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The New Alchemy
Alan Watts
an essay from This is It and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience,
by Alan Watts, Vintage Books, 1973, ©Alan Watts 1958, 1960.
This essay was written in 1960.
Besides the philosopher's stone that would turn base metal
into gold, one of the great quests of alchemy in both Europe and
Asia was the elixir of immortality. In gullible enthusiasm for
this quest, more than one Chinese emperor died of the fabulous
concoctions of powdered jade, tea, ginseng, and precious metals
prepared by Taoist priests. But just as the work of transforming
lead into gold was in many cases a chemical symbolism for a
spiritual transformation of man himself, so the immortality to be
conferred by the elixir was not always the literally everlasting
life but rather the transportation of consciousness into a state
beyond time. Modern physicists have solved the problem of
changing lead into gold, though the process is somewhat more
expensive than digging gold from the earth. But in the last few
years modem chemists have prepared one or two substances for
which it may be claimed that in some cases they induce states of
mind remarkably similar to cosmic consciousness.
To many people such claims are deeply disturbing. For one
thing, mystical experience seems altogether too easy when it
simply comes out of a bottle, and is thus available to people who
have done nothing to deserve it, who have neither fasted nor
prayed nor practiced yoga. For another, the claim seems to imply
that-spiritual insight is after all only a matter of body
chemistry involving a total reduction of the spiritual to the
material. These are serious considerations, even though one may
be convinced that in the long run the difficulty is found to rest
upon semantic confusion as to the definitions of
"spiritual" and "material."
However, it should be pointed out that there is nothing new
or disreputable in the idea that spiritual insight Is an
undeserved gift of divine grace, often conveyed through such
material or sacramental means as the water of baptism and the
bread and wine of the mass. The priest who by virtue of his
office transforms bread and wine into the body and blood of
Christ, ex opere operato, by the simple repetition of the
formula of the Last Supper, is in a situation not radically
different from that of the scientist who, by repeating the right
formula of an experiment, may effect a transformation in the
brain. The comparative worth of the two operations must be judged
by their effects. There were always those upon whom the
sacraments of baptism and communion did not seem to
"take," whose lives remained effectively unregenerate.
Likewise, none of these consciousness-changing chemicals are
literally mystical experience in a bottle. Many who receive them
experience only ecstasies without insight, or just an unpleasant
confusion of sensation and imagination. States akin to mystical
experience arise only in certain individuals and then often
depend upon considerable concentration and effort to use the
change of consciousness in certain ways. It is important here,
too, to stress the point that ecstasy is only Incidental to the
authentic mystical experience, the essence of which might best be
described as insight, as the word is now used in psychiatry.
A chemical of this kind might perhaps be said to be an aid to
perception in the same way as the telescope, microscope, or
spectroscope, save in this case that the instrument is not an
external object but an internal state of the nervous system. All
such instruments are relatively useless without proper training
and preparation not only in their handling, but also in the
particular field of investigation,
These considerations alone are already almost enough to show
that the use of such chemicals does not reduce spiritual insight
to a mere matter of body chemistry. But it should be added that
even when we can describe certain events in terms of chemistry
this does not mean that such events are merely chemical. A
chemical description of spiritual experience has somewhat the
same use and the same limits as the chemical description of a
great painting. It is simple enough to make a chemical analysis
of the paint, and for artists and connoisseurs alike there is
some point in doing so. It might also be possible to work out a
chemical description of all the processes that go on in the
artist while he is painting. But it would be incredibly
complicated, and in the meantime the same processes could be
described and communicated far more effectively in some other
language than the chemical. We should probably say that a process
is chemical only when chemical language is the most
effective means of describing it. Analogously, some of the
chemicals known as psychedelics provide opportunities for
mystical insight in much the same way that well-prepared paints
and brushes provide opportunities for fine painting, or a
beautifully constructed piano for great music. They make it
easier, but they do not accomplish the work all by themselves.
The two chemicals which are of most use in creating a change
of consciousness conducive to spiritual experience are mescaline
and lysergic acid diethylamide (known, for short, as LSD). The
former is a synthetic formulation of the active ingredients of
the peyote cactus, and the latter a purely synthetic chemical of
the indole group which produces its effects even in such minute
amounts as twenty-five micrograms. The specific effects of these
chemicals are hard to identify with any clarity, and so far as is
known at present they seem to operate upon the nervous system by
reducing some of the inhibitory mechanisms which ordinarily have
a screening effect upon our consciousness. Certain psychiatrists
who seem overly anxious to hang on to the socially approved
sensation of reality—more or less the world as perceived on a
bleak Monday morning—classify these chemicals as hallucinogens
producing toxic effects of a schizoid or psychotic character. I
am afraid this is psychiatric gobbledygook: a sort of
authoritative rumble of disapproval. Neither substance is an
addictive drug, like heroin or opium, and it has never been
demonstrated that they have harmful effects upon people who were
not otherwise seriously disturbed. It is begging the question to
call the changes of consciousness which they educe
hallucinations, for some of the unusual things felt and seen may
be no more unreal than the unfamiliar forms perceived through a
microscope. We do not know. It is also begging the question to
call their effects toxic, which might mean poisonous, unless this
word can also be used for the effects of vitamins or proteins.
Such language is evaluative, not descriptive in any scientific
sense.
Somewhat more than two years ago (1958) I was asked by a
psychiatric research group to take 100 micrograms of lysergic
acid, to see whether it would reproduce anything resembling a
mystical experience. It did not do so, and so far as I know the
reason was that I had not then learned how to direct my inquiries
when under its influence. It seemed instead that my senses had
been given a kaleidoscopic character (and this is no more than a
metaphor) which made the whole world entrancingly complicated, as
if I were involved in a multidimensional arabesque. Colors became
so vivid that flowers, leaves, and fabrics seemed to be illumined
from inside. The random patterns of blades of grass in a lawn
appeared to be exquisitely organized without, however, any actual
distortion of vision. Black ink or sumi paintings by
Chinese and Japanese artists appeared almost to be three
dimensional photographs, and what are ordinarily dismissed as
irrelevant details of speech, behavior, appearance, and form
seemed in some indefinable way to be highly significant.
Listening to music with closed eyes, I beheld the most
fascinating patterns of dancing jewelry, mosaic, tracery, and
abstract images. At one point everything appeared to be
uproariously funny, especially the gestures and actions of people
going about their everyday business. Ordinary remarks seemed to
reverberate with double and quadruple meanings, and the
role-playing behavior of those around me not only became
unusually evident but also implied concealed attitudes contrary
or complementary to its overt intention. In short, the screening
or selective apparatus of our normal interpretative evaluation of
experience had been partially suspended, with the result that I
was presumably projecting the sensation of meaning or
significance upon just about everything. The whole experience was
vastly entertaining and interesting, but as yet nothing like any
mystical experience that I had had before.
It was not until a year later that I tried LSD again, this
time at the request of another research team. Since then I have
repeated the experiment five times, with dosages varying from 75
to 100 micrograms. My impression has been that such experiments
are profound and rewarding to the extent that I do my utmost to
observe perceptual and evaluative changes and to describe them as
clearly and completely as possible, usually with the help of a
tape recorder. To give a play-by-play description of each
experiment might be clinically interesting, but what I am
concerned with here is a philosophical discussion of some of the
high points and recurrent themes of my experiences. Psychiatrists
have not yet made up their minds as to whether LSD is useful in
therapy, but at present I am strongly inclined to feel that its
major use may turn out to be only secondarily as a therapeutic
and primarily as an instrumental aid to the creative artist,
thinker, or scientist. I should observe, in passing, that the
human and natural environment in which these experiments are
conducted is of great importance, and that its use in hospital
wards with groups of doctors firing off clinical questions at the
subject is most undesirable. The supervising physician should
take a human attitude, and drop all defensive dramatizations of
scientific objectivity and medical authority, conducting the
experiment in surroundings of some natural or artistic beauty.
I have said that my general impression of the first
experiment was that the "mechanism" by which we screen
our sense-data and select only some of them as significant had
been partially suspended. Consequently, I felt that the
particular feeling which we associate with "the
meaningful" was projected indiscriminately upon everything,
and then rationalized in ways that might strike an independent
observer as ridiculous—unless, perhaps, the subject were
unusually clever at rationalizing. However, the philosopher
cannot pass up the point that our selection of some sense-data as
significant and others as insignificant is always with relation
to particular purposes—survival, the quest for certain
pleasures, finding one's way to some destination, or whatever it
may be. But in every experiment with LSD one of the first effects
I have noticed is a profound relaxation combined with an
abandonment of purposes and goals, reminding me of the Taoist
saying that "when purpose has been used to achieve
purposelessness, the thing has been grasped." I have felt,
in other words, endowed with all the time in the world, free to
look about me as if I were living in eternity without a single
problem to be solved. It is just for this reason that the busy
and purposeful actions of other people seem at this time to be so
comic, for it becomes obvious that by setting themselves goals
which are always in the future, in the "tomorrow which never
comes," they are missing entirely the point of being alive.
When, therefore, our selection of sense-impressions is not
organized with respect to any particular purpose, all the
surrounding details of the world must appear to be equally
meaningful or equally meaningless. Logically, these are two ways
of saying the same thing, but the overwhelming feeling of my own
LSD experiences is that all aspects of the world become
meaningful rather than meaningless. This is not to say that they
acquire meaning in the sense of signs, by virtue of pointing to
something else, but that all things appear to be their own point.
Their simple existence, or better, their present formation, seems
to be perfect, to be an end or fulfillment without any need for
justification. Flowers do not bloom in order to produce seeds,
nor are seeds germinated in order to bring forth flowers. Each
stage of the process—seed, sprout, bud, flower, and fruit—
may be regarded as the goal. A chicken is one eggs way of
producing others. In our normal experience something of the same
kind takes place in music and the dance, where the point of the
action is each moment of its unfolding and not just the temporal
end of the performance.
Such a translation of everyday experience into something of
the same nature as music has been the beginning and the
prevailing undertone of all my experiments. But LSD does not
simply suspend the selective process by cutting it out. It would
be more exact to say that it shows the relativity of our ordinary
evaluation of sense-data by suggesting others. It permits the
mind to organize its sensory impressions in new patterns. In my
second experiment I noticed, for example, that all repeated
forms—leaves on a stem, books on shelves, mullions in
windows—gave me the sensation of seeing double or even
multiple, as if the second, third, and fourth leaves on the stem
were reflections of the first, seen, as it were, in several
thicknesses of window glass. When I mentioned this, the attending
physician held up his finger to see if it would give me a double
image. For a moment it seemed to do so, but all at once I saw
that the second image had its basis in a wisp of cigar smoke
passing close to his finger and upon which my consciousness had
projected the highlights and outline of a second finger. As I
then concentrated upon this sensation of doubling or repeating
images, it seemed suddenly as if the whole field of sight were a
transparent liquid rippled in concentric circles as in dropping a
stone into a pool. The normal images of things around me were not
distorted by this pattern. They remained just as usual, but my
attention directed itself to highlights, lines, and shadows upon
them that fitted the pattern, letting those that did not fall
into relative insignificance. As soon, however, as I noticed this
projection and became aware of details that did not fit the
pattern, it seemed as if whole handfuls of pebbles had been
thrown into-the optical space, rippling it with concentric
circles that overlapped in all directions, so that every visible
point became an intersection of circles. The optical field
seemed, in fact, to have a structured grain like a photograph
screened for reproduction, save that the organization of the
grains was not rectilinear but circular. In this way every detail
fitted the pattern and the field of vision became pointillist,
like a painting by Seurat.
This sensation raised a number of questions. Was my mind
imperiously projecting its own geometrical designs upon the
world, thus "hallucinating" a structure in things which
is not actually there? Or is what we call the "real"
structure of things simply a learned projection or hallucination
which we hold in common? Or was I somehow becoming aware of the
actual grain of the rods and cones in my retina, for even a
hallucination must have some actual basis in the nervous system?
On another occasion I was looking closely at a handful of sand,
and in becoming aware that I could not get it into clear focus I
became conscious of every detail and articulation of the way in
which my eyes were fuzzing the image—and this was certainly
perception of a grain or distortion in the eyes themselves.
The general impression of these optical sensations is that
the eyes, without losing the normal area of vision, have become
microscopes, and that the texture of the visual field is
infinitely rich and complex. I do not know whether this is actual
awareness of the multiplicity of nerve-endings in the retina, or,
for that matter, in the fingers, for the same grainy feeling
arose in the sense of touch. But the effect of feeling that this
is or may be so is, as it were, to turn the senses back upon
themselves, and so to realize that seeing the external world is
also seeing the eyes. In other words, I became vividly aware of
the fact that what I call shapes, colors, and textures in the
outside world are also states of my nervous system, that is, of
me. In knowing them I also know my self. But the strange part of
this apparent sensation of my own senses was that I did not
appear to be inspecting them from outside or from a distance, as
if they were objects. I can say only that the awareness of
grain or structure in the senses seemed to be awareness of
awareness, of myself from inside myself. Because of this, it
followed that the distance or separation between myself and my
senses, on the one hand, and the external world, on the other,
seemed to disappear I was no longer a detached observer, a little
man inside my own head, having sensations. I was the
sensations, so much so that there was nothing left of me, the
observing ego, except the series of sensations which
happened—not to me, but just happened—moment by moment, one
after another.
To become the sensations, as distinct from having them,
engenders the most astonishing sense of freedom and release. For
it implies that experience is not something in which one is
trapped or by which one is pushed around, or against which one
must fight. The conventional duality of subject and object,
knower and known, feeler and feeling, is changed into a polarity:
the knower and the known become the poles, terms, or phases of a
single event which happens, not to me or from me, but of
itself. The experiencer and the experience become a single,
ever-changing self-forming process, complete and fulfilled at
every moment of its unfolding, and of infinite complexity and
subtlety. It is like, not watching, but being, a coiling
arabesque of smoke patterns in the air, or of ink dropped in
water, or of a dancing snake which seems to move from every part
of its body at once. This may be a "drug-induced
hallucination," but it corresponds exactly to what Dewey and
Bentley have called the transactional relationship of the
organism to its environment. This is to say that all our actions
and experiences arise mutually from the organism and from the
environment at the same time. The eyes can see light because of
the sun, but the sun is light because of the eyes. Ordinarily,
under the hypnosis of social conditioning, we feel quite distinct
from our physical surroundings, facing them rather than belonging
in them. Yet in this way we ignore and screen out the physical
fact of our total interdependence with the natural world. We are
as embodied in it as our own cells and molecules are embodied in
us. Our neglect and repression of this interrelationship gives
special urgency to all the new sciences of ecology, studying the
interplay of organisms with their environments, and warning us
against ignorant interference with the balances of nature.
The sensation that events are happening of themselves, and
that nothing is making them happen and that they are not
happening to anything, has always been a major feature of
my experiences with LSD. It is possible that the chemical is
simply giving me a vivid realization of my own philosophy, though
there have been times when the experience has suggested
modifications of my previousthinking. (1) But just as the sensation of
subject-object polarity is confirmed by the transactional
psychology of Dewey and Bentley, so the sensation of events
happening "of themselves" is just how one would expect
to perceive a world consisting entirely of process. Now the
language of science is increasingly a language of process—a
description of events, relations, operations, and forms rather
than of things and substances. The world so described is a world
of actions rather than agents, verbs rather than nouns, going
against the common-sense idea that an action is the behavior of
some thing, some solid entity of "stuff." But the
commonsense idea that action is always the function of an agent
is so deeply rooted, so bound up with our sense of order and
security, that seeing the world to be otherwise can be seriously
disturbing. Without agents, actions do not seem to come from
anywhere, to have any dependable origin, and at first sight this
spontaneity can be alarming. In one experiment it seemed that
whenever I tried to put my (metaphorical) foot upon some solid
ground, the ground collapsed into empty space. I could find no
substantial basis from which to act: my will was a whim, and my
past, as a causal conditioning force, had simply vanished. There
was only the present conformation of events, happening. For a
while I felt lost in a void, frightened, baseless, insecure
through and through Yet soon I became accustomed to the feeling,
strange as it was. There was simply a pattern of action, of
process, and this was at one and the same time the universe and
myself with nothing outside it either to trust or mistrust. And
there seemed to be no meaning in the idea of its trusting or
mistrusting itself, just as there is no possibility of a finger's
touching its own tip.
Upon reflection, there seems to be nothing unreasonable in
seeing the world in this way. The agent behind every action is
itself action. If a mat can be called matting, a cat can be
called catting. We do not actually need to ask who or what
"cats," just as we do not need to ask what is the basic
stuff or substance out of which the world is formed—for there
is no way of describing this substance except in terms of form,
of structure, order, and operation. The world is not formed
as if it were inert clay responding to the touch of a potter's
hand; the world is form, or better, formation, for upon
examination every substance turns out to be closely knit pattern.
The fixed notion that every pattern or form must be made of some
basic material which is in itself formless is based on a
superficial analogy between natural formation and manufacture, as
if the stars and rocks had been made out of something as a
carpenter makes tables out of wood. Thus what we call the agent
behind the action is simply the prior or relatively more constant
state of the same action: when a man runs we have a
"manning-running" over and above a simple
"manning." Furthermore, it is only a somewhat clumsy
convenience to say that present events are moved or caused by
past events, for we are actually talking about earlier and later
stages of the same event. We can establish regularities of rhythm
and pattern in the course of an event, and so predict its future
configurations, but its past states do not "push" its
present and future states as if they were a row of dominoes stood
on end so that knocking over the first collapses all the others
in series. The fallen dominoes lie where they fall, but past
events vanish into the present, which is just another way of
saying that the world is a self-moving pattern which, when its
successive states are remembered, can be shown to have a certain
order. Its motion, its energy, issues from itself now, not from
the past, which simply falls behind it in memory like the wake
from a ship.
When we ask the "why" of this moving pattern, we
usually try to answer the question in terms of its original, past
impulse or of its future goal. I had realized for a long time
that if there is in any sense a reason for the world's existence
it must be sought in the present, as the reason for the wake must
be sought in the engine of the moving ship. I have already
mentioned that LSD makes me peculiarly aware of the musical or
dance-like character of the world, bringing my attention to rest
upon its present flowing and seeing this as its ultimate point.
Yet I have also been able to see that this point has depths, that
the present wells up from within itself with an energy which is
something much richer than simple exuberance.
One of these experiments was conducted late at night. Some
five or six hours from its start the doctor had to go home, and I
was left alone in the garden. For me, this stage of the
experiment is always the most rewarding in terms of insight,
after some of its more unusual and bizarre sensory effects have
worn off. The garden was a lawn surrounded by shrubs and high
trees—Pine and eucalyptus—and floodlit from the house which
enclosed it on one side. As I stood on the lawn I noticed that
the rough patches where the grass was thin or mottled with weeds
no longer seemed to be blemishes. Scattered at random as they
were, they appeared to constitute an ordered design, giving the
whole area the texture of velvet damask, the rough patches being
the parts where the pile of the velvet is cut. In sheer delight I
began to dance on this enchanted carpet, and through the thin
soles of my moccasins I could feel the ground becoming alive
under my feet, connecting me with the earth and the trees and the
sky in such a way that I seemed to become one body with my whole
surroundings.
Looking up, I saw that the stars were colored with the same
reds, greens, and blues that one sees in iridescent glass, and
passing across them was the single light of a jet plane taking
forever to streak over the sky. At the same time, the trees,
shrubs, and flowers seemed to be living jewelry, inwardly
luminous like intricate structures of jade, alabaster, or coral,
and yet breathing and flowing with the same life that was in me.
Every plant became a kind of musical utterance, a play of
variations on a theme repeated from the main branches, through
the stalks and twigs, to the leaves, the veins in the leaves, and
to the fine capillary network between the veins. Each new
bursting of growth from a center repeated or amplified the basic
design with increasing complexity and delight, finally exulting
in a flower.
From my description it will seem that the garden acquired an
atmosphere that was distinctly exotic, like the gardens of
precious stones in the Arabian Nights, or like scenes in a
Persian miniature. This struck me at the time, and I began to
wonder just why it is that the glowingly articulated landscapes
of those miniatures seem exotic, as do also many Chinese and
Japanese paintings. Were the artists recording what they, too,
had seen under the influence of drugs? I knew enough of the lives
and techniques of Far Eastern painters to doubt this. I asked,
too, whether what I was seeing was "drugged." In other
words, was the effect of the LSD in my nervous system the
addition to my senses of some chemical screen which distorted all
that I saw to preternatural loveliness? Or was its effect rather
to remove certain habitual and normal inhibitions of the mind and
senses, enabling us to see things as they would appear to us if
we were not so chronically repressed? Little is known of the
exact neurological effects of LSD, but what is known suggests the
latter possibility. If this be so, it is possible that the art
forms of other cultures appear exotic—that is, unfamiliarly
enchanting—because we are seeing the world through the eyes of
artists whose repressions are not the same as ours. The blocks in
their view of the world may not coincide with ours, so that in
their representations of life we see areas that we normally
ignore. I am inclined to some such solution because there have
been times when I have seen the world in this magical aspect
without benefit of LSD, and they were times when I was profoundly
relaxed within, my senses unguardedly open to their surroundings.
Feeling, then, not that I was drugged but that I was in an
unusual degree open to reality, I tried to discern the meaning,
the inner character of the dancing pattern which constituted both
myself and the garden, and the whole dome of the night with its
colored stars. All at once it became obvious that the whole thing
was love-play, where love means everything that the word can
mean, a spectrum ranging from the red of erotic delight, through
the green of human endearment, to the violet of divine charity,
from Freud's libido to Dante's "love that moves the sun and
other stars." All were so many colors issuing from a single
white light, and, what was more, this single source was not just
love as we ordinarily understand it: it was also intelligence,
not only Eros and Agape but also Logos. I could see that the
intricate organization both of the plants and of my own nervous
system, like symphonies of branching complexity, were not just
manifestations of intelligence—as if things like intelligence
and love were in themselves substances or formless forces. It was
rather that the pattern itself is intelligence and is love, and
this somehow in spite of all its outwardly stupid and cruel
distortions.
There is probably no way of finding objective verification
for insights such as this. The world is love to him who treats it
as such, even when it torments and destroys him, and in states of
consciousness where there is no basic separation between the ego
and the world suffering cannot be felt as malice inflicted upon
oneself by another. By the same logic it might seem that with out
the separation of self and other there can be no love. This might
be true if individuality and universality were formal opposites,
mutually exclusive of one another, if, that is, the
inseparability of self and other meant that all individual
differentiations were simply unreal. But in the unitary, or
nondualistic, view of the world I have been describing this is
not so. Individual differences express the unity, as branches,
leaves, and flowers from the same plant, and the love between the
members is the realization of their basic interdependence.
I have not yet been able to use LSD in circumstances of great
physical or moral pain, and therefore my explorations of the
problem of evil under its influence may appear to be shallow.
Only once in these experiments have I felt acute fear, but I know
of several cases in which LSD has touched off psychic states of
the most alarming and unpleasant kind. More than once I have
invited such states under LSD by looking at images ordinarily
suggestive of "the creeps"—the mandibles of spiders,
and the barbs and spines of dangerous fish and insects. Yet they
evoked only a sense of beauty and exuberance, for our normal
projection of malice into these creatures was entirely withdrawn,
so that their organs of destruction became no more evil than the
teeth of a beautiful woman. On another occasion I looked for a
long time at a colored reproduction of Van Eyck's Last
Judgment, which is surely one of the most horrendous products
of human imagination. The scene of hell is dominated by the
figure of Death, a skeleton beneath whose batlike wings lies a
writhing mass of screaming bodies gnawed by snakes which
penetrate them like maggots in fruit. One of the curious effects
of LSD is to impart an illusion of movement in still images, so
that here the picture came to life and the whole entanglement of
limbs and serpents began to squirm before my eyes. (2)
Ordinarily such a sight should have been hideous, but now I
watched it with intense and puzzled interest until the thought
came to me, "Demon est deus inversus—the Devil is
God inverted—so let's turn the picture upside down." I did
so, and thereupon burst into laughter for it became apparent at
once that the scene was an empty drama, a sort of spiritual
scarecrow, designed to guard some mystery from profanation by the
ignorant. The agonized expressions of the damned seemed quite
evidently "put on," and as for the death's-head, the
great skull in the center of the painting, it became just what a
skull is—an empty shell—and why the horror when there is
nothing in it?
I was, of course, seeing ecclesiastical hells for what they
are. On the one hand, they are the pretension that social
authority is ultimately inescapable since there are post-mortem
police who will catch every criminal. On the other hand, they are
"no trespassing" signs to discourage the insincere and
the immature from attaining insights which they might abuse. A
baby is put in a play pen to keep it from getting at the matches
or falling downstairs, and though the intention of the pen is to
keep the baby closed in, parents are naturally proud when the
child grows strong enough to climb out. Likewise, a man can
perform actions which are truly moral only when he is no longer
motivated by the fear of hell, that is, when he grows into union
with the Good that is beyond good and evil, which, in other
words, does not act from the love of rewards or the fear of
punishments. This is precisely the nature of the world when it is
considered as self-moving action, giving out a past instead of
being motivated by a past.
Beyond this, the perception of the empty threat of the
death's-head was certainly a recognition of the fact that the
fear of death, as distinct from the fear of dying, is one of the
most baseless mirages that trouble us. Because it is completely
impossible to imagine one's own personal absence, we fill the
void in our minds with images of being buried alive in perpetual
darkness. If death is the simple termination of a stream of
consciousness, it is certainly nothing to fear. At the same time,
I realize that there is some apparent evidence for survival of
death in a few extraordinarily unexplainable mediumistic
communications and remembrances of past lives. These I attribute,
vaguely enough, to subtler networks of communication and
interrelationship in the pattern of life than we ordinarily
perceive. For if forms repeat themselves, if the structure of
branching trees is reverberated in the design of watercourses in
the desert, it would not be so strange if a pattern so intricate
as the human nervous system were to repeat configurations that
arise in consciousness as veritable memories of the most distant
times. My own feeling, and of course it is nothing more than an
opinion, is that we transcend death, not as individual
memory-systems, but only in so far as our true identity is the
total process of the world as distinct from the apparently
separate organism.
As I have said, this sense of being the whole process is
frequently experienced with LSD, and, for me, it has often arisen
out of a strong feeling of the mutuality of opposites. Line and
plane, concept and percept, solid and space, figure and ground,
subject and object appear to be so completely correlative as to
be convertible into each other. At one moment it seems that there
are, for example, no lines in nature: there are only the
boundaries of planes, boundaries which are, after all, the planes
themselves. But at the next moment, looking carefully into the
texture of these planes, one discovers them to be nothing but a
dense network of patterned lines. Looking at the form of a tree
against the sky, I have felt at one moment that its outline
"belongs" to the tree, exploding into space. But the
next moment I feel that the same form is the "inline"
of the sky, of space imploding the tree. Every pull is felt as a
push, and every push as a pull, as in rotating the rim of a wheel
with one's hand. Is one pushing or pulling?
The sense that forms are also properties of the space in
which they expand is not in the least fantastic when one
considers the nature of magnetic fields, or, say, the dynamics of
swirling ink dropped into water. The concepts of verbal thought
are so clumsy that we tend to think only of one aspect of a
relationship at a time. We alternate between seeing a given form
as a property of the figure and as a property of the ground, as
in the Gestalt image of two profiles in black silhouette, about
to kiss. The white space between them appears as a chalice, but
it is intensely difficult to see the kissing faces and the
chalice simultaneously. Yet with LSD one appears to be able to
feel this simultaneity quite vividly, and thus to become aware of
the mutuality of one's own form and action and that of the
surrounding world. The two seem to shape and determine each other
at the same moment, explosion and implosion concurring in perfect
harmony, so giving rise to the feeling that one is actual self is
both. This inner identity is felt with every level of the
environment—the physical world of stars and space, rocks and
plants, the social world of human beings, and the ideational
world of art and literature, music and conversation. All are
grounds or fields operating in the most intimate mutuality with
one's own existence and behavior so that the "origin"
of action lies in both at once, fusing them into a single act. It
is certainly for this reason that LSD taken in common with a
small group can be a profoundly eucharistic experience, drawing
the members together into an extremely warm and intimate bond of
friendship.
All in all, I have felt that my experiments with this
astonishing chemical have been most worth while, creative,
stimulating, and, above all, an intimation that "there is
more in heaven and earth than is dreamed of in your
philosophy." Only once have I felt terror, the sense of
being close to madness, and even here the insight gained was well
worth the pain. Yet this was enough to convince me that
indiscriminate use of this alchemy might be exceedingly
dangerous, and to make me ask who, in our society, is competent
to control its use. Obviously, this applies even more to such
other powers of science as atomic energy, but once something is
known there is really no way of locking it up. At the present
time, 1960, LSD is in the control of pharmacologists and a few
research groups of psychiatrists, and though there are
unscrupulous and frankly psychotic psychiatrists, this seems to
me a far more reliable form of control than that exercised by the
police and the Bureau of Narcotics—which is not control at all,
but ineffective repression, handing over actual control to the
forces of organized crime.
On the whole, we feel justified in using dangerous powers
when we can establish that there is a relatively low probability
of disaster. Life organized so as to be completely foolproof and
secure is simply not worth living, since it requires the final
abolition of freedom. It is on this perfectly rational principle
of gambling that we justify the use of travel by air and
automobile, electric appliances in the home, and all the other
dangerous instruments of civilization. Thus far, the record of
catastrophes from the use of LSD is extremely low, and there is
no evidence at all that it is either habit-forming or physically
deleterious. It is, of course, possible to become psychically
dependent on stimuli which do not establish any craving that can
be identified in physiological terms. Personally, I am no example
of phenomenal will power, but I find that I have no inclination
to use LSD in the same way as tobacco or wines and liquors. On
the contrary, the experience is always so fruitful that I feel I
must digest it for some months before entering into it again.
Furthermore, I find that I am quite instinctively disinclined to
use it without the same sense of readiness and dedication with
which one approaches a sacrament, and also that the experience is
worth while to the precise degree that I keep my critical and
intellectual faculties alert.
It is generally felt that there is a radical incompatibility
between intuition and intellect, poetry and logic, spirituality
and rationality, To me, the most impressive thing about LSD
experiences is that these formally opposed realms seem instead to
complement and fructify one another, suggesting, therefore, a
mode of life in which man is no longer an embodied paradox of
angel and animal, of reason fighting instinct, but a marvelous
coincidence in whom Eros and Logos are one.
Footnotes
(1) I have often made the point, as
in The Way of Zen, that the "real" world is concrete
rather than abstract, and thus that the conceptual patterns of
order, categorization, and logic which the human mind projects
upon nature are in some way less real. But upon several occasions
LSD has suggested a fundamental identity of percept and concept,
concrete and abstract. After all, our brains and the patterns in
them are themselves members of the concrete, physical universe,
and thus our abstractions are as much forms of nature as the
structure of crystals or the organization of ferns. (back)
(2) Later, with the aid of a sea
urchin's shell I was able to find out something of the reasons
for this effect. All the small purple protuberances on the shell
seemed to be wiggling, not only to sight but also to touch
Watching this phenomenon closely, I realized that as my eyes
moved across the shell they seemed to change the intensity of
coloring, amounting to an increase or decrease in the depth of
shadow. This did not happen when the eyes were held still. Now
motion, or apparent motion, of the shadow will often seem to be
motion of the object casting it, in this case the protrusions on
the shell. In the Van Eyck painting there was likewise an
alteration, a lightening or darkening, of actual shadows which
the artist had painted, and thus the same illusion of movement. (back)
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