Psychedelic Christianity Part II / Continued from part I.
di Antonio Bonifacio
cover: william blake, beatrice addressing dante
After this "deviation" in Western sacred art, we resume the thread of the discussion, always keeping, however, in the old continent in which the ecstatic phenomenon involuntarily made known by Maria Sabina. Destiny had prepared a truly epochal surprise for this unknown Mazatec shaman, namely her encounter with Gordon Wasson and his wife Valentina Pavlovna Guercken, both unrelated to chemistry and anthropological research. The first, in fact, was a banker, while his wife was a pediatrician. However, despite the total professional extraneousness to botanical themes, the couple was totally dedicated to research extending all over the globe on "psychedelic" properties of fungi and theirs mythological connections, to the point that the two spent all their energy in their disinterested research (in reality there is a dark and very cumbersome aspect of the story, as the banker seems to have been financed by the CIA).Β
In any case to the two fans ethnomycology owes much, if not all. To make it necessarily short on the story in question, it is recalled that the Wassons presented themselves to Maria Sabina really on tiptoe and asked and obtained to attend a session in which an "existential" dilemma had to be necessarily posed in order to be allowed to consume the mushroom. The playful or merely experiential aspect aimed at satisfying an extemporaneous and transient curiosity was evidently completely foreign and inconceivable to the rite which the shaman presided over. Under these circumstances, the two Europeans experienced the effects of the fungus ritually assumed in the human body and perceived how profound it really was lair of the white rabbit, creating a synergy between their mind and the mushroom which multiplied the capacity of perception, thus making the consciousness penetrate into psychic realms totally unknown to the waking dimension, radically modifying the experience of time and space.Β
In a short time the searches of the Wassons, greatly amplified by the press, reached the ears of Albert Hofmann. This scientist, recognized by his community as one of the greatest chemists of the last century, was the first to synthesize (others before him did not succeed), the active principle of the mushroom used by Maria Sabina, the psilocyb molecule and, after having achieved this sensational result and having experienced the very singular effects on himself (he perceived himself as a Mexican native who moved in a pre-Hispanic landscape), he decided to meet the shaman to have a sort of approval of her work as a scientist chemist. One can imagine the scene of this meeting of truly surreal outlines. The greatest European chemist of the time waited in front of the mud hut of an agraphic shaman (she does not know writing but she is not illiterate), almost asking for a response around a spiritual theme, to compare the effectiveness of her " red pill βwith that of mushroom-child born of the blood of Christ, scattered from his crucified body. Communication, with these premises, seems truly inconceivable. In any case, the meeting went very well and Maria Sabina, experimentally assumed as a guinea pig, took the aforementioned "red pill" and found a similarity of effects with her baby mushrooms, "approved" the synthetic product, almost as the appropriate certification body does (in Europe AIFA) in the face of new composition drugs.Β
Hofmann is obviously famous (in primis) for the synthesis of another entheogenic molecule, that ofLSD which took place in 1938, exactly twenty years before his meeting with Maria Sabina, dated 1958. LSD will become for its creator "My difficult child", for a whole series of consequences which, in the circumstances, cannot even be mentioned and which resemble the effects caused by a snowball, which descending into the valley, turns into an avalanche and overwhelms everything. These significant events, but unrelated to this theme, are corroborated by an abundant literature to which we refer; rather, in this passage it is interesting to focus on the passage between the pulsating living matter of the mushroom (which is cannibalized as a divine body) and its reduction-reification through a purely chemical process, synthesized in a "pill". For this reason, a consideration of Ezio Albrile, around this operation, so to speak,Β transmutative.
In fact, it can be said that, with this βwesternβ chemical procedure, one would see summarized the βQuintessenceβ of the sacred mushroom and therefore what has been defined would be made available, here as elsewhere, as it "Spirit of the plant". It should not be overlooked that this operation is however characterized by strong alchemical and not purely chemical traits, as it might appear at first impression. Albrile, in general terms and not specifically relating to the episode we are dealing with, outlines its features, leaning on one of the most ancient alchemical writings, the text known by the title Physika kay mystika, attributed to Democriro di Abdera. In it yes It describes the salvation of the soul, its liberation from worldly adversities following the parameters of a chemical manipulation. The researcher writes:
"Terms such as distillation, sublimation, calcination make it clear how the philosophers known as" alchemists " experimented with material elements such as plants, minerals and metals, states of improvement and evolution of matter that had a direct connection with the life of the soul and its destiny in the world. "
Ezio Albrile, The infinite illusion, p. 112
Evidently Albrile emphasizes a kind of presence of "Elective affinities" between the "inanimate" world, which is not inanimate at all (quite the contrary), and the soul of the "experimenter", who can enter into a symbiotic relationship regardless of the "accidents" that convey the reciprocal interaction. Consequently, according to a certain and not incorrect perspective, Hofmann would have really captured the spirit of the plant, as was recognized directly by Maria Sabina, with a truly singular investiture in this regard.Β
What interests us in these notes, however, is also the aspect of the personal experience that Hofmann had with his "difficult child", as it was told in an interview with another researcher on states of consciousness, so to speak. problematic, that is Stalislav Grof. The significant meeting took place "not by chance" at the Esalen Institute, the home of research on mind / body interactions. For the purposes of this article we are primarily interested in highlighting some passages of this long interview, however one thing is to be put at the top of everything, as an interpretative key of Hofmann's thought, that is the absolute opposition that the great chemist has constantly shown circus the use of LSD in a playful-profane context (as indeed has largely happened often with tragic consequences). Hofmann, in fact, argued that the use of LSD in a setting improper can be regarded as the desecration of a sacred substance.Β
From a completely utopian perspective, "her child" should have inspired the same veneration that the natives harbored for this kind of substances, which, frankly, makes us a little perplexed, given the total cultural difference between the two environments, which exclude the possibility of allowing a simple and harmless transfer between them. Having said this, it is possible to take note of some significant excerpts from the interview containing the questions posed by Stanislav Grof to Albert Hofmann and his answers, indicating that it is taken from the magazine "Elsewhere # 15" (year 2013) where it can be read in its entirety. In the body of the interview some of our observations with modest interpretative kit are present, interspersed and therefore recognizable. Β
grof: If I understand correctly, you believe, as indeed I do, that even managing to explain all the biochemical and neuropsychological modifications in neurons, we would still have to deal with the enormous gap between chemical and electrical processes and consciousness, which seems unbridgeable. .
Hofmann: Yes, it is the fundamental problem of reality. We can study various psychic functions and even the most basic sensory functions, such as sight or hearing, which make up our daily picture of the world. They have a material side and a psychic side. This is the gap that cannot be explained. We can track its metabolism in the brain, we can measure biochemical and neurophysiological changes, electrical potentials, and so on. These are material and energetic processes. But substance and electric current are a very different thing, a very different plane, from psychic experience. Even sight and our other sensory functions raise the same problem. We need to realize that there is a gap that will probably never be bridged or explained. We can study material processes and various energy-level processes - this is what we can do as scientists. But then something very different occurs, the psychic experience, which remains a mystery.
grof: There seem to be two distinctly different approaches to the problem of the brain-consciousness relationship that manifests itself in psychedelic sessions. The first is the traditional scientific setting, which explains the spectrum of LSD experience as an emission of information that is stored in our brain receptors. It hypothesizes that the whole process is enclosed in our skull and experiences are created by combinations and interactions of the engrams accumulated in our memory over the course of life. A radical alternative to this materialistic and monistic vision has been proposed by Aldous Huxley. Following some personal experiences with LSD and mescaline, he began to consider the brain as a "safety valve", which normally protects us against the ingress of a huge mass of cosmic information, to prevent it from flooding and overloading our ordinary consciousness. According to this hypothesis, the brain would have the function of reducing the amount of information available and circumscribing our experience of the world. LSD would free us from this restriction, opening the door to much broader experiences.
Hofmann: I agree with Huxley's thesis that brain functions expand in psychedelic sessions. Generally, we have a limited ability to process the stimuli we receive from the outside world in the form of optical, acoustic, tactile, and so on impulses. We have a limited ability to transfer this information so it can reach consciousness. Under the influence of psychedelics, the valve opens and a huge amount of external impulses manage to enter and stimulate the brain. This gives rise to an overwhelming experience.
Walt Disney has often incorporated the fungal theme into his comics and films, as these images from Alice in Wonderland. A rather eloquent case is a long and "brazen" sequence present in it Il ritorno di Mary Poppins where the βpractically perfectβ nanny gives a long speech to the boys in their room, having a reproduction in a large poster of a mushroom behind her. But it wasn't just Walt Disney who linked the fungi to childhood. In the German children's book Mecki and the dwarves it is shown in the eloquent illustrations that accompany it how mushroom spirits reveal themselves to the dreamer who "has opened the doors of perception". But be careful: one thing is a furtive peek into the underworld, assuming that it has an ontological identity, one thing is a radical transformation of the experiencer after an initiation.
At this point it seems useful to point out that Huxley's experience was mentioned, essentially in the same terms, in the introductory paper of the well-known researcher and scientist Mariano Bizzarri in the cornerstone of the topic, namely "Plants of the gods", of which Richard Evans Schultes and Christian Ratsch are jointly authors, in addition to the aforementioned Hofmann. It is worth noting a very important passage of commentary on the Huxleyan work which is reproduced here in its entirety and which lies in the introduction of the aforementioned text: "The cornerstone of his thesis is that consciousness is normal - the customary waking state - it is only a pale representation of the cognitive and aesthetic possibilities that can be reached through the transition that allows access to other states of consciousness". We emphasize the use of the adjective "others" instead of "altered", a rare use in this literature and also used by another well-known researcher Mario Polia, who deals with religious anthropology, in the field and, mainly in the South American context, Bizzarri also uses the term other states of consciousness and not of conscience thus highlighting that this is only one, and which, as a rule, is "underused". Likewise it is also evident that these "other" states do not lead to the distortion of consciousness, like the "liquid" clocks by DalΓ¬ represented in his famous painting, but rather the penetration into other environments present in the same building, accomplished by crossing doors whose keys have been lost.Β
Lo shaman could be so termed as a kind of "Master of keys", as it holds access (this refers to a character and the "condominium" setting of the film cycle of Matrix) to the totality of consciousness, which is much vaster than that which can ordinarily be experienced. Having said that, just ahead, we will focus on the reasons for this possible "Anthropological mutation" which determined the constitution of a cage of conscience, hypothesizing the possibility that the cause can be traced in a catabasic process, of a historical nature, which has "darkened the sky" (again as happens in Matrix) thereby prevented this "information" (whatever this term is meant) from reaching our consciousness, finally separating the "ego" from the "whole".
grof: I would now like to ask you something very personal. I am sure this question has already been asked several times. During your life you have had several psychedelic experiences, of which you have described some of them today. I start with the lysergic experiences associated with the discovery of LSD, then came those related to the work related to the isolation of the active ingredients of magic mushrooms and ololiuqui, the ritual of mushrooms with MarΓa Sabina, the sessions she described in her book LSD , my difficult baby, and some others. What influence did all these experiences have on you, on your way of being in the world, on your values, your personal philosophy, and on your scientific worldview?
Hofman: They changed my life, as they presented me with a new concept of reality. After the LSD experience, reality began to become a problem for me. Before, I had always believed that there was only one reality, the reality of everyday life. One true reality, while the rest was pure imagination - it wasn't real. Under the influence of LSD, I instead entered into realities that were just as real and even more real than ordinary. I reflected on the nature of reality and had profound insights. I analyzed the mechanisms that contribute to creating the ordinary view of the world, what we call βeveryday realityβ. What are the factors that make it up? What is internal and what is external? For this process I use the metaphor of the sender and the recipient. The productive sender is the external world, the external reality including our body. The recipient is our deep self, the conscious ego, which transforms external stimuli into psychological experiences. It was very useful for me to distinguish what is actually and objectively external, something that cannot be changed, that is the same for everyone, and what is produced by me, homemade, what I am, what I can change, what is my spiritual heart that can be changed. This possibility of modifying reality, which exists in everyone, represents the real freedom of each individual. Each individual has the enormous possibility of changing his view of the world. He has helped me enormously in life to realize what actually exists outside and what is produced by me, in my inner self.
With regard to the possibility outlined to "modify the vision of the world" it is appropriate, in the circumstances, to propose a slightly "quantum" comment on the subject and thus offer an observation by the neuropsychiatrist Rosanna Cerbo, taken from the final part of his report given at the SISSC Conference "Forbidden Medicine", Turin 31 July - 2 August 2015 entitled PAIN AND SUFFERING IN THE DEATH EVENT: A MANDATORY PATH?. The excerpt of the researcher's report is preceded by an important observation by the historian of religions Mario Toti, pbecause the modality in which one participates with the conscience in the "death event" it assumes an absolutely decisive soteriological importance. Toti writes:
"However, it is legitimate to read in Tibetan doctrine a certain analogy with the Catholic thesis of punctuality, without prejudice to the emphasis on meditation: Β«on whatever form of being one meditates, on the point of abandoning the body, towards that only he flows because his nature will always be influenced by that "; and, therefore, βeveryone will get that form of existence upon which his heart is concentrated when he diesΒ». "
This can be welded to what the researcher concludes on the topic dealt with:
"All this reopens the dilemma between traditional physics and realist philosophy of Greek origin: everything you perceive of the world cannot exist without your conscience, for which conscience is the basis of reality and reality exists apart from the observer; while for quantum physics reality is created by the observer who is decisive in the formation of reality, which exists only if there is someone who observes it. "
For quantum physics it will certainly be so, but many had noticed this much earlier, even in the West. Thus the visionary painter William Blake, In his work Jerusalem, describes the peremptory invitation addressed to the giant Albion, representing humanity after the fall, to become aware:
"Wake up! You who sleep in the land of shadows, wakes up! Stretch your limbs! I am in you and you in me, side by side in divine love ... Christ is the divine image or body present in every man, the only universal form in which all things are enclosed in their form universal."
Albion becomes what he perceives and Blake here refers to a Paracelsian doctrine: βMan is what he thinks, and a thing, too, so he thinks it. If he thinks fire, it's fire, if he thinks war is war " (De virtute imaginativa, 1526, quoted by Alexander Robb. 523). Even these expressions could easily be qualified as psychedelic Christianity, given Blake's adherence to Catholic doctrine even in its "esoteric" expression.
After this passage we continue with the words of the researcher: "But if the conscience or mind or soul is able to exist regardless of the functioning of the brain, for those who are believers, such as those who write, or for those who are not, endless boundaries open up. In this scenario, what role might the use of LSD or other psychedelics (psilocybin) play in the final phase of life? Would they be able to interfere with OBE and NDE? Would they be useful to strengthen the defense mechanisms or could they alter them in a negative way, creating a "bad trip" in some subjects? Is it worth investigating? What are the risks, in a crucial and non-repeatable moment in the life of the individual? These questions represent the future of neuroscience research regarding the death event". Certainly Aldous Huxley had guaranteed an extremely peaceful death - and therefore probably a "good trip" -, through the use of a psychedelic substance, because, probably, he was able to concentrate his lucid efforts, operating a peaceful construction of reality during theexitus.
Now, apart from the congruous and significant incident proposed, underlining the relativity of reality from the perspective of quantum interpretation, the point of the interview reported above reveals itself as a contribution of further fundamental importance in favor of that we have seen a conception, even Paracelsian, according to which the observer contributes to the formation of reality. Hofmann in fact also carries out a very lucid reflection on the experience of reality, which is objectified by the subject in an interaction that harmonizes the stimuli he receives and the translation of the same into consciousness. This is a fact that he ascertains from direct experience and not indirectly from the narration of others. Well, in support of Hofmann's cogitation, about the need to break the bank and open the doors of perception, a further contribution, of an almost historical nature, is opportune, which was just mentioned previously with regard to the historical catabasis.Β
This contribution enters the full theme of the progressive closure of the ego in a perceptive cage, socially predetermined which, progressively, takes on suffocating tones and which pushes the subject to try to escape from the walls of this prison (Tolkienly: the holy escape of the prisoner, which coincides with the "Wake up!" of Blake addressed to Albion), in obedience to a persistent instinctive spiritual nostalgia, aimed at restoring that communication (the information first recalled that then we could consider the "words" perceived by Maria Sabina) that in illo tempore one had with "other" states of consciousness, which could be rendered with the religious expression of: see things in divinis.Β
Is this perhaps the "ontological" cap which, as it is told in one Jewish legend collected by Arturo Graf, was placed to protect the earthly Paradise and is represented byguardian angel Uriel who defends access to the unskilled with the whirling movement of his sword of fire? In fact, there is no "wall" between "paradise" and "world" but a fiery simplegade that allows only the brave and qualified to pass.Β
Raffaele K. Salinari writes:
"Towards the end of the second millennium BC, at least in the West in correspondence with the use of writing (" paradoxically "Maria Sabina is agraph) as a tool also accessible to the layman ... there was a progressive weakening of these hallucinatory suggestions which progressively led to the formation of consciousness understood as the individual restructuring of the set of perceptions that determine the image of the world. "
For Julian Jaynes, author of the text The sunset of the bicameral mind and the origin of consciousness, this event, internally cataclysmic, led to a significant evolutionary step, contrary to Salinari's reading, the loss of the hallucinatory function, the hearing of divine voices, the perception of the numinous it entailed the first consequence of the silence of the oracles and, in essence, the end of the archaic holistic perception.
βThe ancient man who oriented himself with these voices seemed not to have his own vision of the world, but rather a relationship mediated by the forces that spoke to him from it and about it. All this is still relevant in some marginal cultures in modernity linked to sacred places and hypostases that continue to guide the choices of the community in the topical moments. "
Raffaele K. Salinari, On the way to Eleusis
Yet, the possibility of this double perception appears so incomprehensible to the eyes of contemporaries that Holger Kalweit, ethnologist and psychologist, was thus able to express his, even professional, discomfort:
βSince our culture does not admit the existence of higher states of consciousness, both psychiatrists and society - and later even the patients themselves - report these states to the ego, the measure of all things. How many sages, how many shamans, healers, seers, wise men, saints have been caught in the coils of psychiatry with its alienation from the world and its false obsession with the ego. "
H. Kalweit: 1996,193
Unfortunately, the "Western sciences" seem to have taken no account of the basic difference that exists between the shamanic call and mental illnesses apparently nosologically so similar. The approach of transcultural psychiatry to states of ecstasy proposed by the aforementioned Rosanna Cerbo is interesting:
βShamanic practices, for example, are comparable to psychopathological phenomena and the so-called initiation, also calledΒ« initiatory disease Β»is a decisive moment in the life of a shaman. The distinctive traits of the shaman's personality essential for achieving the ecstatic state, with a detachment from reality, deep emotions and abnormal perceptual experiences, with or without depersonalization. Western culture has long considered shamanic practices to be expressions of mental pathology, as the definition of normal and abnormal in psychology uses criteria that derive from the clinical practice of Western psychopathology. Furthermore, these evaluation criteria have been considered categories of universal value, and not applied to the different cultural environment in order to interpret these psychic experiences in a different way. And it is more difficult, in a Western view, to distinguish psychotic ecstasy, although it is obvious that psychotic individuals can also be among shamans. But as in Western psychopathology, what matters in these states is the meaning attributed by those who live such experiences and by the specific cultural and social universe to which they are part.. "
On the other hand, bringing these two continents separated by the experience of the sacred to storage, illegitimately putting them together reveals the criminal trait of the western leveling approach since, as the researcher still writes:
"In mystical ecstasies an almost intact personality persists, while in psychotics the personality almost always disintegrates. The element that absolutely distinguishes the visions of mystics from psychotic or epileptic hallucinations are the effects that derive from them for the conduct of life of the person who experiences them and the social consequences they entail. The experience of psychotic or epileptic ecstasy does not lead to concrete results on the community of believers, it remains closed in the sphere of its own subjectivity and does not determine cultural and historical-social developments. From this it can be concluded that: "What absolutely distinguishes the visions of the mystics from pathological hallucinations are the effects that derive from them for the conduct of life Β». [...] We only have to ask ourselves if, physiologically or psychologically, the visions are not human actions set in motion by a power that goes beyond us and that we call God. "Β
For this reason, contrary to what Hofmann thought "naively", the experience of Maria Sabina is not exportable and cannot live outside of an iron religious conscience that knows how to translate the perception of the Elsewhere into symbolic images, which is what we do on our shores we have evidently become incapable. The next step, which is of extraordinary importance in this era dominated by the media elementarity of contemporary Greta-thought, of only materialistic composition, is the spiritual approach that one has with "nature" in the state of consciousness "other βAnd is the one contained in the following lines. Let's continue the interview:
grof: You have an extraordinary awareness and sensitivity regarding ecological issues, for example industrial pollution of water and air, the depletion of nature, the extinction of European forests, etc. Would you attribute them to her psychedelic sessions, in which she experienced the experience of being one with nature and how the whole universe is related? Do you think you have developed, through these experiences, a greater ecological sensitivity, a more acute perception of what we are doing to nature?
Hofman: Yes, through my LSD experience and my new vision of reality, I have become aware of the wonders of creation, the magnificence of nature and the plant and animal kingdom. I have become very sensitive to what is going to happen to all of this and to all of us. I have published articles and lectured on the main environmental problems we have in Europe and in my country.
With these words, it is confirmed that Hofmann does not receive unreal images but its opposite, reality as it presents itself, stripped of its superfluity, subtracted from the submission of alchemical lead and therefore, finally, aurified, perceived in divinis precisely, through that process that appears as the desired restoration of the faculties proper to the "bicameral" mind. It is not a metaverse, rather its opposite. Hofmann in fact seems to describe precisely the passage of every ecstasy, a path that leads from appearance to appearance and in which the imaginal reality is revealed, truly seeing how deep and splendidly real it can be lair of the white rabbit ...Β
As an epitaph we want to add this reflection:
βBut the bicamerality of the mind does not disappear for this: the whole history is traversed by a nostalgia for another mind, our whole psychic life testifies to numerous phenomena, from possession to schizophrenia, which refer to that other mind. What we call history is "The slow retreat of the tide of voices and divine presences". But our mind continues to refer to those voices and presences, even if it no longer knows how to name and listen to them. "
Perhaps this is why Maria Sabina expressed her spiritual condition with these clear words:
"There is a world beyond ours, far and near at the same time, and invisibleΒ And it is here that God, the dead, the spirits of the saints live, a world where everything has already happened and everything is known. This world speaks and has its own language: I refer what it says. The sacred mushroom takes me by the hand and takes me there, to that world where everything is known. It is they, the sacred mushrooms, who speak in a way that is understandable to me. I ask them questions and they answer me. When I return from the journey I have undertaken with them, I will tell what they have told me and showed me. "Β
Richard Evans Schultes, Albert Hoffman, Gregory Ratsch: 2021, 156
In another time and in another place, Enoch called this perception as "Vision of the Celestial Tablets": in the end the universe is ... small.
Bibliography:
Stanislav Grof's interview with Albert Hofmann, Elsewhere n. 15, SISSC Italian Society for the Study of States of ConsciousnessΒ
Albrile Enzo: The infinite illusion, Gnostic ways of salvation, Mimesis 2017, Milan
Raffaele K. Salinari: On the way to Eleusis, in AAVV: Eleusis, the wisdom heart of Europe, Padua University pressΒ
Kalweit Roger: Healers, shamans and sorcerers, Ubaldini publisher, Rome, 1996Β
Richard Evans Schultes, Albert Hoffman Gregory Ratsch. Plants of the gods, Venexia Rome 2021
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