Unleash
The Elegant Teachings of Psychedelic Mushrooms
W
hat does it mean to live in a world that degrades the images which spring up in our
dreams and strips them of their creative energies?
Those energies used to energize so-called primitive ideas, myths or rituals. Freud spoke of them as mere “archaic remnants,” suggesting that we are dealing with a dusty archive of obsolete symbolism.
Others have argued, instead, that our modern civilized approach to that which cannot be contained within common sense explanations has turned us into psychotics.
The dichotomization of body and mind is arguably chiefly to blame for the predicaments of our time. The cartesian cogito, of the famous cogito ergo sum, is still the main philosophical adversary of contemporary theorizing, but it remains doubtful if we have managed to integrate mind, body, and spirit in such a way as to allow us to go beyond our modern civilized approach to what we deem to be the fundamentally rational nature of reality.
Foregrounded in the reductionist views this fundamental separation gives rise to are mechanistic and materialist understandings of humans, human nature, and nature. The consequence of this is a persistent and widespread imbalance of energies, mental, physical, and spiritual suffering.
Civilizational discontent is neither a new phenomenon, nor a new concept. Simplified, it denotes the ill fit between individuals and the societal conditions, meaning the hegemonic ideas and structures of the world they inhabit.
According to Freud, there is a fundamental tension between the instinctive freedom of the individual and the society’s strong and incessant demands for conformity qua repression of instincts and docility.
In the historical perspective, this has led to reforms and revolutions — this is, nevertheless, not to say that we are dealing with a necessarily linear or progressive unfolding of history. Rather, from our current vantage point, the opposite seems to be true.
Coupled with a dearth of grievance-addressing and restorative mechanisms, we have engendered numberless forms of maladaptive coping.
At one end of the spectrum, an imagining of human life completely free of distress — this leads to the avoidance or shielding from any and all encounters with people, ideas, beliefs, art, etc., which are feared as causes of egoic dissonance.
At the other end of the spectrum, a kind of apocalyptic ideation deploys a dream of armageddon.
Even though they may seem motivated by different emotions, different ideologies, or energetic directionalities, when confronted with the diversity, complexity, and mystery of being, these two seemingly polar opposites strive for a common goal:
the destruction of the world —
First, in the form of shutting it out, becoming blind and deaf to it. Second, in the exhilarated vision of annihilation.
The materialist model of disease cannot account for the multiple levels of organization of suffering, disease, and illness, from the societal to the individual to the molecular, to explain these outgrowths of nihilism.
Reframing our distress as biopsychosocial and spiritual symptoms, as necrosis and sclerosis of disenchantment, would not only, and necessarily, expand the materialist model of organic disease, addictions, and afflictions, but also allow us to think more deeply and nuanced about the indispensable differentiation between the human condition and the conditions of our lives in late capitalism.
It is high time that we realized that it is pointless to praise the light and preach it if nobody can see it. It is much more needful to teach people the art of seeing (C.G. Jung)
The distinction of existential distress from disease is not always a clear-cut, but nonetheless essential distinction. We can use this distinction to develop a critical perspective on modern medicine's tendencies to pathologize both, painful, but ultimately normal human experiences, as well as civilizational disease.
This would allow us to integrate inevitable human experiences of pain, grief, etc., and separate them from cultural, societal, economic, i.e. systemic fetters to thriving — fetters we can very well throw off.