preoccupations of their consciousness. But in this other world

the situation is reversed. Ordinary people look like gods because the

values of the organism are uppermost, and the concerns of consciousness

fall back into the subordinate position which they should properly

hold. Love, unity, harmony, and relationship therefore take precedence

over war and division.

For what consciousness overlooks is the fact that all boundaries and

divisions are held in common by their opposite sides and areas, so that

when a boundary changes its shape both sides move together. It is like

the yang-yin symbol of the Chinese---the black and white fishes divided

by an S-curve inscribed within a circle. The bulging head of one is the

narrowing tail of the other. But how much more difficult it is to see

that my skin and its movements belong both to me and to the external

world, or that the spheres of influence of different human beings have

common walls like so many rooms in a house, so that the movement of my

wall is also the movement of yours. You can do what you like in your

room just so long as I can do what I like in mine. But each man's room

is himself in his fullest extension, so that my expansion is your

contraction and vice versa.

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---

I am looking at what I would ordinarily call a confusion of bushes---a

tangle of plants and weeds with branches and leaves going every which

way. But now that the organizing, relational mind is uppermost I see

that what is confusing is not the bushes but my clumsy method of

thinking. Every twig is in its proper place, and the tangle has become

an arabesque more delicately ordered than the fabulous doodles in the

margins of Celtic manuscripts. In this same state of consciousness I

have seen a woodland at fall, with the whole multitude of almost bare

branches and twigs in silhouette against the sky, not as a confusion,

but as the lacework or tracery of an enchanted jeweler. A rotten log

bearing rows of fungus and patches of moss became as precious as any

work of Cellini---an inwardly luminous construct of jet, amber, jade,

and ivory, all the porous and spongy disintegrations of the wood

seeming to have been carved out with infinite patience and skill. I do

not know whether this mode of vision organizes the world in the same

way that it organizes the body, or whether it is just that the natural

world is organized in that way.

A journey into this new mode of consciousness gives one a marvelously

enhanced appreciation of patterning in nature, a fascination deeper

than ever with the structure of ferns, the formation of crystals, the

markings upon sea shells, the incredible jewelry of such unicellular

creatures of the ocean as the radiolaria, the fairy architecture of

seeds and pods, the engineering of bones and skeletons, the

aerodynamics of feathers, and the astonishing profusion of eye-forms

upon the wings of butterflies and birds. All this involved delicacy of

organization may, from one point of view, be strictly functional for

the purposes of reproduction and survival. But when you come down to

it, the survival of these creatures is the same as their very

existence---and what is that for?

More and more it seems that the ordering of nature is an art akin to

music---fugues in shell and cartilage, counterpoint in fibers and

capillaries, throbbing rhythm in waves of sound, light, and nerve. And

oneself is connected with it quite inextricably---a node, a ganglion,

an electronic interweaving of paths, circuits, and impulses that

stretch and hum through the whole of time and space. The entire pattern

swirls in its complexity like smoke in sunbeams or the rippling

networks of sunlight in shallow water. Transforming itself endlessly

into itself, the pattern alone remains. The crosspoints, nodes, nets,

and curlicues vanish perpetually into each other. "The baseless fabric

of this vision." It is its own base. When the ground dissolves beneath

me I float.

Closed-eye fantasies in this world seem sometimes to be revelations of

the secret workings of the brain, of the associative and patterning

processes, the ordering systems which carry out all our sensing and

thinking. Unlike the one I have just described, they are for the most

part ever more complex variations upon a theme---ferns sprouting ferns

sprouting ferns in multidimensional spaces, vast kaleidoscopic domes of

stained glass or mosaic, or patterns like the models of highly

intricate molecules---systems of colored balls, each one of which turns

out to be a multitude of smaller balls, forever and ever. Is this,

perhaps, an inner view of the organizing process which, when the eyes

are open, makes sense of the world even at points where it appears to

be supremely messy?

Later that same afternoon, Robert takes us over to his barn from which

he has been cleaning out junk and piling it into a big and battered

Buick convertible, with all the stuffing coming out of the upholstery.

The sight of trash poses two of the great questions of human life,

"Where are we going to put it?" and "Who's going to clean up?" From one

point of view living creatures are simply tubes, putting things in at

one end and pushing them out at the other---until the tube wears out.

The problem is always where to put what is pushed out at the other end,

especially when it begins to pile so high that the tubes are in danger

of being crowded off the earth by their own refuse. And the questions

have metaphysical overtones. "Where are we going to put it?" asks for

the foundation upon which things ultimately rest ---the First Cause,

the Divine Ground, the bases of morality, the origin of action. "Who's

going to clean up?" is asking where responsibility ultimately lies, or

how to solve our ever-multiplying problems other than by passing the

buck to the next generation.

I contemplate the mystery of trash in its immediate manifestation:

Robert's car piled high, with only the driver's seat left unoccupied by

broken door-frames, rusty stoves, tangles of chicken-wire, squashed

cans, insides of ancient harmoniums, nameless enormities of cracked

plastic, headless dolls, bicycles without wheels, torn cushions

vomiting kapok, non-returnable bottles, busted dressmakers' dummies,

rhomboid picture-frames, shattered bird-cages, and inconceivable messes

of string, electric wiring, orange peels, eggshells, potato skins, and

light bulbs---all garnished with some ghastly-white chemical powder

that we call "angel shit." Tomorrow we shall escort this in a joyous

convoy to the local dump. And then what? Can any melting and burning

imaginable get rid of these ever-rising mountains of ruin---especially

when the things we make and build are beginning to look more and more

like rubbish even before they are thrown away? The only answer seems to

be that of the present group. The sight of Robert's car has everyone

helpless with hysterics.

The Divine Comedy. All things dissolve in laughter. And for Robert this

huge heap of marvelously incongruous uselessness is a veritable

creation, a masterpiece of nonsense. He slams it together and ropes it

securely to the bulbous, low-slung wreck of the supposedly chic

convertible, and then stands back to admire it as if it were a float

for a carnival. Theme: the American way of life. But our laughter is

without malice, for in this state of consciousness everything is the

doing of gods. The culmination of civilization in monumental heaps of

junk is seen, not as thoughtless ugliness, but as self-caricature---as

the creation of phenomenally absurd collages and abstract sculptures in

deliberate but kindly mockery of our own pretensions. For in this world

nothing is wrong, nothing is even stupid. The sense of wrong is simply

failure to see where something fits into a pattern, to be confused as

to the hierarchical level upon which an event belongs---a play which

seems quite improper at level 28 may be exactly right at level 96. I am

speaking of levels or stages in the labyrinth of twists and turns,

gambits and counter-gambits, in which life is involving and evolving

itself ---the cosmological one-upmanship which the yang and the yin,

the light and the dark principles, are forever playing, the game which

at some early level in its development seems to be the serious battle

between good and evil. If the square may be defined as one who takes

the game seriously, one must admire him for the very depth of his

involvement, for the courage to be so far-out that he doesn't know

where he started.

The more prosaic, the more dreadfully ordinary anyone or anything seems

to be, the more I am moved to marvel at the ingenuity with which

divinity hides in order to seek itself, at the lengths to which this

cosmic joie de vivre will go in elaborating its dance. I think of a

corner gas station on a hot afternoon. Dust and exhaust fumes, the

regular Standard guy all baseball and sports cars, the billboards

halfheartedly gaudy, the flatness so reassuring---nothing around here

but just us folks! I can see people just pretending not to see that

they are avatars of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, that the cells of their

bodies aren't millions of gods, that the dust isn't a haze of jewels.

How solemnly they would go through the act of not understanding me if I

were to step up and say, "Well, who do you think you're kidding? Come

off it, Shiva, you old rascal! It's a great act, but it doesn't fool

me." But the conscious ego doesn't know that it is something which that

divine organ, the body, is only pretending to be.* When people go to a

guru, a master of wisdom, seeking a way out of darkness, all he really

does is to humor them in their pretense until they are outfaced into

dropping it. He tells nothing, but the twinkle in his eye speaks to the

unconscious---"You know....You know!"

In the contrast world of ordinary consciousness man feels himself, as

will, to be something in nature but not of it. He likes it or dislikes

it. He accepts it or resists it. He moves it or it moves him. But in

the basic superconsciousness of the whole organism this division does

not exist. The organism and its surrounding world are a single,

integrated pattern of action in which there is neither subject nor

object, doer nor done to. At this level there is not one thing called

pain and another thing called myself, which dislikes pain. Pain and the

"response" to pain are the same thing. When this becomes conscious it

feels as if everything that happens is my own will. But this is a

preliminary and clumsy way of feeling that what happens outside the

body is one process with what happens inside it. This is that "original

identity" which ordinary language and our conventional definitions of

man so completely conceal.

The active and the passive are two phases of the same act. A seed,

floating in its white sunburst of down, drifts across the sky, sighing

with the sound of a jet plane invisible above. I catch it by one hair

between thumb and index finger, and am astonished to watch this little

creature actually wiggling and pulling as if it were struggling to get

away. Common sense tells me that this tugging is the action of the

wind, not of the thistledown. But then I recognize that it is the

"intelligence" of the seed to have just such delicate antennae of silk

that, in an environment of wind, it can move. Having such extensions,

it moves itself with the wind. When it comes to it, is there any basic

difference between putting up a sail and pulling an oar? If anything,

the former is a more intelligent use of effort than the latter. True,

the seed does not intend to move itself with the wind, but neither did

I intend to have arms and legs.

It is this vivid realization of the reciprocity of will and world,

active and passive, inside and outside, self and not-self, which evokes

the aspect of these experiences that is most puzzling from the

standpoint of ordinary consciousness: the strange and seemingly unholy

conviction that "I" am God. In Western culture this sensation is seen

as the very signature of insanity But in India it is simply a matter of

course that the deepest center of man, atman, is the deepest center of

the universe, Brahman. Why not? Surely a continuous view of the world

is more whole, more holy, more healthy, than one in which there is a

yawning emptiness between the Cause and its effects. Obviously, the "I"

which is God is not the ego, the consciousness of self which is

simultaneously an unconsciousness of the fact that its outer limits are

held in common with the inner limits of the rest of the world. But in

this wider, less ignore-ant consciousness I am forced to see that

everything I claim to will and intend has a common boundary with all I

pretend to disown. The limits of what I will, the form and shape of all

those actions which I claim as mine, are identical and coterminous with

the limits of all those events which I have been taught to define as

alien and external.

The feeling of self is no longer confined to the inside of the skin.

Instead, my individual being seems to grow out from the rest of the

universe like a hair from a head or a limb from a body, so that my

center is also the center of the whole. I find that in ordinary

consciousness I am habitually trying to ring myself off from this

totality, that I am perpetually on the defensive. But what am I trying

to protect? Only very occasionally are my defensive attitudes directly

concerned with warding off physical damage or deprivation. For the most

part I am defending my defenses: rings around rings around rings around

nothing. Guards inside a fortress inside entrenchments inside a radar

curtain. The military war is the outward parody of the war of ego

versus world: only the guards are safe. In the next war only the air

force will outlive the women and children.

I trace myself back through the labyrinth of my brain, through the

innumerable turns by which I have ringed myself off and, by perpetual

circling, obliterated the original trail whereby I entered this forest.

Back through the tunnels---through the devious status-and-survival

strategy of adult life, through the interminable passages which we

remember in dreams ---all the streets we have ever traveled, the

corridors of schools, the winding pathways between the legs of tables

and chairs where one crawled as a child, the tight and bloody exit from

the womb, the fountainous surge through the channel of the penis, the

timeless wanderings through ducts and spongy caverns. Down and back

through ever-narrowing tubes to the point where the passage itself is

the traveler---a thin string of molecules going through the trial and

error of getting itself into the right order to be a unit of organic

life. Relentlessly back and back through endless and whirling dances in

the astronomically proportioned spaces which surround the original

nuclei of the world, the centers of centers, as remotely distant on the

inside as the nebulae beyond our galaxy on the outside.

Down and at last out---out of the cosmic maze to recognize in and as

myself, the bewildered traveler, the forgotten yet familiar sensation

of the original impulse of all things, supreme identity, inmost light,

ultimate center, self more me than myself. Standing in the midst of

Ella's garden I feel, with a peace so deep that it sings to be shared

with all the world, that at last I belong, that I have returned to the

home behind home, that I have come into the inheritance unknowingly

bequeathed from all my ancestors since the beginning. Plucked like the

strings of a harp, the warp and woof of the world reverberate with

memories of triumphant hymns. The sure foundation upon which I had

sought to stand has turned out to be the center from which I seek. The

elusive substance beneath all the forms of the universe is discovered

as the immediate gesture of my hand. But how did I ever get lost? And

why have I traveled so far through these intertwined tunnels that I

seem to be the quaking vortex of defended defensiveness which is my

conventional self?

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---

Going indoors I find that all the household furniture is alive.

Everything gestures. Tables are tabling, pots are potting, walls are

walling, fixtures are fixturing---a world of events instead of things.

Robert turns on the phonograph, without telling me what is being

played. Looking intently at the pictures picturing, I only gradually

become conscious of the music, and at first cannot decide whether I am

hearing an instrument or a human voice simply falling. A single stream

of sound, curving, rippling, and jiggling with a soft snarl that at

last reveals it to be a reed instrument---some sort of oboe. Later,

human voices join it. But they are not singing words, nothing but a

kind of "buoh---buah---bueeh" which seems to be exploring all the

liquidinous inflections of which the voice is capable. What has Robert

got here? I imagine it must be some of his far-out friends in a great

session of nonsense-chanting. The singing intensifies into the most

refined, exuberant, and delightful warbling, burbling. honking.

hooting. and howling---which quite obviously means nothing whatsoever.

and is being done out of pure glee. There is a pause. A voice says.

"Dit!" Another seems to reply, "Da!" Then, "Dit-da! Di-dittty-da!" And

getting gradually faster. "Da-di-ditty-di-ditty-da!

Di-da-di-ditty-ditty-da-di-da-di-ditty-da-da!" And so on, until the

players are quite out of their minds. The record cover which Robert now

shows me, says "Classical Music of India," and informs me that this is

a series edited by Alain Danielou, who happens to be the most serious,

esoteric, and learned scholar of Hindu music, and an exponent. in the

line of Rene Guenon and Ananda Coomaraswamy, of the most formal,

traditional, and difficult interpretation of Yoga and Vedanta. Somehow

I cannot quite reconcile Danielou, the pandit of pandits, with this

delirious outpouring of human bird-song. I feel my leg is being pulled.

Or perhaps Danielou's leg.

But then, maybe not. Oh, indeed not ! For quite suddenly I feel my

understanding dawning into a colossal clarity, as if everything were

opening up down to the roots of my being and of time and space

themselves. The sense of the world becomes totally obvious. I am struck

with amazement that I or anyone could have thought life a problem or

being a mystery. I call to everyone to gather round.

"Listen, there's something I must tell. I've never, never seen it so

clearly. But it doesn't matter a bit if you don't understand, because

each one of you is quite perfect as you are, even if you don't know it.

Life is basically a gesture, but no one, no thing, is making it. There

is no necessity for it to happen, and none for it to go on happening.

For it isn't being driven by anything; it just happens freely of

itself. It's a gesture of motion, of sound, of color, and just as no

one is making it, it isn't happening to anyone. There is simply no

problem of life; it is completely purposeless play---exuberance which

is its own end. Basically there is the gesture. Time, space, and

multiplicity are complications of it. There is no reason whatever to

explain it, for explanations are just another form of complexity, a new

manifestation of life on top of life, of gestures gesturing. Pain and

suffering are simply extreme forms of play, and there isn't anything in

the whole universe to be afraid of because it doesn't happen to anyone!

There isn't any substantial ego at all. The ego is a kind of flip, a

knowing of knowing, a fearing of fearing. It's a curlicue, an extra

jazz to experience, a sort of double-take or reverberation, a dithering

of consciousness which is the same as anxiety."

Of course, to say that life is just a gesture, an action without agent,

recipient, or purpose, sounds much more empty and futile than joyous.

But to me it seems that an ego, a substantial entity to which

experience happens, is more of a minus than a plus. It is an

estrangement from experience, a lack of participation. And in this

moment I feel absolutely with the world, free of that chronic

resistance to experience which blocks the free flowing of life and

makes us move like muscle-bound dancers. But I don't have to overcome

resistance. I see that resistance, ego, is just an extra vortex in the

stream-- part of it---and that in fact there is no actual resistance at

all. There is no point from which to confront life, or stand against

it.

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---

I go into the garden again. The hummingbirds are soaring up and falling

in their mating dance, as if there were someone behind the bushes

playing ball with them. Fruit and more wine have been put out on the

table. Oranges ---transformations of the sun into its own image, as if

the tree were acknowledging gratitude for warmth. Leaves, green with

the pale, yellow-fresh green that I remember from the springtimes of my

childhood in Kentish spinneys, where breaking buds were spotted all

over the hazel branches in a floating mist. Within them, trunks,

boughs, and twigs moist black behind the sunlit green. Fuchsia bushes,

tangled traceries of stalks, intermingled with thousands of magenta

ballerinas with purple petticoats. And, behind all, towering into the

near-twilight sky, the grove of giant eucalyptus trees with their

waving clusters of distinctly individual, bamboo-like leaves.

Everything here is the visual form of the lilting nonsense and

abandoned vocal dexterity of those Hindu musicians.

I recall the words of an ancient Tantric scripture: "As waves come with

water and flames with fire, so the universal waves with us." Gestures

of the gesture, waves of the wave---leaves flowing into caterpillars,

grass into cows, milk into babies, bodies into worms, earth into

flowers, seeds into birds, quanta of energy into the iridescent or

reverberating labyrinths of the brain. Within and swept up into this

endless, exulting, cosmological dance are the base and grinding

undertones of the pain which transformation involves: chewed nerve

endings, sudden electric-striking snakes in the meadow grass, swoop of

the lazily circling hawks, sore muscles piling logs, sleepless nights

trying to keep track of the unrelenting bookkeeping which civilized

survival demands.

How unfamiliarly natural it is to see pain as no longer a problem. For

problematic pain arises with the tendency of self-consciousness to

short-circuit the brain and fill its passages with dithering

echoes---revulsions to revulsions, fears of fear, cringing from

cringing, guilt about guilt---twisting thought to trap itself in

endless oscillations. In his ordinary consciousness man lives like

someone trying to speak in an excessively sensitive echo-chamber; he

can proceed only by doggedly ignoring the interminably gibbering

reflections of his voice. For in the brain there are echoes and

reflected images in every dimension of sense, thought, and feeling,

chattering on and on in the tunnels of memory. The difficulty is that

we confuse this storing of information with an intelligent commentary

on what we are doing at the moment, mistaking for intelligence the raw

materials of the data with which it works. Like too much alcohol,

self-consciousness makes us see ourselves double, and we mistake the

double image for two selves---mental and material, controlling and

controlled, reflective and spontaneous. Thus instead of suffering we

suffer about suffering, and suffer about suffering about suffering.

As has always been said, clarity comes with the giving up of self. But

what this means is that we cease to attribute selfhood to these echoes

and mirror images. Otherwise we stand in a hall of mirrors, dancing

hesitantly and irresolutely because we are making the images take the

lead. We move in circles because we are following what we have already

done. We have lost touch with our original identity, which is not the

system of images but the great self-moving gesture of this as yet

unremembered moment. The gift of remembering and binding time creates

the illusion that the past stands to the present as agent to act, mover

to moved. Living thus from the past, with echoes taking the lead, we

are not truly here, and are always a little late for the feast. Yet

could anything be more obvious than that the past follows from the

present like the wake of a ship, and that if we are to be alive at all,

here is the place to be?

Evening at last closes a day that seemed to have been going on since

the world began. At the high end of the garden, above a clearing, there

stands against the mountain wall a semicircle of trees, immensely tall

and dense with foliage, suggesting the entrance grove to some ancient

temple. It is from here that the deep blue-green transparency of

twilight comes down, silencing the birds and hushing our own

conversation. We have been watching the sunset, sitting in a row upon

the ridgepole of the great barn whose roof of redwood tiles, warped and

cracked, sweeps clear to the ground. Below, to the west, lies an open

sward where two white goats are munching the grass, and beyond this is

Robert's house where lights in the kitchen show that Beryl is preparing

dinner. Time to go in, and leave the garden to the awakening stars.

Again music---harpsichords and a string orchestra, and Bach in his most

exultant mood. I lie down to listen, and close my eyes. All day, in

wave after wave and from all directions of the mind's compass, there

has repeatedly come upon me the sense of my original identity as one

with the very fountain of the universe. I have seen, too, that the

fountain is its own source and motive, and that its spirit is an

unbounded playfulness which is the many-dimensioned dance of life.

There is no problem left, but who will believe it? Will I believe it

myself when I return to normal consciousness? Yet I can see at the

moment that this does not matter. The play is hide- and-seek or

lost-and-found, and it is all part of the play that one can get very

lost indeed. How far, then, can one go in getting found?

As if in answer to my question there appears before my closed eyes a

vision in symbolic form of what Eliot has called "the still point of

the turning world." I find myself looking down at the floor of a vast

courtyard, as if from a window high upon the wall, and the floor and

the walls are entirely surfaced with ceramic tiles displaying densely

involved arabesques in gold, purple, and blue. The scene might be the

inner court of some Persian palace, were it not of such immense

proportions and its colors of such preternatural transparency. In the

center of the floor there is a great sunken arena, shaped like a

combination of star and rose, and bordered with a strip of tiles that

suggest the finest inlay work in vermilion, gold, and obsidian.

Within this arena some kind of ritual is being performed in time with

the music. At first its mood is stately and royal, as if there were

officers and courtiers in rich armor and many- colored cloaks dancing

before their king. As I watch, the mood changes. The courtiers become

angels with wings of golden fire, and in the center of the arena there

appears a pool of dazzling flame. Looking into the pool I see, just for

a moment, a face which reminds me of the Christos Pantocrator of

Byzantine mosaics, and I feel that the angels are drawing back with

wings over their faces in a motion of reverent dread. But the face

dissolves. The pool of flame grows brighter and brighter, and I notice

that the winged beings are drawing back with a gesture, not of dread,

but of tenderness---for the flame knows no anger. Its warmth and

radiance---"tongues of flame infolded"---are an efflorescence of love

so endearing that I feel I have seen the heart of all hearts.

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* "Self-conscious man thinks he thinks. This has long been recognized

to be an error, for the conscious subject who thinks he thinks is not

the same as the organ which does the thinking. The conscious person is

one component only, a series of transitory aspects, of the thinking

person." L. L. Whyte, The Unconscious Before Freud (Basic Books, New

York, 1960), p. 59. (back)

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Epilogue

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THIS IS, as I have said, a record not of one experiment with

consciousness-changing drugs, but of several, compressed for reasons of

poetic unity into a single day. At the same time I have more or less

kept to the basic form which every individual experiment seems to

take---a sort of cycle in which one's personality is taken apart and

then put together again, in what one hopes is a more intelligent

fashion. For example, one's true identity is first of all felt as

something extremely ancient, familiarly distant ---with overtones of

the magical, mythological, and archaic. But in the end it revolves back

to what one is in the immediate present, for the moment of the world's

creation is seen to lie, not in some unthinkably remote past, but in

the eternal now. Similarly, the play of life is at first apprehended

rather cynically as an extremely intricate contest in one-upmanship,

expressing itself deviously even in the most altruistic of human

endeavors. Later, one begins to feel a "good old rascal" attitude

toward the system; humor gets the better of cynicism. But finally,

rapacious and all-embracing cosmic selfishness turns out to be a

disguise for the unmotivated play of love.

But I do not mean to generalize. I am speaking only of what I have

experienced for myself, and I wish to repeat that drugs of this kind

are in no sense bottled and predigested wisdom. I feel that had I no

skill as a writer or philosopher, drugs which dissolve some of the

barriers between ordinary, pedestrian consciousness and the

multidimensional superconsciousness of the organism would bring little

but delightful, or sometimes terrifying, confusion. I am not saying

that only intellectuals can benefit from them, but that there must be

sufficient discipline or insight to relate this expanded consciousness

to our normal, everyday life.

Such aids to perception are medicines, not diets, and as the use of a

medicine should lead on to a more healthful mode of living, so the

experiences which I have described suggest measures we might take to

maintain a sounder form of sanity. Of these, the most important is the

practice of what I would like to call meditation---were it not that

this word often connotes spiritual or mental gymnastics. But by

meditation I do not mean a practice or exercise undertaken as a

preparation for something, as a means to some future end, or as a

discipline in which one is concerned with progress. A better word may

be "contemplation" or even "centering," for what I mean is a slowing

down of time, of mental hurry, and an allowing of one's attention to

rest in the present---so coming to the unseeking observation, not of

what should be, but of what is. It is quite possible, even easy, to do

this without the aid of any drug, though these chemicals have the

advantage of "doing it for you" in a peculiarly deep and prolonged

fashion.

But those of us who live in this driven and over-purposeful

civilization need, more than anyone else, to lay aside some span of

clock time for ignoring time, and for allowing the contents of

consciousness to happen without interference. Within such timeless

spaces, perception has an opportunity to develop and deepen in much the

same way that I have described. Because one stops forcing experience

with the conscious will and looking at things as if one were

confronting them, or standing aside from them to manage them, it is

possible for one's fundamental and unitive apprehension of the world to

rise to the surface. But it is of no use to make this a goal or to try

to work oneself into that way of seeing things. Every effort to change

what is being felt or seen presupposes and confirms the illusion of the

independent knower or ego, and to try to get rid of what isn't there is

only to prolong confusion. On the whole, it is better to try to be

aware of one's ego than to get rid of it. We can then discover that the

"knower" is no different from the sensation of the "known," whether the

known be "external" objects or "internal" thoughts and memories.

In this way it begins to appear that instead of knowers and knowns

there are simply knowings, and instead of doers and deeds simply

doings. Divided matter and form becomes unified pattern-in-process.

Thus when Buddhists say that reality is "void" they mean simply that

life, the pattern-in-process, does not proceed from or fall upon some

substantial basis. At first, this may seem rather disconcerting, but in

principle the idea is no more difficult to abandon than that of the

crystalline spheres which were once supposed to support and move the

planets.

Eventually this unified and timeless mode of perception "caps" our

ordinary way of thinking and acting in the practical world: it includes

it without destroying it. But it also modifies it by making it clear

that the function of practical action is to serve the abiding present

rather than the ever-receding future, and the living organism rather

than the mechanical system of the state or the social order.

In addition to this quiet and contemplative mode of meditation there

seems to me to be an important place for another, somewhat akin to the

spiritual exercises of the dervishes. No one is more dangerously insane

than one who is sane all the time: he is like a steel bridge without

flexibility, and the order of his life is rigid and brittle. The

manners and mores of Western civilization force this perpetual sanity

upon us to an extreme degree, for there is no accepted corner in our

lives for the art of pure nonsense. Our play is never real play because

it is almost invariably rationalized; we do it on the pretext that it

is good for us, enabling us to go back to work refreshed. There is no

protected situation in which we can really let ourselves go. Day in and

day out we must tick obediently like clocks, and "strange thoughts"

frighten us so much that we rush to the nearest head-doctor. Our

difficulty is that we have perverted the Sabbath into a day for laying

on rationality and listening to sermons instead of letting off steam.

If our sanity is to be strong and flexible, there must be occasional

periods for the expression of completely spontaneous movement---for

dancing, singing, howling, babbling, jumping, groaning, wailing---in

short, for following any motion to which the organism as a whole seems

to be inclined. It is by no means impossible to set up physical and

moral boundaries within which this freedom of action is

expressible---sensible contexts in which nonsense may have its way.

Those who provide for this essential irrationality will never become

stuffy or dull, and, what is far more important, they will be opening

up the channels through which the formative and intelligent spontaneity

of the organism can at last flow into consciousness. This is why free

association is such a valuable technique in psychotherapy; its

limitation is that it is purely verbal. The function of such intervals

for nonsense is not merely to be an outlet for pent-up emotion or

unused psychic energy, but to set in motion a mode of spontaneous

action which, though at first appearing as nonsense, can eventually

express itself in intelligible forms.

Disciplined action is generally mistaken for forced action, done in the

dualistic spirit of compelling oneself, as if the will were quite other

than the rest of the organism. But a unified and integrated concept of

human nature requires a new concept of discipline---the control, not of

forced action, but of spontaneous action. It is necessary to see

discipline as a technique which the organism uses, as a carpenter uses

tools, and not as a system to which the organism must be conformed.

Otherwise the purely mechanical and organizational ends of the system

assume greater importance than those of the organism. We find ourselves

in the situation where man is made for the Sabbath, instead of the

Sabbath for man. But before spontaneous action can be expressed in

controlled patterns, its current must be set in motion. That is to say,

we must acquire a far greater sensitivity to what the organism itself

wants to do, and learn responsiveness to its inner motions.

Our language almost compels us to express this point in the wrong way

---as if the "we" that must be sensitive to the organism and respond to

it were something apart. Unfortunately our forms of speech follow the

design of the social fiction which separates the conscious will from

the rest of the organism, making it the independent agent which causes

and regulates our actions. It is thus that we fail to recognize what

the ego, the agent, or the conscious will is. We do not see that it is

a social convention, like the intervals of clock time, as distinct from

a biological or even psychological entity. For the conscious will,

working against the grain of instinct, is the interiorization, the

inner echo, of social demands upon the individual coupled with the

picture of his role or identity which he acquires from parents,

teachers, and early associates. It is an imaginary, socially fabricated

self working against the organism, the self that is biologically grown.

By means of this fiction the child is taught to control himself and

conform himself to the requirements of social life.

At first sight this seems to be an ingenious and highly necessary

device for maintaining an orderly society based upon individual

responsibility. In fact it is a penny-wise, pound-foolish blunder which

is creating many more problems than it solves. To the degree that

society teaches the individual to identify himself with a controlling

will separate from his total organism, it merely intensifies his

feeling of separateness, from himself and from others. In the long run

it aggravates the problem that it is designed to solve, because it

creates a style of personality in which an acute sense of

responsibility is coupled with an acute sense of alienation.

The mystical experience, whether induced by chemicals or other means,

enables the individual to be so peculiarly open and sensitive to

organic reality that the ego begins to be seen for the transparent

abstraction that it is. In its place there arises (especially in the

latter phases of the drug experience) a strong sensation of oneness

with others, presumably akin to the sensitivity which enables a flock

of birds to twist and turn as one body. A sensation of this kind would

seem to provide a far better basis for social love and order than the

fiction of the separate will.

The general effect of the drugs seems to be that they diminish

defensive attitudes without blurring perception, as in the case of

alcohol. We become aware of things against which we normally protect

ourselves, and this accounts, I feel, for the high susceptibility to

anxiety in the early phases of the experience. But when defenses are

down we begin to see, not hallucinations, but customarily ignored

aspects of reality---including a sense of social unity which civilized

man has long since lost. To regain this sense we do not need to abandon

culture and return to some precivilized level, for neither in the drug

experience nor in more general forms of mystical experience does one

lose the skills or the knowledge which civilization has produced.

I have suggested that in these experiences we acquire clues and

insights which should be followed up through certain forms of

meditation. Are there not also ways in which we can, even without using

the drugs, come back to this sense of unity with other people? The

cultured Westerner has a very healthy distaste for crowds and for the

loss of personal identity in "herd- consciousness." But there is an

enormous difference between a formless crowd and an organic social

group. The latter is a relatively small association in which every

member is in communication with every other member. The former is a

relatively large association in which the members are in communication

only with a leader, and because of this crude structure a crowd is not

really an organism. To think of people as "the masses" is to think of

them by analogy with a subhuman style of order.

The corporate worship of churches might have been the natural answer to

this need, were it not that church services follow the crowd pattern

instead of the group pattern. Participants sit in rows looking at the

backs of each other's necks, and are in communication only with the

leader ---whether preacher, priest, or some symbol of an autocratic

God. Many churches try to make up for this lack of communion by

"socials" and dances outside the regular services. But these events

have a secular connotation, and the type of communion involved is

always somewhat distant and demure. There are, indeed, discussion

groups in which the leader or "resource person" encourages every member

to have his say, but, again, the communion so achieved is merely verbal

and ideational.

The difficulty is that the defended defensiveness of the ego recoils

from the very thing that would allay it---from associations with others

based on physical gestures of affection, from rites, dances, or forms

of play which clearly symbolize mutual love between the members of the

group. Sometimes a play of this kind will occur naturally and

unexpectedly between close friends, but how embarrassing it might be to

be involved in the deliberate organization of such a relationship with

total strangers ! Nevertheless, there are countless associations of

people who, claiming to be firm friends, still lack the nerve to

represent their affection for each other by physical and erotic contact

which might raise friendship to the level of love. Our trouble is that

we have ignored and thus feel insecure in the enormous spectrum of love

which lies between rather formal friendship and genital sexuality, and

thus are always afraid that once we overstep the bounds of formal

friendship we must slide inevitably to the extreme of sexual

promiscuity, or worse, to homosexuality.

This unoccupied gulf between spiritual or brotherly love and sexual

love corresponds to the cleft between spirit and matter, mind and body,

so divided that our affections or our activities are assigned either to

one or to the other. There is no continuum between the two, and the

lack of any connection, any intervening spectrum, makes spiritual love

insipid and sexual love brutal. To overstep the limits of brotherly

love cannot, therefore, be understood as anything but an immediate

swing to its opposite pole. Thus the subtle and wonderful gradations

that lie between the two are almost entirely lost. In other words, the

greater part of love is a relationship that we hardly allow, for love

experienced only in its extreme forms is like buying a loaf of bread

and being given only the two heels.

I have no idea what can be done to correct this in a culture where

personal identity seems to depend on being physically aloof, and where

many people shrink even from holding the hand of someone with whom they

have no formally sexual or familial tie. To force or make propaganda

for more affectionate contacts with others would bring little more than

embarrassment. One can but hope that in the years to come our defenses

will crack spontaneously, like eggshells when the birds are ready to

hatch. This hope may gain some encouragement from all those trends in

philosophy and psychology, religion and science, from which we are

beginning to evolve a new image of man, not as a spirit imprisoned in

incompatible flesh, but as an organism inseparable from his social and

natural environment.

This is certainly the view of man disclosed by these remarkable

medicines which temporarily dissolve our defenses and permit us to see

what separative consciousness normally ignores---the world as an

interrelated whole. This vision is assuredly far beyond any

drug-induced hallucination or superstitious fantasy. It wears a

striking resemblance to the unfamiliar universe that physicists and

biologists are trying to describe here and now. For the clear direction

of their thought is toward the revelation of a unified cosmology, no

longer sundered by the ancient irreconcilables of mind and matter,

substance and attribute, thing and event, agent and act, stuff and

energy. And if this should come to be a universe in which man is

neither thought nor felt to be a lonely subject confronted by alien and

threatening objects, we shall have a cosmology not only unified but

also joyous.

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