Category: articles

By Alex Grey

Twenty-five years ago I took my first dose of LSD. The experience was so rich and profound, coupled as it was with the meeting of my future wife, Allyson, that there seemed nothing more important than this revelation of infinite love and unity. Being an artist, I felt that this was the only subject worthy of my time and attention. Spiritual and visionary consciousness assumed primary importance as the focal point of my life and art. My creative process was transformed by my experience with entheogens.

Due to its visionary richness, I think the entheogenic experience has great importance for fueling an artistic and cultural renaissance. By giving artists a meaningful experience and access to deeper and higher aspects of their soul, they are given a subject worth making art about. A worthy subject is an artist’s most important discovery — it’s the magnetic passion that burns in their work and attracts them to it, and also determines whether they will attempt to evoke what is deepest and highest in their viewers.
Oscar Janiger’s studies of LSD and creativity showed that many artists felt the work done while tripping or post-tripping was more inventive and inspired work than their previous work. Keith Haring, one of the most celebrated artists of the 1980s, credited LSD with stylistic breakthroughs that brought him to his own unique work. I feel the same way about my art. This doesn’t mean I recommend sacramental drug use for everyone, but I do think it should be a legal option for all.
“How can we bring the insights of the entheogenic state into our lives?” For the visionary artist this is a somewhat straightforward translation of the mystical experience into artworks that transmit the depth of feeling and perception of the subtle inner worlds. The entheogenic state is, of course, unique to each individual. And yet there are archetypal states of being that are experienced by large numbers of psychonauts, and which can be evoked with our art. Let’s look at the trajectory and potential stages of the psychedelic experience and see how it translates into works of art.
First Effects:

1). In the beginning stages we notice some physical body changes. We might feel jittery or some rushes of energy through the body, possibly an opening up of the chest or head. We feel a heightened sensitivity to colors and notice wavy or slowly billowing distortions of our outer world perceptions. When we look inward, we begin to perceive dynamic geometric forms and cartoon-like figures morphing into strange and inventive shapes. The unconscious is becoming conscious. The depth of mystery and meaning that our conceptual mind keeps at bay in our ordinary perception becomes flooded with portent.

2). Our perception is open to the beautiful and in the back of our minds we begin to feel that reality is weighty or there seems to be some kind of symbolic importance to life. The perception of beauty and meaningfulness is mingled. Rushes of bliss and laughter, releases of ecstasy. Life is lucidly interpreted in a more holistic framework. Everything is okay, even if it is out of our control.

Beginning to Surrender to a Higher Power:
3). Psychodynamic visions. Unresolved repressed emotions emerge and are faced via dramatic personally meaningful imagery. This can lead to frightening encounters with suppressed memories, and can begin to break down an individual’s ego structure. This is perhaps not as important or lengthy a phase for emotionally stable and integrated individuals.

Transpersonal Stages:
4). Birth, death, and rebirth experiences. The ego/small self is frightened, crushed, overcome and reborn through intense chthonic and cathartic visions.
5). Archetypal and mythic figures. In our last trip, Allyson and I were meditating on each other’s faces and began to see “everyface” of humanity wash across the face of our adored one. Allyson became every woman and every animal and for her I became all men and all animals.
6). Energy release. Kundalini movements in body, chakras opening, awareness of subtle energy systems.
7). Universal mind. Cosmic unity, voidness or emptiness as ground of being beyond polarities.

Each of these stages or structures of higher consciousness and the subtle inner worlds can be evoked in our art. The Integrative Entheogenic Vision in art would at least bring together the opposites as most every sacred art tradition has done in the past, both the dark and the light, reason and intuition, science and religion, male and female, life and death, matter and spirit.
Heinrich Klüver studied the effects of mescaline on normal subjects and he found there were certain visual and perceptual “form constants” that recur in psychedelic voyages. I think these shapes have relevance to developing our entheogenic artistic vision. The form constants are the spiral, the lattice or fretwork, and the imagery of tunnels and funnels or passageways. There is a perception of “greater dimensionality,” both visual multi-dimensionality and ontological dimensions of meaning. Iridescent and finely filigreed organic and complex geometric shapes evolve and dissolve, referencing both nature and sacred architecture. Colors appear more radiant and overwhelming. Light itself takes on a palpable character. The white light is everywhere present holding everything together.

An experience of such overwhelming power can influence an artist’s approach to their work. In order to bring forth her or his deepest work, an artist needs to be sensitive and courageous toward their own creative process. There are many stages in the creative process. Several scientists have attempted to outline the mysterious phases of creativity.1 Below is my adaptation of their findings.
The Creative Process:

1). Formulation: discovery of the artist’s subject or problem
2). Saturation: a period of intense research on the subject/problem
3). Incubation: letting the unconscious sift the information and develop a response
4). Inspiration: a flash of your own unique solution to the problem
5). Translation: bringing the internal solution to outer form
6). Integration: sharing the creative answer with the world, and getting feedback

Not all artists will recognize each phase in their work, and each phase takes its own time, widely varying from work to work. The first stage is the discovery of a problem. This is the most important question for an artist, “What is my subject?” The formulation of the problem arises from the artist’s world-view and may set the stage for an entire life’s work — that is, if the problem is sufficiently broad. The problem is the “well” dug to reveal the Source, the Vision, the creative matrix of questions and obsessions that drive an artist. Solving your aesthetic problem becomes your mission.
In an effort to illuminate the many stages of the creative process, I’d like to share a bit of the story behind my painting, Transfiguration. I have always been mystified by the body-mind-spirit relationship and the difficulty of making these multiple dimensions of reality visible in a work of art, but not until my LSD experiences did I want to make mystical consciousness itself the subject of my art. It took me about ten years of making art and obsessing over this subject to reach the formulation that this was one of my primary artistic problems, an important part of my vision.
During the next stage of saturation I looked over everything I could find about the subject. It was a period of research that led me through many tracts of transpersonal psychology and the art of diverse cultures. I prepared a slide-show and lectured on the subject of “Transfiguration,” showing artistic representations of transcendental light or energy in relation to the body. At that point I didn’t know I’d be doing a painting by that name.

The incubation stage is where the vast womb of the unconscious takes over, gestating the problem. The embryonic artwork grows effortlessly at its own pace. For the Transfiguration painting, this phase lasted about half a year. Then early one morning I woke from a dream. In the dream I had been painting a piece called Transfiguration. The painting had a simple composition, two opposing spherical curves connected by a figure. Floating above the earth sphere, a human, which was fleshly at the feet became gradually more translucent. At about groin level it “popped” into a bright hallucinogenic crystal sphere. The dream revealed a unique solution to my simmering aesthetic problem. But this illumination or inspiration phase, my “Aha!” moment provided by the dream, was extended or underscored later that week when I smoked DMT for the first time. As I inhaled the immediately active and extremely potent psychedelic, I got to experience the transfigured subject of my painting first hand. In my vision, my feet were the foundation of the material world. As I inhaled, the material density of my body seemed to dissolve and I “popped” into the bright world of living geometry and infinite spirit. I noticed strange jewel-like chakra centers within my glowing wire-frame spirit body, and spectral colors that were absent from my dream painting. I was in my future painting and was being given an experience of the state in order to better create it. After receiving these two visionary encounters of the same painting, I began to draw what I had seen in my sketchbook. This started the translation phase, bringing the inner solution of my artistic problem to an outward form. I drew the body and worked on the computer to help me plot an accurate texture map of the electric grid around the hyper-mindsphere. I then assembled the various elements and stretched a fairly large canvas, because I wanted the viewer to identify with a “life-sized” figure. Finally, I started painting. After many months of work, my wife Allyson continued to ask me about an unconsidered area of the painting. This was the space beneath the hyper-mindsphere. I hadn’t noticed the space in my visions except that it was dark. This was a puzzling dilemma, which lasted for a week or two, because “empty” looked wrong or unconsidered, yet what belonged there?

As is sometimes our custom when we are aesthetically “stumped” and need to see our work with fresh and creative eyes, Allyson and I smoked marijuana and gazed at the piece. Suggestions of what should appear in the empty space began to coalesce. Stars obviously, but this was not just outer space, this was inner space, the place of numinous angels or demons, of Terence’s “self-dribbling basketballs,” beings with skin like a Fabergé egg, the oddly glowing mindspheres anticipating the transformative megasphere above. This seemed like the appropriate answer among the many that occurred to me. Work on the piece lasted almost a year.

Part of the function of the vision and the creative process is the integration of the inspired moment, via the art object or event, into the world beyond the studio, a process that continues as I share this story. We made a poster of this piece, and it will be reproduced in my new book, Transfiguration. Allyson and I have decided to retain the actual piece for the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors. For myself as well as other artists, entheogens have played a crucial role in the creative process. However, I don’t advocate that artists live in a constant haze of chemically-altered consciousness, and some sensitive artists should completely steer clear of the substances. Vision drugs catalyze our inherently visionary and potentially mystical dimensions of consciousness. May they be recognized and honored for the powerful and sacred substances that they are, proof of the importance and infinite vastness of the subtle inner worlds of imagination and illumination, and may they open an endless source of inspiration for new universal sacred art. •

Notes: 1. Rollo May examines the phases of creation in his inspiring book, The Courage to Create. Betty Edwards has written a number of excellent books, including Drawing on the Artist Within, which is where some of the creativity research is discussed. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Herman Helmholtz, a physicist, Henri Poincaré, a mathematician, and Jacob Getzels, a psychologist, all worked on a theory of the stages of the creative process

By Dennis J. McKenna

Over the last few decades Ayahuasca has become one of the most thoroughly studied of the traditional shamanic plant hallucinogens. In his excellent and most important article, famous ethnopharmacologist Dennis J. McKenna, Ph.D., comes to the conclusion that Ayahuasca has the same message for us now that it has always had, since the beginning of its symbiotic relationship with humanity. And finally rises the crucial question: Are we willing to listen?

My good friend and colleague, Dr. Charles Grob, has extended a kind invitation to submit a contribution to this special edition of the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, devoted to the topic of ayahuasca, for which he has been selected as guest editor. I’m pleased to be asked and happy to respond, particularly since I have collaborated for many years with Dr. Grob and other colleagues who are represented here, on various aspects of the scientific study of ayahuasca. For most of the last 33 years, ayahuasca has been one of the major preoccupations of my life.

In that time, I have written extensively on the botany, chemistry, and pharmacology of ayahuasca, on its potential therapeutic uses, and on the need for more, and more rigorous, scientific and clinical investigations of this remarkable plant decoction. Working with colleagues such as Dr. Grob, my good friends Jace Callaway and Dr. Luis Eduardo Luna in Finland, my mentor Dr. Neil Towers, my late and beloved brother Terence, Dr. Glaucus de Souza Brito, and others, to investigate the myriad mysteries of ayahuasca, has been as rich and rewarding an experience as any scientist could ever hope for.

Partly as a result of our collective efforts, over the last few decades ayahuasca has become one of the most thoroughly studied of the traditional shamanic plant hallucinogens. We now have a firm understanding of the plant species that are utilized in its preparation, including the diverse pharmacopoeia of ayahuasca admixture plants, a shamanic technology unto itself that begs additional investigation. We understand the chemistry of the active constituents of its primary botanical components, and have better insight into its remarkable synergistic pharmacology.

We have identified potential therapeutic applications for ayahuasca and the role that it may some day find in healing the physical and spiritual wounds of individuals, if it is ever afforded its rightful place in medical practice. Ethnographically, my colleagues and I have made contributions to an understanding of the central role that ayahuasca already has in the context of Amazonian shamanism and ethnomedicine. We have described, and written about, its status as a window into the sacred cosmology of magic, witchcraft, transcendent experience, and healing that permeates and defines the practices of Mestizo ethnomedicine.

The visionary paintings of Peruvian shaman and artist Pablo Amaringo, brought so beautifully to the attention of the world by Dr. Luis Eduardo Luna, has helped to make that tradition accessible to many who would otherwise have seen it (if they were aware of it at all) as alien, exotic, and incomprehensible. To an extent, our work has shed some small light on the more contemporary role of ayahuasca as the sacramental vehicle of syncretic religious movements that originated in Brasil and now are reaching out globally, if incrementally, to embrace a sick and wounded world that desperately yearns for the healing that this mind/body/spirit medicine can offer.

The story of ayahuasca, and our evolving understanding of its place in the world, and of its significance for medicine, pharmacology, ethnobotany, and shamanic studies, is far from over, and in fact, it may have just begun. I would like to believe that is the case. But for the purposes of this contribution, rather than submit yet another dense and lengthy review on the botany, chemistry, pharmacology, &c., of ayahuasca, I have chosen to adopt a broader perspective, and to indulge in some reflections, and speculations on the past and future of ayahuasca of the sort that a scientist, probably mercifully, rarely shares with his colleagues or the larger world.

To those readers who may wish for my more usual nuts-and-bolts approach to the subject, I call attention to my recent review in the journal Pharmacology and Therapeutics (McKenna, 2004). In addition, a complete list of all of “my” publications on ayahuasca is appended to the end of this article; and I use the term “my” advisedly because these publications represent the work and creativity of many people with whom I’ve been privileged to collaborate over the years. They would not exist without them.

On a personal level, ayahuasca has been for me both a scientific and professional continuing carrot, and a plant teacher and guide of incomparable wisdom, compassion, and intelligence. My earliest encounters with ayahuasca were experiential; only later did it become an object of scientific curiosity, sparked in part by a desire to understand the mechanism, the machineries, that might underlie the profound experiences that it elicited.

As a young man just getting started in the field of ethnopharmacology, ayahuasca seemed to me more than worthy of a lifetime of scientific study; and so it has proven to be. Pursuing an understanding of ayahuasca has led to many exotic places that I would never have visited otherwise, from the jungles of the Amazon Basin to the laboratory complexes of the National Institute of Mental Health and Stanford; it has led to the formation of warm friendships and fruitful collaborations with many colleagues who have shared my curiosity about the mysteries of this curious plant complex.

These collaborations, and more importantly, these friendships, continue, as does the quest for understanding. Though there have been detours along the way, always, and inevitably, they have led back to the central quest. Often, after the fact, I have seen how those apparent detours were not so far off the path after all, as they supplied some insight, some skill, or some experience, that in hindsight proved necessary to the furtherance of the quest.

Just as ayahuasca has been for me personally something of a Holy Grail, as it has been for many others, I have the intuition that it may have a similar role with respect to our entire species. Anyone who is personally experienced with ayahuasca is aware that it has much to teach us; there is incredible wisdom and intelligence there. And to my mind, one of the most profound and humbling lessons that ayahuasca teaches – one that we thick-headed humans have the hardest time grasping – is the realization that “you monkeys only think you’re running things.”

Though I state it humorously, here and in other talks and writings, it is nonetheless a profound insight on which may depend the very survival of our species, and our planet. Humans are good at nothing if not hubris, arrogance, and self-delusion. We assume that we dominate nature; that we are somehow separate from, and superior to, nature, even as we set about busily undermining and wrecking the very homeostatic global mechanisms that have kept our earth stable and hospitable to life for the last four and a half billion years. We devastate the rainforests of the world; we are responsible for the greatest loss of habitat and the greatest decimation of species since the asteroid impacts of the Permian-Triassic boundary, 250 million years ago; we rip the guts out of the earth and burn them, spewing toxic chemicals into the atmosphere; at the same time we slash and burn the woody forests that may be the only hope for sequestration of the carbon dioxide that is rapidly building to dangerous and possibly uncontrollable levels. For the first time in the history of our species, and indeed of our planet, we are forced to confront the possibility that thoughtless and unsustainable human activity may be posing a real threat to our species’ survival, and possibly the survival of all life on the planet.

And suddenly, and literally, “out of the Amazon,” one of the most impacted parts of our wounded planet, ayahuasca emerges as an emissary of trans-species sentience, to bring this lesson: You monkeys only think you’re running things. In a wider sense, the import of this lesson is that we need to wake up to what is happening to us and to the planet. We need to get with the program, people. We have become spiritually bereft and have been seduced by the delusion that we are somehow important in the scheme of things. We are not.

Our spiritual institutions have devolved into hollow shells, perverted to the agendas of rapacious governments and fanatic fundamentalisms, no longer capable of providing balm to the wounded spirit of our species; and as the world goes up in flames we benumb ourselves with consumerism and mindless entertainment, the decadent distractions of gadgets and gewgaws, the frantic but ultimately meaningless pursuits of a civilization that has lost its compass. And at this cusp in human history, there emerges a gentle emissary, the conduit to a body of profoundly ancient genetic and evolutionary wisdom that has long abided in the cosmologies of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon who have guarded and protected this knowledge for millennia, who learned long ago that the human role is not to be the master of nature, but its stewards, Our destiny, if we are to survive, is to nurture nature and to learn from it how to nurture ourselves and our fellow beings. This is the lesson that we can learn from ayahuasca, if only we pay attention.

I find it both ironic, and hopeful, that within the last 150 years, and particularly in the last half of the 20th century, ayahuasca has begun to assert its presence into human awareness on a global scale. For millennia it was known only to indigenous peoples who have long since understood and integrated what it has to teach us. In the 19th century it first came to the attention of a wider world as an object of curiosity in the reports of Richard Spruce and other intrepid explorers of the primordial rainforests of South America; in the mid-20th century Schultes and others continued to explore this discovery and began to focus the lens of science on the specifics of its botany, chemistry, and pharmacology (and, while necessary, this narrow scrutiny perhaps overlooked some of the larger implications of this ancient symbiosis with humanity). At the same time, ayahuasca escaped from its indigenous habitat and made its influence felt among certain non-indigenous people, representatives of “greater” civilization.

To these few men and women, ayahuasca provided revelations, and they in turn responded (in the way that humans so often do when confronted with a profound mystery) by founding religious sects with a messianic mission; in this case, a mission of hope, a message to the rest of the world that despite its simplicity was far ahead of its time: that we must learn to become the stewards of nature, and by fostering, encouraging, and sustaining the fecundity and diversity of nature, by celebrating and honoring our place as biological beings, as part of the web of life, we may learn to become nurturers of each other. A message quite different, and quite anathema, to the anti-biological obsessions of most of the major world “religions” with their preoccupation with death and suffering and their insistence on the suppression of all spontaneity and joy.

Such a message is perceived as a great threat by entrenched religious and political power structures, and indeed, it is. It is a threat to the continued rape of nature and oppression of peoples that is the foundation of their power. Evidence that they understand this threat and take it seriously is reflected by the unstinting and brutal efforts that “civilized” ecclesiastical, judicial, and political authorities have made to prohibit, demonize, and exterminate the shamanic use of ayahuasca and other sacred plants ever since the Inquisition and even earlier.

But the story is not yet over. Within the last 30 years, ayahuasca, clever little plant intelligence that it is, has escaped from its ancestral home in the Amazon and has found haven in other parts of the world. With the assistance of human helpers who heard the message and heeded it, ayahuasca sent its tendrils forth to encircle the world. It has found new homes, and new friends, in nearly every part of the world where temperatures are warm and where the ancient connections to plant-spirit still thrive, from the islands of Hawaii to the rainforests of South Africa, from gardens in Florida to greenhouses in Japan. The forces of death and dominance have been outwitted; it has escaped them, outrun them.

There is now no way that ayahuasca can ever be eliminated from the earth, short of toxifying the entire planet (which, unfortunately, the death culture is working assiduously to accomplish). Even if the Amazon itself is leveled for cattle pasture or burned for charcoal, ayahuasca, at least, will survive, and will continue to engage in its dialog with humanity. And encouragingly, more and more people are listening.

It may be too late. I have no illusions about this. Given that the curtain is now being rung down on the drunken misadventure that we call human history, the death culture will inevitably become even more brutal and insane, flailing ever more violently as it sinks beneath the quick sands of time. Indeed, it is already happening; all you have to do is turn on the nightly news.

Will ayahuasca survive? I have no doubt that ayahuasca will survive on this planet as long as the planet remains able to sustain life. The human time frame is measured in years, sometimes centuries, rarely, in millennia. Mere blinks when measured against the evolutionary time scales of planetary life, the scale on which ayahuasca wields its influence. It will be here long after the governments, religions, and political power structures that seem today so permanent and so menacing have dissolved into dust. It will be here long after our ephemeral species has been reduced to anomalous sediment in the fossil record. The real question is, will we be here long enough to hear its message, to integrate what it is trying to tell us, and to change in response, before it is too late?

Ayahuasca has the same message for us now that it has always had, since the beginning of its symbiotic relationship with humanity. Are we willing to listen? Only time will tell.

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McKenna, Dennis J. (2004) Clinical investigations of the therapeutic potential of Ayahuasca: Rationale and regulatory challenges. Pharmacology and Therapeutics. 102:111-129.
Dennis J. McKenna (1999) Ayahuasca: an ethnopharmacologic history. In: R. Metzner, (ed) Ayahuasca: Hallucinogens, Consciousness, and the Spirit of Nature. Thunder’s Mouth Press, New York.
Callaway, J. C., D. J. McKenna, C. S. Grob, G. S. Brito, L. P. Raymon, R.E. Poland, E. N. Andrade, E. O. Andrade, D. C. Mash (1999) Pharmacokinetics of Hoasca alkaloids in Healthy Humans. Journal of Ethnopharmacology. 65:243-256.
McKenna, DJ, JC Callaway, CS Grob (1999). The scientific investigation of ayahuasca: A review of past and current research. Heffter Review of Psychedelic Research 1:
Callaway, J. C., L. P. Raymon, W. L. Hearn, D. J. McKenna, C. S. Grob, G. S. Brito, D. C. Mash (1996) Quantitation of N,N-dimethyltryptamine and harmala alkaloids in human plasma after oral dosing with Ayahuasca. Journal of Analytical Toxicology 20: 492-497
C. S. Grob, D. J. McKenna, J. C. Callaway, G. S. Brito, E. S. Neves, G. Oberlender, O. L. Saide, E. Labigalini, C. Tacla, C. T. Miranda, R. J. Strassman, K. B. Boone (1996) Human pharmacology of hoasca, a plant hallucinogen used in ritual context in Brasil: Journal of Nervous & Mental Disease. 184:86-94. McKenna, DJ (1996)
James C. Callaway, M. M. Airaksinen, Dennis J. McKenna, Glacus S. Brito, & Charles S. Grob (1994) Platelet serotonin uptake sites increased in drinkers of ayahuasca. Psychopharmacology 116: 385-387
Dennis J. McKenna, L. E. Luna, & G. H. N. Towers, (1995) Biodynamic constituents in Ayahuasca admixture plants: an uninvestigated folk pharmacopoeia. In: von Reis, S., and R. E. Schultes (eds). Ethnobotany: Evolution of a Discipline. Dioscorides Press, Portland
Dennis J. McKenna, & G. H. N. Towers, (1985) On the comparative ethnopharmacology of the Malpighiaceous and Myristicaceous hallucinogens. J. Psychoactive Drugs, 17:35-39.
Dennis J. McKenna, & G. H. N. Towers, (1984), Biochemistry and pharmacology of tryptamine and ß-carboline derivatives: A minireview. J. Psychoactive Drugs, 16:347-358.
Dennis J. McKenna, G. H. N. Towers, & F. S. Abbott (1984) Monoamine oxidase inhibitors in South American hallucinogenic plants: Tryptamine and ß-carboline constituents of Ayahuasca. J. of Ethnopharmacology 10:195-223.
Dennis J. McKenna, G. H. N. Towers, & F. S. Abbott (1984) Monoamine oxidase inhibitors in South American hallucinogenic plants Pt. II: Constituents of orally active Myristicaceous hallucinogens. J. of Ethnopharmacology 12:179-211.
Dennis J. McKenna & G. H. N. Towers (1981) Ultra-violet mediated cytotoxic activity of ß-carboline alkaloids. Phytochemistry 20:1001-1004

© 2006 Journal of Psychoactive Drugs

By Simon G. Powell

If one opens up a modern computer, the tangle of wires, chips and circuits inside are incontrovertible evidence that the system was brought into being by the action of intelligence. Indeed, the exact configuration of parts, their systematic organisation and embodied functionality reflect human ingenuity in its most advanced form. There can be little doubt of this especially with the advent of smaller and faster computers as well as their networking into powerful parallel architectures. Its seems nothing can stop this creative outpouring of intelligent design.

All this technological wile and engineering finesse is made possible by the human brain/mind complex. The reason for the term ‘brain/mind complex’ is because the human mind – the domain in which human intelligence arises – is intimately linked to the human brain. In particular the most recently evolved outer layer of the brain called the neo-cortex is thought to be bound up with our conscious intelligence. Although a naked human brain may look pretty dull in comparison to the inner parts of a computer system, a brain is in actuality far more complex in design. Instead of wires, microchips and silicon circuits, the human brain consists of many billions of living metabolising brain cells, each cell an exquisite manifestation of co-ordinated and well executed biological engineering that makes use of electricity (in this case electrochemically derived) just as machines use electricity. En masse, huge arrays of electrochemical neurons compose ‘wet’ polyneuronal circuitry which endows the brain with prodigious powers of computation (thinking, sensing and feeling) which leave silicon computer systems in the dark.
In short, the human brain is in an altogether different design league than are computers. It is far more advanced. And yet modern science denies that the brain has been intelligently designed. So whereas science accords computers and other machines with intelligent design, natural biological creations like organisms and organs (such as brains) are deemed to have arisen according to a non-intelligent process. We call this process evolution. The perplexing mystery is why we do not divine intelligence in the evolutionary process. Why does contemporary science insist that evolution is dumb and mindless when evolution has forged the most advanced ‘machines’ – i.e. brains and organisms – in the known Universe?

Artificial Intelligence and Natural Intelligence

To argue that the evolutionary process is an intelligent process is not to call into question Darwin’s original insights so lucidly spelled out in his Origin of Species but to reinterpret what the process of evolution represents.
In order to commence this reinterpretation we first need to understand exactly what intelligence is. How are we to define intelligence? Whilst there are many ways of defining intelligence, all involve learning in some form or another. For instance, scientists from a discipline like Artificial Intelligence will readily attest that intelligence involves learning, that the more a system – like a computer-controlled robot for example – can learn, then the more intelligent it is. Facilitate learning and you facilitate the development of intelligence and intelligent behaviour. Increase a robot’s learning capacity and you concurrently increase its (artificial) intelligence and its capacity to behave intelligently. If, for example, we compare the robots of 40 years ago with the robots of today, then we shall see that the principle reasons why today’s Artificial Intelligence robots are considered smarter than their predecessors is because of their improved capacity to learn. Take the Mars Rover vehicle that was employed by NASA during their 1997 Pathfinder Mission to Mars. This Rover was an advanced expression of Artificial Intelligence because it could learn about the Martian landscape in its vicinity so as to afford it effective locomotion. In other words, the Rover’s computational circuitry was able to learn and make sense of the Martian world thereby allowing the Rover to act in a sensible manner in a wholly novel terrain. The more sense a robot can make and the more it can learn, the smarter or more intelligent it is deemed to be. In short, learning and intelligence are indubitably bound together.
Now, if we concede that learning and making sense are the key hallmarks of intelligence then we must also concede that evolution is a form of intelligence since evolution is precisely a learning process. Over some 3 and half billion years, evolution has learned all the tricks of life – from metabolism, to visual perception, to photosynthesis. Every single feature of an organism is a manifest expression, or enduring record, of (natural) intelligence, written down in replicating DNA and expressed via bio-logic. So rich is the store of intelligence infusing the tree of life that we have copied numerous instances of it for our own benefit. We build aircraft whose airfoils were originally derived from bird wings. We make epoxy glues copied from the glues made by barnacles. We make photon sensitive solar panels in an attempt to mimic photosynthesis. And so on. In short, life is replete with wisdom accrued over millions of years and written down in enduring DNA, DNA and genes representing the established records of this organic wisdom much like Darwin’s notebooks contain the records of his intelligence as it unfolded over time.

Genetic Algorithms

It might be argued that this intelligence evinced by biological evolution over billions of years only seems like intelligence and that if we look more closely then evolution more closely corresponds to a form of ‘brute learning’ and not the kind of intelligent learning with which we are familiar. After all, since evolution depends, in part, on random changes in DNA then it seems to be rather ‘hit and miss’ since most changes in DNA will be harmful. How could such a hit and miss affair really be intelligent? Surely this is a brute force approach to learning and thus not indicative of intelligence at all?
To answer this criticism consider genetic algorithms. These are computer programs which simulate evolution inside a computer. They are used to quite literally breed solutions to complex problems. For instance, if you wanted to create an effective face recognition program that could differentiate between male and female faces, you could evolve it via an appropriate genetic algorithm. You take an initial population of candidate programs (which can recognise faces to a very primitive degree), measure how well each one does at differentiating between male and female faces, and then breed from the most successful one. This ‘breeding’ involves taking the more successful programs and replicating their underlying code – but with random changes. You then test the offspring population and then once again take the most successful one and breed from it. Repeat millions of times on a fast computer. What is the result? Well, the result is inevitable – namely that you eventually evolve a program with a maximised ability to differentiate between male and female faces.
Now, the question to ask is: do such genetic algorithms evince intelligence? Or are they simply demonstrating the action of brute non-intelligent learning? The answer which emerges when we look with ‘wide angle lenses’ is that such genetic algorithms are most definitely infused with intelligence. Firstly a genetic algorithm must be precisely configured in advance. This is done by shrewd software authors who have learned how to write the actual algorithms (an algorithm is basically a software program). Secondly, the computer hardware which runs the software algorithm must also be precisely configured in advance (i.e. designed and built). Viewed as a systemised totality including hardware, software and designers, a genetic algorithm running on a computer has (human) intelligence written all over it, in every circuit, chip and line of computer code. It might be a kind of exhaustive search approach to learning but it is a sure-fire way of being successful for impressive results are guaranteed. Indeed, this is why genetic algorithms are now used worldwide in industry and it also explains why the tree of life is so amazing. Once you have a configured system – i.e. Nature with its plastically linguistic DNA embedded in an environment infused with sensible law-abiding properties – and you ‘run it’ over time then, eventually, fantastic creations are wrought. If we focus on but one part of the system – like a random change in DNA or, in the case of a genetic algorithm, a random change in computer code – then we will not really see the intelligence involved. But if we expand our focus and view Nature as a total system then, like a computer system running a genetic algorithm, it is rife with the attributes of intelligence. In Nature, this intelligence comes to be overtly reflected through the evolutionary process in the same way that human intelligence is overtly reflected in the activity and final outcome of a genetic algorithm.
Consider the following which illustrates the intelligent learning process that typically constitutes evolution. It concerns the evolution of flight:
«It is usually thought that animals attained flight step by step from some primitive semblance of flying. Flying squirrels come to mind. Utilising taught wing-like flaps of membrane, a flying squirrel with outstretched legs can effectively glide from tree to tree. Moving our attention to the evolution of flight by birds, if we imagine that a linear evolutionary sequence of, say, 50 ancestral bird-type species (i.e. reptiles, or even dinosaurs) were involved in the evolution of proper full-blown flight, each successive species will obviously be more physically adept at flight. Each of the 50 successive species therefore embodies one closer step towards the realisation of refined flight. The entire sequential process can be seen as a learning process. Species quite literally learn to fly over time. Bio-logic learns the mathematical and engineering wisdom necessary to implement the precise muscle structure, muscle co-ordination and wing design required to achieve heavier-than-air flight. In more dramatic terms, one can say that avian wing structure and musculature clearly embody an acute ‘understanding’ of aerodynamics. If, however, you only concentrate your attention on but one species in this sequence of 50, you will not divine the learning. But if you focus on the entire process, the sequential progression, a natural but nonetheless intelligent learning process becomes apparent. To be sure, all evolutionary innovations can be viewed in the same way, whether we think of locomotion, sight, metabolism or any other biologically determined behaviour. In every case, a natural process of learning (and ‘understanding’) is synonymous with evolution.»

The Implications

So what does all this mean? Well, for starters it means that evolution can indeed be seen as an intelligent process, with so-called random variations of DNA being but individual events within a greater system which, in its totality, is patently not random but the very epitome of intelligent design. Which is to say that Nature, considered as a vast organised system, is precisely configured so as to foster creative processes – in the same way that a computer system running a genetic algorithm is precisely configured so as to foster creative processes. Whereas a genetic algorithm running on a computer system is replete with human intelligence, Nature is replete with natural intelligence, the evolution of the tree of life being an on-going manifest expression of this intelligence. Darwin’s groundbreaking legacy therefore resides in his discovery of the methodology of Nature’s creative intelligence.
According to this new paradigm, modern scientific teachings pertaining to evolution are totally misguided. Evolution is not some dumb mindless phenomenon but rather an on-going process of creative intelligence. Thus human intelligence is not the ‘highest’ form of intelligence that we know of for human intelligence stems from the human brain which itself stems from evolution – an eminently intelligent process that weaves more miracles than any human engineer. No-one can deny this. That many seemingly intelligent people do deny the intelligence of evolution reveals how alienated we have become from the natural intelligence which birthed us. It is high time we rediscovered the true glory of the natural world in which we live. Until we do this, until we reconnect with the immense wisdom within Nature, until we concede that we are not as smart as the system which created us, then we shall remain estranged from our roots and continue to suffer the consequences.

Simon G. Powell, author and musician, lives and works in London. His article is an extract from his unpublished manuscript «Natural Intelligence: Lessons from the Jesus Lizard.» His recent production is «Sacred Ground • Psilocybin Mushrooms and the Rebirth of Nature,» a 48 page booklet packaged with a 55 minute documentary film and music on CD-ROM, exploring the history and eco-psychological importance of psilocybin.

By Drake Bennett

Alexander Shulgin, Sasha to his friends, lives with his wife, Ann, 30 minutes inland from the San Francisco Bay on a hillside dotted with valley oak, Monterey pine and hallucinogenic cactus. At 79, he stoops a little, but he is still well over six feet tall, with a mane of white hair, a matching beard and a wardrobe that runs toward sandals, slacks and short-sleeved shirts with vaguely ethnic patterns. He lives modestly, drawing income from a small stock portfolio supplemented by his Social Security and the rent that two phone companies pay him to put cell towers on his land. In many respects he might pass for a typical Contra Costa County retiree.

It was an acquaintance of Shulgin’s named Humphry Osmond, a British psychiatrist and researcher into the effects of mescaline and LSD, who coined the word ”psychedelic” in the late 1950′s for a class of drugs that significantly alter one’s perception of reality. Derived from Greek, the term translates as ”mind manifesting” and is preferred by those who believe in the curative power of such chemicals. Skeptics tend to call them hallucinogens.

Shulgin is in the former camp. There’s a story he likes to tell about the past 100 years: ”At the beginning of the 20th century, there were only two psychedelic compounds known to Western science: cannabis and mescaline. A little over 50 years later — with LSD, psilocybin, psilocin, TMA, several compounds based on DMT and various other isomers — the number was up to almost 20. By 2000, there were well over 200. So you see, the growth is exponential.” When I asked him whether that meant that by 2050 we’ll be up to 2,000, he smiled and said, ”The way it’s building up now, we may have well over that number.”

The point is clear enough: the continuing explosion in options for chemical mind-manifestation is as natural as the passage of time. But what Shulgin’s narrative leaves out is the fact that most of this supposedly inexorable diversification took place in a lab in his backyard. For 40 years, working in plain sight of the law and publishing his results, Shulgin has been a one-man psychopharmacological research sector. (Timothy Leary called him one of the century’s most important scientists.) By Shulgin’s own count, he has created nearly 200 psychedelic compounds, among them stimulants, depressants, aphrodisiacs, ”empathogens,” convulsants, drugs that alter hearing, drugs that slow one’s sense of time, drugs that speed it up, drugs that trigger violent outbursts, drugs that deaden emotion — in short, a veritable lexicon of tactile and emotional experience. And in 1976, Shulgin fished an obscure chemical called MDMA out of the depths of the chemical literature and introduced it to the wider world, where it came to be known as Ecstasy.

In the small subculture that truly believes in better living through chemistry, Shulgin’s oeuvre has made him an icon and a hero: part pioneer, part holy man, part connoisseur. As his supporters point out, his work places him in an old, and in many cultures venerable, tradition. Whether it’s West African iboga ceremonies or Navajo peyote rituals, 60′s LSD culture or the age-old cultivation of cannabis nearly everywhere on the planet it can grow, the pursuit and celebration of chemically-induced alternate realms of consciousness goes back beyond the dawn of recorded history and has proved impossible to fully suppress. Shulgin sees nothing strange about devoting his life to it. What’s strange to him is that so few others see fit to do the same thing.

Most of the scientific community considers Shulgin at best a curiosity and at worst a menace. Now, however, near the end of his career, his faith in the potential of psychedelics has at least a chance at vindication. A little more than a month ago, the Food and Drug Administration approved a Harvard Medical School study looking at whether MDMA can alleviate the fear and anxiety of terminal cancer patients. And next month will mark a year since Michael Mithoefer, a psychiatrist in Charleston, S.C., started his study of Ecstasy-assisted therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder. At the same time, with somewhat less attention, studies at the Harbor-U.C.L.A. Medical Center and the University of Arizona, Tucson, have focused on the therapeutic potential of psilocybin (the active ingredient in ”magic mushrooms”). It’s far from a revolution, but it is an opening, and as both scientist and advocate, Shulgin has helped create it. If — and it’s a big ”if” — the results of the studies are promising enough, it might bring something like legitimacy to the Shulgin pharmacopoeia.

“I’ve always been interested in the machinery of the mental process,” Shulgin told me not long ago. He has also, from a very young age, loved playing with chemicals. As a lonely 16-year-old Harvard scholarship student soon to drop out and join the Navy, he studied organic chemistry. His interest in pharmacology dates to 1944, when a military nurse gave him some orange juice just before his surgery for a thumb infection. Convinced that the undissolved crystals at the bottom of the glass were a sedative, Shulgin fell unconscious, only to find upon waking that the substance had been sugar. It was a revelatory, tantalizing hint of the mind’s odd strength.

When Shulgin had his first psychedelic experience in 1960, he was a young U.C. Berkeley biochemistry Ph.D. working at Dow Chemical. He had already been interested for several years in the chemistry of mescaline, the active ingredient in peyote, when one spring day a few friends offered to keep an eye on him while he tried it himself. He spent the afternoon enraptured by his surroundings. Most important, he later wrote, he realized that everything he saw and thought ”had been brought about by a fraction of a gram of a white solid, but that in no way whatsoever could it be argued that these memories had been contained within the white solid. . . . I understood that our entire universe is contained in the mind and the spirit. We may choose not to find access to it, we may even deny its existence, but it is indeed there inside us, and there are chemicals that can catalyze its availability.”

Epiphanies don’t come much grander than that, and Shulgin’s interest in psychoactive drugs bloomed into an obsession. ”There was,” he remembers thinking, ”this remarkably rich and unexplored area that I had to explore.” Two years later, he was given his chance when he created Zectran, one of the world’s first biodegradable insecticides. In return, Dow gave him its customary dollar for the patent and unlimited freedom to pursue his interests.

As Shulgin turned toward making psychedelics, Dow remained true to its word. When the company asked, he patented his compounds. When it didn’t, Shulgin published his findings in places like Nature and The Journal of Organic Chemistry. Eventually, however, Dow decided that Shulgin’s work wasn’t something it wanted to endorse and asked that he not use the company address in his publications. He began to work out of a lab he had set up at home, eventually leaving Dow altogether to freelance as a consultant to research labs and hospitals.

All along he made drugs: 2,5-dimethoxy-4-ethoxyamphetamine, or MEM for short, was his Rosetta stone, a ”valuable and dramatic compound” that opened the door to a whole class of drugs based on changes at the ”4 position” of a molecule’s central carbon ring. A compound he dubbed Aleph-1 gave him ”one of the most delicious blends of inflation, paranoia and selfishness that I have ever experienced.” Another, Ariadne, was patented and tested under the name Dimoxamine as a drug for ”restoring motivation in senile geriatric patients.” Still another, DIPT, created no visual hallucinations but distorted the user’s sense of pitch.

Shulgin tested for activity by taking the chemicals himself. He would start many times below the active dose of a compound’s closest analog and work his way up on alternate days. When he found something of interest, Ann, whom he married in 1981, would try it. If he thought further study was warranted, he would invite over his ”research group” of six to eight close friends — among them two psychologists and a fellow chemist — and try the drugs out on them. In case of a truly dangerous reaction, Shulgin kept an anti-convulsant on hand. He used it twice, both times on himself.

Shulgin’s pace has slowed recently — the research group hardly meets anymore. Nevertheless, Ann figures that she’s had more than 2,000 psychedelic experiences. Shulgin puts his own figure above 4,000. Asked if they had suffered any effects from their remarkable drug histories, they laughed. ”You mean negative effects?” Ann said. In more than a dozen hours of conversation, her memory proved sharp. But Shulgin, while a nimble conversationalist, can have trouble with names — of people and places, never chemicals. At one point, while explaining a mnemonic device he uses to remember world geography, he paused and asked me, ”Where’s that place where Ann is from?” (She was born in New Zealand.) He is, though, also nearing 80.

Once a Shulgin compound develops a reputation, it is almost invariably placed on the Drug Enforcement Agency’s list of Schedule I drugs, those deemed to have no accepted medical use and the highest potential for abuse or addiction. It is therefore rather striking that Shulgin is not only still a free man, but also still at work. His own explanation is that, quite simply, ”I’m not doing anything illegal.” For more than 20 years, until a government crackdown, he had a D.E.A.-issued Schedule I research license. And many of the drugs in his lab weren’t illegal because they hadn’t existed until he created them.

Shulgin’s knack for befriending the right people hasn’t hurt. A week after I visited him, he was headed to Sonoma County for the annual ”summer encampment” of the Bohemian Club, an exclusive, secretive San Francisco-based men’s club that has counted every Republican president since Herbert Hoover among its members.

For a long time, though, Shulgin’s most helpful relationship was with the D.E.A. itself. The head of the D.E.A.’s Western Laboratory, Bob Sager, was one of his closest friends. Sager officiated at the Shulgins’ wedding and, a year later, was married on Shulgin’s lawn. Through Sager, the agency came to rely on Shulgin: he would give pharmacology talks to the agents, make drug samples for the forensic teams and serve as an expert witness — though, he is quick to point out, he appeared much more frequently for the defense. He even wrote the definitive law-enforcement desk-reference work on controlled substances. In his office, Shulgin has several plaques awarded to him by the agency for his service. (Shulgin denies that this had anything to do with his being given his Schedule I license.)

Nevertheless, in the early 80′s, Shulgin began having grim fantasies of the D.E.A. throwing him in jail, ransacking his lab and destroying all of his records. At the same time, he was finding it harder to get his work published: journals were either uninterested in or leery about human psychedelic research. He decided to make as much of what he knew public as quickly as possible. He and Ann started work on a book called ”PiHKAL” (short for ”Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved,” after a family of compounds particularly rich in psychoactivity), self-publishing it in 1991.

It is a curious hybrid work, divided into two sections. The first, ”The Love Story,” is a thinlyfictionalized account of Sasha’s and Ann’s comings of age, previous marriages, meeting, courtship (to which nearly 200 pages are devoted) and many drug experiences. The second, ”The Chemical Story,” is not a story at all, but capsule descriptions of 179 phenethylamines. Each entry includes step-by-step instructions for synthesis, along with recommended dosages, duration of action and ”qualitative comments” like the following, for 60 milligrams of something called 3C-E: ”Visuals very strong, insistent. Body discomfort remained very heavy for first hour … 2nd hour on, bright colors, distinct shapes — jewel-like — with eyes closed. Suddenly it became clearly not anti-erotic … Image of glass-walled apartment building in mid-desert. Exquisite sensitivity. Down by? midnight. Next morning, faint flickering lights on looking out windows.” ”TiHKAL” (”Tryptamines I Have Known and Loved”), self-published six years later, follows the same model.

To date, ”PiHKAL” has sold more than 41,000 copies, a figure nearly unheard-of for a self-published book. It introduced Shulgin’s work to a whole new audience and turned him into an underground celebrity. An organization called the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics has an online Ask Dr. Shulgin column that receives 200 questions a month. On independent drug-information Web sites like www.erowid.com, you can find the ”PiHKAL” and ”TiHKAL” entries for dozens of drugs, along with many anonymously posted accounts of Shulgin-style self-dosing drug experiments, some of them harrowing in their recklessness.

With all of these fellow travelers, some very bad experiences are inevitable. In 1967, a Shulgin compound called DOM enjoyed a brief vogue in Haight-Ashbury under the name STP, at doses several times larger than those at which Shulgin had found significant psychoactive effects, and emergency rooms saw a spike in the number of people coming in thinking they would never come down. And while the number of psychedelic-related deaths is orders of magnitude smaller than the number due to alcohol, prescription drugs or even over-the-counter painkillers, they do occur regularly. In October 2000, a 20-year-old man in Norman, Okla., died from taking 2C-T-7, a drug Shulgin describes in ”PiHKAL” as ”good and friendly and wonderful.”

When I asked Shulgin whether he remembered the first time he heard that someone had died from one of his drugs, he said he did not: ”It would have struck me as being a sad event. And yet, at the same time, how many people die from aspirin? It’s a small but real percentage.” (The American Association of Poison Control Centers, whose numbers are not comprehensive, attributed 59 deaths to aspirin in 2003; most, though, were suicides.) Asked whether he could imagine a drug so addictive that it should be banned, he said no. With his fervent libertarianism — he says the only appropriate restriction on drugs is one to prevent children from buying them — he has inoculated himself against any sense of personal guilt.

Shulgin’s special relationship with the D.E.A. ended two years after the publication of ”PiHKAL.” According to Richard Meyer, spokesman for the agency’s San Francisco Field Division: ”It is our opinion that those books are pretty much cookbooks on how to make illegal drugs. Agents tell me that in clandestine labs that they have raided, they have found copies of those books.” In 1993, D.E.A. agents descended on Shulgin’s farm, combed through the house and lab and carted off anything they thought might be an illicit substance. Shulgin was fined $25,000 for violations of the terms of his Schedule I license (donations from friends and admirers ended up covering the whole amount) and was asked to turn the license in.

To the extent that Shulgin is known to the wider world, it is as the godfather of Ecstasy: 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine, or MDMA, was originally patented in 1914 by Merck. The byproduct of a chemical synthesis, it was thought to have no use of its own and was promptly forgotten. But Shulgin resynthesized it in 1976 at the suggestion of a former student. (He has never found out how she heard about it.) Two years later, in a paper written with his friend and fellow chemist David Nichols, he was the first to publicly document its effect on humans: ”an easily controlled altered state of consciousness with emotional and sensual overtones.”

Unlike many of its subsequent users, Shulgin did not find his MDMA experience transformative. For him the effect was like a particularly lucid alcohol buzz; he called it his ”low-calorie martini.” He was intrigued, though, by the drug’s unique combination of intoxication, disinhibition and clarity. ”It didn’t have the other visual and auditory imaginative things that you often get from psychedelics,” he said. ”It opened up a person, both to other people and inner thoughts, but didn’t necessarily color it with pretty colors and strange noises.” He decided that it might be well suited for psychotherapy.

At the time, it was not such an unconventional idea. In the 50′s and 60′s, the use of LSD, psilocybin and mescaline in therapy was the subject of much mainstream scholarly debate. LSD was a particularly hot topic: more than a thousand papers were written on its use as an experimental treatment for alcoholism, depression and various neuroses in some 40,000 patients. One proponent was a psychotherapist and friend of Shulgin’s named Leo Zeff. When Shulgin had him try MDMA in 1977, Zeff was so impressed that he came out of retirement to proselytize for it. Ann Shulgin remembers a speaker at Zeff’s memorial service saying that Zeff had introduced the drug to ”about 4,000” therapists.

In certain therapeutic circles, MDMA acquired a reputation as a wonder drug. Anecdotal accounts attested to its ability to induce in one session the sort of breakthroughs that normally took months or years of therapy. According to George Greer, a psychiatrist who in the early 80′s conducted MDMA therapy sessions with 80 patients, ”Without exception, every therapist who I talked to or even heard of, every therapist who gave MDMA to a patient, was highly impressed by the results.”

But the drug was also showing up in nightclubs in Dallas and Los Angeles, and in 1986 the D.E.A. placed it in Schedule I. By the late 90′s, household surveys showed millions of teenagers and college students using it, and in 2000, U.S. Customs officials seized nearly 10 million pills. Parents and public officials worried that a whole generation was consigning itself to a life of drug-induced depression and cognitive decay.

There is, in fact, little consensus about what MDMA does to your brain over the long run. Researchers generally agree on its immediate physiological effects: especially at higher doses, it can trigger sharp increases in muscle tension, heart rate and blood pressure. Hyperthermia, or raised body temperature, is a particular worry, along with the attendant risk of heatstroke or dehydration. MDMA also, at least temporarily, exhausts the brain’s supply of serotonin (a neurochemical thought to play a role in memory and mood regulation). But as to the extent and duration of that depletion, and whether it has any measurable functional or behavioral consequences, there is fierce debate and surprisingly scarce data. Nationwide, fatality numbers are hard to come by, but a study by New York City’s deputy chief medical examiner determined that of the 19,000 deaths from all causes reported to his office between January 1997 and June 2000, 2 were due solely to Ecstasy.

In the past couple of years, MDMA’s opponents have backed off from some of their stronger claims. (In one particularly embarrassing instance, a study linking MDMA to Parkinson’s disease was revealed to have instead been based on the use of methamphetamine, which is known to be much more neurotoxic.) Emboldened, a few psychiatrists are bringing MDMA back into the news in a role closer to the one Shulgin originally imagined for it.

With the F.D.A.’s approval of the Harvard cancer-patient study on Dec. 17, all that’s still needed is a D.E.A. license for MDMA. John Halpern, the psychiatrist heading the study, anticipates that happening in the next couple of months. At the same time, he cautions against making too much of his ”small pilot study”: eight subjects undergoing a course of MDMA therapy, with another four receiving a placebo. The Charleston study is similarly modest, with 20 subjects.

Still, according to Mark A.R. Kleiman, director of the Drug Policy Analysis Program at U.C.L.A., ”there’s obviously been a significant shift at the regulatory agencies and the Institutional Review Boards. There are studies being approved that wouldn’t have been approved 10 years ago. And there are studies being proposed that wouldn’t have been proposed 10 years ago.”

The theoretical basis for MDMA therapy varies a bit depending on whom you talk to. Greer says that by lowering patients’ defenses, the drug allows them to face troubling, even repressed, memories. Charles Grob, the psychiatry professor running the U.C.L.A. psilocybin study (also with terminal cancer patients) and a longtime advocate of therapeutic MDMA research, focuses more on the ”empathic rapport” catalyzed by MDMA. ”I don’t know of any other compound that can achieve this to the degree that MDMA can,” he said.

The medical community remains dubious. For Vivian Rakoff, emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto, there is something familiar about the claims being made for psychedelics. ”The notion of the revelatory moment due to some drug or maneuver that will allow you to change your life has been around for a long time,” he said. ”Every few years, something comes along that claims to be what Freud called the ‘royal road to the unconscious.”’ Steven Hyman, professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School and former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, put it this way: ”If you asked me to place a bet, I would be skeptical. In general, one worries that insights gained under states of disinhibition or mild euphoria or different cognitive states with illusions may seem strange and distant from the vantage of our ordinary life.” Even so, both Hyman and Rakoff say that research should be allowed to proceed.

Shulgin has been credited with jump-starting today’s therapeutic research, but he prefers to play down his role. While heartened by the MDMA studies and happy to play psychedelic elder statesman, he insists that he is not a healer or a shaman but a researcher. Asked why he does what he does, he replies, ”I’m curious!” He is most animated when describing the feeling that accompanies the discovery of a new compound, no matter what its properties. Sometimes he compares the moment to that of artistic creation (”The pleasure of composing a new painting or piece of music”), and sometimes it sounds more like a close encounter of the third kind (”You’re meeting something you don’t know, and it’s meeting something it doesn’t know. And so you have this exchange of properties and ideas”).

The New York Times

30 January 30 2005

By Timothy Leary

When in the course of organic evolution it becomes obvious that a mutational process is inevitably dissolving the physical and neurological bonds which connect the members of one generation to the past and inevitably directing them to assume among the species of Earth the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitle them, a decent concern for the harmony of species requires that the causes of the mutation should be declared.
We hold these truths to be self evident:
• That all species are created different but equal;
• That they are endowed, each one, with certain inalienable rights;
• That among them are Freedom to Live, Freedom to Grow, and Freedom to pursue Happiness in their own style;
• That to protect these God-given rights, social structures naturally emerge, basing their authority on the principles of love of God and respect for all forms of life;
• That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of life, liberty, and harmony, it is the organic duty of the young members of that species to mutate, to drop out, to initiate a new social structure, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its power in such form as seems likely to produce the safety, happiness, and harmony of all sentient beings.
Genetic wisdom, indeed, suggests that social structures long established should not be discarded for frivolous reasons and transient causes. The ecstasy of mutation is equally balanced by the pain. Accordingly all experience shows that members of a species are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, rather than to discard the forms to which they are accustomed.
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, all pursuing invariably the same destructive goals, threaten the very fabric of organic life and the serene harmony of the planet, it is the right, it is the organic duty to drop out of such morbid covenants and to evolve new loving social structures.
Such has been the patient sufferance of the freedom-loving peoples of this earth, and such is now the necessity which constrains us to form new systems of government.
The history of the white, menopausal, mendacious men now ruling the planet earth is a history of repeated violation of the harmonious laws of nature, all having the direct object of establishing a tyranny of the materialistic aging over the gentle, the peace-loving, the young, the colored. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to the judgement of generations to come.
• These old, white rulers have maintained a continuous war against other species of life, enslaving and destroying at whim fowl, fish, animals and spreading a lethal carpet of concrete and metal over the soft body of earth.
• They have maintained as well a continual state of war among themselves and against the colored races, the freedom-loving, the gentle, the young. Genocide is their habit.
• They have instituted artificial scarcities, denying peaceful folk the natural inheritance of earth’s abundance and God’s endowment.
• They have glorified material values and degraded the spiritual.
• They have claimed private, personal ownership of God’d land, driving by force of arms the gentle from passage on the earth.
• In their greed they have erected artificial immigration and customs barriers, preventing the free movement of people.
• In their lust for control they have set up systems of compulsory education to coerce the minds of the children and to destroy the wisdom and innocence of the playful young.
• In their lust for power they have controlled all means of communication to prevent the free flow of ideas and to block loving exchanges among the gentle.
• In their fear they have instituted great armies of secret police to spy upon the privacy of the pacific.
• In their anger they have coerced the peaceful young against their will to join their armies and to wage murderous wars against the young and gentle of other countries.
• In their greed they have made the manufacture and selling of weapons the basis of their economies.
• For profit they have polluted the air, the rivers, the seas.
• In their impotence they have glorified murder, violence, and unnatural sex in their mass media.
• In their aging greed they have set up an economic system which favors age over youth.
• They have in every way attempted to impose a robot uniformity and to crush variety, individuality, and independence of thought.
• In their greed, they have instituted political systems which perpetuate rule by the aging and force youth to choose between plastic conformity or despairing alienation.
• They have invaded privacy by illegal search, unwarranted arrest, and contemptuous harassment.
• They have enlisted an army of informers.
• In their greed they sponsor the consumption of deadly tars and sugars and employ cruel and unusual punishment of the possession of life-giving alkaloids and acids.
• They never admit a mistake. They unceasingly trumpet the virtue of greed and war. In their advertising and in their manipulation of information they make a fetish out of blatant falsity and pious self-enhancement. Their obvious errors only stimulate them to greater error and noisier self-approval.
• They are bores.
• They hate beauty.
• They hate sex.
• They hate life.
We have warned them from time to time to their inequities and blindness. We have addressed every available appeal to their withered sense of righteousness. We have tried to make them laugh. We have prophesied in detail the terror they are perpetuating. But they have been deaf to the weeping of the poor, the anguish of the colored, the rocking mockery of the young, the warnings of their poets. Worshipping only force and money, they listen only to force and money. But we shall no longer talk in these grim tongues.
We must therefore acquiesce to genetic necessity, detach ourselves from their uncaring madness and hold them henceforth as we hold the rest of God’s creatures – in harmony, life brothers, in their excess, menaces to life.
We, therefore, God-loving, peace-loving, life-loving, fun-loving men and women, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the Universe for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name and by the Authority of all sentient beings who seek gently to evolve on this planet, solemnly publish and declare that we are free and independent, and that we are absolved from all Allegiance to the United States Government and all governments controlled by the menopausal, and that grouping ourselves into tribes of like-minded fellows, we claim full power to live and move on the land, obtain sustenance with our own hands and minds in the style which seems sacred and holy to us, and to do all Acts and Things which independent Freemen and Freewomen may of right do without infringing on the same rights of other species and groups to do their own thing.
And for the support of this Declaration of Evolution with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, and serenely confident of the approval of generations to come, in whose name we speak, do we now mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor.

By Silvia Polivoy

The human being shows a remarkable disposition to seek spiritual transcendence. Since the irrational cannot be erased from the human mind, the harder we try to deny it, the greater the power it will exert upon us. The spiritual experiences are associated to the occurrence of altered states of consciousness.

The society we live in considers (as opposed to shamanic knowledge) modified states of consciousness to be onanistic and vicious. Shamans argue that to satisfy our religious drive we have to experience the divine, and in order to achieve that, they use sacred plants. That is why the sacred plants are called entheogens, because they help experience the divine.
Abraham Maslow called these experiences «peak experiences», but they are not limited to the altered states achieved through drugs or sacred plants. They can take place during meditation, hyperventilation, the practice of yoga, hypnosis, fast, physical suffering (such as the self-inflicted pain some saints underwent or the postures certain yoguis kept for months, etc). In short, it is a state that can be reached in many ways and, once there, we can explore aspects of reality which are different from those perceived in an ordinary state of consciousness. These different aspects of reality are well studied.

The orthodox branch of science considers these altered states subjective, therefore worthless. Then, these feelings of ecstasy, these other «dimensions» of reality, these occurrences of mystical reunion, of beauty, this crossing of the space-time barrier, can be catalogued as pathological. Traditional Psychiatry does not separate mysticism from psychosis. That is why Transpersonal Psychology blends science with the study of the spiritual capabilities of man using methods to alter the state of consciousness, because the spiritual phenomena seem to be incomprehensible in an ordinary state of consciousness.

Modified states of consciousness may have a dangerous side because, since they affect the defense mechanisms of the individual, they may pave the way for unacceptable, repressed material from the individual’s past to the conscious mind and cause restlessness, which could rise to terrifying levels if the individual is unable to cope with his anxiety (this is what is usually known as a «bad trip»). That is why previous psychological counseling is advised, for the individual to be able to tell what comes from the outside from what comes from the inside. It is recommended, also, to experience such modified states of consciousness in the context of psychotherapy, under the supervision of qualified, well trained professionals.
But, in spite of the risks, the spiritual experiences, the unconscious material, and the altered amplified of consciousness related to them, are too valuable to be ignored. Thus psychotherapy takes advantage of the information, available when the repression mechanism is weak, to modify unwanted patterns of behaviour.
Most psychoactive substances resemble (and sometimes are identical to) substances normally produced by the human body. Therefore, the individual has a built-in capacity to experiment psychedelic states, which are inherent to certain aspects of the human mind inaccessible during wakefulness. So, under the appropriate circumstances, these substances allow the individual (for a limited period of time) to gain access to deeper parts of his psyche.

Through dreams we get in touch with those aspects of our personality which are hidden from the conscious mind. The entheogenic or psychointegrative plants help reach those states that we experience while dreaming or while in the middle of those rare, ecstatic epiphanies that can happen while we are awake. Unlike most drugs, entheogenic plants do not produce physical dependence. A quick, time-limited tolerance (that does not increase with the dose administered) is also characteristic.
Their main use is to spot the individual’s conditionings and destroy them, to be unselfish by dissolving momentarily the limits of the ego, to expand the inner vision, to be more lucid, obtaining in that fashion very important insights. In short, to be able to recognize the forces, the impulses behind the individual’s actions and emotions, to track thoughts back to their source and to be in control of one’s life. That’s why they help the individual to become one.

Due to all this the sacred plants are called psychointegrative, or entheogenic. The list includes Ayahuasca, Peyote, Psilocybin mushrooms, Salvia divinorum, San Pedro (a cactus), Epena, Cebil, Brugmansia, among others.

Abraham Maslow in his book called «The psychology of Science» has shown how science might be the best neurotic defense mechanism invented by man, because the selective rejection wielded by human knowledge acts as a defense and therefore constitutes a neurotic maneuver which, out of fear, disqualifies transpersonal experiences as objects of study.
We’d all benefit if science became an open sistem oriented to personal growth.
Modern physics teaches us about the Universe’s unity, in which consciousness plays a role much closer to the one described by the great mystics.
When we transcend the ego for however brief, it is the beginning of an awakening to our true Self.

By Martin A. Lee

Wander long enough through the bustling passageways of any crowded village marketplace in the Northwest Amazon and you’ll come upon herbalist stands with dried plants, hanging animal parts, and lots of bottled medicines. Among the local offerings you’ll inevitably find «ayahuasca» a fearsome, foul-tasting, jungle brew sold by the liter.

Pronounced «ah-yah-waska,» the word is from the Quechua language; it means «vine of the soul,» «vine of the dead,» or «the vision vine.» Known by various names among 72 native ayahuasca-ingesting cultures in Peru, Columbia and Ecuador, this legendary, industrial-strength hallucinogen is used by curanderos, or witch doctors, to heal the sick and communicate with spirits. Many rainforest shamans simply refer to ayahuasca as el remedio, «the remedy.»
Revered by indigenous people as a sacred medicine, a master cure for all diseases, it is without a doubt the most celebrated hallucinogenic plant concoction of the Amazon. But it is also under threat from both anti-narcotics agencies and corporations that want to patent it and corner the market on its use.

Plant teachers

Long ago, South American Indian medicine men and medicine women became adept at manipulating an array of ingredients that were mixed and boiled into ayahuasca or «yage,» as it is often called. An elaborate set of rituals governed every step of the process, from gathering leaves, roots, and bark to cooking and administering the intoxicant.
Ayahuasca is unique in that its powerful psychopharmacological effect is dependent on a synergistic combination of active alkaloids from at least two plants – the banisteriopsis caapi vine containing the crucial harmala alkaloids, along with the leafy plant psychotria virdis or some other hallucinogenic admixture that contains dimethyltryptamine (DMT) alkaloids.
Most curious is the fact that when taken orally, DMT is metabolized and deactivated by a particular gastric enzyme. But certain chemicals in the yage vine counter the action of this stomach enzyme, thereby allowing the DMT to circulate through the bloodstream and into the brain, where it triggers intense visions and supernatural experiences.
Contemporary researchers marvel at what chemist J.C. Callaway describes as «one of the most sophisticated drug delivery systems in existence.» Just how the Amazon Indians managed to figure out this amazing bit of synergistic alchemy is one of the many mysteries of yage.
The ayahuasqueros, the native healers who use yage, will tell you that their knowledge comes directly from «the plant teachers» themselves. Hallucinogenic botanicals are viewed as the embodiments of intelligent beings who only become visible in special states of consciousness and who function as spirit guides and sources of healing power and knowledge.
According to indigenous folklore, ayahuasca is the fount of all understanding, the ultimate medium that reveals the mythological origins of life. To drink yage, anthropologist Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff once wrote, is to return to the cosmic uterus, the primordial womb of existence, “where the individual ‘sees’ the tribal divinities, the creation of the universe and humanity, the first couple, the creation of the animals, and the establishment of the social order.”

The great cleansing

Ayahuasca was never used casually or for recreational purposes in traditional societies. Only a ritually clean person who maintained a strict dietary regimen (low on spices, sugars and animal fat) for several weeks or months was deemed ready to partake of the experience. Shamanic initiation rites entailed a lengthy period of preparation, which included social isolation and sexual abstinence, before novices got to ingest yage with the curandero.
A connoisseur of the chemically-induced trance-state, the curandero provides guidance to those who wish to embark upon a «vision-quest.» But rainforest shamans typically “resist the heroic mold into which current Western image-making would pour them, ” says anthropologist Michael Taussig. Instead, they often exude a bawdy vitality and a funny, unpretentious, down-to-earth manner.
More of a trickster than a guru or saint, the curandero is unquestionably the master of ceremonies, the key figure in the ayahuasca drama. After nightfall, the bitter brew is passed around a circle from mouth to mouth, and the shaman starts to sing about the visions they will see. Listening to his chant, the novices feel some numbness on their lips and warmth in their guts.
A vertiginous surge of energy envelops them. And then all hell breaks loose: wretching, vomiting, shitting diarrhea – an unstoppable, high colonic that penetrates the innards, sweeping through the intestinal coils like liquid draino of the soul, cleansing the body of parasites, emotional blockages, long-held resentments. It is for good reason that Amazonian natives refer to la purga when speaking of yage.
«One cannot help be impressed by the remarkable health-enhancing effects attributed to the purging action of the vine,» writes Sonoma-based psychologist Ralph Metzner, editor of Ayahuasca, an anthology of scholarly and first-person accounts of the yage experience. Metzner notes that there have been anecdotal reports of the complete remission of some cancers after one or two ayahuasca sessions. The rejuvenating impact of «la purga» would help to explain the exceptional health of the ayahuasqueros, even those of advanced ages.

Space time travel

After the unavoidable episode of purging, the senses liven up and the initiate experiences a kind of «magnetic release from the world,» as Wade Davis, author and explorer in residence with the National Geographic Society, put it. This is followed by an onslaught of spectacular visions, a swirling pandemonium of kaleidoscopic imagery that changes faster than the speed of thought.
While under the influence of ayahuasca, it is not uncommon for people to feel as though they have been lifted out of their bodies and catapulted into a strange, aerial excursion. During this voyage to far-off realms, they see gorgeous vistas and enchanted landscapes that suddenly give way to harrowing encounters with fierce jaguars, huge iridescent snakes, and other predatory beasts intent on devouring the novice.
William Burroughs described the sensation of long-distance flying when he took ayahuasca during an expedition to South America in 1953. «Yage is space time travel,» he wrote in a letter to Allen Ginsberg. «The blood and substance of many races, Negro, Polynesian, Mountain Mongol, Desert Nomad, Polyglot Near East, Indian – new races as yet unconceived and unborn, combinations not yet realized pass through your body. Migrations, incredible journeys through deserts and jungles and mountains. … A place where the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum.»
It is not known why the visions provoked by ayahuasca often involve Amazon jungle animals, even when people from other continents swallow the acrid tonic. Stories of anacondas the length of rivers and electric eels that light up the night sky are classical elements of the yage experience. Heinz Kusel, a trader living among the Chama natives of northeastern Peru in the late 1940s, recounted how an Indian once told him that whenever he drank ayahuasca, he had such beautiful visions that he “put his hands over his eyes for fear that someone might steal them.”

Drug wars in the New World

Indeed, there was a time when people did try to steal the visions. Ever since the European invaders came to the New World more than 500 years ago, they scorned and demonized ayahuasca and other hallucinogenic substances that were employed by native peoples in their healing rituals.
Western knowledge of yage ceremonies was first recorded in the 17th century by Jesuit missionaries who condemned the use of «diabolical potions» prepared from jungle vines. The ruthless attempt to eradicate such practices among the colonized inhabitants of the Americas was part of an imperialist effort to impose a new social order that stigmatized the ayahuasca experience as a form of devil-worship or possession by evil spirits. But the ingestion of yage for religious and medicinal purposes continued, despite the genocidal campaigns of the conquistadors.
It wasn’t until the 1930s that Richard Evans Schultes, director of Harvard University’s Botanical Museum, provided a scientific analysis of the complex ethnobotany of yage and many other psychoactive plants in the Amazon region. By this time, the shamanic use of ayahuasca had spread from remote jungle areas to South American urban centers, where mestizo curanderos added a Christian gloss to archaic Indian ceremonies. Several Brazilian churches started to administer ayahuasca as a sacrament in a syncretic fusion of Catholicism and shamanism.
The two largest of these church movements – Santo Daime and Uniao de Vegetal – utilized yage in their religious services without interference by the Brazilian government until the mid-1980s, when U.S. officials pressured Brazil’s Federal Council on Narcotics to put the banisteriopsis caapi vine on a list of controlled substances. The ayahuasca churches protested and a government committee was appointed to investigate the matter. After examining the churches’ use of yage and testing it on themselves, the members of this committee recommended that the ban on ayahuasca be lifted. The Brazilian government acted upon this recommendation and legalized the sacramental use of yage in 1987, much to the dismay of the U.S. embassy.

Resurgent shamanism

The revival of shamanic rituals found a fertile ground particularly in areas where wealthy plantation owners and multinational corporations displaced peasants from the land. For these poor and desperate people, ayahuasca was a gift that helped them cope with the expansion of the market economy into the frontier. As their subsistence society unraveled, so, too, did their sense of sanity and well-being. Consequently, a growing number of mentally-ill individuals and uprooted wage-laborers sought out curanderos, who were forced into a new role. In addition to curing the sick and communicating with the spirit world, many witch doctors began using ayahuasca to mediate class conflict. As one Putumayo medicine man told Michael Taussig, «I have been teaching people revolution through my work with plants.»
The more big business encroached upon native turf, the greater the resurgence of shamanism. And in another ironic twist of globalization, the sacred beverage of the Amazon made its way to Europe and the United States, sending law enforcement into a tizzy.
The Santo Daime religion has taken root in Hawaii and the San Francisco Bay Area, where yage sessions are held in secret. This ayahuasca church also has branches in several other countries, including Great Britain, Belgium, France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, and Japan.
In October 1999, successive police raids targeted Santo Daime members in Amsterdam, Paris, Marseilles, and Germany. The crackdown prompted church representatives throughout Europe to mobilize. They are seeking official recognition of their religion, and they want the sacramental use of ayahuasca to be legalized.
Predictably, U.S. narcotics control officials are opposed to ending the prohibition against yage, despite Peruvian medical studies that indicate ayahuasca can be an effective treatment for cocaine addiction. The fact that yage tastes so awful –- to the point where some people can’t even bring themselves to swallow it –- provides an additional safeguard against those who might use it in a cavalier fashion.

Who owns yage?

The U.S. pharmaceutical industry has also taken an interest in ayahuasca. Loren Miller of the International Plant Medicine Corporation received a sample of the yagé vine from a tribal elder in Ecuador. In 1986, Miller obtained a U.S. patent for a specific type of banisteriopsis caapi with the hope of profiting from the plant’s medicinal properties. The patent, which gave Miller’s company exclusive rights in the United States to breed and sell a new variety of the plant, is due to expire in 2003.
Upon learning what had transpired, the Ecuador-based Coordinating Committee of Native Organizations of the Amazon Basin (COICA) accused Miller of committing “an offense against indigenous peoples” by patenting a sacred plant for his own benefit. «Commercializing an ingredient of the religious ceremonies and of healing for our people is a real affront for the over four hundred cultures that populate the Amazon basin,» declared COICA General Coordinator Antonio Jacanamijoy. COICA proclaimed that Miller and his company were unwelcome in indigenous territories. The State Department considered this warning a death threat against Miller and interceded on his behalf.
The controversy over ayahuasca spilled into the diplomatic arena when the Ecuadorian government refused to sign a bilateral agreement on intellectual property rights with the United States in 1996. Washington countered by threatening Ecuador with economic sanctions. Thus far, the U.S. Senate has refused to ratify the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity that recognizes the property rights of native people. More than 100 countries have signed this treaty, including Ecuador.
While multinational corporations seek to exploit the natural treasures of the Amazon, the destruction of the rainforest continues at an accelerated pace and indigenous ways of life are being threatened. “I feel a great sorrow when trees are burned, when the forest is destroyed,” explained Peruvian shaman and painter Pablo Cesar Amaringo, co-author of Ayahuasca Visions. «I feel sorrow because I know that human beings are doing something very wrong. When one takes ayahuasca, one can sometimes hear how the trees cry when they are going to be cut down. They know beforehand, and they cry. And the spirits have to go to other places, because their physical part, their house, is destroyed.»

Martin A. Lee is the author of The Beast Reawakens and Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and the Sixties Rebellion
martin@aciddreams.com

By Peter Meyer

There are two fundamental errors which are often made in thinking about God. The first (and worse error) is that God is “out there”. The second (and better error) is that God is “within”.

The claim that God is “out there” is common to the Western monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. This is the most pernicious error ever to have corrupted spiritual thinking. To say that God is “out there” is to imply that one is separate from God, and renders God an object, to which can be attributed various qualities. Among the most common of these are the alleged qualities of being a ruler, a lawgiver, a judge, a delegator of authority, an interested party in the conflicts that humans wage among themselves. In such conflicts it is always asserted that “God is on our side” against those perceived as “the enemy”. Such an assertion is then used to justify acts of barbarity, such as the slaughtering of the enemy — “in the name of God” of course.

To believe that God is “out there” is to believe that God and oneself are separate. This is a basic error. There can be nothing other than God. To believe that from God can come something which is not of the substance of God is absurd. All that exists is within God. This includes everything that makes up the being you think of as yourself, including your body and your mind. Your body is not made of some kind of “matter”, basically dead and lifeless, as materialist scientists would have you believe. Your body is of the same substance as God, and insofar as we can distinguish body from mind, your mind is also of the same substance as God.

This is hidden in normal consciousness because constant awareness of this would hinder the concentration needed to survive in the physical world. An animal needs to be alert to dangers which threaten its existence, and to attend too much to the presence of God in its own body would distract from this alertness.

Christians claim that Jesus Christ was an incarnation of God. That’s true. Where they err is in denying that anyone else was or is an incarnation of God. In fact all humans are an incarnation of God, indeed, all animals, all plants and all organisms are an incarnation of God. Anything which has a physical body and which acts so as to maintain itself in existence is an incarnation of God. Of course, these various incarnations of God differ widely in the quality of their awareness of themselves and their environment. Where Jesus differed was in the nature of his spiritual awareness. To claim uniqueness for Jesus it would be necessary to claim uniqueness for this spiritual awareness, a claim which is difficult to justify.

There is only one being, here called God, and this being is one of unlimited love-intelligence-energy (since there is no other being which could limit it). There is no limit to the ways in which this energy can organize itself and manifest itself in various spaces, times and spatiotemporal structures. This divine energy can be directly experienced. It can be experienced as a high-frequency vibration. (The string theorists in physics are probably getting close to a proper description of the fundamental physical entities in the physical world when they posit vibrating “strings”.) By means of meditation, breathing practices, psychedelic drugs and sacred plants, a combination of these, or simply through divine grace, one can become aware of this energetic vibration manifesting in one’s own body. What one is experiencing is God directly.

In such experience one is not experiencing a God which is outside one’s body. One’s body is part of God, which is why one can have this experience. What is experienced is not some effect of God, it isGod. But, of course, only a part of God. As St. Thomas Aquinas said, “What is received is received according to the nature of the recipient.” So when we experience God directly we experience God only in the manner in which, as experiencing beings of a certain kind, we are capable of experiencing God. God is vastly greater than anything we can experience of God; we can obtain just a glimpse, but a glimpse sufficient to produce both awe and humility.

But this does not mean that God is anything like what the Jewish, Christian and Islamic theologians claim. Nothing in this experience suggests that God is a lawgiver, a judge of human actions or a commander sitting in heaven directing human affairs. Such notions have been foisted on the gullible to facilitate social and political control. In one’s more fanciful moments it is perhaps permissible to anthropomorphize God in the way that the Hindus do — Shiva as realizer of cosmic consciousness, Kali as (sometimes destructive) mother of all, Radha and Krishna as divine lovers, and so on — but this is simply to make it easier for those people who cannot experience God directly (as Sat-Chit-Ananda) to relate to or think of God, especially with the addition of an emotional component.

This view of God is consistent with a Buddhist view of the world, even though Buddhism is generally described as atheistic. The Buddha’s teaching of anatman can be understood as asserting that there is no individual being (atman) which is separate from that-which-is (Tathata, Suchness). It is a delusion to think of oneself as a being separate from the world, an individual. Certainly as a physical being one strives to preserve one’s existence, but identification of oneself with one’s physical body and its well-being and preservation produces all the suffering (and some joy) that flesh is heir to, but really one is not separate from the that-which-is, here called God, and abandoning this false identification is the way out of suffering, for those who prefer to go in this direction.

The other error mentioned above, that God is “within”, is not an error insofar as the assertion draws attention to the fact that we may experience God as within ourselves (since we are part of God), but it is an error if the assertion is interpreted to mean that what is “without” — the physical world that we see about us — is not also God. Spinoza was correct when he equated Nature with God (though God extends further than what we see as the natural world). All things are God, the animals, the trees, even the rocks and the oceans are a part of God, since there is nothing which is not God.

So don’t be fooled by any priest or cleric who claims that God is “out there” — especially if he then proceeds to act as if he were some kind of intermediary between you and God, or as if he knew what God thinks or wants or intends you to do. (And especially don’t buy into the fraudulent claim that you are a sinner, deserving punishment, but will be saved if you just believe and do what you’re told to.) Just say (in thought if not in deed), “No, thanks, I am (a part of) God and I don’t need anyone else to tell me how to think or what to do.”

Source: Serendipity