Drugs let you dismiss what you experience while they affect you. Under the influence, we say. We blame intoxication, a poisoning. Some drugs we call hallucinogens. They engender false visions, we claim. Drugs let us deny what we experience because we ascribe cause to them. They’re scapegoats to let us slip past what ever doesn’t jibe with our prejudices and preferences. On drugs, as if it’s a viewing platform — if we experience it ‘on drugs’ then it’s not real. It’s apart from reality if drugs are involved.
Can any experience be apart from reality? Where is such a place, space, or zone? Isn’t reality literally everything? “Is that concrete all around, or is it in my head?” Bowie sang. “Dreamer, you’re nothing but a dreamer, but can you put your hands in your head, oh no.” Supertramp made the same distinction: the intangible is not real reality, it’s fake reality.
Are fakes not part of the entire scope of the art world?
Drugs offer absolution from having to accept certain experiences as fact. This keeps us sane. Sanity is defined, it seems, by how much reality we agree to deny.
Graham Hancock’s book Supernatural details his shamanic experiences with ayahuasca, a DMT-based drug compound. ‘Under its influence’ he entered what he calls the spirit realm, the world of plant and animal spirits. Gaia’s animus, as it were. ‘On drugs’ he experienced this; was it ‘real’?
Thing is, the information imparted by the spirits seen and interacted with ‘while intoxicated’ is provable. It is real and can be confirmed. There is no way else to trace and calculate, for example, the recipe for ayahuasca. It requires plants from all over a continent, many of which are rare and the effects of which unknown. Each must be handled in precise, delicate ways and be combined with others in complicated, highly-specific ways, cooked over weeks or months of precise adjustments in strict and changing conditions. It would require decades, generations perhaps, to develop such a recipe via trial-and-error, if it could be done at all. It would employ a process any one step of which results in failure, one that needs constant attention over years. One would need to know the goal all along, too, else why do it?
Shamans say they were taught how to do it during natural visits to their Dreamland, their Magic Realm, their Spirit World. They were told about the compound so they could show other, less-sensitive people this spirit world because it would boost their receptivity.
The spirits of the plants instructed the shamans how to do it, they claim, and sure enough, it’s the only reasonable explanation.
Yet it is also irrational according to our materialist definition of sanity, which excludes ‘hallucination’ experienced ‘on drugs’. Those are illusions. As if what goes on in our minds is not part of reality. Which is itself insanity.
We begin to see reality as nested context. It relies strongly on viewpoint. Information affects it strongly, which in turn relies on data. Quantum physics understands. Perception collapses particle-wave form potential. Until it’s seen, it’s a cloud of possible functions, an array of futures not yet present. Not yet real.
We collapse the possible into the real.
Seeing makes it so.
Experience defines reality, drugs or not. What we call delusions are simply experiences outside accepted, materialist consensual perception.
Many minds have probed these seeming contradictions and anomalies, from Kafka to PKD, Shröedinger to Tesla. While Aleister Crowley’s argument that Love is the Law, Love under Will, pivots on uncertainty and perception, Huxley’s hinges on a good solid door of English oak to keep what’s not real in a closed mental room.
East meets West when we take down the oak door and hang a beaded curtain.
England’s Oldest Door, No Mr. Mojo Risin’. Note the black iron Huxley Hinges.
