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<title>The Far-Off Land: A Philosophical Journey into Consciousness</title>

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<p class="subtitle">An Attempt at a Philosophical Evaluation of the Hallucinogenic Drug-Experience</p>

<p class="author">by Eugene Seaich</p>

<p><em>Ich weiss nicht, was soll es bedeuten,<br>

Dass ich so traurig bin;<br>

Ein Märchen aus alten Zeiten,<br>

Das kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn...</em></p>

<p>(I know not the meaning of this melancholy,<br>

A legend from long ago<br>

Keeps running through my mind...)</p>

<p>— German Folksong</p>

</div>

<h2>Table of Contents</h2>

<ul>

<li><a href="#introduction">Introduction <span class="page-number">ix</span></a></li>

<li><a href="#chapter1">Chapter 1: The Persistence of Memory <span class="page-number">1</span></a></li>

<li><a href="#chapter2">Chapter 2: The Paradise of Childhood <span class="page-number">4</span></a></li>

<li><a href="#chapter3">Chapter 3: The Mystery of Otherness <span class="page-number">7</span></a></li>

<li><a href="#chapter4">Chapter 4: The Return to Primal Chaos <span class="page-number">11</span></a></li>

<li><a href="#chapter5">Chapter 5: The Finite Become Infinite <span class="page-number">14</span></a></li>

<li><a href="#chapter6">Chapter 6: The Awakening of Vision <span class="page-number">18</span></a></li>

<li><a href="#chapter7">Chapter 7: The Light of Inner Vision <span class="page-number">20</span></a></li>

<li><a href="#chapter8">Chapter 8: The Encounter with Self <span class="page-number">27</span></a></li>

<li><a href="#chapter9">Chapter 9: The Dark Night of the Soul <span class="page-number">32</span></a></li>

<li><a href="#chapter10">Chapter 10: Scientific and Philosophical Implications <span class="page-number">38</span></a></li>

<li><a href="#chapter11">Chapter 11: The Ancient Visionary Gifts <span class="page-number">43</span></a></li>

<li><a href="#appendix">Appendix: Experimental Notes <span class="page-number">47</span></a></li>

</ul>

</div>

<span class="chapter-number">Introduction</span>

The Discovery of Sacred Substances

</h2>

<p>When the Spaniards entered Mexico in the early sixteenth century, they found the natives using a family of strange new drugs, unlike any they had known before. The Aztecs had given one of them the name, <em>Teonanacatl</em> ("The Flesh of the God") in honor of its miraculous properties, which enabled one to see visions, to foretell the future, and to obtain supernatural revelation.</p>

<p>Farther north, the Conquistadors discovered a cult surrounding a mysterious, turnip-shaped cactus, almost indistinguishable from the stones of the desert, which enabled its users to behold the secrets of the universe. Duly noting the properties of these drugs, the Spaniards succeeded in stamping out their use.</p>

<p>Through the centuries, they remained all but forgotten, until in the last century settlers in the American Southwest observed that the cult of the peyote cactus still survived among certain Indians, although in an altered form. As they became converted to Christianity, these tribes adapted their worship of the magic plant to its celebration as a Sacrament; in its new form, the cult spread as far north as Canada and is today incorporated as the Native American Church of the United States.</p>

<p>Men of letters learned of peyote after the middle of the nineteenth century. Its properties were explored by cultured Europeans, such as Havelock Ellis and Alexandre Rouhier, who discovered for themselves the marvelous visions that the drug produced. The German pharmacologist A. Heffter finally isolated an active chemical from the plant, which was called <span class="emphasis">mescaline</span>.</p>

<p>In the meantime, confusion reigned among historians regarding the descriptions of the other Aztec drugs. In 1923, Dr. Blas Pablo Reko discovered that the sacred mushroom, Teonanacatl, was still employed by Indians deep in the mountains of Oaxaca. Subsequent investigators established the identity of the ololiuqui, or the seeds of a narcotic bindweed, employed by the Mazatec tribe.</p>

<p>In 1943, a Swiss chemist, Albert Hoffman, accidentally absorbed through his fingers a minute quantity of a powerful synthetic substance, which caused him to behold the same sort of visions produced by the ancient American drugs. It received the designation <span class="emphasis">LSD-25</span> (for d-Lysergic acid diethylamide, the twenty-fifth of a series of chemicals being investigated).</p>

<p>Since that time, a number of other synthetic drugs, capable of producing hallucinations, have been created, including DMT (diethyl tryptamine), T-9 (diethyl tryptamine), and adrenolutin, which closely resembles the metabolic hormones of the human body. In 1959, the sacred mushroom yielded its secret in the form of the drug psilocybin, a relative of the tryptamines mentioned above, and its psychogenic ally active precursor psilocin.</p>

<p>Deep within each of us, the past slumbers on. All of the patterns of our understanding lie buried in the unconscious memory, shaping our desires, our inspirations, and our dreams.</p>

</div>

<p>It has seemed to me that the well-established properties of the hallucinogenic drugs might be well employed to enable us to explore this <span class="emphasis">far-off land</span>, which is in effect our subconscious mind. Were we to learn its secrets, we would better understand our own desires and the motives that drive us through life.</p>

<p>Still better, the secrets of human history would perhaps be discovered as the eternal patterns of imagination that have shaped our spiritual existence. But, perhaps most important of all, to penetrate the well of the past might restore to us that visionary perception that we think we once possessed.</p>

</div>

<span class="chapter-number">Chapter 1</span>

The Persistence of Memory

</h2>

<p>We are told that, in those moments immediately preceding death, the world of our earliest infancy frequently opens up to us. We are also assured that senile reason passes readily into a state of second childhood, wherein the light of rationality is obscured by the resurrected past, experienced as fully as if the intervening years had rolled away.</p>

<p>Normal adults occasionally dream of long-forgotten events, which have otherwise passed into oblivion. These facts, together with Freud's rediscovery of the unconscious mind, suggest that within each of us the past slumbers on, occasionally reasserting itself in the fragments of a sudden recollection, the perception of some haunting perfume, or the unexplained appearance of an ancient face in our dreams.</p>

<p>Most striking, however, is the fact that it is this earliest layer of the human memory that persists to the moment of death, even after the adult memory and its powers of reason are gone. Knowledge recently gained disappears, while that mysterious world of the long forgotten is reawakened, showing that our earliest experiences indeed have vitality that rational intelligence does not possess.</p>

<p>The strange discovery in recent years of certain drugs that can open up this buried world at will seems to me to be worthy of our best romances, wherein men have ever dreamed of piercing the veil of memory in search of the ultimate secrets of Being.</p>

</div>

<p>I can scarcely describe the excitement that possessed me when I first held in my hand a tiny vial of whitish powder, extracted from the sacred cactus, which the ancestors of the Aztecs worshipped millennia ago, when men believed in the Mysteries of Existence, now laid open to the dead knife of scientific analysis.</p>

<p>Before me, in a heap of delicate needles, lay the divine power, which the ancient Indians identified with life itself, a supernatural and invisible force pervading the visible world, referred to by anthropologists as <em>mana</em>. Modern Indians say that God has sent His Holy Spirit in the form of the peyote plant, and he who eats thereof may take into himself this Power; he will see visions, obtain hidden knowledge, and be led to the Truth that evades his grasp.</p>

<p>Even stranger claims have been made for the sacred mushroom, Teonanacatl, which can extend man's vision to the future, to the past, or to remote occurrences of the present. Today, a third such chemical has emerged from the synthetic laboratory derived artificially from the ergot fungus. All three substances have one thing in common: the power to penetrate that deepest layer of the human mind, that mysterious realm that lies beyond the veil of ordinary perception.</p>

</div>

<span class="chapter-number">Chapter 2</span>

The Paradise of Childhood

</h2>

<p>Childhood is our first experience with life; it will therefore be obvious that our deepest attitudes are the product of a childlike intellect. This earliest vision is the one against which we must inevitably compare our present situation. Far back into the distance, a furtive memory stretches, like a far-off land, visible chiefly through the haunting suggestions of dreams.</p>

<p>This labyrinth of half-forgotten existence is opened to us by a variety of methods, mostly gratuitous. In those strange moments when unexpected sights and sounds suggest past memories; when the bosom of nature seems to recall some childhood knowledge of flowers, trees, and clouds; or when a dream reawakens some ancient experience from out of the past, we feel as if life indeed possessed another dimension, a deeper level of prior existence, perhaps more real than the one that we ordinarily inhabit.</p>

<p>Most importantly, the powerful charm of such a suggestion, complete with its memories of freedom from the burdens of adult necessity, invests this "otherworld" with the qualities of a primal paradise. The formative years of our lives are the ones most devoid of responsibility, watched over by parental authority suspended, as it were, in time and space, scarcely aware of the laws of causality.</p>

<p>Something always rebels in the sensitive individual against the ugly demands of material life because the unconscious memory suggests a previous stage of effortless happiness. I am convinced that this experience lies at the root of the universal myth of lost Paradise, wherein perfection is equated with innocence, and good and evil are deemed to be penalties of adult knowledge.</p>

<p>Such legends are found amongst all peoples: The Gaels dream of the lost Isle in the West, <em>Tir-na-n-Og</em>, the land of Eternal Youth, called Avalon by the Brythonic Celts. According to the Taoist symbolism of the Golden Flower, the beginning of things to which the soul longs to return is a state of perfect oneness, unconscious of the opposition of good and evil, located in a sea of primal life-force, comparable to the Waters of Life that flowed forth from Eden.</p>

<p>I would like to point out what may well be the real meaning of the Sumerian, Babylonian, and Hebrew myths of Paradise: Here again we find in poetic form a representation of our universal memory of lost perfection, fashioned from dim recollections of innocence, now obscured by analytical adult knowledge, i.e., the "knowledge of good and evil."</p>

<p>As Byron's Manfred tragically observed,<br>

"The tree of knowledge is not that of life."</p>

</div>

<p>Consequently, history has witnessed the ubiquitous appearance of mysticism, which seeks to repair these shattered opposites of conceptual thought with the whole cloth of direct experience. Mahayana Buddhism, for example, describes this need for reintegration as follows: The superficial concepts of the causally oriented ego must be extinguished (Nirvana), so that pristine existence can again be experienced.</p>

<p>Only let your mind dwell<br>

In the realm of Nothingness,<br>

And you shall see not far off<br>

Hakoya's Transcendent Hills.<br>

— Manyoshu, xvi, 3851</p>

</div>

<p>Again, Christ likened the kingdom of Heaven unto the mind of childhood; this was not because children are easily beguiled, as orthodox religion would have it, but because Christ understood the world with which children are conversant. Children alone are capable of pure innocence, that they might consider the lilies of the field, which to the poetic mind are clothed in such beauty that "even Solomon in all his Glory was not arrayed like one of these."</p>

</div>

<span class="chapter-number">Chapter 3</span>

The Mystery of Otherness

</h2>

<p>Such an image, persisting up to death, strong enough to finally replace all other memories, explains the sense of immanent mystery that surrounds our waking consciousness. Once we have perceived this mystery, all that life has to show becomes suggestive of an ultimate secret, the desire for which is tantamount to promise of attainment in the future.</p>

<p>This accounts for the traditional obsession of man with states of "otherness" (alterations of consciousness) and his determination to recover by any means the "otherworldly" reflection of his inmost memory. "Otherness," whether induced or gratuitous, and the notion of immortality are both rooted in the archetypal recollection of paradise, since in each of us there operates at once a longing for its return and a psychological assurance of success.</p>

<p>Theology generally states that salvation must begin with "re-birth," affirming the innate belief in something that has had a prior existence. In this sense, the idea of eternity itself, at least insofar as we are capable of visualizing it, is fashioned from the half-remembered world that we occasionally perceive in moments of "otherness."</p>

<p>The employment of drugs to bring about the required alterations of everyday consciousness is an ancient one, as old as men's reverence for prophetic trances, clairvoyance, and related visionary powers. The Greeks acknowledged wine to have divine attributes, which were revealed by Dionysus, the son of Zeus himself. Through the intoxication of alcohol, knowledge of a transcendent sort was vouchsafed the partaker—hence, the institution of the sacred Dionysian, out of which evolved the art of drama.</p>

<p>The Latin proverb "in vino veritas" expresses the same veneration for wine's intuitive gifts, gained by transcending the limits of lifeless, analytical thought.</p>

</div>

<p>Cocaine, which produces hallucinations, was believed by the Incas to be of sacred origin, since it produced even more intense alterations of perception than alcohol, thus finding its way into the religious ceremonies of the Ancient Peruvians. Opium is likewise said to have played a part in the religion of Ceres, the Roman goddess of agricultural fertility.</p>

<p>Whether it be the ibogaine of Gabonese Africa, the little-known Ayahuasca of the Colombian Amazon, the ololiuqui seeds of the Mexican Mazatecs, or the legendary soma of the Hindus, chemical means of peering into the contents of the inner mind have been universally prized as divine exordia in man's quest for the beyond, and as such have well deserved the hieratic awe extended to them, before the coarseness of utilitarian minds reduced them to the status of "dope."</p>

<p>Perhaps a new significance can now be attached to the recent discovery of the hallucinogenic alkaloids, one of which I frankly feel has been overlooked by the prosaic pharmacological mind. Medical men have widely heralded the possible uses of mescaline, LSD, or psilocybin in elucidating the etiology of mental disease; researchers hope to shed new light upon the workings of the sick mind with the fact that such drugs can mimic various aspects of schizophrenia.</p>

<p>But the empirical limitations of the medical scientist have caused him to virtually ignore the deeper connection between man's archetypal being and the forms assumed by mental illness, since it must follow that every manifestation of the human mind, whether "normal" or bizarre, is but a reflection of its inner contents.</p>

</div>

<span class="chapter-number">Chapter 4</span>

The Return to Primal Chaos

</h2>

<p>This phenomenon of return to pre-rational existence has many archetypal parallels in human history. Myth and philosophy have universally alluded to the Primal Chaos out of which the forms of being evolve. Our late discoveries are merely restatements of such ancient notions of the Tantric Dharma Kaya, the uncreated Eternal, which externalizes itself in the plastic forms of the universe, or of Nietzsche's Dionysian Will, which dreams itself into the Apollonian world of beauty and order.</p>

<p>Perhaps these are themselves archetypal memories of man's development from the interior world of childhood to adult objectivity, where dreams must become directed activity. Viewed against the practical necessities of work-a-day reality, this memory appears as an opposite pole of our consciousness, asserting itself in the shape of the mysterious or the uncreated.</p>

<p>Since its domain is prior to the rational intellect (although the intellect alone can translate it into art), it can be experienced at its fullest only by re-creating some state of irrationality—hence, the persistence throughout history of the longing for pure, non-conceptual experience that, I believe, explains the Romantic tyranny of chaos over life, of death-wishes over reality.</p>

<p>It explains man's perennial desire to transcend the limits of reason, to recapture the state before the encounter with the Tree of Knowledge, before the imposition of rational forms upon purely existent phenomena.</p>

</div>

<p>Like Goethe's Faust, who descended into primordial chaos to obtain the secret of life, the sensitive being must keep alive the dark, fertile dreams within him, in order to remain creative; otherwise, the balance of his two worlds may swing over to the mere objective and result in sterility.</p>

<p>A possibly new kind of psychoanalysis might also be suggested by the revelations of psychotropic medicine, leading to a more fundamental view of human experience than Freudian psychology has hitherto supplied. The anxiety and rootlessness of modern life will be seen to be the result of inner barrenness, created by the frustration of our subconscious needs in a predominantly rational society.</p>

<p>Empty utilitarianism, deprived of poetic faith, forces the sensitive being to reject reality, since reality is devoid of the emotional appeal that it formerly enjoyed. Man is a creature whose necessity is to dream; when the individual, or the race as a whole, is frustrated of its inner vision, it must suffer as when deprived of material health.</p>

<p>Human beings are nostalgic for the fulfillment of their primordial Life. Their anxiety is not the result of fear, since modern life is more secure than ever before, but of the loss of inner destiny, of the devitalization of the illusions revealed in the yearnings of myth and poetry.</p>

<p>This task of rediscovering our lost eidetic powers is the goal of human wisdom. To transform the work-a-day into what existence signified on the morning of life's innocence is perhaps the ultimate accomplishment in life, for life's greatest offering is life itself, i.e., experience—hence, the more acute our experience, the more real existence will become.</p>

</div>

<span class="chapter-number">Chapter 5</span>

The Finite Become Infinite

</h2>

<p>Religion has been defined as the "finite become infinite" (R. K. Blythe, <em>Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics</em>). Albert Einstein described it as the sense of awe and mystery attaching to our contemplation of life. Both descriptions suggest that pure experience is made more vast by our emotional identification with it, evolving the aura of infinitude that is the essence of real religious feeling.</p>

<p>Religion, far from being merely the belief in supernaturalism, is the ultimate dimension perceived in reality, the transformation of the indifferent into the meaningful. No matter what the nature of metaphysical "reality," it can have no intelligible content without final reference to the objects of experience; hence, all concepts of reality, spiritual or material, aim at realization in the objective world.</p>

<p>The ultimate meaning of existence is to be found in the glorified forms of our experience, elevated to the religious through sharpened emotional focus. This process is described in William Blake's famous quatrain:</p>

<p>To see a World in a Grain of Sand<br>

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,<br>

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand<br>

And Eternity in an hour...<br>

— "Auguries of Innocence"</p>

</div>

<p>A striking paradox thus presents itself: The deepest spiritual awareness results in the purest sort of affirmative materialism; on the other hand, the greatest folly is abstract materialism devitalized by idealism.</p>

<p>American "materialism" is in actual fact a form of idealism, which seeks to make commerce and gadgetry a spiritual achievement. It avers that life has somehow become more meaningful because of the perfection of our machines. Such an ideal, however, is an ultimate denial of life, for machines can only implement the prior values that life itself possesses.</p>

<p>All we have gained the machine threatens, so long<br>

As it makes bold to exist in the spirit instead of obeying.<br>

— Rilke, <em>The Sonnets to Orpheus</em></p>

</div>

<p>The only way to assert our authority over matter is to reject the intellectual slogans of this pseudo-materialism and to return to the original materialism of our primal memory, where the objects of experience stand forth in their own natural light, perceived as sheer, potential existence, as surfaces, textures, shapes, and elemental forms, electrically acute with the mystery of naked Being.</p>

<p>D. H. Lawrence described this natural materialism—which can also be detected in Christ's reference to the lilies of the field, in the Buddhism of China and Japan, or in a thousand other poetic guises—as follows:</p>

<p>It was a vast old religion, greater than anything we know: more starkly and nakedly religious. There is no God, no conception of a god. All is god. But it is not the pantheism we are accustomed to, which expresses itself as "God is everywhere, God is in everything." In the oldest religion, everything was alive, not supernaturally but naturally alive. There were only deeper and deeper streams of life, vibrations of life more and more vast.</p>

</div>

<span class="chapter-number">Chapter 6</span>

The Awakening of Vision

</h2>

<p>A few moments after ingesting a suitable dose of LSD or mescaline, one suddenly and unexpectedly notes that familiar objects in the room have acquired strange qualities. Without altering their appearance, they begin to suggest new facets of meaning that elude analysis: invisible as electricity, yet irresistibly real. The sense of "otherness" that we earlier described begins to unfold, revealing forgotten glimpses of adventure and mystery.</p>

<p>A calm, euphoric tranquility pervades the mind, which suddenly discovers that it is gazing on pure, timeless reality. Things are no longer fragments of some metaphysical system, but primal objects whose beauty is integral with their essence, as is the blue of the sky or the wetness of water.</p>

<p>All the values that have been previously taken for granted are suddenly impressed upon the beholder as palpable notions, such as the quality of straightness inherent in lines, the smoothness of surfaces, or the symmetry of some design. These geometric archetypes, which are the basis of the plastic arts, are revealed with such tangible acuteness that a fresh, vital aspect of matter is disclosed, corresponding to the suggestions of myth and legend.</p>

<p>One is overwhelmed by the supreme fact that a wall is flat or that a line is straight; these are no longer abstract categories of geometry and space, but splendid actualities to be contemplated with endless satisfaction.</p>

<p>Colors and textures are even more strikingly revealed; the sheer quality of redness or whiteness seems to carry in itself the ultimate meaning of Being, which is seen as shining existence, above and beyond all theory.</p>

</div>

<p>While gazing upon the surfaces of an ordinary room, one realizes that the noontide splendor of creation is no less expressed in the humblest aspect of a common rug, wallpaper, or piece of furniture, now transformed into the gold of celestial vision, palpitating with undivided significance, as the fairest petals of a rose or the flesh of a beloved.</p>

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