Viewing Entheogens as a Whole System

Viewing Entheogens as a Whole System by Bruce Eisner (rewritten from Post to the ELF list 1997)

I have studied what many people on this list call "entheogens" for 30 years now -- since age 19. One phenomenon, that I have become acutely aware of, is an obsessive quality among some people to focus on the psychedelic compounds themselves rather than looking at the whole system, "the big picture" of how these compounds relate to the rest of the society or culture.

I think that this has something to do with having written a book about a particular drug, MDMA or "ecstasy"as it is fondly referred to. I have done countless lectures and talk shows in. which people ask me about all of the details and every bit of trivia about this fascinating compound. I have been asked the same question hundred of times, sometimes at the same lecture or talk show two or three times.

So I had to do my homework and to learn to answer the questions most people want to know about. This, of course, is a community service but I was very glad when Nicholas Sanders published his books and put up ecstasy.org. It took the burden off of me of being the font of MDMA knowledge. I still keep up with what's new but I can always refer a question of Nicholas Saunders or Rick Doblin of MAPS and get the latest news.(Note: Since this essay was written, Nicholas Saunders passed away but his website remains a memorial).

Drug information about pharmacological "nuts-and bolts", the amount of it is expanding rapidly on the web. As part of the Island Web links, I have to add maybe 3 or 4 links a day including vast new achives like the Lycaeum, Erowid and the Psychedelic Library which have been added to repositories such as alt.drugs. Add to that lists such as this ELF list and you get enormous amount of information about the compounds, a lot of information about their effects and chemistry and a great deal of first hand accounts of experiences and opinions about the compounds.

There is relatively little information putting the drug experience in context. Island Web: Psychedelic Culture has been a project of mine to do that.

My interest in psychedelic drugs began during the hippie movement. Yet the hippies were not the first "alternative culture" to explore psychedelic as a path to insight. Alternative cultures have existed throughout recorded history -- including the Brethren of the Free Spirit, The Pre-Raphaellite Brotherhood, the Dadaists, Bohemians, and the Beats -- to name just a few. Each alternative culture seems to become larger and more high profile. In a way, the way the rave scene has been turning into a mass movement the way the hippies were is a good thing.

I see alternative cultures as a future culture waiting to be born. As the world population expands and the mainstream culture breaks down under this pressure, the alternative culture becomes more important. The purpose of alternative culture incubation of a memes,, of "media viruses that might infect the world with good.  My long-range goal with regard to starting the Island Foundation is to do just that.

As Island author Aldous Huxley did, I try to look at the larger picture an understand the whole system. Drugs are just one part of a much more all-encompassing ecosystem and we should pull them out and focus our attention on them alone, to the exclusion of the context they are used, the culture they are used in, the psychology of human beings. etc. Speaking of drugs without their context is like talking about sex and focusing on "tits and asses" -- It misses the whole erotic thing . High Times is famous for publishing pictures of buds or blotter papers as centerfolds, just like Playboy is famous for printing centerfold showing tits and ass and pubic areas of females considered beautiful by our culture. The reason people are so fixated on the object rather than the process is that both drugs and sex are taboos. So people aren't allowed to access images and talk about these objects with complete openness. So they lust after the object and forget the big picture.

I continue to believe that there is an unmet need for good drug education among the youth and even among the Boomers and GenX demographic strata above them. They do no get it in school and they do not get it in the mainstream media. But it seems to me that the more central task is to move past asking what psychedelic are and what they do We should begin to address largely unaddressed larger questions that place entheogens in the larger contextof how people relate to each other and to the universe. It this way, the entheogens may be seen as the beginning point, the catalyst rather than the end point. Our consciousness is like a beam of white light, the entheogen is like a prism and the rainbow of colors that our out the other side the many new insights, ecstasies and ideas that then engender. It is then up to us to take this crazy quilt of color and make it into a the whole fabric of a new culture.

In this context, it is useful to talk about set and setting as first promoted by the Leary, Metzner, Alpert, Barron and
their Harvard Research Project of the early Sixties.. Set is our own unique personality and setting is the people and things we surround ourselves with. Our own personalities can be "reprogrammed" or "reimprinted" by psychedelic experiences within the limits of the biological constraints of the individual. Our genetics are an important component of what we call personality. Add to this a lifetime of imprinting and exposure to the setting of the culture and you get what you call your personality.

Certainly, one point that needs to be driven home repeatedly. Entheogens are not for everyone nor are do they unlock the god within for everyone. There are some people whose genetic wiring and life experiences make them bad candidates for the use of psychedelics, especially the way that the are used in this culture, which is mostly without a cultural framework or context. And even when people take psychedelics once or many times, they don’t turn into saints automatically. People like Charlie Manson and those of  his ilk prove the old homily: "you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear."

After looking at the set, next is the setting. Setting is the other people around you and the environment, in which you work and play. I certainly remember those glorious days when MDMA was legal and we were conducting large-scale experiments with groups. These groups would become temporary autonomous zones for love and compassion and noncompetitive behaviors. People would feel connected, part of a loving tribe.

Then it was back to the "work-a-day" world come Monday morning and soon people would be back at their old games, gossiping and backbiting and competitive and uncompassionate. This was because the culture did and does not reinforce the empathogenic/entactogenic experience of MDMA.

Certainly many people who have taken glorious high dose psychedelic sessions and have felt it quite difficult to "come down." Coming down means returning to a world that mostly does not support the unitive, mystical, playful experience that they have just had.

Having gazed through the lens of a psychedelic compound, they have experienced the relativity of reality itself. Each compound in that regard, is like putting a new lens into a microscope of telescope and gaining a new view of the universe which puts the other views into perspective.

But the social world we live in becomes the limiting factor. There is only so much personal enlightenment once can achieve before we begin to feel a need to turn from within outward, to start changing the setting around us. Hindu "gurus” make a big point of being able to be "happy" and "enlightened" while things are going to hell around them. Certainly this is a useful skill. But for me and I believe that for most people, coping with a world gone mad isn't really adequate. A good book that explores this dea is "A Hundred Years of Psychotherapy And the World is Getting Worse by James Hillman Ph.D. and Michael Ventura.

I think that the reason people need to repeat psychedelic experiences so much is that they need to revisit a place beyond the consensual reality in order to reassure themselves that its still there. They keep needing another fix of transcendence least they forget the vision.

The problem is that the culture is not supporting their visions or at least not enough. So how do we go about approaching this limitation? To go back to the where I started; it is by developing a big picture of the whole system. We might start asking and attempting to experimentally and experimentally and even intellectually explore what a culture might be like that could exist in the post-industrial, information age, post-modern world which we live that would support our experiences in alternative states of consciousness.

I continue to be an ELFer, and to consider you fellow Entheogen Loving Friends to be the community I choose to call my own. I enjoy my role as someone who has studied psychedelic compounds and can help answer basic questions for naivetes and enthusiasts. But I also would like to challenge those who gather here to begin looking at the larger picture.

Alternative cultures have always provided a critique of the mainstream culture and aspects of each alternative culture has found their way into the mainstream.

But with the population bomb ticking, the educational system falling apart, the social contract which makes us feel safe with one another breaking down and industrial societies splitting into a two class society of haves and have nots, it is important to address this question. How do we create an entheogenic culture with the wisdom to reverse some of these trends and turn the world into a better place to trip?