Commentary on William Braden's Mescaline Experience
by Peter Webster
How is it possible for two persons of such obvious intellectual
talent as William Braden and Aldous Huxley to have such radically
different experiences as a result of ingestion of a similar quantity
of mescaline? Both Huxley and Braden brought to their first psychedelic
experiment a wide knowledge and understanding of science, religion,
mysticism, literature and fine arts, yet Huxley's initial psychedelic
experience was a revelation, and led to the writing of The
Doors of Perception, a book which launched a movement, if
not a revolution. William Braden's experiment, recounted in the
Postscript of his book, The Private Sea, could not have
been more opposite to Huxley's. Anguish and torment forced Mr.
Braden to ask that the experience be terminated with the anti-psychotic
drug Thorazine, and several days of painful recovery, he tells
us, ensued.
The so-called "bad trip" has been the occasional result
in both psychedelic research and the clandestine use of psychedelics
since the 1950s. Authorities of all persuasions have warned us
of the ever-present risk, and that it is next to impossible to
predict if a given personality will experience the negative aspect
of psychedelic experience. It has also often been observed that
a bad experience may even follow several positive, ecstatic ones,
for no apparent reason. Even the careful control of the supposed
principal determinants of the experience, set and setting,
seems to leave a way open for negative experience, and indicates
a crucial lack in the understanding of how and why a bad experience
may arise. Or so it has been repeatedly said.
The set and setting hypothesis may fail to provide control or
understanding of the occurrence of negative experience for a very
good reason: Although many investigators have attempted to understand
the content of psychedelic experience solely in terms of the set
and setting of the experiment, I feel there is more of tautology
than scientific theory in this "explanation." Saying
that the psychedelic experience depends on set and setting is
rather like saying that the weather is dependent on the contents
of the atmosphere. The weather IS the contents of the atmosphere,
and the psychedelic experience IS the set and setting of
the time and place in which the psychedelic drug is taken. This
is, of course, the case with everyday experience as well: the
set and setting of your day at the office IS the experience
of your day at the office. The set and setting hypothesis really
"explains" nothing we don't already know. We will have
to delve a little deeper than a comparison of the set and setting
of the experiences of Braden and Huxley to understand the extreme
difference of result.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
There has been a continuing ignorance by a great many of the players
in the psychedelic controversy concerning the experience of tribal
man, both past and present. The visionary realms sometimes attained
through the use of psychedelic drugs have been visited since time
immemorial, and for a modern researcher to ignore what tribal
man has to say on the subject of psychedelic experience is a serious
oversight. Especially guilty have been those on the side of Prohibition
of the psychedelic drugs, whether government minister or categorically-abstinent
researcher: the great majority of persons who have themselves
experienced the psychedelic vision have subsequently educated
themselves on the subject of shamanism and the use of psychedelic
plants by the tribal practitioners of early medicine and religion.
At the same time the Prohibitionists, including some eminent researchers,
have gone so far as to insist that those having themselves taken
psychedelics are irrevocably tainted, and incapable of judging
the results of their own investigations. The very existence of
such an attitudinal conflict among trained thinkers suggests that
modern rationality may not be all that it is cracked up to be,
and might also be an intimation of at least one of the sources
of negative psychedelic experience.
If one starts, of course, with the premise that tribal man is
primitive, ignorant, backward, incapable of rational thought,
lost in delusion, etc., then a complete disregard for the hundred-thousand
years (or more) of tribal psychedelic research follows. Such a
premise may play an important and stifling role in the outlook
of many moderns, even those who believe themselves far more broad-minded,
as the roots of prejudice are notoriously difficult to uncover.
But the brain of Homo sapiens has had exactly its present
macroscopic and neurological structure for at least 150 thousand
years, and although early man of course did not have the (not
all that certain) advantage of modern culture as a tool, it is
preposterous to believe that a nervous system capable of creating
symphonies and relativity theories was simply not employed to
full capacity before modern times. Evolution does not work like
that. The human brain would not have evolved to its present capability
had there been no aboriginal use for all that symphony- and relativity-theory-producing
hardware. The chronic skeptic will demand, "well what do
you propose those primitives were doing with all that hardware?"
If we would listen to them, instead of eradicate them, we might
begin to know.
Many modern thinkers, of course, have been listening. But
they are not usually among the cohort of institutional professionals
who practice hard, reductionist science. They are rather specialists
on mythology such as Joseph Campbell, anthropologists such as
Michael Harner, ethno-botanists such as Gordon Wasson and Richard
Evans Schultes, or psychedelic researchers such as Humphrey Osmond
and Albert Hofmann. Recognition of such pioneers by mainstream
science and society, not to mention Nobel Prizes and the like,
will not likely occur soon. Yet these are the very workers, and
fields of endeavor, which we must listen to very closely not only
to understand what early man has to say, but also to understand
the nature of the psychedelic experience and cause of the occasional
"bad trip." Only by listening to the psychedelic wisdom
of the ages have we a chance for understanding how we moderns
fit into this very large picture. In evolutionary time, we are
but a mere blip, an exaggeration, perhaps an aberration which
might well soon self-destruct for lack of ageless wisdom, for
lack of listening to our ancestors who, with perceptions and thoughts
every bit as human, and every bit as potent as our own, ensured
human survival for greater than 99% of the time of human life
on earth.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A principal lesson from the psychedelic past, which applies not
only to the use of visionary plants but to the optimal structuring
of society itself, is the importance of myth and ritual, both
for daily and seasonal life, and for the seeking of ultimate or
mystical understanding by a tribe or people. Today there are many
who would deny the importance, or even the presence of myth and
ritual as an underlying factor in their lives. But as with the
atheist, such denial is as much a mythology and ritual as the
denial of God by the atheist is in a very real sense, a religion:
An equivalent amount of faith is required to believe that God
does not exist (for there can be no absolute proof either
way).
A great and modern myth is that we no longer live by myths, but
hard facts, and perhaps peoples of all times and places found
it difficult to know the myths they lived by, the underlying
paradigm of their metaphysic. But the principal difference with
all tribal peoples as compared to us moderns, was that they all,
without fail, developed elaborate ritual and shamanism as a central
guiding framework for their lives. The myth and ritual of tribal
man was a living, evolving, all-encompassing structure, continually
being added to, and providing the long-term practical and
metaphysical understanding which kept such societies stable and
functioning for periods of time which make a mockery of modern
societal systems. For ritual today we have very primitive and
impotent relics indeed: empty "religious" charades on
the one hand, and a cut-throat tooth-and-nail paradigm of capitalistic
competition to the death as our day-to-day program for survival.
And compounding such a sickness-producing paradigm, the conviction
that we live by truth alone! If these be our myths and rituals,
we do not need to take psychedelics to experience a bad trip,
for we are already on one.
The primary importance of myth and ritual for understanding the
psychedelic experience, as well as for structuring psychedelic
experiments is today illustrated most forcefully by the use of
peyote by the Native American Church. In the ceremonies of the
NAC, quite powerful doses of peyote are often ingested, and "bad
trips" essentially never occur. The few documented cases
of negative result have uniformly involved a misuse of the sacrament
outside of NAC ceremonies, non-compliance with the wisdom of the
road-men or psychedelic guides for the ceremonies, or the
simultaneous use of alcohol. Within the structure of the NAC,
the peyote sacrament has continually been a very powerful and
efficacious one: by the definition of sacrament which we
use in the Christian tradition, peyote seems to many to be far
more the genuine article than the wine or bread, whose potency
one must take on faith alone. (Note that the mescaline which Huxley
and Braden ingested, is the main active component of peyote.)
So let's get this straight: the primitive, backward, ignorant,
irrational Indian, laboring under a childish and simplistic religious
paradigm, can ingest heroic quantities of a potent "hallucinogen"
and derive the most positive, reliable, reproducible and in every
sense of the word, human effects from this "risky"
behavior; yet one of us modern, rational, truth-loving supermen
know not whether the same dose might send us permanently over
the brink and into the looney-bin. I detect a faulty paradigm
somewhere.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Aldous Huxley writes in Heaven and Hell, a book written
two years after The Doors of Perception:
I have spoken so far only of the blissful visionary experience
and of its interpretation in terms of theology, its translation
into art. But visionary experience is not always blissful. It
is sometimes terrible. There is hell as well as heaven.
Like heaven, the visionary hell has its praeternatural light and
its praeternatural significance. But the significance is intrinsically
appalling and the light is 'the smoky light' of the Tibetan
Book of the Dead, the 'darkness visible' of Milton. In the
Journal d'une Schizophrene, the autobiographical record
of a young girl's passage through madness, the world of the schizophrenic
is called le Pays d'Eclairement - 'the country of lit-upness.'
It is a name which a mystic might have used to denote his heaven.
But for poor Renée, the schizophrenic, the illumination
is infernal - an intense electric glare without a shadow, ubiquitous
and implacable. Everything that, for healthy visionaries, is a
source of bliss, brings to Renee only fear and a nightmarish sense
of unreality. The summer sunshine is malignant; the gleam of polished
surfaces is suggestive, not of gems, but of machinery and enamelled
tin; the intensity of existence which animates every object, when
seen at close range and out of its utilitarian context, is felt
as a menace.
And then there is the horror of infinity. For the healthy visionary,
the perception of the infinite in a finite particular is a revelation
of divine immanence; for Renée, it was a revelation of
what she calls 'the System,' the vast cosmic mechanism which exists
only to grind out guilt and punishment, solitude and unreality.
Sanity is a matter of degree, and there are plenty of visionaries
who see the world as Renée saw it, but contrive, none the
less, to live outside the asylum. For them, as for the positive
visionary, the universe is transfigured - but for the worse. Everything
in it, from the stars in the sky to the dust under their feet,
is unspeakably sinister or disgusting every event is charged with
a hateful significance every object manifests the presence of
an Indwelling Horror, infinite, all-powerful, eternal.
This negatively transfigured world has found its way, from time
to time, into literature and the arts. It writhed and threatened
in Van Gogh's later landscapes; it was the setting and the theme
of all Kafka's stories; it was Gericault's spiritual home; it
was inhabited by Goya during the years of his deafness and solitude;
it was glimpsed by Browning when he wrote Childe Roland; it had
its place, over against the theophanies, in the novels of Charles
Williams.
The negative visionary experience is often accompanied by bodily
sensations of a very special and characteristic kind. Blissful
visions are generally associated with a sense of separation from
the body, a feeling of deindividualization. (It is, no doubt,
this feeling of deindividualization which makes it possible for
the Indians who practise the peyote cult to use the drug not merely
as a short cut to the visionary world, but also as an instrument
for creating a loving solidarity within the participating group.)
When the visionary experience is terrible and the world is transfigured
for the worse, individualization is intensified and the negative
visionary finds himself associated with a body that seems to grow
progressively more dense, more tightly packed, until he finds
himself at last reduced to being the agonized consciousness of
an inspissated lump of matter, no bigger than a stone that can
be held between the hands.
It is worth remarking, that many of the punishments described
in the various accounts of hell are punishments of pressure and
constriction. Dante's sinners are buried in mud, shut up in the
trunks of trees, frozen solid in blocks of ice, crushed beneath
stones. The Inferno is psychologically true. Many of its pains
are experienced by schizophrenics, and by those who have taken
mescalin or lysergic acid under unfavourable conditions.
What is the nature of these unfavourable conditions? How and why
is heaven turned into hell? In certain cases the negative visionary
experience is the result of predominantly physical causes. Mescalin
tends, after ingestion, to accumulate in the liver. If the liver
is diseased, the associated mind may find itself in hell. But
what is more important for our present purposes is the fact that
negative visionary experience may be induced by purely psychological
means. Fear and anger bar the way to the heavenly Other World
and plunge the mescalin taker into hell.
And what is true of the mescalin taker is also true of the person
who sees visions spontaneously or under hypnosis. Upon this psychological
foundation has been reared the theological doctrine of saving
faith - a doctrine to be met with in all the great religious traditions
of the world. Eschatologists have always found it difficult to
reconcile their rationality and their morality with the brute
facts of psychological experience. As rationalists and moralists,
they feel that good behaviour should be rewarded and that the
virtuous deserve to go to heaven. But as psychologists they know
that virtue is not the sole or sufficient condition of blissful
visionary experience. They know that works alone are powerless
and that it is faith, or loving confidence, which guarantees that
visionary experience shall be blissful.
Negative emotions - the fear which is the absence of confidence,
the hatred, anger or malice which exclude love - are the guarantee
that visionary experience, if and when it comes, shall be appalling.
The Pharisee is a virtuous man; but his virtue is of the kind
which is compatible with negative emotion. His visionary experiences
are therefore likely to be infernal rather than blissful.
The nature of the mind is such that the sinner who repents and
makes an act of faith in a higher power is more likely to have
a blissfull visionary experience than is the self-satisfied pillar
of society with his righteous indignations, his anxiety about
possessions and pretensions, his ingrained habits of blaming,
despising and condemning…
In The Doors of Perception Huxley reveals the secret in
an even clearer way (at this stage, he recounts his experience
at the height of the mescaline's effect):
'If you started in the wrong way,' I said in answer to the investigator's
questions, 'everything that happened would be a proof of the conspiracy
against you. It would all be self-validating. You couldn't draw
a breath without knowing it was part of the plot.'
'So you think you know where madness lies ?'
My answer was a convinced and heartfelt, 'Yes.'
'And you couldn't control it?'
'No, I couldn't control it. If one began with fear and hate as
the major premiss, one would have to go on to the conclusion.'
Young people who have explored consciousness with the aid of psychedelic
drugs have usually done so in a spirit of love, love of adventure,
love of exploration, love of freedom, love of community... The
older, "wiser" folk of today more often explore for
competitive or compulsive reasons, for fame, to achieve, to ascend
the ladder of success, to cement preconceptions into certainties...
Such exploration is often mixed with a compulsive or chronic skepticism,
constructed perhaps from previous entrapment in folly during youth.
Arthur Koestler was deceived into supporting the Communist movement
in Russia for a time, even after he had toured the country and
seen, not the desolation that he should have, but instead believed
the empty promises of the doctrine he had espoused. The discovery
of his self-deception produced an exaggerated skepticism in his
later years, hence his rejection of the psychedelic experience
as "pop Zen" (in The Ghost in the Machine). Perhaps
It is not surprising that he also had a negative experience in
an experiment with psychedelic drugs. And as for skepticism, Jean-Paul
Sartre was a chronic skeptic if ever there was one, and he, too,
experienced only the negative aspects of psychedelics in his first
and only psychedelic experiment. The experiments of such as these
are essays in search of proof that nothing has been missed, they
do not start with a premise of openness and love of life for its
own sake, as Huxley has prescribed, but of exclusion and suspicion,
precisely the formula for torment.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
From the viewpoint revealed by these several (not altogether congruent)
paragraphs, it is not hard to see why the chronic skeptic, the
hardened reporter, William Braden, might not be able to shed his
defenses, and paradigm, to experience the age-old visionary reality.
He sees a cartoon-world which he takes for hard, cold "reality,"
the kind of world his underlying mythology has created, and yet
the visionary psychedelic wisdom unlocked by these chemicals does
not permit him to believe in his own paradigm. He "knows"
plenty about Eastern philosophy, about western science, about
anything you can name, but it is all theoretical knowledge, none
of it bonded to ultimate experience, and so his world is, in the
final analysis, artificial, not "reality-based" as he
is bound by his metaphysic to believe. Suddenly he experiences
that artificiality in full force, with all the implied consequences
and contradictions, and of course, it is too much to take. What
is surprising about bad trips is not that they occur, but that
they are not predominant. The power of these substances to forbid
the lie of an empty metaphysic, a hard, cold world of facts devoid
of ultimate mystery and spirituality, would seem to me to require
bad trips almost every time for us moderns. It is the obvious
near-indestructibility of the human spirit, the almost unbelievable
fact that man survives in this lunatic world still for the most
part unscathed, that explains much about the results of psychedelic
experience and why it is not usually or even uniformly a negative
experience. Thanks be to those such as Huxley for providing a
light in our darkness, so that at least a few of us may find our
way through.