For about twenty years of my conscious life now, everywhere I go — be it at school or the university, be it at work or just some random gathering with friends, even at political meetings and workers councils — someone started to talk about one or another form of ‘spiritual practices.’ Be it meditation, yoga, positive thinking, mindfulness, or holotropic breathing, hallucinogenic trips (mescaline, mushrooms, LSD), microdosing, some shamans doing retreats in the woods, etc., they somehow surround and deafen me on every side.
I indulged in similar procedures quite a few times. I performed diverse forms of meditation and used various psychotropic substances in different sets and settings. While most of the people I interact with have little to no understanding whatsoever of where and why those practices emerged (and I do not want to display elitism here; reading further, you will find out why), I had the opportunity to deeply engage in Eastern attitudes during my time in the philosophy department. I daresay that almost nothing of the primal charge that gave impetus to the vast majority of these exercises can be located in their present disguises. The more I delve into them, the less I find.
I sure held dear both breathing techniques and those substances. I believe in what they are capable of in terms of my own (sic!) well-being. Still, some of the trends surrounding them bother me to no end and are getting more dangerous by the day.
A man can haunt his own shadow for a long time in search of greatness. There are not a few who manage to reach it and place themselves higher than anything or anyone else. But such greatness beats hollow. It is, at best, feared by moles. On the contrary, the greatest battle of all and the persecution is not against and of the self, against and of some internal essence, but against and of a world that does not fathom and cannot contain us — with all our creative needs and aspirations; a world that convinces us that such an essence exists only to diminish us and make us comfortable, necessary, and reconcilable with it while fighting with our ‘inner selves.’
The inconvenient truth is that for the world to be convenient enough for the few, it should be more than inconvenient for the many. But for this formula to work, the many should not recognize this inconvenience, or if they do, they should attribute it to themselves. The age of the self, conceived in the bosom of misunderstood psychoanalysis, seeking profit through advertisement and endless economic growth, imposes it on us. Our freedom is what, shamefully walking along the pavement behind us, must drag its chains silently. And it is enough for this silence to fool ourselves and no one else.
For this reflection, I will commence with an unnervingly personal and disturbingly wacky story, which I hope will not frighten the dear reader. From this weird snapshot of my biography, I intend to draw and outline certain—hopefully meaningful—conclusions.
This is the account of a bad trip, which I would love to carry out again. It was about mid-October 2018. Me and a friend of mine decided to finally get on a decent psychedelic trip. Meaning that we will follow the rules of the gurus in the field and have a good vegan diet for at least a couple of weeks prior to the event. We prepared ourselves through meditation for a month or so. We gathered a playlist without any vocals that was about to guide us through the depths of ourselves. He carefully chose a location—a regional botanic garden. We have contacted them and picked a day when, usually, there is no one else around.
The park is a majestic place that successfully meets artificial and natural ecosystems. Ninety acres of well-preserved native habitats spread across a slope from which you can glimpse the sea, with relatively minor adjustments around the visited and designated rest areas. We also got ourselves fresh nuts and fruits, some tea, and plenty of water.
A good deal of LSD was, back then, readily available throughout our circles. We have ordered what everyone was recommending. My fellow traveler had some previous experience with LSD, and I had mine with mushrooms, truffles, ketamine, MDMA, of course, and a mild trip with old and probably well-weathered LSD papers. The one we just bought was in liquid form. We have ‘mindfully’ measured the micrograms. About 400 per each. If it sounds a bit too much for the enlightened, that is because it was.
We went there by early afternoon, planning to make our journey before it got dark. It was a relatively warm autumn day. The sky, with its scattered, almost motionless clouds, heralded a colorful sunset. It was just right for us; we agreed.
It hit us no more than twenty minutes after ingestion. For about an hour or so, everything seemed relatively fine. The world around us came alive in a different way. It felt like we were in a sort of multi-player, virtual reality game. What was even stranger was that we were able to control our environment and change it to our desires. Or at least our experience of it. We walked around, carrying our bags, picking up space-time blocks, and observing the sheep we had invited into our playground.
At some point, we went into intense, personal conversations. About our childhoods, about failed relationships, about lost friends or relatives. About death.
Before we knew it, sunset was upon us. The intertwined branches of unfamiliar but beautiful trees, which seemed to have evolved to protect themselves from the huge creatures that lived before us, were drawing memories under the pinkish ephemeral expanses of a sky incomprehensible even to a trippy mind.
I needed to take a leak, and so did my friend. We pulled off to the side, and, as he informed me later, by the time he turned around, I was gone. My clothes, from jacket to sweater to underpants to socks, were folded and stacked where I had done my job. “Like they have just come out of your closet,” he said.
What I remember, on the other hand, was that all of a sudden, I was eons away. I wouldn’t say I was anywhere in particular. I was nowhere. Sucked in by some kind of proto-memory. Placeless, as in ‘beyond time and space.’ As if a return began. At once a setting forth and a coming back. The whole history, not of mankind, not of our close relatives, not of the first living things, not of our solar system or galaxy, but of the first matter, started to unfold before me. From me. “The ascent towards composition, towards life,” that Kazantzakis speaks about. It felt like I was the holder and the keeper of the ascent’s memory. Even more so, I was both the ascent and the memory it had of itself.
For a couple of hours, as I later found out, I was nowhere to be found. During that time, I’ve traveled wide and far—through the battered stones of the beginning(s?), on the bent planes of nothingness and its opposite, within the jagged remnants of what was. I didn’t see the first atom; I was the first atom. I didn’t see the first molecule; I was it. I didn’t see the first single-celled organism, the first microbes and viruses, the first algae, or the very first fungi; I was them. I was the first eye that looked and tried to make sense of the shadows, ominously approaching it. And so all along the phylogenetic tree.
While writing the above, I realized how difficult it is to put into words this ludicrous dance of history that overcomes my senses. I thought I could make things easier by finding my notes from back then. And I did. Then I realized that I was in the same daze the following day.
How do you put the incomprehensible into words? The same problem that the old St. Augustine has with defining (from Latin de-fini-tio, setting a boundary) time. It is always slipping away. Even though I experienced it as a sequence, it felt like this chronology exists because things are evolving, not as a result of time. As if the matter were creating time and space. Another dear old philosopher, Immanuel Kant, would agree with this.
At some point, I was a fully-equipped animal. Vertically so, no doubt, but far closer in evolution than any of the things I’ve been before. I already have a full experience of the world in which I lived. I crawled through twigs and thorns and the damp forest gloom in search of companions.
The full moon crept slowly across the canopy and made me utter sounds I had never heard before. As though I were making them up. However, I still feel like I knew them well, subconsciously, if you wish. As if the history of life were speaking through me.
History, the ultimate ventriloquist.
I was climbing trees, I defecated a few times, I tore my skin, and I made sounds, completely naked in temperatures of about 7–8°C. To this day, I find it hard to interpret the fact that, during all that time, I never, for instance, recalled who I was. What I was seeing myself as was what I was. In all these different iterations, there was not a vestige of my ‘humanness.’ Everything that you are reading is me reflecting on it afterward. It is the same reason why I don’t find Feed Them Silence by Lee Mandelo so plausible, since, while being a wolf, the lead character was (most of the time) thinking as a human.
At some point, I became ‘conscious.’ I found myself submerged up to my chin in a murky and odory lake. I later discovered there were more than six in the park. My teeth were chattering with cold. I was terrified, alone under the moon—frigid and indifferent—looming over my head. The incessant sea breeze pounded the branches above me and my chest. I was the first human being. That is, if we can even pose a notion like this. But that’s how it felt.
I didn’t know any words. The whole world around me was hostility personified. I didn’t know the clothes, the shelter, or the fire.
All I knew was fear.
During these couple of hours in which I’ve traveled through deep history, my friend was searching for me while calling on the phone for help. He reached out to friends and, at some point, even the police. A few weeks earlier, a boy had taken a similar substance and hanged himself during an underground rave near our town. And my friend attended that rave. When he finally found me, walking alone and naked in the woods, he hit me so hard that I fell more than once.
Besides being a great story to tell and a trip I would gladly repeat, this personal experience fed my understanding and led to my distancing from those sorts of practices. I was never overzealous about them. It was just pure curiosity. As a materialist (in the philosophical sense, not the everyday one), I never saw as real the possibility of connecting to some hyper-realm or reconciling my previous incarnations, as many people understand those exercises.
On the contrary, for me, they were always an opportunity to overcome a personal trauma, an unrecognized abnegation or disavowal, something repressed (the Freudian Verdrängung). However, since I got familiarized with the critique of those practices and their incorporation into capitalism by—most notably—Žižek and Purser, I was almost disgusted. Not solely by what we have turned them into, by colonizing them, by Westernizing them, but also by how much they facilitate our reconciliation.
Here, I’ve focused exclusively on psychedelics. However, the psychedelic experience is completely different for different people or groups, just like any other fundamentally 'spiritual practice’ like this. My feeling is that individual or group beliefs are what got reestablished through these sorts of personal or collective ventures. Perhaps this is why we feel we have achieved some truth bigger than ourselves afterward. Just as those ancient people who used magical substances to conform the lower with the upper and the profane with the sacred achieved peace in their knowledge, so have I, but only for a while.
In the end, however, one should ask oneself, where did those projections come from? Are they universal? Or, on the contrary, are they fundamentally internal or singular? Were they the very depths of being speaking to me, as the usual transcendental interpretation insists, or something else? Were the journey’s peculiarities, on the contrary, resulting from my own beliefs, my own knowledge, and my own understanding of the world, manifested in front of me as before a mirror?
My friend, who is a conventional dualist, even though he shared a trip with me, multi-playing, had it all differently—it was the transcendental that led him. He felt a presence that I was unable to feel. Could it be a result of my lack of belief in its existence?
If that is the case, then the only good thing those substances are capable of doing for us is helping us visualize and make concrete notions that we are unable to grasp otherwise than as pure abstractions; to make us reproduce the hyperobjects that our belief systems are into regular objects.
People argue, and to a greater or lesser extent, I agree, that they also help us restart ourselves—building new habits and all that. From where I stand, it is our shared world that needs restarting, not me or you. With each reset of the self, it is this simple truth concerned with our gore world of war, exploitation, and misery that we forget.
What is left for all those rediscovering some absolute being like my friend did? The vast and greatest presence? The absolute otherness? Are they not rediscovering the very belief they have already fully submerged in, just as I rediscovered my evolutionary, material, and scientific belief of how all came to be?
Perhaps this is the root of why the vast majority of the new-age gurus, the believers in Gaia, Mother Nature/Earth, those secular and religious fans of psychotropic substances, and other regular users of McMindfulness are so convinced of their claims—the reason they look down on the rest of us and expect, not so hospitably, our still-to-come enlightened ascent to their heights.
We can follow Žižek in his claim that by co-opting the practices of the East, the West fulfilled the “highest speculative identity of opposites” one can imagine. We can follow Purser by criticizing them in the same vein for years now. However, this does not, I think, help us grasp why they are so attractive. It only pushes us to recognize why they are so endlessly advertised to us.
And their attractiveness, it seems to me, is rooted precisely in the fact that they reaffirm what is already established. They are self-referential, meaning they are based on themselves and refer to themselves.
Only the Other, with its otherness, can bring change, either in our thoughts or in our actions. The same gurus are anything but capable of change. Once they have attained the absolute, all that is left is to wait and preach it. If people do not want to listen, the guru can always shelter under a self-referential appeal to authority.
In conclusion, for me, what all those endeavors achieve is to immerse ourselves in ourselves and make the self visible, unconcealed, and self-sufficient. In that sense, the only salvation there is is of ourselves. And it is not solely ourselves we must strive to save.
It is the path to save us all that we should search for, collectively.