Psychedelic Literalism: Part Four
In which we offer participatory hermeneutics as an alternative to literalism.
This is part four of five in a series on psychedelic literalism and the ways we interpret non-ordinary states of consciousness.
Mediating the Marvelous
“Whenever there is the world of appearances, there is self... There are always selves. And those selves are always presented, they’re always imagined in a certain way. We are imagining self and other and world, always… What’s important is not trying to get rid of that fantasy, as we might usually believe, but actually seeing image as image, knowing image as image. This is image. And engaging with it rather than disengaging.”
—Rob Burbea, “The Theatre of Selves”
The first time I smoked Bufo (5-MeO-DMT)—in a secret loft in Chelsea, Manhattan—my guide allowed me an introductory hit before the full dose. A “kiss,” she called it. As I came up, I sensed a terrible threat on the horizon. It was as though an important non-physical membrane—the very membrane creating the favorable conditions in which I, this self, this precious me-ness, could exist—was about to burst. If it broke, what would happen to Patrick?
I clenched up.
At last the fizzle of energy subsided and I could reflect soberly on my reaction. Right away, I saw what was behind it.
The night before my session, a friend of mine had called to wish me well. He was experienced in Bufo, and indeed was the one who’d connected me with the guide. Before hanging up, he imparted these words of… encouragement: “This is a very powerful medicine. Your ego may snap.”
Oh, I didn’t like it that word, snap. I fixated on it all night and into the next morning. Naturally, after that “kiss” of the Toad, the image had cast itself onto my experience like a stencil, characterizing my encounter with the contentless explosion that is 5-MeO.
My guide was waiting. Did I want the full dose?
I did, I did. But was I ready to actually… snap?
Suddenly I knew what I had to do. I told her exactly what I was afraid of, I named the metaphor structuring my encounter—and I asked for a new one.
She was happy to oblige.
“Not snap. No, no! You’ll be embraced.”
Holding that image, I took the full dose and found the whole experience fantastically altered. By the Big Holy Nothing, by the Mysterium Tremendum, by that placeless place outside time and space—I was embraced.
*
I’m telling this story, obviously, to illustrate our hermeneutical freedom to shape psychedelic experience.
Now, we want to be careful here. We shouldn’t confuse the metaphor, the interpretive structure, with the experience itself, which is always irreducible. Our interpretive forecasting shapes and informs it, gives it a container—but experience, including psychedelic experience, is not perfectly “programmable.” For all our contextualism in the preceding sections, it’s important to remember this: if psychedelics are water, they are a weird water that doesn’t always conform 100% to the shape of their container. Sometimes they even burst the container. (If you read the full account of my Bufo experience, you’ll find it riddled with the verbiage of immediacy. “I was outside my mind, my body, my history.” “I felt utterly decontextualized.”)
But to return to our maxim from Part Two: “All Immediacy is embedded in Mediation.” The Unmediated Absolute as we experience it cannot ultimately be separated from its intentional, linguistic, imagistic and conceptual context. No matter what contentless, contextless place I’d witnessed on Bufo, no matter if there was no longer an “I” to witness it—it was still Patrick who came back down, Patrick who wrote up his experience and chose the words he chose. It was a Patrick encounter, through and through.
Erik Davis theorizes eloquently on this point. Where McKenna naïvely wants to locate the transcendent zero-culture-point in the psychedelic peaks, Davis understands that all experience is embedded in a hermeneutical process, even the most mystical journey. He calls this tempered view of transcendence “weird naturalism”:
I want to understand these extraordinary experiences not as signs of a “separate reality” but as manifestations or mutations of this one… Our experiences of the weird —as aesthetic encounter, as deviation from the social norm, as inexplicable factum—may point beyond, but they are perhaps better seen as an unnerving and enigmatic warp or wiggle in the web of reality itself… [Psychedelic] experiences open up a space of encounter and evolution that does not transcend so much as loop together culture and consciousness, sacred and profane, romance and realism, gnosis and nature.1
In this view, it’s not that psychedelics reveal a Gnostic truth, lifting the veil and giving you a glimpse of “the way things really are.” Nor do they plunge you into delusions. Both images participate in a naïve realism.
Davis is suggesting something different. Something… participatory.
The Loopy Psychedelic Discourse
“Perhaps how we see psychedelics can also shape them?! Oh, the rabbit hole!”
—Behike Sensei Kevon Simpson, “A New Standard: The Urban Heroic Dose of 10g”
Thus far, we’ve described the multifarious forms of psychedelic literalism. We’ve seen how a blindness to the interpretive dimension and the impulse to reify metaphorical realities locks us into limiting (and lame) perspectives. Now we will explore the alternative: a participatory hermeneutic.
*
You’ve heard it before: “I took the medicine.” “The medicine told me…” “How much medicine were you on?” This isn’t code language in case there’s narc in the room. “Medicine” is in fact many people’s preferred term for psychedelics.
I spoke with someone recently who dislikes this nomenclature. To call psychedelics “medicine,” he said, imbues them with a healing power they don’t intrinsically posses, while simultaneously obscuring the truly healing power: intention, relationship, and context.
I agree… sort of. When it comes to the starry-eyed and uncritically literal use of the term “medicine,” of course he’s right. Psychedelics aren’t medicine. It’s the whole dynamic of set and setting and intention that, catalyzed by the molecule, comes together in an event we might, during or after the fact, interpret as healing. But I’ve also seen a usage that is more self-aware, more attuned to the language game at play. The linguistic act of calling psychedelics “medicines” puts us in a particular relationship with them. We need not have any illusions about what we’re doing: we are invoking the power of placebo, of self-fulfilling prophecy. So what? Calling them “medicines” is a practice. Calling them medicines helps make them medicine.2
This is a participatory hermeneutic. Our practices, even our language practices, around psychedelics shape psychedelics themselves.
The way someone engages in the name game is actually a decent litmus test for the literalizing ego. “Psychotomimetics” are out of favor, “hallucinogens” too for the most part, and who these days says “telepathines”? But alternatives to “psychedelics” (mind-manifesting) are in use, including “entheogens” (engendering god) and “ecodelics”3 (interconnectivity-manifesting). At the Synchronicity Unconference I helped organize in NYC in 2023, Glauber Loures de Assis even suggested “kin-delic” (relationship-manifesting). In a sense, all these names are prayers. They draw the attention toward particular potentialities of a multi-dimensional phenomenon. Should anyone become dogmatic, should anyone conceive of the properties suggested by their preferred name as the “intrinsic essence” of this class of psychoactive compounds, they have wandered into the land of literalism.
I’ve seen it happen in even the best places. I’m thinking of this substack I encountered recently: “Are Psychedelics Inherently Feminist?” I’m thinking, too, of Kate Kincaid’s statement in the anthology, Queering Psychedelics: “The psychedelic worldview is inherently queer.”4
I might agree… if they just didn’t use that term, “inherently.” Can’t I be an ally and still be insufferable about philosophic distinctions?
Here’s another fun one. Most plant medicine people I know refer to peyote as masculine and ayahuasca as feminine: “Grandfather” and “Grandmother.” But in her book Swimming in the Sacred, Rachel Harris encounters a Native American guide who refers to “Sacred Mother Peyote,” and in his book Plant Teachers, Jeremy Narby points out that many indigenous tribes consider ayahuasca to be male. “Ayahuasca,” he says, “has no fixed persona.” It seems that for plants as well as for humans, gender is a culturally-mediated reality.
Or take the “bad trip” vs. “challenging experience” debate. I’ve heard scornful rejections of the latter: “Sometimes a bad trip really is just a bad trip!” Fair enough. Indeed, the term “challenging experience” can be mildly gas-lighting—as though it’s your fault if you can’t redeem the trip somehow, your fault if what didn’t kill you is still trying to. Rachael Peterson, a Johns Hopkins trial participant who had a terrible time in her second session, writes eloquently about this dynamic in her article, “A Theological Reckoning with ‘Bad Trips.’”5
And yet. Sometimes I get whiffs of an inflexible literalism: “it is a bad trip, end of story!” Given that what’s at stake is our ability to make meaning from suffering, from darkness, do we really want to lock it down this way?
Let’s keep going. You’ve heard the phrase “higher consciousness.” It might seem a natural and even obvious description of what’s going on when you eat five grams of Psilocybe cubensis. But in his book Psychonauts, Mike Jay points out that if you time-travel back before Gordon Wasson and Robert Graves—the first Westerners to really name the experiences these mushrooms occasioned as sacred—you can find plenty of accounts from doctors, mycologists and toxicologists of accidental ingestion of various psychoactive mushrooms, and they come nowhere near the sacred.
Their subjects, on noticing the early onset of psilocybin’s effects – dizziness, gastric disturbance, odd and intrusive thoughts – had typically leapt to the conclusion that they had inadvertently eaten poisonous fungi and were undergoing a toxic crisis, perhaps a fatal one. Hallucinatory effects and visual distortions were experienced as delirium or fever, and often rendered more disturbing by attendant physicians applying emergency medicine such as emetics or stomach pumps.6
The point is, it took interpretive effort to arrive at a different paradigm than poisoning. It wasn’t even yet a “trip.”
In an interview with Erik Davis, Manuel De Landa has this to say about the metaphor of “higher consciousness”:
When I’m tripping, I’m thinking concepts I’m sure no one’s ever thought before, and in a way it’s like a higher state of consciousness, but it’s not a plane that was waiting there for me to access it. It’s something I’m building that moment by destratifying my brain. If you’re destratifying thinking there’s some benevolent god out there, or a world of harmony with nature right through the door, you’re fucked. ‘Cause you’re not gonna find the world of eternal harmony. Everything there is something we will build.
De Landa is making an ontological claim: he is not discovering a pregiven mystical plane, he is co-creating it. Where some psychonauts talk about leaving or literally transcending the immanent frame, De Landa talks about immanentizing transcendence.
This is Davis’s weird naturalism again. The transcendent and the immanent are two sides of a continuous mobius strip: we don’t leave—we loop.
The “As If”: Entities and Messages
“Some people, when they meet a monster, flinch away. Some think: This is interesting. Others say to the monster: I created you. Our interpretation of events is what gives them meaning. This is the power of the medicine: to show us our own power.”
—Little Owl, before my first ayahuasca ceremony
In his book Daimonic Reality, Patrick Harpur writes about what he calls “non-literal” phenomena. Things like apparitions, demon possession, alien abduction. A naïve hermeneutic reacts to the felt reality of such experiences as though they were “literal,” i.e. happening in the same way that consensus reality events happen. In contrast to this, Harpur offers Carl Jung’s approach:
When Jung spoke of images, he referred especially of course to those archetypal images we encounter as daimons and gods. We must not be misled by the word “images” into thinking of them as somehow unreal. We should, on the contrary, approach them as Jung approached daimons like his Philemon—“as if they were real people” to whom he “listened attentively.” He did not, we notice, treat them as literally real, as we (mistakenly) treat hallucinations or (correctly) treat people in the street. He did not treat them as “extraterrestrials.” Nor did he treat them as parts of himself, illusions or mere projections. He treated them as metaphorical beings.
Philemon was a guru-like being who first appeared to Jung in a dream. Throughout his later life, Jung had dialogues with this being and acted just as though they had a real master-pupil relationship. Because… well, they did. The metaphorical reality of Philemon’s appearances was of no less consequence than, and indeed was just as “real” to Jung as, literal reality.
But Jung didn’t mistake one for the other. He took Philemon seriously but not literally.7
This is a pragmatic approach to non-literal experience. “Skepticism during the experiment prevents any interesting results,” Robert Anton Wilson notes.8 By bracketing your ontological judgments, the phenomenon is allowed to unfold with its own agency, even as you, too, keep your hermeneutical agency. As a result, an intentional, dialogical relationship opens up.
In the same way, we can work with psychedelic entities without risking an unself-aware literalism—or, for that matter, undergoing harrowing, psychosis-inducing quests like, uh, this guy:
(Honestly, give it a read; it’s quite entertaining.)
*
In the midst of writing this essay, I set aside a Saturday for a 30 mg dose of 4-AcO-DMT (equivalent to about 5 g of mushrooms). I wanted to test out these ideas from “the inside,” so to speak. How did all this talk about interpretive freedom sound when I was really high?
At one point in my journey, an entity appeared. I was lying on my back, eye mask on, listening to my playlist, when suddenly space itself bulged toward me, coalesced across a complex convex surface, and with a neutral affect extended a proboscis-like appendage into my chest above my right nipple. It was implanting something! Curiosity threatened to tip into fear: I tried to relax. There is so much emphasis in psychedelic/therapeutic discourse on “letting go” and “surrendering” that this has become my default response. And yet… wasn’t I in the middle of writing an essay on psychedelic hermeneutics? Oughtn’t I to engage more actively in meaning-making?
I put up a hand and said aloud: “I’m not going to let you put anything in my body until I know who you are. Can you respect that?”
The entity had eyes in all kinds of strange places, and every one of them bulged. But it withdrew its appendage, and left.
Who knows what would have happened had I received the implant submissively. Maybe something marvelous, maybe something sinister. But I chose to defend my bodily sovereignty, and the choice left me with more confidence and self-respect. I can, apparently, stand up to weird-ass 4-AcO space probes.
Life skillz…
This minor enactment of the “as-if” was shaped, in turn, by Rachel Harris’s more compelling exploration of hermeneutical freedom in Swimming in the Sacred. In one chapter, she juxtaposes two experiences of “trespassing” on discarnate entities. The first is from parapsychology researcher, David Luke.
After about fifty journeys smoking DMT, [Luke] began to get “the feeling I was intruding upon a cosmic gathering I wasn’t invited to.” He felt he was trespassing and that he surprised an entity he described as an “ominous luminous voluminous numinous … [who] proceeded to let me know that I should not be there and that I should certainly not be peering into the hallowed space beyond it, which it clearly guarded.” Luke was sufficiently frightened to stop smoking DMT for fourteen years.
I sympathize. I’ve startled a DMT entity before, a Cthulhu-like being guarding the edge of space-time who, after asking me “What the fuck are you doing here?” cast me back into my body. It wasn’t pleasant.
But look at this next trespassing experience. Ariella, a psychedelic elder who has been journeying and holding space for decades, describes being
in a maze with doors, hallways, stairs, different rooms. I went through a door and encountered and surprised an entity, a very old, ancestral being. The entity admonished me, ‘You’re not supposed to be here.’ The entity put on a cloak of skin with lots of wrinkles to look like an old being.
Arielle asked the entity, “Why are you putting this on?”
“To make it okay to talk,” the entity replied. “So that you will be able to understand me and not be frightened.”
“You don’t need to do that for me,” Arielle told the entity.
Where Luke was scared off for fourteen years, Arielle ends up reassuring the entity about its appearance. The comparison shows the degree of creative engagement available to us. Even if you are taking the non-literal reality seriously, you don’t have to take it at its word. It is possible to go off-script. The secret is, there is no script.
Of course, exercising this power doesn’t mean it will go well. Once, having smoked a mix of DMT and Salvia, I encountered a force of darkness beyond malice, a thing not to be fucked with. For some time I held myself perfectly still, energetically-speaking, as though to prevent it noticing me.
When I felt it leaving, a sliver of courage wormed up inside me. I called (mentally) after it: “You’re only in my head!”
WHAM—it was back, closer this time. Imagine being an inch from a snarling tiger. Feel the spittle on your cheeks. Hear your heart jumping like panicked jackrabbit. Oh yeah? it seemed to say. Only in your head?
Such are the costs of our hermeneutic freedom.
*
The practice of the “as if” can go much deeper, of course. In a dharma talk titled “Releasing the Self, Freeing its Demons,” meditation teacher Rob Burbea proposes an exercise with the inner critic. After describing what it might look like to deconstruct this phenomenon into its elements, he describes the opposite: a reification. That is, relating to the inner critic as if it were a person.
Is it possible to have a dialogue? Is it possible to speak and listen, turn towards, and have relationship with this figure? There’s two styles of doing that. You could turn towards this inner critic and challenge everything that he/she/it said, ask it to prove something, question what it means. You actually will find that you have more intelligence than this inner critic that tends not to be the smartest in the world. Or you could adopt a much more loving approach, much more softness, seeking to understand, much more kindness in relating to this person. What might unfold if we do that slightly different approach?
Both deconstructing it, or letting it be a person and then relating to that person, can be helpful. It’s not like one is right and one’s wrong. None of them, neither of them, is ultimately true.9
Burbea then describes a woman on a meditation retreat who, inquiring into the pressure she felt to perform well, discovered that this inner critic was actually related to her deceased mother, a woman who set high standards in life. In another instance, a meditator decided to stop cowering and confront their overactive inner critic with a direct question:
She asked it what it wanted. Why it criticized. And to her enormous surprise, a gentle and extremely kind voice replied, “I want you to use your full potential.” Tears came.
The ultimate point of this practice is empowerment. It is seeing clearly. This dialectical engagement opens up the phenomenon into more liberating possibilities. Furthermore, by consciously reifying the phenomenon, you avoid the less self-aware reification that happens outside your control. Uncritical literalism, in other words—the kind that might, in this instance, lead me to obey my inner critic and leave this hot mess of an essay unfinished.
Stay back, you bastard. We’re almost there.
The Hermeneutic Burden (Or: It’s Okay to Co-Create!)
“Be careful how you interpret the world; it is like that.”
—Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind
Remember that college course on Continental Philosophy I mentioned in Part One, the one that changed my life? After that class, I got depressed. There were many causal factors, including a mysterious physical illness, but the despair in my soul was in no small part catalyzed by the hermeneutical insight. If everything was decided by our interpretation, if everything was “constructed,” then what was “real”? I went full Holden Caulfield: Phony! It’s all phony!
The universality of hermeneutics may be a hard pill to swallow for us moderns, who still live with the legacy of the European Enlightenment (or Endarkenment, as C. S. Lewis called it). We’ve inherited a suspicion of authority and tradition and find ourselves mid-way on a wild goose chase for objectivity: that “view from nowhere,” that “knowledge without presuppositions.” We are haunted, as Gadamer put it, by a prejudice against prejudice.
By prejudice, Gadamer means the preconceptions that we bring to any interpretive situation—even (especially) the situation of Being. Prejudice in this sense is inescapable. There is no neutral ground from which to begin our relationship to otherness, to reality. There is no possibility of achieving a completely objective or universally valid interpretation.
And here’s the thing.
This isn’t bad.
Prejudice—or, to return to our more familiar vocabulary, interpretation—is in fact what reveals being.
This is Gadamer’s point about language being “the all-embracing form of the constitution of the world.” Experience and interpretation are consubstantial. The world can only be accessed through a tradition: the interpretive comportments implicit in languages, in cultures, in ways of being. It is through this pre-conscious and conscious hermeneutical engagement that the world emerges.
In this sense, prejudices are ontological. Our interpretation of the world, you might say, is the world for us.
“All culture is a flight from reality,” McKenna said. But from our perspective, without culture—in the deep phenomenological sense—we wouldn’t have reality.
Now, the hermeneutical process isn’t whimsical or arbitrary. It’s not like just any interpretation will fly; contra certain New Age platitudes, you can’t just believe whatever you want to believe. “We create our own reality.” “Everything is in your head.” No, no. If we were indeed self-powered reality generators, we’d have bootstrapped our way into a land of unicorns and rainbows by now. But it’s so much more interesting than that. Hermeneutics is dialectical, involving an “other,” and the best interpretations are those that include more, explain more, respond more.
It’s not reality creation, but reality co-creation.
In his book, Revisioning Transpersonal Theory, Jorge N. Ferrer, teases out the nuances of this perspective.
In nature mysticism, as well as during certain ritual uses of entheogens, the natural world can be drastically transformed and unfold with an exalted quality of depth, pregnant meaning, profound numinosity, luscious Life, and sacred Mystery. In the context of the participatory vision, this transfiguration of the world is not seen as a mere change in our individual experience of a pregiven world, but as the emergence of an ontological event in reality in which our consciousness creatively participates. In other words, it is not so much our experience of the world that changes, but rather our experience-and-the-world that undergo a mutually codetermined transformation.
Catch that? This is not objectivism. Nor is it pure constructivism. “Spiritual knowing,” as Ferrer puts it elsewhere, “is not a mental representation of pregiven, independent spiritual objects, but an enaction, the ‘bringing forth’ of a world or domain of distinctions co-created by the different elements involved in the participatory event.”
My Holden Caulfield despair, then, was based on a misunderstanding about what made something “real.” I was grieving the death of my naïve metaphysics. I wanted unmediated access to reality, I wanted it to be simple, and I thought that universal mediation meant never getting to the real thing.
It took me a while to consider the possibility that mediation might be the real thing. That, paradoxically, mediation may be the unmediated thing itself...
*
We’ve gone abstruse, so let’s bring it back to the concrete. There are all kinds of realities that we take for literally real which are in fact co-created hermeneutical phenomena. Yet this does not diminish the power of their presence in our Lebenswelt. “Wahr ist, was wirkt,” Carl Jung said: “Real is what has an effect.”
The months of the year, for example. “Time is an illusion,” sure. The days of the week, the hours of the day, the minutes of the hour—arbitrary as fuck, arising in part from the conditions of our particular solar system. But I’m still going to celebrate my birthday in August.
Or: nation states. Are the lines on the world map “literally” real? Are currencies? Take an American twenty dollar bill. (Use a Canadian twenty if that’s easier. ) The literalist says: this “is” money. But we know that’s bullshit. This isn’t money, this is a physical object representationally embedded in a culturally-agreed-on value arrangement. But again: that doesn’t mean I’m going to burn it.
Let’s keep going. As a white boy from the Canadian plains, I used to not think much of chakras. Now, having had an unusual experience with kundalini breathwork in Costa Rica (groans from the audience), I think about chakras as an imaginal body, a particular spiritual tradition’s meaning-making around certain psycho-physical phenomena which is now, for whatever reason, enjoying a cultural moment.
The songlines of the Australian aborigines are another, geological example of an imaginal relationship with physicality. So too is logging tape. The resource-extraction relationship of Teal Jones to the last of BC’s old growth forest (viewing those majestic beings as resources, “standing reserve”) is also an imaginal relationship. Reductive materialism, too, is based in metaphor.
This goes even for our own bodies, as Thomas Metzinger examines in unnerving exactitude in his book, Ego Tunnel.
The sense that our bodies are literally real is a construct of the rational ego which, while it does not identify itself with the body (it sees the body as its vehicle), nevertheless allies itself so closely with the body as to impose its perspective on the body. It makes our physical reality the only reality—makes of our physical reality a literal reality.
On and on. If we wanted to go down that rabbit hole, we could deconstruct the universe, revealing the non-literal reality of everything.10 But the point is: it is still a kind of reality.
And it is our relationship to this reality, this co-creation, that is decisive. How self-aware are we about our own interpretations, our constructions? How do we value them? Do we, like McKenna, think of culture as a placenta from which to escape? Do we, like Enlightenment philosophers, think of our traditions as a cage? Or can we also see these preconceptions, these pre-ontological understandings, as the very thing that opens up the world, allowing our creative participation?
In the history of world religions, Ken Wilber argues, you track a pendulum swing of spiritual desire from one side of dualism to the other: from Gnostic craving for the Unconditioned, to reconciliation with the world of form:
The Nondual revolution… had one basic tenet: the manifest world of samsara is not an impediment to Spirit but is rather the perfect expression of Spirit: samsara and nirvana are not-two. Emptiness is Form, Form is Emptiness.
The revolution brought by Plotinus and Nagarjuna is of the same form: Plotinus lashes into the merely Ascending gnostics (who taught that the manifest realm was evil incarnate) with a devastating critique that said, in effect, since this manifest world is actually the creation and expression of Spirit, then how can you despise this world and say you love Spirit?... Full spiritual realization is rather to be found in the perfect nondual embrace of this world, not in fleeing this world for the unmanifest.
I’m setting this vision of participatory hermeneutics alongside this pendulum swing toward the nondual embrace. Contra the “tease of immediacy,” we can’t locate final liberation in any so-called unmediated blip of non-culture—because we can’t live there. We live here, in the world. Every effort to metabolize the mystical Unconditioned, every stage in our process of meaning making, is conditioned by this world and informed by a web of relationships within and without us: our past, our hopes for the future, the material of our cultural and personal history, the concepts we’ve been exposed to or introspected our way toward, etc., etc.
And that is beautiful.
“Any object whatever may paradoxically become a hierophany,” as Mircea Eliade says, “a receptacle of the sacred, while still participating in its own cosmic environment (a sacred stone, e.g., remains nevertheless a stone).”
Language, culture, stories—all of it, the whole contextual shebang, can be the set and setting of our experience of the divine.
*
And if anyone is still reeling from the loss of an objectivist metaphysic and the real-fake dichotomy, I suggest reading C. S. Lewis’s greatest children’s book, The Silver Chair. Does anyone out there remember it? Does anyone recall that heartbreaking scene at the end when the children and Puddleglum are trapped in the dreary Underworld?
The Queen has bewitched them into thinking that the above-ground world of Narnia, with its flowers and sunlight, with the majestic godlike lion Aslan, are just made up and never really existed. All seems lost, so lost.
Then Puddleglum speaks.
Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things—trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones… I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it.
How can you argue with that? So what if it’s all co-created reality! So what if higher consciousness is “constructed,” if even love is somehow imagined. If such a thing as love can be imagined, the only rational, the only truly sane response is: let’s fucking imagine it!
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Erik Davis, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies (2019).
See this paper by Bia Labate and Ken Tupper for a rigorous look at this looping hermeneutic, whereby what we call psychedelics affect their very nature.
Richard Doyle, Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noosphere (2011): “Reagents of interconnectivity, ecodelics appear to amplify the human perception of immanence.”
The idea of psychedelics as inherently queer is also challenged by instances in which they appear to further entrench boundaries and divides. See for example “Right-Wing Psychedelia: Case Studies in Cultural Plasticity and Political Pluripotency,” by Brian Pace and Neşe Devenot.
“The effort to medicalise psychedelics has focused on a narrow subset of experiences that are positive and therapeutic. Variations are dismissed as statistical outliers, flukes resulting from flaws in set and setting or vulnerabilities in the patient. A serious effort to examine bad trips can be perceived as positioning oneself ‘against’ the movement.”
Mike Jay, Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind (2023).
This can get a little trippy when the nonliteral entities push back, as “Elijah” does in the Red Book, cap. ix Mysterium: “We are real and not symbols.”
Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger I: Final Secret of the Illuminati (1977).
Rob Burbea, “Releasing the Self, Freeing its Demons.” (Edited for brevity)
For a thorough exploration of this, see Rob Burbea, Seeing that Frees: Meditations on Emptiness and Dependent Arising (2014). “When developed, such practices are capable of cutting through the reifications of avijjā at the deepest levels and with respect to all things. All possible notions of self and all phenomena can thus be seen to be empty, including even those which seem to be the most fundamental givens of existence – awareness, space, time and the present moment, for instance – where subtle reification is usually unrecognized and unquestioningly entrenched” (67).