The Marriage of the Sun and Moon

Dispatches from the Frontiers of Consciousness

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

Contents

DEPARTURE

ON A VIOLENTLY STORMY night in September 1971 I left my house near Sterling, Virginia, to drive to New Jersey on the first leg of a journey that would take four years and cover many thousands of miles. I rode north through blinding rain in a 1969red Land Rover I had just acquired. It would soon be known to me as El Rojo and was to be a faithful companion through the mountains, deserts, and jungles of North and South America.

Sometimes we cross divides in our lives that are visible only in retrospect, being unaware at the time that an action taken or a parting is to mark the end of one phase and the opening of another. But that night in the blackness of northern Virginia was planned and anticipated as an important transition. I had put my affairs in order, packed up or given away most of my possessions, reduced my material needs to what I could fit in the back of El Rojo, and had prepared my body and mind for a long trip into the unknown.

For the previous year I had lived by myself in rural Loudoun County, enjoying the country, learning to be quiet, and working on the manuscript of a book. I finished the book in August and delivered it to the publisher just before leaving. It would appear a year later as The Natural Mind: A New Way of Looking at Drugs and the Higher Consciousness. In it I set out a theory of drugs and the mind based on several years of research, experience, and observation. Much of the book was speculative, the product of periods of reflection in the Virginia woods and the ordering of a great deal of information I had compiled during my medical training and my work as a researcher. On finishing the book, I was eager to go out in the world again and test my theories, to see more, have new experiences, and refine my ideas.

I was enabled to do that by a remarkable foundation in New York City called the Institute of Current World Affairs, which awarded me a fellowship to travel about and collect information on altered states of consciousness, drug use in other cultures, and other matters to do with the complementarity of mind and body. The night that I drove to New Jersey was the start of my new life as a fellow of that institute.

During the years that I held this position, the institute provided me with full financial support. In return I had two obligations. The first was to write a brief report twice a year summarizing my activities. The second was to write, on the average of one a month, newsletters on topics of my investigations. These were to be addressed to the executive director of the institute, Mr. Richard H. Nolte, for reproduction and private circulation to a list of my friends and a list of "certain persons in government, education, business, and the professions" who were interested in me or in the area about which I would be writing.

In the course of my fellowship, I wrote thirty-nine of these newsletters. They were mailed to New York from a variety of stopping points and covered a broad range of subjects. Some of them have since appeared in scientific journals and popular magazines. These newsletters, edited and revised, are published here for the first time in book form.

My fellowship was a bit unusual. Most institute fellows go to a particular region of the world, stay there for several years, and write about it. I moved about constantly and investigated a general theme rather than a geographical area. That the subject matter of my investigations qualified as a "current world affair" reflected the growing interest in consciousness at all levels of society at the beginning of the 1970s, as well as the willingness of Dick Nolte to be innovative and unconventional.

My favorite method of research is participant observation. I like to experience people and activities, record my impressions, and then analyze them at leisure. The fellowship provided an excellent opportunity for that kind of work, and the newsletters a perfect format for recording it.

There were several questions I hoped to look at in my travels, all of them raised by theories in The Natural Mind. In the first place, I wanted to observe the relationships traditional peoples form with psychoactive plants. Second, I wanted to think about ways of getting high and changing consciousness without drugs. Third, I wanted to sharpen my conceptions of mind-body interactions and their implications for health and medicine.

The first of these topics reflects my long-standing interests in curious plants, New World Indians, herbal medicine, and psychoactive drugs. I needed to see certain plants firsthand and learn their uses from people who had lived with them for generations. One reason for doing so was to test my theory that some Indians have solved the problem of drug abuse by allowing ritualized use of natural drugs in positive ways under careful social controls. Accordingly, many of the pieces in this book are descriptions of plants that affect the mind and of people who use them to change their awareness of themselves and the world.

But the concerns of this book are broader than drugs, and I hope readers will notice that I am writing about drugs mainly as models of interactions between human consciousness and natural forces. Long ago, I came to understand that people's expectations of drugs often explain their responses to them better than books of pharmacology; psychologists call this kind of expectation "set." Social and cultural setting also modify pharmacology. Over and over in my research and writing, I have stressed the importance of set and setting. Furthermore, drugs are typical of many elements in nature that are both powerful and ambivalent. They can either harm us or help us. The choice seems to be ours: Drugs become useful or dangerous depending on how we view them and how we use them.

The chapters describing drug plants are really about set and setting, conceptual models, and the power of mind to modify physical reality. For example, these same ideas apply to phenomena like fire walking and healing, which are also discussed here. How is it possible for people to handle fire and not get burned? Why do unorthodox medical treatments based on absurd theories sometimes cure patients of real diseases, while rational, scientific treatments sometimes fail? Belief is the key to these mysteries: not intellectual conviction but gut-level belief that links up with the physical nervous system and, through it, influences all the functions of the body.

The catch in this scheme is that the kind of belief that matters is often unconscious and may be at variance with conscious belief. People may tell you they expect thus and so of a drug or a medical treatment, but they may expect something quite different at the level of mind that connects to the nervous system and be unaware of it. This problem has led me to consider the nature of the unconscious mind and its relationship to the ordinary mind.

A major theme of The Natural Mind was that people take drugs to produce desired altered states of consciousness, to get high. But the highs of drug experience seem essentially the same as highs obtained through music, dancing, sex, athletics, meditation, hypnosis, religious ecstasy, and many other activities. I concluded that highs are innate capacities of the nervous system and that drugs merely trigger them by making us feel physically different, thereby giving us opportunities to be high. For this reason, drugs do not work unless set and setting encourage us to interpret their direct physical effects in ways that allow us to be high. Also, I suggested that the neurological basis of high states is some sort of interchange between the conscious and unconscious minds, between higher and lower parts of the brain.

The statement that highs can be had without drugs (and may be better that way because they are uncontaminated by irrelevant effects on the body) brought me much criticism from committed users and researchers of drugs. Some of these people insisted that drug highs were special in some way, either more intense or more interesting than nondrug highs.

I heard this objection so often that I began to wonder if I were mistaken. Had I myself ever had as intense an experience without a drug as with LSD, for example? Certainly my clumsy skill at meditation had not brought me anything approaching an LSD trip. Yet two experiences seemed to me to qualify: learning the ritual of the Indian sweat lodge from a Sioux medicine man in South Dakota and seeing a total eclipse of the sun in southern Mexico. So powerful were these highs that I was eager to repeat them. At the start of my travels with El Rojo, I went back to South Dakota for more of the sweat lodge, and in 1973 I caught another solar eclipse in Africa.

The eclipses suggested to me a model of consciousness I found very useful. I took the sun and moon as symbols of the two spheres of the mind, and a total eclipse as the symbol of a union that produces transcendent states. This theme is developed in "The Marriage of the Sun and Moon," the last chapter, which also describes the sweat lodge. All of the chapters converge toward the idea of unifying consciousness.

* * *

I knew that Latin America would be a rich source of information. Therefore, I went to Mexico to learn Spanish. Once in Mexico, at the beginning of November, I quickly abandoned my plan to take formal language classes in Cuernavaca and settled, instead, in the nearby village of Tepoztlán. There I became one of the first students in a new, experimental school called the Colegio de Tepoztlán, under the direction of Marco Polansky, an offbeat teacher and unforgettable character. Marco, an Italian Jew who had lived in Israel and Sweden, now was based in Tepoztlán with an American wife and daughter, two Italian daughters by a previous marriage, and an adopted Mexican son. His household was a polyglot's delight.

Marco's philosophy of learning languages was out of the ordinary but struck me as correct. He said we all had the capacity to learn languages, since we did it as infants, that it had nothing to do with intellect but rather was an operation of the unconscious mind. The only abilities it depended upon were accurate listening and accurate imitating. Therefore, the way to learn a new language is to want to learn it badly and to immerse yourself in it, letting as much of it flow into the unconscious mind as possible; whether you understand it or not is irrelevant. Forget about grammar books and formal instruction, Marco said. Just listen and imitate.

"Classes" at the Colegio de Tepoztlán were bizarre. Sometimes Marco would have us fall into trance states to the accompaniment of recorded chamber music while he intoned vocabulary words from a Spanish comic book. When pressed for more-structured help, he would decline, saying there was no way to teach another person a language. He did arrange for us to be apprenticed to local people to force us to talk. I was placed in the care of the village carpenter, who was also the mail carrier, and spent many pleasant afternoons with him in an outdoor shop, helping to make furniture.

I must say that the Polansky method worked like a charm. In three months I was speaking passable Spanish, and three months after that (I was in Colombia by then) I was speaking good Spanish. The only other language I ever learned as well was German, and that took four years of painful work in high school. I would never again attempt to learn a language by studying it, and I have no doubt that I can learn any language now just by really wanting to and placing myself in the right part of the world. I am grateful to Marco for teaching me that lesson.

Tepoztlán was a fine place to live. It had a colorful Indian market, delightfully eccentric gringos, and spectacular mountains: the Sierra Tepozteco, named for the Aztec god of pulque and intoxication. (Pulque is the traditional fermented drink made from the sap of the blue maguey.) A rugged climb from the village led to a pyramid used for worship of the god. My coming to Tepozteco's sacred spot to begin my fellowship seemed curiously appropriate.

At the beginning of February 1972 with the coming of the period of "crazy weather" (febrero loco is the Mexican term), on an afternoon of fierce winds, green thunderheads, and salmon and purple light on the mountains of Tepozteco, I readied El Rojo for the next move. At the first light of dawn, I drove off to the Mazatec region of northeast Oaxaca to encounter the famed magic mushrooms and then continue south to Central America and Colombia.

THROWING UP IN MEXICO

VOMITING IS NOT a subject for polite discussion, at least not around the dinner table. Nevertheless, I consider it an important subject because it has much to teach us about the relationships between mind and body and the natural mechanisms available to us for altering internal processes. Also, it provides an example of how physical realities can be changed by adopting different mental conceptions of them. Finally, it offers some practical clues about possibilities of coordinating conscious and unconscious mental energies.

A good place to begin is with the very emotional attitudes that stand in the way of our talking about vomiting in polite company. Vomiting is an ultimately antisocial act in societies desirous of relegating natural functions to the obscurity of the lavatory, away from public view. Moreover, these attitudes seem to be justified by experience; most of us have vomited only in association with illness and do not think of it as something we could feel good about, let alone practice openly.

That such feelings are not universal may come as a surprise to many persons. But, for example, instructional materials on yoga urge students to learn to vomit voluntarily, to practice it regularly, and to perform it as a morning ritual (called jala dhauti), much as many people gargle. American Indians who eat hallucinogenic plants that cause nausea often vomit effortlessly and unself-consciously. Vomiting is even a central part of certain Indian rituals, such as the sahuaro wine festival of the Papagos, held near the summer solstice in the Sonoran Desert along the Mexico-United States border. The Papagos force themselves to drink as much as possible of a fresh wine made from the sweet, red fruit of giant cactuses. The vomiting and urinating that follow are supposed to help bring on the summer rains and thereby ensure survival through the hottest season.

In my medical training I was taught nothing about vomiting except as a symptom of disease, but I do not regret having learned that information. For it is my understanding of the nervous mechanisms underlying the process that makes me so willing to pay attention to what yogis say are the right uses of those mechanisms. Vomiting is a reflex action. That is, it is initiated by nervous impulses from the periphery of the body (usually the stomach), which, traveling to a center in the brain, produce an outgoing nervous impulse that causes the regurgitation of stomach contents. Now, the vomiting center is in an anatomically discrete part of the brain called the medulla oblongata, the connecting link between the lowest portion of the brainstem and the uppermost portion of the spinal cord. Because it also contains centers regulating heartbeat and respiration, the medulla may be considered the most vital unit of the entire nervous system whose disruption means cessation of the life of the body. Occasionally, vomiting arises directly from irritation of the medulla itself in the absence of impulses from the stomach: so-called "central vomiting," which may be a symptom of serious trouble in the brain. Because the medulla is that part of the brain farthest from the cortex and closest to the spinal cord, and because its centers control the basic rhythms of life, which will continue even in deep coma, neurologists think of it as a keystone of the involuntary nervous system.

The nerve fibers that issue from the vomiting center in the medulla to the alimentary tract form part of the vagus nerve, a huge conduit that leaves the cranium to innervate many structures in the throat, chest, and abdomen. The vagus is a principal component of the parasympathetic nervous system — that portion of the autonomic system whose influence is to slow down certain internal functions and conserve energy. For example, when vagal fibers to the heart are stimulated, heartbeat slows down. During the act of vomiting, massive vagal discharges occur, producing a number of physiological changes in addition to emptying of the stomach. Is it possible that learning to vomit willfully opens this important channel of unconscious activity to conscious influence? Might it not also extend cortical influence to the very center of the unconscious part of the brain, the medulla?