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Psychedelic Society Revisited

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Psychedelic Society Revisited PSYCHEDELIC SOCIETY REVISITED On Reducing Valves, Reality Tunnels and the Question of Psychedelic Culture by Ido Hartogsohn Some thirty years ago, in May 1983, Terence McKenna's contact lenses failed him during a critical moment of his speech at the psychedelic conference in Santa Barbara. Unable to read from the page, McKenna had to resort to improvising. Listening to the recording after the event, he couldn't help but notice the crowd's reaction to a certain bit in his improvised talk, when he'd spoken the words 'psychedelic society'. He had never used the phrase consciously before, but hearing the ripples that went through his listeners when he brought up the concept made McKenna wonder about its possible meanings. A year later, in a classic June 1984 talk which was given at the Esalen Institute, and later adapted into a chapter in the 1997 psychedelic anthology Entheogens and the Future of Religion, McKenna proposed some of the possible characteristics and implications of such a psychedelic society.'A psychedelic society, he suggested, need not be one in which all members ingest psychedelics themselves. Rather, it is a society which orients itself and lives in the light of the irreducible Mystery of Being; a society in which problems and solutions are displaced from their traditional central role, and which puts' irreducible Mysteries' in their stead. Such a society, McKenna suggested, would be less keen to find clear and definitive answers, and more open to exploring reality without imposing simplified structures upon it. It would be more immune to the disastrous urge for simple clear-cut 84 IDa HARTOGSOHN answers and identities, which characterizes human societies, and be society. ': _'..; more open to co-existing with the doubts and contradictions inherent experie:"; :: to the cosmos. Reac.z ; ::: McKenna's vision of a psychedelic society was closely related to I immers s : J another of his most popular ideas: the idea that culture and ideology I was (:2.::- .a are not your friends. According to McKenna, ideology and culture are the sube.: ::..; tools which give other people the power over one's experience and Mclvenr; . r., identity, since they lead individuals to shape their identity according to without '~::__ pre-conceived forms. If you identify yourself with brands or with the notion. -.:- popular ideas about what is beautiful, true, right or important, you are Was it :: =' - giving away the power over your experience to other people. You let without c--:..:...J others tell you what to think, instead of thinking for yourself. In this e"~ Not to mistake culture and ideology as your friends meant seeking the subic.: - to understand reality in one's own terms instead of buying into pre- packaged ideological and cultural deals such as communism, capitalism, democracy or totalitarianism. Psychedelics were the tools that would enable that to happen, for as McKenna repeatedly argued, psychedelics Mck.enr.; ' are boundary dissolvers, belief breakers, and deconditioning agents that bel.e: , ::: which raise doubts in you whether you are a Hasidic Rabbi or a Marxist ideas in ::::.:::; anthropologist.' 'The plants ... don't address cultural values, they blast Large T:::'::- through them, they address the animal body, the mammalian brain. '3 Mind at L::.::- Z:: The psychedelic human being was thus to be a person that creates that Mans his own culture and ideology. The psychedelic artist was to be the out his pe: ~:::'" artist whose work is uniquely original, transcending the limits of pre- perceptio; ~: conceived styles and forms. The psychedelic thinker; the one thinker to Huxley ::.~;_:: think outside the established norms of thinking. Henry B:::-;:. And there was another, even more fundamental, flaw to culture Broad. -,'.::.' :: and ideology. Belief in itself, argued McKenna, was limiting to the senses ir.t: :_ individual, because every time you believe in something you are of detai.s automatically precluded from believing its opposite. By believing mechanis:r something, you are virtually shutting yourself from all contradictory birds chir; =-_; information, thus once again performing the sin of imposing a rigid importar.: :':"''- simplified structure upon an infinitely complex reality." A psychedelic light ref.:::' _ • PSYCHEDELIC SOCIETY 85 society, McKenna suggested, 'would abandon belief systems for direct experience. '5 Reading the Psychedelic Society many years ago, in a time when I immersed myself in the universe of McKenna's writings and talks, I was captivated by the idea. Yet, in the years since, my thoughts of the subject have become less certain and unequivocal. Like many of McKenna's ideas, the concept of the psychedelic society as a society without belief and ideology was a brilliantly articulated and inspiring notion, yet it seemed to have a suspect air of unexamined utopianism. Was it possible to live without culture and ideology? Was a society without certain types of shared beliefs and constructs even conceivable? In this essay, I wish to convey some of my thoughts and reflections on the subject following a recent encounter with a Spanish psytrance tribe. A genealogy of the psychedelic counter-cultural idea: 100·_. w _"" __ '- ~ McKenna's notions that culture and ideology are not your friends, and that belief is intrinsically limiting, were closely related to two other key ideas in the history of psychedelic thought: Aldous Huxley's Mind at "'-- _. - --::-. Large Theory and Timothy Leary's idea of Reality Tunnels. Huxley's Mind at Large Theory, elaborated in the Doors of Perception, suggested that Man's view of reality is limited by a 'reducing valve' which filters out his perception of reality so that it includes only the thinnest trickle of perceptions necessary for his survival. The function of consciousness, Huxley argued, following such thinkers such as French philosopher Henry Bergson and the English epistemologist and philosopher C.D. -- -,""''::'' I.... L,,- '- Broad, was not to channel the myriad impressions perceived by the senses into our awareness, but rather to filter out the staggering noise of details which fills our raw perception. Consciousness was the "::c"_:;-~=g mechanism which allowed us to edit out of our awareness the sound of " ~~::,][\ birds chirping in the background while we are working to complete an important task; or making us neglect to notice the special way in which light reflects upon the skin of an apricot we are about to consume. • « 86 IDO HARTOGSOHN Were we to become engrossed in the many details perceived by the avidly ; ~.; -: senses, we might become unable to function efficiently, Huxley argued, their clz.r; ',= so consciousness edits out from our experience what it considers and d13~~.~.=-= inconsequential information. In this way, an infinite world is reduced into our finite and more manageable, but also infinitely poorer and of info:-.:-:-~,::" incomplete perception of reality: what we call a worldview. best ecc :: -= Same as with McKenna's culture and ideology, Huxley's reducing inform;': : : valve was a mechanism which cuts down on the complexity of reality ubiqu.t ;', ;":' by fitting it into pre-conceived forms which make us more immediately Romar, '_''~ efficient in terms of evolutionary survival, but immensely less open, OXfOl'C :::- > creative, and aware. And culture was also a type of reducing valve, lRA·i5:'. -. 'What we see through the meshes of this [cultural] net is never, of us harr : ~:-'-: course, the unknowable 'thing in itself' [...J What we ordinarily take sexes. :~,-:. .2 in and respond to is a curious mixture of immediate experience with Realirv :-,=.=~ culturally conditioned symbol." infonr r.;" The extraordinary value of psychedelics, Huxley argued, lay in Lis e :..:., their ability to allow us to loosen this reducing valve of perception a phys.: ; :=. and let ourselves behold reality in a fuller, richer way, bringing us case) :.::- - ::. closer to the Mind at Large, the ultimate reality of things, and enabling the imr : :-, us to revolutionize psychology, spirituality, education and society. highly ~: --:-. Psychedelics were tools for 'cutting holes in cultural fences [...J the friends =>: most urgent of necessities. '7 of these ~__:-" About a decade after Huxley suggested his Mind at Large concept, Where::., :..:..:~ Timothy Leary proposed his own take on the idea: the concept of the how C::-.'·, . Reality Tunnel. Same as Huxley's reducing valve of perception before Lear- ::':-.:;,' and McKenna's Culture and Ideology concepts after, Leary's reality how c:::.,: ';', tunnels, later further elaborated by Robert Anton Wilson in books such and 0:,::-, __ as Prometheus Rising.' were a pre-composed pattern which limits and Ideolo z: :"-2 distorts the perception of reality by reducing complexity and options. A which ~"-:;: person's reality tunnel would determine their perception of the world, only c'..::- editing out those bits of perception that do not fit their beliefs, while unique. ::.',:-c: singling-out and enlarging those details which fit well together with Tb_._. :~.::..: the persons' particular reality tunnel. A capitalist, for example, would and R...::.,''- ..• F c PSYCHEDELIC SOCIETY 87 avidly gather any fact and piece of information which might support their claim that capitalism is the best economic system, easily forgetting .- - - --- -1-·.-..----- ... and discarding any piece of information which might contradict that view. Similarly, a sworn communist would avidly collect any article ~--:~---- of information which might support their claim that communism is the best economic system, quickly forgetting and discarding any piece of information which might contradict that view. Reality tunnels were ubiquitous and included 'Eskimo totemists, Moslem fundamentalists, Roman Catholics, Marxist Leninists, Nazis, Methodist Republicans, Oxford agnostics, Snake worshipers, Ku Kluxers, Mafiosos,Unitarians, IRA-ists, PLO-ists, orthodox Jews, hard shell Baptists etc. etc." All of us harbor established ideas about minorities, religions, nationalities, the sexes, the right ways to think, act, feel, govern, eat, drink and what not. Reality tunnels act to help us fortify these ideas against any challenging information.
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