Coming late in a new book by Sam Harris called Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, this passage snapped me to attention. It's not that Harris's book had lulled me up to that point: It's a provocative, informative and, at times, infuriating look at consciousness and the self. Its main argument is that techniques exist, meditation prime among them, to reduce human suffering by helping us to understand that the self — as conventionally understood — is an illusion. Our feeling of "I" is a product of thought, and thoughts merely come and go in our consciousness; there's no self behind our eyes or in our head and when we grasp this, it's easier to unmoor ourselves from the sources of suffering in our lives.
The ways in which Harris supports this thesis are worth reading. Yet as a parent of a college-age daughter, I found that it was his move beyond meditation — Harris's expressed hope that his kids, once they become adults, will ingest psychedelics — that made me stop and think hard. Is Harris's wish an ethical one? What can my field of anthropology bring to bear in thinking about this matter?
On this topic of psychedelics, Harris has an advantage that I lack. Not only has he spent considerable time in serious meditative practice, he also has experienced moments of immense beauty and love — and other moments of total terror — on MDMA (ecstasy), psilocybin (mushrooms) and LSD. I grew up in the '60s in a family whose lives centered closely on law enforcement — my father was a captain in the New Jersey State Police — and I wasn't exactly the drug-experimenting type. In high school and college, I watched a few friends go through trips good and bad, but that's as close as I got.
Harris is candid about the risks of ingesting psychedelics:
Harris describes one LSD trip as plunging him into "a continuous shattering and terror for which I have no words."
Some readers, Harris notes at the outset, may want to consult their mental-health professionals before carrying out any of the ideas he endorses (including meditation), and he concludes that after expanding one's consciousness through drugs "it seems wise" to find other practices that "do not present the same risks."
So how should we think about the psychedelic-ingestion experience in connection with a search for enlightenment? Research in neuroscience certainly shows real change in the brain from the action of psychedelic drugs. But I don't think it's enough to say that the outcome of any given trip is a matter of which drug one ingests — and of individual luck.
Like everything else humans do, ingesting psychedelics — even if we are totally alone while doing so — is a cultural matter, and the outcomes are culturally contingent. Anthropologists Greg Downey and Daniel Lende, who co-blog at Neuroanthropology, each made the same point to me in separate emails this week when I invited them to respond to Harris's passages about enlightenment through psychedelic drug use: "One could say that Harris goes a bit far," were Lende's words. He continued:
Downey made the point to me that no intoxicant has a predictable response:
It's hard to escape our own cultural lens: It's a constant struggle, for anthropologists as much as anyone. Still, Harris's perspective would, I think, be strengthened by his explicitly considering the variable cultural contexts for what he's espousing.
"It is your mind, rather than circumstances themselves, that determines the quality of your life," he writes, then repeats this sentiment in similar words throughout the book.
Does Harris really think that mushrooms and meditation are enough to overcome, to take but one example, a life of hunger or poor health emerging from poverty? Of course not. Harris is smarter than that — but he's writing for a certain audience, and what comes to the fore is not a global perspective on human suffering or on what society should do about it.
Circling back to the passage from Waking Up that I used to open this post, I'll wager that we can collectively create a lengthy list of responsibilities that our society has — to each other, to our environment, to other animals — that take take priority over eating mushrooms or dropping acid and urging our adult children to do so.
Barbara's most recent book on animals was released in paperback in April. You can keep up with what she is thinking on Twitter: @bjkingape
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