Re-Wilding the Soul

Rob Marsh

30 min readFeb 8, 2020

“I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.”

- Frank Lloyd Wright

“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”

- John Muir

“In wildness is the preservation of the world”

- Henry David Thoreau

“The wise man knows that it is better to sit on the banks of a mountain stream than to be emperor of the whole world.”

- Zhuangzi

“He who loves the world as his body may be entrusted with the empire.”

- Lao Tzu

“Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth.”

- Herman Hesse

wild

/wʌɪld/

adjective

From the Germanic “Wald”

(of an animal or plant) living or growing in the natural environment; not domesticated or cultivated.

“a herd of wild goats”

(of a place or region) uninhabited, uncultivated, or inhospitable.

“an expanse of wild moorland”

(of sea or the weather) rough and stormy.

“a wild, bitterly cold night”

(of people) not civilized; primitive.

“the wild tribes from the north”

(of a look, appearance, etc.) indicating distraction or strong emotion.

“her wild eyes were darting back and forth”

lacking discipline or restraint.

“wild parties were never her scene”

not based on sound reasoning or probability.

“a wild guess”

(of a playing card) deemed to have any value, suit, colour, or other property in a game at the discretion of the player holding it.

noun

noun: wild

a natural state or uncultivated or uninhabited region.

“kiwis are virtually extinct in the wild”

INTRODUCTION

The intent of this piece is to radicalize artists, thinkers, and doers in every corner of the world to embrace the wildness of their own souls and of the planet that cradles them.

It is a call to return to the wilds of the heart and the mind, through the wilds of the woods and the deep valleys, the raging shores of the oceans, and the vast sunlit deserts.It is a meandering through our history and our present, and a suggestion of the paths we may take next.

Most of all, it is a collection of new mythic patterns for our time, myths which perhaps can help heal us and allow us to steer our sinking ship away from the edge of the world and into safer harbors.

SOCIETY AND THE WILD

It is becoming increasingly obvious in the age of ecological and economic collapse that our default anthropocentric style of thinking about the world is a convenient yet dangerous fiction.

It divides a unified world, a web of mutually interconnected and interdependent phenomena into humans and resources, users and used, subjects and objects. These dualistic categories are, despite our willingness to take them as established fact, beliefs about the nature of reality; beliefs which reflect our assumptions about the world a great deal more than they do the organization of the cosmos, and they have dangerous unintended consequences. They do not appear to be grounded in the best scientific understandings of our time, having more in common with Aristotle than Albert Einstein.

New understandings, developed out of the findings of earth systems theory, of deep ecology, of modern biology, the study of animal and plant intelligence, and more broadly speaking from across the sciences from physics to psychology show us a picture of the universe as a vast web of relationships, a mutually interdependent network wherein no element of the whole exists in isolation. Indigenous peoples of the world appear to have lived in the light of this understanding since time immemorial, and we are finding more and more that our most sophisticated scientific models of the universe and of the natural world are coming to resemble the cosmologies and natural philosophies of first peoples the world over. Studies of the human genome have left no doubt whatsoever that we are all cut from the same cloth. Every human being shares the same potential for genius. Modern science has come to echo the ancient wisdom that we are all inter-related, from the fungi to the flatworm to the fellow who drives the bus.

We often say to one another that we want to live according to our best understandings of how reality “is,” and get our feelings and perceptions in line with what we more-or-less know to be true about the nature of things. Therefore, how we treat each other, and the planet at large, should reflect a consciousness of the unity underlying the apparent duality of our lives.

A widespread understanding of the web of life, of the principle of mutual interdependence, is in my view a necessary component of the healing of the world. The understandings of the Lakota, the Kogi, the Mahayanists, the Shipibo-Conibo, the Wurundjeri, of the long-surviving tribes and people of the world tend to reflect this deeply sensible and practical philosophy. It has allowed people to live in stable connection to the land for hundreds of thousands of years. In contrast, our mechanistic, anthropocentric and economic worldviews have led us to the brink of extinction in less than a few hundred. It is well past time we let go of the centrality mindset which has fuelled the colonization of the majority of the earth, and instead begin to humble ourselves in the recognition that there is no ladder or pyramid with Western culture at the top and so-called “primitive” cultures at the bottom. We are not “more advanced” simply by virtue of the presence of mechanistic technology, nor are we exempt from the consequences of our actions simply because we have built vast and complex things. We are not separate from one another, or the planet at large. Our fates are intertwined.

The great task of our time is to speak this truth with clarity, so as to communicate this sense of the unity of nature to our mechanistic, economic and anthropocentric cultures in a way that may be understood clearly, and fully. No doubt there will be resistance to the adoption of this way of thinking and perceiving who we are and what we’re doing here. The dominant economic and cultural models of our time are predicated on separateness and operate through violence and isolation. Their most successful actors will not simply drop their allegiance to the games which have allowed them to accrue vast material wealth and earthly power.

As such, we must become not only technicians and scientific thinkers, but also poets and artists; people who can speak to anyone and everyone in such a way as to leave them feeling connected and inspired. We must become listeners, humble and attentive, before the wise people of our world who have tended to the archaic flame of union with the natural world while we descended into history, conquest, and technics. We must become magicians and alchemists, explorers of the wild country of our own minds; healers capable of restoring harmony and vitality to the ourselves, and to the wider community of life.

We must communicate with everyone, including the people we consider to be our “enemies”; for through this process there is at least a slim chance that they will become friends. We are all in this together, and simply put we cannot afford to look at each other as opponents, nor can we afford to live and speak in echo-chambers of agreement. Hatred is a luxury.

This discussion must, if it is to be effective in changing minds and behaviours, be focused around actionable strategies through which we, in our diversity, can manifest positive change in our environments. It cannot be a long winded and melancholy lament at the present state of disarray and destruction; nor can it be a retreat into the abstractions of philosophy, authority, or rationalization. It must contain the potential for action and a sensible, mutable and grounded praxis. It must clearly identify the main causal factors behind our present crises, and provide methods for bringing about change. It must be fully inclusive, inspirational and motivational; leading people not into despair but instead, radicalizing them into action.

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

Where have all the wild places gone? Where are the dappled forests we once called home, full of the chorus of life and the dance of evolution? In the early years of the twenty-first century, these once climaxed natural phenomena have been pushed to the margins of our technologic, mechanistic lives. We in the West and in the bastions of capital have imagined that we are the head of nature, the master of all living creatures; and in our conceit we have driven the wild world, which is our extended body, to the precipice of destruction.

We human beings have a right to be here, as does all life. Humanity is a natural phenomenon; we are as much a part of this earth as the trees and the rocks and the rivers. We came out of this world, like an apple from an apple tree; we are of this place. Our efforts as a species ought not be diminished or discarded, for although we have through our greed perpetuated vast destruction; through our love and our creative spirit we have forged many great things. At a time of mass extinction and rapid ecological collapse, we cannot afford to entertain misanthropy, for even the most despised among us is human, deserving of love and understanding. Indeed, it may be love and understanding, practiced honestly in the moment, that serve as the balm to heal some of our most grievous wounds.

It is our birthright to be here on this earth, but what we do not have a right to is domination.

A good deal of our present fractious and destructive attitudes to nature come down to us through some of the oldest religious and economic traditions. The forms of imperial statecraft practiced in our distant historical past have more-or-less retained their basic characteristics down to the present day: the male-dominator god-image, the suppression of natural medicines and ways of worship, the fetishization of violence and a warrior-class, the oppression of women and children and those who do not fit the standard cultural mold.

The characteristic imperial image of humanity and their relationship to nature is one where the entirety of the natural world is seen as the property of Man, to be used for his purposes and to be at every turn dominated and pushed into submission. Associated with this is a disdain for the flesh, and the idealization of spirituality and heaven itself as being removed from the natural world; with the natural world having to be pushed away in order to achieve transcendence. We see this perhaps most vividly in early Christian thought, where man is supposed to be the head of nature and all things are seen as his property.

Evolving more-or-less alongside these cultural forms were the atomistic worldviews of the ancient Greeks. Epicurus, Democritus and Leucippus all argued that nature was composed of what they had named “atomos,” or ‘indivisible individuals’. In their view, nature was not alive or conscious, but simply matter in motion, a collection of indivisibles separate from each other and yet somehow interacting to form the world of form and pattern we perceive each day.

It was perhaps with the discovery of “De Rerum Natura” in the 1400s by Poggio Braccionelli, and its subsequent errant translation, that the spell of the separated world was cast into history; however due to the unfavorable standing of these ideas with Aristotelian, Platonist and Christian traditions throughout the Middle Ages, this particular concept of nature as discrete and discontinuous did not appear to shape our world significantly until the 16th and 17th centuries.

“My only earthly wish is… to stretch the deplorably narrow limits of man’s dominion over the universe to their promised bounds… [Nature will be] bound into service, hounded in her wanderings and put on the rack and tortured for her secrets….

I am come in very truth leading you to Nature with all her children to bind her to your service and make her your slave… the mechanical inventions of recent years do not merely exert a gentle guidance over Nature’s courses, they have the power to conquer and subdue her, to shake her to her foundations.”

— Francis Bacon

Further expanding upon these concepts were the mechanistic, atomistic assumptions of such titans of the scientific tradition as Rene Descartes. It is not overly surprising that a man who performed vivisections on dogs would consider the cosmos to be a disorganized collection of non-living particles: it conveniently removed any moral responsibility from his shoulders, and allowed his conscience freedom while he tortured the living for dead knowledge. We have based much of our scientific epistemology on the works of folk like Descartes and Francis Bacon without seemingly assessing them as whole people: as moral actors as well as intellectual actors. As such, we have constructed a science until very recently has been woefully ignorant of the ethical consequences of its insatiable quest for knowledge; and in the case of Bacon and many of his contemporaries, gleefully advocated for the enslavement and torture of the natural world.

Developments in technology in the 17th century led to the conception of nature as a machine, a word originally associated with engagement and responsiveness. Over the course of the century, the meaning associated with the machines shifted to signify something inert, regular and predictable. On the sails of the idea of reality as disconnected and discrete, and with the justifications of the founding fathers of the movement, a reductive brute mechanism came to predominate the thinking of men of science; and thus filtered down into the mainstream of our Western culture.

Over the next several hundred years, the social and economic organization of mankind shifted rapidly from a largely agrarian style of life to one based on industrial mechanization. Systems were conceived of in the image of the disconnected universe: factory assembly lines, where human beings became cogs in vast machines of production. Soon enough these worldviews became so manifest, so embedded in the general state of our affairs that we began to forget their origins, and so became entranced by them to the point of developing a mental monoculture.

This mental monoculture was further helped along by the efforts of men like Edward Bernays, who, through the construction of narratives of individualism and uniqueness, eroded the foundations of community and solidarity among the working class. We became consumers, each of us an island, enslaved to the desire to become a truly unique individual through the acquisition of material. The rise of the myth of the self-sustaining individual, the Rand-ian derangement whereby every man is an island unto himself, has created a class of amoral and destructive rogue actors. These actors, unmoored from the consciousness of interdependence, believe in personal gain as its own legitimate end, and see the community of living beings as an object to be manipulated or escaped from. Emotional connection is viewed as sentimental, as an irrational and wooly-headed waste of time. All that matters, the highest value in this individualist worldview, is personal power. Whether that comes in the form of vast monetary wealth, extreme militarism, or dominance of the social hierarchy; the underlying theme is that there is no web of life worth thinking about, and that the world is a cold, dead place to be exploited and remade in one’s own image.

The overuse of statistical science and forms of overwrought skepticism that deny the bizarre and the unusual, has given us a picture of the world that is mundane, a world of averages, where magic is the delusion of so-called “primitive” people, and where mechanism is the Manichaean quintessence that will after long struggle finally remove man from nature altogether. By considering all unusual phenomena as “statistically insignificant”, we have de-valued the strange and the odd, those things which have always driven the vehicle of science and human inquiry to further and higher levels of understanding and coherence. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy by which the magical, wild world is marginalized simply because it is uncommon. It is maligned with the phrase “supernatural”. But magic never was supernatural. It was and is, a rare, uncommon yet altogether natural phenomena. It cannot be relegated to fiction with a simple verbal dismissal.

Now, we stand at the threshold of our own extinction, seemingly incapable of self-reflection or a correction in course. But humanity, as we have seen above, is a species in flux. What we have brought about, we can change, but only if we can be uncompromisingly honest about our history and our present.

WHERE ARE WE NOW?

Alongside the destruction of the natural world, there has been a general breakdown in the social structures of modern civilization. In recent times, our anomie is due in part to the stagnation of wages, longer work hours, the price of housing and accommodation, more frequent relocation of individuals and families for economic reasons, the rise of corporatism, and the aggressive polarization of opinion into false dichotomies by the mainstream corporate media. Many of us live in colonial settler states, and the intergenerational trauma which haunts these outposts is seldom so much as acknowledged, let alone addressed and acted upon.

Our society is, according to the most mainstream analyses, more anxious, depressed, worried, unhealthy and paranoid than it has ever been. Our attitudes towards each other and ourselves have been so corrupted by the worldview of separation and disconnection that we assume to get anything done we must push ourselves and others, that to succeed in private or public life we must force ourselves to do things. We over-medicate ourselves and spend most of our time ignoring the pains and twinges and joys of the body, somewhat out of embarrassment and somewhat out of a sense of being above and beyond such gross, earthly things. We consume out of neurosis, we judge based on utility, and rarely do we consider the relationships which form the substrate of our lives.

We increasingly have a desire to leave the prison of our bodies behind and to fly forth into realms of pure light and information, as demonstrated by the attitudes of certain techno-futurists and their adoption of philosophies of transcendence through the uploading of consciousness to machines. We, in some fugue state of childish irresponsibility, want to flee from the mess we have created. We are unconsciously reviving Manichaean notions of the uncleanliness or sinfulness of the natural world, and the ecstasy of escaping it once and for all into an invisible heaven somewhere in the sky, and dressing them in the clothes of the 21st century.

Techno-escapism is, unfortunately, a woefully presumptive attitude, not just for those of us who would rather form an intelligent relationship with nature while embodied; but also for our relatives in the animal and plant nations, who are seldom if ever mentioned by the prophets of singularity. Those building machine-neural interfaces and artificial intelligence claim that this course of events in “inevitable.” But I do not trust those who claim inevitability when they themselves are driving the vehicle. This is, pure and simple, an abrogation of responsibility. Nothing is inevitable, especially not that which is formed by human hands and minds. We can practice restraint, but we are likely to do so only if we believe the reasons for doing so are sound.

There is a Faustian quality to this arcane marriage of knowledge to power, conducted in the shadow of ethics. In many ways, we have sold our souls to the devil of material control, exchanging connection and respect for the living world with a mindset of exploitation and sacrifice. As in Faust, we have tricked ourselves into believing that the devil of power’s promise was a simple one, with no strings attached. As we are fast discovering, with wildfires raging throughout the developed world, and vast storms bearing down on our cities; this was little more than naivety.

The notion of transcending into an artificial heaven also comes loaded with un-testable assumptions. Advocates in search of funding tout the benefits and the amazing possibilities of these new frontiers of technology, but rarely mention the glaring unknowns facing those who choose to bet their lives on their efficacy: will consciousness survive the upload? Can it be uploaded in the first place, when we do not know what consciousness is? Are we genuinely escaping suffering, or as the Buddha pointed out, is suffering simply a facet of being; one that we should relate to rather than run from?

We seek escape our own reality, to flee into an unknown based on little more than the assurances of those with vested interests in seeing these technologies become financially viable. This seems hasty and ill-advised, in my opinion. We have not destroyed this world yet, and to act as if we have is to engage in a delusional nihilism. We still have the time, the resources, and in the case of what appears to be the overwhelming majority of people, the good will necessary to heal at least some of the wounds we have created and bring about a measure of harmony in the web of life.

Another great assumption of the techno-escapist class is that we have the time to create this escape route, and to do it safely. Considering the extremity of many of the ecological and geological crises we face, I am not so sure that is the case. It is extremely likely that we will be forced into ecocentric and environmentally conscious ways of life whether we embrace them or not. Necessity will eventually give us no other option but to perish. The cost of our delay to adopt these new ways of living is going to be the lives of our loved ones, the lives of our living relatives in the non-human world, and the lives of the generations to come. This is already a lived reality for so many of us. We must ask ourselves whether our preoccupation with escapism is truly serving the whole, or simply serving ourselves.

Our impact on the earth is not just about the size of our populations. Our consumption habits contribute significantly: the average citizen of any given First World nation consumes significantly more than the average Third World citizen does. Developed nations with a pattern of consumption, i.e. those nations which have adopted consumerist capitalism as the dominant economic rationale are contributing significantly more to the destruction of the habitable biosphere than those who have not. Furthermore, the narrative of overpopulation has found roost in the violent and crude forms of neofascism. It is a narrative which furthers the aims of those who wish to bring about ethno-statism and race war. We ought to recognize the danger of such proclamations and work to tell the whole story, in full recognition of the fact that it is not how many of us there are which is our primary problem, but rather what we are doing with ourselves; how we are behaving and consuming that is driving us over the precipice.

We do not have to consume this way. In fact, the less we do, the better we feel. Meditation and contemplation, solitude in nature, reading great works of literature, creating art, dancing, making music; all these take time and patience, intelligent relationship to the world of matter and form. They fulfill us in ways that the hasty over-consumption of food, media and experiences never can.

We are borrowing from the future to artificially enhance the present. This is unsustainable. It is a form of violence, one that we all too readily ignore because the consequences of this violence seldom befall us in the Western world. They accrete to the inhabitants of our sacrifice zones, to the masses of people whose land and wealth we are continuing to steal through the trojan horses of “progress” and “development.” These behaviours accrete to our children’s children, and so by putting the consequences at arms length we allow ourselves to live in denial. This denial, I believe, is something we can change. Through awareness, through honesty with ourselves and each other, through honesty about our history, and through a shift in our worldviews from objectification to animation, we can recognize that this world, this life, this body, this wildness is worth preserving, and worth looking after.

THE BALKANIZATION OF EPISTEMOLOGY

As we look around the modern political and social environment, we see a vast battlefield of idiosynractic groups gathering around “truths”, held to be self-evident, with skirmishes between interested parties over epistemological turf.

In a lecture entitled “Surfing the Fractal Wave at the End of History”, ethnobotanist and author Terence McKenna spoke of this fragmentation of the mental landscape of the modern world as the “balkanization of epistemology”:

“This balkanization of epistemology: It’s sort of like, if you believed in economic theory, thinking that it would be a good idea if everybody printed their own money. And then to the degree that you had vigor for the use of your printing press, you could run off more and more copies of whatever meme you had invested in, and I suppose these things would compete. In your imagination they would compete… But anybody who’s studied economics for ten minutes can tell you there’s something called Gresham’s Law, which is that ‘bad money drives out good money.’ And I think it’s even more true with ideology. Squirrelly ideas drive out ideas of depth and substance. There’s a kind of danger of being gently, without quite noticing what’s going on, ushered into a world of increasingly more cartoon-like ontological and epistemological fantasies about what’s going on, or what’s partially going on.”

He expands on the definition in “Dreaming Awake at the End of Time”:

“For some reason, a balkanization of epistemology is taking place. And what I mean by that is: there is no longer a commonality of understanding. I mean, for some people quantum physics provides the answers. Their next door neighbors may look to the channeling of archangels with equal fervor. … It is accompanied by a related phenomenon which is technology, or the historical momentum of things, is creating such a bewildering social milieu that the monkey mind cannot find a simple story, a simple creation myth or redemption myth to lay over the crazy contradictory patchwork of profane techno-consumerist post-McLuhanist electronic pre-apocalyptics existence.

And so into that dimension of anxiety created by this inability to parse reality rushes a bewildering variety of squirrelly notions, epistemological cartoons if you will. … Conspiracy theory, in my humble opinion … is a kind of epistemological cartoon about reality. I mean, isn’t it so simple to believe that things are run by the greys, and that all we have to do is trade sufficient fetal tissue to them and then we can solve our technological problems, or isn’t it comforting to believe that the Jews are behind everything, or the Communist Party, or the Catholic Church, or the Masons. Well, these are epistemological cartoons, you know, it is kindergarten in the art of amateur historiography.”

It would appear that Gresham’s Law is operating as McKenna predicted, with bad ideas driving out the good. Social media has functioned as a catalyst for this process of splitting apart the foundation of our worldviews, hastened by bad actors such as Cambridge Analytica. The rise of groups like the alt-Right, flat-earth proponents, anti-vaccine advocates and so on demonstrates the rapidity and intensity with which these echo-chambers of thought and identification can arise. What characterizes these groups is their hostility to alternate explanations of reality, and their projection of the negative qualities of life and humanity onto those external to their in-group, and in particular, onto a chosen scapegoat. In a way, they are the logical end result of hundreds of years of colonial exceptionalism and the centrality-mindsets of imperial conquest.

In the case of the alt-Right (and the conservative bloc more generally), it is the monolithic “Left” who are accused of everything from neo-Stalinism to the surreptitious installation of a world government through shady financiers. In the case of anti-vaccine advocates, the boogey-man has become “mainstream” science, which is seen to be a shadowy cabal of co-conspirators seeking to chemically oppress the citizenry. All of these peculiar beliefs have some grain of truth in them: the shady financiers of the alt-Right’s paranoia do exist in the form of people like the Koch Brothers, corporate lobbyists, industry groups, military contractors and weapons manufacturers, and wealthy oil families. The fears of chemical oppression coming from the anti-vaccine camp have their roots in historical attempts by various states to sterilize, brainwash and control their populations through chemistry and psychopharmacology, perhaps most notably in the case of MKULTRA, a U.S. government program to create “sleeper agents” through extreme psychological manipulation of unwitting citizens.

The ease of video-editing and the availability of information of varying degrees of accuracy concerning these historical and theoretical forms of oppression, obfuscation and manipulation has given rise to channel after channel of conspiracy-oriented content, screaming idiosyncractic theories on everything from Martian panspermia to Atlantean genetic heritages to CIA moon bases. Without a proper grasp of logic and critical thinking, and with the ubiquitous presence of the Dunning-Kruger effect, the average person is likely to get caught up in these webs of pattern recognition and lose their contact with grounded practices of sense-making. The responses of denial and mockery from peers and members of the public tends only to isolate people further into these broken epistemologies, leading to breakdowns in clear communication between camps.

To restore this communication, and to either develop a system of epistemology broad enough to satisfy the overwhelming majority of people; or to develop a style of life which can flow with contradiction, appear to be our only options. And we need not choose one or the other. Indeed, it would seem to me that the best course of action in regards to this headache of a situation is to get comfortable with contradiction in one’s own life, while also working on developing universal epistemology for use with others. As the poet William Blake once said, “If the truth is told so as to be understood, it will be believed.” So then, the task for those of us who are concerned with stabilizing the wonky cultural narratives of our age is to refine our metaphors, to find ways to speak more clearly and to put into action what it is we are trying to say.

What unites us as human beings? What are the characteristics of our lives, our experiences, our emotions and behaviours that we share in common? What are our highest common values? What common interests do we share? What unique skills and traits do we possess? What are our differences, and how can we honor them? All of these questions and more will need to become standard fare for human beings if we are to survive and thrive in the rapidly shifting environment of the 21st century. We simply cannot afford to argue while the planet burns around us, for then, right or wrong, we all perish.

RE-WEAVING THE WEB, RE-WILDING THE SOUL

So then, it appears that we need to get our collective shit together and start living out the kind of lives that bring people together and embody the practices of healing and care for this world. And perhaps in order to facilitate this kind of living, we need an experience; not an ideology, not a static code to follow, but a living mystery. An experience which, when taken in the appropriate context, can communicate the interrelated nature of the web of life directly, emotionally, to the person undergoing the experience.

Luckily, we have such an experience. And it is the same experience, the same mystery that people have been involved with for the last hundred thousand years and likely more:

Connection to the intelligence of the planet through an intelligent relationship with plants.

The Gaian mind is not a stereotype, a mythic fiction, or an ideology; but a living breathing reality. The vegetable/psychoactive relationship is not a private Idaho of transcendence, but a recognition of the necessity of ecological consciousness and the importance of ego dissolution and self inquiry at extreme levels of intensity for the future of life and humanity on the planet.

Barely an ecosystem on this wild earth is devoid of consciousness changing plants. This alone implies a potential for a beneficial relationship with the living ecosystems of the planet, one mediated through psychoactive plants via the vessel of the human organism. Further, it implies that the intelligence of this living world is attempting to reach out to us and give us information which may be of great importance in our continued survival. In many ways we are seed-delivery mechanisms for the plants, and as such it may be an evolutionary advantage to remain in chemical contact with them, so as to best understand the harmonious expression of our organisms in relation to the vegetable matrix.

This connection confers other evolutionary advantages, too. Plant hallucinogen using cultures tend to be partnership cultures, where women have strong roles in the culture/social group, and where the unique talents of the individual are seen as valuable and so protected and encouraged. Contrast this with imperial and often alcoholic cultures where there tends to be male dominance, violence, worship of power and control, and where the uniqueness of the individual is often beaten out of them so that they become better soldiers, or guards. We might say that alcohol represents plant intelligence when it has become rotten, a perversion of the natural wisdom of plants through fermentation. When we contrast this with the clarity and the ecological awareness conferred by the ingestion of psilocybin, ayahuasca, or peyote; it is easy to see why these cultures behave in disparate ways.

The vegetable mind is reaching out to a species with thought, speech and hands, and calling us into a partnership whereby we may carry out the more complex aspects of maintaining a habitable, evolving biosphere. Psychedelics may provide one piece of the unfolding puzzle of our collective liberation; a way to experience the grounded and connected kinds of reasoning and ideas that we need to use our technology wisely, to increase our chances of survival and our ability to live well in the world.

The tantric route is often said to be the direct route, and one could say that psychedelics are the most direct form of yoga, or union, the quickest and most repeatably reliable method to attain states of consciousness conducive to spiritual growth and integration; if they are used wisely. Freedom to alter consciousness and the action of actually doing so is part of the trajectory of liberation which has included the emancipation of African Americans, women, the LGBTQI+ community, First Nations people and other marginalized groups through out history. The freedom to change our minds is a necessary precondition for a sane society based on the values of creativity, compassion, awareness, and the dignity of the individual.

The archetypal motif of psychedelic growth could be framed as death and rebirth, the rarefaction of the human psyche through the alchemical processes of dissolution, the application of heat and pressure in a vessel designed to sort the shit from the gold, and the re-concretization of the psyche at a higher level of integration and functioning. One has to die to be reborn, be dissolved down into base elements in order to reform as the quintessence, the rarefied matter that the alchemist seeks: the very Stone itself. We have to be willing to die to everything that is familiar, every cherished notion and belief, every form of identification; it all must be relinquished so that the unfamiliar, the new, the unknown can manifest and do the work of evolution in the individual. It is a maturation process: the naive child of the culture dies and the mature adult of the wilderness is born. Nature herself has created a microcosm of the process by which she renews and evolves, and made it available to us in the form of the psychoactive plants.

Alongside the process of changing our minds in this way, we need art, the creation of memes that are superpositions of the best values we as human beings can produce. We need magic, the technologies of the psyche, to help us understand the last great wilderness known to man: the human soul. Art that can give voice to the stones, to the rivers, the rocks, the trees, the plants, the oceans. To all that in nature which does not speak a human language, the artist must give voice.

This art, these memes can come in any form, but will be most effective if we each read and study deeply into the worlds symbol systems, the shorthand visual languages men and women have built over millenia to describe the activity of the heart and mind. It will be effective when we come to understand and relate to our ancestry, our history, and the places we call home. Drawing from the pool of human creativity, we each can form our own detailed maps of the associative patterns of culture, the strongest and most effective symbols to produce the greatest emotional response. Then, we can start smashing these things together in dense packets, highly concentrated artifacts of meaning, to convey the fundamental and rarely spoken truth of our age: that the redemption of the human spirit is not to be accomplished with number and measurement as was told to Rene Descartes, the founder of modern science, by an angel in a dream; but rather through the qualitative, subjective technologies of the heart and through the prism of human consciousness itself, with art as its vessel and wild nature as its guide. It will perhaps be achieved through immersion in the mind of the planet, in the networks of consciousness that make up the vegetable world and which carry messenger molecules heralding the wisdom of billions of years of evolution.

This will no doubt require a re-shifting of our worldview from one of deterministic, mechanistic rationality to one closer to the animism of shamanic culture, but without, of course, throwing the various babies of science out with the bathwater. We must come to recognize, as studies of ecology, animal behaviour and the psychedelic experience have shown us, that the world is not a dead and mute “thing”, but rather an alive and intelligent process, a colossal verb, and one that seeks through infinite complex gestures to speak to and with us. It is said in the Hermetica that man is the brother of god, and at home with the angels. For us, our most immediate god is our planet, and the angels are the flora and fauna that it holds. They are our relatives, and we need to start treating them with the respect and the care that implies.

So, we have to inspire people, starting with ourselves. What has to be communicated is that people are already with us, that they already subscribe to these ways of connection and compassion. A life lived in relationship to wild nature, both inner and outer, represents values which are fundamental to humanity as a whole: continuity, compassion, unity, joy, intelligence, beauty, truth, connection. We are arguing for the continuation of the human story, the dignity of life and of the individual, the opportunity for our children to live well, create, and perhaps even explore the stars.

This is not about Us vs Them, Economy vs Environment; it is about humanity standing united against its own demise, and with the highest values and the greatest intelligence we can produce, healing ourselves and this world. It is about creating a life for the generations to come where they can sing and play music, read great works of literature and poetry, walk in gardens wet with rain, smell the salt spray from the ocean, pick wild strawberries, lay in the groves of moss and hear the call of birds in the deep forest. It is about the recognition that this world is our extended body, that we have no “I, myself” without everyone else, without the great and varied community of living beings that we call nature. It is about moving from a language which sees phenomena as nouns to one that sees them as verbs, as living processes, possessed of consciousness and a sense of being.

The ego, man’s image of man as the head of nature, as the manager of the universe, conceived in the archetypal image of the dominator God; must be dissolved. It must be blown away by wild winds on mountain walks. It must be illuminated as the tawdry facade it is by the authenticity of the wilderness. It is a deadly fiction, a false image of ourselves that degrades not only those who fall afoul of its machinations, but the ones who believe that this ego is who they truly are.

If we look throughout our long history, we see that in almost every case we have lived in partnership with each other and the land. Current schismatic attitudes towards gender, sexuality and individual identity that characterize the discourse of our mainstream media environment are a recent historical phenomenon. For the better part of our history as human beings, we have lived with each other, in support of each other; recognizing and honoring our differences, for it is those very differences that, when brought together, make us strong, make us who we are as human beings. This is the natural state of humankind: non-hierarchical, accepting of difference, honoring that which makes us unique as invaluable in our forward dance into the future of our species. We are truly stronger together than apart, and we are good at living together. We have had a lot of practice.

To bring this about, we cannot simply have good intentions: it’s about being effective.

Communication, sharing, opening, building consensus. This is a struggle for the hearts and minds of people everywhere. Most people are with us already, and so we’re not out to convert anyone to anything, we are out to help people discover that they agreed with this point of view all along. We stand for the simple and unambiguous: life, survival, continuity, caring, relationship, feeling, joy. Who will go against what they already hold dear?

Our task as artists, poets, psychedelic people, magicians, alchemists, scientists and human beings; is to motivate and inspire each other into taking on the project of reclaiming the earth and redeeming the historical process. This is our legacy and our birthright, and it is that of our unborn children. It is not a pipe-dream, we are winning this fight. If ever there was a moment to talk to your neighbour, to clarify your own thinking, to support organization, this is it. We can make a difference.

So, to the re-wilding of the world, and to the re-wilding of our souls. As the poet Van Morrison once said:

“No guru, no method, no teacher
Just you and I and nature…
…In the garden, in the garden, wet with rain.”

Re-Wilding the Soul

Written by Rob Marsh