I ate psychedelic mushrooms for the first time when I was 24 years old, on a trip out of town – to the place of my family on both sides, stretching back generations, with a woman I was just getting to know. Yarmouth County, Nova Scotia. The last time I had been there was to bury my Grandmother – a steadfast presence in my life and the next time I would be having my first pro wrestling match – nearly getting my jaw dislodged by a legend.
We ate at around 10pm; small sandwiches, lovingly produced. It was that mesmerizing Maritime phenomenon of something between a heavy mist and a gentle rain. A surreal kind of weather that cloaks everything in an ethereal haze. As the mushrooms began to take effect we walked out of our motel room and into a seminal evening in my life. We walked about with the express purpose of finding the water – a large and wonderful lake – which for all intents and purposes was directly across the street, yet somehow managed to elude us the entire evening. Never the less, we traipsed up and down the road, getting slowly soaked in all kinds of things. At one point the police showed up and – dreadlocked and peaking as we were – I thought that was likely it for us on those sodden back-country roads but no…. They had been alerted to our presence by concerned neighbors who, likely due to our smaller statures and general demeanor, thought that two small children had escaped their homes in the middle of the night and were wandering the streets in the rain but the police, realizing we were – perhaps a little mad, but harmless – politely let us carry on.
A universe would open up to me that night that would begin some of the principle journey’s of my life. Tracy and I discovered each other that night. Some fascination and love and understanding that would abide. Like a little shack by the ocean that despite raging seas stands somehow, always. My home at the end of the world. And I would fall in love with the feeling of being high on mushrooms. It wasn’t the hallucinations or the feeling of being on some sort of horrific, awe-inspiring roller coaster of transcendent God-head magic. I mean, that was cool – don’t get me wrong. We loved that shit. And had a penchant for eating more than our fair share: if our faces weren’t melting, we weren’t high… But it wasn’t that. It was this underlying perspective. And with it a magical sort of contentment. I have tried to explain it for years. Always in vain. I can say that I didn’t know such a way of seeing the world had existed – despite eating acid and reading my requisite romantic poetry as a teenager – but knowing it gave me a hope and inspiration I had never before known and a daemonic desire to know this feeling, always.
This was not an original thought. Much of the spirituality of the sixties and seventies was first born by way of psychedelics and it matured through the new Eastern philosophies and techniques being brought to North America en masse for the first time. Psychedelics were seen by some as a window into another world or an elevator to the top floor, whereas meditation and yoga where doorways or steps up to the top floor – so that when you got there, you had half a clue as to what was happening and how to navigate it.
So that was my lineage in a way and I understood that techniques like yoga and meditation would be part of my path as they had been for so many before me.
Then I picked up Thomas Moore’s “Care of the Soul” and everything changed.
Sitting in this crooked little cafe one day I began to read and within the first few pages I realized that what he was talking about; what he meant by care of the soul was how I felt while I was high on mushrooms.
Immediately I was hooked.
The word psychedelic came about from conversations between the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond and Aldous Huxley in the 1950’s. From the onset, psychedelics were a part of psychology. Osmond needed a name for what was happening in his psychedelic therapy sessions. Huxley suggested “phanerothyme” from Greek, to “manifest spirit.” But Osmond went with his own “psychedelic” which he meant to mean “mind-manifesting” but whose deeper meaning implied “soul-manifesting.”
It is so curious to me that at the beginning there was a choice made between defining the experience of psychedelics as either spirit or soul-based and that soul was chosen, yet most everyone uses them for more spirited aims. Perhaps that speaks to their failure. It is not meant to get you high and away as much as it is meant to get you down and in.
Regardless, my experience and the subsequent reading of Moore indicated to me a clear correlation. And I went with it whole hog. I devoured most of everything Moore had written to that point with few exceptions, often re-reading everything two or three times. One name kept coming up over and over.
James Hillman.
For anyone who has tried, (with a few notable exceptions) Hillman is not an easy read. His concepts are almost just outside this dimension of reality. In a way they are. And it takes a different kind of understanding to get him. He’s not speaking to your intellect. He’s speaking – eruditely – to your soul. And chances are that’s not an experience you are used to having. What kept me going in the early days was the physical sensation I would have when I would really grasp something. Some sort of giddy contentment deep in my belly. Like something in my blood had shifted.
To offer an explanation of how this website came to be would be to miss a crucial point. I could talk about how, at the age of 37 I came to view my situation as something akin to the Game of Life but with the disadvantage of my piece no longer being on the board – rather being chewed in a corner by a dog. I could recall how a tertiary glance around me revealed so many other people seemingly in the same boat. Refugees from project paradise adrift on a sea of bloated affluence with no direction home. I could recall a trip into the woods with a friend for the weekend. This ancient grove of trees tended by Buddhists. That in that silence, from deep within me, all I could hear was a scream. Me, writing into the night while my friend napped. I could talk about death – of every stripe. I could talk about Steve Jobs words echoing in my head for days after an old acquaintance was murdered by a drunk driver.
“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
I could talk about my brief experience with Shamanism and how it shattered my conception of reality – and the ocean-full of gratitude I have for it. I could mention Camus’ “Myth of Sisyphus”, Victor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning”, pay homage to Ram Das and speak at length about Allen Ginsberg.
This is, perhaps what I look like when I stand up straight and answer eye-to-eye with the absurd proposition before us.
Specifically, my intent is to explore “Re-Visioning Psychology” – the seminal work in both Archetypal Psychology and James Hillman’s illustrious career – in close detail. What that inspires or how that takes shape is a proper mystery. I do know I have my eye on the lived experience of all this. What does a revolutionary cosmology such as Hillman’s, lived out loud look like?
What are the implications? Because we do need revolution. You and me and the world. Many revolutions, big and small. Re-Visioning Psychology, as Hillman noted, was a fortunate title. Incredibly apt. But to re-vision one’s psychology is to re-vision one’s life. By the roots. Hillman’s work was to shift our relationship with the deepest parts of our beings. And that is nothing if not grassroots, fuck the powers that be, let’s run naked through the streets because we are alive and free revolution.
Howling into the still blue dawn revolution.
Let’s fuck shit up.
As Jung – and later Hillman – noted, any sort of psychological writing is at base a confession of the author’s inner experience. My confession reminds me of an impressionist painting. A large piece. Floor to ceiling, against an exposed brick wall. Hillman and his ideas and Jung’s and my own and many others mixed on the canvas. There is some hard-bop jazz playing in the background. Cannonball Adderly. Live in New York. I offer you Chianti or a smoky, peaty scotch.
Enjoy. And as Ginsberg often insisted “Don’t hide the madness.”