Visionary art by Alex Grey
In his seminal presentation for ARC 1,'Guerilla Psychonautics', Neil Kramer briefly goes into the notion of 'neophobic shutdown'. This, he explains, is the condition of refusal to entertain new and strange ideas and angles on life, reality, etc. Neil suggests various reasons for the defences going up in this apparently irrational manner. There's fear, built up and played upon by the media. Previous investment: if we have spent all our life buying into a particular version of reality, backing out can pose a threat to our very identity. Then cognitive dissonance, the uncomfortable and potentially depressing feeling of holding conflicting ideas about life simultaneously. Finally, Neil enumerates our inability to focus for any length of time. Fast cut edit in the media has led to attention deficit disorder being the modern norm, with a consequent inability to evaluate new information.
For myself, I have the opposite tendency. If anything, I am a neophile. Strange, unorthodox notions attract me like a bee to a honeypot, while most of 'normal' is old, tired, the same old fraudulent song played over and over again. It's an attitude I've had since an early age. I loved my parents, but I had no wish whatsoever to emulate the kind of life they led - even more so for my aunts, uncles, and grandparents. 'There must be more to life than this' was an intuition of mine even in infancy; which was accompanied by its darker corollary, the sense that a 'normal' life is stuffy, limited, and (to turn Buddhist for a moment) unsatisfactory. Then the 1960s arrived with an explosion of the new. Musical sounds that had never been dreamed, yet alone heard, before hit the radiowaves on a weekly basis. I was tailor-made for the era.
Pale Green Vortex is liberally sprinkled with ideas to make a neophobe's blood curdle: the multidimensional nature of existence, the entheogenic origins of our sense of the sacred; archons and nature spirits; partnership cultures as an integral part of our heritage. Not to mention the windfarm scam and global warming fraud as two of the least ecologically-enlightened topics on the political, social, and economic agenda. It may well be that some of these notions prove without foundation. But, in the spirit of a review of Terence McKenna's pioneering 'Food of the Gods', which declared that 'if only a fraction of McKenna's thought is true, he will someday be regarded as the Copernicus for consciousness', if only a handful of themes explored on Pale Green Vortex have real substance, this is enough to force a radical revisioning of what life and consciousness are about.
So, on to this article's neophobic spine-chiller, which concerns the function of the brain and its relationship to consciousness.....
Modern science, it would seem, now understands a good deal about how the brain works. Interestingly, though, with regard to 'what is consciousness?', it has failed to make much headway at all. Which is a polite way to say that it still hasn't a clue. There is a telling 'editorial note' provided by one Professor Richard Gregory in the New Penguin English Dictionary (2000) which sits on my bookshelf. 'The human brain is the most complicated structure known, with its 100 billion nerve cells, each with around 2000 connections' is its boggling factual introduction. But the note ends with this frank yet ominous statement: 'How it generates consciousness remains mysterious.'
Just so, just so. It's a magnificent giveaway of the mainstream 'scientific' assumption that gets in the way of any real understanding. That the brain generates consciousness is the only way that modern science can conceive of things. This is the necessary reflection of its model of the universe as made up of separate units of matter and other stuff that are, of themselves, by-and-large dead. From a shamanic and psychonautic perspective this view is totally ridiculous. The shamanic, psychonautic universe is alive, its separate units actually inextricably interconnected. This worldview proceeds from a direct experiential rather than theoretical basis, that of anima mundi, the world ensouled. Consciousness is not generated by the brain, but is a 'given' of reality itself. As John Lash writes of those specialists in reality and consciousness, the initiates into the Mysteries of Eleusis: 'They realised that the entire cognitive field of human beings and of all sentient life is set up and supported by the external world, a projection of the living intelligence of the planet.' And, as David Abram says in his article 'The Perceptual Implications of Gaia': 'the psyche is a property of the ecosystem as a whole' (quoted by John Lash, 'Not in His Image', ch 16).
The brain turns out to be, not so much a generator of consciousness as a receiver. And we can take this further. Not only is it a receiver, but it can tune into different channels given the right circumstances. Prime among the aims of shamans, tantrikas, Gnostic telestai, psychonauts, and others is developing the ability to tune into other channels of reality for reasons of gnosis and healing. To expand the analogy: there is, it seems, a default channel to which we are tuned as human beings from early on. This is 'channel normal',' channel survival'. While familiarity with this wavelength is obviously important, it is commonly presented as the only one, and anybody protesting this viewpoint is dismissed as either dangerous or mad - or both. But it is like having a television complete with satellite dish and capable of receiving a hundred stations, only someone has hidden the remote control and all you can watch is BBC One. I submit that any quest for wholeness, wisdom, or whatever, will be futile, or at best seriously compromised, without experientially embracing the multi-channelled nature of consciousness and the universe.
This realisation that the relationship between brain and consciousness is not as often assumed can create a good deal of soul-searching for the best-qualified minds educated within the paradigms of mainstream science. One such example is Stanislav Grof. Classically-trained in psychiatry, he became a leading figure in the use of psychedelics in psychotherapy until this became legally untenable. He went on to develop the technique of holotropic breathwork ('holotropic' meaning 'moving towards wholeness') as a powerful means of opening the doors of the psyche (or tuning into other channels of consciousness, to use the model in this article).
In the Preface to 'When the Impossible Happens', his personal memoir, Grof relates the following: 'My initial encounter with holotropic states was very difficult intellectually, as well as emotionally challenging. In the early years of my laboratory and clinical research with psychedelics, I was bombarded daily with experiences and observations for which my medical and psychiatric training had not prepared me...... I was experiencing and seeing things that...... were not supposed to happen......' And later: 'After I had overcome my initial conceptual shock, incredulity concerning my observations, and doubts about my own sanity, I began to realise that the problem might not be in my capacity to observe or in my critical judgement, but in the limits of current psychological and psychiatric theories and of the monistic, materialistic paradigm of Western science.' And in the Epilogue he concludes: 'I now believe that the universe was created and is permeated by cosmic consciousness and superior creative intelligence (anima mundi) on all its levels and in all its dimensions.' Newtonian worldview, bye bye.
Another such example is Dr. Rick Strassman, who was privileged to conduct the first legally-sanctioned research on consciousness and psychedelics in the USA for 20 years during the 1990s. As he describes in his interview with Graham Hancock in 'Supernatural', he tried very hard to explain away his volunteers' many strange experiences under DMT (which include numerous encounters with alien beings) through more orthodox models. He tried the idea of subjective hallucinations, followed by Freud's notions of the unconscious and Jung's archetypes. But his volunteers were all unimpressed. Eventually, he was forced to treat their experiences 'as is': 'It was then I began allowing myself to consider that DMT provides a portal into alternative dimensions of reality.' And he says further: 'The receiver model is just that. The brain receives information at the level for which it happens to be tuned at that particular time.'
With the subjects of multidimensional consciousness and the brain as organ of reception rather than generation, we have stumbled into an area wherein lie some of the greatest fears of the Control System, including the hornets' nest of current inquisitorial approaches to psychedelic (entheogenic) usage. All for another time.......
With thanks to Nilo for mentioning to me Rupert Sheldrake, so inadvertently reminding me of the theme of this blog piece.
