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LSD,
Dogs and Me
by Robert Anton Wilson
[writen for a Swiss magazine, on the 60th anniversary of Dr Hoffman's discovery of LSD.]
Greetings to
Dr. Albert Hoffman on the 60th birthday of his "problem child!"
And greetings to the Free World in general from the occupied U.S.A.! Two
major factors have rendered me incapable of believing in the dominant
mechanistic-materialist model of mind and the universe: [1] dogs, all
of my life, and [2] LSD, since 1962.
About dogs I will write elsewhere; here I will say only that no matter
how much mechanistic biology I read, no dog who ever lived as a guest
in my house ever seemed like a machine to me. They all seemed like four-legged
people.
Every LSD voyager has his or her own unique reports to offer; here I offer
only my own recollections of my own experiences, expressed in my own favorite
metaphors.
After my first LSD voyage, dogs not only seemed even less like machines
than before, but so did bugs and trees and birds and the starry sky itself.
After my 100th trip, even I seemed less like a machine.
I have not embraced pantheism or even panpsychism as a philosophy; rather,
I have given up on philosophies entirely. I live amid wonders, which I
file under the law of general semantics which states that no map can ever
show "all" the territory. In fact, I think we should ban the
word "all" from ordinary speech and restrict it solely to pure
mathematics.
Let me explain that a bit. Consider any large city you know well -- Zurich,
Berlin, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, whatever. For the sake of illustration,
let me write "Dublin" and you may think of any other city you
prefer. Do you think any map of Dublin can show the locations and directions
of all the mice in that city? Even if you regard this absurdity as theoretically
possible, this map still would not include the flowers, fleas, microbes,
etc. -- nor would it depict the emotions, joys, sufferings of the people
[or the dogs] -- and it would remain relatively accurate for only seconds.
[It could not remain totally accurate for even a nanosecond.]
Now consider our other kinds of "maps" -- our beliefs, our arts,
our sciences. Does quantum mechanics tell "all" or even most
of the reasons George W. Bush wants to kill Saddam Husein? Does Freudian
theory, Marxism, postmodernism, bile samples, or oil prices -- alone or
combined into a mega-model --tell "all" about that?
Does Van Gogh tell more or less about vegetation than Beethoven's Sixth,
Darwin's Origin of Species or the latest papers on botony? Which geometry
reveals "all" the truth about the starry sky above Dublin --
Euclid, Gauss, Lobatchevsky, Buckminster Fuller?
To fully grasp what I mean here, try the following simple experiment:
try to say "all" about the page [or computer screen] on which
you see these words. Assuming you have it in hard copy, try to write down
all you know about the chemical composition of the ink and the paper;
if you don't know enough, do some research.
Try to learn "all" about how it got from me to you, even if
that requires six months of computer science and electronic theory. Who
asked me to write this? Find out "all" you can about her or
him. Don't neglect the others involved in the production of this page
-- their salaries, their worries, their religions if any, their politics,
their sex-lives usw.
And don't forget me: why did somebody ask me to write about LSD and why
did I agree? Try to investigate "all" about me. [Hint: in doing
this exercize, I discovered that among the infinite reasons I became a
writer I could not omit the Danes over-fishing the North Sea 15 centuries
ago.*]
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*My paternal grandmother had the name O'Lachlann, which means "son
of the Dane" in Gaelic. The Danes took to invasion and conquest,
of Ireland and elsewhere, after the fish problem arose.....
--------------------------------------------------------
If you continue this search for "allness" reasonably long enough
[about two years minimum], the page will have yellowed and the ink might
have faded, which will require more nvestigation into chemistry and even
political history ---e.g. the paper would last longer if made of hemp;
why did the publisher use wood pulp instead?
Now imagine these gigabytes of information entering your brain not in
two years, but in two nanoseconds, and radiating not just from this page
but from the fruit on the table, the wall paint, the pencil, the cars
passing in the street..... and the furthest stars.
That's why LSD has altered the world for so many of us in the last 60
years. Like English poet William Blake we have found "infinity in
a grain of sand" and the deeper we look, the deeper the abyss grows.
And like Nietzsche, we often suspect that as we gaze into the abyss, the
abyss also gazes into us......
LSD seems to suspend the imprinted and conditioned brain circuits that
normally control pereption/emotion/thought, allowing a flood -- an ocean
-- of new information to break through. The experience will seem either
very frightening or exileratingly educational, depending on how rigidly
you previously believed your current map contained "all" the
universe. Since I learned that no model equals the totallity of experience
long before I tried LSD, I never had a bad trip; but I have seen enough
anxiety atttacks and downright wig-outs in cases of the naive and dogmatic
that I have never favored or advocated LSD's promiscuous use by the general
population. As J.R. "Bob'' Dobbs says, "You know how dumb the
average ccitizen is? Well, mathematically, by definition, half of them
are even dumber than that."
While splashing about and trying not to drown in this ocean of new information,
you generally experience a second LSD surprise: an explosion of newfound
energy within your own body. Whether you call this kundalini or bio-electricity
or orgone or libido or Life Force, it can trigger muscle spasms, unbridled
Eros or just "warm and melting" sensations -- or all three in
succession, or all three almost simultaneously -- usually followed by
something loosely called "near-death experience" or "out
of body experience." Again, this can seem either psychotically terrifying
or "religiously" ecstatic, and can imprint short-or--long-term
tendecies toward paranoia ["everything wants to destroy me"]
or metanoia ["everything wants to help me."] In either case,
one tends to retain a heightened awareness of those peculiar coincidences
that Jung called synchronicities and Christian conspiracy buffs attribute
to hostile occult forces.
In my case, after a few years I found myself seemingly forced to choose,
not between paranoia and metanoia -- both by then appeared pitiful oversimplifications
-- but between mysticism and agnosticism. I solved that problem, for myself
anyway, by choosing agnostic mysticism in the tradition of Lao-tse:
Something unknown, unspeakable,
before Earth or sky,
before life or death,
I do not know what to call it
So I call it Dao
What do I think we should do with Dr. Hoffman's "problem child"?
Well, no commodity becomes safer when its manufacture, sale and distribution
all fall into the hands of professional criminals; and prohibition, of
alcohol and all other drugs, inevitably has that effect, followed by police
corruption and public cynicism. Maybe governments should leave this arena
entirely and let professional scientists, medical and otherwise, write
the guidelines?
Copyright: Robert Anton Wilson
Used with kind Permission
