Challenges

Challenges — Part 1*

Our business is to wake up, we have to find ways in which to detect the whole of reality in the one illusory part which our self-centered consciousness permits us to see.

—Aldous Huxley

It doesn't require a hyperactive SN (Salience Network, the brain's salience detection system)¹ to perceive and understand that we are facing multiple, unprecedented challenges today.² We are surely—and much sooner than has so far been predicted—destined to experience an uncharted zone of catastrophe as the repercussions of anthropogenic climate change affect essentially all aspects of life on earth.³

For perception and understanding to reliably lead to a radical shift in one’s attitudes, intentions, motivations and occupations, however, some renewed activation of the relevant salience at a higher, more urgent level may well be required. It may require viewing our present ecological and political crises as if for the first time, for example, as if we had been suddenly transported from our more comfortable, secure life as it was in the early 1960s, when the future looked brighter and brighter (for most of us in the West, at least), when the future for our children promised them even a better life than we enjoyed, when there wasn't the least suspicion we were rapidly destroying our own future and the future of the planet itself and doing it through the very same collective style of life that was so satisfying and prosperous in that earlier age.⁴

Waking up to today having known nothing of its stark horror in advance would surely be a monstrous shock and SN activator in the extreme.

Psychedelically-assisted SN amplification⁵ may well provide such an as-if-for-the-first-time experience. Perceptions and situations we have grown used to, become bored with, even very threatening ones and especially ones we feel powerless to do anything about, may once again seem critical enough to incite us to some action. And psychedelic training for an individual over a period of time may well sharpen his everyday abilities for self-catalyzed critical evaluation, creative thinking and action, inspired by a more vivid perception of the salient in his everyday consciousness. By contrast, for many the SN may be calmed, stifled and rendered quite hypoactive by repeated or continuous exposure to what might otherwise be seen as critical and requiring immediate action. If a ship-full of extra-terrestrials suddenly landed, appeared to everyone everywhere on all the TV channels and their chief announced, “We are taking over for your own good”, salience detection systems would universally be operating at full blast—especially for those high-ranking types in the Pentagon. But over the next days and weeks, as little seemed to be changing, most of us would get used to the idea (excepting those in the Pentaton I'd reckon), and the frenetic activity of our SNs would subside. It would take a new twist on the situation to re-activate the perceived salience of the original event, perhaps a new proclamation: “For starters, first thing tomorrow we will hold court to see who is most responsible for the sinful degradation of your once-beautiful planet”. (Pentagon higher-ups begin soiling themselves, especially upon hearing the Biblical term).

The primary neurocognitive importance of the salience detection system; how the SN is controlled and used by individual consciousness; how and why due to evolutionary necessity it ordinarily maintains an everyday, default-mode operation where most events and thoughts are overwhelmingly deemed hum-drum, of little consequence; and how the gain of the SN might be radically increased by various age-old methods mentioned previously or with psychedelic assistance so that one's very existence may suddenly be perceived for the miracle and mystery that it in reality is; all this has been explored here in previous chapters. The role that psychedelically-assisted SN increase might have played in the sudden appearance of cognitively-modern humans was the subject of the previous chapter, and here I would like to take a look at what role the effect might have played in ancient Greece, the 1960s social upheavals, and for the future of our home planet.

Eleusis

In the year 395 A.D. Alaric the Goth and his merry band of Onward Christian Soldiers overran and destroyed the Temple at Eleusis, the holy place where the famous and two-thousand-year-old celebration of the Eleusinian Mysteries had been practiced. The central feature of that yearly celebration, initiation, and revelation was the partaking of a powerful and mysterious psychedelic potion, the kykeon. Far from being a minor and obscure sect, the Mysteries had been for centuries a central and important religious experience and inspirational revelation whose initiates included essentially all the great names of Greek antiquity. Its importance, along with the secret of the divine and psychoactive sacrament used in the yearly celebration, has only in the past few decades been adequately revealed despite earlier, mostly unproductive speculation by scholars.

The first, and still today seminal publication that set the stage for a meaningful clarification of the Eleusinian Mysteries is The Road to Eleusis, first published in 1978.⁶ It was the reading of this book, shortly thereafter, that ignited my own musings about the larger implications of psychedelic use by the entire family of man, back to our first prehistoric awakenings in Africa. The significance of Eleusis strongly suggested that the use of such plant drugs had been a global phenomenon of long development and of utmost importance to tribal man—a human universal⁷ —so that “drug use” must extend back into the most remote periods of human prehistory.

In ancient Greece, the yearly celebration at Eleusis was a major religious and intellectual event that had profound effects on Greek society. A few lines from Wasson's chapter in The Road should convey the special salience of the Celebrations:

We are dealing with a central theme of Greek civilization in antiquity. Early Man in Greece, in the second millennium before Christ, founded the Mysteries of Eleusis and they held spellbound the initiates who each year attended the rite... Aristides the Rhetor...in the 2nd century A. D. pulled aside the curtain for an instant when he said that what the initiate experienced was “new, astonishing, inaccessible to rational cognition”, and he went on: “Eleusis is a shrine common to the whole earth, and of all the divine things that exist among men, it is both the most awesome and the most luminous.”

Plato tells us that beyond this ephemeral and imperfect existence here below, there is another Ideal world of Archetypes, where the original, the true, the beautiful Pattern of things exists for evermore. Poets and philosophers for millennia have pondered and discussed his conception. It is clear to me where Plato found his “Ideas”; it was clear to those who were initiated into the Mysteries among his contemporaries too. Plato had drunk of the potion in the Temple of Eleusis and had spent the night seeing the great Vision.

The ancient testimony about Eleusis is unanimous and unambiguous. Eleusis was the supreme experience in an initiate’s life. It was both physical and mystical: trembling, vertigo, cold sweat, and then a sight that made all previous seeing seem like blindness, a sense of awe and wonder at a brilliance that caused a profound silence since what had just been seen and felt could never be communicated: words are unequal to the task. Those symptoms are unmistakably the experience induced by a [psychedelic]... ⁸

For among the many excellent and indeed divine institutions which your Athens has brought forth and contributed to human life, none, in my opinion, is better than those mysteries. For by their means we have been brought out of our barbarous and savage mode of life and educated and refined to a state of civilization; and as the rites are called “initiations,” so in very truth we have learned from them the beginnings of life, and have gained the power not only to live happily, but also to die with a better hope. ⁹

The Eleusinian Mysteries were in the exclusive hands of the Eumolpus and Kerykes families, and for close to two thousand years, these hierophants governed with autocratic authority the rites at Eleusis. The rites were open to all, women and men, young and old, slave and free. There were only two requirements: that initiates be able to understand the Greek language used for the ceremonies; and, more importantly, that they have no unatoned blood guilt on their hands.

I never gave much thought to the second of these requirements, I guess I just assumed that a murderer should, as punishment perhaps, not be permitted the redemption that a psychedelic experience might provide. More recently however, I'm wondering what the logic of this prohibition might have been. In modern times it may be probable that a murderer, especially a first degree, cold blooded one, having become used to the idea that he has murdered and not very repentant, might well have a psychedelic experience that turned into a very bad trip indeed. Suddenly understanding the deep significance of his act... Perhaps over the centuries the Eleusis priests had seen such people become a danger to themselves and especially to others during the long night of awakening.

In an operative and very real sense Eleusis was a 2000-year ongoing Psychedelic Revolution, a revolution of collective awakening. Each and every generation was awakened at Eleusis, and Greece progressed from a quite primitive culture to heights of civilization not re-achieved for many centuries. It might be objected that the ancient Greeks fought plenty of wars of both defense and conquest, practiced slavery and capital punishment, and that such practices are not illustrative of an “enlightened society”. Yet our Enlightenment ancestors of the Renaissance were equally, if not more so guilty. And what the Catholic Church and its Inquisition did to the New World could hardly be called a product of an “advanced civilization”. And... what we are doing to the planet today certainly reeks of barbarism and collective stupidity. Ancient Greece may therefore still stand in many respects as the best-achieved example of an advanced civilization.

In microcosm, the isolated hypothetical society described in Aldous Huxley's novel Island exemplifies the idea of a continuing psychedelic revolution as was the case in ancient Greece. The story is of a society on a Pacific island, founded by a Scottish doctor and an enlightened Buddhist king, that for over a hundred years was an ongoing and unique experiment in civilization. Moksha, a psychedelic fungus, like Eleusis' kykeon, was a central agent of influence that guided the initiation of the young into adulthood, and also provided a refresher awakening for citizens in later life: it was an activator and amplifier of salience perception taken ceremonially for mystical, intellectual and cosmological insight.

Every generation must undergo the initiation/awakening experience, whether as youngsters as in Island, or in adulthood too, as it is not something literal that can be taught from a book or lecture and preserved in a society by rote educational means. The revolutionary aspect of both societies, is just that psychedelic awakening plays a continuing and necessary role in bringing the human issuing from evolutionary necessity out of his barbarous and savage mode of life and educating him toward a refined state of civilization. (paraphrased from Cicero.) Without the continued application of the psychedelic awakening, under the guidance of a society's wise elders/priests/initiates, succeeding generations will more or less quickly fall back into the “barbarous and savage mode of life.” To me, an apt description of the Twentieth Century, which has continued into the Twenty-First.

A great many philosophers and scientists have tried to identify the source of humankind's destructive nature, our default-mode “barbarous and savage mode of life,” our rampant “malignant aggression” as Erich Fromm has called it. The multitude of high-octane minds that have attempted a theory might discourage most from entering the fray, but since I have already gone way out on a great number of limbs in previous chapters, I will yet again ignore the possible consequences of a serious fall. I never did finish a paper on the subject as I promised, but the main elements of my idea were presented to ENCOD's Drug Peace Conference: a counter-event to the annual meeting of the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs, Vienna, 7-9 March 2008. The lecture dealt with several topics, so I have excerpted the relevant part relating to malignant aggression. (See also "Drug Prohibition: A Perverted Instinct?")

* “Challenges”, parts 1-3 is an edited version of Chapter 9 of my book KOSMOS.

Part 1 — Part 2 — Part 3

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1. Menon V. (2015) "Salience Network", In: Arthur W. Toga, editor. Brain Mapping: An Encyclopedic Reference, vol. 2, p. 597. Academic Press: Elsevier. Available in .pdf In a paper at my website, I propose that the primary effect of taking one of the three classic psychedelic drugs, LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, is to "artificially" amplify the operation of the SN.

2. I find it stultifying to write about today's eco-politico horrors, so I won't attempt it here. In any case, those already in the know need no further convincing and those who have not been paying attention usually don't want to hear about it, least of all from someone trying to convince them of impending catastrophe. I therefore let others do such writing, and there are many who do it well, and forward to my newsletter subscribers the most salient articles I come across, always titled [THS] The Harder Stuff. From there, they can take it or leave it, but at least I have given a try at spreading the Real News. For any readers here who would like to sample some of these sendings, I've made several of my recent ones available. An example of the kind of information and analysis you can read there, and this is a good one as it bears upon both our ecological and political situation: From an article entitled, Is Climate the Worst Casualty of War? “The money misspent on the Iraq War—a war for oil, let’s not forget—could have purchased the planetary conversion to renewable energy. Just sit with that a moment...” If that doesn't activate your SN to meltdown conditions, you should get an fMRI immediately as there must be something wrong with it.

3. See "Do You Really Want to Know?" and the collection of papers referenced therein.

4. For my purposes here I am, of course, exaggerating the pros of that earlier age and ignoring the cons that so many citizens of the world were experiencing. For my middle-class generation, in the USA, things mostly did seem on the up-and-up. College was very affordable, well-paying jobs awaited graduates, McCarthyism had been slain, a little détente had eased our duck-and-cover paranoia, we had “better living through chemistry” and cigarettes didn't really cause cancer, music and the arts were blossoming after the rather drab post-war 1950s scene... and we seemed to have a few politicians and statesmen who actually merited their positions.

5. For a detailed account of the SN and its relation to the psychedelic experience, see "Psychedelic Elephant"

6. R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, Carl A.P. Ruck: The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1978. For an analysis of the possible composition and method of preparation of the kykeon, see "Mixing the Kykeon"

7. See Human Universals, Donald E. Brown, McGraw Hill 1991.

8. ibid. The Road to Eleusis

9. Cicero, Laws II, xiv, 36