Evola’s chapter on substances really resonated with my own experience. The thing people don’t really like to talk about with psychedelics: they can be medicinal and fun, sure, but there’s a price you pay. Insight at most is what you get, but you don’t get to keep it. You don’t get ‘transcendence’ and if someone tries to tell you otherwise they are a fool, misusing a term.
The drug is just a mechanism, not the potential “possession” itself. When you submit to this current, you allow yourself to be impressed upon, and your self fragments. This is what I believe applies to ego death as well, as the extreme. People like to talk about it as if it’s the most transcendent experience you’ll ever undertake and it’ll bring you closer to God but it is actually the opposite; you shatter yourself and are left vulnerable to latch onto whatever entities (these can be ideas, people, otherworldly things, etc) available at the time. Attachment to externalities; the fatal blockage to true understanding. If the “I” is maintained, then this opens the doors to higher realities, rather than trying to eliminate the “I.”
To avoid fragmentation, instead of submitting to the current, you ride it; you have to be proactive in creating your trip without attempting dissolution. And this is when you get to meet the Seraphim.
The “illusory phantasmagoria” as a synthesis of internal subconscious projections and influence of outer entities. Huxley’s “Heaven & Hell” goes into this topic deeper, but I believe this is the case when one hallucinates.
As I was looking into Evola’s background I realized we had quite a bit of similar life experiences and maybe this is why I like him so much. Also dabble in Beat-esque dada experimental music, stepping into the role of a facilitator a mushroom ceremony not too long ago, the process was exactly as Evola described.
Music as ritual, and psychedelics possessing a sort of inert sacredness—perhaps the wrong way of looking at it. The difference between dada and casual drug usage versus ceremonial African music rituals and plant medicine is the aspect of Sacredness. The substance in itself isn’t sacred, and the “intent” doesn’t make it so either. Music isn’t ritual just because you intend it to be. It’s the formal, ceremonial, religious process set up combined with intent that makes it so. Without synthesis, it’s all just escapism.
You can set up a makeshift hapé ‘cleansing’ on your balcony but this isn’t sacred. It’s not sacred nor transcendent in any way.
The “toxic equation” is interesting; some scientists such as Ling-Shao deny this, because psilocybin’s supposed to repair neurons, but this doesn’t answer the question of the existence of the toxic equation for each individual; that’s like saying “actually berries are healthy for you” when what we’re trying to locate is that one specific red toxic berry that will be toxic to bears but not humans.
A: Eastern Orthodoxy’s dualistic nature of the serpent