I sometimes think we’ve allowed our gardens to be bowdlerized, that the full range of their powers and possibilities has been sacrificed to a cult of plant prettiness that obscures more dubious truths about nature, our own included. It hasn’t always been this way, and we may someday come to regard the contemporary garden of vegetables and flowers as a place almost Victorian in its repressions and elisions.
For most of their history, after all, gardens have been more concerned with the power of plants than with their beauty — with the power, that is, to change us in various ways, for good and for ill. In ancient times, people all over the world grew or gathered sacred plants (and fungi) with the power to inspire visions or conduct them on journeys to other worlds; some of these people, who are sometimes called shamans, returned with the kind of spiritual knowledge that underwrites whole religions. The medieval apothecary garden cared little for aesthetics, focusing instead on species that healed and intoxicated and occasionally poisoned. Witches and sorcerers cultivated plants with the power to “cast spells” — in our vocabulary, “psychoactive” plants. Their potion recipes called for such things as datura, opium poppies, belladonna, hashish, fly-agaric mushrooms (Amanita muscaria), and the skins of toads, which can contain a powerful hallucinogen. These ingredients would be combined in a hempseed-oil-based “flying ointment” that the witches would then administer vaginally using a special dildo. This was the “broomstick” by which these women were said to travel.
The medieval gardens of witches and alchemists were forcibly uprooted and forgotten (or at least euphemized beyond recognition), but even the comparatively benign ornamental gardens that came after them went out of their way to honor the darker, more mysterious face of nature. The Gothic gardens of England and Italy, for example, always made room for intimations of mortality — by including a dead tree, say, or a melancholy grotto — and the occasional frisson of horror. These gardens were interested in changing people’s consciousness, too, though more in the way a horror movie does than a drug. It’s only been in modern times, after industrial civilization concluded (somewhat prematurely) that nature’s powers were no longer any match for its own, that our gardens became benign, sunny, and environmentally correct places from which the old horticultural dangers — and temptations — were expelled.
Or if not expelled, almost willfully forgotten. For even in Grandmother’s garden you’re apt to find datura and morning glories (the seeds of which some Native Americans consume as a sacramental hallucinogen) and opium poppies — right there, the makings of a witch’s flying ointment or apothecary’s tonic. The knowledge that once attended these powerful plants, however, has all but vanished. And as soon as this plant knowledge is restored to consciousness — as soon as, say, one forms the intention of slitting the head of an opium poppy to release its narcotic sap — so too must be its taboo. Curiously, growing opium poppies in America is legal — unless, that is, it is done in the knowledge that you are growing a drug. Then, rather magically, the exact same physical act becomes the felony of “manufacturing a controlled substance.”
With the solitary exception of the Eskimos, there isn’t a people on Earth that doesn’t use psychoactive plants to effect a change in consciousness, and there probably never has been. As for the Eskimos, their exception only proves the rule: historically, Eskimos didn’t use psychoactive plants because none of them will grow in the Arctic. As soon as the white man introduced the Eskimos to fermented grain, they immediately joined the consciousness changers. This suggests that the desire to alter one’s experience of consciousness may be universal.
Nor is the desire limited to adults. Andrew Weil, who has written two valuable books treating consciousness changing as a “basic human activity,” points out that even young children seek out altered states of awareness. They will spin until violently dizzy (thereby producing visual hallucinations), deliberately hyperventilate, throttle one another to the point of fainting, inhale any fumes they can find, and, on a daily basis, seek the rush of energy supplied by processed sugar (the child’s plant drug of choice).
As the examples from childhood suggest, using drugs is not the only way to achieve altered states of consciousness. Activities as different as meditation, fasting, exercise, amusement-park rides, horror movies, extreme sports, sensory or sleep deprivation, chanting, music, eating spicy foods, and taking extreme risks of all kinds have the power to change the texture of our mental experience to one degree or another. We may eventually discover that what psychoactive plants do to the brain closely resembles, on a biochemical level, the effects of these other activities.
Human cultures vary widely in the plants they use to gratify the desire for a change of mind, but all cultures (save the Eskimo) sanction at least one such plant and, just as invariably, strenuously forbid certain others. Along with the temptation seems to come the taboo. The reasons for drawing the bright line here and not there generally make more sense within the culture itself, rooted as they are in its values and traditions, than they do outside it. But the reasons cultures give for promoting one plant and forbidding another are remarkably fluid in both time and space; one culture’s panacea is often another culture’s panapathogen (root of all evil). Think of the traditional role of alcohol in the Christian West as compared to the Islamic East. Indeed, one culture’s panacea can, over time, transmogrify into that same culture’s panapathogen, as happened to opiates in the West between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Tobacco smoking and coffee drinking were taboo in the West before the Industrial Revolution. The German historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch suggests that the two drugs became socially acceptable because they aided in industrialization’s “reorientation of the human organism to the primacy of mental labor.”
Historians can explain these shifts much better than scientists can, since they usually have less to do with the intrinsic nature of the various molecules involved than with the powers that cultures ascribe to them and the changing needs of those cultures. Cannabis in American culture has at various times been said to foster violence (in the 1930s) and indolence (today): same molecule, opposite effect. Promoting certain plant drugs and forbidding others may just be something cultures do as a way of defining themselves or reinforcing their cohesion. It’s hardly surprising that something as magical as a plant with the power to alter people’s feelings and thoughts would inspire both fetishes and taboos.
What is harder to comprehend is why virtually all people, and more than a few animals, should have acquired such a desire in the first place. What good, from an evolutionary standpoint, could it do a creature to consume psychoactive plants? Possibly none at all: it’s a fallacy to assume that whatever is, is that way for a good Darwinian reason. Just because a desire or practice is widespread or universal doesn’t necessarily mean it confers an evolutionary edge.
In fact, the human penchant for drugs may be the accidental byproduct of two completely different adaptive behaviors. This, at least, is the theory Steven Pinker proposes in How the Mind Works. He points out that evolution has endowed the human brain with two (formerly) unrelated faculties: its superior problem-solving abilities and an internal system of chemical rewards, such that when a person does something especially useful or heroic, the brain is washed in chemicals that make it feel good. Bring the first of these faculties to bear on the second, and you wind up with a creature who has figured out how to use plants to artificially trip the brain’s reward system.
But doing so is not necessarily good for us. Ronald Siegel, an animal-intoxication expert, has shown that animals who get high on plants tend to be more accident-prone, more vulnerable to predators, and less likely to attend to their offspring. Intoxication is dangerous. But this only deepens the mystery: Why does the desire to alter consciousness remain powerful in the face of these perils? Or, put another way, why hasn’t this desire simply died out, a casualty of Darwinian competition: the survival of the soberest?
The Greeks understood that the answer to most either/or questions about intoxicants (and a great many other of life’s mysteries) is “Both.” Dionysus’s wine is both a scourge and a blessing. Used with care and in the proper context, many drug plants do confer advantages on the creatures who consume them — fiddling with one’s brain chemistry can be very useful indeed. The relief of pain, a blessing of many psychoactive plants, is only the most obvious example. Plant stimulants such as coffee, coca, and khat help people to concentrate and work. Amazonian tribal peoples take specific drugs to help them hunt, enhancing their endurance, eyesight, and strength. There are psychoactive plants that uncork inhibitions, quicken the sex drive, muffle or fire aggression, and smooth the waters of social life. Still others relieve stress, help people sleep or stay awake, and allow them to withstand misery or boredom. All these plants are, at least potentially, mental tools; people who know how to use them properly may be able to cope with everyday life better than those who don’t.
These are the easy cases, though: the plants that merely inflect the prose of life without rewriting it. “Transparent” is a term used to characterize drugs whose effects on consciousness are too subtle to interfere with one’s ability to get through the day and fulfill one’s obligations. Drugs such as coffee, tea, and tobacco in our culture, or coca and khat leaves in others, leave the user’s space-time coordinates untouched. But what about the more powerful plants, the ones that do alter the experience of space and time in such a way as to take users out of everyday life — out of, even, themselves?
Cultures tend to be more wary of these plants, and for good reason: they pose a threat to the smooth workings of the social order. This may be why most complex, modern, secular societies have seen fit to forbid them. Even the cultures that endorse these plants cloak them in elaborate rules and rituals as a way of containing or disciplining their powers. So what are these powers, and what commends them — not only to adventurous individuals in all societies but, in some cases, to entire societies as well? For many cultures have held these plants to be sacred.
No one has yet written the natural history of world religion, but we have some idea of the story such a book would tell. Among other things, it would force us to rethink the relation of matter and spirit — specifically, plant matter and human spirituality. For it would tell of how a select group of psychoactive plants and fungi (among them the peyote cactus, the Amanita muscaria and psilocybin mushrooms, the ergot fungus, the fermented grape, ayahuasca, and cannabis) were present at the creation of several of the world’s religions. One of the world’s earliest known religions was the cult of soma, practiced by the ancient Indo-Europeans of central Asia; according to its sacred text, the Rig-Veda, soma was an intoxicant with the powers of a god. People worshiped the drug itself — which ethnobotanists now think was Amanita muscaria — as a path to divine knowledge.
Much the same process took place again and again all over the ancient world as people experimented, individually and in groups, with the power of plants to transcend the here and now and induce ecstasy — to take them elsewhere. What these people discovered was that certain plants or fungi (ethnobotanists call them “entheogens,” meaning “the god within”) opened a door to another world. The images and words brought back from these journeys — visits with the souls of the dead and unborn, visions of the afterlife, answers to life’s questions — were powerful enough to compel belief in a spirit world and, in cases such as the cult of soma, to serve as the foundation of whole religions. Of course, plant drugs are not the only technologies of religious ecstasy; fasting, meditation, and hypnotic trances can achieve similar results. But often these techniques have been used to explore spiritual trails first blazed by the entheogens.
What a natural history of religion would show is that the human experience of the divine has deep roots in psychoactive plants and fungi. (Karl Marx may have gotten it backward when he called religion the opiate of the people.) This is not to diminish anyone’s religious beliefs; to the contrary, that certain plants summon spiritual knowledge is precisely what many religious people have believed, and who’s to say that belief is wrong? Psychoactive plants are bridges between the worlds of matter and spirit — or, to update the vocabulary, chemistry and consciousness.
As the sorcerers, shamans, and alchemists who used them understood, psychoactive plants stand on the threshold of matter and spirit, at the point where simple distinctions between the two no longer hold. Consciousness is what we’re talking about here, of course, and consciousness is precisely the frontier where our materialistic understanding of the brain stops — at least for the time being, but possibly forever. What’s interesting about a plant like marijuana is that it takes us right up to that frontier and may have something to teach us about what lies on the other side. We tend to smile indulgently at poets like Allen Ginsberg for believing that cannabis is a useful tool for exploring consciousness, but it turns out they may be right.
In the mid-1960s, an Israeli neuroscientist named Raphael Mechoulam identified the chemical compound responsible for the psychoactive effects of marijuana: delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, a molecule with a structure unlike any found in nature before or since. For years Mechoulam had been intrigued by the ancient history of cannabis as a medicine (a panacea in many cultures until its prohibition in the 1930s, it has been used to treat pain, convulsions, nausea, glaucoma, neuralgia, asthma, cramps, migraine, insomnia, and depression) and decided it might be worthwhile to isolate the plant’s active ingredient. But it was the popularity of marijuana as a recreational drug in the sixties, and the attendant official worries, that freed up the resources to underwrite this kind of work — and a great deal of other cannabinoid research that, taken together, has yielded more knowledge about the workings of the human brain than anyone could have guessed.
In 1988 Allyn Howlett, a researcher at the St. Louis University Medical School, discovered a specific receptor for THC in the brain — a type of nerve cell that THC binds to like a molecular key in a lock, causing it to activate.
On the assumption that the human brain would not have evolved a special structure for the express purpose of getting itself high on marijuana, researchers hypothesized that the brain must manufacture its own THC-like chemical for some as-yet-unknown purpose. (The scientific paradigm at work here was the endorphin system, which is tripped by opiates from plants as well as endorphins produced in the brain.) In 1992, some thirty years after his discovery of THC, Raphael Mechoulam (working with a collaborator, William Devane) found it: the brain’s own endogenous cannabinoid. He named it “anandamide,” from the Sanskrit word for “inner bliss.”
Someday soon Mechoulam and Howlett will almost surely receive the Nobel prize, for their discoveries opened a new branch of neuroscience that promises to revolutionize our understanding of the brain and lead to a whole new class of drugs. Following on their work, neuroscientists are now busy trying to figure out exactly how the cannabinoid network works — and why we should have one in the first place.
I put that question to Mechoulam and Howlett and several of their colleagues in cannabinoid research, and their answers, while speculative, are richly suggestive. The cannabinoid network is unusually complex and varied in its functions, I learned, in part because it seems to modulate the action of other neurotransmitters, such as serotonin, dopamine, and the endorphins. When I asked Howlett what the purpose of such a network might be, she began her answer by listing some of the various direct and indirect effects of cannabinoids: pain relief, loss of short-term memory, sedation, and mild cognitive impairment.
“All of which is exactly what Adam and Eve would want after being thrown out of Eden. You couldn’t design a more perfect drug for getting Eve through the pain of childbirth or helping Adam endure a life of physical toil.” She noted that cannabinoid receptors had been found in the uterus, of all places, and speculated that anandamide may not only dull the pain of childbirth but help women forget it later. (The sensation of pain is, curiously, one of the hardest to summon from memory.) Howlett speculated that the human cannabinoid system evolved to help us endure (and selectively forget) the routine slings and arrows of life “so that we can get up in the morning and do it all over again.” It is the brain’s own drug for coping with the human condition.
The scientists I talked to had a lot to say about the descent and biochemistry of cannabis, but about the plant’s effects on our experience of consciousness they were all but silent. What I wanted to know is: what exactly does it mean, biologically, to say a person is “high”? When I put this question to Allyn Howlett, her answer consisted of two rather parched words: “Cognitive dysfunction.” Cognitive dysfunction? OK, but isn’t that a little like saying that having sex elevates one’s pulse? It’s perfectly true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t get you any closer to the heart of the matter — or to the desire. John Morgan, a pharmacologist who has written widely about marijuana, points out that “we don’t yet understand consciousness scientifically, so how can we hope to explain changes in consciousness scientifically?” Mechoulam replied to my questions about what it means biochemically to be high simply by saying, “I am afraid we have to leave these questions still to the poets.”
So there it seemed the neuroscientists had stranded me, all on my unscientific own with a dime bag and the dubious company of such poets as Allen Ginsberg and Charles Baudelaire, Fitz Hugh Ludlow and (yikes!) Carl Sagan — but Carl Sagan wearing his goofiest nonscientific hat. You see, I’d discovered that in 1971 Sagan had anonymously published an earnest, marvelous account of his experiences with pot, which he credited with “devastating insights” about the nature of life. “There is a myth about such highs,” Sagan wrote:
The user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved while high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we’re down the next day. . . . If I find in the morning a message from myself the night before informing me that there is a world around us which we barely sense, or that we can become one with the universe, or even that certain politicians are desperately frightened men, I may tend to disbelieve; but when I’m high I know about this disbelief. And so I have a tape in which I exhort myself to take such remarks seriously. I say, “Listen closely, you son of a bitch of the morning! This stuff is real!”
(Sagan’s essay, attributed to “Mr. X,” appears in Marihuana Reconsidered, by Lester Grinspoon. After Sagan’s death in 1996, Grinspoon revealed Mr. X’s identity.)
As I proceeded with my literary and phenomenological investigations of the pot experience, though, I soon realized I had gotten something valuable from the scientists after all. They had inadvertently pointed me in the direction of a deeper understanding of what it is that cannabis does to human consciousness and what, possibly, it has to teach us about it. In fact, Howlett was probably right, if inelegant, in her simple formulation, because I’ve come to think that a “cognitive dysfunction” of a very special kind does in fact lie at the heart of it. Let me try to explain.
The scientists I spoke to were unanimous in citing short-term memory loss as one of the key neurological effects of the cannabinoids. In their own way, so were the poets who tried to describe the experience of cannabis intoxication. All talk about the difficulty of reconstructing what happened mere seconds ago and what a herculean challenge it becomes to follow the thread of conversation (or a passage of prose) when one’s short-term memory isn’t operating normally.
Yet the scientists said that the THC in cannabis is only mimicking the actions of the brain’s own cannabinoids. What a curious thing this is for a brain to do, to manufacture a chemical that interferes with its own ability to store memories — and not just memories of pain, either. So I e-mailed Raphael Mechoulam to ask him why he thought the brain might secrete a chemical that has such an undesirable effect.
Don’t be so sure that forgetting is undesirable, he suggested. “Do you really want to remember all the faces you saw on the New York City subway this morning?”
Mechoulam’s somewhat oblique comment helped me begin to appreciate that forgetting is vastly underrated as a mental operation — indeed, that it is a mental operation, rather than, as I’d always assumed, strictly the breakdown of one. Yes, forgetting can be a curse, especially as we age. But forgetting is also one of the more important things healthy brains do, almost as important as remembering. Think how quickly the sheer volume and multiplicity of sensory information we receive every waking minute would overwhelm our consciousness if we couldn’t quickly forget a great deal more of it than we remember.
The THC in marijuana and the brain’s endogenous cannabinoids work in much the same way, but THC is far stronger and more persistent than anandamide, which, like most neurotransmitters, is designed to break down very soon after its release. (Chocolate, of all things, seems to slow this breakdown process, which might account for its own subtle mood-altering properties.) What this suggests is that smoking marijuana may overstimulate the brain’s built-in forgetting faculty, exaggerating its normal operations.
This is no small thing. Indeed, I would venture that, more than any other single quality, it is the relentless moment-by-moment forgetting, this draining of the pool of sense impression almost as quickly as it fills, that gives the experience of consciousness under marijuana its peculiar texture. It helps account for the sharpening of sensory perceptions, for the aura of profundity in which cannabis bathes the most ordinary insights, and, perhaps most important of all, for the sense that time has slowed or even stopped. For it is only by forgetting that we ever really drop the thread of time and approach the experience of living in the present moment, so elusive in ordinary hours. And the wonder of that experience, perhaps more than any other, seems to be at the very heart of the human desire to change consciousness, whether by means of drugs or any other technique.
“Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by,” Friedrich Nietzsche begins a brilliant, somewhat eccentric 1876 essay called “The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.”
They do not know what is meant by yesterday or today; they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day, fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored. . . . A human being may well ask an animal: “Why do you not speak to me of your happiness but only stand and gaze at me?” The animal would like to answer, and say, “The reason is I always forget what I was going to say” — but then he forgets this answer too, and stays silent.
The first part of Nietzsche’s essay is a moving and occasionally hilarious paean to the virtues of forgetting, which he maintains is a prerequisite to human happiness, mental health, and action. Without dismissing the value of memory or history, he argues that we spend altogether too much of our energy laboring in the shadows of the past — under the stultifying weight of convention, precedent, received wisdom, and neurosis. Like the American transcendentalists, Nietzsche believes that our personal and collective inheritance stands in the way of our enjoyment of life and accomplishment of anything original.
“Cheerfulness, the good conscience, the joyful deed, confidence in the future — all of them depend . . . on one’s being just as able to forget at the right time as to remember.” He admonishes us to cast off “the great and ever-greater pressure of what is past” and live instead rather more like the child (or the cow) who “plays in blissful blindness between the hedges of past and future.” Nietzsche acknowledges that there are perils to inhabiting the present (one is liable to “falsely suppose all his experiences are original to him”), but any loss in knowingness or sophistication is more than made up for by the gain in vigor.
For Nietzsche the “art and power of forgetting” consist in a kind of radical editing or blocking out of consciousness everything that doesn’t serve the present purpose. A man seized by a “vehement passion” or great idea will be blind and deaf to all except that passion or idea. Everything he does perceive, however, he will perceive as he has never perceived anything before: “All is so palpable, close, highly colored, resounding, as though he apprehended it with all his senses at once.”
What Nietzsche is describing is a kind of transcendence — a mental state of complete and utter absorption well-known to artists, athletes, gamblers, musicians, dancers, soldiers in battle, mystics, meditators, and the devout during prayer. Something very like it can occur during sex, too, or while under the influence of certain drugs. It is a state that depends for its effect on losing oneself in the moment, usually by training a powerful, depthless concentration on One Big Thing. (Or, in the Eastern tradition, One Big Nothing.) If you imagine consciousness as a kind of lens through which we perceive the world, the drastic constricting of its field of vision seems to heighten the vividness of whatever remains in the circle of perception, while everything else (including our awareness of the lens itself) simply falls away.
Some of our greatest happinesses arrive in such moments, during which we feel as though we’ve sprung free from the tyranny of time — clock time, of course, but also historical and psychological time, and sometimes even mortality. Not that this state of mind doesn’t have its drawbacks; to name one, other people cease to matter. Yet this thoroughgoing absorption in the present is (as both Eastern and Western religious traditions tell us) as close as we mortals ever get to an experience of eternity. Boethius, the sixth-century Neoplatonist, said the goal of our spiritual striving is “to hold and possess the whole fullness of life in one moment, here and now, past and present and to come.” Likewise in the Eastern traditions: “Awakening to this present instant,” a Zen master has written, “we realize the infinite is in the finite of each instant.” Yet we can’t get there from here without first forgetting.
All those who write about cannabis’s effect on consciousness speak of the changes in perception they experience, and specifically of an intensification of all the senses. Common foods taste better, familiar music is suddenly sublime, sexual touch revelatory. Scientists who’ve studied the phenomenon can find no quantifiable change in the visual, auditory, or tactile acuity of subjects high on marijuana, yet these people invariably report seeing, hearing, and tasting things with a new keenness, as if with fresh eyes and ears and taste buds.
You know how it goes, this italicization of experience, this seemingly virginal noticing of the sensate world. You’ve heard that song a thousand times before, but now you suddenly hear it in all its soul-piercing beauty, the sweet, bottomless poignancy of the guitar line like a revelation, and for the first time you can understand, really understand, just what Jerry Garcia meant by every note, his unhurried cheerful-baleful improvisation piping something very near the meaning of life directly into your mind.
Or that exceptionally delicious spoonful of vanilla ice cream — ice cream! — parting the drab curtains of the quotidian to reveal, what? The heartrendingly sweet significance of cream, yes, bearing us all the way back to the breast. Not to mention the never-before-adequately-appreciated wonder of: vanilla. How astonishing is it that we happen to inhabit a universe in which this quality of vanilla-ness — this bean! — happens also to reside? How easily it could have been otherwise, and just where would we be (where would chocolate be?) without that singular irreplaceable note, that middle C on the Scale of Archetypal Flavors? (Paging Dr. Plato!) For the first time in your journey on this planet you are fully appreciating Vanilla in all its italicized and capitalized significance. Until, that is, the next epiphany comes along (Chairs! People thinking in other languages! Carbonated water!) and the one about ice cream is blown away like a leaf on the breeze of free association.
Nothing is easier to make fun of than these pot-sponsored perceptions, long the butt of jokes about marijuana. But I’m not prepared to concede that these epiphanies are as empty or false as they usually appear in the cold light of the next day. In fact, I’m tempted to agree with Sagan that marijuana’s morning-after problem is not a question of self-deception so much as a failure to communicate — to put “these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we’re down the next day.” We simply don’t have the words to convey the force of these perceptions to our straight selves, perhaps because they are the kinds of perceptions that precede words. They may well be banal, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t at the same time profound.
Marijuana dissolves this apparent contradiction, and it does so by making us temporarily forget most of the baggage we usually bring to our perception of something like ice cream, our acquired sense of its familiarity and banality. For what is a sense of the banality of something if not a defense against the overwhelming (or at least whelming) power of that thing experienced freshly? Banality depends on memory, as do irony and abstraction and boredom, three other defenses the educated mind deploys against experience so that it can get through the day without being continually, exhaustingly astonished.
It is by temporarily mislaying much of what we already know (or think we know) that cannabis restores a kind of innocence to our perceptions of the world, and innocence in adults will always flirt with embarrassment. The cannabinoids are molecules with the power to make romantics and transcendentalists of us all. By disabling our moment-by-moment memory, which is ever pulling us off the astounding frontier of the present and throwing us back onto the mapped byways of the past, the cannabinoids open a space for something nearer to direct experience. By the grace of this forgetting, we temporarily shelve our inherited ways of looking and see things as if for the first time, so that even something as ordinary as ice cream becomes Ice Cream!
There is another word for this extremist noticing — this sense of first sight unencumbered by knowingness, by the already-been-there’s and done-that’s of the adult mind — and that word, of course, is wonder.
Memory is the enemy of wonder, which abides nowhere else but in the present. This is why, unless you are a child, wonder depends on forgetting — on a process, that is, of subtraction. Ordinarily we think of drug experiences as additive. It’s often said that drugs “distort” normal perceptions and augment the data of the senses (adding hallucinations, say), but it may be that the very opposite is true — that they work by subtracting some of the filters that consciousness normally interposes between us and the world.
This, at least, was Aldous Huxley’s conclusion in The Doors of Perception, his 1954 account of his experiments with mescaline. In Huxley’s view, the drug — which is derived from peyote, the flower of a desert cactus — disables “the reducing valve” of consciousness, his name for the conscious mind’s everyday editing faculty. The reducing valve keeps us from being crushed under the “pressure of reality,” but it accomplishes this at a price, for the mechanism prevents us from ever seeing reality as it really is. The insight of mystics and artists flows from their special ability to switch off the mind’s reducing valve. I’m not sure any of us ever perceives reality “as it really is” (how would we know?), but Huxley is persuasive in depicting wonder as what happens when we succeed in suspending our customary verbal and conceptual ways of seeing. He writes with a wacky earnestness about the beauty of fabric folds, a garden chair, and a vase of flowers: “I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation — the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.”
I think I understand Huxley’s reducing valve of consciousness, though in my own experience the mechanism looks a little different. I picture ordinary consciousness more as a funnel or, even better, as the cinched waist of an hourglass. In this metaphor the mind’s eye stands poised between time past and time to come, determining which of the innumerable grains of sensory experience will pass through the narrow aperture of the present and enter into memory. I know there are some problems with this metaphor, the main one being that all the sand eventually passes through the waist of an hourglass, whereas most of the grains of experience never make it past our regard. But the metaphor at least gets at the notion that the principal work of consciousness is eliminative and defensive, maintaining perceptual order to keep us from being overwhelmed.
So what happens under the influence of drugs or, for that matter, inspiration? In Huxley’s metaphor, the reducing valve is opened wide to admit more of experience. This seems about right, though I’d qualify it by suggesting (as Huxley’s own examples do) that the effect of altered consciousness is to admit a whole lot more information about a much smaller increment of experience. “The folds of my gray flannel trousers were charged with ‘is-ness,’ ” Huxley tells us, before dilating on Botticelli draperies and the “Allness and Infinity of folded cloth.” The usual process by which the grains of perception pass us by slows way down, to the point where the conscious “I” can behold each grain in its turn, scrupulously examining it from every conceivable angle (sometimes from more angles than it even has), until all there is is the still point at the hourglass’s waist, where time itself appears to pause.
But is this wonder the real thing? At first glance, it wouldn’t seem to be: a transcendence that’s chemically induced must surely be fake. Artificial Paradises is what Charles Baudelaire called his 1860 book about his experiences with hashish, and that sounds about right. Yet what if it turns out that the neurochemistry of transcendence is no different whether you smoke marijuana, meditate, or enter a hypnotic trance by way of chanting, fasting, or prayer? What if, in every one of these endeavors, the brain is simply prompted to produce large quantities of cannabinoids, thereby suspending short-term memory and allowing us to experience the present deeply? There are many technologies for changing the brain’s chemistry; drugs may simply be the most direct. (This doesn’t necessarily make drugs a better technology for changing consciousness — indeed, the toxic side effects of so many of them suggest that the opposite is true.) From a brain’s point of view, the distinction between a natural and an artificial high may be meaningless.
Aldous Huxley did his best to argue us out of the view that a chemically conditioned spiritual experience is false — and he did so long before we knew anything about cannabinoid receptor networks. “In one way or another,” he writes, “all our experiences are chemically conditioned, and if we imagine that some of them are purely ‘spiritual,’ purely ‘intellectual,’ purely ‘aesthetic,’ it is merely because we have never troubled to investigate the internal chemical environment at the moment of their occurrence.” He points out that mystics have always worked systematically to modify their brain chemistry, whether through fasting, self-flagellation, sleeplessness, hypnotic movement, or chanting. (Huxley suggests that the reason there aren’t nearly as many mystics and visionaries walking around today, as compared to the Middle Ages, is the improvement in nutrition. Vitamin deficiencies wreak havoc on brain function and probably explain a large portion of visionary experiences in the past.)
The brain can be made to drug itself, as seems to happen with certain placebos. We don’t merely imagine that the placebo antidepressant is working to lift our sadness or worry; the brain is actually producing extra serotonin in response to the mental prompt of swallowing a pill containing nothing but sugar and belief. What all this suggests is that the workings of consciousness are both more and less materialistic than we usually think: chemical reactions can induce thoughts, but thoughts can also induce chemical reactions.
Even so, the use of drugs for spiritual purposes feels cheap and false. Perhaps it is our work ethic that is offended — you know: no pain, no gain. Or maybe it is the provenance of the chemicals that troubles us, the fact that they come from outside. Especially in the Judeo-Christian West, we tend to define ourselves by the distance we’ve put between us and nature, and we jealously guard the borders between matter and spirit as proof of our ties to the angels. The notion that spirit might turn out in some sense to be matter (and plant matter, no less!) is a threat to our sense of separateness and godliness. Spiritual knowledge comes from above or within, but surely not from plants. Christians have a name for someone who believes otherwise: pagan.
The challenge these plants posed to monotheism at its inception was profound, for they threatened to divert people’s gaze from the sky, where the new God resided, down to the natural world all around them. The magic plants were, and remain, a gravitational force puling us back to earth, to matter, away from the there and then of Christian salvation and back to the here and now. Indeed, what these plants do to time is perhaps the most dangerous thing about them — dangerous, that is, from the perspective of a civilization organized on the lines of Christianity and, more recently, capitalism.
Christianity and capitalism are both probably right to detest a plant like cannabis. Both faiths bid us to set our sights on the future; both reject the pleasures of the moment and the senses in favor of the expectation of a fulfillment yet to come — whether by earning salvation or by getting and spending. More even than most plant drugs, cannabis, by immersing us in the present and offering something like fulfillment here and now, short-circuits the metaphysics of desire on which Christianity and capitalism — and so much else in our civilization — depend.
“The Botany of Desire” is excerpted from The Botany of Desire, by Michael Pollan. ©2001 by Michael Pollan. It is used by permission of Random House, Inc.
