Who's Hallucinating Here?

When used in an insulting and uncouth context, “hallucination” implies that one is dissociated from the streamlined chemical responsiveness of society. A person who is hallucinating is allegedly delaying or all-together skipping out on the importance of conformed reality, the hard facts of life. However, the same dogmatic and berating eyes who resolutely sneer at the act of “tripping out” are the same people who trip out on their intractable egos. These people are hallucinating on mental programs that ensnare and deaden as opposed to liberate and enlighten.

What do we mean by “hallucinating” then? Is hallucinating an exodus from a life filled with autonomous emptiness, hollow visions, and cynical impasses? Or does hallucinating imply something much more ghastly in the long run? Does it imply that we have no clue what happiness entails? Are we collectively hallucinating so we can put that cultural bounty out on eradicating graciousness and redemption once and for all?

In the public eye, psychedelic users never get the chance to explain what exactly is crossing the mind’s eye when the banal crust of one’s mental functioning is penetrated. Under the vice of society’s rational concepts and precepts, psychedelic storytelling must sound like pure lunacy. But perhaps the precarious situations in which entheogenic elixirs or admixtures are ingested help illustrate the madness behind such demonizing. A noisy basement is no place to smoke a salvia extract. A busy freeway is no place to inject ketamine.

Psychedelics--or hallucinogens if you prefer--are intoxicants that open up shrouded doorways in the abode known as one’s mind. Once the doorways fling open, sacred geometrical shapes and somewhat-cryptic psychoacoustical pulsations come swooping out for the psychedelic voyager to experience. In the 1960’s, when this chemical experimentation was as common as having a cup of coffee in the morning, people pooled together in droves to share in the good vibrations of the psychedelic twang. Forlornly, these same people ended up hospitalized by melting away into the infernal landscape known as the “bad trip”.

Stanislav Grof, a reputable Czechoslovakian psychologist, said the reason psychedelic research languished in the psychiatric field was due to a bevy of bad trip casualties. Psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, and other doctors of the psyche blacklisted further investigation of hallucinogens because they were causing states of alarum in the social order. Grof said such disconcerting behavior is not something we should blame on the chemical itself, but rather something we should blame on our negligence. He provides the following introspective comment on LSD in relevance to such negligence:

“LSD does not produce a drug-specific state with certain stereotypical characteristics: it can best be described as a catalyst or amplifier of mental processes that mediates access to hidden recesses of the mind.”

He continues…

“All the phenomena encountered during this journey--images, emotions, thoughts, and psychosomatic processes--should thus be seen as manifestations of latent capacities in the experient’s psyche rather than symptoms of ‘toxic psychosis’.”

Well established as a purveyor and pioneer of psycho-spiritual techniques (Holotropic Breathwork and Psycholytic therapy), Grof scrupulously investigated the effects of LSD, and, more importantly, how individuals could reach some sort of resolution or absolution with the demons within by using LSD as a magnifier of the inner self or atman. By repudiating and even rectifying a lot of the poorly investigated reports facilitated by society’s disdain for psychedelics, Grof sought to wipe the record clean. He wanted to look at just exactly what Albert Hoffman’s “wonder drug” was doing to American youth. By cloistering the drug participant in a comfortable and not too gaudy setting, Grof was able to document even-handed psychological case reports about LSD and its influence over the depth of one’s mind.

LSD, along with a plethora of other psychoactive compounds, doesn’t provide answers to the feverish ways our minds collect and repress traumatic experiences over time. To say so would give such chemicals an exaggerated upper hand on the tenuous and robust mental layers inside our psyches. Psychoactives can best be described as “enhancers of unconscious and supraconscious processes”—chemicals which unveil the moving mandala known as the ultimate mind. If used in the proper way, the experient comes out of the trip with a broader picture of what further steps could be taken to heal the abject protuberances of one’s unconscious.

I use the analogy of listening to a radio to describe the psychedelic odyssey. Usually when a radio is turned on the dial is set on an audible station. Perhaps the soft rock saxophone of Michael Bolton comes sensuously leaking into your ears. Or perhaps the blaring and cacophonous stylings of Captain Beefheart paces like mad into your ears. Regardless of the music, a station is designated and the experiencer responds to the frequencies of a fixed station. But when the station is changed, there is a glitch in the correspondence between station and experiencer. No longer decipherable as music, the radio emits static until another station is located. This dynamic between pleasurable auditory continuity and discontinuity is much akin to the workings of hallucinogens.

Before you ingested your psilocybin mushrooms or your peyote cacti, your mental station was locked into a prosaic world filled with familiar friends, familiar environments, and familiar moods. After the hallucinogen courses its way through your endogenous chemical contours, changing the molecular contingents in the subtlest of ways, your mental station travels along a synaptic asymptote to a previously uncharted station in your mental topological field. You brush past dormant clumps of static noise until you emerge completely bamboozled on a new station. A new and peculiar mood comes over you. Like a hybrid of ecstasy and utter awe, you have traveled that much closer to the center of your Axis Mundi---the verdant oasis you could call your radiant soul.

Yes, you feel less physically dense. Yes, you feel less inhibited by the woes and tribulations of the previous mental station. Why you might even say that the hallucinatory sabbatical climaxes with a feeling encompassing the inscrutability of death, a death only verified by what you could possibly compute “in the moment”, on that very station. As the experience transpires, as it escalates, as it engulfs you, you further recognize that the diaphanous line between station X and station Y was never really an obstruction. You simply realize you’re always going to be conscious of your self’s continuity in an ordinary reality, and, if you so chose, conscious of your discontinuity into altering states inherent in the Mind’s ever-morphing ontology.

After you come back to the mundane station, no residual effects bother you. Unlike a night of reckless partying with booze, psychedelic alkaloids don’t maroon you in a place of haziness or nausea. Actually, most people testify that the mundane station feels more real than ever before. Like a remedial exorcizer of the pensive or furious voices in one’s head, a psychedelic changes the cave of mental grittiness into a rapturous grove of serenity. One becomes a seer of a clearer vision. Self and other, individual thoughts and relational exchanges, conceptualizations and articulations all become clearer in this fogless vision as well.

In shamanic cultures, where illiteracy is about as commonplace as a yawn is after watching paint dry for ten hours straight, people fast and dance with the visual symphonies promulgated from the reveries inherent in sacred plants. In the festival of elemental beings, ethnobotanical myths, and fully revealed inner cosmologies, these quaint people of the exotic jungles show us modernized inhabitants of the world something very magical. These people bequeath to us a sense that something is very magical about the construction of reality, as it vibrates in an interconnected nest, as it peers at us from a depth far beyond the dank echoes of our neurotic caverns. Shamanic dreams unveil a metaphysical and astral world always in propulsion behind the eyelids. From the ultraviolet panoramas of the potent ayahuasca brew to the luxurious visions of the tryptamine-laden fungi, psychedelics provide religious experiences to anyone who is valiant enough to try.

Of course at the heart of all shamanic practice is the reconfiguration of the soul. As a psychopomp by trade, the decorated Shaman plays a vital role in curing the illnesses of the tribe. Not only ordained as a curative miracle worker, the Shaman is also an advisor to the after-life deities and entities living somewhere in the mandala of eternity. By speaking in tongues, the Shaman is able to use his voice as a divinatory tool—channelling the wisdom of the akashic records or the ancient words of formless beings. Through utilization of a sacrament and enigmatic hymns, the Shaman assists folks in watering the desecrated inlets of their souls.

However, the Shaman isn’t only a vocation available to an animal-bone-wearing-man of the exotic jungles. The Shaman is a vocation for any person that has taken an unequivocated stance on ridding the world of distress or distress. Clairvoyants, psychoanalysts, social workers, teachers, professors, philosophers, best friends, and lovers: all of these humane dispositions or jobs are synonymous with the curative Shaman. They help us when our vision isn’t firing on all cylinders. They show us a way when darkness creeps in from all angles. They’re guiders of tremendous knowledge and sincerity. For this, we should give them the respect they so rightfully deserve.

Psychedelics ask us profound questions:

“How far does your vision stretch?”
“Where do you play into the expansiveness of the cosmos?”
“What do you have to share with the world that envelops you?”

Without question, the answers can only be found deeply within.