A friend (thanks, Rebecca Wimer!) alerted me to a website
displaying the artwork of Bryan Lewis Saunders who “takes every drug known to
man [and] draws [a] self-portrait after each use.” Saunders’ portraits, it is
noted, “aren’t all that different from artist Bobby Baker’s self-portraits of
mental illness.”
It would be easy to sneer at Saunders’ project, wondering
why he would want to subject himself to such a drug regimen and whether the
resulting artwork has any significance.
A lot could be said about this, and an excellent place to
begin the conversation would be with an essay, “Altered States” (The New Yorker, August 27, 2012) by physician
(neurologist) Oliver Sacks. Though the entire essay is worth reading and
discussing, Sacks’ opening three paragraphs puts the topic in correct focus:
To live on a day-to-day basis is
insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need
meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in
our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or, at
least, the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with
telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology, or in states of mind
that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate
surroundings.
We may seek, too, a relaxing of
inhibitions that makes it easier to bond with each other, or transports that
make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday
from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and
now, the beauty and value of the world we live in.
Many of us find Wordsworthian
‘intimations of immortality’ in nature, art, creative thinking, or religion; some
people can reach transcendent states through meditation or similar
trance-inducing techniques, or through prayer and spiritual exercises. But
drugs offer a shortcut; they promise transcendence on demand. These shortcuts
are possible because certain chemicals can directly stimulate many complex
brain functions. (p. 40).
It seems undeniable that there is a link between psychotropic
drugs and ways of seeing. I say it is undeniable not because I am up on the
research on such things but because I was in college in the Sixties, and lived
in a commune in New Mexico in the Seventies. Drugs of all sorts were part of
the social fabric of my life, and long hours talking with people stoned on LSD
or psychedelic mushrooms made it obvious that the drugs had changed their
perception of reality—mostly for curse, and occasionally for blessing. Plenty
of people got high merely because it was a fad, or through peer pressure, or because
it was entertaining, or to escape the pain of coping with a broken world. But I
met some who took drugs seriously, as part of a pilgrimage in which they wanted
to know the truth of reality and had come to think that drugs might be a way to
gain some insight into realities hidden from ordinary perception.
The belief that there is a mysterious link between spiritual
realities, mental illness, and drugs was widely held during the Sixties but it
was difficult to get many people outside the drug culture to take the idea
seriously—especially Christians. We should be receptive to such things since we
do believe that reality includes both the seen and unseen, and there are
surprising times when the veil between the two is parted in some way. One time,
we are told, St Peter was hungry, went up onto the flat roof of a house to
pray, and “fell into a trance” (Acts 10:10). He saw a vision, spoke with God,
and learned something that was crucial to the early church. Christ himself
fasted 40 days and nights—now there is a radical use of a spiritual
discipline—and had a personal encounter with the evil one (Matthew 4:1-11).
Mystics over many centuries have used spiritual disciplines—silence, solitude,
fasting—and sometimes found their perceptions altered.
I am not here arguing that drugs and spiritual disciplines
are somehow parallel, but rather that we dare not be dismissive of the notion
that spiritual realities are easily perceived and comprehended, or that there
is not great mystery here, or that intelligent, sincere human beings can go to
extreme lengths to find significance or to peer into the depths of reality.
With the rise of paganism and decline of Christianity in the
West I suspect that once again the church will be asked to consider such
things. I hope the watching world does not find us sneering.
Graphics: Drawing by Bryan Lewis Saunders, “‘Bump’ of Crystalmeth;”
portrait of Dr. Oliver Sacks.
This entry was posted
at Wednesday, October 03, 2012
and is filed under
Asking questions,
Drugs,
Meaning,
Significance,
Spiritual reality
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