Amplified Psychedelics
On the so-called Nonspecific Amplification of the Psychedelic Substance
Do psychedelics have a direction?
Stanislav Grof has claimed that the psychedelic substance—LSD in particular—is a nonspecific amplifier. In what is a kind of reverse-view of the parameters of set and setting, the substance is merely a catalyst, amplifying what is encountered in the trip, be it internal or external, into the trip. Recent scientific research papers have added to this argument the terms “political pluripotency,” noting that even Nazi’s amplify their belief systems with LSD; and likewise, the “active super-placebo” is yet another term from science-world that attempts to explain the powerful effects of these substances. The answer, it would seem, is that no, psychedelics do not have a direction; the direction is supplied by you the user alone.
And yet it is important to note these terms and explanations fall under the auspices of the science-world, a world incapable of even thinking about these drugs without applying laboratory logic and its attendant jargons (I will admit that Stan Grof may be rather marginal to this world, to his credit—even while he is subject to its logic). Furthermore the lab deploys this logic and this jargon as a means to erase the earthly context and the terrestrial origins of these substances.
Psilocybin is not nonspecific, rather it is specifically, even explicitly a mushroom. DMT likewise is an endogenous compound that is responsible for the production of dreams (if not consciousness itself); and that can also be rendered from the bark of specific Acacia plants. LSD—a minute, near-invisible, tasteless and odorless substance originating in the lab—is yet still a chemical representation of ergot, that itself has had a long and active involvement in human history and that the ethno-botanist is only just beginning to understand.
The science-world, by removing the plant from plant-medicine, continues its nature/culture division, hallmark of extraction colonialism and that is the essential isolation of the lab itself—the maintenance of a world of dead matter, where only humans are allowed to possess anima. In this world the “wisdom of the plant” must necessarily be a superstition, an old wives tale, a myth disproved by a superior logic.
But given the necessity of set and setting in the psychedelic situation, the logic of nonspecific amplification cannot be so easily discarded. Nevertheless, to deny the terrestrial origins and the relational nature of these substances amounts to a willful act of ideological ignorance, or, even a kind of anthropocentric white-washing (the erasure of indigenous knowledges).
Suspending the authority of science—returning anima to mycelium—we will ask this question: if the mushroom amplifies something of itself within its eater, what then is amplified? In other words: what does the mushroom want from us?
