Isness and Suchness

[Halfglass]

Huxley talked about the "over-flow valve" that keeps the mind from being over-inundated with sensory input. With this valve bypassed by way of the psychedelic, the mind is "At Large". This is when almost anything can be imbued with significance. What is this state of suchness...Realer than real? I took a hike with a friend in the mountains on a hit of blotter--not too strong--and I was getting off on this isness (having just recently read some things on it). We stopped by a pond and the water was "thick", it ran down a gully like syrup. "Why do I see it like this?," (I kept trying to get a handle on it.) Back at my friends house, she took out her pet iguana. I couldn't stop marvling at this little beast. As he crawled across the floor I suddenly saw that its legs weren't legs at all--it was perfectly obvious that they were anti-gravity "parts". Legs were just part of the machinery. They were only shaped like they were because they had to bend, to lift, then move the animal/machine/brain/waterbag around--pushing against gravity. (Of course I'd always known that, but now I could SEE it plain as day.) Can the suchness of a thing, when it is experienced so clearly, be considered to be the real reality? Or a wavelength closer to realness at least?

[Woodpecker]

Blake would think so. He writes:

"The ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six
thousand years is true, as I have heard from Hell.

"For the cherub with his flaming sword is hereby commanded to leave his guard at
tree of life, and when he does, the whole creation will be consumed, and appear
infinite, and holy whereas it now appears finite & corrupt.

"This will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment.

"But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul, is to be expunged:
this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are
salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the
infinite which was hid.

"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is,
infinite.

"For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his
cavern."

(From The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, c.1793)

And what's more medicinally corrosive than a hit of acid?

All matter is condensed energy according to Einstein's formula. What if, in turn, all energy is condensed thought. Everthing's made of densely woven dream-material. Which is spirit. Forgive me if better brains than mine have already said this in other threads and in other times and places. Well, it's been said before and it'll be said again.

Huxley in Doors of Perception sees a doorknob spinning without being touched. You saw the water behaving in a different, unusual way. Once I saw the stars literally dancing. Another time I saw the moon in three or four shapes at the same time--oblong; rounded triangle, rounded square; fat crescent; all gleaming silver edged with a fizzy pale yellow. Another time, the sun seemed full of a multitude of joyous, brilliant people who were working and partying there, pounding out light like work or music. Another time, the sun was a gated green garden with a little girl beckoning me inside. In an animist universe, everything is alive and made of spirit. What we can see in trance are some of the living dreams that things are woven of, no?

[ June 02, 2003, 10:15 PM: Message edited by: Woodpecker ]

[Charlie]

Suchness is a basic principle of Zen:

'The voices of torrents are from one great tongue,
the lions of the hills are the pure body of Buddha.'
'Isn't that right?' he said to the teacher.
'It is,' said the teacher, 'but it's a pity to say so.'

Experiencing things directly without analyzing them—“no-thinking”-- is considered to be an important precursor to satori.

[Halfglass]

Charlie: Yes, perhaps that's why I couldn't intelectualize it. Woodpecker: That's something, Blake I mean. It really does sound like he's talking about a psychedelic. Maybe he'd had opium at his disposal at least? His talk about the change to come after 6000 years is familiar too. I wonder if there is a way to determine when that 6000 years started, and if it may land around 2012.

[ June 04, 2003, 04:20 AM: Message edited by: Halfglass ]

[sidecross]

I have heard the same idea that Charlie expressed concerning Zen; I remember the notion as “Zen stink”.

[Buzz]

Sounds to me like Blake got a hold of psychedelics. I've always heard and read that there was very little use of psychedelics in the 19th century (in the Western world that is).
In Ken Burns feature about Mart Twain there is a brief mention about how Clemmons hung out with some journalists in the west (California or Nevada, I forget exactly where), and this group was into psychedelics, but he didn't explore that subject. Does anyone have any information on the use of psychedelics, other than cocaine or opium, by Europeans or Americans in the 19th century? Seems to me that Daniel or someone I've read recently mentioned a few people who were quite skeptical of its visionary qualities.

[Proteus]

Love the zen quote! My teacher, too, talks about "stinky zen"--the self-conscious, sentimental pronouncements that we students sometimes make when trying to show our "grasp" of Buddhist philosophy. The Zen way, as you so succinctly put it, is to encounter the world in a state of nonthinking. No ideas! No preconceptions about right, wrong, real, or unreal! No epistemic pigeon-holes for filing our impressions of this thing or that person.

Presumably, then, from the zen perspective, answering Halfglass' question about whether or not his experience of the river while on blotter was more real than his experience of the river when sober would always result in "pitiable" assertions about the "Truth." Yes, the river as experienced on blotter is WAY more real. No, it's not as real. Yes and no, it's just as real.

Here's my "idea" about the "reality" of the psychedelic experience. Extend your hand, palm-out, toward a friend. Ask her what she sees. She'll probably say something like, "your hand....Duh!" And she's right; but, the hand she sees isn't the hand you see. She's seeing the palm-side of your hand while you're gazing at its backside. Asking which river is more real--the blotter river or the sober river--is like asking which perspective on your hand is the most "real?" Obviously, they both are equally real. From the perspective of your friend the hand is only a palm. From your perspective, it's only the backside. Someone could take an X-ray, or an infrared photograph, or a Xerox of your hand. Are any of those perspectives more real than your friend's palm-side view? No, not more real, but each view registers another layer of reality. All views, front, back, X-ray, top, bottom, Infrared, "blottered," etc. have equal claim to "realness." According to this idea, Halfglass' experience of the stream on blotter is no more nor less real than his experience of the stream while sober. But the perspectives are different and they might prove more or less useful or appropriate for certain activities or certain discussions.

But this idea, too, is stinky Zen. In fact, it's a Zen master's teaching trick. If someone seems committed to a particular point of view, show them how things look from the perspective of the Totality, erasing all distinctions between this perspective and that one. If someone wants to sound like Mr. or Ms. Satori, like the student Charlie quotes above, by speaking from the perspective of the Totality, the Zen master is likely to respond with the equivalent of a whack on the head with a stick. "There! Put THAT into flowery language about Tigers, Elephants, Mountains, and the Treasure of Dharma Eye why don't you?!"

The truth of my own psychedelic experiences is that my perceptions of reality DO seem deeper and more authentic than those that come to me through sober consciousness. My experiences with the Vine have consistently included heightening of all bodily senses--sometimes to an uncomfortably intense degree. The senses of touch, taste, and hearing are particularly acute while on ayahuasca and the mental component of perception is such that every nuance of every sensory experience seems to receive the utmost of focused attention and grateful appreciation. The amount and quality of insight that flows from these Vine-enhanced sensory experiences is orders of magnitude richer and more prolific than those the sober mind produces. My view of the world while on Aya DOES seem, despite all my high-falutin stinky-Zen talk about the equality of all perspectives, to be, if not more "real," at least a vastly richer experience of the real than i've so far encountered while sober.

Think i just said and unsaid everything i know on the subject! ;-}

[Woodpecker]

Halfglass and Buzz, IMHO Blake was probably not into foreign substances. To me, Blake and Walt Whitman support speculations that Strassman makes in The Spirit Molecule that some people's natural mysticism comes from the brain's naturally-occurring DMT somehow not getting broken down so quickly. Those two poets are totally psychedelic as far as their insights are concerned. Specifically, their insights are DMT-psychedelic. That's the way it seemed to me, of course, and I was only seeing the palms of the hands of their poems, of course....

Check out the opening pages from Leaves of Grass and you'll almost swear Whitman had gotten ahold of some yage somewhere; but that's just the way he was. Ecstatically singing the mysteries of the cosmos, and then returning home to his parents' place, where he still lived in his early 30s, and where he shared a bed with a retarded kid brother.

Some colleagues and I are performing Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in English and German here in Vienna this Saturday night. Y'all are invited to drop by if you're around.... But the point I want to add about that is just that in the course of wandering through Blake's prophetic texts, I found some passages that reminded me strongly of Pablo Amaringo's paintings.

On the subject of not using foreign substance, an anthropologist called Richard Katz has published a book called Boiling Energy about the !Kung Bushmans' trance dance. The shamans there dance themselves into a trance that comes on extremely painfully, like a wave of boiling energy that rolls up from the soles of the feet and eventually overwhelms the head. That's compared to a little death, and when it passes, the shaman is in trance. He (usually he) can pull illness out of people, see inside them, go on astral journeys, and transform into a lion.

!Kung shamanism is for all intents and purposes exactly what Amazonian shamanism is, a continent away and without the magic plants. DMT?

[Woodpecker]

PS, Buzz, that story about Clemmons and the psychedelic journalists would be interesting to know more about. Maybe it was peyote?

And Halfglass, about the business of the world ending after 6000 years--Blake lived in a time when people believed the world was only 4000 or so years old. Or 5000, I don't know.

My own idea about the apocalypse is that each one of us will experience it, personally, because it is conflated with our individual deaths. It exists outside of calendar time. And that's exactly why so many people feel the nearness of the apocalypse so strongly. It's their own death, the sudden corrosion of their personal samsara, and the awakening into the infinite.

In other words, the end of the world will come to us all, but the world will keep on going. The world is too useful as a training camp and purification center for souls to be scrapped any time soon, IMHO.

[ June 04, 2003, 10:20 PM: Message edited by: Woodpecker ]

[Proteus]

Originally posted by Woodpecker:
Halfglass and Buzz, IMHO Blake was probably not into foreign substances. To me, Blake and Walt Whitman support speculations that Strassman makes in The Spirit Molecule that some people's natural mysticism comes from the brain's naturally-occurring DMT somehow not getting broken down so quickly.Woodpecker: i agree with you about Blake and have come to a similar conclusion about the origins of his vision. Reading Peter Akroyd's biography of Blake, i came across some interesting eye-witness reports of Blake drawing creatures that he claimed to be seeing. One is fairly famous--"The Flea"--in which another artist (whose name i naturally forget) watched him sketch this entity as though there were a model in front of him. His wife spoke of his retiring to his room sometimes for days because he was "plagued" by these visions.

The liklihood that Blake had access to psychedelics in 18th-19th century London strikes me as extremely unlikely. But human bodies have all kinds of varieties of abilities and inabilities to create, store, and make use of endogenous chemicals. Diabetics suffer from an inability to produce insulin; some schizophrenics have been shown to have detectable traces of DMT in their blood. Blake was probably fortunate in that he produced enough DMT to see the Otherworld but not so much that he couldn't function in a rather tough world.

[sire_012]

woodpecker:
To me, Blake and Walt Whitman support speculations that Strassman makes in The Spirit Molecule that some people's natural mysticism comes from the brain's naturally-occurring DMT somehow not getting broken down so quickly.its my understanding that walt whitman had a penchant for chewing calamus root - http://www.erowid.org/herbs/calamus - , which acts as an empathogen, stimulant, and hallucinogen. many settlers were interested in this as it both stimulated and pacified the lonesome traveler. in fact, whitman was apparently so enamored with the calamus root and its effects that he wrote a group of poems after his beloved root!

[Woodpecker]

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/lukas/whit/comment/calclust1.html

Sire,
I scanned some web Whitmanological texts and saw no indication that he chewed the root of the calamus; is there anything that establishes that he got high on it? The bits I read, like the link above, talk about his having "used" the calamus plant as a whole as a poetic symbol of manly attachment and friendship and the possibilities of democracy. Can you turn up anything more pharmacological?

[Halfglass]

It may be that it was intentionally left up to the reader to decide as in this poem by French poet Arthur Rimaud: (from "The Drunken Boat" I think) "Roam my hungers, hungers browse--In the field on sound--Suck up bindweed's gay venom--along the ground..." Bindweed of course is a type of morning glory. Maybe Amanitas were around as well back in the day (in Europe) but there wasn't any Leary types with the idea that every kid in the land needed to get the news? And wasn't datura used by witches in old europe? And mandrake and such? (If tobacco and coke from the new world made its way into Egyptian mummies who knows what was possible.) Then there's that secret brew used by Aristotle and his boys (forget the name too lazy to look it up) but there may have been a secret underground of its ingredients (ergot?) due to punishment by Christian kings (and Greece is next to Rome who came to England). Besides that, there had to be a few curious alchemists/witches who figured out it was ergot causeing the madness outbreaks from moldy grains in Europe--it would have been right up their alley to find out about what was happening....Thing is we'll never know but I wouldn't write it off. P.S. What is IMHO?

[ June 22, 2003, 03:52 AM: Message edited by: Halfglass ]

[Woodpecker]

It's either In My Humble Opinion or Indigo Mythical Humanoid Opiate, depending on the context.

That's very interesting about Rimbaud and the bindweed. He's known to have been a consumer of hashish. For me, the jury's still out on Whitman--though I'd like to be convinced.

[sire_012]

woodpecker wrote:
I scanned some web Whitmanological texts and saw no indication that he chewed the root of the calamus; is there anything that establishes that he got high on it? check the Psychedelic Encyclopedia http://www.erowid.org/library/books/psychedelics_encyclopedia.shtml i believe that is where i came across it. and its a beautiful book.

i'm really not too surprised no academic papers mention this fact, while whitman was an eccentric mystic he still seems to be held very high in the collective myth as a hero being the first american poet. i wouldn't imagine that myth would like the concept of one of its more prominent heroes as an entheogen gobbler to penetrate its sacred ground. how many academic sources spend time discussing washington's marijuana plants? anyway it deos seems like a prudish miscalculation to assume that he wrote over 50 poems about a well known and traded entheogen amongst settlers, but he himself only found it valuable only as a metaphor.

hope this helps! enjoy.

[Woodpecker]

A bit of news caught my eye on the web a couple months back: an archaeologist tested the remains of some clay pipes found at Shakespeare's place and found traces of marijuana. Inneresting.

[sidecross]

http://www.startribune.com/stories/484/3862902.html />

Anthropologist says Shakespeare might have smoked marijuana

Peg Meier

Star Tribune
Published 05/04/2003

To toke or not to toke? That is one question.

Several 17th-century clay pipes found at the site of William Shakespeare's home were used to smoke marijuana, a South
African anthropologist says. Although he has no proof that the Bard was the guy who smoked the pipes, he surmises that
some of Shakespeare's sonnets and plays also lend credence to the possibility that the writer smoked marijuana for
inspiration.

J. Francis Thackeray of the Transvaal Museum in Pretoria spoke last week to the University of Minnesota's Undergraduate
Anthropology Club. It invited him to Minnesota to speak about his major area of study -- ancient ancestors of humans in
Africa -- but when members heard about his sideline, they asked him to address that too. His talk, "Shakespeare's Tenth
Muse," drew a bigger audience than the club's other events on campus.

Thackeray said in an interview Friday that he has never ingested marijuana himself and certainly doesn't recommend using
it. In fact, he believes that Shakespeare warned against it. Shakespeare's suggestion to "weed this wormwood from your
fruitful brain" might mean, Thackeray said, that the Bard was "aware of the deleterious effects of drugs."

Thackeray said his "hobby" developed after he played the part of the ghost in Shakespeare's "Hamlet" in 1998. That
renewed his interest in Shakespeare's work. He noticed a reference in Sonnet No. 76 to "invention in a noted weed."
"Weed" is a slang term for marijuana, and "invention" can refer to writing. The same sonnet refers to "compounds
strange," a known reference to drugs. In Sonnet 27, Shakespeare wrote about "a journey in my head." Sonnet No. 118
speaks of "to make our appetite more keen, with eager compounds we our palate urge." Perhaps a reference to marijuana
as an appetite stimulant, Thackeray wonders.

Intrigued, Thackeray asked the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon to allow South African researchers
with state-of-the-art equipment to analyze 24 pipe fragments. Marijuana degrades over time, but eight of the fragments
showed signs suggestive of marijuana, he said. Two also showed evidence of cocaine.

"We do not claim that any of the pipes belonged to Shakespeare himself," Thackeray said.

A Shakespeare enthusiast at the university disagreed: "He's making much ado about nothing," said Christine Gordon, an
academic adviser in the university's College of Liberal Arts, honors division. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on
Shakespeare. She said, "I wouldn't mind if Shakespeare smoked marijuana, but I don't think he did."
She looked over the sonnets this week and came to different conclusions. For example, she thinks "noted weed" in
Sonnet 76 refers to clothing, not marijuana.

When Thackeray's theory was first publicized two years ago, Georgianna Ziegler, head of reference for the Folger
Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., told the Associated Press that scholars had no proof that Shakespeare took
narcotics. "I'm not saying that Shakespeare would never have drunk, or eaten, or smoked marijuana, because it was used
as a medical remedy of the time. But we have no evidence that he ever used it for pleasure," she said.

Hemp, the plant from which marijuana is derived, was widely grown in Shakespeare's England, according to Thackeray. It
was used for garments, rope and paper, some of which was used to print Shakespeare's work. In fact, Queen Elizabeth,
Shakespeare's patron, declared that landowners with more than 60 acres were obligated to plant cannabis, the herb from
which marijuana is derived. Shakespeare owned 120 acres. But, Thackeray said, it is not known how potent the plants
were.

The clay pipes also showed evidence of tobacco use. Several painted portraits of Shakespeare show a stain on his left
lower lip, Thackeray said, suggesting that he smoked a pipe.

Thackeray said he'd love to be able to have Shakespeare's bones analyzed for evidence of drug use, but there are reasons
that won't happen. One is that Shakespeare put a curse on his skeleton: "Cursed be he who moves my bones."

Peg