I wanted to start this blog to put ideas out there and step out of the narrow confines of being a fashion brand. Behind the creative output you see manifesting through Arahant are a whole host of ideas and practices that i've been working on for a number of decades, ideas emerging out of things like meditative practices, music, art, philosophy and psychedelics. In this post I wanted to write about a 5 gram "heroic dose" mushroom ceremony (heroic being the term the psychonaut Terrence Mckenna used to describe a 5 gram mushroom dose) in which I had a number of interesting insights, one of which was to start working on this blog that you are reading now. For those who are dismissive or still on the fence about psychedelics this piece may seem esoteric, weird or simply the ramblings of an hallucinating artist. If that is you I encourage you to read on and approach the ideas with a playful mind. I could reference how psychedelics are becoming mainstream and being utilised in mental health practices in order to convince you the legitimacy of these compounds. However I would rather urge you to follow your own curiosity and not dive into something simply because of herd mentality. Anyway......
As my ceremony started in one scene it seemed like the mushroom communicated with me directly and had an anthropomorphic guize. In this encounter it seemed quite pissed off. I scanned the image coming forth and saw its leg had been clipped with a tag of some sort like the type of tag you would see on cattle. As I became more inquisitive around this image a whole host of insights effervesced in my mind. It wasn't just an inconvenience or mild embarrassment to the mushroom but was in fact a tragedy unfolding in front of me. What was becoming clear was that the mushroom was expressing disgust at the commercialisation of itself (for those who don't know recent developments in the field of psychedelics have led to big business investing heavily in the belief that large profits will be made in its forthcoming legalisation). I realised that we are in the early stages of treating psychedelics the same way we do cattle. I let my mind cascade over the implications of this and opened to what the mushroom was making efforts to communicate with me.
I don't use the word "wrong" much but in this case I feel that the commercial use of mushrooms is in fact wrong. Here is something that has been used for time immemorial, before recorded history for sure, as a sacrament, as a key to the divine and transcendent, if not God itself.....and our modern approach is to dissect it, package it and put a label on it. It feels like an alien abduction scenario in reverse where we are the aliens probing and violating the flesh of another being.
My mind moved on ....I realised that in ceremony we are in a dialogue with the mushroom. This is a two way relationship. Could it be that it wants to converse with us as much as we want to converse with it and it is this circle that brings both revival and affirmation to us both? If we treat it with reverence or at least with respect we imbue ourselves with that quality also. My experience with mushrooms is that they have been incredible healing and renewing for me. There is a wholeness that one can experience in the heroic dose and that feels core to the reason why these states are healing. One could argue that trauma is in fact characteristic of unwholness, parts of our psyche splintering off due to un-integrated experiences. That wholeness experienced by a more expanded sense of the psyche is the healing thing in of itself.
The point I think the mushroom was trying to make is that scientific commodification will negate this circle. In order to maintain objectivity, in order to isolate and ultimately consume the benefits the scientific worldview risks negating the healing benefits themselves. We can't maintain scientific distance to obtain the result. One has to give oneself over to its process., feel it, dance with it, fall in love with it.
Its seems mans creations are not in communication with the ongoing totality. They live in a closed vacuum reserved only for concepts and ideas. My experience seems to be calling me to wake up from that mesmerising narrative: ossified institutionalised scientism ....the idea that if we apply that ad infinitum we will get to the bottom of it all. However one thing becomes abundantly clear in the psychedelic experience and thats there doesn't seem to be a bottom to any of this. The Buddhists would concur.
How can you tag and package something that humanity has deemed to be worthy of, lets face it, worship, for eons. Its the arrogance of our age and the blindness of modern man that we think we can just own and control anything and that owning is the fruition of the objects existence and completion of our own (Iain McGilchrist has offered a great thesis on the limits of science and its overreach in his book the Master and his Emissary..... science applied to seeing the limits of science, a thoroughly worthwhile endeavor).
What I got in this experience was the sanctity of the cycle and the dialogue itself. Our age is plagued by loneliness because we don't think we are connected to anything anymore. The enlightenment project of "I" is paramount. Our thinking places us outside of the lived experience of the cycle. There is something about the workings of our consciousness, about the symbolic ruminations of our minds that sees itself separate from everything. In my own personal inquiry this in itself seems the grounds for spiritual inquiry: to reach past how we routinely see life and experience the relief and ecstasy of wholeness.
How can you not revere something that reveals such profundity?
We have an opportunity now with psychedelics to find the baby we threw out with the bathwater. That baby is the lived experience of communion with the totality where words like "wholeness" and "healing" have real meaning to them.