BETWEEN CULTURE and the individual the relationship is, and always has been, strangely ambivalent. We are at once the beneficiaries of our culture and its victims. Without culture, and without that precondition of all culture, language, man would be no more than another species of baboon. It is to language and culture that we owe our humanity. And "What a piece of work is a man!" says Hamlet: "How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! ... in action how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god!" But, alas, in the intervals of being noble, rational and potentially infinite,
man, proud man,
Dressed in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he is most assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As make the angels weep.
Genius and angry ape, player of fantastic
tricks and godlike reasoner—in all these roles individuals
are the products of a language and a culture. Working on the
twelve or thirteen billion neurons of a human brain, language and
culture have given us law, science, ethics, philosophy; have made
possible all the achievements of talent and of sanctity. They
have also given us fanaticism, superstition and dogmatic
bumptiousness; nationalistic idolatry and mass murder in the name
of God; rabble-rousing propaganda and organized Iying. And, along
with the salt of the earth, they have given us, generation after
generation, countless millions of hypnotized conformists, the
predestined victims of power-hungry rulers who are themselves the
victims of all that is most senseless and inhuman in their
cultural tradition.
Thanks to language and culture, human behavior can
be incomparably more intelligent, more original, creative and
flexible than the behavior of animals, whose brains are too small
to accommodate the number of neurons necessary for the invention
of language and the transmission of accumulated knowledge. But,
thanks again to language and culture, human beings often behave
with a stupidity, a lack of realism, a total inappropriateness,
of which animals are incapable.
Trobriand Islander or Bostonian, Sicilian Catholic
or Japanese Buddhist, each of us is born into some culture and
passes his life within its confines. Between every human
consciousness and the rest of the world stands an invisible
fence, a network of traditional thinking-and-feeling patterns, of
secondhand notions that have turned into axioms, of ancient
slogans revered as divine revelations. What we see through the
meshes of this net is never, of course, the unknowable
"thing in itself." It is not even, in most cases, the
thing as it impinges upon our senses and as our organism
spontaneously reacts to it. What we ordinarily take in and
respond to is a curious mixture of immediate experience with
culturally conditioned symbol, of sense impressions with
preconceived ideas about the nature of things. And by most people
the symbolic elements in this cocktail of awareness are felt to
be more important than the elements contributed by immediate
experience. Inevitably so, for, to those who accept their culture
totally and uncritically, words in the familiar language do not
stand (however inadequately) for things. On the contrary, things
stand for familiar words. Each unique event of their ongoing life
is instantly and automatically classified as yet another concrete
illustration of one of the verbalized, culture-hallowed
abstractions drummed into their heads by childhood conditioning.
It goes without saying that many of the ideas
handed down to us by the transmitters of culture are eminently
sensible and realistic. (If they were not, the human species
would now be extinct.) But, along with these useful concepts,
every culture hands down a stock of unrealistic notions, some of
which never made any sense, while others may once have possessed
survival value, but have now, in the changed and changing
circumstances of ongoing history, become completely irrelevant.
Since human beings respond to symbols as promptly and
unequivocally as they respond to the stimuli of unmediated
experience, and since most of them naively believe that
culture-hallowed words about things are as real as, or even
realer than their perceptions of the things themselves, these
outdated or intrinsically nonsensical notions do enormous harm.
Thanks to the realistic ideas handed down by culture, mankind has
survived and, in certain fields, progresses. But thanks to the
pernicious nonsense drummed into every individual in the course
of his acculturation, mankind, though surviving and progressing,
has always been in trouble. History is the record, among other
things, of the fantastic and generally fiendish tricks played
upon itself by culture-maddened humanity. And the hideous game
goes on.
What can, and what should, the individual do to
improve his ironically equivocal relationship with the culture in
which he finds himself embedded? How can he continue to enjoy the
benefits of culture without, at the same time, being stupefied or
frenziedly intoxicated by its poisons? How can he become
discriminatingly acculturated, rejecting what is silly or
downright evil in his conditioning, and holding fast to that
which makes for humane and intelligent behavior?
A culture cannot be discriminatingly accepted, much
less be modified, except by persons who have seen through
it—by persons who have cut holes in the confining stockade
of verbalized symbols and so are able to look at the world and,
by reflection, at themselves in a new and relatively unprejudiced
way. Such persons are not merely born; they must also be made.
But how?
In the field of formal education, what the would-be
hole cutter needs is knowledge. Knowledge of the past and present
history of cultures in all their fantastic variety, and knowledge
about the nature and limitations, the uses and abuses, of
language. A man who knows that there have been many cultures, and
that each culture claims to be the best and truest of all, will
find it hard to take too seriously the boastings and dogmatizings
of his own tradition. Similarly, a man who knows how symbols are
related to experience, and who practices the kind of linguistic
self-control taught by the exponents of General Semantics, is
unlikely to take too seriously the absurd or dangerous nonsense
that, within every culture, passes for philosophy, practical
wisdom and political argument. As a preparation for hole cutting,
this kind of intellectual education is certainly valuable, but no
less certainly insufficient. Training on the verbal level needs
to be supplemented by training in wordless experiencing. We must
learn how to be mentally silent, must cultivate the art of pure
receptivity.
To be silently receptive—how childishly simple
that seems! But in fact, as we very soon discover, how difficult!
The universe in which men pass their lives is the creation of
what Indian philosophy calls Nama-Rupa, Name and Form.
Reality is a continuum, a fathomlessly mysterious and infinite
Something, whose outward aspect is what we call Matter and whose
inwardness is what we call Mind. Language is a device for taking
the mystery out of Reality and making it amenable to human
comprehension and manipulation. Acculturated man breaks up the
continuum, attaches labels to a few of the fragments, projects
the labels into the outside world and thus creates for himself an
all-too-human universe of separate objects, each of which is
merely the embodiment of a name, a particular illustration of
some traditional abstraction. What we perceive takes on the
pattern of the conceptual lattice through which it has been
filtered. Pure receptivity is difficult because man's normal
waking consciousness is always culturally conditioned. But normal
waking consciousness, as William James pointed out many years
ago, "is but one type of consciousness, while all about it,
parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential
forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life
without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite
stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their
completeness, definite types of mentality which probably
somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No
account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves
these forms of consciousness disregarded."
Like the culture by which it is conditioned, normal
waking consciousness is at once our best friend and a most
dangerous enemy. It helps us to survive and make progress; but at
the same time it prevents us from actualizing some of our most
valuable potentialities and, on occasion, gets us into all kinds
of trouble. To become fully human, man, proud man, the player of
fantastic tricks, must learn to get out of his own way: only then
will his infinite faculties and angelic apprehension get a chance
of coming to the surface. In Blake's words, we must "cleanse
the doors of perception"; for when the doors of perception
are cleansed, "everything appears to man as it
is—infinite." To normal waking consciousness things are
the strictly finite and insulated embodiments of verbal labels.
How can we break the habit of automatically imposing our
prejudices and the memory of culture-hallowed words upon
immediate experience? Answer: by the practice of pure receptivity
and mental silence. These will cleanse the doors of perception
and, in the process, make possible the emergence of other than
normal forms of consciousness—aesthetic consciousness,
visionary consciousness, mystical consciousness. Thanks to
culture we are the heirs to vast accumulations of knowledge, to a
priceless treasure of logical and scientific method, to thousands
upon thousands of useful pieces of technological and
organizational know-how. But the human mind-body possesses other
sources of information, makes use of other types of reasoning, is
gifted with an intrinsic wisdom that is independent of cultural
conditioning.
Wordsworth writes that "our meddling intellect
[that part of the mind which uses language to take the mystery
out of Reality] mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things: we
murder to dissect." Needless to say, we cannot get along
without our meddling intellect. Verbalized conceptual thinking is
indispensable. But even when they are used well, verbalized
concepts mis-shape "the beauteous forms of things." And
when (as happens so often) they are used badly, they mis-shape
our lives by rationalizing ancient stupidities, by instigating
mass murder, persecution and the playing of all the other
fantastically ugly tricks that make the angels weep. Wise
nonverbal passiveness is an antidote to unwise verbal activity
and a necessary corrective to wise verbal activity. Verbalized
concepts about experience need to be supplemented by direct,
unmediated acquaintance with events as they present themselves to
us.
It is the old story of the letter and the spirit.
The letter is necessary, but must never be taken too seriously,
for, divorced from the spirit, it cramps and finally kills. As
for the spirit, it "bloweth where it listeth" and, if
we fail to consult the best cultural charts, we may be blown off
our course and suffer shipwreck. At present most of us make the
worst of both worlds. Ignoring the freely blowing winds of the
spirit and relying on cultural maps which may be centuries
out-of-date, we rush full speed ahead under the high-pressure
steam of our own overweening self-confidence. The tickets we
have sold ourselves assure us that our destination is some port
in the Islands of the Blest. In fact it turns out, more often
than not, to be Devil's Island.
Self-education on the nonverbal level is as old as
civilization. "Be still and know that I am
God"—for the visionaries and mystics of every time and
every place, this has been the first and greatest of the
commandments. Poets listen to their Muse and in the same way the
visionary and the mystic wait upon inspiration in a state of wise
passiveness, of dynamic vacuity. In the Western tradition this
state is called "the prayer of simple regard." At the
other end of the world it is described in terms that are
psychological rather than theistic. In mental silence we
"look into our own Self-Nature," we "hold fast to
the Not-Thought which lies in thought." we "become that
which essentially we have always been." By wise activity we
can acquire useful analytical knowledge about the world,
knowledge that can be communicated by means of verbal symbols. In
the state of wise passiveness we make possible the emergence of
forms of consciousness other than the utilitarian consciousness
of normal waking life. Useful analytical knowledge about the
world is replaced by some kind of biologically inessential but
spiritually enlightening acquaintance with the world. For
example, there can be direct aesthetic acquaintance with the
world as beauty. Or there can be direct acquaintance with the
intrinsic strangeness of existence, its wild implausibility. And
finally there can be direct acquaintance with the world's unity.
This immediate mystical experience of being at one with the
fundamental Oneness that manifests itself in the infinite
diversity of things and minds, can never be adequately expressed
in words. Like visionary experience, the experience of the mystic
can be talked about only from the outside. Verbal symbols can
never convey its inwardness.
It is through mental silence and the practice of
wise passiveness that artists, visionaries and mystics have made
themselves ready for the immediate experience of the world as
beauty, as mystery and as unity. But silence and wise passiveness
are not the only roads leading out of the all-too-human universe
created by normal, culture-conditioned consciousness. In Expostulation
and Reply, Wordsworth's bookish friend, Matthew, reproaches
the poet because
You look round on your Mother Earth,
As if she for no purpose bore you;
As if you were her first-born birth,
And none have lived before you!
From the point of view of normal waking consciousness, this
is sheer intellectual delinquency. But it is what the artist, the
visionary and the mystic must do and, in fact, have always done.
"Look at a person, a landscape, any common object, as though
you were seeing it for the first time." This is one of the
exercises in immediate, unverbalized awareness prescribed in the
ancient texts of Tantric Buddhism. Artists visionaries and
mystics refuse to be enslaved to the culture-conditioned habits
of feeling, thought and action which their society regards as
right and natural. Whenever this seems desirable, they
deliberately refrain from projecting upon reality those hallowed
word patterns with which all human minds are so copiously
stocked. They know as well as anyone else that culture and the
language in which any given culture is rooted, are absolutely
necessary and that, without them, the individual would not be
human. But more vividly than the rest of mankind they also know
that, to be fully human, the individual must learn to
decondition himself, must be able to cut holes in the fence of
verbalized symbols that hems him in.
In the exploration of the vast and mysterious world
of human potentialities the great artists, visionaries and
mystics have been trailblazing pioneers. But where they have
been, others can follow. Potentially, all of us are
"infinite in faculties and like gods in apprehension."
Modes of consciousness different from normal waking consciousness
are within the reach of anyone who knows how to apply the
necessary stimuli. The universe in which a human being lives can
be transfigured into a new creation. We have only to cut a hole
in the fence and look around us with what the philosopher,
Plotinus, describes as "that other kind of seeing, which
everyone has but few make use of."
Within our current systems of education, training
on the nonverbal level is meager in quantity and poor in quality.
Moreover, its purpose, which is simply to help its recipients to
be more "like gods in apprehension" is neither clearly
stated nor consistently pursued. We could and, most emphatically,
we should do better in this very important field than we are
doing now. The practical wisdom of earlier civilizations and the
findings of adventurous spirits within our own tradition and in
our own time are freely available. With their aid a curriculum
and a methodology of nonverbal training could be worked out
without much difficulty. Unhappily most persons in authority have
a vested interest in the maintenance of cultural fences. They
frown upon hole cutting as subversive and dismiss Plotinus'
"other kind of seeing" as a symptom of mental
derangement. If an effective system of nonverbal education could
be worked out, would the authorities allow it to be widely
applied? It is an open question.
From the nonverbal world of culturally
uncontaminated consciousness we pass to the subverbal world of
physiology and biochemistry. A human being is a temperament and a
product of cultural conditioning; he is also, and primarily, an
extremely complex and delicate biochemical system, whose
inwardness, as the system changes from one state of equilibrium
to another, is changing consciousness. It is because each one of
us is a biochemical system that (according to Housman)
Malt does more than Milton can
To justify God's ways to man.
Beer achieves its theological triumphs because, in William
James' words, "Drunkenness is the great exciter of the Yes
function in man." And he adds that "It is part of the
deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of
something that we immediately recognize as excellent should be
vouchsafed to so many of us only in the fleeting earlier phases
of what, in its totality, is so degrading a poisoning." The
tree is known by its fruits, and the fruits of too much reliance
upon ethyl alcohol as an exciter of the Yes function are bitter
indeed. No less bitter are the fruits of reliance upon such
habit-forming sedatives, hallucinogens and mood elevators as
opium and its derivatives, as cocaine (once so blithely
recommended to his friends and patients by Dr. Freud), as the
barbiturates and amphetamine. But in recent years the
pharmacologists have extracted or synthesized several compounds
that powerfully affect the mind without doing any harm to the
body, either at the time of ingestion or, through addiction,
later on. Through these new psychedelics, the subject's normal
waking consciousness may be modified in many different ways. It
is as though, for each individual, his deeper self decides which
kind of experience will be most advantageous. Having decided, it
makes use of the drug's mind-changing powers to give the person
what he needs. Thus, if it would be good for him to have deeply
buried memories uncovered, deeply buried memories will duly be
uncovered. In cases where this is of no great importance,
something else will happen. Normal waking consciousness may be
replaced by aesthetic consciousness, and the world will be
perceived in all its unimaginable beauty, all the blazing
intensity of its "thereness." And aesthetic
consciousness may modulate into visionary consciousness. Thanks
to yet another kind of seeing, the world will now reveal itself
as not only unimaginably beautiful, but also fathomlessly
mysterious—as a multitudinous abyss of possibility forever
actualizing itself into unprecedented forms. New insights into a
new, transfigured world of givenness, new combinations of thought
and fantasy—the stream of novelty pours through the world in
a torrent, whose every drop is charged with meaning. There are
the symbols whose meaning lies outside themselves in the given
facts of visionary experience, and there are these given facts
which signify only themselves. But "only themselves" is
also "no less than the divine ground of all being."
"Nothing but this" is at the same time "the
Suchness of all." And now the aesthetic and the visionary
consciousness deepen into mystical consciousness. The world is
now seen as an infinite diversity that is yet a unity, and the
beholder experiences himself as being at one with the infinite
Oneness that manifests itself, totally present, at every point of
space, at every instant in the flux of perpetual perishing and
perpetual renewal. Our normal word-conditioned consciousness
creates a universe of sharp distinctions, black and white, this
and that, me and you and it. In the mystical consciousness of
being at one with infinite Oneness, there is a reconciliation of
opposites, a perception of the Not-Particular in particulars, a
transcending of our ingrained subject4bject relationships with
things and persons; there is an immediate experience of our
solidarity with all being and a kind of organic conviction that
in spite of the inscrutabilities of fate, in spite of our own
dark stupidities and deliberate malevolence, yes, in spite of all
that is so manifestly wrong with the world, it is yet, in some
profound, paradoxical and entirely inexpressible way, All Right.
For normal waking consciousness, the phrase, "God is
Love," is no more than a piece of wishful positive thinking.
For the mystical consciousness, it is a self-evident truth.
Unprecedentedly rapid technological and demographic
changes are steadily increasing the dangers by which we are
surrounded, and at the same time are steadily diminishing the
relevance of the traditional feeling-and-behavior-patterns
imposed upon all individuals, rulers and ruled alike, by their
culture. Always desirable, widespread training in the art of
cutting holes in cultural fences is now the most urgent of
necessities. Can such a training be speeded up and made more
effective by a judicious use of the physically harmless
psychedelics now available? On the basis of personal experience
and the published evidence, I believe that it can. In my utopian
fantasy, Island, I speculated in fictional terms about the
ways in which a substance akin to psilocybin could be used to
potentiate the nonverbal education of adolescents and to remind
adults that the real world is very different from the misshapen
universe they have created for themselves by means of their
culture-conditioned prejudices. "Having Fun with
Fungi"—that was how one waggish reviewer dismissed the
matter. But which is better: to have Fun with Fungi or to have
Idiocy with Ideology, to have Wars because of Words, to have
Tomorrow's Misdeeds out of Yesterday's Miscreeds?
How should the psychedelics be administered? Under
what circumstances, with what kind of preparation and follow-up?
These are questions that must be answered empirically, by
large-scale experiment. Man's collective mind has a high degree
of viscosity and flows from one position to another with the
reluctant deliberation of an ebbing tide of sludge. But in a
world of explosive population increase, of headlong technological
advance and of militant nationalism, the time at our disposal is
strictly limited. We must discover, and discover very soon, new
energy sources for overcoming our society's psychological
inertia, better solvents for liquefyingthe sludgy stickiness of
an anachronistic state of mind. On the verbal level an education
in the nature and limitations, the uses and abuses of language;
on the wordless level an education in mental silence and pure
receptivity; and finally, through the use of harmless
psychedelics, a course of chemically triggered conversion
experiences or ecstasies—these, I believe, will provide all
the sources of mental energy, all the solvents of conceptual
sludge, that an individual requires. With their aid, he should be
able to adapt himself selectively to his culture, rejecting its
evils, stupidities and irrelevances, gratefully accepting all its
treasures of accumulated knowledge, of rationality,
human-heartedness and practical wisdom. If the number of such
individuals is sufficiently great, if their quality is
sufficiently high, they may be able to pass from discriminating
acceptance of their culture to discriminating change and reform.
Is this a hopefully utopian dream? Experiment can give us the
answer, for the dream is pragmatic; the utopian hypotheses can be
tested empirically. And in these oppressive times a little hope
is surely no unwelcome visitant.