LSD and the Breaking of the Mind – Part 2
When you’ve had an extreme experience on a strong psychedelic such as LSD, then it’s very difficult to see the world in the same way again. When the boundaries of your own little pocket of consciousness have been swept away, it’s possible to come to the conclusion that your consciousness is not just confined to your brain. This can be quite a realisation for a young teenage bumpkin from Somerset to reach. In the West we are largely brought up safe in the knowledge that we live in a mechanistic universe. There are physical laws by which all things are governed. The behaviour of people, the world around us and even the atomic realm, are all predictable phenomena that can be fully understood through the use of systematic, objective empirical research methods. The universe and the worlds within it are seen as inanimate and unalive. Life and consciousness somehow springs forth and evolves from a dead planet.
This is not a world view that fits easily in to a psychedelically altered consciousness. LSD and other hallucinogens have the potential to allow you to see the world afresh with un-socialised eyes. Your mind, no longer restricted by the limitations imposed upon it from birth, may come to a realisation that everything is alive and the universe itself is conscious. This then imbues your world with new significance and meaning. Portents, omens and premonitions are perceived more readily and synchronicities are no longer seen as coincidences. Things that you have been told to be impossible and supernatural, are in fact an active part of your reality.
From this novel viewpoint, you can generally go two ways. The first is to seriously doubt your sanity and go and seek psychological help. Here the strength of your upbringing over-powers any other-worldly experiences you may have had and you resort back to the scientific based framework that you were brought up in. Over the years I have known many who have taken this path and some who have ended up in psychiatric care as the enormity of the experience takes its toll on the mind. The second possibility is to question everything that you have been taught and assume that much of it is wrong, or at the very least it is only a part of the truth. Luckily, being strong willed (or pig-headed some might argue), I chose the latter.
Fortunately, for the seeker, the modern Western view point is not the only philosophy out there. There is barely a tribe, society or culture throughout the world that at some point hasn’t sought out some sort of root, berry, bark or mushroom to alter the consciousness of its members. The Persians had a potion called soma, in India and Egypt they have always had hashish and in Europe and Asia many types of magic mushrooms have been gathered. Mexico has the morning glory flower and the peyote cactus, whereas South America is blessed with dozens of types of hallucinogens. These plant medicines would have often been taken in ceremony as rite of passage, or by a medicine man or woman seeking to heal and gain insight through connection with the plant spirit and the living world at large.
LSD can certainly be put in to this plant medicine category. Originally derived from the ergot fungus that can grow on rye, it has been attributed to the mass hysteria that often broke out in European villages in the Middle Ages. Bread that had been contaminated with this black mould would be ingested and result in the wild phenomenon known as St. Anthony’s fire.
In its modern extracted synthesised form, it is possibly the most potent hallucinogen known to man, with just one three-hundred-thousandth of an ounce having a profound effect on the highest levels of mind. It acts directly on the part of the brain responsible for filtering sensory information, seemingly allowing a greater range of frequencies through. This can be likened to expanding the bandwidth of the brains radio and may explain some of the insights people experience whilst under its influence.
However it is not just through plant medicines that these altered states of consciousness can be reached. From the sweat lodges of the Native Americans to the meditations of the Tibetan Buddhists and from the chanting of the Gregorian monks to the whirling dances of the dervishes, mankind has always desired to enter in to various forms of transcendental awareness. As Blake might have put it, they are all different doors to the same corridor. And what is it we find in this corridor? What is it that all these seemingly disparate groups of peoples agree upon? What understanding did all of the ancient spiritual traditions reach? The realisation that the cosmos itself was conscious; more that, that it was consciousness.
“The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend.”
Aldous Huxley
To be continued…