TREPIDATIONS

                                                                    by Stanley

 By way of a personal confession I want to admit publically that I wrestle with a devil.  I don’t know whether it’s always been a devil or whether it is a fallen angel. Its called ‘Spirituality’. When that simple word is voiced out loud in my company it has a devastating effect; I go into a state of shock and trepidation. It has almost the same effect on me as when the word religion is uttered – only it’s worse, because in recent times, Spirituality has detached itself from religion and become modern and healthy, along with the New Age belief that pre-religious native people were spiritual in the best possible way. The problem is that there is some truth in it. It all has an enormous pull for those who strongly feel, there’s got to be something more than this..!

But for me it conjures up all the terrors of the Middle Ages where religion and spirituality, the living and the living dead, God and the Devil, merged in a ghastly dance of death, and where the power of the unseen had us by the throat for centuries of oppression. Belief in the unseen resulted in a hundred of years of witch burning, where it was believed that witches – always women – kidnapped babies for sacrifice, flew through the air, could, by their association with the devil, cause hailstorms; and where, with their insatiable sexual appetite, these supposed witches cavorted with demons.

Some spiritual beliefs are not only stupid but very nasty, like the belief that a bit of real estate in the Middle East called Jerusalem is holy to Jews, Muslims and Christians – it’s been a vicious obsession since the Crusades. Mad also is the current worldwide violence over a third-rate film insulting the Prophet Mahomet. Spiritual beliefs are potentially lethal.

I know that after its long, dark supernatural history, spirituality in the west has come to mean a higher realm of mystical experience, a consciousness of our oneness with all of nature. It is an interesting theatre of struggle. Sam Harris, that implacable atheist – famous now for his book The End of Faith and his Letter to a Christian Nation – recently wrote a blog saying how we should not be afraid of this term, as many atheists are.  He said,

‘I strive for precision in my use of language, but I do not share these semantic concerns. And I would point out that my late friend Christopher Hitchens … believed that “spiritual” was a term we could not do without, and he repeatedly plucked it from the mire of supernaturalism in which it has languished for nearly a thousand years.’

Sam’s sane advice doesn’t settle my anxiety. I fear that it is not so easy to make the distinction; we are still too close to the use of the unseen to terrorise and subjugate. Even now we can see it in every religious cult from scientology to the doomsday sect of Heaven’s Gate.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of the hugely influential Mindfulness movement, doesn’t like the term ‘spirituality’ either, I suppose because of the bad press it has in academia and medicine, even though he would happily say that his work on mediation has its roots in Buddhism.

Perhaps the term ‘spirituality’ is the only word we have to register the utter disjunction between certain types of ‘higher’ mystical moments, and those which are of our normal everyday experience. The two types of encounter are so different that there seems to be no bridge between them. Mystical highs, where we seem to touch something greater, defy the rational world, inviting all kinds of fantasies to explain them.

Our modern world has been stripped of ancient mythology that placed all power in the supernatural and unseen. This has left us with a society that is much more practical, down to earth and much less cruel and violent, but in some way missing something.

I think the most convincing case for the existence of the so-called ‘spiritual dimension’ has come from the use of psychedelic compounds like LSD and psilocybin (magic mushrooms). In the 1960s the recreational use of these substances caused panic government legislation, even against legitimate research into their effects. The current research using psychedelics heralds a reawakening to the healing possibilities of these now prohibited substances and has generated over 1,000 scientific papers, several dozen books and six international conferences.

Stanislav Grof and colleagues at Spring Grove State Hospital in Baltimore, working with terminally ill patients, provided strong evidence that a psychedelic experience can be immensely beneficial for the terminally ill, relieving them of the pain and fear of death.

Psilocybin mushrooms have been used for thousands of years by indigenous cultures for a variety of religious and therapeutic purposes. In 1954 ‘Aldous Huxley took four-tenths of a gram of mescaline, sat down and waited to see what would happen. When he opened his eyes everything, from the flowers in a vase to the creases in his trousers, was transformed. Huxley described his experience with breathtaking immediacy in The Doors of Perception. This book can also be seen as a part of the history of the entheogenic model of understanding these drugs, seeing them in a spiritual context, as they always have been in primitive cultures. In its sequel Heaven and Hell, Huxley goes on to explore the history and nature of mysticism. Still bristling with a sense of excitement and discovery, his illuminating and influential writings remain the most fascinating account of the visionary experience ever written, says J. G. Ballard. In October 1955, Huxley had an experience while on LSD that he considered even more profound than those he spoke of in The Doors of Perception. He had discovered that Love was the primary and universal fact of the cosmos. This kind of remarkable experience has been corroborated with hundreds of other accounts of a similar nature using psychedelics for spiritual exploration. People have reported having acid trips that changed their lives forever, by essentially removing the way perception is filtered in normal brain functioning. They say they saw things they'd never seen before, on a physical or spiritual plane. Is all this a wonderful truth or a magnificent illusion?

There is no doubt now that non-ordinary states of consciousness, as Groff prefers to call them, can produce lasting improvements in the quality of living and in how we face death, and can do so from a single non-addictive psychedelic session.

What has been learned since the discovery of LSD is that this work must be undertaken in what I would call a person-centred setting (although researchers do not put it this way). It is vital that such trips be prepared for and conducted in a respectful, careful and thoughtful setting. As researchers would insist now, the set and setting is everything. That is a lesson we already knew in person-centred therapy.

What is most impressive is that these elevating results are not the effect of religious or cult indoctrination. They seem to arise out of the nature of the psyche itself.

Who knows where western humanity will go once it has gotten over its knee-jerk shock when these magic medicines were released into the headily ignorant sexual revolution of the 60s. Thankfully much work is now underway by organisations like MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies). I’m sure these slow advances will eventually calm our nerves and trepidations.  

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264