DMT, Ecocide, and the Western Psyche

Plagued by fears of civilizational collapse, the human relation to nature is charging back into modern consciousness. The natural sciences alert us to calamities on a vast scale, yet court the suspicion that they themselves presuppose an attitude intrinsic to the destructive dynamic. Thoughtful people diagnose a spiritual malaise at the heart of modern western culture. They wonder aloud how consumerist, status-conscious, gadget-obsessed urbanites in pseudo-democracies dominated by mega-corporations can ever recapture a compelling relationship to the suffering Earth.

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In different ways in different locales, but everywhere to an unprecedented degree, modernized people have become insensitive to the environmental costs of “progress.” The situation is obviously dire. One can imagine a rewriting of Nietzsche’s famous Madman declaring the death of God in the marketplace. Only now the Mad man declares the death of the living planet, of Mother Earth, and “it is we”—he shouts—“it is we who are killing her!” The crowd shrugs and goes about its business.

However, the shoulder-shrugging is deceptive. In thinking about these reactions in the broadest context, we become aware, as Jungians have long insisted, of archetypal mobilizations in the collective unconscious: the archetypal images of death, of the looming apocalypse, of Divine Retribution of Mother Earth. Social scientific thought has no automatic immunity from such archetypes; nor from neurotic defenses against their presence; nor from the host of inherited mythic figures, from Prometheus to Faust, Pandora to Kali, Darwin to Gandhi, which crowd in upon the mind, offering their metaphorical associations like baited fishhooks for the anxious psyche.

It would be simple enough to say that I have been studying users of the psychoactive alkaloid dimethyltryptamine (N, NDMT), along with an associated brew of Amazonian provenance, ayahuasca—a vine noted for its hallucinogenic properties. It would be more accurate to say I have joined in the ceremonies of use of western “psychonauts”—those who explore their inner psyche through various means such as hallucinogens, meditation, ritual, and dreaming—in Australia, Argentina, Mexico, and Peru. These are people who largely belong, sociologically speaking, to the neo-shamanic revival, where the “teacher plants” are carefully and often reverently processed so as to extract the sacramental molecules, or “entheogens,” which open onto what, phenomenologically speaking, are multi-dimensional worlds populated by what practitioners describe as “entities” or “spirit beings.”

Many of the experiences in these worlds take natural processes as their theme. Stan, an Australian man in his mid-40s with a military background and a long-term meditative practice, discovered this on his first ayahuasca journey. Early on, as plasticky patterns began to form in front of his eyes, he tried to change the pat-

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terns into wood. As he did so, Stan noted:

A voice said to me, ‘Not power over. At one with’… When I tried to be at one with the experience, all of a sudden, the experience changed, and I found myself inside a tree. … I was literally standing inside a tree trunk. I travelled up the tree trunk right up to the very top of the tree. And it was a pine tree. It was almost like I was the tree. I went right out to where the pine needles were in the sunshine. And I could feel the sunshine on the pine needles. And it felt so good! Oh my God! And I remember thinking: “No wonder plants reach up for the sun, coz it is so good!” (fieldwork interview).

Speaking for myself, under the influence of the teacher plants, it is easy to conceive a thought that goes like this: here, finally, is the lost bridge between civilized humanity and the natural world; here, in the nick of time, are the messengers intent on turning us inside out, displaying the wilderness at the heart of human being. Rak, an Australian journalist and film maker, tells me of “a plan by Madre Ayahuasca.” Perhaps, he speculates, “she is emerging from the Amazon, sending out her vine intelligence across the planet, answering our need for a consciousness upgrade.”

Was it always the “plan” to wait until global midnight? In any event, as the well-known writer on psychedelics James Kent puts it, “[W]hen you get to the heart of what the typical DMT message is, it is usually something about the environment or living systems or the vast plant consciousness that penetrates our world” (“The Case Against DMT Elves,” Tripzine.com, 2004). Is it not astonishing, then, that most environmentalists continue to overlook these powerful allies in the struggle to let the biosphere be heard?

Yet things are not so simple. For here, with the aid of the plants, one enters realms that are paradoxically both too crazy for the ecological “download” they are tasked with (since these realms are much weirder than anything resembling what most of us think of as “nature”). At the same time, the realms are too familiar to serve as the wished for Archimedean point (since on inspection the

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experiences are still clearly marked by the user’s culture). How to begin thinking about the promise, and the seduction, of these plant substances for the modern western attempt, such as it is, to avert ecocide? In a DMT journey, we are thrown, I suggest, into the “objective psyche.” By this, I mean the nutrient grounds of culture itself: what we actually get when we go looking with powerful enough magnification for the wellsprings of meaning; what the psychoanalyst Cornelius Castoriadis designated in volcanic terms as psycho-ontological “magma”; what in numerous pre-modern cosmologies is to some degree included within “the world” and is referred to as the realm of spirits or entities, where mythic creation happens and the culture heroes are born.

Under the tutelage of the plants, it becomes all too obvious that the so-called “unconscious,” in its personal, collective, and “psychoid” forms, is very far from unconscious. It is better thought of as an infinitely capacious, transpersonal energetic-protean consciousness of its own, an ever-present primordial soup of electro-magnetism and biosemiosis, which can in no way be plausibly understood as a “result” of repression—though repressive dynamics are certainly at work in it, and in its symbolizations and cultural institutionalizations.

Interestingly, DMT and ayahuasca are usually spoken of in Western circles as “medicines” of personal healing and vehicles of spiritual and philosophical “exploration.” These personal agendas intersect with the existential politics of the anthropocene. One of the common connecting links, as we have seen, is an archetypal mother: ayahuasca as Gaian healing presence full of promise. May an “Entheogenic Reformation” lead us, Jonathan Ott writes, to “the spiritual rebirth of humankind at Our Lady Gaia’s breasts, from which may ever copiously flow the amrta, the ambrosia, the ayahuasca of eternal life!” (Jonathan Ott, The Age of Entheogens and The Angel’s Dictionary, 1995, p. 12).

Ott’s reference to “eternal life” reminds us that this feminine archetype is breaking the surface in the context of anxiety about looming collective death. Here, too, the plants are not shy. Experiencing a kind of death, usually personal, but sometimes more general, is one of the key dimensions of the experience. To take

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but one instance, Nen, a very experienced Australian DMT user in his late 30s, advocates high doses of DMT as training for “bardo”—or transitional—states, so as to be “forced out of any control… to be forced into a disembodied state, to understand that consciousness continues regardless of a body and can have all sorts of different forms… So for me once we just get over dying, for a start, on mass, that makes a big change” (“Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse,” In a Perfect World podcast, 50, 2011).

What then is the upshot of all these journeys into hyperspace? We can perhaps see the contemporary cultural situation in the West as one of a breakdown of ontological coordinates, of rising “ontological insecurity,” to echo R. D. Laing’s echo of Soren Kierkegaard. Many, in this situation, are struck dumb, condemned to terminal uncertainty. Others, more active, become spokespeople for archetypal forces fashioned into ideologies, into “beliefs.” Those who journey with the plants are no doubt distributed across both camps. However, because all of these processes happen in this zone with heightened uncanniness, we can perhaps hope not so much that journeyers will come back with the solution, but rather that they will continue to practice a more reflective and conscious relation to these options than otherwise possible. Keeping alive a free, intelligent, and experientially grounded discussion of our situation is perhaps one of the best things the entheogens can offer. That and the realization that non-human others—the plants, animals, and the ever so strange other others—not only can be, but actually are and have always been, part of the conversation.

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