I dreamt about it this morning. In the blazing reddish light of a desert sunset I was walking a tightrope, a line suspended between unseen moorings. Beneath the slender fiber lay the abyss, the death of nerve.
My terror is a wind of change.
It is the immigrant’s fear of the new world my mother brought across the sea in steerage, through the portals of Ellis Island and into my description of reality.
It is the endlessly perpetuated terror of the Jew. There is no one outside the tribe whom you can trust, nowhere you can go in peace. Renounce yourself, and they still call you Jew. Celebrate yourself, for your myth has chosen you for persecution.
It is the terror of a man who has needed a woman, now alone with the revelation of his own potential for emptiness: a boy who rejected his mother fifteen years ago yet still wants her. The spring remains tensed.
It is the mortal terror of any alienated human, alone within a rational consciousness and bereft of magic.
I have confronted my terror many times now. Once, with the help of a psychedelic drug, I pushed it away from me into its own formless shape and wrestled with it for many hours, perhaps as Isaac once wrestled with his god. For the duration of that struggle I was reconnected with the unconscious: the drug had burned across long neglected synapses and made me whole.
But chemicals fade away. A technological fix is flawed in its essence. My fear perceived my gradual return to rationality and slipped back within me, weaker now but still awesome, a headless beast howling against the rising of the sun. I feel it sometimes in the morning when I wake into the disorientation of a depression. I flee into the rhythm of exercise. The flesh has power over the mind, as both are connected elements of a unity. And gradually my consciousness re-creates itself as a familiar fabric.
There’s a fearful hole inside me where the myth of my lover used to reside. I desperately sought to fill it as soon as it appeared. Fortunately I failed.
Now I have a new fantasy to explain myself: a way to achieve reconnection with the unconscious lies through the achievement of control over the ego; as William Irwin Thompson says, through learning to use the ego as the ego uses the hand; when the imperial ego can be denied its volition, then one can know oneself simultaneously as a whole and as a part of what is; the loss of love is only my path towards learning that I must find a good path towards reconnection.
Do I know enough now to begin?
The desire for knowing springs from a terror of helplessness. Epistemology attracts the most profoundly fearful of us all: that is its secret.
Were I to live within a sacred landscape, I would not own this passion for intellectual knowing.
To paraphrase Gregory Bateson, reason disconnected from the unconscious is profane madness, unholy disease. The evidence of the plague of purposive rationality, of logical positivism, of rational empiricism which infects technological culture floods over us as we violate the very earth which grants us succor. Herbert Marcuse tells us that our separation from the sacred developed with the rise of science because objectivity, by its very definition, requires alienation: like Faust, we gain power but lose our souls. Theodore Roszak traces the origins of our alienation back to the initial rejection of idols in the inception of Judaism and details the development of this estrangement throughout the evolution of the three major Western religions: the image of one god necessitates a consciousness which cannot perceive the godhead as immanent and universal. Julian Jaynes offers a theory which suggests an alternative though not necessarily conflicting version of this transformation: the breakdown of the bicameral mind, of the whole brain, results in our loss of connection with the right hemisphere, with the unconscious and the universe of the gods; we see the unconscious in the distance but are exiled from it by our atomistic reason.
According to Carlos Castaneda, Don Juan defines reality as a description learned from one’s culture. St. Augustine defines idolatry as “mankind tyrannized by the work of his own hands.”
I was raised in a rational, empirical, and positivistic universe. Reason described every aspect of what lay beyond the borders of me. The gears moved in and out with utter regularity, and when they didn’t, I learned how not to see what it was I ought not to see.
Yet my child’s mind engaged in resistance. Two dreams that I can clearly recall first experiencing prior to the age of seven have recurred periodically since then. One involves a journey through a higher civilization which flourishes on a distant planet on the other side of the galaxy. The other portrays a cosmic struggle between the forces of good and evil, with vast arrays of human, humanoid, and other sentient creatures fighting on both sides. Years later I found both of these dreams, now familiar to me by virtue of their repetition, in literature: the first in Childhood’s End, by Arthur Clarke, and in Journeys Out of the Body, by Robert Monroe; the second in The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien.
These dreams embody my passage into the collective unconscious. They are both archetypal and, Don Juan would tell us, as real as anything else we’ll ever experience. Throughout most of my life, my gate into this universal realm of consciousness has been shrouded by the forces of my terror. Now I’m just beginning to recognize its outline again. I dreamt of the distant civilization only last week. But when I’m there, I’m still terrified that I won’t be able to return home.
When I was in high school I learned about the treacherous powers of driving and rock and roll. Both are cultural forms which offer a path towards a kind of transcendence.
The car seduces us into its cultural sway through its promise of a seemingly boundless personal freedom and, within the experience of that freedom, a means towards a kind of religious experience. However, the transcendence elicited on the highway is spurious, an act of idolatry based not in a communion with other sparks of consciousness throughout the universe, but, rather, in a glorification of the imperial ego. Driving provides a majestic alienation; it seems to give us personal power beyond our usual selves, to draw energy out from our untapped potentials and fill us with feelings of control over time and space. But control is the ego’s game. It is not at issue in cosmic consciousness, in wholeness.
Abraham Maslow describes the peak experience — the state of being within a cosmic consciousness, a reconnection of the conscious and unconscious into an old and new unity — as including the perceiver’s sense of truth, goodness, beauty, wholeness, dichotomy-transcendence, aliveness, uniqueness, perfection, necessity, completion, justice, order, simplicity, richness, effortlessness, playfulness, self-sufficiency. In this universe, the ego is irrelevant; animism reigns as truth. Every part of what is has consciousness, is part of the energy of god.
Driving offers spurious transcendence. It is not a passage beyond the ego’s grip into cosmic consciousness; it is only the maximization of the range of the ego’s power. Yet, ironically, the experience of driving hour after infinite hour can usher one into a meditative consciousness. Thus, the paradox: in the bloating of the ego through a feast of power, excess can lead one beyond the ego towards a rendezvous with transcendence.
Remember: the central myth of those who rejected technological culture in the America of the nineteen-fifties was “on the road.” It is a contradictory myth, offering both corruption and transcendence.
I have driven across the North American continent half a dozen times, alone and with companions. Each crossing has led me to a vision . . . It is sometime after midnight. The air is crisp, bright stars piercing the blackness of the sky like static fireworks. For fifteen hours I have driven across expanses of the earth largely untouched by human endeavor, through Oregon and Nevada and on into Utah. I’ve spoken only to buy gas. Now, somewhere in the Great Salt Desert, I jolt the car roughly off the interstate and begin to roll across the salt flats. My passage is rough but without major obstruction. In ten minutes the racing lights of the highway have vanished. In another ten there are no signs that speak of any other human activity at all. I am finally alone on this tiny planet. I stop the car and start to walk away from its security. My caution wants to stop me, tie my feet to the salt and sand, but each time one foot stops, the other starts. I am a marionette, strings unseen by my conscious sight. I march like clockwork into the absolute night, and then, without warning, I freeze as if paralyzed. There’s something rushing towards me. In the distance, a roaring, an ethereal trampling, a stampede of spirits. It flows towards me like an onrushing breaker, and as I quake in terror, passes through me. For the instant in which we coincide, I am someone else: an old man from a small fishing village whose tragedy has brought him light and peace. And then it’s gone. I touch my head with both hands: it’s still there. I sit down in the sand and cry quietly.
It was experiences like this one which first began to prick holes in my rational description of reality. Driving, then rock and roll and drugs. The human need for transcendence is at least as powerful as the need for control: in the very material of the technological culture, in its power to shape matter to meet our material ends, lay the means for at least the beginnings of an escape from its alienating confines. At its peak in terms of cultural power, technology gave birth to forces which at least have a chance either to destroy it or control it. I am of the generation which embodies that paradox. I am that which I seek to destroy or control.
Rock and roll offers a kind of transcendence. Even without drugs, it can take you beyond yourself.
You can see its power clearly in “The Buddy Holly Story,” a movie which portrays scenes from the introduction of rock and roll into American culture. You’re inside a roller skating rink in Waco, Texas in 1956. Buddy and his band are playing traditional country and western music, and the hall is calm. Folks are doing whatever they’d be doing if the music weren’t there, except for a few people who are singing along quietly. But then, as if on a dare, the band kicks into a rocker. Kids start to clap along with the beat and dance to its captivating rhythm. Some of the adults join in. Others are repulsed by the wildness and begin to leave, trying to take their struggling children with them. Buddy and the band jump into a second rock and roll number, and the transformation is complete: what was a collection of individuals has now become an ecstatic communal ceremony.
Look at the experience carefully. Live rock and roll, what we’re trained to see as performers and audience, is actually more a ritual than a performance. It’s all individual movement shaped into a collectivity by a common rhythm: the synchronization of one’s inner rhythm with a public one, the diminution or loss of ego and a flow of narrowed consciousness into rhythm. It’s an analogue to meditation: narrowing consciousness is a route to expanding it. The very same understanding of the mechanics of consciousness informs the experience of every “primitive” celebratory ritual, of every tribal ceremony. As many observers have noted, rock and roll re-creates precisely the same external phenomenon as such ceremonies. It’s ecstatic, communal, and transcendent.
In a powerful sense, rock and roll is a religion of the technological culture. The lyrics of the most powerful rock and roll often make this identity explicit. Bruce Springsteen’s music provides perhaps the best example of this, as his songs deal largely with transcendence, salvation, and apocalypse, the basic religious themes. Daily life in technological America is a slow death, he tells us. The only salvation lies in an escape into transcendence. “In the day we sweat it out on the streets of a runaway American dream. At night we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machines . . . Baby, this town rips the bones from your back. It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap. We gotta get out while we’re young. . . .” Get out, but how? One path is driving. “Well, I’m no hero, that’s understood. All the redemption I can offer, girl, is beneath this dirty hood. . . .” “Well, the night’s busting out and these two lanes will take us anywhere. We got one last chance to make it real, to trade in these wings on some wheels. Climb in back, heaven’s waiting on down the tracks . . . riding out tonight to case the promised land. . . .” “Tonight, my baby and me, we’re gonna ride to the sea and wash these sins from our hands.” Another path is romantic love: a tortured aching for some kind of union, or reunion. “Together, Wendy, we can live with the sadness, I’ll love you with all the madness in my soul.” “I wanna die with you out on the streets tonight in an everlasting kiss.” Yet another path, a harder and less fantastic one, is the admission of despair and compulsion. “Tonight I’ll be on that hill ’cause I can’t stop, I’ll be on that hill with everything I’ve got. Lives on the line where dreams are found and lost, I’ll be there on time and I’ll pay the cost, for wanting things that can only be found in the darkness on the edge of town.” And finally, when there’s not even an edge of hope that remains, only the apocalypse can clear away the ravages of this technological wasteland, and let us begin anew. “There’s a dark cloud rising from the desert floor. I packed my bags and I’m heading straight into the storm. Gonna be a twister to blow everything down that ain’t got the faith to stand its ground. Blow away the dreams that tear you apart, blow away the dreams that break your heart, blow away the lies that leave you nothing but lost and brokenhearted. Well, the dogs on Main Street howl ’cause they understand. If I could take one moment into my hands, mister, I ain’t a boy, no, I’m a man. And I believe in a promised land.”
Rock and roll is power and sex, but not cosmic consciousness. . . .
You can ignore or denigrate the words easily enough. But when you put them together with the ritualistic power of the music and the seemingly holy charisma of the man on stage, a jumping and whirling shaman who can hold the hearts of six thousand people in his hands as easily as that of one, what you have seems as powerful as any burning bush in the wilderness. It feels as if it must be genuine.
Yet, rock and roll, like its cousin, driving, offers a spurious kind of transcendence: it provides the form of religious experience without any connection with a genuine content. While vivid and powerful, the transcendence fails to connect with any values beyond those of the ego or the id. Rock and roll is power and sex, but not cosmic consciousness. It is an ironically appropriate religious form in that while its energy was originally derived from its rebellion against the sterility and alienation of technological culture, it is totally dependent on technology, both in terms of its material needs and its values, and thus cannot provide a meaningful alternative to the culture which it rails against. All it can do is offer a glimpse of what an escape might mean; yet, at the same time, the force of rock and roll acts as an opiate to convince people that such an escape is either not necessary or not possible. Thus, now it is both the jailer and the window.
Rock and roll first exploded into the culture in the nineteen fifties as a form which allowed young people to reconnect with a primal archetype of communal ecstasy. While it still offers this access to the archetype, since its origins the music has evolved into its current decadence through the following stages: an innocent birth into power; an initial seduction through commercialization; reaction against the seduction and a rebirth into a renewed innocence; the conscious articulation of its previously implicit revolutionary values; and corruption through commercialization. You can see the articulation of this pattern in the lives of most famous rock and roll musicians: first they are naifs, then priests, then millionaires. Marcuse has explained this: one dimensional society will co-opt and corrupt almost any rebellion against it. For the moment and perhaps for good, rock and roll as a critical analysis and an alternative form, however incomplete, is dead. Obituary reads: choked to death on its own success. Only a few visionaries remain plying the old rock and roll trade. Everyone else is having brunch in Hollywood. Or sticking safety pins in their earlobes.
With the rebirth of rock and roll in the nineteen sixties came drugs, initially brought across from black culture just as the seeds of rock and roll had been, and then transformed by the cultural needs of young whites. You can see this pattern of learning from black experience in the lives of the beats of the nineteen fifties. The hippies of California began to follow a similar path a decade later, until a collaboration between mass media and big business exploded rock and roll and drugs and all the values associated with them all over the map of America. There was big money in the Beatles and their descendants, and even more in the drug business.
Most drugs are like the music; they serve only the ego and the id. Either they intensify sensation or they obliterate it. But the psychedelics are different. They can take you beyond the borders of your normal consciousness. The question, then, is where you go and what you make of it.
I knew a Shoshone medicine man once who walked a line of belief that included both the traditional Shoshone religious vision and that of the Native American Church. In that church peyote, a natural psychedelic, is a sacrament. In the cool of the early morning we used to sit by the rapids on the Little Wind River just north of Fort Washakie and swap stories. He had never met anyone of Jewish origins before. He was fascinated by stories about Jewish history I had learned in Hebrew school and had never appreciated as much as I did then. He had heard Christian missionaries talk about the chosen people who had killed Christ, and he couldn’t understand the seeming paradox. I suggested that it might be some expression of the will to patricide. He nodded thoughtfully and then told me the Shoshone myth of the young brave who must kill his own father, an aged chief who had turned against his people under the sway of evil spirits. Is it the same? he asked. I don’t know.
My friend would tell me about the cosmology of peyote, about the world of spirits which he could only enter with the aid of his benefactor, the power mushroom. It was a world very much different from this one and yet as clear and consistent in its description as the one we shared in our conversation. It was literally another reality: that’s what he told me. I couldn’t believe him then, at least not beyond my willingness to believe. I had previously read Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan and found myself drawn to the conception of reality as a learned description, but even when I granted that, my rational description still defined the reality I knew. Even under the influence of psychedelic drugs, the spaces which I had visited were all in some way logical extensions of the clockwork universe.
However, at the end of that summer, my friend allowed me to witness a phenomenon that effectively broke through the closed circle of my rational description for the first time. On a clear August afternoon, a small bank of dark clouds, like an island of gray and black in a sea of blue, drifted over the Wind River peaks to the west and inundated the site of the Shoshone sundance with a brief cloudburst. For barely a minute the rain swept across the parched land in a torrent. Then it stopped. My friend had told me that morning to expect this aberration of nature. The organizers of the sundance were violating the traditional law, and he wanted to punish them. He had journeyed into the spirit world and had enlisted the spirit of the storm to aid him in this pursuit. It would be this afternoon, he told me with anticipation. I should make sure to be there. I was.
When I look into myself, all that is central consists of contradictions. I am both what I disparage and what I value. From the vantage of my normal consciousness, I can’t even imagine what it would be like to be whole, to perceive truth.
In the culture of peyote the drug is a benefactor. It helps you to transcend your normal consciousness and gain access to another description of reality, a different cultural tradition founded on other archetypes within the collective unconscious. But in a technological culture, psychedelic drugs lack connection with any other description of reality which functions as a cultural whole. The drug can take you into the collective unconscious, into the form of cosmic consciousness, but you are without a culture which allows you to make sense of this experience other than through the forms of your technological thought. If the drug experience spills beyond those forms, then all you have is busyness: flash and fireworks, but no meaning. All human meaning flows from making sense of experience within culture. Without the matrix of meaning which culture provides, experience is only a jumble of sensation. That’s often what results from taking psychedelics with only a technological culture, one which denies the reality of non-ordinary states of consciousness, to guide you. You get a trip, but only an escape from without any sense of an escape into. And the thrill of a temporary escape palls eventually. Some drug users backed away from the experience altogether. Others, without a guide or benefactor, became obsessed with their own shadow sides and were consumed. Still others sought a more enduring means of entering into cosmic consciousness. The temporary experience of wholeness under the influence of the drug, the sense of reconnection between conscious and unconscious, made the fragmentation of normal consciousness unbearable. The acceptance of a religious tradition which offered relief from this daily horror was the only answer.
If all matter has consciousness, then all reality is subjective. Objectivity is, then, a particular kind of subjectivity which denies its own central truth for the sake of gaining technological power over nature.
If matter and energy are one, the same principle in different forms, then all energy has consciousness. Acupuncture and Kirlian photography show us that living things are not only physical systems but systems of energy as well. We all have/are auras which most of us in technological culture lack the vision to see.
We are matter and energy. Dualism is a construct of the mind; there is only one form of consciousness. That is what god is.
Psychedelic drugs led me away from the clockwork universe, but there was ultimately nowhere to go with them other than out . . . and back. There was no in, no alternative culture. They offered only a glimpse of heaven and a critique of hell.
Terror fuels my ego. My ego is less now than it once was but still immense. Despite my glimpse of an alternate reality I have resisted my own efforts at change. I go through the motions of epistemological search but only avail myself of my intellect. On that ground, I’m always safe, always free to remain as I am. And still I resist embracing any cultural description which limits what I call my freedom. I am the contradiction which seeks to escape from alienation as I maintain my desire to be free, and thus alienated, from culture.
I wonder if there is a middle ground, a meeting place between individual and culture. Thompson argues that there is indeed, that it consists of all individuals gaining personal access to the godhead such that everyone is Jesus or Buddha. His vision articulates a culture which successfully marries mysticism and technology, a culture in which the ego is diminished in power but maintained as a tool of the Self, of the whole being. Such a culture would be holy: all would be connected but still individual.
Thompson seems a prophet posing as a self-exiled academic. Why does he keep so many of his pedantic trappings if his vision is clear? I wonder.
One morning I wake up and pick Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance from the shelf next to my bed. I read through it quickly two years ago. Perhaps I want to know if I ought to read it again, as I am now.
In the section I have selected randomly, Pirsig explains that the answer to the crisis of technological civilization lies not in the rejection of reason as the primary epistemological form but in the invention of a higher form of reason, beyond classical analytical reasoning, which will allow us to make sense of a universe which includes technology and, thus, learn to control the impact of our power. From my previous reading, I recall Pirsig’s obsession with “quality” and his equation of “quality” with the Tao. I wonder if he and Thompson, though approaching from different sides of the mountain, are heading towards the same destination.
My question is answered: I do want to read Pirsig again.
Edward Sapir offers a theory which allows for the distinction of quality among cultures. He delineates two polarities, genuine and spurious, and offers four criteria for evaluating any particular culture’s position on this continuum. The continuum may be described by defining the aspects of a genuine culture, as follows:
- All parts of a culture are infused with intrinsic meaning and are inter-related. Meanings in the culture are integrated and authentic.
- Activities within the culture are spiritually meaningful and fulfilling to individuals as well as means to technical ends. Genuine culture starts from activities which are perceived as meaningful by individuals.
- Proximate ends within a genuine culture are vital and important; proximate ends are not seen as means. Ultimate ends are vital and achieved.
- A genuine culture is governed neither by the technological imperative nor by a consumption ethic but, rather, by the will to provide its members with control over the ends and means in their own lives.
I would add two additional criteria:
- A genuine culture achieves a constructive and healthy balance between the domain of cultural control and that of individual control.
- A genuine culture is based upon a description of reality within which the conscious and the unconscious are not only connected but integrated such that rational and sacred epistemological means co-exist and mediate each other’s paths.
Sapir’s theory gives us a critical tool for creating a society in which the culture is genuine. At least in theory it does. Yet we seem not to know how even to begin. I certainly don’t.
When I look into myself, all that is central consists of contradictions. I am both what I disparage and what I value. From the vantage of my normal consciousness, I can’t even imagine what it would feel like to be whole, to perceive truth. My psyche, partly the product of an alienated technological culture, lacks connection and integration. I know that now.
To a profound extent, a culture both creates and mirrors the psyches of its members. Those of us who are alienated and disconnected cannot transform technological culture if we remain as we are. We can plan and theorize and even act, but we will only succeed in replicating beyond us what there is within us. The nature of consciousness guarantees this outcome.
I needed access to power to accept this belief. Without regret, I chose to seek it in the most immediate way I knew. While I was driving across a reddish sweep of sunset, I finally knew that before anything else, I must transform myself.
© Copyright 1980 David Marshak
