TelexExternal LinkInternal LinkInventory Cache
Peter Lamborn Wilson
This nOde last updated February 11th, 2002 and is permanently morphing...
(3 Ix (Jaguar) - 12 Pax - 94/260 - 12.19.8.17.14)

For the underground anarcho-Sufi scholar Peter Lamborn Wilson, the answer lies in spiritual heresy. For over a decade beginning in the late 60s, Wilson wandered from North Africa to India to Java, but spent the bulk of his  time in Iran. He explored the heterodox nooks and crannies of Islam, a religion the West caricatures as fanatically  monolithic but which Wilson's voluminous reading, Sufi practices, and face-to-face encounters with sorcerers,   Satanists, and hash-smoking dervishes proved to possess one of the world's richest and most diverse living mysticisms. Now ensconced in Manhattan, Wilson has ended his expatriot days, but he remains a cultural and intellectual nomad—a true free-thinker.

 - Erik Davis - _The Wandering Sufi_

While the old technology produced and distributed material resources, the new technology produces and disseminates information. The resources marketed in high technology are less about matter and more about mind. Under the impact of high technology, the world is moving increasingly from a physical economy into what might be called a "metaphysical economy." We are in the process of recognizing that consciousness rather than raw materials or physical resources constitutes wealth.

_Ploughing The Clouds: The Search For Irish Soma_ by Peter Lamborn Wilson coverart by Jim Koehnline

According to certain mystics, spirit and body are "one".  Certainly spirit has lost its ontological solidity (since Nietzsche, anyway), while, body's claim to "reality" has been undermined by modern science to the point of vanishing in a cloud of "pure energy". So why not assume that spirit and body are one, after all, and that they are twin (or dyadic) aspects of the same underlying and inexpressible real? No body without spirit, no spirit without body. The Gnostic Dualists are wrong, as are the vulgar "dialectical materialists". Body and spirit together make life. If either pole is missing, the result is death. This constitutes a fairly simple set of values, assuming we prefer life to  death. Obviously I'm avoiding any strict definitions of either body or spirit. I'm speaking of "empirical" everyday experiences. We experience "spirit" when we dream or create; we experience "body" when we eat or shit (or maybe vice versa); we experience both at once when we make love. I'm not proposing metaphysical categories here. We're still drifting and these are ad-hoc points of reference, nothing more. We needn't be mystics to propose this version of "one reality". We need only point out that no other reality has yet appeared within the context of our knowable experience.    For all practical purposes, the "World" is "one".

There is a historical question, in the history of religions per se, and that is: Where do psychedelics come from? Terence McKenna believes that human consciousness itself is a function of the psychedelic experience, specifically of the psilocybin    mushroom. He believes that one day an ape took a shroom and became a human, because cognition appeared. Terence says that what makes us human is the psychedelic experience. I don't know if I literally believe this; in any case, I don't believe in any single origin for human consciousness. But it's enlightening to think about the possibility that we may owe our difference from the other members of the simian clan to our ability to experience psychedelics in a certain way. If that were the case, it would be true that our entire experience of cognition--which historically belongs in the category of what is known as "religion"--would have begun with psychedelics. The entire psychedelic experience would be co- existent in time with human becoming. An interesting hypothesis; we can add it to all theories of human origins.

[...]

on agriculture

Agriculture is the only radical new technology that ever appeared in the world; what it amounts to is a cutting into the earth. If you read any anthropology about Native Americans, you will find that when the white Europeans arrived and tried to force the tribes into agriculture, the tribal people always say the same thing: "What, you want us to rape our Mother, the Earth? This is perverse. How could you ask human beings to do this?" Agriculture immediately appears as a bad deal to these tribes. There is no doubt that this technology leads inevitably and fairly quickly to social hierarchies, separation, class structure, property, and religion as we understand it--a priest class that tells everybody else what to do and how to think. It leads, in other words, to authoritarianism and, ultimately, to the state itself.

[...]

on christianity and alcohol

It is the spread of christianity which seems to signal the end of the classical psychedelic world. John Allegro, one of the original Death Sea Scroll scholars--he went crazy, according to most people--wrote a book called _The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross_ in which he said that jesus christ was a  mushroom. I always felt that jesus christ can be whatever you want him to be, so why not?  Historically, perhaps this antipsychedelic effect had something to do with wine, the sacrament of Christianity. Wine itself, although it is psychoactive, is not nearly as psychedelic as magic mushrooms. And alcohol has it's problems. Terence McKenna has taken a very puritanical stand--  antialcohol, coffee, sugar, tea, any of those modern psychotropics.  The West probably lost awareness of the most mind-altering substances in a gradual process parallel to the diffusion of christianity. Wine is sacramentalized, and its Dionysian potential remains, as magic--for example in the Catholic Mass, a magical performance in which bread and wine are turned into a cannibal feast, And in the "soma function," which means that everything is
psychotropics. As one of the Sufi poets said: "A drunkard will never become wise, even after a hundred bottles of wine, but a wise man will become intoxicated one a glass of water."

[...]

on the memeticflow of psychedelics

The rediscovery had already been going on since the nineteenth century when people like Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and DeQuincy, or the Romantics, who got into hashish and opium. They learned about it from the Islamic world. Once again, in a very occult and hidden way, these were *poetes maudites*--damned knowledge, known by damned people. Then there is Antonin Artaud, who went to Mexico and took peyote; or Ernst Juenger, Mircea Eliade, C.-G. Jung, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch--they were all experimenting with drugs. We know about Aldous Huxley because he wrote the first book in English. So when the psychedelic revolution happens, it is already an old story.
 

[...]

on the paradigm shift of consciousness

As a culture, we like to laugh at primitive tribes--for example, those who are shown photographs of themselves and cannot recognize them. But in 1876 a French
scientist fell by accident into one of the paleolithic caves. Later, in his diary he wrote that there seemed to be some scribbles on the wall.  He could not see that it was art, he was just as blind as the pygmy who is blind to the photograph.  Suddenly, a few years later, people could see it as art.  What allowed T. S. Eliot to say that ever since Lascaux, Western art "tumbled from the staircase"? What allowed Picasso suddenly to see African masks, the French expressionists to see Japanese art, the hippies in the sixties to hear Indian music? For the colonialist British who visited India, the music for them was like the "whining of the mosquitoes--how can they stand it?" The Brits could not hear it as music. My parents' generation could never hear Indian music as music: "What's that buzzing noise? Are you kids stoned again?" That is what I call a paradigm shift of cognition.

[...]

on the war on drugs as war on cognition

At the very moment when entheogenesis--that is, the birth of the Divine Within--reappears in the West with the late Romantics as a subculture, as "occult history," the conditions were being set up for this paradigm shift. We are still basically undergoing it. The only thing that could even pretend to suppress this shift of consciousness, would be the Law, as in the War on Drugs. But our law is a machine law, a gridwork, clockwork law, and it is obviously unable to contain the fluidity of the organic. That is why the War on Drugs will never ever work.  You might as well declare war on every plant. So public discourse is approaching breakdown over the question of consciousness. The War on Drugs is a war on cognition itself, about thought itself as the human condition. Is thought this dualist cartesian reason? Or is cognition this mysterious, complex, organic, magical thing with little mushrooms elves dancing around. Which it is to be?
 

The War on Drugs is a paradigm war. Each refinement in machinic consciousness will evoke a dialectical response from the organic realm. It is as if the mushroom elves were there; it is as if there were plant consciousness that responds to the machinic consciousness. It is such a beautiful metaphor--you don't have to believe in the elves, it's all human consciousness, ultimately. You don't have to believe in something supernatural to explain this.  So around the mid-twentieth century, technology begins to shift away from an imperial-gigantic frame to a more "inward" dimension,  with the splitting of the atom, the virtual space of communications and the computer. And it was around that same time that the really serious psychedelics begin to show up--mescaline, psilocybin, LSD, DMT, ketamine, MDMA, etc. etc.

[...]

on soma and/or rg-veda

It's fairly clear that all the great neolithic societies had some kind of cult of soma--the Sanskrit word for the psychoactive experience. The Rg-Veda, one of the oldest books of humanity, is all about the psychedelic experience. If only Tim Leary had used the Rg-Veda instead of the Tibetan Book of the Dead to introduce LSD, the sixties would have been a different decade. The Tibetan Book is about death, a downer, whereas the Rg-Veda is very much about life and joy and power. Anyway, all neolithic and classical societies had some variety of this. We owe these discoveries to the great Gordon Wasson, who was the first to discuss whether the soma of the Rg-Veda was in fact a magic mushroom. He also came to the conclusion that the Eleusinian Mysteries, one of the central religious rights of the ancient Greeks, was also fueled by a psychoactive plant. The ancient Persians  had something called "helma," it might have been a plant that contains harmoline. I claim to have discovered that the ancient Irish had a similar cult... and of course we know about the Aztecs and the Mayans: they still ha an active psychedelic cult when the conquistadors arrived. In some of the old Spanish chronicles you can actually read about magic mushrooms. But somehow these texts were lost, or no one read them, or if they read them they did not believe them, or they were horrified by them.

 - Peter Lamborn Wilson - _Cybernetics And Entheogenics_ lecture

TelexExternal LinkInternal LinkInventory Cache