ONCE WERE CHILDREN

For males in many indigenous societies what is known as the ‘a rite of passage’ into manhood has the effect of cutting a youth off from his younger self, dissociating him from his childhood – it is a ceremony that is painful and traumatic and felt to be necessary for the boy to become a  man. Among the Luiseño Indians, a boy has to ‘undergo severe ordeals such as laying on red ant mounds and not crying out from pain as they are repeatedly bitten over long periods of time.  Among some Australian Aborigine societies, a boy being initiated was expected to repeatedly hit his penis with a heavy rock until it was bruised and bloody.  He also had several of his incisor teeth knocked out with a sharp rock by the adult men who were instructing him in the duties and obligations of manhood and the secrets of their religion.’  1

As I said, purpose of these barbaric rituals is to dissociate the boy from childhood. In some aboriginal societies this is accomplished with such effectiveness that a boy will walk past his mother and ignore her. He is now a man, not a boy. She simply doesn’t exist any longer as his mother.

In western society a man’s break with childhood isn’t as complete as this. Over the decades things have slowly changed.  ‘Macho’ is now a derogatory label; but there lingers the powerful ghost of the old primitive image of what it is to be ‘a man’: a tough, fearless warrior, indifferent to pain and physical injury.

In our country the aggressive ‘rugby culture’, energised by our Maori people, has an enormous grip on the male psyche. Its Anglo-Saxon roots can be traced back to the bullying practices of the English Public Schools where men were trained in sports and the cool ruthlessness necessary to run the British Empire.  There are still the remnants of this traditional mindset even in the gentlest of nappy-changing New Age fathers. Powerful emotions can be switched on in front of TV sports programs, triggering a rush of war-like adrenaline. The primitive warrior loiters in the unconscious at the ready, like an archetypal savage. It has allied itself with the warrior nostalgia of the Maori with which the New Zealand sense of national identity has become conflated.

But the repressed child does not go away and for many men it unconsciously reemerges in the family situation, where the man, now a father, is emotionally tethered to the wife as his mother, without his in the least realising it – a situation he would vehemently deny and only becomes openly manifest when there is the threat that he may lose her.

It is strange, isn’t it, that the very emphasis on manhood produces men who are psychologically fixated in childhood. The internal child is repressed and with it the vital connection with the original self. Masculine bravado tries to compensate for this loss, sometimes going to enormous lengths to prove his mastery. Such men show all the outward signs of strength and competence, and indeed do posses these qualities in war, sport and the creative struggle for survival – but the price is an unconscious regressive streak that is weak and immature. The plus side, the pay-off, is the sense of power and the freedom from the pull of the feminine.

Women are not subject to requirements that so severely cut them off from childhood and, because of this, and for other reasons too, women retain a more wholesome connection with their original self and are thus, on the whole, more psychologically skillful and mature.

The history of western society has been that of the ‘dominator style’, a man’s world – deeply cut off from nature. We are beginning to see the devastating consequences of this mindset.  We have bullied and raped the natural world and are now beginning to pay for it; and the life of a single man will also eventually reap the desolation of being detached, discovering that power and self-mastery are ultimately self-defeating.

To accomplish the rite of passage into ‘manhood’ the past has to be rewritten to fit the myth. A man’s fictional history becomes that of the warrior, ten feet tall, strong as an ox and who, like Heracles, Theseus and Odysseus can defy even the gods. The self made man. To make the fiction true a man has to accomplish masterful deeds. Our violent history has been littered with madmen like Genghis Khan, Napoleon and Hitler, the results of whose great deeds we know all too well.

If we look at our small New Zealand society we can see that this myth of manhood is not distributed evenly across the boards. It is culturally determined, but variations run in families. The hyper-masculine mindset, its particular style and strength, is handed down from one generation to the next. A style can persist in the family atmosphere across the generations without ever being explicitly stated – unconsciously endemic in the family ethos. And because it is never even thought about its hold on the soul is tenacious.

As a psychotherapist I have seen how much difficulty some men have with this affliction: the instinctive terror of weakness, uncertainty or vacillation: and there is a sort of pall of guilt hanging over it all, where any admission of childlike feelings is absolutely inadmissible. It is a terrible burden to carry. They struggle with what they are supposed to be.

We must understand that the macho archetype, if we can call it that, is not simply genetic, but rather epigenetic. This means that the genes involved can be switched on or off by environmental and cultural factors. Nobody chooses the kind of culture they are born into. But it is culture that greatly determines what we become. Cultures change slowly. Not as slowly as biological evolution, but change it does.

The way we each struggle with our culture is how we help create the future. It’s the difference between what we have been dealt with and what kind of deal we hand on.

1 http://anthro.palomar.edu/social/soc_4.htm

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

THERE’S GOT TO BE SOMETHING MORE

  

At the height of their confidence and wealth something curious happened to the Victorians. Spiritualism suddenly became a popular a craze that swept both England and America. One late 19^th century critic described the outbreak of spiritualism as a ‘monstrous folly’. Folly or not, it had all the hallmarks of a similar outbreak in the mid-20th century: the New Age movement beginning with the popular use of psychedelic drugs and the pursuit of mystical insights and other worlds. The Victorian Spiritualist may not have practiced nudity and free love, but their séances had a moral subversiveness and occasionally a naughty slant to them. They, like their later psychedelic compatriots were searching for something.  

 These Victorian New Agers ‘tried everything - they attended séances, visited mediums, collected and researched hundreds of ghost stories. When members of the group started to die, they tried to contact each other from beyond the grave.’1 The ideas of spiritualism affected all ranks of society. The lower classes didn’t go in for fancy parlour séances, but they gaped at music hall performances of mediums like Daniel Douglas Holm, who demonstrated moving tables with ‘spirit hands’, musical instruments playing in mid-air, and body levitation. Many from the upper classes were converted to Spiritualism by the amazing experiences they had in their parlour séances led by mediums, usually large impressive women in flowing robes – experiences where they contacted their dear newly departed. And Madam Blavatsky and her Secret Doctrine was at the height of her theosophical influence.

From our vantage point, looking back, it’s easy for us to see that the Victorians were psychologically deprived by their buttoned-up style of society. But, of course, they couldn’t see it. They were in it. And that’s true of all real deprivation – it’s invisible to those who are in it. They feel it, but can’t identify it, so they go out on all kinds of tangents to fill the hole. Often the search is quite desperate. You can see how whole families and their descendants are psychologically deprived by a style of life that is endemic in the family tradition, handed on from one generation to the next like an inherited but invisible disease. Emotional attitudes are remarkably persistent across generations. A person brought up in a strong religious background may have drifted away from the church, but retain the same driven intensity toward another quite different area.

The search for something more can take on many different guises. A few years ago there was an amusing cartoon in the New Yorker. It pictured two meditating Zen monks – just sitting. The master is saying to the novice, ‘What do you mean “what’s next” – this is it’.

I think one of the most terrifying philosophical questions is: ‘Is this all there is?’ It speaks of a invisible vacuum. That question is the engine that drives one of the most stubborn and intrepid of human desires – the need for something more. It can kick in the spiritual search which, if ever it reaches its goal, ossifies into belief. But mostly, with spiritual seekers, the search goes on forever. Nothing quite fills the hole because the real deprivation has not been identified.

Did you know there is a Shopaholics Anonymous, besides an Overeaters and Alcoholics Anonymous and all the other Anonymouses - all trying to deal with the terrible drive for something more.

It makes you wonder what is the quality of ‘enough’.  As he was dying of cancer Aldous Huxley’s wife administered a dose of LSD by his request. When he was nearly gone she put a rose under his nose. After a few moments she said: ‘Is that enough?’

 He whispered, ‘It is never enough’.

Not a bad remark as a checkout to this life.

1 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3663243/Spooked-by-Victorian-spiritualists.html

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

PERCEPTION

“Modern psychology has shown us that much of what we call ‘perception’ is not a straightforward taking in the world around us … but is strongly biased by our beliefs and conditioning so that our perception is slanted to validate what we already believe.(1)

         This is obviously very true; but not all perceptions are misperceptions; it is a matter of degree. My perceptual world may be more or less true of reality. At a very intimate level, between persons, there can be times when I do perceive how it is for another. There are times when I am in touch and times when I am hopelessly out of touch and my observations are biased.

       Let me illustrate this simplified view of perception. Say there is this great movie. It’s full of passion and intrigue, drama and humour, a colourful storyline full of fascinating characters. Now suppose you go to this movie and you are a bit deaf so that you miss some of the dialogue; or that you are worried and distracted; or that the gay relationships in the movie are against Bible teaching; or suppose the hero reminds you of a once hated schoolmaster; or maybe there was too much kinky sex. In any of these instances your perceptions of the film will be limited or distorted. You will edit out aspects, or simply miss certain subtleties of the film. The question becomes; how much of the total reality of the movie can you take in? How much does your mind act like a reducing value?

        Now lets say you, you yourself, are the equivalent of a movie: you have highly complex history. Like everyone you are a person of many characters and moods, each with a colourful and intricate storyline. Now let’s take a person who has known you, a friend, a partner maybe: they have witnessed hundreds of your performances – you have been on view day after day. They know you well we would suppose, but the crucial question is: how much of your total reality can they take in. How broad a spectrum of you can they get.  How much do they project their own feelings into your story, how much do they edited out, reinterpret or just neglect. Based on insufficient or distorted perception they can then make judgments that are equally inappropriate. Whatever their interactions with you, whatever they have to say to you, it won’t come out right, or their timing will be wrong.

          You cannot be in sync with anything you cannot fully perceive. Perception is the awareness of how things are. Put simply, when a person perceives how things are they will make the right choices at the right times; if there is distortion of perception then their choices and actions will be out of sync with the flow of events.

         When we perceive the total flow of life around us we make the right choices. When we are cut off from the environment then our choices are wrong. We think our choices are made by weighing up the circumstances – ‘weighing up’ as a thinking operation. But our choices are not made by thought, but by prior perception.

          You don’t need to be a good judge of life or worry about your decisions. It’s like when you drive a car, the rightness of your actions, your judgment, is totally dependent on the full perception of the moment to moment flow of traffic. Your perception flows directly into your action. To go straight from perception to action is the ultimate form of self-trust.

*

       Nothing marks off modernity so much as the evolving relationship between the sexes. We have come a long way since 1879 when Kate Sheppard campaigned for women’s right to vote; but as a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Movement she would surely have been shocked to learn that 100 years later we are about to legalise same sex marriages.

        Different styles of relationships that are now acceptable have made traditional marriage merely one of many alternatives. As this social fluidity evolves it requires a much greater psychological sophistication to deal with it. And even within marriage there are alternative arrangements that were unthinkable in the past. We need a new psychological orientation that can cope with the fluidity of modern relationships. The psyche has to catch up with what is actually the case in modern society.

           As one generation replaces another, the established parental downloads gradually mutate and society as a whole changes. But the changes are not smooth. On the relationship level there is tension not only between partners, but between different parts of oneself. The battle is between the older unconscious orientations and the newly emerging ones. There can be tension too, as one partner moves psychologically faster than the other. A typical difficulty is the emergence of the woman as a person in her own right. The situation is seldom static. Within the same relationship there can be oscillating waves of regression and progression. It’s like the complex flow of the weather, unpredictable with sudden changes of mood.

          What struggles to emerge is a broader spectrum of perception. This broader perspective is everything we mean be ‘person-centred’. How you actually perceive the other person is crucial; how broad a spectrum of their actual being can you accept as actually existing. If your filter is such that you see the other as a role your perception will be limited to just that. If the person is only a ‘son’, a ‘wife’, a ‘mother’ calling up the old archetypes, then your present-time perception will be inadequate.

          Its not a question of being ‘judgmental’. Its about something much more basic than that – one’s very perception of people is already a judging. Unless, that is, you are really in touch.

[1] Tart, Charles T.   The End of Materialism. New Harbinger Publications, 2009

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

PERCEPTION

 “Modern psychology has shown us that much of what we call ‘perception’ is not a straightforward taking in the world around us … but is strongly biased by our beliefs and conditioning so that our perception is slanted to validate what we already believe[1] 

This is obviously very true; but not all perceptions are misperceptions; it is a matter of degree. My perceptual world may be more or less true of reality. At a very intimate level, between persons, there can be times when I do perceive how it is for another. There are times when I am in touch and times when I am hopelessly out of touch and my observations are biased.

Let me illustrate this simplified view of perception. Say there is this great movie. It’s full of passion and intrigue, drama and humour, a colourful storyline full of fascinating characters. Now suppose you go to this movie and you are a bit deaf so that you miss some of the dialogue; or that you are worried and distracted; or that the gay relationships in the movie are against Bible teaching; or suppose the hero reminds you of a once hated schoolmaster; or maybe there was too much kinky sex. In any of these instances your perceptions of the film will be limited or distorted. You will edit out aspects, or simply miss certain subtleties of the film. The question becomes; how much of the total reality of the movie can you take in? How much does your mind act like a reducing value?

Now lets say you, you yourself, are the equivalent of a movie: you have highly complex history. Like everyone you are a person of many characters and moods, each with a colourful and intricate storyline. Now let’s take a person who has known you, a friend, a partner maybe: they have witnessed hundreds of your performances – you have been on view day after day. They know you well we would suppose, but the crucial question is: how much of your total reality can they take in. How broad a spectrum of you can they get.  How much do they project their own feelings into your story, how much do they edited out, reinterpret or just neglect. Based on insufficient or distorted perception they can then make judgments that are equally inappropriate. Whatever their interactions with you, whatever they have to say to you, it won’t come out right, or their timing will be wrong.

You cannot be in sync with anything you cannot fully perceive. Perception is the awareness of how things are. Put simply, when a person perceives how things are they will make the right choices at the right times; if there is distortion of perception then their choices and actions will be out of sync with the flow of events.

When we perceive the total flow of life around us we make the right choices. When we are cut off from the environment then our choices are wrong. We think our choices are made by weighing up the circumstances – ‘weighing up’ as a thinking operation. But our choices are not made by thought, but by prior perception.

You don’t need to be a good judge of life or worry about your decisions. It’s like when you drive a car, the rightness of your actions, your judgment, is totally dependent on the full perception of the moment to moment flow of traffic. Your perception flows directly into your action. To go straight from perception to action is the ultimate form of self-trust.

*

Nothing marks off modernity so much as the evolving relationship between the sexes. We have come a long way since 1879 when Kate Sheppard campaigned for women’s right to vote; but as a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Movement she would surely have been shocked to learn that 100 years later we are about to legalise same sex marriages.

Different styles of relationships that are now acceptable have made traditional marriage merely one of many alternatives. As this social fluidity evolves it requires a much greater psychological sophistication to deal with it. And even within marriage there are alternative arrangements that were unthinkable in the past. We need a new psychological orientation that can cope with the fluidity of modern relationships. The psyche has to catch up with what is actually the case in modern society.

As one generation replaces another, the established parental downloads gradually mutate and society as a whole changes. But the changes are not smooth. On the relationship level there is tension not only between partners, but between different parts of oneself. The battle is between the older unconscious orientations and the newly emerging ones. There can be tension too, as one partner moves psychologically faster than the other. A typical difficulty is the emergence of the woman as a person in her own right. The situation is seldom static. Within the same relationship there can be oscillating waves of regression and progression. It’s like the complex flow of the weather, unpredictable with sudden changes of mood.

What struggles to emerge is a broader spectrum of perception. This broader perspective is everything we mean be ‘person-centred’. How you actually perceive the other person is crucial; how broad a spectrum of their actual being can you accept as actually existing. If your filter is such that you see the other as a role your perception will be limited to just that. If the person is only a ‘son’, a ‘wife’, a ‘mother’ calling up the old archetypes, then your present-time perception will be inadequate.

Its not a question of being ‘judgmental’. Its about something much more basic than that – one’s very perception of people is already a judging. Unless, that is, you are really in touch.

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

---

[1] Tart, Charles T.   The End of Materialism. New Harbinger Publications, 2009

HORSE-SENSE

“Through my work as a horse trainer and equine-facilitated therapy specialist, I’ve observed that feelings are contagious. They expand outwards like sound waves travelling through the air and affect others in predictable ways – even across species lines. No matter how good you are at hiding feelings from yourself and others, your nervous system involuntarily broadcasts what you are really feeling – at a frequency horses are especially good at tuning into.”

So writes Linda Kohanov in her book Riding Between the Worlds. She is best known for what she calls ‘equine facilitated psychotherapy’. She founded the Epona Equestrian Services, a collective of riding instructors and counsellors for equine-facilitated psychotherapy sessions, located in Tucson, Arizona. There are, of course, many riding schools that use horses to facilitate people with physical difficulties – but this one is different.

 Kohanov sees the horse as almost the perfect counsellor: non-judgmental; perfectly in tune with a person’s emotional state and extremely sensitive to any psychological incongruence [1]any inner conflict or self disharmony. So much so that the horse will straightforwardly react to the emotion a person is trying to suppress. The horse will pick up falsehood and pretence in an instant, she assures us. This isn’t just a theory. Linda Kohanov demonstrates this in story after personal story in her book, leaving one in no doubt as to its authenticity.

It is worth noting that children too, even before they can talk, are also able to pick up incongruence in adults; and I think young babies even more so. Like horses and some other domesticated animals they have no awareness of deceptive mind-games and are open to the physical emanations of our animal nature. In human families where there is a huge discrepancy between what people are pretending to be and what the actually are can drive children to despair.

What children obviously see as reality is totally denied by an adult conspiracy of lies which the perpetrators even believe themselves. This causes the child to doubt their perception of reality. It is the stuff of insanity and is known as the ‘double-bind’ syndrome’[2]  

Conversely, the horse comes from a family that is at one with its own nature, unaffected by the advantages and dangers of symbolic language. The horse has a direct non-verbal perception of reality. Its mother, father and the herd have no use for prevarication; their being is identical to their appearance; what you see is what they are. There is no such thing as pretence; and apparently they just can’t stand incongruence.  “Unlike human beings, horses don’t judge or reject us for what we’re feeling; it’s the act of trying to suppress our emotions that drives them crazy”. With their ability to see directly into our nature and accept us as we are, they are perfect psychotherapists, being fully there, but counselling nothing – no advice or clever interpretations. And if a person can tune into a horse’s nature they benefit by osmosis.

In the wild, a herd of horses depend for their survival on a sense of danger being instantly communicated to each other. A lion with a full belly can walk close to the herd without alerting them. But the moment a lion is on the hunt, a herd of horses or zebras will react instantly as a whole. Putting it in human terms you could say that they have the ability for instantaneous emotional communication with each other. And it is this ability they have carried forward in their domesticated life with us, giving them fine intuition and empathy. They are actually better at it than we are. Even though we ourselves, for most of our evolution, were also prey animals[3] like the horse, we have since lost touch with our primal senses.

Such are the attributes of the horse that are so useful in Kohanov’s kind of therapy?  She uses the immediacy of their nature, without all the mental trappings of human culture, to draw out that part of our own nature that is intuitive, communicative and empathic – in fact, all the qualities that we ourselves have beneath our educated mind. In our wordless encounter with this animal it is as though a mirror is held up showing us how we are deep down.   

There are some passages in the book, where the author strays from the importance this wordless encounter and uses the style of most self-help books.  I find this at odds with the implicit psychological insights of the horse/human relationship. She will occasionally step outside this magic place and give us a popular self-help mode of cognitive analysis and prescriptive advice. For example, she suggests that when you are feeling ‘vulnerable’ ask yourself, “What belief, behavior or perception is being challenged?” Apparently a useful question, no doubt. The problem is that such an approach will put most people straight into their thinking-heads to look for an answer. This is not a good guide in how to relate to one’s emotional self – in fact, it is counter-productive, validating entirely the wrong way to relate to bodily feelings. There are a number of examples like this in the book. Where they occur they impose an artificial analytical approach instead of using a natural process – which, after all, is really what the book is all about.

Such slips are perhaps forgivable for she does see the difficulty, which is precisely finding an adequate concept of the relationship between feeling and language. As she says, “To share this equine inspired wisdom with others I had to point to non-verbal realities with words and procedures.” Had she known ‘Focusing’ and Eugene Gendlin’s philosophy of the Implicit she would have found the task a good deal easier.

[1] “Incongruence” See my last blog: The Vale

[2] Bateson, G. (1972). Double bind, 1969. Steps to an ecology of the mind: A revolutionary approach to man's understanding of himself, 271-278. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

[3] Ehrenreich,  Barbara. (2011) Blood Rites. Granta Publications, 2011

Contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

THE VEIL

    

       In the 1960s Carl Rogers introduced the term ‘congruence’ to indicate a person’s harmony with themselves. Roughly it means honesty, transparency, openness and self-revealing. It is the opposite of dissemblance. A sign of in-congruence would be, for example, smiling when one is annoyed.  In counselling the idea is to help the client achieve greater immediacy and spontaneity. 
       Increasing congruence was an indication of the client’s progress in therapy. Later, Rogers saw how important it was in every relationship, not just for clients in therapy. It was at this time that Rogers began to call his method ‘person-centred’ rather than ‘client-centred’, realising we are not just talking about therapy, but how we relate to each other in daily life. 
       Everything we have discovered in therapy show us that any relationship goes better if both parties are congruent with their own feelings. Often it produces disturbance, but at least honesty provokes honesty. One person’s congruence draws out the other, who is increasingly truthful too. Congruence is not primarily about my relationship with others, but with myself. Secondarily, if I am congruent with myself it will automatically change how others behave toward me.
       On the face of it, this seems a very simple idea: one is either in harmony with oneself or in conflict with it, true to one’s inner being or trying to hide or escape from it; and most often, actual situations are just as simple as this. But as soon as we look deeper it becomes more complex. It turns out that in the shadowy place behind the veil is not just a single, unitary, self. I have to be true; but true to what exactly? How do I tell what is most true – what I really feel? There are so many ways of looking at every situation and each viewpoint can be quite genuine. Each of my selves claims to be ‘me’ – but to which one do I give the crown. 
        This problem arises because of a very simple error. If we view the psyche as a structure, a sort of static being – a state, then we should be able to discover what that state is, how it is laid out. It should have an anatomy. Somewhere in all that complexity one should be able to find a stable, continuous something that is my true self, who I really am. 
       Even the statement: ‘who I really am’, assumes a stable, permanent ‘me’. But an anatomy of the psyche is not possible. In reality the psyche is not static, but dynamic. What is so one moment, is different the next; if only because a continually changing environment elicits different responses from me. Thus it is that the intellect cannot assist here. Your ‘true’ self is never the same from one moment to the next. In a word, life is a flow not a fixture. But the saving grace is that at any given moment there is a senior truth: it is what wants to reveal itself right NOW. Among all the possible ways of responding, at this very moment, there is one on top, pushing to be recognised, crying out to be said – that is the only moment you can be congruent.
        Congruence is a challenge entirely of the present moment; but in saying this there is something that needs clarifying. Congruence does not have to be ABOUT the present; but what is surfacing IN the present. 
       Congruence, then, is not an on-going state, but the challenge of recognising your actual experience of the moment. In response to any situation what is most true, your truest self, is what is coming alive and pushing at the veil right now – right there within you. In the flowing dynamism of the soul there is no other way of knowing exactly what constitutes being true to yourself. Each moment of your life carries with it the challenge of knowing and admitting what you are in the present instant. 
       One difficulty is that in the presence of other people I tend to disappear. I mean this quite literally. Face to face with another person, they are always more real than I am. That’s why I only know what I should have said afterwards, sometimes hours later. Other people seem to have more thereness than I do. This kind of self-forgetting is not modesty. In actual fact it’s regression. I regress to a childlike state of being where everyone is grownup and I watch them with my mouth open. I have thoughts and feelings, but like a child, I hide behind the veil. 
       I exaggerate, of course – but to make a point. It’s not that I feel inferior; it’s just that when the heat is on I just can’t find the fullness of myself.  Afterwards I know what I should have said. In fact, I go over the dialogue again, remembering what it would have been like to be congruent. Imaginatively, I go over it again, alter what happened – and feel a bit better.
        Are there people who are too congruent, who withhold nothing? Yes. And the best you can say is that they cause disruption. But at least, you know where you are with them.
        Dissemblance is a lifelong habit; living behind the veil is entrenched in childhood where you have to fake it to get by. The solution is to be with people who not only tolerate you daring to be truthful, but who welcome it and urge you on.

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264

ECSTASY

The word ‘ecstasy’ is from the Greek ekstasis meaning: entrancement, displaced outside (oneself). Used by 17^th century mystical writers it meant ‘a state of rapture that stupefied the body while the soul contemplated divine things’. What we would call these days an altered state of consciousness.

Perhaps the most famous tradition of involving ecstasy was what was known as the Eleusinian Mysteries, practiced for two thousand years right up to 390 AD. Thousands of people, slaves, philosophers and aristocrats, from all over the Greek world came to Eleusis, 15 miles northwest of Athens, to celebrate the festival each year. The procession of initiates would start from Athens and make their way towards the Telesterion (Initiation Hall) where they would rest for the night.

The next day they would drink a special brew of barley water and mint. After that, whatever happened inside the Telesterion has always been the most dreadful secret. Initiates were forbidden to speak of it on pain of death. But many were able to speak about the effect of the experience on their lives. What they had to say sounds every bit like what modern people have said about the effects of psychedelic drugs, taken in a sacred or therapeutic setting.

In the Elusion Mysteries, Plutarch tells us, ‘… there are all kinds of terrors, with shivering, trembling, sweating, and utter amazement. After this, a strange and wonderful light meets the wanderer; he is admitted into clean and verdant meadows, where he discerns gentle voices, and choric dances, and the majesty of holy sounds and sacred visions.’

There is evidence that the Kykeon, the ‘special brew of barley water’ given to the initiates, was derived from locally grown barley which regularly gets infected with the ergot fungus known as Claviceps Purpurea, a potent hallucinogen related to lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). It means that all those thousands of initiates way back then were on a dope assisted, holy trip.

Many spoke about how it changed their whole outlook on life. Aristides the Rhetor in the 2^nd century speaks of the ‘ineffable visions’ they had in the Telesterion: ‘Eleusis is a shrine common to the whole earth’ he said, ‘and of all the divine things that exist among men, it is both the most awesome and the most luminous. Aristotle’s view was that the initiates did not have a lesson to learn, but an experience to undergo.

The Roman emperor Theodosius closed the sanctuary in CE 392. It was probably the first drug-bust in history; and when Christianity arrived in the region all cult worship was forbidden.

*

The picture above is of the session room at the Behavioural Biology Research Center Johns Hopkins University. Sandy Lundahl, with the blue eyeshade, lies on the couch listening to classical music through headphones. She has just taken two 30milligrams capsules of psilocybin, the active hallucinogenic in ‘magic mushrooms’ for an ongoing research study. It is the first study of its kind since the early '70s – ‘a rigorous, scientific attempt to determine if drugs like psilocybin and LSD, demonised and driven underground for more than three decades, can facilitate life-changing, transformative mystical experiences.’

The research made news around the world. Its conclusion: ‘psychedelic drugs offer the potential for profound, transformative, and long-lasting positive changes in properly prepared individuals’. Recalling her experimental session four years later Sandy said "Nothing had ever been that vivid. There was this grid on top of everything, all these colors. And I don't know how long, as I was mesmerized by it, and then I started thinking, Oh, no ... am I going to be looking at this for six hours? Oh, no, no. It was interesting for about five minutes -- maybe not even. I started thinking, Oh, what a waste of time. But I’d made a vow (to go along with the research).

 "I'm never going to make an inauthentic decision again. Never again”. And as soon as I said that to myself it was like -- whooosh -- the colors were gone. And I felt like I was being whisked ... whoa, boy ... and then I went to all these other places."

Bill Richards, in charge of the experiment, said later said. "First, it's sensory and aesthetic. People experience colors, patterns, intriguing bodily sensations -- what most people think of when they think of the effects of a psychedelic drug. It's not life-transforming, by any means. Beyond that stage, they start dealing with psychodynamic issues – the sense of self, obstacles, fears. It's very personal. In that stage, people often regress to their childhood and relive emotional episodes with parents, sibling, spouses, and children. After that ... we enter the archetypal realm. Visions of Christ, or Buddha, or Greek gods, that sort of thing.”

It was in this stage that Sandy saw this jester. “He was coming down the street. I was in the crowd, I was right there. And one side of him was totally black, and the other side was totally colorful, and here he is, just laughing." She closes her eyes, remembering. "And I'm getting the image of the dark side of life, and the light side, and here is this jester ... just laughing! Laughing at the human condition…” and Sandy began to laugh with him.

What seems to follow this stage is the mystical realm, says Richards. Here people have this overwhelming sense of oneness with the universe: "There's a dimension of awesomeness, of profound humility, of the self being stripped bare. In the psychology of religion, mystical experience is well-described:  unity, transcendence of time and space, sacredness, ineffability.”

The team had marked success with alcoholics and neurotics; and then quite by accident a member of the research team developed a terminal cancer. She was open to the idea of trying psychedelics to see if it would be helpful.

"She experienced a dramatic decrease in anxiety and depression and lived the time that she had left much more fully," Richards says. Over the next ten years the team applied psychedelic therapy to cancer patients at Baltimore hospital.

"There are a lot of people with cancer lying in bed, depressed, just lying there, suffering, preoccupied with pain and estranged from their family members.  Sort of half alive while they're waiting for the cancer to advance. We found that people who have mystical experiences tend to benefit most dramatically. They resolve conflicts of guilt, grief, estrangement from family members, breaking through the denial and pretense that often accompanies cancer. That's incredibly helpful. They are less anxious, less depressed, closer in their personal relationships, less preoccupied with pain.

"And, perhaps most significantly, those who have mystical experiences claim loss of a fear of death ... that they somehow feel part of something eternal”, says Richards. “Not necessarily personal immortality – there's a paradox there – it's not denying death, but that somehow in spite of the reality of death, it's a good universe. Life makes sense. And there's every reason to live the rest of this lifetime as fully as possible. It's pretty inspiring."

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Perhaps we are getting over the awful fright psychedelics gave us in the 60s; maybe rediscovering what we lost when the Elusion Mysteries were closed down sixteen hundred years ago.

For a most instructive TED talk by Dr Roland Griffith on psilocybin research go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKm_mnbN9JY

contact: stanrich@vodafone.co.nz

(03) 981 2264