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The Far-Off Land offers an explanation of psychedelia that appears to me pretty spot on. Seaich stresses the primacy of lasting perspective change after coming down from the trip. But he achieves this by highlighting past experience and memory (The Far-Off Land) as vivid realities in the psychedelic experience, and treats these properties as much greater and more important than the impeccably awesome visuals.
The idea here is that by accessing this land, so to speak, we learn how parts of our lives and and experiences and trends of our past affected how we think, act, and think of ourselves, to the point of coming in full contact with the forces that shape our identity. Learning from our past gives us a better understanding of our selves, motivations and cognitions, and through this we tangentially learn about momentum as the moving principle of the mind of matter. By manifesting past experience and situating our attention at the end-point of it all--the existential now--psychedelia helps us realize that our identities are a result of millennia of evolving biology within an organizational universe.
My only compass is that this text, in many ways, makes a lot of sense to me.
The Far-Off Land
An Attempt At a Philosophical Evaluation of the Hallucinogenic Drug Experience
by Eugene Seaich
Excerpts:
Ever since mescaline became available, the close resemblance between its effects and the symptoms of schizophrenia has been noted. In a classic study of the “mescaline psychosis,” Tayleur Stockings (1940) observed that both “paranoia” and “catatonia” can be produced by administration of the drug. Psychiatrists and pharmacological researchers have accordingly suggested that mescaline, LSD, and related chemicals might provide a clue to the nature of insanity. Many studies have been made, and continue to be made, in hopes that an ultimate cure for mental illness might be found.
But, other studies of the human mind await the application of hallucinogenic tools, studies that might prove even stranger and more illuminating than those of the pharmacological laboratory.
Deep within each of us, the past slumbers on. All of the patterns of our understanding lie buried in the unconscious memory, shaping our desires, our inspirations, and our dreams. It is these ancient memories, particularly those at the deepest level of the organism, that perpetually appear as haunting suggestions of a prior existence, or a higher reality, which prefigures our picture of human life. This vast residue of mental experience is what the Greeks recognized as the daimon, or the sense of destiny that drives our conscious energies toward their necessary fulfillment. As an active repository of intuitive knowledge, it integrates and guides our understanding of reality; whatever we know, or feel, or hope to attain is rooted in its primal soil.
It has seemed to me that the well-established properties of the hallucinogenic drugs might be well employed to enable us to explore this far-off land, which is in effect our subconscious mind. Were we to learn its secrets, we would better understand our own desires and the motives that drive us through life. Still better, the secrets of human history would perhaps be discovered as the eternal patterns of imagination that have shaped our spiritual existence. But, perhaps most important of all, to penetrate the well of the past might restore to us that visionary perception that we think we once possessed. Legend and myth are curiously persistent in their suggestion that the human race formerly enjoyed the delights of paradise; actually, I believe that this paradise has been fashioned perennially by each of us from his own recollection of life’s initial innocence, and therefore awaits recreation from the depths of primal memory. If this is true, the strange drugs that the Indians left to us might prove to be the very Hermetic Secret sought after by the alchemists.
[...]
Perhaps the greatest significance of the deeper stages of mescaline or LSD perception is that the subject now stands face to face with this integrative bedrock of memory. Even more meaningful than the brilliant visual phantasmagoria are the ideational processes that they reveal, processes that are in fact the basic content of human experience.
[...]
Amongst the symbols and archetypes of cultural life, the entirety of our past lies root-active, waiting through the years of intellectual distraction to be reawakened in adult experience. Buried in this store of memory are the patterns of all the perceptions that we experience as reality; for this very reason, the psychogenic reencounter with our primal vitality can reveal the meaning of whatever ordinary existence has to offer of genuine significance and fulfillment of inner destiny.
[...]
During the hallucinogenic experience, one is frequently obliged to undergo such an encounter with the naked soul, robbed of its “outer-directed” pretensions and driven by the need to rationally cope with the material released from the inner consciousness. The nature of this encounter necessarily varies with the subject, but since one’s visions are but projections of the self, the self is inevitably forced to evaluate its own image, resulting in varying degrees of apprehension. Anxieties, fears, practiced deceits, and neurotic habits, all emerge under a powerful magnifying lens, along with the illusions that constitute one’s appraisal of reality. To be brought face to face with one’s own defects may be a terrifying experience, but the truthfulness of LSD and mescaline is such that it does not spare the beholder unpleasant facts regarding himself.
[...]
Questions of a metaphysical nature are concretely reduced to the experiences that created and then revealed the conceptual processes behind our drama of reality and meaning with eidetic clarity.
[...]
A few moments after ingesting a suitable dose of LSD or mescaline, one suddenly and unexpectedly notes that familiar objects in the room have acquired strange qualities. Without altering their appearance, they begin to suggest new facets of meaning that elude analysis: invisible as electricity, yet irresistibly real. The sense of “otherness” that we earlier described begins to unfold, revealing forgotten glimpses of adventure and mystery. A calm, euphoric tranquility pervades the mind, which suddenly discovers that it is gazing on pure, timeless reality.
Things are no longer fragments of some metaphysical system, but primal objects whose beauty is integral with their essence, as is the blue of the sky or the wetness of water. All the values that have been previously taken for granted are suddenly impressed upon the beholder as palpable notions, such as the quality of straightness inherent in lines, the smoothness of surfaces, or the symmetry of some design. These geometric archetypes, which are the basis of the plastic arts, are revealed with such tangible acuteness that a fresh, vital aspect of matter is disclosed, corresponding to the suggestions of myth and legend. One is overwhelmed by the supreme fact that a wall is flat or that a line is straight; these are no longer abstract categories of geometry and space, but splendid actualities to be contemplated with endless satisfaction. [...]
The simplest texture is suddenly drenched with the kind of poetic significance that has always tantalized the dreams of our greatest painters. One gazes upon a newly discovered world of wood-grains, fabrics, lacquers, glazes, and fragile transparencies all cloudless and pellucid as the beauties of Paradise, when first beheld in childlike wonder. The remains of food on a soiled plate are more miraculous than the colors of a Van Gogh masterpiece, and the mystery of a colored button lying on a white tile drain surpasses the whole Arabian Nights.
[...]
The world of mythology and ecstatic vision suddenly opens up to the perceiver, who begins to experience for himself what history has restricted to a fabled few.
[...]
The Gaels dream of the lost Isle in the West, Tir-na-n-Og, the land of Eternal Youth, called Avalon by the Brythonic Celts. According to the Taoist symbolism of the Golden Flower, the beginning of things to which the soul longs to return is a state of perfect oneness, unconscious of the opposition of good and evil, located in a sea of primal life-force, comparable to the Waters of Life that flowed forth from Eden.
[...]
For, in worrying over much about the self, one exhausts one’s vital energy and inhibits all normal activity. True “selflessness” is not to be construed as mere maudlin “charity” or the so-called “love of others” (which is more often than not a piously concealed means of glorifying the self); it is rather the complete forgetfulness of self-consciousness and its accompanying anxiety, which permits one to act with natural innocence and efficiency.
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