Labels and Psychedelics
How the wind blows. I love when something comes along that is unexpected. Today, the clouds flowed quietly but heavy. About mid day, a breeze flowed through the trees and it began to rain, a respite from the oppressive heat we have been having. I didn’t pay attention to what the weather was “supposed” to be, so the rain was unexpected and beautiful.
Something similar flowed into our dialogue last night. As we had fewer people, we began to check in with one another. One of our participants spoke about an acid trip he had while jumping out of an airplane. Well, this was something that created a curiosity in all of us and focused our attention and off we were running into a dialogue around psychedelics. The beautiful thing was that in the end, it all circled back to labels. Why? Ah, now that is the question and something for us all to ponder.
In her book Untamed, Glennon Doyle begins by talking about a cheetah that is in a zoo like environment. As Glennon is watching, she notices how domesticated this cheetah is. While she continues to observe, Glennon and her daughter notice how the cheetah is pacing back and forth, back and forth, searching outward, seemingly looking for some place outside the fence. This cheetah seems to know that there is something wrong, but she can’t place it. She was born here, domesticated here and is all she knows. Yet, deep inside, she recognized that this enclosure was not her place, and was not the role she wanted to be playing.
I am not so sure that we are any different. Do you ever get this ache that there is something wrong, that something feels out of place, that the world that one is living is a bit off and that what is going on just doesn’t feel authentic? Do you ever feel like you are caged in and want to leap out, but are unsure how to even begin? Whether rich or poor, domestication is the nature of our culture. We are domesticated like a cat, dog, and like this cheetah. We may have many things or few things, but unless we recognize it, we are enslaved by our cultural conditioning. Someone who is rich is playing out there role just as someone who is impoverished. It is a system of conditioning. We are programmed to see the world in the way our culture tells us to see the world - separated and hierarchical. We lose our trueselves in order to play our our societal role. We lose our authenticity, the wild arc of our nature, and we lose our voice.
Emptiness and anxiety percolate to the surface at times. We notice how we feel separated from those around us, and from nature itself. Yet, as it is all we know, we just push it down and keep going, keep pacing.
Many of us drink or use drugs to escape even for just a moment. We use them in order to relax and push down that ache, to be happy so that subtle voice inside ourselves that is illustrating that there is something amiss quiets. Of course, alcohol and drugs simply cover up this ache, but the ache is still there urging one to wake up, to see, to question. Of course to do so, our ego’s recognize at some level that in doing so will shake up the very foundations that it has created to be in the world, even though that foundation is nothing but smoke and mirrors. For of course, all those beliefs, labels - our very identity, is culturally created and modified.
Yet, psychedelics (which can absolutely be used as an escape) can unlock the door, to break through the walls of our domestication, our conditioning, and dive into what is real, alive and has been there all along. Wholeness.
As Michael Pollan’s book, How to Change Your Mind, illustrates, psychedelics have the potential - given the right environment and with an open mind set, to open up one's consciousness in a split moment. What can take years through meditation practice, can take just one one dose to unlock one’s potential and wipe away old beliefs and opinions. In this space, one will recognize that labels are mere pointers but never the thing itself.
Lao Tzu shared in the Tao Te Ching, “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth. The named is the mother of ten thousand things.” We use the word tree to communicate the living entity that grows out of the ground and branches into the sky showering each and every limb with green leaves. Yet, tree of course is not this entity itself. For many of us however, we get lost in the word, and don’t actually see the wonder of what that word is actually pointing at for us to see. So instead of seeing the actuality of the tree, we begin to divide the world through our use of language and labels and thereby create the idea that we ourselves are also separate. Yet, if we can see what the label is actually pointing towards and get underneath, we wouldn’t divide but rather see how that “tree” is a part of a grand interconnected web of wholeness.
Simply said, If we hold the labels to be real, we then separate the world into parts. Yet if we can see that labels are a way of communicating but not the things itself, then we can see the flow of wholeness in which we are a part of. Psychedelics can help open the door to such a quiet presence, a presence that’s very light of awareness burns away all labels all divisions until one directly perceives the wholeness of the Universe.
The point of this is to not necessarily go out and do psychedelics. The point is to wake up. If by understanding that we don’t have to live enclosed in the walls of our cultural domestication, and that we can wake up, then maybe that in itself is the key. If we can see that our culture, one in which we are all collectively recreating every day, lives in the illusion of separation, then maybe, just maybe we can question its very basis, and begin to create together a world that reflects the nature of ourselves and the Universe - one of wholeness. For what I have come to understand is that by living in wholeness, we live in love for love is the expression of wholeness. For if I am whole and see that all things are imbued in wholeness, how can i not love.
Fear is born out of the idea of feeling separate. Love is and has always been for all is whole. If anything came out of our dialogue last night, is that though there maybe different ideas around whether people should or should not take psychedelics, we did see that maybe there is a deep want in our souls to break free.
