Heaven and Hell Revisited

Peter Webster

Composed in 1996 for The Psychedelic Library

 

How is it possible for two persons of such obvious intellectual talent as William Braden and Aldous Huxley to have such radically different experiences as a result of ingestion of a similar quantity of mescaline? Both Huxley and Braden brought to their first psychedelic experiment a wide knowledge and understanding of science, religion, mysticism, literature and fine arts, yet Huxley’s initial psychedelic experience was a revelation, and led to the writing of The Doors of Perception, a book which launched a movement, if not a revolution. William Braden’s experiment, recounted in the Postscript of his book, The Private Sea, could not have been more opposite to Huxley’s. Anguish and torment forced Mr. Braden to ask that the experience be terminated with the anti-psychotic drug Thorazine, and several days
of painful reccovery, he tells us, ensued.

The so-called “bad trip” has been the occasional result in both psychedelic research and the clandestine use of psychedelics since the 1950s. Authorities of all persuasions have warned us of the ever-present risk, and that it is next to impossible to predict if a given personality will experience the negative aspect of psychedelic experience. It has also often been observed that a bad experience may even follow several positive, ecstatic ones, for no apparent reason. Even the careful control of the supposed principal determinants of the experience, set and setting, seems to leave a way open for negative experience, and indicates a crucial lack in the understanding of how and why a bad experience may arise. Or so it has been repeatedly said.

The set and setting hypothesis may fail to provide control or understanding of the occurrence of negative experience for a very good reason: Although many investigators have attempted to undersand the content of psychedelic experience solely in terms of the set and setting of the experiment, I feel there is more of tautology than scientific theory in this “explanation.” Saying that the psychedelic experience depends on set and setting is rather like saying that the weather is dependent on the contents of the atmposhpere. The weather IS the contents of the atmosphere, and the psychedelic experience IS the set and setting of the time and place in which the psychedelic drug is taken. This is, of course, the case with everyday experience as well: the set and setting of your day at the office IS the experience of your day at the office. The set and setting hypothesis really “explains” nothing we don’t already know. We will have to delve a little deeper than a comparison of the set and setting of the experiences of Braden and Huxley to understand the extreme difference of result.
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There has been a continuing ignorance by a great many of the players in the psychedelic controversy concerning the experience of tribal man, both past and present. The visionary realms sometimes attained through the use of psychedelic drugs have been visited since time immemorial, and for a modern researcher to ignore what tribal man has to say on the subject of psychedelic experience is a serious oversight. Especially guilty have been those on the side of Prohibition of the psychedelic drugs, whether government minister or categorically-abstinant researcher: the great majority of persons who have themselves experienced the psychedelic vision have subsequently educated themselves on the subject of shamanism and the use of psychedelic plants by the tribal practitioners of early medicine and religion. At the same time the Prohibitionists, including some eminent researchers, have gone so far as to insist that those having themselves taken psychedelics are irrevocably tainted, and incapable of judging the results of their own investigations. The very existence of such an attitudinal conflict among trained thinkers suggests that modern rationality may not be all that it is cracked up to be, and might also be an intimation of at least one of the sources of negative- psychedelic experience.

If one starts, of course, with the premise that tribal man is primitive, ignorant, backward, incapable of rational thought, lost in delusion, etc., then a complete disregard for the hundred-thousand years (or more) of tribal psychedelic research follows. Such a premise may play an important and stifling role in the outlook of many moderns, even those who believe themselves far more broad-minded, as the roots of prejudice are notoriusly difficult to uncover. But the brain of Homo sapiens has had exactly its present macroscopic and neurological structure for at least 150 thousand years, and although early man of course did not have the (not all that certain) advantage of modern culture as a tool, it is preposterous to believe that a nervous system capable of creating symphonies and relativity theories was simply not employed to full capacity before modern times. Evolution does not work like that. The human brain would not have evolved to its present capability had there been no aboriginal use for all that symphony- and relativity-theory-producing hardware. The chronic skeptic will demand, “well what do you propose those
primitives were doing with all that hardware?” If we would listen to them, instead of eradicating them, we might begin to know.

Many modern thinkers, of course, have been listening. But they are not usually among the cohort of institutional thinkers who practice hard, reductionist science. They are rather specialists on mythology such as Joseph Campbell, anthropologists such as Michael Harner, ethno-botanists such as Gordon Wasson and Richard Evans Schultes, or psychedelic researchers such as Humphrey Osmond and Albert
Hofmann. Recognition of such pioneers by mainstream science and society, not to mention Nobel Prizes and the like, will not likely occur soon. Yet these are the very workers, and fields of endeavor, which we must listen to very closely not only to understand what early man has to say, but also to understand the nature of the psychedelic experience and cause of the occasional “bad trip.” Only by listening to the psychedelic wisdom of the ages have we a chance for understanding how we moderns fit into this very large picture. In evolutionary time, we are but a mere blip, an exaggeration, perhaps an aberration which might well soon self-destruct for lack of ageless wisdom, for lack of listening to our ancestors who, with perceptions and thoughts every bit as human, and every bit as potent as our own, ensured human
survival for greater than 99% of the time of human life on earth.
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A principal lesson from the psychedelic past, which applies not only to the use of visionary plants but to the optimal structuring of society itself, is the importance of myth and ritual, both for daily and seasonal life, and for the seeking of ultimate or mystical understanding by a tribe or people. Today there are many who would deny the importance, or even the presence of myth and ritual as an underlying factor in their lives. But as with the atheist, such denial is as much a mythology and ritual as the denial of God by the atheist is in a very real sense, a religion: An equivalent amount of faith is required to believe that God does not exist (for there can be no absolute proof either way). A great and modern myth is that we no longer live by myths, but hard facts, and perhaps peoples of all times and places found it difficult to know the myths they lived by, the underlying paradigm of their metaphysic. But the principal difference with all tribal peoples as compared to us moderns, was that they all, without fail, developed elaborate ritual and shamanism as a central guiding framework for their lives. The myth and ritual of tribal man was a living, evolving, all-encompassing structure, continually being added to, and providing the long-term
undersanding which kept such societies stable and functioning for periods of time which make a mockery of modern societal systems. For ritual today we have very primitive and impotent relics indeed: empty “religious” charades on the one hand, and a cut-throat tooth-and-nail paradigm of capitalistic competition to the death as our day-to-day program for survival. And compounding such a sickness-producing paradigm, the conviction that we live by truth alone! If these be our myths and rituals, we do not need to take psychedelics to experience a bad trip, for we are already on one.

The primary importance of myth and ritual for understanding the psychedelic experience, as well as for structuring psychedelic experiments is today illustrated most forcefully by the use of peyote by the Native American Church. In the ceremonies of the NAC, quite powerful doses of peyote are often ingested, and “bad trips” essentially never occur. The few documented cases of negative result have uniformly involved a misuse of the sacrament outside of NAC ceremonies, noncompliance with the wisdom of the road-men or psychedelic guides for the ceremonies, or the simultaneous use of alcohol. Within the structure of the NAC, the peyote sacrament has continually been a very powerful and efficacious one: by the definition of sacrament which we use in the Christian tradition, peyote seems to many to be far more the genuine article than the wine or bread, whose potency one must take on faith alone. (Note that the mescaline which Huxley and Braden ingested, is the main active component of peyote.) So let’s get this straight: the primitive, backward, ignorant, irrational Indian, laboring under a childsh and simplistic religious paradigm, can ingest heroic quanities of a potent “hallucinogen” and derive the most postive and human effects from this “risky” behavior; yet one of us modern, rational, truth-loving, supermen know not whether the same dose might send us permanently over the brink and into the looney-bin. I detect a faulty paradigm somewhere.

(…)

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