You could say psychedelic drugs are an inoculation against the formation of the narcissistic ego.
The dissolution of boundaries is something around which we have profound anxiety—both as individuals, and our institutions are even more anxious about this. Any compound or dietary constituent which dissolves the boundaries between human beings poses a profound problem for the kinds of social organization that we have been familiar with throughout recorded history.
The ego is like a calcareous tumor on the personality of each of us. This tumor must be psycholytically removed. It must be dissolved. Not that we must have no ego—after all, when you take someone to dinner, you want to know whose mouth to put food in. But a big ego that flowers out beyond the operational need to identify with a single body is an entirely maladaptive response—and we are sick with it, through, through, and through.
We have to interfere with the ego. It’s completely unnecessary. It’s a burden to everyone who has it, and the collective impact of it is absolutely thanatoptic.
It is the psycholytic effect on ego that makes it necessary to take the psychedelic experience extremely seriously, because we want to live. We want to turn off the series of lethal cascades that seem to be leading toward a very heart-stopping conclusion, which is that this is a sinking submarine, and that we cannot get out unless we change our minds. There’s no question that we have the resources, the intelligence, the infrastructure to save our neck. But do we have the sense to change our mind? It is the mind that is intractable. And into our hands has then been placed this tremendously powerful tool, which our institutions immediately leap upon and attempt to stigmatize, drive underground, criminalize, and discredit.
People have not been straight with each other about how weird these psychedelic experiences are. This stuff is absolutely confounded. It is not sensory distortion, it is not a delusion of reference, it is not recovery of traumatic material from the personal past. All of these psychoanalytic models fail utterly, because ultimately the psychedelic experience hardly seems to be addressing the personality of the individual. Rather, it is some kind of insight into a tremendum before which we are as helpless as the herders of Africa of 35 millennia ago. We don’t understand what it is. We haven’t got a clue. We believe in matter, causality, the here and now, the discreetness of objects, the unknowability of the future, and so forth and so on. It’s just a laundry list of wrongheaded notions that you can immediately disabuse yourself of with five grams of dried mushrooms.
This is our birthright. It is profoundly our birthright in the same way that our sexuality is our birthright. The notion that a person would call themselves intelligent and aware and present in the world, and that they would go from the cradle to the grave without ever having a psychedelic experience, is nothing short of obscene. It’s absurd. It makes my flesh crawl in the same way that celibacy and virginity make my flesh crawl. What a horrible, horrible waste of a human life!
If the expansion of consciousness does not loom large in the future of the human species, then what kind of future is it going to be?
If you search far enough—if you look in the oldest places, the densest jungles, if you talk to the least assimilated tribes—sooner or later you are going to confront the psychedelic experience. And at that point your relationship to reality becomes very different from that of everyone around you. Because everyone around you is searching for the answers. The task of the person who, by one means or another, has found their way to the psychedelic experience is to face the answer. The answer is found.
We need no more powerful tools than what we have inherited from these shamanic cultures. It’s a question, pure and simple, of courage, of having the guts to use it, of surrender. And of course it had to be that, because surrender requires the abandonment of the ego. And it is the ego’s house of cards that is entirely at risk if we begin to look more deeply at the psychedelic experience.
