Drugs and Beliefs

In Psychedelic Society, I was intrigued with McKenna's beliefs on beliefs themselves. He says, "A psychedelic society would abandon belief systems for direct experience. This is I think much of the problem of the modern dilemma: direct experience has been discounted, and in its place all kinds of belief systems have been erected." This really goes along well with what my group pegged as the theme of Huxley's book, really living in the moment. McKenna claims that our beliefs are the very reason we don't live in the moment.  He calls belief a "self-limiting function."

And when I think about it, I suppose belief is a self-limiting function. By believing one thing, you probably don't believe the opposite. For example, as in Pearce Ch. 6, if you believe fire burns, it's absolutely incredible to think that people can walk across fire and be unharmed. I was intrigued by this fire-burning chapter, because walking across fire seems an impossible feat and yet many do it and aren't harmed in the least. Pearce talks about people witnessing these fire-walking ceremonies and still not believing it. I guess  a strong set of beliefs can cause us to completely disregard the incredible, even if we have tangible evidence or have seen it ourselves.

Also sticking with the living in the moment theme, McKenna says, "We must transcend the historical movement and become exemplars of humanity at the End of Time." I believe McKenna doesn't mean the End of Time like the end of the world but rather very literally the end of time. What I got from this statement was that we either live in the past, constantly attempting to learn from it, or we live in the future, always striving toward something not there yet, but we never live in the present. We never just "are", which is what I think Huxley challenged in his book.

McKenna talked about ridding ourselves of our beliefs so we are not inhibited by them. I thought about this as I read Law Enforcement Against Entheogens and when Sterling discussed religious tolerance I got a very visual image. I thought that maybe we need to get rid of our beliefs to make room for more and I imagined tapping the side of my head and having my beliefs fall out so that I could put more ideas in and form new beliefs. And although not quite so literally, I think that's what I do. My views of the world are always changing and especially as I struggle with my religious affiliations, I'm constantly revising my beliefs. In high school, I used to believe Jesus was the only way to Heaven and I was strongly convicted in that belief, but over the years, I've revised my belief to simply say that I don't know the way to Heaven. 

I compare the revision of beliefs to the Constitution of the United States. We base our laws, court decisions, everything on the Constitution today, but according to Gore Vidal in Inventing A Nation, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams only pushed for the ratification of the Constitution with the hopes that they would later have the chance to improve it. My professor compared it to a student handing in a paper knowing it's not great, but hoping it will get an average grade. Jefferson and Adams knew a federal government was needed and the Articles just weren't doing it, so they supported the Constitution. And Benjamin Franklin supported the Constitution much for the same reason, but he was also very vocal about its faults. He in fact predicted the government corruption that exists in Washington today. Now we base everything on a half-assed development of our Founding Fathers, at least according to my interpretation of Vidal's book. But we make amendments as necessary and make new laws and overturn those new laws as necessary, because society and culture is constantly changing and to keep up, law must in turn change. 

As McKenna says, "Our fundamental ontological conceptions of reality have to be remade." According to McKenna, to become a psychedelic society, we not only have to discard our belief systems, but was also have to redefine reality. Or maybe we should just get rid of a definition of reality. Discard the belief system that causes us to require a definition for everything. 

I feel quite confident a psychedelic society as McKenna describes will never happen. Why? I think Pearce sums it up when he says in Ch. 6, "We are so heavily committed to our constructs that any suggestion of their relativeness fills us with anxiety." And at least in our society, anxiety is bad, change causes anxiety, so change must be bad. After all, isn't that why psychiatrist prescribe lorazepam and diazepam? I'm not saying anxiety is good, I'm just saying that certain levels of anxiety probably weren't meant to be doused with Valium.

Keeping in line with beliefs, Pearce says in Ch. 5, "Data can be found to bolster the conviction. The desire for conviction can produce its own data," which makes me think of Santa and the fly agaric mushrooms. As a class, we pretty much agreed that a lot of his supporting evidence was quite a stretch. Bursenos so believed that Santa was connected to the mushrooms that he forced his data to fit. I've certainly done this in the aforementioned half-assed papers and I think is an interesting not to end on that a belief can be so persuasive in our lives.

Our beliefs undoubtedly shape who we are and what we do, but do they close us off to the rest of the world?