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Dr. Susan Blackmore: I take illegal drugs for inspiration
Posted on Friday, July 08, 2005 (CDT) by Thoth
 Every year, like a social drinker who wants to prove to herself that she's not an alcoholic, I give up cannabis for a month. It can be a tough and dreary time - and much as I enjoy a glass of wine with dinner, alcohol cannot take its place.
Some people may smoke dope just to relax or have fun, but for me the reason goes deeper. In fact, I can honestly say that without cannabis, most of my scientific research would never have been done and most of my books on psychology and evolution would not have been written.
Some evenings, after a long day at my desk, I'll slip into the bath, light a candle and a spliff, and let the ideas flow - that lecture I have to give to 500 people next week, that article I'm writing for New Scientist, those tricky last words of a book I've been working on for months.
This is the time when the sentences seem to write themselves. Or I
might sit out in my greenhouse on a summer evening among my tomatoes
and peach trees, struggling with questions about free will or the
nature of the universe, and find that a smoke gives me new ways of
thinking about them.
Yes, I know there are serious risks to my health, and I know I might
be caught and fined or put in prison. But I weigh all this up, and go
on smoking grass.
For both individuals and society, all drugs present a dilemma: are
they worth the risks to health, wealth and sanity? For me, the pay-off
is the scientific inspiration, the wealth of new ideas and the spur to
inner exploration. But if I end up a mental and physical wreck, I
hereby give you my permission to gloat and say: "I told you so".
My first encounter with drugs was a joint shared with a college friend
in my first term at Oxford. This was at the tail end of the days of
psychedelia and flower power - and cannabis was easy to obtain. After
long days of lectures and writing essays, we enjoyed the laughter and
giggling, the heightened sensations and crazy ideas that the drug
seemed to let loose.
Then, one night, something out of the ordinary happened - though
whether it was caused by the drug, lack of sleep or something else
altogether, I don't know. I was listening to a record with two
friends, sitting cross-legged on the floor, and I had smoked just
enough to induce a mild synaesthesia. The sound of the music had
somehow induced the sensation of rushing through a long, dark tunnel
of rustling leaves towards a bright light.
I love tunnels. They come on the verges of sleep and death and are well
known in all the cultures that use drugs for ritual, magic or healing.
The reason for them lies in the visual cortex at the back of the brain,
where certain drugs interfere with the inhibitory systems, releasing
patterns of circles and spirals that form into tunnels and lights.
I didn't know about the science then. I was just enjoying the ride,
when one of my friends asked a peculiar question: "Where are you, Sue?".
Where was I? I was in the tunnel. No, I was in my friend's room. I
struggled to answer; then the confusion cleared and I was looking down
on the familiar scene from above.
"I'm on the ceiling, " I said, as I watched the mouth down below open
and close and say the words in unison. It was a most peculiar
sensation.
My friend persisted. Can you move? Yes. Can you go through the walls?
Yes. And I was off exploring what I thought, at the time, was the real
world. It was a wonderful feeling - like a flying dream, only more
realistic and intense.
The experience lasted more than two hours, and I remember it clearly
even now. Eventually, it came to seem more like a mystical experience
in which time and space had lost their meaning and I appeared to merge
with the universe. Years later, when I began research on out-of-body
and near-death experiences, I realised that I'd had all those
now-familiar sensations that people report after close brushes with
death. And I wanted to find out more.
However, nothing in the physiology and psychology that I was studying
could remotely begin to cope with something like this. We were learning
about rats' brains, and memory mechanisms, not mind and consciousness -
let alone a mind that could apparently leave its body and travel around
without it. Then and there, I decided to become a parapsychologist and
devote my life to proving all those closed-minded scientists wrong.
But I was the one who was wrong. I did become a parapsychologist, but
decades of difficult research taught me that ESP almost certainly
doesn't exist and that nothing leaves the body during an out-of-body
experience - however realistic it may feel.
Although parapsychology gave me no answers, I was still obsessed with
a scientific mystery: how can we explain the mind and consciousness
from what we know about the brain? Like any conventional scientist, I
carried out experiments and surveys and studied the latest developments
in psychology and neuroscience. But since the object of my inquiry was
consciousness itself, this wasn't enough. I wanted to investigate my
own consciousness as well.
So I tried everything from weird machines and gadgets to long-term
training in meditation - but I have to admit that drugs have played a
major role.
Back in those student days, it was the hallucinogens, or
"mind-revealing" psychedelics, that excited us - and the ultimate
hallucinogen must be LSD. Effective in minuscule doses, and not
physically addictive, LSD takes you on a "trip" that lasts about eight
to 10 hours but can seem like forever. Every sense is enhanced or
distorted, objects change shape and form, terrors flood up from your
own mind, and you can find joy in the simplest thing.
Once the trip has begun, there is no escape - no antidote, no way to
stop the journey into the depths of your own mind. In my twenties, I
used to take acid two or three times a year - and this was quite
enough, for an acid trip is not an adventure to be undertaken lightly.
I've met the horrors with several hallucinogens, including magic
mushrooms that I grew myself. I remember once gazing at a cheerfully
coloured cushion, only to see each streak of colour turn into a scene
of rape, mutilation or torture, the victims writhing and screaming -
and when I shut my eyes, it didn't go away. It is easy to understand
how such visions can turn into a classic "bad trip" , though that has
never happened to me.
Instead, the onslaught of images eventually taught me to see and
accept the frightening depths of my own mind - to face up to the fact
that, under other circumstances, I might be either torturer or
tortured. In a curious way, this makes it easier to cope with the
guilt, fear or anxiety of ordinary life. Certainly, acceptance is a
skill worth having - though I guess there are easier ways of acquiring
it.
Then there's the fun and just the plain strangeness of LSD. On one
sunny trip in Oxford, my friend and I stopped under a vast oak tree
where the path had been trampled into deep furrows by cattle and then
dried solid by the hot weather. We must have spent an hour there,
gazing in wonder at the texture of this dried mud; at the hills and
valleys in miniature; at the hoof-shaped pits and sharp cliffs; at the
shifting patterns in the dappled shade. I felt that I knew every inch
of this special place; that I had an intimate connection with the mud.
Suddenly, I noticed a very old man with a stick, walking slowly
towards us on the path. Keep calm, I told myself. Act normal. He'll
just say hello, walk by, and be gone.
"Excuse me, young lady," he said in a cracked voice. "My eyes are weak
and, in this light, I can't see my way. Would you help me across?" And
so it was that I found myself, dream-like, guiding the old man slowly
across my special place - a patch of mud that I knew as well as my own
features.
Two days later, my friend came back from lectures, very excited. "I've seen him. The man with the stick. He's real!"
We both feared that we'd hallucinated him.
Aldous Huxley once said that mescaline opened "the doors of
perception"; it certainly did that for me. I took it one day with
friends in the country, where we walked in spring meadows, identified
wild flowers, marvelled over sparkling spider's webs and gasped at the
colours in the sky that rippled overhead.
Back at the farmhouse, I sat playing with a kitten until kitten and
flowers seemed inextricable. I took a pen and began to draw. I still
have that little flower-kitten drawing on my study wall today.
On another wall is a field of daffodils in oils. One day, many years
later, I went to my regular art class the day after an LSD trip. The
teacher had brought in a bunch of daffodils and given us one each, in a
milk bottle. Mine was beautiful; but I couldn't draw just one.
My vision was filled with daffodils, and I began to paint, in bold
colours, huge blooms to fill the entire canvas. I will never be a great
painter but, like many artists through the ages, I had found new ways
of seeing that were induced by a chemical in the brain.
So can drugs be creative? I would say so, although the dangers are
great - not just the dangers inherent in any drug use, but the danger
of coming to rely on them too much and of neglecting the hard work that
both art and science demand. There are plenty of good reasons to shun
drug-induced creativity.
Yet, in my own case, drugs have an interesting role: in trying to
understand consciousness, I am taking substances that affect the brain
that I'm trying to understand. In other words, they alter the mind
that is both the investigator and the investigated.
Interestingly, hallucinogens such as LSD and psilocybin are the least
popular of today's street drugs - perhaps because they demand so much
of the person who takes them and promise neither pleasure or cheap
happiness. Instead, the money is all in heroin, cocaine and other drugs
of addiction.
I have not enjoyed my few experiences with cocaine. I don't like the
rush of false confidence and energy it provides - partly because that's
not what I'm looking for and partly because I've seen cocaine take
people over and ruin their lives. But many people love it - and the
dealers get rich on getting people hooked.
This is tragic. In just about every human society there has ever been,
people have used dangerous drugs - but most have developed rituals that
bring an element of control or safety to the experience. In more
primitive societies, it is shamans and healers who control the use of
dangerous drugs, choose appropriate settings in which to take them
and teach people how to appreciate the visions and insights that they
can bring.
In our own society, criminals control all drug sales. This means that
users have no way of knowing exactly what they are buying and no-one
to teach them how to use these dangerous tools.
I have been lucky with my own teachers. The first time I took ecstasy,
for example, I was with three people I had met at a Norwegian
conference on death and dying. It was mid-summer, and they had
invited me to join them on a trip around the fjords. One afternoon,
we sat together and took pure crystals of MDMA - nothing like the
frightening mixtures for sale on the streets today.
MDMA has the curious effect of making you feel warm and loving towards
everyone and everything around you: within a few short hours, we were
all convinced that we knew each other in a deep and intimate way. Then
we deliberately each set off alone to walk in the mountains, where the
same feeling of love now seemed to encompass the entire landscape.
I was told then that I should make the most of my first few
experiences with MDMA because, after five or six doses, I would never
get the same effects again. In my experience, this has been true,
although prohibition makes it all but impossible to find such things
out. In fact, we know horrifyingly little about the psychological
effects of drugs that people take every day in Britain because
scientists are not allowed to carry out the necessary research.
That is why I've had to do my own. I once had an expert friend inject
me with a high dose of ketamine because I had heard it could induce
out-of-body experiences. Known as K, or Special K, on the street, this
is an anaesthetic used more often by vets than anaesthetists because of
its unpleasant tendency to produce nightmares.
Get the dose right, as I did, and you are completely paralysed apart
from the ability to move your eyes. This is not very pleasant. However,
by imagining I was lifting out of my body, I felt I could fly, and I
set off home to see what my children were up to. I was sure that I saw
them playing in the kitchen; but when I checked the next day, I was
told they had been asleep.
Back in the room, my guide began holding up his fingers out of my
line of vision and, as soon as my mouth started working again, made me
guess how many. I seemed to see the fingers all right, but my guesses
were totally wrong.
I didn't repeat the experiment. It was not nearly as interesting as
those drugs, such as LSD, psilocybin, DMT or mescaline, that undermine
everything you take for granted. These are psychedelics that threaten
our ordinary sense of self, and that is where they touch most deeply
on my scientific interests.
What is a self? How does the brain create this sense of being "me",
inside this head, looking out at the world, when I know that behind my
eyes there are only millions of brain cells - and nowhere for an inner
self to hide? How can those millions of brain cells give rise to free
will when they are merely physical and chemical machines? In
threatening our sense of self, could it be that these drugs reveal the
scary truth that there is no such thing?
Mystics would say so. And, here, we hit an old and familiar question:
do drugs and mystical experiences lead to the same "insights"? And are
those insights true?
Since those first trips, I have taken many other drugs - such as
nitrous oxide, or laughing gas. For just a few moments, I have
understood everything - "Yes, yes, this is so right, this is how it has
to be" - and then the certainty vanishes and you cannot say what you
understood.
When the discoverer of nitrous oxide, Sir Humphrey Davy, took it
himself in 1799, he exclaimed: "Nothing exists but thoughts". Others,
too, have found their views profoundly shifted. It seems quite
extraordinary to me that so simple a molecule can change one's
philosophy, even for a few moments, yet it seems it can.
Why does the gas make you laugh? Perhaps it is a reaction to a brief
appreciation of that terrifying cosmic joke - that we are just shifting
patterns in a meaningless universe.
Are drugs the quick and dirty route to insight? I wanted to try the
slow route, too. So I have spent more than 20 years training in
meditation - not joining any cult or religion but learning the
discipline of steadily looking into my own mind.
Gradually, the mind calms, space opens up, self and other become
indistinguishable, and desires drop away. It's an old metaphor, but
people often liken the task to climbing a mountain. The drugs can take
you up in a helicopter to see what's there, but you can't stay.
In the end, you have to climb the mountain yourself - the hard way.
Even so, by giving you that first glimpse, the drugs may provide the
inspiration to keep climbing.
Psychologist Susan Blackmore, neuro-scientist Colin Blakemore and
author Mike Jay will be appearing at the Cheltenham Science Festival
(June 8-12) to discuss whether drugs can teach us anything about
ourselves. For tickets to the Altered States session at the town hall (
£6, 4pm on Saturday, June 11) or for any other festival event , please
call 01242 227 979 (information: www.cheltenhamfestivals.org.uk)
Article Source
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Dr. Susan Blackmore: I take illegal drugs for inspiration
by Billo on Friday, July 08, 2005 (CDT)
(User Info | Send a Message) | | Timothy Leary, eat your heart out. |
Dr. Susan Blackmore: I take illegal drugs for inspiration (Score: 1)
by sheshet on Friday, July 08, 2005 (CDT)
(User Info | Send a Message) http://www.geocities.com/sheshet2001 | This woman was always so anti anything spiritual, anything that delt with the consciousness of animals and other lifeforms. She was always on discovery channel as the skeptic who put down other people's supernatural or UFO experiences...
What a HYPOCRITE!
Sheshet |
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Dr. Susan Blackmore: I take illegal drugs for inspiration
by StarCat on Friday, July 08, 2005 (CDT)
(User Info | Send a Message) | Ganja.....back in the day when we were teens, me and the ones I ran with loved the stuff.
Even then I saw its darker aspects, and today I write a few things for people to consider.
I saw older folk back then who were stoners to the exclusion of all else and they were in association with the teens. These people were unproductive and irresponsible.The pattern repeats itself to this day. It was surreal and ugly beyond all measure.
The plant itself is a miracle botanical and no doubt it was undermined by some highly neagtive forces in our country around WW2, its valid uses rent asunder and lied about for generations to come.
But what was the real agenda??
Some research along these lines will reveal much to the interested seeker about the natural vs. the synthetic and dark deeds by corporate entities...Du Pont and the likes.
The many uses of this plant could solve much of our modern problems. Its also a great fuel source and the best natural source on the planet for paper. It has valid medical uses, but really only when applied esoterically.
There is great mystery on this end of the equation.
More on the dark side...
It is a sacred plant that has fallen into widespread misuse in my view, and was never meant to be intaken by habit, same as tobacco. Most have forgotten the sacredness of plants and the responsibility involved in taking them for our purposes. Also the reverence and the consciousness involved need be considered.
What I see in people who are into this plant is a master-slave relationship...an unhealthy dependence that often brings out some of the worst in people which they then refuse to look at squarely. There are exceptions, but very few, and these tend to be unusual people that are highly accomplished. They are rare.
This girl writing may be one of them.
It may be the plant, or it may be that it catalyses something already there in a persons inner nature. The signs are easy to spot at a distance and unmistakable.
More disturbing is what is being seen by those with etheric sight, that being the fact that the aura takes on a dingy yellow-brown haze that does not go away. This is the sticky nature of the plant taking hold in the subtle bodies and also in the neural synapses. This has been proven in research.It lingers.
Stuart Wilde has written a few papers on the etheric effect and they can be seen on his websight. http://www.stuartwilde.com/SW_books.htm
What I see happening is a type of symbiosis. Its unhealthy and unbalanced as is any indulgence left unchecked. Unhealthy because its altering the body-mind complex in ways that people are not seeing soberly.
Unbalanced because people who allow their attention to get trapped by this plant will go to great lengths to spend excessive time in those altered states.....removed from the reality of this world we live in, and neglecting their lives and relationships in various ways.
There is an entropy in the energy signature.
That paranoid feeling that often comes along with the experience happens because things are literally coming into your field, you've opened yourself to them. All plant induced altered states open you to hyperdimensions.
I see it messing up peoples lives in these times of accelerated energies.
The danger is alot greater for those on the spiritual path exactly because you are working with higher dimensional enegies as a part of that path, and that path will force you to look at the totality of yourself and your actions in ever increasing ways.
The average person is in a sense protected to a degree by his own ignorance.
I think this girls article is an important step to help shatter the dogma about Ganja, but people need to be fully informed about such a powerful plant. There alot of dark interests that make big $$ from this thing and they know they have people in bondage.
They also know it makes people more docile and that it can also lend itself to fostering states of fear.
Thats why its costs so muc
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