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 a 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.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
---

*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.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
---

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?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
---

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.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
---

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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