A Pioneer in the Consciousness Movement

The American Way of Enlightenment

A Universe Soft as Pudding

Questioning Meditation & Psychotherapy

Spiritual Medication

Replanting the Seeds of Social Discontent

Recirculated Electrons

Ken Wilber: Da Vinchi For Our Day

Mental Health: Being in the
Right Mind at the Right Time

Monotheism, Monagomy, & Monotony

Fun with Fiction

e.com: Let's go back for one second to the idea of spiritual practices. You talked about it being an American sort of way, that we need new ...

Fadiman: That we're able to go from practice to practice in a way that was not possible in any other time.

e.com: Do you think that it's also part of who we are, the way we've been speeded up by the electronification of everything, with more events [in the technical sense of the word "event" used by Jerry Mander in In The Absence Of The Sacred] happening all the time, and that we just have a shorter attention span? That we're not capable of having the necessary discipline?

Fadiman: No, because I know people who have stayed with one discipline for many years, and certainly they seem like wonderful people. I'm just saying that we have an advantage, in America, in the 20th Century. Let me see if I can give you a parallel.

Historically, most people ate a very repetitive diet, because the foodstuffs that could be grown in their particular area, or at best they had a cuisine, called a "national cuisine," which they ate all the time. But, here, at least in Northern California and in many other places, I can literally decide which national cuisine I will eat on any given evening. Is it appropriate that I have a more chopped vegetable kind of Chinese, or an American huge amount of red meat, or a Korean hot spicy pickled. These are very wide variations in food that have never been available to almost anyone in any other period of history. If you were Louis 14th and could build a 300 room palace, you still had to have French food every night.

We're in a unique historical period in terms of spiritual events. I can work with someone who has been trained for 20 years in Tibetan Buddhism, but I can also go home and that Sunday go work with an Orthodox Catholic who has been training for 10 years in poetry.

e.com: Isn't there a fear that people will, just when the practice gets hard, just when they hit the sort of plateaus that George Leonard talks about in his book on Mastery, that they'll give up, and that they'll never actually get to the place where they have to just persevere to break through, that they'll say, "Well, I've tried this long enough, now I'm going to try this other type of meditation, or take this other kind of workshop, and it's not working any more, and it's no fun any more, so let me just try something different."

Fadiman: Well, that undoubtedly happens. One of the few advantages I found in getting older is I look at people who have basically been tripping from groovy item to groovy item for 20 years versus people who stopped at the first groovy item and are still doing that. In terms of their development, other than that the people with the narrower point of view have a much smaller vocabulary, there's not a lot of difference. People who are determined to develop seem to find a way.

There's a Sufi saying that says "You are always in the hands of your teacher. The question is whether your teacher can do anything for you." That suggests two things. One is that you are still the person who has to make the growth changes, not the teacher, and second of all, whether you know it or not, you are being helped. In the Sufi tradition you have a kind of Master teacher who says to you, "Well, I think you should leave me and go to a different teacher and learn to weave rugs, and when the rug weaving teacher says that you can make a good rug, come back and check in."

So you literally go, and you work in what seems to be a totally different way of working, for maybe years, but the rug weaving teacher also knows you are part of a larger group of possibilities, and says "Well, now that you can weave rugs, I think you would probably do well to work with this wonderful master who teaches dance." You say, "Will I be able to use any of my weaving?" And the answer is, "That's the wrong question. Your teacher sent you here, and I'm sending you on."

So, in that tradition it's visible that people work in different things. I've known people who quit when its easy because they think its not painful enough, and I've certainly known people who stayed when it seemed clear that they weren't getting any more benefit.

One of the problems, for instance, in psychotherapy is there's an economic incentive for therapists to keep a person longer than the therapy may be useful. You finally become an interesting person as a client instead of a hopeless neurotic, and as a therapist you don't want to lose nice interesting people that you've got a relationship with. And two, it's hard to get clients for many therapists; there's an inborn conflict of interest.

In spiritual teaching, I remember beautiful Kennet Roshi saying, with real sadness, that "my best monks always leave." What she meant was, that the monks she loved the most would leave her. Usually they left and set up their own Zen situation, which would lead to another Zen center being formed. It was the process of graduation. But it didn't mean she didn't miss them. There is that human need to keep people around. It's much worse to stay too long in a situation where you are not benefiting than to quit when it's getting difficult. The "difficult" is in you, and you'll carry the difficult to whatever the next practice is.

e.com: Going back to psychedelics, just for a moment, do you think what happened -- their being outlawed -- was a mistake? Do you think they'll ever come back and be able to be used by therapists and religious practitioners? Do you think they were the most powerful means we had of doing therapy, as you indicated before?

Fadiman: All of the above. What I know historically is that psychedelics have been used by most cultures that had them available during most of recorded and lots of unrecorded history. Even in the cave paintings in France that are 25,000 years old, there's a clear indication that they were painted in an altered state. It's part of the human condition. Whenever there is a repressive age that says you shall not be free to use our consciousness to the fullest, it has been a mistake.

The American experience has proved the unnaturalness of this repression. Marijuana, for example, is illegal in all 50 states, and has been illegal for maybe 50 years. The research that I read says that 35 to 40 million people are using marijuana. Making it illegal hasn't worked or prevented people from using it. The mistake has been is that it has prevented many people from learning to use it well.

There is a wonderful saying, "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing," but a little ignorance is even worse. And a lot of ignorance is even worse yet. I was personally disappointed that the government in the 60's in its thrashing around and not knowing quite what to do decided that by preventing us from understanding psychedelics any better, by preventing all research, that that somehow would make the world a better place. It hasn't worked.

There's a kind of non-sense to that if you apply it to any other field of endeavor. Iatrogenic disease -- complications caused by going to a physician, for example -- is the fourth leading cause of death in the United States. Cancer, heart disease, diabetes or stroke, and medicine. So, if we were using the same logic, we would say "Well, given that it's dangerous, let's stop learning anything about medicine, and let's make it illegal for people to use medication, surgery, or physical therapy."

That is so blatantly absurd that everyone would think that I was merely being stupid. However, that is what we have done in the area of spiritual medication. We have taken that position. As the ostrich noted bitterly at the end of the day, every time I stick my head in the sand, someone still comes along and kicks me in the ass. I don't know why it isn't working." I think it is a tragedy of a spiritual sort, a tragedy about religious freedom, and a tragedy about the deliberate limitation of scientific knowledge and advancement.

e.com: And so instead of psychedelics being used in a conscious way, they tend to be used today mainly for things like raves ...

Fadiman: It's the same notion that says if you don't give people sex education ... the theory behind the people who said "don't teach sex education in the schools" is somehow people won't find out. What we found is that you can correlate lack of sex education with making stupid mistakes with your sexuality.

I think there is a very high correlation between not having any education on how to use these very powerful and difficult to use substances with people making mistakes. It's as if we said "private airplanes are dangerous, so let's stop training pilots." Any example I come up with sounds so bizarre that it is only fifty years of propaganda that have kept psychedelics down. But as we noted, not down from use, just down from better understanding.

e.com: What about the rest of the 60's, the revolutionary consciousness energy that seemed one of the hallmarks of the 60's. Originally people were saying things like "the 90s' will be like the 60's turned upside down," but personally, I don't see it. Do you think it's out there, is there some kind of consciousness revolution brewing among the children following the Baby Boom, or is it just flat?

Fadiman: Well, if you take it in a larger context, the 60's were preceded by the 50s', and the 50s were really an incredibly dull brainless era in terms of any kind of excitement about improving the human condition. They were one of those eras where they said "everything is fine as long as we don't discuss it." Let's put everything under the rug, let's repress, let's look towards prosperity as the goal.

Well, the 80's and 90's have a lot of that, between political correctness, which means the repression of free speech for almost everybody except the far right, the glorification of money, the disparity between rich and poor, but enough prosperity so even the poor can manage. The seeds of social discontent have been replanted. People forget that the 60's came out of a complacent, prosperous period in which America was numero uno.

This should sound a little familiar. At the moment, America has no real enemies (except ones we create so the Pentagon can stay in business) and so forth and so on. There is a large complacent government, and there is denial of lots of basic human rights and a growing disinterest in social justice at the governmental level. All that sounds like the kinds of things that allow a grass roots -- not a rebellion -- but resurgence of willingness to do something to get personal freedom to emerge.

And the 60's were fueled by psychedelics. There's just no doubt that psychedelics undergirded the computer revolution, the civil rights revolution, the woman's rights revolution, the music revolution, literary revolution. All of those were supported by psychedelics, because psychedelics allowed people to continue to break set, to look out from beyond their own frameworks, and to actually try new things. I don't find the 60's a revolutionary, as much as a highly experimental, era. I can see another experimental era coming.

e.com: So, instead of the focus being on millennial predictions of Armageddon, or let's say Terence McKenna and other Mayan predictions that 2012 will be the end of things, perhaps the period starting with the new millennium will be a more interesting one than the one we've just had.

Fadiman: Yes, we now have two interesting forces we didn't have in the 60's. We have the internet, which allows very small groups of people with very divergent ideas from the mainstream to support each other. We also have the homeless, a whole class of people deliberately being pushed out of society. They will never be caught by a belief that the mainstream is the only stream there is.

In addition, there is a growing shift, even in governmental awareness, that the war on drugs is being lost so badly by the United States. Around the world what I'm seeing is that government after government is no longer being willing to be co-opted by U.S. domestic policy. In Belgium, for example, as of last week, there will be no more arrests made for what are called soft drugs. As you know, America has more people in jail for drugs per hundred thousand people than any place on Earth by a factor of maybe 20. England's House of Lords is now looking very seriously into whether marijuana should be legalized for medical use. One province in Australia in a close vote almost legalized marijuana last year.

People are beginning to acknowledge that there has been an enormous nuttiness about all of this. I still can recall parts of the McCarthy era when if you read a foreign newspaper you were probably a Communist. Total paranoid insanity, and a very provincial one. I'm seeing that the provincialism of the Untied States policy on restricting consciousness is beginning to go. Since an enormous amount of creative energy in science and the arts is fueled by people having a freer consciousness, I'm guardedly optimistic.

e.com: That's good. You talked about computers and the Internet. Do you see either of these being able to directly enhance people's search for higher consciousness and enlightenment, or indirectly, will there be computer-based tools that will enable people to do certain types of things they weren't able to do? Will the Internet really provide people direct types of experiences, or is it more likely they'll just be adjuncts, or maybe it will even take away freedom as we get sucked into more electronic and magnetic fields?

Fadiman: I think to give the Internet either credit or blame for what it is capable of doing is confusing the tool for the content, kind of shooting the messenger. Which is, if you ask the same question about the library, I would say that the nice thing about the library is that it's available, and it has within it, with a little bit of human interaction, enormous capacities for all the things you're talking about. But, books are simply recirculated dead trees covered with petrochemicals. But there's this wonderful thing that happens when you take this recycled tree and petrochemical and read it. If the question is, is the Internet going to make available a whole new realm of knowledge in ways that haven't been available before, then the answer is sure.

Let me give you a 60's parable. And the magic word is not books, but translations. From the 60's on, you have beginning in the Untied States, in English, access to Tibetan lore, Egyptian lore, Peruvian lore, Summerian lore, medieval French esoteric religious traditions, etc. You have access, in a sense, to the spiritual and intellectual treasures of cultures that never were available. An explosion of new ways of thought.

So the Internet, in a way, is similar. It is making available things that were not available, especially for people who don't live in the middle of the consciousness cauldron. The fact that Amazon.com can find a couple of million books doesn't matter as much to me living within ten miles of fifteen bookstores. But it would allow me to, say, live in Taos, New Mexico, which has one bookstore, and not feel cut off from world literature. It makes it less necessary to be physically near sources of knowledge. As to whether it per se will be a source of knowledge, I'm sure that as technology improves, there will be more and more physiological situations that can occur with the help of the Internet.

e.com: Just a couple of more questions. Ken Wilber -- you've met him on a number of occasions, what do you think is at the root of the Ken Wilber phenomenon that is going on? It seems that we've crossed a threshold, where a lot of people are suddenly aware that this body of amazingly insightful writing exists. Does America actually have a consciousness philosopher unlike any it has had since, I don't know, William James?

Fadiman: Well, I think Ken Wilber is closer to Michelangelo, or Leonardo da Vinci. His interests span so many fields. He is a synthetic, or synthesis-making philosopher. And we haven't had a philosopher with as wide a range for a while. James had as wide a range as was possible in his era. Translations, world travel, and the Internet and so forth make it easier for Ken Wilber to have a wider range. I think Ken Wilber is an incredible cultural phenomena; I find nobody who stands close to him in his scope. I find lots and lots of people who stand close to him in various little pockets of his thinking. But he is genuinely encyclopedic.

So, I am not at all able to say much about Ken Wilber's work in any given sub-area, but the fact that he exists and that he sees that one can do a higher level synthesis between rather disparate parts of the culture is one of the very optimistic views. As to what a major philosopher does for a culture, that's a tough one. He is writing in an era when literacy is going in the other direction. People's spans of attention are smaller, their willingness to think complicated thoughts is less. But, as Margaret Meade said, "the world is changed by the action of a very few people and it's always been that way." I think Ken is one of them.

e.com: As for some of your theories, you said something a while ago that has stuck with me, the idea that mental health is being in the right sub-personality at the right time.

Fadiman: The right mind at the right time.

e.com: You still hold to that and work with that?

Fadiman: Well, what I love about regulation science is that it says "observe the phenomena, and only create a theory about what you observe." Now, religious science, or scientism, or the "science is better than everything else position" says "well, we do that mainly, except when it gets in the way of our assumptions."

There's an assumption out there that we are a unified personality. And that sounds sensible since you only have one body -- well, you have two eyes but they are focused on one image -- and you have four limbs, but they often go in the same direction. There's a lot of assertion about one personality. There's also a religious system, now dominant, which says it's monotheism (the evidence, again, is a little shaky), so there's a lot of religious bias towards individual unity inside your head.

My observations on myself and almost everyone else I've ever met is that we behave extraordinarily differently at different times. That we really say things about ourselves, like "I lost total control," which doesn't mean you lay on the ground muscles twitching, as if you'd been zapped by a large electric charge. When you say "I lost control," it means you did things that you wouldn't normally do. That's all it means. And they are usually things which your normal self would have disapproved of or been really envious that you got away with.

I talk to alcoholics, and alcoholics say in the morning, almost always, that they really feel terrible about drinking. Yet in the evening they go out and drink again. That doesn't sound like unity, it sounds like two personalities, a morning personality that is repentant and sorry they're in a body that runs around and drinks, and an evening personality that really couldn't care what the consequences are, especially since the consequences seem to be almost all borne by the morning person. So imagine that the drunk never gets the hangover, and the persons with the hangover never gets to drink.

I can go on and on and on with examples, many of which are a little easier to take than that. Probably the simplest that most people will resonate to is "Are you different when you are with your parents?" And people say, "Oh, well, that's different," and I say "Well, that's what I'm saying. You see it is different."

William James says we have a number of selves. When I'm tired or angry, a great many of my other values shift, a great many of my perceptions shift, my desire for different kinds of food or company shift, I'm in a different, what we call, a different space.

If we drop the assumption of unity, then what comes up is what I call a healthy multiplicity. A theory in psychology just slightly before Freud was that we associate our various selves into a kind of bundle. Mental illness was called "disassociation," where various aspects of this bundle would split off and cause trouble. The extreme splitting off is what we now call multiple personality as a pathology, which means that one part of you literally does not remember what another part of you did.

What I was taught in elementary psychology and advanced graduate psychology, is one reason you study psychopathology is that it is an extreme version of normal. Thus I look at multiple personality where there are truly deep splits, and I learn (1) such things exist, so multiple personalities exist, so they are a possibility inherent in all people, and (2) if they are an abnormal version, then "normal" is not one personality, but a group of personalities who are in deep harmony, who share all memories, and who know who should be ascendant at any given time.

e.com: Don't you have a metaphor whereby each sub-personality needs to be in the "spotlight" for a certain amount of time or they become unruly and act out?

Fadiman: Right, the metaphor is that all these personalities, being part of you, want some time to be themselves, to have their moment in the sun or the spotlight, but because the human body is designed the way it is, it's only one at a time.

For instance, there's a part of me that reads very serious fiction, and there's another part of me that reads not very serious science fiction. Now and then I notice I need to stay up with a not very good science fiction book (hopefully a very good one, but I'm willing to settle for less) until three in the morning. That's not at all my life pattern -- I'm screwed up the next day, I'm over-tired, I don't get much done -- it's a kind of drunken moment. However, I notice that when I'm in it, and it's one o'clock, and I've got 80 pages to go, there isn't the faintest intention to stop.

I observe that, and I say, "Is this the Jim Fadiman we all know?" And the answer is "No." It is a Jim Fadiman that I know, and certainly I've seen you before over the years, and I know that once you've had your fill, and kept me up all night, and disrupted my patterns, that you will not make the same demands for quite a while.

It's those sorts of observations that lead to the notion that healthy multiplicity is normal. If you are a single personality, undifferentiated, the same in all situations, there is a term for that, and it's called a fanatic. That's where I am on healthy personality, it looks to me that that's the way it is. It's easier to pretend that we're unified, just as it's easier to pretend that divinity only appears in one form. But it idoesn't fit the data

e.com: That brings us to Terence McKenna's notion of "down with monotheism, monogamy, and monotony." It also dovetails with your notion that different practices are necessary because maybe different sub-personalities need different psycho-spiritual practices.

Fadiman: Yes, and it also ties into why I say monotheism is not working very well where it works at all. The strict monotheisms have been not very popular, Judaism being probably the clearest example. Christianity was never a very strict monotheism. Early on it espoused three major elements -- the Holy Spirit, Christ, and the Father -- and that was psychologically un-nourishing. It left out too much. You then added in Mary for the basic feminine. You also added, very early in Christianity, saints, who looked an awful lot like the gods pagans had in the first place, local deities. You then add in higher groups of deities such as archangels and so forth, until basically you have a huge pantheon of gods and goddesses of every description that far exceeded in variety and interests whatever Rome and Greece had ever created. That seems psychologically nourishing.

It looks like -- however the universe is constructed -- that polytheism is saner and more congruent with the human being and our way of looking at things. To the extent that we are multiples, healthy multiples, it also seems to make sense. Just as we like different foods, and worship different aspects of divinity, we need different spiritual practices.

e.com: What about the notion of monogamy versus some sort of polyamorous lifestyle?

Fadiman: Monogamy is a theoretical notion pushed by one or two religious traditions, but, historically, if we go back to pre-history, and look at tribal behaviors, basically the rule of thumb was you found a system that protected children, that protected women when they needed protection, and that allowed everyone to be fed. Powerful males were able to support more women and have genetically more important children. You wanted to have some evolutionary system that allowed weaker genes, the less survival oriented, to die out.

If you look at most species, monogamy has not been a solution. If we look at animal research, monogamy turns out to be rarer and rarer. It used to be there were a lot of birds we thought were monogamous, but it turns out that they behave very much like humans. The female birds will go out and have sex with higher ranked male birds. They'll have affairs with males with more power. It looks an awful lot like contemporary life.

I started reading biographies of practically anybody in the European-American tradition, and I couldn't find very few biographies in which monogamy seemed to be the pattern. Being married to one person seems to me to be a very sensible material and political and social situation, and useful for children. But actual monogamy is rare among people who seem to have mattered. Someone defined monogamy as doing something well that you'd rather not. We do have a social system and a legal system based on monogamy, but we have an underground social system -- more overt in Europe -- that says monogamy is neither the rule nor the ideal.

In Islam, it's very simple. You cannot have more than one wife, unless you can take care of her. And if you can take care of her, then it's between consenting adults. Marriage must not be something which is dangerous to the health of wives and children, and in the few cultures where we have women having more than one husband, you have similar economic considerations.

e.com: What are you doing now for fun and for amusement other than doing the kind of teaching that you've been doing? What interests you now?

Fadiman: I'm writing fiction. I just heard a wonderful phrase that literature is always left-wing theology, and left-wing politics. So in some sense what fiction writers are doing, and what I'm doing, is I'm exploring alternative ways of envisioning personalities, or particular crises, or particular conflicts.

Fiction writers are like little deities. I create the entire world for my fictional characters, and they'll do anything I want. Now, they might now do it in a way that makes no sense to anyone else -- that may be called bad writing -- but I'm creating the entire little world, and I get to people it, and run it, and see what happens.

e.com: Do your characters take on a life of their own?

Fadiman: I wish they did, it would make the writing a lot easier. William Faulkner said you run after your characters and write down what they say. I haven't quite gotten that far. But I do, sometimes, get to go out to a coffee house with one of my characters and find out something that I didn't know about them. It is a wonderful moment in fiction when you start a scene, and something in the middle of the scene totally new appears and you had no anticipation that it would.

There may be writers who write more rationally, but most writers I know are in it not for the thrill of self-discovery, but of discovery. As if you've been traveling, and at the end somebody says, "What happened that interested you on this trip?" and you say, "Well, we were on the way to the Pyramids in Egypt in our bus. Then it blew a tire in this little village, and then we ended up surrounded by hundreds of children who begged for our lunches." What you realize is that the unexpected made the trip fascinating. I find fiction fascinating.

Also, for me fiction is a discipline, a spiritual discipline in that I'm not very good at it, that I'm getting better, and that I do it as a daily practice. It's not repetitive, it is the opposite of trance, and that it may even be of some benefit to other people at the level of entertainment, and maybe at the level of opening them up to a larger view of the world. Who knows.

e.com: Jim, you've said some wonderful things here and I really appreciate your taking the time. Do you have any final words of advice for the viewers of this website seeking whatever it is they are seeking?

Fadiman: Well, sex, drugs, and rock and roll have been vastly underrated as paths to enlightenment.

e.com: Thank you again.