DIVINE TOAD SWEAT—
Copyright © by The Neo-American Church, Inc.
ON ARCHETYPES AS
SOLIPSISTICAL DREAM FIGURES
by
"I
am resolutely determined to defend the independence of
"I
can upset his
Reverence for the
more imposing figments of one's own Imagination, particularly when such are
encountered during psychedelic visionary extravaganzas and perhaps wear wings
or have sparks coming out of their ears, is the certain mark of infantile
occultism and that species of intellectual pretense which substitutes
categorization for judgment and analysis.
Unfortunately,
Thoreau's neurotic inability to get off his ass and wrestle with a few
angels, which led to the "pantheistic" grandiosity of his lesser
prose and poesy, has led some to assume that solipsism naturally leads in this
direction, and produces a squeamish inability to deal with people as they are,
and to substitute an ethereal system of perfect and unobtainable
"idealizations" in the place of one's actual experience and
feelings. This is not solipsism, but an
escape and a repression of it, by way of "transcendentalism"
(sublimation) and "pantheism" (displacement), and what was good in
We are misled also
by the example of Carl Gustav Jung, who know nothing of solipsism (or of
philosophy in general) but whose exquisite sensibility and admirable honesty
and courage as a reporter of his own impressions and ideas made him into a kind
of Homer of the Psyche, an artist, and a great categorizer and
typologist - of which there is only one kind: the fellow who first tells the
world in a straightforward manner that it "knew" all along.
It seems almost
unbelievable that Jung could have been aware of synchronicity, much less have
been the person to first precisely describe it and give it its modern name,
without also making the obvious inference that here was evidence of the
solipsistic hypothesis, which would perfectly explain the "who" the
"where" the "what" and the
"how" of
the whole business and save all appearances, yet he did not do so.
In attempting a
pragmatic combination of the concepts of
synchronicity and the denial of the externality of relations, we are
therefore beset by certain habits of mind which have become attached to both
concepts through (yech!) the history of ideas and the personal quirks
and fallibilities of the dead personalities who first originated or gave a
clear expression to the ingredients of our mix, as if we had to bake a
chocolate cake in a world in which flour was invented by and was mostly used
and packaged by a sect which hated chocolate, and chocolate invented and
supported by a sect which hated cake.
The answer to this is to join with
So - let us
congratulate Thoreau for his solipsism without feeling in any way constrained
by his tastes or his "sentiments", and likewise, let us not hesitate
to take what is good from any psychologist, since we believe that everything is
psychological, without requiring of the psychologist that that he understand what he describes, in terms of any consistent
epistemological theory.
The independence of
awareness from any particular personality, locale, or form of sensory
organization is demonstrated to us every night in our dreams when the blind
see, the deaf hear, the crippled walk and we take up the strands of
relationships with people we firmly believe we have known for a long time
and yet have never seen "on earth."
There is not one shred of epistemological difference between that
"state" and the state of awareness or consciousness you are "in"
right now. Yet, until a few years ago,
when all self-respecting philosophers and psychologists started taking LSD
(those who have not, to my way of thinking have sufficiently demonstrated their
fraudulence, to the extent that they should be disgraced on the quad in some
kind of public ceremony and officially transferred to the Sociology
Department), it was taken for granted that visionary experience was nothing
more than some kind of trivial oddity, limited in quality and complexity by the
quality and complexity, the personality and the I.Q. of the reporter, so that,
for example, a low grade moron could never see in his visionary experience a
scene of such complexity and intricate organization as the City of new York
spread out before him, although any imbecile can see such a scene by taking an
elevator to the top of the Empire State Building.
We now know that
the assumption was false. We can
demonstrate its falsity. As with the
primitive savages of the Amazon, so with
How well he
understands what he sees is another matter.
As with the savage, so with
The archetypes are
those figures which appear in ordinary life, art, dreams and visions and are
taken to be models of a group, classics of the genre, standard roles, perennial
embodiments of a certain theme, furtherers of the plot.
They are clichés,
in other words, hackneyed clusters of characteristics which any simpleton in
the theatre will instantly recognize when they appear on stage, and yet, for
all of that, convey in their speech and actions and relations with each other
such a range of ideation and emotion as to satisfy the requirements of any
dramatist's intent or any audience's expectations. It is efficient to have "good"
represented by a white hat and "bad" represented by a black hat, and
to merely switch the identification around every now and then is merely a
trick, for the effect depends on the comparison, and any dramatist who depends
on such switches can say little more than "you can't judge a book by its
cover" over and over again, which, on examination, reduces to an even
further weakness and is no more than the conventional truth that care should be
taken in predicting particulars from generalities.
Without some
standardization of images, there could be no standardization of words, which
are just the abstract labels given to certain impressions or classes of
impressions. Those impressions which
have the characteristics we categorize as belonging to a "living
being" or "entity" and which play a persistent and/or decisive
part in the story of one's life, myth, book, memory, drama, history, dream or
whatever are "the archetypes."
To the occultist,
of course, they are "more" than that, in the sense by which
occultists mean "more", that is to say, the paranoid sense of
"having (quantifiable, physical) power." Since the ludicrous illogic of "ethereal
mechanics" is a topic I have dealt with elsewhere, I will try not to waste
much time on it here, but proceed on the assumption that, since everything is
psychological, everything is psychological.
Elephants and whales are not the gods of my dreams, any more than giant
Castanedian fleas or ambulatory roots.
The gods of my dreams are my closest friends, enemies, rivals, lovers,
since they mean the most to me... and, not being paranoid, I do not grant to
coercive power relations the highest place in my scheme of meaning. My wife is the greatest of my
archetypes (it we leave aside, for a moment, that fellow I see in the mirror).
I have a living
hero also -
It puts things
in their place.
The archetype you
live with is the one that will tell you the most, in words and deeds, about the
kinds of games you are playing, the drama in which you are engaged, the story
you are writing. This is in contrast to
the assumption made by most occultists, that the archetype they can learn the
most from is the most difficult to locate, being found only in comets,
Himalayan caves, or "vibrational frequencies" which, for some reason,
they always find it difficult to locate on their meters. It is, of course, not easy to accept the
notion that your wife (for example) is your most important archetype if you
happen to dislike the woman, but it is true nonetheless, and your dislike of
her should tell you not only that your drama has little to recommend it, but in
exactly what way you have gone wrong, and how you should change and what
you should give up in yourself, what the price is indeed, everything
about the subject.
Role confusion is
a terrible thing for a solipsist, one might say that role confusion is the only
"metaphysical" difficulty, and it is interesting how much sexual role
confusion is being produced, in a seemingly independent development, along with
the prevailing "Cosmic Mind" occultism which has become the
prevailing Weltanschauung of our era.
They are related. Transcendentalist
occultism tends to encourage people to "rise above" their
circumstances instead of directly confronting their circumstances as the living
contents of their minds. Instead of
cherishing the differences which exist, and using them to make an efficient
division of role, the occultists despise the differences which they can only
understand as some mechanistic division of space or power or labor
which cause (they think) quarrels and strife, and which can be escaped only
through their elimination and the hopeful future restriction of consciousness
to some featureless blob. Mystics do not
cry for unity. Occultists cry for
unity. Genuine solipsistic mystics call
for greater and clearer divisions as did
I have had the company of several wives and dozens of mistresses, and I
have never failed, in retrospect, to find a perfect match between wife
and life. What was wrong with her either
was or showed what was wrong (or right) with me. The trick is to see it when it is happening,
so that the insight will help to further the drama rather than simply serve as
the basis for a sterile criticism later.
Does it make any difference if it is turned around?
Not really - in
fact, if there is any difference it consists in the greater willingness
of women to see their husbands in this light, and I think much of female
discontent is exactly the discontent of Thoreau: the original impulse which is good and genuinely
mystical, finding no acceptable cultural expression, is debased into romantic
idealizations and vague unfulfilled longings for "something" grand
and meaningful "above" rather than in the actual experience of
everyday life.
If you look for
what is meaningful in the other person, you may also find something grand, or
you may be able to make something grand out of what you find, or you may find
out what it is in yourself that restricts your life to pettiness and drudgery,
and thereby escape it. To merely cast
about for something impressive is always futile. Life is a dream, not a department store, and meanings
are the keys to the treasures thereof.
As on psychedelic trips, and as in psychoanalysis, when you discover a
key your reaction will almost always be, "but I knew that all along!".
Yes, you may have
"known" it, but for some reason you were unwilling to "buy
it", to use the insightful colloquialism.
Truths are only obtained by giving up lies. Every truth has a price which increases
daily. The great "mistakes" of
our lives are really those times when we have preferred to lie to ourselves and
others rather than to have and express the truth.
Can I offer any
practical advice on how to get good archetypes and keep them?
Sure.
1. If at all possible, meet your next prime
archetype on an acid trip. One of the
most important tasks I see ahead for the Neo-American Church is to provide the
proper setting (parks and "houses with many mansions") wherein people
may seem to "find" but actually create each other. Every village should have such a place close
by to which the unmatched may go every week to trip and, when the time is
right, "come down" hand in hand with someone they were born
with.
Mile after dusty
and muddy mile of rocky road traversed by non-psychedelic couples is
"short cut" by this means, and you begin your journey together
at the point most (happy) non-psychedelic couples strive for - in a feeling of absolute
"rightness".
When I say
"trip" in these pages, I am not referring to casual nibbles of the
supreme sacrament - such as one or two of the weak doses now (1974) circulating
but "death-rebirth" doses, which, for the average person requires 500
micrograms and up, or at least 10 "hits" taken after at least three
days of abstinence.
One's motto should
be: If you throw enough shit against the wall some of it is bound to
stick. The amount of fakery and lies in
this area of experience is incredible since it is considered a mark of manhood
in some circles to be able to boast of having taken hundreds of trips in as
many days. The fact is that after the
third day, daily (or every other day) "tripping" has no effect at all
and many small trips do not by any means "add up" to one big one.
2. Never trip without your prime archetype,
unless you have decided that it is time for a change, in which case tripping
without your prime archetype is exactly what you ought to do. Any relationship which has become destructive
or wearisome and yet seems impossible to terminate on account of
"external" circumstances or infantile emotionality may be
conveniently dispatched by this means.
3. Avoid tripping exclusively with your
prime archetype. To do so can lead to
social claustrophobia. The ideal setting
is midway between being completely open (as in a public park) on one hand, and
tight shut on the other, - parties extensive enough so that a few people
will be strangers to you, but sufficiently intensive so that most of those
present will know each other well enough to feel sympathetic and protective
from the start.
Within the illusion
of space-time, advice about how to trip is the only advice that matters. Your life, as you live it now, has been
absolutely determined circumstantially (or perceptually or existentially)
by choices of repressive mechanisms, the lies you chose to tell yourself as
your were "coming down" from your last death-rebirth experience, be
it last week or how many years ago you were born. Some are "born of woman" and some
are "born of themselves", but, whatever the case, the few hours
immediately following your decision to be "one of the boys - or
girls" again are so enormously crucial that nothing that could possibly
happen later is even in the same league with it.
To the skeptic, to
whom these words seem overblown, I advance the suggestion that he read what I
have said again, nine hours after taking 500 micrograms of LSD. They will seem to him then to contain a truth
so sacred that he will perhaps wonder how anyone could have dared to put it on
paper.
As for the
archetypes of myth and art, of stage and screen, (which seem to the
non-solipsistic to have an overbearing influence on their tiny lives because
they rule that fearsome external monstrosity, organized society at large,
which they mistakenly believe to be the dog while they themselves are the tail,
instead of the other way around) I know
of no arguments half so effective in convincing those mired in the dismal swaps
of sociological determinism of the error of their fundamental assumptions than
getting stoned (even on marijuana) while watching a few hours of ordinary
television programs.
T.V. is an
entirely different experience for the stoned than it is for the unstoned, as is
every other form of dramatic art.
If you were
watching T.V. in one of your ordinary nighttime dreams, what kinds of things
would you expect to see there?
Why, obviously,
you would expect to see little dreams within the dream which would be
expressions, just like everything else in one of your dreams, of your tensions,
repressions, wishes, fears, and characteristic mechanisms of defense.
Most of the
stories produced would be infantile and regressive.
T.V.
is, mostly, infantile and regressive.
Most
of the stories would have themes directly related to your immediate problems
and recent experience.
(There
is only one way to demonstrate this - watch and see for yourself.)
Most of the
stories would relate, at another level of "abstraction", to the
classic themes of intra-psychic tension in general: the Oedipus Complex,
Sibling Rivalry, the Primal Scene, and the standard strategies of progressing
through the various stages of libidinal organization. Every method for denying the finality of
death would be played through again and again.
Conflicts would be
"solved" by combining contradictory wishes, which under more rigorously
consistent circumstances, would be mutually exclusive.
As you made
"breakthroughs" in your understanding of yourself, the content and
quality of T.V. would instantly and radically alter.
Again, this can
only be demonstrated by experience.
What is the
fundamental "message" of T.V. - or of dreams and dramas in
general? It can be nothing other than
the demonstration of its own nature. All
these things are saying, always, again and again, "you are dreaming, you
are dreaming, you are dreaming..."
When that message
is grasped, you have eliminated the duality of life and dream. Both are "transcended."
It
is only at that point that (for very good reasons) the "you" that is
everything will permit the "you" of your personality to create
- rather than just imitate and watch and decide when to clap and when to boo,
or to turn to this or that channel.
Great art and solipsism (however disguised or perverted) are always
related. Every artist worthy of the name
thinks of himself as "God".
But there must be
a "catch" to all this, otherwise why doesn't everyone see it?
Yes, there is a
catch. If what you wish for is not the
truth, but rather demonstrations of randomness, mechanical causation,
impersonality, and organic and societal determinism, that is exactly what will
be served up! In such a case, your only
hope is "the return of the repressed". If you pay attention, you will see that even
in these demonstrations, a continuous series of "little slips" will
occur - strange "coincidences", bizarre (in terms of your
epistemology) twists, a peculiar refusal, on the part of what and who is
nearest and dearest to you, to behave according to statistical probabilities or
"self interest."
If you can
remember what "doesn't fit" (a rare talent) you will learn despite
yourself.
Much of what one
sees on T.V. and in one's dreams is what is on the way out (of one's
"personal" life – one's personality life) and it is very
important in the analysis of drama, as it is in the analysis of dreams, not to
become overly attached to any one syntactic form. At times what you see is a warning, at other
times a good example, sometimes a "who", sometimes a
"where", sometimes a "how", and sometimes a "what". To "get it", you have to be aware
of all these possibilities, and you must allow yourself to be led to
"follow it up", rather than play the part of a critic who, having
made an a priori decision that what he is seeing means such and so,
blames the author for being untrue to a vision, which was not his in
the first place. All labels should be
tentative.
The ubiquity of
some figures in the media at large, and the absence of others, is, of course,
always a tip off to the general condition of the Psyche. I intend to deal with this subject in future
papers, but, as a sort of stimulant and also as a reminder of how comedically
amusing this kind of thing can get if you follow it to its logical conclusions,
I'll end this paper by asking the reader to ponder the following question:
Why is it that King
Kong atop the Empire State Building, a fantastic but uninspiring figure
from a conceptually trashy, badly acted, cheaply produced, dated and all-around
third-rate motion picture, has a seemingly secure place in the media-world,
where he appears regularly in cartoons and references and a variety of
imitative guises, while Ethan Allen, the hero of Ticonderoga and an American
original if there ever was one, a veritable fountain of quotable
"one-liners" and the leading figure in dozens of amusing and dramatic
episodes all of which, one would think, fit perfectly into the great
American mystique of individualism and irreverence, is almost totally ignored?
Why are no T.V
series or movies made about
If the reader can
answer this question, he is well on his way to understanding not only
V/H
Art
Kleps
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