Magic in Life and Evolution

I’ve added a new PDF to the download page. Magic in Life and Evolution combines three posts from this blog–We’re all hard-wired for magic, You are the first line of defense against your own experience, and The problem of living with magic–in sequence with light editing for style and continuity.

America’s Favorite Pastime

Here’s Todd Snider performing his song “America’s Favorite Pastime,” about the legendary 1970 baseball game in which Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Dock Ellis pitched a no-hitter against the San Diego Padres while under the influence of LSD. Great, funny lyrics. It’s all set and setting, eh?

The problem of living with magic

Magic, like love, will find you. You can hide. You can scoff. Resistance is futile.

At the very least, you’ll be on the receiving end of other people’s magic. It might be a friend who bugs you about your horoscope or your Representative in Congress who believes in Noah’s Ark and votes accordingly.

If the believers don’t get you, your own brain will. Magic can creep out at any moment and grab you with prophetic dreams or flying saucers. Since the magic within you is the strongest, it’s also the most convincing and the hardest to resist.

We’re stuck with magic like we are with a million other evolutionary relics from jealousy to the appendix. The problem is not how to get rid of it—we can’t and, if we could, we wouldn’t be human beings any more—the problem is how to live with it.

Common sense advises preparation and familiarity, even for skeptics. That way, when magic shows up, it won’t take you by surprise and sweep you away.

It’s also good to bring a map of the territory showing well-marked hazards. The biggest peril may be literalism, the trap of taking unusual experiences at face value. If you’re too quick to accept your own experience, you may believe that you really are reading minds or seeing the future.

The boundaries of the danger zone are pretty clear. People who claim to have information or abilities that aren’t available to everyone else through ordinary means have left the realm of magic and crossed over into the occult. It’s one thing if the Tarot cards say that you can find true love; it’s something else if they say that you can levitate.

Evolution has us in an awful plight. If we ignore magic or pretend that it doesn’t exist, we’re shutting the door on a big part of human experience. On the other hand, if we go native and embrace magic, we run the risk of occult delusion. We need a safe path through the horns of the dilemma.

I cautiously recommend meditation to people who want to dip their toes in the waters of the inner abyss. Meditation—along with prayer, ritual, fasting, psychedelics, ecstatic dance, and lots of other techniques—clears the mind and lets in the beauty and wonder of the universe.

Meditation is about as innocuous as it gets, but there’s no guarantee. My old meditation group started with twenty minutes twice a day and ended with a plan to transform the world into a global theocracy.

The sad part is that a lot of people need meditation. They’re stressed out and hungry for a spiritual life, but they look at the shenanigans of meditation teachers and they sensibly flee in the opposite direction.

I’m not sure if there’s any good answer to the problem of living with magic, but I think that it makes sense to look at case studies of groups and individuals who explored the magical depths of human psychology and returned in triumph or tragedy. After two generations of the New Age, there are plenty of wise men and women who learned from their mistakes. They have a lot to offer.

I believe that these questions will become more important as our society loosens up and evolves toward enlightenment. For now, I’d like to pass on the two best pieces of advice I ever received:

Let love be your guide, and keep your crap detector turned up on high.

JUST SAY YES… to the War on Drugs

The band, that is. Their new album Lost in the Dream is wonderful. Perhaps naming a band after Nixon’s evil legacy is a form of exorcism. Let’s hope.

JUST SAY NO… to the War on Drugs

Here’s a public service announcement about the harm that the War on Drugs causes in our communities.

Neuropunked

In Neuropunked: 5 ways our brains are messing with our memories, author Victoria Stern describes how the brain alters our memories in ways that makes them unreliable.

“Psychologists at Northwestern University showed that each time you recall an event, your brain alters the memory by integrating new information—perhaps drawing on your current mood, activity or location, among other things.”

Our memories seem so real that we’re compelled to believe them even when they’re full of nonsense. Memories are like cheese in a mousetrap. If you’re not careful when you take the bait, you risk getting “neuropunked”–played for a sucker by your own nervous system.

In We’re all hard-wired for magic, I listed some other mental activities–mistaking correlation for causality, detecting patterns where there are none–that put us at risk of being neuropunked. It happens to all of us all the time. What could we do to stop it?

Peychedelics are medicine for people who are trapped

By now, I suppose we’ve all got the memo: psychedelic drugs have great medical potential. The next step, for me at least, is a better understanding of how they work.

There seems to be a big gap in our knowledge. When we discuss psychedelics at the level of chemistry and neuroscience, we use very precise, technical language. We talk about molecular structure, receptor sites in the nervous system, neurotransmitters, and so forth in great detail.

Then we move over to the clinical side where, say, a psychologist administers psilocybin to an alcoholic. The technical language goes away and we talk about “integrative experiences” and “wholeness” and so on to explain why the drug works.

As I see it, the switch from precise, scientific terminology to the vague language of spirituality is one of the mysteries of psychedelics. You wouldn’t see a gap like that with an antibiotic or decongestant.

My guess is that we resort to fuzzy explanations for psychedelic therapy because they’re the best we have. That doesn’t mean that the spiritual terminology is wrong, it just means that there’s a lot more work to do. Since the current period of mystery may last awhile, I’d like to propose some vague language of my own which, I hope, will shed some light and narrow the gap.

We know that psychedelics are useful for treating a broad range of conditions—addiction, PTSD, depression, autism, and anxiety for starters. I’m curious to know what these conditions have in common. At first, I naïvely expected a simple answer—a shared gene or neurochemical or some other MacGuffin that might expose the inner workings of psychedelic therapy. I don’t think I’m going to get my simple answer any time soon.

As it happens, however, I know a number of people who live with the serious conditions that are treated with psychedelics—addicts, alcoholics, and trauma victims. When they tell their stories, they talk about a feeling of imprisonment. People with PTSD describe an overpowering fear that compels them to avoid others or stay indoors. Addicts are slaves condemned to repeating the same destructive behaviors over and over.

Psychedelics can produce a powerful experience of freedom, as I discovered first hand when I took ayahuasca at the Santo Daime church in Oregon. It was like walking into a vast, open space free of the inner noise and endless thought loops I’d carried around for years.

For an addict or trauma victim, this taste of freedom could be the blessing of a lifetime. It could be the beginning of hope. Maybe that’s a key to understanding the value of psychedelic therapy.

Peychedelics are medicine for people who are trapped.

Slate article on quantum consciousness

There’s an excellent article on Slate about the abuse of quantum mechanics in pop culture. Author Matthew R. Francis does a great job exposing the flimsy arguments people use to connect quantum physics and consciousness. Along the way, he provides clear explanations of concepts like quantum entanglement, which are often hijacked by New Age proponents and twisted beyond recognition.

“Maybe there’s room for some small quantum effects in the brain, but I sincerely doubt those will be directly relevant for consciousness. That’s because almost anything involving individual quantum states requires isolation from environmental interference for the weirdness to show up. For example, most particles aren’t entangled in any meaningful way, because interactions with other particles change their quantum state.”

We’re used to quantum nonsense from pop culture gurus like Deepak Chopra. Francis points out that a few of the culprits are genuine physicists. He blames it on age, but every field has a handful of qualified PhDs who gleefully reject the consensus opinion. I’d guess that the number of physicists who believe in quantum consciousness is about the same as the number of biologists who reject evolution.

The cartoon accompanying the article is priceless. This is a must-read.

Psychedelics and the greater good

Psychedelics aren’t like other drugs. They break the mold in many ways—their uniquely powerful psychoactive effects, their ability to inspire mystical experiences, their roots in tribal cultures.

They are also, like the experiences they produce, difficult to understand. Is LSD a tool for neuroscientists studying the brain? Is it for psychologists treating their patients? For spiritual seekers looking for enlightenment?

Unlike drugs with a clear-cut purpose (Tylenol for headaches, say), psychedelics have a dual identity. They’re both medical and spiritual. Patients with serious conditions like addiction and depression can use them for relief. Healthy people can use them for personal growth and development.

Most people who write about psychedelics—me included—come from the more-or-less healthy camp. We pump out books and articles on a subject that’s purely optional for us. That’s fine as long as we don’t distract anyone from the deeper need. As my friend Jackie Vanden Heuvel puts it:

“Enlightenment is a bonus for those who are already on a healthy path, but is a godsend for someone who suffers.”

It’s easy to get carried away by mystical or utopian visions and forget the practical effects of psychedelic drugs. Obviously, whenever a person loses the handicap of depression or PTSD, the world becomes a better place. The consequences could go way beyond individual lives.

Moving psychedelics out of Schedule 1 would be a major blow to the War on Drugs. The effects might include a reduction in the prison population and changes to unjust laws and police practices that incarcerate one in six African American males.

We could also see a transformation of our health care system. Conventional drug therapy for serious illness may mean years of daily meds with debilitating side effects. By contrast, the research on psychedelics shows that a few sessions can lead to profound and long-lasting benefits. This new model of therapy could require major changes in the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. The resulting economic and social consequences could be as big as the health benefits.

These goals are all possible. That doesn’t mean they’re inevitable, however. Psychedelic therapy was quite promising 50 years ago until the research was derailed by politics and fear. This time, it makes sense to focus on the science and the pressing needs of medical patients who could benefit from legalization.

That path may not be as sexy as our mystical visions. It is, however, the greater good. The rest will follow.

The guru script

Recently, a friend invited me to join her meditation group. The four people in her group meet every week to practice Tai Chi. They start each session with a guided meditation.

She described me to her friends in the group as a person with a lot of experience with meditation who might be interested in joining and leading the sessions. The other people in the group responded enthusiastically.

When I read the email with the invitation, I had one of those “fork in the road” moments.

You know how, in the movies, a character has to make a crucial decision with huge consequences? For example, a person arrives at a Greyhound station and sees two coaches, one marked “Oshkosh” and the other “New York City.” The movie shows the chain of events that occurs when the character gets on one bus, then the other, resulting in triumph or disaster.

I read that email invitation and I flashed back to my years in a fringe religious sect. I recalled how it started—so many young and idealistic people ready to change the world. Maharishi was upbeat and accessible. It was like a big party.

Years passed and fewer and fewer people saw Maharishi in person. He withdrew to a secluded compound and surrounded himself with a small band of true believers. His teachings grew more and more bizarre. In his final years, he occasionally appeared on video, surrounded by vast floral displays and a computer-generated golden nimbus, to rail against democracy and threaten doom.

In the end, Maharishi didn’t turn out well, but how many of us would do a better job? Imagine the pressure he was under—decades of fawning adulation by crowds projecting their hopes on him. The constant drone of sycophants telling him what they thought he wanted to hear. The total lack of normal human relationships. How many of us could survive all that without cracking up?

So, I got that email invitation and I imagined myself sitting cross-legged looking out at eager faces waiting for spiritual insight. I hit Reply and firmly declined the offer.

If I’d taken the other bus, I doubt that I would turn out like Maharishi. I doubt I’d ever have the opportunity. I might have even done some good.

That’s all beside the point. I turned down the invitation to lead a group meditation for the same reason that some people say they don’t want to try heroin.

I might like it.