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Psychedelics and Culture
The Acid Queen
Robert Hunter
Chapter 7 of The Storming of the Mind
McClelland and Stewart Ltd., ©Robert Hunter, 1971
The human mind cannot be conceived of as a glass or window
through which information passes without bending or being distorted. Rather,
the external phenomena are filtered through a preexisting structure. This
structure itself is shaped by experience and conditioning and expectations
which are themselves, to varying degrees, learned. This filter—or
"reticular system," as it is more precisely called—discriminates. It
accepts and rejects information, sifting through the daily barrage of sensory
input like a kind of organic pre-programmed computer. The philosopher, J.
Bronowski, has written about what he calls the "interlocked picture of the
world" which the brain constructs. This picture is not the way the
world looks but rather our way of looking at it. All perceptions, after having
been picked up by the senses, are graded (interviewed, if you like) and
screened by the reticular system before being forwarded to the mind.
Accordingly, we automatically distinguish between what our
experience has told us is relevant and what is irrelevant—or nonfunctional.
This filter is itself shaped by the environment in which the individual finds
himself. The signals and messages he chooses to pick up are those he has been
trained to categorize as being of some importance to his survival. Others will
be deflected. Accordingly, it is not the "eye" of the artist which
permits him to detect nuances where the non-artist will see nothing—it is
simply that the artist will not automatically screen out information which, to
the other, is of no value or importance.
It is likely that LSD attacks this filter, rendering it more
porous, opening up tunnels which would otherwise remain sealed. The effects of
LSD are therefore of deep significance. One's reticular system is finally the
product of one's whole cultural milieu. No culture could ever remain
"intact" if the mental filters of its members were not synchronized
with the larger, more generalized cultural filter. When LSD disrupts the
functioning of the filter, it removes the individual from this over-all
cultural context. It drives him not "out of his mind," but out of the
filter surrounding his mind.
On the basis of its morality, priorities, prejudices, goals,
ideals, and fears, any given society will roughly impress a similar set of
mental reflexes on its members. Thus, people who grow up in a given society
tend strongly to agree upon certain concepts basic to the structure of the
society. Depending upon the technology and philosophy of the society, its
degree of sophistication, their views will be approximately representative. And
to the extent that the society is incapable of achieving some kind to
overview—of transcending its own nature, its own habits, its own assumptions—so
too will the perceptions of the individual be limited and inhibited. The
cultural point of view, which is converted into a perceptual method, is
internalized, and each individual becomes a walking micro-culture. Any device
or system which tends to break down the structure of the individual
micro-culture assaults, in the most direct and specific way possible, the very
foundations of the overculture, the partial and culturally-limited point of
view-which members of a given society share, if they are to have any common
impulse or behavior pattern at all. Or, more to the point, if they are to be
controlled, managed, organized, or led.
A Czech doctor once said that LSD inhibits conditioned reflexes.
To the extent that it does that, it removes the individual from the context of
his culture. It takes him-however temporarily away from the familiar board,
renders the normal rules of the game useless, and opens him up to a
radically-altered perception.
To a lesser degree, regardless of the differences in the chemical
process whereby the effect is achieved, this is also the secret of marijuana,
hashish, peyote and so on: not really that they "expand" the mind,
but that they widen the doors of perception, as Aldous Huxley said, sometimes
just slightly, although at other times not only is the door (the preconditioned
mental filter) knocked right down, but a whole wall may be demolished, and
sensory data previously blocked out comes pouring in. One stands exposed,
literally, to the elements, suddenly naked.
Few cultures have ever had as much of a vested interest in
compartmentalized perception as technological society. Specialization insists
upon informing individuals deeply but narrowly. And the organization of
specialists from different fields has become the key to technological success.
The "partial and culturally limited point of view" which has grown up
in the West takes its shape mainly from the incubators of Aristotelian logic,
Christian dualism and the concept of length. These great formative roots have
in common an insistence upon division and fragmentation. Aristotelianism gave
us a subject-predicate language, "with its tendency to treat objects as in
isolation and to have no place for relations." Christianity, of course,
insists upon the theology of God and the Devil, absolute Good and absolute
Evil, Heaven and Hell, the Spirit and the Flesh. We have already noted the
effects of the concept of length. Together, they provide the conceptual
blueprint for the Western psyche—a blueprint the outline of which has been
blurred by electronic media, physics and the tremendous insights offered by
Gestalt therapy and general semantics, but which remains nevertheless the
operative design.
It is worth noting, as several writers have pointed out, that what
is existentially astonishing about the LSD experience is the
"discovery" that, mentally, most of us have been operating within the
confines of a quite narrow and sharply restricted level of consciousness. The
dualistic image of the world, which is our culturally limited way of viewing
things, is "real" only along the avenues of this one wavelength of
consciousness. It is the Oneness of the universe which becomes apparent once
the dualistic image to which the reticular system is harnessed has been dissolved
or broken down. Again, this discovery can be made through less potent (and
dangerous) drugs. It can also be made without recourse to drugs at all.
For the consciousness which the drug experience offers is not unique; it is not
"new"; it is not unnatural; there is nothing "freaky" or
"far-out" or weird about it all, except in the context of
contemporary society. The fact that such a holistic consciousness should be
seen as being irrational reveals nothing except the degree to which Western
civilization itself has become unnatural and freaky. [emphasis added, ed.]
What do you "see" while stoned, whether on pot or acid
or any other "hallucinogen," that isn't already apparent to a mind
not locked in a conceptual cage? The attraction felt by drug-users for ancient
Oriental philosophies and religions is no mere coincidence. Through their drug
experiences they have come to see a reality not split by Aristotelian logic or
Christian dualism or operationalism. They see things as they were always seen
long before the concrete perceptual foundations of the West were poured. The
"culturally-limited" point of view stamped upon generations of
Europeans and their colonizing children is suddenly seen, through the medium of
drugs, to be the product of a "narrow and restricted level of
consciousness." To those minds most conditioned by the Western version of
consciousness, the attitudes induced by drugs seem appallingly regressive: the
idea that "primitives" and "savages" and "barbarians"
and "heathens" might have had a better grasp of reality than their
white conquerors does not go down well. It makes white supremacy a cruel joke.
It makes what we have been conditioned to think of as "civilization"
something very close to a farce. Just incidentally, it renders every established
political context meaningless, at least as meaningless as the artificial
contexts established by economics.
The real fear behind the generally hostile reaction to drugs is
that the insights offered by these drugs might be more valid than the insights
offered by established authority, that what is called "hallucination"
and "illusion" might in fact be a greater (wider, deeper, more
profound) perception of reality than the ordinary. Suppose that while stoned
you do see things more clearly and directly. Suppose that ordinary (that
is, culturally-conditioned) perception is something like partial blindness,
imperfect, distorted, incomplete. And now allow just the possibility
that drugs might open your eyes wider, that you might be able through the medium
of drugs to perceive things in a more complete manner, that you might be able
to activate repressed or dormant perceptual faculties within yourself....
Immediately, one can appreciate the threat these drugs represent to the
established order. It is an order dominated by people who have learned the
tricks of surviving and flourishing inside it. If it may be thought of as an
elaborate machine, it is a machine which some people have learned to operate,
and these people, naturally, have risen to positions of power based on their
ability to operate the controls. They understand this machine. They have a
mechanic's love of its familiar intricacies. Anything which suggests the
existence of another, more complex and pervasive machine, one whose functioning
is not understood by the people who have learned to work the old machine (or
reality) is threatening to them in the extreme. If a greater reality emerges
and claims the minds of men, what becomes of the lesser reality? It will be
consigned, inevitably, to the garbage heap. And with it, also inevitably, will
go all those who depended on it for their power and authority.
The fear of drugs is deep-rooted, but it has nothing to do with
worries over whether young minds might be corrupted or ruined or that people
will get intoxicated; after all, alcohol is not so feared. As for fear of young
minds being ruined or somehow "lost" to society, this is at the very
least a transparent rationalization. If the danger of "losing" young
citizens was the authentic cause of the reaction to drugs, then automobiles
would be far more loathed and hated than pot or acid. Who can argue that the
automobile does not claim more young "minds" (along with their
bodies) every weekend in North America than do drugs in a year? No, the parent
who will turn the keys to his car over to his teenage son, but who will fly
into a rage if he finds a single joint of grass in that same son's room, is
reacting to a fear that runs far deeper than concern for anyone's well-being
other than his own. Instinctively, many in our society have sensed what is
going on: namely, that the premises and assumptions upon which this social
order was built are being shaken at their roots, and that drugs, in some
mysterious way, are a critical factor. The people who advocate their use, or
who, more simply, use them, are in some fundamental way different.
They come, rather literally, from another world. They are foreigners, aliens,
members of another tribe. The reaction to them is almost as ferocious as the
reaction to immigrants in earlier times.
It was presumably an understanding of this which prompted
Eldridge Cleaver to gravitate towards sodomy with animals to write that the
conflict between the generations today is deeper, even, than the struggle
between the races. Although it is much more than a purely generational
conflict, there are proportionately far fewer older people who perceive the
"greater reality" than there are young ones.
This great reality is, to begin with, ecological. Ecology, after
all, is merely one of the first of our Western sciences to escape the clutch of
Aristotelian logic. Of necessity, it abandons subject-predicate methods in
favor of relational methods, extends the concept of the organism-as-a-whole to
"organism-as-a-whole-in environments," is non-anthropomorphic, and
concerns itself with whole systems in a functional (rather than merely
additive) nonlinear manner. The orders and relations recognized by ecology are
"higher;" that is, they are more profound. Peter Henry Liederman
notes that we are moving from the Dialectic Age to the Ecological or Global
Age. The "greater reality" is becoming increasingly apparent.
"Western philosophy has taught us to think of everything in terms of
dualisms, diametrically opposed, competing opposites. However, the
philosophical base of Western thinking may be undergoing drastic change, for in
science, politics, economics, and even religion, it is becoming less and less
popular to view everything in isolation from the total system surrounding
it."
But ecology recognizes, as yet, only purely physical
relationships and harmonies. The task of exploring further non-physical
relationships has fallen to such embryonic sciences as parapsychology. J. B.
Rhine has been able to verify experimentally the reality of psychokinesis,
extra-sensory perception, precognition, clairvoyance, and telepathy. Evidence
is beginning to accumulate that plants have emotions, that there is a
"pool" of vegetable consciousness which functions telepathically
across great distances and possesses memory. Experiments by Clive Backster
indicate that every living cell has "primary perception," which
implies a mind of sorts. (A test tube sample of human sperm was able to select
its "daddy" from a group of men.) Amoebas, mold cultures, fresh
fruits and vegetables, yeasts and blood samples have all shown
"emotional" reactions recorded on the galvanic skin-response section
of polygraph instruments, and the "power of prayer" to affect the
growth of plants has been repeatedly demonstrated. The literature which almost
overnight has become available on these new "paranormal" frontiers of
the mind is staggering. While it is true that much of it can be dismissed as
being exploitive and sensationalistic, it remains that empirical data is accumulating
at a tremendous rate. Much of the serious work being done is going on in the
Soviet Union, although Soviet scientists take the position that psi results
(which many of them acknowledge) must stem from some unknown physical source of
energy.
J.B. Rhine, after forty years of experimental work in the field
of parapsychology, was able to put it sweetly: "If a man criticizes us
honestly, I know that he just has his windows cut to a certain size and can't
see any further." And can't see any further. Here perhaps, is the
edge which splits our society so cleanly into fundamentally different camps. On
the one hand: the predominantly older individuals whose perception is filtered
through a pre-existing operational structure, the result of previous
experience, conditioning and internalization of culturally-patterned points of
view. And on the other: the mainly younger individuals whose reticular system
has been softened in a variety of ways (electronic media would be one) so that
it is not so tightly bounded and fixed, in terms of what they are able to
perceive; and for these individuals the traditional Western mode of
consciousness is but one wavelength on the spectrum of perception. Other
wavelengths are more apparent to them.
The consciousness which emerges once the walls fashioned by
Western science and religion have been dissolved or penetrated by drugs is not
by any means a peculiar consciousness. The extent to which it is in harmony
with the teachings and intuitive knowledge of other times and places (pre-technological
and non-Aristotelian) has been clearly revealed by various studies, perhaps the
most definitive one of which was reported by Willis Harman in Main Currents
of Modern Thought :
Through the psychedelic experience persons tend to accept beliefs which are at variance with the usual conception of the "scientific world view." In a current study (by C. Savage, W. Harman, J. Fadiman, and E. Savage) the subjects were given prior to and immediately after the LSD session, a collection of 100 belief and value statements to rank according to the extent they felt the statements expressed their views. Subsequent personality and behavior-pattern changes were evaluated by standard clinical instruments and independent interviews. It was found that therapeutic consequences of the LSD session were predictable on the basis of the extent to which subjects indicated increased belief in statements such as the following:
"I believe that I exist not only in the familiar world of space and time, but also in a realm having a timeless, eternal quality."
"Behind the apparent multiplicity of things in the world of science and common sense there is a single reality in which all things are united."
"It is quite possible for people to communicate telepathically,
without any use of sight or hearing, since deep down our minds are all connected."
"Of course the real self exists on after the death of the body."
"When one turns his attention inward, he discovers a world of 'inner space' which is as vast and as real as the external, physical world."
"Man is, in essence, eternal and infinite."
"Somehow, I feel I have always existed and always will."
"Although this may sound absurd, I have the feeling that somehow I have participated in the creation of everything around me."
"I feel that the mountains and the sea and the stars are all part of me, and my soul is in touch with the souls of all creatures." "Each of us potentially has access to vast realms of knowledge through his own mind, including secrets of the universe known so far only to a very few."
Note that in accepting these statements the individual is in effect saying that he is convinced of the possibility of gaining valid knowledge through an extrasensory mode of perception.
Dr. John Beresford, who has described the discovery of LSD as
possibly the most critical event in human history, remarked: "Take it once
and you know that all you've known about consciousness is wrong."
The point here is simply to emphasize that the consciousness
which comes into focus through the medium of drugs is basically no different
from the consciousness manifest in various ways in most, if not all, peoples
who have not been snagged by the inherent limitations of Western
thought-processes. Those belief and value statements just quoted might have
been uttered as readily by ancient Chinese, aboriginal Bantu tribesmen,
Eskimos, American Indians, devotees of the Upanishads, Buddhists, Taoists and
Zen masters, as they were by Westerners who had taken LSD. And those beliefs
and values, while sounding strange coming from the heart of Technology Land,
were by no means strange to these other peoples. What was strange, even
frightening and insane, to them was the Western brand of logic, which
was clearly exploitive, atavistic, and egocentric.
"It is my personal belief, after thirty-five years
experience of it," wrote Sioux Indian doctor Charles Eastman, "that
there is no such thing as 'Christian civilization.' I believe that Christianity
and modern civilization are opposed and irreconcilable, and that the spirit of
Christianity and of our ancient religion is essentially the same." Dr.
Eastman here put his finger on the crack which has now widened to the point
where it is breaking the established Western churches apart. This Sioux would
seem to be closer in spirit to a modern white pothead or acidhead (and a lot of
others, all of whom could be loosely grouped together under the heading counter
culture) than these whites are to their own elected representatives, the
administrators of their universities and, certainly in many cases, to their own
parents.
Ted Hughes has noted that the fundamental guiding ideas of our
Western civilization derive from Reformed Christianity and from Old Testament
Puritanism, which are based
on the assumption that the earth is a heap of raw materials given to man by God for his exclusive profit and use. The creepy crawlies which infest it are devils of dirt and without a soul, also put there for his exclusive profit and use. By the skin of her teeth, woman escaped the same role. The subtly apotheosized misogyny of Reformed Christianity is proportionate to the fanatic rejection of Nature, and the result has been to exile man from Mother Nature—from both inner and outer nature. The story of the mind exiled from Nature is the story of Western Man. It is the story of his progressively more desperate search for mechanical and rational and symbolic securities, which will substitute for the spirit-confidence of the Nature he has lost. The basic myth for the ideal Westerner's life is the Quest. The quest for a marriage in the soul or a physical re-conquest. The lost life must be captured somehow. It is the story of spiritual romanticism and heroic technological progress. It is a story of decline. When something abandons Nature, or is abandoned by Nature, it has lost touch with its creator, and is called an evolutionary dead end. According to this, our Civilization is an evolutionary error. Sure enough, when the modern mediumistic artist looks into his crystal, he sees always the same thing. He sees the last nightmare of mental disintegration and spiritual emptiness, under the super-ego of Moses, in its original or in some Totalitarian form, and the self-anaesthetising schizophrenia of St. Paul. This is the soul-state of our civilisation. But he may see something else. He may see a vision of the real Eden, 'excellent as at the first day,' the draughty radiant Paradise of the animals, which is the actual earth, is the actual Universe: he may see Pan, whom Nietzsche, first in the depths, mistook for Dionysus, the vital, somewhat terrible spirit of natural life, which is new in every second. Even when it is poisoned to the point of death, its efforts to be itself are new in every second. This is what will survive, if anything can. And this is the soul-state of the new world. But while the mice in the field are listening to the Universe, and moving in the body of nature, where every living cell is sacred to every other, and all are interdependent, the housing speculator is peering at the field through a visor, and behind him stands the whole army of madmen's ideas.
So the "greater reality" is an ecological
consciousness, coupled with an intuitive awareness of the existence of
super-sensory phenomena; it is, further a pantheistic consciousness
well-understood by non-technological peoples, not bounded by an Euclidean,
Aristotelian or Newtonian conceptual framework, a "native" (i.e.,
non-literate, less rigidly structured) sensibility. And it involves, as well, a
kind of existentialism: that is, the awareness that man is a creature with no
excuses. Meaning is something we invent or create for ourselves; everything we
do, whether we are willing to acknowledge it or not, we choose to do.
Authoritarian religions flourish in direct proportion to the unwillingness of
great numbers of people to assume responsibility for what they are and what
they do. Reliance on a higher moral authority—an anthropomorphic authority, at
any rate—is no different from reliance on a parent for guidance. It is evidence,
simply. that one has not grown up or learned to stand on one's own feet; it is,
in an adult, a form of regressive behavior. The great sense of reality involves
an awareness of more complex orders, higher levels of interaction and
influence, but it does not allow that these be grasped solely through metaphor
or allegory: it demands that they be perceived directly. The responsibility for
bringing one's behavior into harmony with these more pervasive orders of
existence remains with the individual.
Through the medium of drugs, many people achieve a comprehension
of this reality. Others are "there" to begin with, and many others
find their way to it through other media, such as creative activity, various
kinds of existential group therapy, Gestalt therapy, General Semantics, yoga,
meditation, etc. These other routes are most arduous, yet when they do finally
break the mind out of its cage, the effects are more lasting and indelible. By themselves,
drugs can awaken individuals to a higher consciousness, but they cannot keep
anyone there. If we may conceive of "normal" consciousness as being a
kind of stupor, then the individual whose only means of awakening involves
recourse to drugs is in the position of a person who must have cold water
dashed in his face repeatedly to keep him on his feet. There is more than a bit
of Pavlov's dog in all of us. Inevitably, through habitual activity of any
kind, whether dependence on drugs or an alarm clock or cold water or hot
coffee, we get programmed, and to the extent that we are programmed we are that
much less free and that much less capable of creative behavior; we are also
that much less able to respond in new ways to new situations.
The drug experience cannot be understood in the absence of an
understanding of the events and experiences onto which it impresses itself. For
people who are genuinely turned on, drugs are incidental. Being turned-on is a
state of being which exists to varying degrees, or at least in its embryonic
form, before one comes into contact with drugs; one's consciousness may
be liberated by drugs only to the extent that it was ripe for liberation to
begin with. The answer is not to be found in drugs; drugs may make the
questions clearer, or even pose them. But what answers there are can be found
only in existence, in the experience of one's being. Turned-off people
generally remain turned off, no matter how many drugs they ingest.
Psychedelics are devices which can be made use of by individuals
whose psychology is properly geared to the era we are entering, just as
automobiles are devices used (sometimes well, sometimes badly) by people geared
to the age we are just leaving. The risk factor is probably about the same. And
let us not forget the reactions of horror and loathing with which the
automobile was greeted when it made its debut. Simply, if we do not consider it
immoral to drive to the supermarket in the jockstrap of a mechanical monster,
why should we consider it immoral to be carried somewhere else in the arms of a
psychopharmacological angel? Drugs lend themselves to the kind of psychic
adjustments which are involved in being turned on, just as cars lend themselves
to the state of mind which derives some value from mobility.
We may understand the drug phenomenon better if we think in terms
of the need for equilibrium. It was not until the advent of mass media that the
operational mode of consciousness could penetrate every level of experience. At
every point of contact with the world out there we found ourselves
confronted with engineers. Our emotional responses had been fiddled with,
tickled, trained. Every commercial sought to control these responses. Every
government announcement had been designed to impress itself upon us at the
deepest level possible. Subtle (and often not-so-subtle) manipulation had
become the overwhelmingly dominant characteristic of the mass society in whose
currents we found ourselves washed. Manipulation is pure operationalism. Almost
nothing was said or done "in public" without a reason. The whole
public sector had been turned into a fantasy world. Not incidentally, but
fundamentally. And not despite "rationality," but strictly in
accordance with the functionalistic imperatives inherent in our concept of
rationality. It was to this world that we related ourselves, incorporating its
distortions into our own systems. Even our "spontaneity," in part,
had become based on emotional responses patterned on false memories.
Yet in its natural state, human consciousness possesses a
"center," which is not a single point of identity but a psychic
ecosystem of sorts. It was this system whose equilibrium had been massively
disrupted by the full-scale intrusions of technological rationality, and it was
this system which needed to right itself in order for identity, the touchstone
of consciousness, to retain some basic intactness. Just as physically we
require nourishment (real food) in order to survive, so psychically, we require
real, substantial experience, real events, real people. Certainly, we still have
much of that. But the servings of real experience, in relative terms, had
shrunk drastically in comparison to the unreal experience with which we were
daily confronted. The psyche was to become undernourished, its internal
equilibrium was disrupted, and in order to regain that equilibrium, to
replenish itself, the, psyche had to make some large re-adjustments. It had to
become more adept at distinguishing real from unreal, in order to reject the
toxic food of unreal experience. And it had to find ways of improving its
immediate perception of things and events. Drugs, insofar as their use
(as opposed to their misuse) assisted in the process of cleansing the
doors of perception, enlarging them at any rate so that they were no longer
contained within the artificial operational frame, were admirably suited to one
of the essential psychic requirements of the times.
Let us back up a bit at this point and see if we can get a little
closer to what is meant by a "psychic center."
To begin with, not very much is known about the "mind"
except that it is assumed to exist somewhere inside the brain. That does not
narrow the search very much: exploring the brain is like sending a rocket into
space; it is a bottomless universe. One might ask, where in the midst of the
uncharted region am "I"?
There are roughly twelve billion nerve cells inside the brain.
Each is capable of transmitting and receiving impulses from other nerve cells.
Some of these cells may have as many as ten thousand transmitting terminals each.
In comparison to the complexity of the workings of these cells, the most
sophisticated computer is nothing much more than a toy.
Roughly, the brain is made up of the left and right cerebral
hemispheres, each covered by a deeply folded cortex. Each cortex has a temporal
lobe having something to do with hearing, an occipital lobe relating to seeing,
a parietal region having to do with skin sensations and muscular activity, and
the crucial frontal lobe which gives us the power to plan. Among other things,
the brain also contains large tracts known only as "Silent Areas"
about which nobody knows very much. Our sense of consciousness is assumed to be
housed in the cortex, popularly known as the seat of the intellect. But when
Wilder Penfield of the Montreal Neurological Institute explored the cortex of
his patients during brain surgery by "tickling" different parts of it
with an electrode, he discovered that the person being tickled could not be
"found" there. "I" was always somewhere else. As science
writer N. J. Berrill puts it, people make use of the cortex, and may even in
part be embodied there, but they remain "elusive even though fully at
home...." The question of consciousness is two-fold: What is it and where
is it? We know almost nothing of the nature of thought and little of the
relationship of mind to brain. "One of the few things which is known is
that the activity of the brain is almost pure energy, primarily electrical. All
cell activity is accompanied by electrical charges." Marshall McLuhan has
defined automation as being "a non-specialist kind of energy or power that
can be used in a great variety of ways." This definition could as easily
be applied to the mind, which could also be referred to as a "total
synchronized electric field." Or, as Jung has described it, "a
question mark arbitrarily confined within the skull." Science writer
Berrill sums up most of what is known about the mind by saying, rather lamely,
"consciousness, thought, the mind itself, are the expressions or creations
of the sum total of the activities of twelve billion cells, each with multiple
extensions and connections. Together they seem to embody pure energy of an
electrical nature."
Our thoughts, our sense of identity itself, somehow emerge out of
the seemingly random interplay of forces within this given area. How? No one
knows. Why? Again, no one knows. Nevertheless, we take this most central of
mysteries for granted. It seldom, if ever, crosses our "minds" that
we do not know what our "minds" are. "I" exist and am
conscious of being conscious, and it is possible to assume functions, to take
on responsibilities, on the basis of this thinnest of threads of information.
Our "center" is therefore not a given point, but a
whole effect. The impact of mass media and technological rationality can now
perhaps be better understood. Just as the whole eco-system of the earth can be
disrupted by the addition of certain compounds, so that the system loses its
equilibrium and begins to collapse, so too can the "mind" be affected.
The acquisition of false memories, false sets of responses, etc., disrupted the
internal harmonies of the psyche in just such a fashion. The mind of
technological man had become polluted. Well, everyone knew this. But few
realized just how far the pollution had gone and how dangerous it was. The
earth, obviously, had suffered the effects of pollution for thousands of years
without its atmospheric balance being decisively affected. It was not until the
Industrial Revolution that man's capacity to pollute took a quantum leap,
suddenly threatening the balance of the whole global eco-system. Individual
psychic ecosystems had, too, been affected by manipulation and tampering for
thousands of years, but it was not until arrival of mass society that these basic
harmonies likewise found themselves threatened on a gigantic scale. Drugs, at
this point, may fairly accurately be conceived of as detergents being added to
oil slick in order to clean up the mess.
The central point about drugs is the most obvious: the fact that
they do nothing except alter the chemical relationships in the brain. (The
mescaline molecule, for instance, resembles adrenaline. When mescaline is
introduced, this enzyme, mistaking the mescaline molecules for adrenaline,
begins to destroy them. While its attention is focused on the mescaline,
however, the adrenaline begins to accumulate elsewhere: the enzyme can't handle
both.) Once the chemical environment has been altered, the brain begins to
function differently. It is still functioning. But not in accordance
with established frames of reference. Frequently, it begins to work overtime.
Images, thoughts, impressions, always flashing about in the background,
suddenly move to stage center. The brain is now functioning in a different
continuum. Like an engine run at high speed, it gets "broken in,"
accustomed, that is, to operating at a different frequency, rate of speed, and
along different perceptual avenues. It becomes, in many basic respects, more
agile.
It is, as a result, more prepared to move in new
evolutionary directions. The mind trains with drugs. It acquires new reflexes,
a new kind of coordination. It exercises its muscles and gets itself ready to
take the leap into the future. The drug phenomenon is not an end. It is the beginning
of something which has never happened before. What will follow is now becoming
apparent. Drugs, finally, are only another medium. In the context of
technological society, acting synergistically in relation to rock music, mass
media, urbanization, and a host of other factors, this major new medium carries
the message of change, real change, as opposed to a mere change in
flags, label, underwear, or oaths of loyalty.