Huxley did it under the influence of mescaline, a drug derived from the “sacred cactus,” peyote, used in American Indian rituals. Russell Kirk thought this was good scientific evidence to support religiosity in general against the “liberal humanists,” whom he regards as the prime villains in history. Kirk said, among other things, that “only the most dogmatic old-fangled materialist” would reject Huxley’s report a priori without duplicating the experiment. Being a dogmatic old-fangled materialist at the time, I resented this and argued about it a lot inside my head over a period of months. It seemed that, as a materialist, I had to accept one aspect of Huxley’s book that Kirk had not noted: the strong implication that consciousness is chemical in nature and changes as its chemistry changes. That was provocative.
The Materialist had his first drug trip on December 28, 1962, in an old slave-cabin in the woods outside Yellow Springs, Ohio. With my wife, Arlen, and our four small children, I had rented the cabin from Antioch College for $30 per month and had an acre of cleared land to grow food on, 30 acres of woods to seek Mystery in. Farming was only partly supporting us; I was working as Assistant Sales Manager for a microscopic business, the Antioch Bookplate Company in Yellow Springs. But we had found (we thought) a way to escape the regimented urban hive without starving to death.
Before eating the first peyote button, the Materialist asked his supplier (a black jazz musician), “Is this stuff dangerous at all?”
“The fuck,” he said. “The Indians been eating it every full moon for thousands of years.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s right,” the Materialist said, remembering also Huxley’s glowing description of his first trip. I quickly ate seven buttons and for the next 12 hours whirled through an unrehearsed and incoherent tour of the vestibule of Chapel Perilous — a most educational and transcendental experience.
A few years later, it would have been different, of course. The Materialist would have said, “But the newspapers claim that people sometimes go crazy on this stuff and flip out for months.”
And the Supplier would have said, “The newspapers also say our troops are in Vietnam to help the Vietnamese. Man, don’t believe any of the crap they say.”
And, being of a curious and experimental nature, I would have gone ahead anyway, but with a lot of doubt, and that could easily have turned into anxiety or outright panic. We later saw exactly that happen to others, after the press really got into gear on this story and built up the hysteria to fever-pitch.
As it was, the Materialist simply suffered the usual delusion of the first trip: he thought he was reborn. After all, back then, he had Russell Kirk and the National Review — the certified sages of sanctified conservatism — on his side.
When, in the following weeks, it became sadly obvious that I was not entirely reborn, and that many neurotic, depressive and egotistic programs still remained in my central computer, I was somewhat disillusioned. But the trip had been so interesting and ecstatic . . . Like the Lady of Spain in the poem, I tried “again. And again. And again and again and again.” By mid-1963, I had logged 40 trips to inner space and it was obvious that peyote was, indeed, a magical chemical, as the Indians claim, but that one had to be a shaman to know how to use it profitably.
We don’t propose to enthuse about those 40 peyote voyages in technicolor prose. There was more than enough of that kind of writing in the 1960s. In Dr. Timothy Leary’s terminology, each trip involved a transmutation of consciousness from the “symbolic” and linear terrestrial circuits of the nervous system to the somatic-genetic future circuits (Dr. Leary’s circuit theories are explained in Part Two, “Models and Metaphors.”) The Materialist learned to experience rapture and bliss, to transcend time. In each trip, the Body was Resurrected, Osiris rose from his tomb; I was godly and eternal for a while. Each time, the yo-yo effect (as Dr. Richard Alpert calls it) occurred within a day or so: I came down again. The next trip brought me back up, of course, but then, once more, I came down again; up-and-down, up-and-down — the yo-yo effect. It was alternately inspiring and exasperating.
But a change in my mind (my “neurological functioning,’ Dr. Leary would say) was slowly and subtly, beginning to happen.
The Materialist frequently had the hallucination of telepathic communication with plants, both when flying on the wings of peyote and when he was straight. Hallucination was the judgment of his engineering-trained rational mind; it seemed real as all get-out each time it happened. But the Materialist knew too much to take it seriously . . . and he continued to know too much until later in the ’60s, when Cleve Backster’s research with polygraphs produced some hard evidence that human-plant telepathy may be occurring all the time, usually outside the conscious attention of the human participant.
Several times the Materialist contacted an Energy or an Intelligence that seemed to deserve the description superhuman. It was obvious to me that I could easily, with a less skeptical cast of mind, describe these trans-time dialogues as meetings with actual gods or angels. (Quanah Parker, the great Cheyenne war-chief, who was converted to pacifism by a peyote trip and later founded the Native American Church, used to say, “The white man goes into his church and talks to Jesus. The Indian goes into his tipi, takes peyote, and talks with Jesus.”) I regarded the entities contacted as X’s — unknowns — and tried, in each experiment and in reflections between experiments, to find a psychological, neurological, or even parapsychological explanation.
The strangest entity I contacted in those twenty-odd months of psychedelic explorations appeared one day after the end of a peyote trip, when I was weeding in the garden and a movement in the adjoining cornfield caught my eye. I looked over that way and saw a man with warty green skin and pointy ears, dancing. The Skeptic watched for nearly a minute, entranced, and then Greenskin faded away “just a hallucination . . .”
But I could not forget him. Unlike the rapid metaprogramming during a peyote trip, in which you are never sure what is real and what is just the metaprogrammer playing games, this experience had all the qualities of waking reality, and differed only in intensity. The entity in the cornfield had been more beautiful, more charismatic, more divine than anything I could consciously imagine when using my literary talents to try to portray a deity. As the mystics of all traditions say so aggravatingly, “Those who have seen, know.”
Well, I had seen, but I didn’t know. I was more annoyed than enlightened.
But that was not to be my last encounter with that particular critter. Five years later, in 1968, the Skeptic read Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan, dealing with traditional Mexican shamanism and its use of the sacred cactus. Castaneda, an anthropologist, saw the same green man several times, and Don Juan Matus, the shaman, said his name was Mescalito. He was the spirit of the peyote plant.10 But the Materialist had seen him before he ever read a description of him. That was most perplexing to the Materialist.
A fairly plausible explanation is that Mescalito is an archetype of the collective unconscious, in the Jungian sense. He has been reported by many others besides Castaneda and me, and he always has the same green warty skin and is often dancing.11
However, might we dare consider that Mescalito may be just what the shamans (who know him best) always say he is — one of the “spirits” of the vegetation? Too silly an idea for sophisticates like ourselves? Paracelsus, the founder of modern medicine, believed in such spirits and claimed frequent commerce with them. So did the German poet Goethe and the pioneer of organic agriculture, Rudolph Steiner — and the ideas of Goethe and Steiner, once rejected as too mystical, are currently being seriously reconsidered by many ecologists.12
Or consider Gustav Fechner, the creator of scientific psychology and psychological measurement. Fechner lost his sight and then regained it, after which he asserted that with his new vision he saw many things normal people do not see — including auras around humans and other living creatures, and vegetation spirits just like Mescalito. George Washington Carver also claimed a link wi
th spirits in the vegetation, and so did the great Luther Burbank. Thomas Edison became so convinced of their literal existence that he spent many years trying to develop a photographic process that would render them visible.13
Marcel Vogel (whose corporation, Vogel Luminescence, has developed the red color used in fluorescent crayons, and the psychedelic colors popular in 1960s poster art) has been studying plant consciousness and vegetative “telepathy” for ten years now. In one experiment, Vogel and a group of psychologists tried concentrating on sexual imagery while a plant was wired up with a polygraph to reveal its electrochemical (“emotional”?) responses to their thoughts. The plant responded with the polygraph pattern typical of excitement. Vogel speculates that talking of sex could stir up in the atmosphere some sort of sexual energy, such as the “orgone” claimed by Dr. Wilhelm Reich. If this is true, the ancient fertility rites in which humans had sexual intercourse in freshly seeded fields might indeed have stimulated the fertility of the crops, and the shamans are not as naive as we like to think.14 Mescalito could be both an archetype of Jung’s Collective Unconscious and an anthromorphized human translation of a persistent signal sent by the molecular intelligence of the vegetative world. Naturally, the ability to decode such orgonomic or neuro-electric signals would be eagerly sought by all shamans in societies dependent on agriculture. In other words, according to this model, Mescalito is a genetic signal in our collective unconscious, but activated only when certain molecular transmissions from the plant world are received.
This shamanic kind of selective attention, or special perception, has been duplicated in the modern world by Dr. Vogel, who has given many demonstrations before audiences, in which he accurately reads vegetative signals from plants. It is no more spooky than the selective yogic trance of the average city-dweller, which allows him to walk in mindless indifference through incredible noise, filth, pandemonium, misery, neurosis, violence, psychosis, rape, burglary, injustice and exploitation, screening it all out and concentrating only on robot-repetition of his assigned role in the hive-economy. One can train oneself to receive or ignore a far wider variety of signals than the neurologically untrained realize.
A third model would be that Mescalito and all his kith and kin (the fairies and “little people,” etc.) are all extraterrestrials who have been experimenting upon us for millennia. This does not necessarily mean that they come here in spaceships. Consider the following speculations:
#1. Clarke’s Law (by science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke): “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magick. ”
Imagine a technology a hundred years beyond ours. A thousand years beyond ours. A million years beyond ours. And then remember that many stars, which might have planets and civilizations, are literally billions of years older than our sun. There might be races in this galaxy advanced as much as 10 billion years beyond our technology.
An old Arizona joke asks, “How many Apaches are hiding in this room?” The answer is, “As many as want to.” Advanced communication technologies would be far more subtle than the stalking techniques of the Apaches. If Clarke is right even on a materialistic level, the only answer to “How many Advanced Civilizations are monitoring the events in this room?” must be “As many as want to.”
#2. Wilson’s Corollary to Clarke’s Law (by R.A.W.): Any sufficiently advanced parapsychology is even more indistinguishable from magick.
Consider the slow advance of parapsychology, despite entrenched opposition, during the past 70 years. Project it forward another hundred years. A thousand. A million. And imagine races in this galaxy 10 billion years ahead of us in this area.
Extraterrestrials with advanced psionic knowledge may have been experimenting on us and/or aiding our evolution and/or playing ontology games with us for millions of years, projecting any form they desire from Mescalito to the Lord God Jehovah, without ever leaving their home planets. If a salesman in West Virginia and a college student in Washington, D.C. can both share the same “hallucination” of faster-than-light UFO abduction to a planet called Lanalus where everybody goes naked, then maybe there is one interstellar broadcaster of such educational dramas.
Maybe.
Did a leprechaun leave the Simonton pancakes?
The greenish-skinned, pointy-eared man I saw in 1963 has appeared in the folklore of many cultures who do not even use peyote. He has been seen most frequently, in recent years, as a humanoid extraterrestrial in various flying saucer reports by alleged Contactees. And, in the late 1960s, he began to appear regularly on TV, known as “Mr. Spock” on the Star Trek show, and has remained on the tube ever since, despite frequent network attempts to cancel the show and get rid of him. The fans always insist on bringing him back, and now in 1977, as I write, “Mr. Spock” is scheduled to appear either in the first Star Trek movie or a revival of the series on TV. He is an image, or as Jung would say, an “archetype” that that cannot be erased from the human mind.
Mescalito takes many forms in many myth-systems. Here he is as Peter Pan in a commercial advertisement, as sketched from descriptions by American Indian shamans, and as Mr. Spock on Star Trek. He is one of the most widely-reported denizens of Chapel Perilous and is known in dozens of shamanic traditions.
By coincidence, in his guise as Spock, this pointy-eared godling has given us a slogan that has become widely used in correspondence among Immortalists-scientists dedicated to the search for longevity and eventual physical immortality. The slogan is, of course, “Live long and prosper.” We have seen that slogan on letters from the Cryonics Society of Michigan, the Bay Area Cryonics Society, the Prometheus Society and other Immortalist groups. This “coincidence” will appear, possibly, to be more than a coincidence when we have examined further data . . .
The Irish form of Mescalito is the leprechaun, noted for playfulness, trickery, and, oddly, for leaving behind gifts in the form of food, just as the alleged “UFOnaut” left Joe Simonton a gift of pancakes.
It needs to be emphasized that whether we are talking of an experience involving Mescalito or one involving a kitchen chair, all of our perceptions have gone through myriads of neural processes in the brain before they appear to our consciousness. At the point of conscious recognition, the identified image is organized into a three-dimensional hologram which we project outside ourselves and call “reality.” We are much too modest about our own creativity if we take any of these projections literally. We see the sun “going down” at twilight, but science assures us that nothing of the sort is happening; instead, the earth is turning. We perceive an orange as really orange whereas it is actually blue, the orange light being the light bouncing off the real fruit. And, everywhere we look, we imagine solid objects, but science finds only a web of dancing energy.
The great and venerable Sufi sage, Mullah Nasrudin, once raced through Bagdad on his donkey, galloping as fast as the poor beast could travel. Everybody got excited and people rushed into the streets to find out why the philosopher was in such a great hurry.
“What are you looking for, Mullah?” somebody shouted.
“I’m looking for my donkey!” Nasrudin answered.
Like most Sufi jokes this seems calculated only to annoy us, like a Marx Brothers routine that doesn’t quite succeed in being funny. Actually, Nasrudin was much given (perhaps overmuch) to acting out his parables, and he was merely dramatizing the most common error of seekers after the Cosmic Secret.
We look for the Secret — the Philosopher’s Stone, the Elixir of the Wise, Supreme Enlightenment, “God,” or whatever the final answer might be — in all directions, north, east, south, and west, and all the time it is carrying us about. It is the human nervous system itself, the marvelous instrument through which we create order out of chaos, science out of ignorance, meaning out of mystery, “Mescalito” (or a chair) out of whirling energy.
Dogen Zenji, an 18th century Zen master, used to ask trainees, “Who is the Master who makes the grass green?” Again, the answer is as close
as our visual cortex.
Psychologists have performed thousands of experiments revealing the presence of “the Master who makes the grass green,” which Dr. John Lilly calls the metaprogrammer in the nervous system. Two actors rush into a Psychology 101 class and one makes a stabbing motion at the other, who falls. Almost all the students “see” a knife in the stabber’s hand. Later, it turns out the actual implement was a banana. Apparently, the stabbing motion itself creates the knife: the nervous system “knows” that nobody stabs anybody with a banana, just as it still “knows” (despite 300 years of science) that the sun “goes down” in the evening.
Or: a picture is flashed on a screen for one second. It shows a white man struggling with a black man, and the white man is wielding a razor. Again, the nervous system “knows” what it is programmed to see. The majority of students, even those who will swear until blue in the face that they are not racists, will see the razor in the black man’s hand: our national stereotype. And we still see the orange as orange, even though we know it isn’t.
You can see this image above at least two ways. Our inability to see the world more than one way normally is due to cultural conditioning — according to modern behavioral scientists — or to the fact that we are all asleep, according to the mystics.
Of course, we all realize that other people are frequently inclined to what Freud called “projection” — seeing what they expect to see. That our own experience of reality might be equally self-created — that, as Nietzsche said, “We are all greater artists than we realize” — is hard to believe, and even harder to remember moment-by-moment, even after we have had enough experience to believe it.
Learning to remember the invisible donkey who carries us about — the self-programmer — is the first step in awakening from conditioned, mechanical consciousness to true, objective consciousness. Whether or not there are fairies, elves and extraterrestrials hiding behind every bush, awakening reveals that the universe is full of invisible intelligence. It is very hard for us to learn to contact that intelligence without clothing it in projected humanoid forms. . .
Final Secret of the Illuminati Page 5
