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Psychedelic anthropology: the study of man through the manifestation of the mind by A. Coult (1977) Options
 
someblackguy
#1 Posted : 5/12/2021 1:41:10 AM

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Coult, A. D. (1977). Psychedelic anthropology: the study of man through the manifestation of the mind†. Philadelphia: Dorrance & Company.

“Foreword: ‘When the chela (student) is ready, the guru appears’, is an axiom of esoteric religions, and it is not uncommon that teacher and pupil recognize each other upon first meeting. So it was when I met Allan Coult in 1966. He was on vacation from teaching anthropology at the State University of New York at Binghamton. I was eighteen, living in Berkeley with a mutual friend. She was out when Allan arrived, but must have already told him that I was an aspiring poet, because the first thing he said to me was ‘So you're a poet. You think you're beautiful.’ Allan said this in such a strange, matter-of-fact way, without a trace of personal pettiness, that I was not offended. Instead I was immediately struck by his presence and felt a strong connection—a bond between us, a flowing of non-verbal communication.

I thought about what he had said and saw how, by thinking that his perceptions and words are beautiful, a poet thinks that he is beautiful. ‘Yes, you're right’, I replied. This positive response must have surprised him. We visited often after that. He would talk and I would listen and say ‘That's right.’ Everything he said was so simple, so obvious; when he made a statement, it was as if I had known it all along, although I never heard it nor thought of it myself before. Even when he talked on academic or esoteric subjects concerning which I had little background, I understood him. ‘This is the first person I've met in my life who knows what he's talking about’, I remember thinking. It was not just that he knew a lot of things, but that he knew one thing—the most important, the key to it all: the source of an endless stream of knowledge.

Allan went back east but returned to Berkeley later that year to start his own school [New University]. I had broken up with my girlfriend and moved a couple of towns south, but visited Allan frequently. One night I helped him collate some pages of an article and it got very late. I spent that night sleeping on the floor of the study, and the next night, and the next. I never asked his permission to stay and be his student, nor did he invite me. We never said a word about it. I just moved in. Curiously, this process was repeated a couple of years later when Karen Lance enrolled in Allan's class. She, too, had deep, instant rapport with him. One night she helped us with some art work after class. Again it got late, and she stayed the night. And the next night, and the next, again without a word being said. Eventually Karen and I got married. We lived with Allan until he died, on April 24, 1970. He was our spiritual father and his teachings continue to guide us.

Although Allan ‘died young’ (just a few weeks before his fortieth birthday), he was an Ancient One. **One tenet of Psychedelic Anthropology is that every person's psyche contains not only his personal history, but the collective history of his race, the human species, the animal forms which evolved into man, the preceding vegetable and inorganic forms, back to Creation.** Various techniques make it possible to reexperience any or all of these levels. Allan made this journey through the psyche to ‘the clear white light’ and beyond many times, traversing the deepest layers of his Mind, passing through that point in Infinity—the seed point of creation—to reemerge in the Tao. Intimate knowledge of the deepest levels of consciousness (also called the ‘highest’ levels) made Allan sage. When he talked about ancient cultures, how early man thought, or how the One divided into the two worlds made three and so on, he took you there. You could tell he knew; he'd seen it, and he'd been there. One time when he explained something to me. I responded ‘I see’. ‘No’, he said, ‘you understand. You don't see.’ Sometimes Allan would take a modern social convention and trace it back through historical forms showing how it reflected the social structure. Then he would explain it as a reflection of a biological process, and show how in turn this process reflected a psychic archetype. This archetype he would reduce to the basic form of a trinity. When he told these stories, it struck me that his natural forum would have been the primitive village, for he seemed to he the Old Grandfather sitting in front of his hut telling his people about the origins and meanings of their traditions.

[“Schizotypalism runs throughout human history.” – Dr. Robert Sapolsky https://youtu.be/4WwAQqWUkpI]

Allan was old in another way. His mind seemed to work much faster than most. I would pass him on my way through the house and he'd give me a big ‘Hello’. I'd pass him again perhaps a minute later and get the same big, almost surprised ‘Hello’, as if he hadn't seen me in some time. So much transpired in his mind that one minute of his subjective time was a week of anyone else's.

Allan first experienced higher states of consciousness using psychedelic drugs, primarily LSD, in 1963. Enthusiastic about their efficacy in consciousness expansion, he later saw that one should not and could not rely on drugs to achieve higher states of being and greater enlightenment. Accordingly, he applied the knowledge of the structure and function of his mind gained through drug experiences to teach himself mind control without drugs. He could stop his thoughts at will, and completely still his mind. He meditated regularly in his bedroom with the shades down and the door closed. When he reappeared after ten or fifteen minutes, his body would seem out of focus, as if reflected on a slightly stirred pond. Patches of light of different colors would move over him like muted spotlights. Sometimes his face would be surrounded by blue-white stars. I'd he sitting in the breakfast room at 11:30 in the morning, having a cup of green tea, feeling (and being) totally straight and sober, perhaps snaking up a grocery list. Then Allan would emerge from his room with a sheet wrapped around him, looking like the Statue of Liberty on the Fourth of July. Often he’d walk up to you and relate an amazing insight or an incredible story.

Because Allan could turn off his mind, he could see clearly. His vision was not blocked or altered by all the ‘static’ in his head; the constant babble of the intellect which most of us mistakenly identify as the real Self. Allan understood people perfectly. **He could read their minds by reading their faces**; relating the most subtle of fleeting expressions to corresponding thoughts. There was no hiding from Allan. Some people found this threatening, but it was comforting as well, for it put an end to game playing.

When I began to live and study with Allan, I thought he was a veritable god. Later I saw that he was ‘just’ a man, but one of the very few adults on earth today. He extended my idea of what a man was and what he could become, from ‘boy’ to ‘Buddha’. Allan was not the typical conception of a guru: no robes, no beads, no incense burning, no performing rituals simply because they were contained in the literature of a favored system. He separated the essential and universal from the cultural and ornamental. He was not a perennially cheerful yogi, but more like a stern, salty Tang dynasty Zen Master. One of Allan's looks could shock the ego as sharply as a physical blow. Many people thought he was impatient with them when they didn't grasp or do something right away. They failed to see how impatiently patient he was, day after day, month after month, merely anxious for those around him to catch on and wake up.

Allan was enlightened; he knew what his true nature was. He was unattached, but not aloof. The clothing of his spirit—his body and mind—were like pieces to play with, and lie played the game of life to the hilt. He knew he could step off the merry-go-round, as he called it, whenever he tired of the ride. He lived intensely and enjoyed every experience—suffering as well as bliss. One time I found him crying in the living room. I asked him what was wrong. He related some personal details from his past, sobbing that they had ‘messed up his life.’ I couldn't believe this from the man who had taught me to take total responsibility for whatever happens, and who had taught me that there is no past. ‘Allan’, I said, ‘what the hell are you doing?’ Instantly he stopped crying and his demeanor changed. Looking at me in total calm he said, ‘Will you please leave me alone? I'm enjoying myself.’ Then, seeing my still nervous expression, he added with a smile, ‘I'm OK’. And he went back to crying, enjoying every miserable moment. Most great men are crazy; that is, not bound by rigid social conventions of which most of us are unaware.

Allan was no saint. He loved sex and rich food, not simply as Epicurean delights but blended into the world of symbol and thought. He was always investigating something new, coming up with brilliant idea after brilliant idea. Practically everything he said was right on center, whether he was commenting on religious scripture, relating the elements of objective sciences to psychological functions, analyzing behavior, or interpreting political events. Allan was a tremendous scholar of the old school, who sought to broaden his intellectual horizons rather than specialize himself into mental tunnel vision. Although erudite, he was no pedant. lies knew that words didn't really mean anything, that no matter what conclusion he reached the opposite was equally true. He was in Gnani Yogi who knew that the facts he learned didn't describe reality but his own mental processes, and that the important thing was not the accumulation of facts but the mastery of the mind.

• • •

Psychedelic Anthropology was written in one month during the summer of 1968. Allan had been formulating this material during the previous four years, and many of the basic Ideas had been presented earlier in a series of separate monographs. ‘Yoga and Orgasm’ (Chapter 4) is similar to his paper ‘LSD, Sex and Religion’. Most of Chapter 10 and part of Chapter 3 were contained in a paper read at the 1967 American Anthropological Association (AAA) meeting In Washington, ‘Psychedelic Panics and Sties: Levi-Strauss and the Bogey Man.’ Most of the rest of Chapter 3 was earlier laid out in ‘The Structure of the Psyche and the Deification of Man’. Allan had taught some of this material to his university classes from 1965 through 1967 and had pre3ented roost of it in a series of private classes since early 1968. The chapters in Psychedelic Anthropology are for the roost part discrete lectures set down in book form.

The main concern of Psychedelic Anthropology is the human predicament. In explaining his approach to the study of man, Allan once wrote:

‘Human nature has been severely repressed by society so that man has become alienated from his true nature to the extent that he rarely believes that this nature actually exists. In order to rediscover this nature it is necessary that persons be shown exactly how their present psychic condition has been created and how they may change that condition. These goals may be achieved only after one has been led through the maze of evolution and of the psyche and begins to understand the meaning of human existence. ‘

The subtitle of this book, The Study of Man Through the Manifestation of the Mind**, is a literal translation of the Greek roots of the title. With a freer translation it could be called ‘The Study of Man Through the journey Within’. Its premise, as Allan writes in the first chapter, is that

‘All knowledge is contained within the psyche of each human being, for at the deeper levels of the psyche there is communion with the entire universe.’

Allan saw, as have many others, that all things were created by a dialectical process, by the interplay of opposing forces sometimes called the two hands of God. He talks about this process of creation in chapters 3, 5, 6, 7 and 10, referring to these forces as the masculine and feminine principles. In the Orient they are called yang and yin. They may also be called positive and negative or active and passive.

All theories reflect this structure, for they are created by the same dialectical interplay of opposites, even if their promulgators are unconscious of the process. Thus psychologists interpret human behavior according to the relationship of the unconscious and the conscious, and physicists discuss the interplay of energy and matter. These opposites are not the actual forces, however they are reflections of the archetype, which exists independent of its material manifestations. We give the forces names in order to discuss them but it is important to remember that they have no names nor fundamental form.

**Psyche is usually translated as ‘soul’, but the author preferred the more modern and ,ocular term Mind to encompass the tame phenomenon. Throughout the book, terms used to describe the various modes, functions and vehicles of consciousness are clearly defined. What emerges is a comprehensive. integrated and intelligible explanation of the mechanics, dynamics and nature of the Mind. Delic comes from the Greek Delos, ‘to make visible’, i.e., to be actually seen and experienced, or manifested.

These two forces are really One. Their very opposition unifies them. Allan was fond of saying, ‘Things must be different in order to be the same.’

Allan defined the human predicament as alienation from one's true nature. He taught that consciousness is split, primarily through the socialization process. The only mode of consciousness of which we're ordinarily aware is self.consciousness, or ego. This is only a tiny portion of the Mind, the greater part of which becomes the unconscious. The ego cannot exist except in a state of dualism, split off from the unconscious. Man exists in a state of dualism as long as he is aware of only this one mode of consciousness. He perceives everything dualistically. Because of the nature of his conditioned mind, he can see how things are opposite, but never how they are the same. He exists in a constant state of conflict, tension and incompleteness. He may become attached to a particular level, and think that he will only be happy if he possesses one half of a pair of opposites while being totally rid of the other half. This is either-or logic. There is an essential unity of opposites. To seek one is to create the other.

The chapters of Psychedelic Anthropology focus on different levels of human existence, Allan isolates the elements of each level and demonstrates their unity. He illustrates that each—level expresses the same basic process of creation; that all follow the same simple natural laws and reflect the same archetypal structure.

In the first five chapters Allan addresses himself to the split in man's consciousness. In Chapter 1 he illustrates the split from a cosmic level, the Fall of Man as it is recorded in the religions and mythologies of the world. He shows how the stories symbols reflect the same structure, and refer to the same phenomenon. He deals with the ‘opposing’ elements of microcosm and macrocosm, amid the separation of the fundamental aspects of consciousness into masculine and feminine principles.

Chapter 2 shows how the cosmic Fall of Man is recapitulated in every individual through certain socialization processes. It reveals how the undifferentiated consciousness of the infant is split into a body/mind dualism, and how this represents the victory of culture over stature.

In Chapter 3 two basic modes of consciousness are discussed, analytical thought and intuitive thought. Man's alienation from nature is proportional to the degree to which he rejects the latter and embraces the former. The dualistic nature of the (analytical) intellect is examined, as well as the mechanism whereby the intellect makes the entire universe appear dualistic.

In Chapter 4 Allan deals with the pleasure/pain antithesis, delving deeper Into the body/mind, nature/culture antagonism. Fast meets West in this chapter, as Allan shows how the theories and techniques of Wilhelm Reich and Yoga, while starting at opposite ends, accomplish precisely the same goal.

In Chapter 5 Allan ties together the preceding four chapters by showing the functional identity of thought, language, intellect, body, culture, the subconscious and the Veil of Maya (the world of Illusion). The Veil of Maya, he postulates, is our own psyche. He details the structure of the psyche and its development, and reveals the triangular structure of the process of creation and the nature of archetypes. He explains the relationships between levels of consciousness and contrasts all these with the experiencing of Reality (the Tao).

The rest of the book concerns itself with the evolution, structure, nature and meaning of some of the cultural institutions of man, and deals with many of the basic problems in anthropology, mythology, psychology, philosophy and religion.

• • •



Psychedelic Anthropology is being published In book form for the first time eight years after it was written and five-and-a-half years after its author's death. Three factors caused delay. First, geniuses often meet resistance because of the originality and hence unfamiliarity of their ideas.

Lack of support from the powers-that-be in academic anthropology, due mainly to the polemics against the state of anthropology (and the modern university system in general) throughout the book, was a second factor. Third was Allan's initial use and advocacy of psychedelic drugs as a valid tool for exploring the psyche. These last two factors are related, not only because any work associated with drugs tended to be automatically discredited in the late 1960's, but also because modern anthropology does not consider the exploration of the psyche relevant to its studies or curriculum.

It seems ironic that both these factors are embodied in the book's title. Without doubt, much of this resistance could have been circumvented had we changed it. From an editor's view-point the book was unmarketable. The word ‘Anthropology’ makes it seem too scholarly to be popular, while the word ‘Psychedelic’ makes it seem too popular to be issued as an academic text. But because the word ‘Anthropology’ is in the title, most publishers turned the book over to their consulting editors in the field for evaluation and recommendation. Invariably these editors were leading academics, whose offices and sacred tenets were the objects of devastating criticism in the book, and whom Allan categorized as a class of people loyal to security, status and money at the expense of intellectual integrity and the pursuit of meaningful or correct knowledge about the nature of man.

Even when Allan was alive, we knew that the title was awkward, unmarketable, unfashionable and misleading. With all the trouble it caused, the reader might wonder why the author didn't change it to something catchier and less controversial. One reason is that the title has historical significance. Before Allan devoted most of his time to trying to enlighten individuals, he attempted to enlighten academic anthropology as a whole. When he first experienced deep intuitive insights using psychedelic drugs, he had virtually no background in esoteric systems or religions such as Zen or Yoga; he did know a great deal about anthropology, mythology, history and psychology. His experiences clarified much of this information; one of the main reasons he first experimented with LSD was that his work wasn't leading anywhere, and left him feeling unsatisfied. For the next few years he devoted himself to the study of the traditional concerns of his discipline, but from a viewpoint entirely new to modern anthropology. His studies actually had much in common with the anthropology of the 19th century, which was concerned with the basic questions of human existence and considered the psychic functioning of man crucial to an understanding of his external, cultural expressions. Allan read pioneering anthropologists, whose works are now, for the most part, discredited. Although Allan's theories were considered heretical, he had a greater knowledge of and perspective on his discipline than any of the modern orthodox anthropologists. This book serves as an introductory text outlining the scope and basic premises of his approach to the study of man.

Allan kept his experiments and studies quiet until 1966, when he shocked the world of anthropology and received national news coverage by reading a paper entitled ‘The implications of the Psychedelic Experience for Anthropology’ at the annual meeting of the AAA [American Anthropological Association http://americananthro.org] in Pittsburgh. He began his paper with a scathing attack on the current state of his discipline: ‘Much of the anthropology of today is in the grip of a mindless conformism which is inundating the halls of academia with organization men.’ It is pertinent to the discussion of Allan's relationship with academia to quote a few more excerpts:

I have spoken with graduate students at a number of our more prestigeful institutions. They are for the most part persons completely disillusioned with the Ph.D. system as far as it relates to learning. A Ph.D. for them means a soft job with two or three courses a week to teach and an income which they could achieve only through hard work in the outside world, in short the Ph.D. system is a ticket to security, not to knowledge. How could this be otherwise when their professors go through the exercise of producing vast accretions of meaningless publications. When the leading men of our profession foist upon graduate students such inane exercises as those embodied, for example, in almost:fence, componential analysis, formal analysis, and transformational analysis. When it is sufficient to cover a number of pages with obscure notations and mathematical formulae in order to be published in some of our most prestigeful journals... The slogan of our new Anthropology is security through conformity... It should be apparent by now that the so-called new Anthropology has no clothes, it is meaningless jargon dressed up in fancy but increasingly confused mathematics. It is the Anthropology of J. Alfred Prufrock. ‘Do not ask what is it, let us go and make our visit.’

He then continued:

‘The topic of this paper is the meaning of the psychedelic experience... it is not unusual for persons to report 'that they have encountered God in the psychedelic experience. The tendency of the modern scientist is to consider this absurd. But consider that it is not important whether or not one has seen God, what is important is the implication of the experience for the interpretation of human nature.

I have not seen God but I have seen what man takes to be God, I have not seen Shiva and Shakti, or Isis and Osiris, or Jesus and Mary, but I have no doubt that I have seen what man takes to be Shiva and Shakti, and Isis and Osiris, and Jesus and Mary. I have seen the psychological constellations which produce dragons and princesses, and totem ancestors. I have met wolf, and snake, and coyote. I have seen and believe I understand the killing and eating of gods. I think I know why religion is sex and sex is religion. I have been introduced to the sacredness of food, and have seen the transformations of minerals to plants and plants to animals. Of animal to man and man to God and the reverse. If you tell me that I have merely had hallucinations, I will reply that certainly I have had hallucinations but so did the thousands of men in the past who created mythologies and gods and art and culture in general. What I have seen is beyond doubt psychologically real, it is the contents of the unconscious from which I will maintain, man creates all of those human excrescences known as culture. No one who has not seen them will ever understand the nature of man. The Anthropologist's first field trip should not be to Africa or South America or Japan but into the hidden primitive layers of his own mind. If one can brave the dangerous and often fatal conditions of the Amazon basin, or the Congo, one ought not to shrink from an encounter with the unexplored areas of self. 'If you think that you know about cultural relativism and that you thereby no longer see the world through the screen of your own toilet training you are in for a vast surprise should you take a psychedelic field trip. You must certainly go out of your mind if only to begin to understand your mind.



To go out of one's mind is taboo in this society although it is a state that is encouraged in many others. In remote cultures we are quite willing to take the risks involved: why then should we refuse these risks in our own? As Berreman has said we seem to consider things academically important to the degree that they are remote from the circumstances in which we are involved.

The rest of his paper consisted of brief sketches detailing a few of his insights on totemism, the incest taboo, and the basis for variations in cultural art styles. Allan founded the International Society for Psychedelic Anthropology (ISPA) and presented psychedelic anthropology as a valid anthropological subdiscipline. In spite of his blunt indictment of most modern anthropology, and the revolutionary nature of his ideas, his paper was extremely well received, he spoke to overflowing crowds and a ‘Symposium on Psychedelic Anthropology’ was scheduled and held at the 1967 meeting of the MA in Washington. Allan was invited to speak on psychedelic anthropology at Syracuse, Cornell, Columbia and other universities, and was asked to prepare a statement to he published in Current Anthropology describing the aims and organization of ISPA. ISPA membership quickly climbed into the hundreds. Allan wrote a research proposal seeking a National. Science Foundation (NSF) grant to continue his studies. I will quote its beginning since it further clarifies his criticism of anthropology and explains Allan's views of the role of psychedelic drugs up to that time (1967):

‘The anthropology of the last century and of the early part of this century was largely concerned with the investigation of the psychic functioning of man. Persons such as Briffault, Bachofen, Crawley and Frazer recognized that human culture was a projection of psychic processes which were revealed in kinship structures, mythologies and religious beliefs. Culture was seen as a projection of unconscious processes that revealed amazing regularities of pattern although each culture had unique ways of expressing the pattern. The work of many of the earlier anthropologists was often cited by the founders of psychoanalysis. Thus early anthropology and psychoanalysis were both attempts to understand the human psyche and sometimes they could only be distinguished by the disciplines with which their respective practitioners associated themselves.’

‘Recent anthropology seems to bear no relation to psychoanalysis. Whereas, for early anthropologists the history of the psyche and the history of culture were one, for the current anthropologist culture is usually considered as having a life of its own independent of the psyche and psychological questions are usually excluded from anthropological consideration. (cf. CottIt 1966) It is my opinion that this situation has come about through the alienation of modern man from his own unconscious processes. In the present world only the rare person has access to and therefore knowledge of the unconscious. For even these few the experience of the unconscious is often so overwhelming that it results in a breakdown of normal ego functioning and a diagnosis of psychosis. The unconscious has thus become alien territory which is not only largely unknown, but feared and avoided. This has resulted in skepticism concerning the very existence of the unconscious and a decreasing concern with the unconscious as it relates to cultural processes...’

‘Psychedelic substances have, as it were, democratized the unconscious, making it systematically available to those willing to undergo the possible dangers of a trip to uncharted territory. I myself had been highly skeptical of the existence of the unconscious before my first psychedelic experience and had in no way considered that unconscious processes were of importance for anthropology. Approximately 100 psychedelic experiences have convinced me that the key to the understanding of human and cultural evolution lies in the unconscious processes which have yet to be mapped out in systematic fashion...’

Psychedelic drugs were becoming increasingly popular, which led to a dramatic drop in the level and intensity of most people's experiences. The papers were filled with horror stories of abuse, and restrictive laws were passed. Allan's work was indissolubly linked with LSD, and no matter how serious and cautious his approach to it was, he could not overcome the bad press the psychedelic movement received. His request for an NSF grant was denied, in spite of the fact that he had received substantial grants and fellowships every year since his pre-doctoral days. In 1965 he had been teaching Psychedelic Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. Before he had received any publicity for his work, he had accepted a lucrative job offer from the State University of New York at Binghamton. He moved there in 1966, but immediately found himself at odds with the anthropology department and the administration because of his association with drugs. In spite of Allan's protestations that he wasn't telling his students to take LSD (which was illegal by this time) and his opposition to many of the leading advocates of drug use, the college wanted nothing to do with psychedelic anthropology. Allan was instructed not to use the college's address for ISPA, and his outgoing correspondence was secretly examined. He found it impossible to work in this atmosphere. Rather than compromise his principles, Allan left the university, returned to Berkeley, founded his school and began teaching private classes.

He felt that the modern anthropological theories in vogue were intellectual frauds, and had a negative view of the university system and the role of modern education. He felt they were consciousness-narrowing experiences designed to turn people into ‘good’ members of society, at the expense of their ability to function as independent, creative, happy individuals.

He deals with these issues at some length in different sections of this book, documenting his arguments extensively. Allan's polemics were the result of his sincere beliefs, thorough study and intellectual integrity. ‘Unlike most Anthropologists’, he wrote in his 1966 AAA paper, I believe some things are more worthwhile than others, and that it is our responsibility not only to do what we feel worthwhile but to discourage others from doing what we consider senseless.’

• • •

The words ‘psychedelic’ and ‘anthropology’ have become unfashionable among serious students of human nature. Anthropology no longer addresses itself to the basic questions of human existence. Psychedelic now connotes the use of drugs to experience altered states of consciousness. This path has been discredited as ultimately self-defeating. Although coined by persons experimenting with hallucinogens, ‘psychedelic’ did not denote the use of drugs per se, but the altered states induced by any means. When Allan refers to the psychedelic experience, he means the unconscious being made conscious, whether by drugs, meditation, physical and/or mental exercises, prayer, fasting, grace or sex.

Allan used LSD extensively from early 1964 through 1967. He received many insights about the structure and contents of the unconscious during these experiences or as a direct result of them. He believed that psychedelic drugs could be useful both for academic research and for an individual's spiritual awakening. But the more he observed the long range effects drugs have on most people, the less enthusiastic he became. He was aware of their dangers and their limitations.

Nowhere in this book does Allan set down his views on exactly how psychedelic drugs can be helpful or harmful. Unfortunately his feelings on the subject have been misinterpreted both by those who favor drug use and those who oppose it, Allan felt that drugs could effect a...
Spellbreaking is the better part of alchemy, extraction, and the art of undoing—but a cocksure kind of lovingkindness, a clockwork clock, works time.

Nakhig lo shulun, Sharuku! Gorz nash!
“Where is your master? Where is he?”
Mig shâ zog... Undagush! Nakh
Atigat iuk no lighav wizard...
 

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LoveInTheDream
#2 Posted : 11/17/2022 2:36:18 PM
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Deep and hearty thanks for introducing me to this text - it is disappointing that the only copies I can find to read the rest are over $150. Any chance you would be open to uploading some more passages?
 
downwardsfromzero
#3 Posted : 11/17/2022 8:39:04 PM

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[I was editing some OCR typos in the OP and noticed that, after re-posting, there was a huge chunk lopped off the end. So here it is.][EDIT: There are ways of viewing the full content of truncated oversized posts as well...]
someblackguy wrote:
Nowhere in this book does Allan set down his views on exactly how psychedelic drugs can be helpful or harmful. Unfortunately his feelings on the subject have been misinterpreted both by those who favor drug use and those who oppose it, Allan felt that drugs could effect a preliminary awakening of consciousness by providing a ‘shock’ which completely reorients the perspective and values of a person. Similarly, Zen masters sometimes attempt to shock their followers out of conditioned behavior patterns by hitting or kicking them. Extreme circumstances can induce supra-normal or transcendent states, dramatically changing one's life. Shakespeare wrote, ‘There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy’. Nothing proves this like an intense acid trip. Unless one has had a prior nonchemical psychedelic experience, nothing can prepare him for what occurs the first time he ingests a potent psychedelic.

Besides providing the shock needed to wake an individual, psychedelic drugs can produce ecstatic states, indescribable bliss, profound insights, and a feeling of Oneness which may provide the incentive to expand his consciousness toward these levels.

Most people can't retain their feelings of increased reality, bliss and insight, but may remember them. These memories help people understand, or at least accept some of the descriptions of the deep workings of nature and high states of being in esoteric or religious literature. This gives the seeker faith that his or her goal Is real, good and attainable.

But Allan concurred with Gurdjieff that in using drugs one borrows from one's karma. It takes good karma to attain flashes of important insights and bliss anrunon to many people's first drug experiences. When that karma is used up, one will not attain these heights again until, through good works and right actions (Karma Yoga) one has replenished good karma. ‘But if Karma Yoga is practiced’, Allan said, ‘drugs are unnecessary and counterproductive’. Another problem with psychedelic drugs is that no one can at first control the experience. Those who claim to have learned usually mean that they have armored themselves against the effects of the drug and no longer get very high. Being high can be like riding a comet, whooshing through time and space. One is here, there, inside out, way ahead and in a million different places within a microsecond. Afterwards, without knowing where one's been or how to get there, one can't retain the high states.

Along with good experiences may come terrifying ones — approaching ego death, for instance. ‘No one jumps across the void’, Allan said, ‘they venture too close and are pulled across, screaming’. In other experiences one can be eaten up by horrible monsters; locked on the wheel of life for all eternity; turned into a stone or a little black square in space for a million years. The psyche may block out these traumas and set up defenses to guard the ego. Even though one may briefly experience a very high state, and try to reexperience it, his ego defenses will have been doubly strengthened as a result of a psychic wound which he's completely forgotten.

With psychedelic drugs, one may make feeling good the goal of one's so-called spiritual practice, losing sight of the real purpose: to transcend the dualism between feeling good and feeling bad.

One side effect of drugs is eventual physical degeneration. Any synthetic or refined chemical is a poison, and even organic drugs have extreme effects on the body such as acidification, the accumulation of toxins, tiring out various organs and biological functions which must work unnaturally hard to metabolize these substances, and using up important reserves of vitamins and minerals. It is possible to be happy in this life and advance spiritually in a physically sick body; some gurus suffer physically because they've taken on the karma of their followers. Their spirits are so great that it doesn't bother them. But these people are rare. The vast majority of us need a solid foundation of physical health just to have enough energy to carry out the simplest spiritual practice.

Allan came to feel that there had been a time for psychedelic drugs (in the early and middle 1960's) but that the time had passed. Their function fulfilled, they were no longer necessary.

Today the human potential movement is more popular than ever. Millions of people are meditating. Millions inure are into natural foods. People are practicing hundreds of mental and physical therapies. Religion is experiencing a great resurgence. This is a direct result of the psychedelic movement of the sixties, and the experiences millions of people had using LSD. But now that we've had our eyes opened and seen the mountains that were hidden before, it's time to start the long journey by foot. This book points to many paths.

– Tom Klaber
Berkeley September 15, 1976

NOTE: Allan went far beyond what is contained in this book, but stopped working on it after the manuscript was rejected by several publishers. At the time he died, the manuscript was incomplete. **‘Chapter 8, The Evolution of Religion’** [entheogenic anthropology], was left entirely unwritten. I therefore took it upon myself to write it sometime after Allan died. The reader should notice a distinct change in style. I based this chapter upon Allan's lectures on the subject, which I had heard many times. However. I must take full responsibility for any errors it may contain. – T.K.”

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“Introduction: You often have a strange feeling of not belonging in this world. You look out on an alien landscape populated by shadowy figures bearing little relationship to yourself. Alone in the crowd, you long for something to fill your emptiness. Like a child who has lost his mother you cry out in a void, only to be met by echoes of emptiness, by plastic people, plastic sounds, plastic feelings. You grasp at every passing hope, wanting any anchor that will secure you. Again and again, those things that you grasp at melt away and disappear, and you are left in an alien environment.

How very sad you are. How much you suffer. Is there nothing you can do? Yes, certainly there is a solution. Wake up, stop being stupid! You are surrounded by ignorance, by robotized people, by idiots walking in a trance. And you yourself are an idiot. You and your civilization suffer from a practically incurable insanity. If you want to find out who you are, start thinking for the first time in your life. Ask yourself how much of what you presume to know about the world, about the meaning of life, is based upon your own experience, your own thinking, and how much of it has been instilled in you by your education, by newspapers and books, by people unable to answer the most basic questions of life.

As you read this you are asleep. If you do not believe you are asleep, it will do you no good to continue reading. If you want to understand what is going to be said here you must rid yourself of every idea you believe to be true. You must read this book as if you were born five minutes ago. You must balk at nothing that will be said. You must say, ‘Yes, this certainly could be true. I will think about it for a long time’. You must realize that what is written here cannot be disproved by you, that you can offer not one bit of evidence that it is not absolute truth. You must realize that any objections that may occur to you are readymade objections instilled in you by your education, and that the objections are automatic responses, conditioned reflexes to ideas that are not acceptable in modern society.

You yourself must be the sole judge of what is written here. It will do you no good to ask the sleepwalkers surrounding you to give you their opinions. It will do you no good to ask professors, or doctors, or persons having scholarly credentials no matter what their alleged qualifications. Everybody is asleep, everyone is a robot. You must either make decisions for yourself or abandon all responsibility for yourself.

If you put yourself in the hands of robots you have no one but yourself to blame for your aimless wandering, for your life without meaning or hope.

Nothing that is written here should be accepted on faith. It is all logical and subject to personal verification. You are not asked to believe without thinking. You are merely asked to suspend your disbelief, and actually think for yourself for the first time in your life. Consider what is said as a personal communication between the author and the reader which you are under obligation to reveal to no one. Consider it if you like as a secret teaching which you are not free to discuss with others. Keep it to yourself until you have thought it over for many months or years. Stop thinking that something must not be true because ‘everyone’ thinks it not to be true. Never mind what ‘everyone’ believes, for if you listen to ‘everyone’ you will share the fate of ‘everyone’. Remember that those people who build atomic bombs and perform other ‘miracles’ of modern civilization are merely people who know a few mechanical tricks. They do not necessarily know anything more about the meaning of existence than you yourself.

This book is a unified totality. If the reader wishes to understand it he must constantly keep this in mind, for to understand any part of the book he must understand the whole book. In reading it he will often come to certain passages which he will tend to reject automatically, thinking that he must understand them since he has read or heard of similar ideas elsewhere. But a sentence or a paragraph does not make a book. Any statement in the book must be understood within its total context. Therefore the reader is asked to suspend his disbelief until he has read the last sentence. Only then will he be in a position to review what he has learned and make a fair judgment of various ideas which he might otherwise reject out of hand.

I have taught the material contained in this book to many classes. It is almost invariable that some students began to object to certain ideas as soon as they were voiced. I was then forced to ask them to keep quiet, listen, and consider until they had heard the entire theory. Only then could they judge any part of it.

Academics have never learned to follow this practice. They begin to read a book and immediately do they find one sentence with which to disagree, they gleefully discontinue their reading, announcing to themselves that the author is incompetent. Some academics in this way have saved themselves the trouble of reading most of the literature that is pertinent to their concerns, and have reduced the bibliographies of books which they require their students to read to their own works and the works of colleagues and friends who agree with them.

I ask the reader then to suspend his disbelief until he has thoroughly studied the entire contents of this work. If he does this he will learn why he so often disbelieves, even if he learns nothing else.” http://scribd.com/book/148421840

†[“Implications of the Psychedelic Experience for Anthropology” – AAA conference (1965) Online Archives of California—Guide to the Records of the Department of Anthropology, 1901 – (ongoing)
“Processed by The Bancroft Library staff
University Archives.
The Bancroft Library
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, California, 94720-6000
Phone: (510) 642-2933
Fax: (510) 642-7589
Email: uarchive@library.berkeley.edu
URL: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/BANC/UARC
[...]
– Coult, Allan D.
1965, Harber invited to participate in conference on the **Implications of the Psychedelic Experience for Anthropology**” http://oac.cdlib.org/fin...0/tf5489n83n/entire_text (http://archive.is/zQ0XC)]

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[“The anthropologist's first field trip should not be to Africa or South America or Japan, but into the hidden primitive layers of his own mind.” – Allan D. Coult]

•Richard Milner—Dr. Allan D. Coult (1931 - 1970) A Personal Memoir: “On April 24, 1970, the spirit of Dr. Allan D. Coult separated from its earthly body. Although he was one of the most dedicated and productive of anthropologists, he was reviled during his lifetime by most of his professional colleagues, who thought him a madman. The Anthropology Department at the University of California, Berkeley, granted him its Ph.D. in 1961, but later tried hard to forget it had ever considered him a colleague.
Coult came to Berkeley with a B.A. in psychology from Syracuse University in his home town, and a stint with the Army in Korea behind him. After gaining his doctorate he moved from school to school, including UC Davis, Santa Barbara, and Santa Cruz, the University of Texas, and the State University of New York. Several years later, disillusioned with Establishment universities, he set up his own ‘New University’ in Berkeley, which was principally a forum for him to expound on his ideas to the paying public. When he found that to be an inefficient means for reaching large numbers of people, he took over the Berkeley Barb for several months during 1969 in a last major effort to be heard.
Although I first met Allan when I was a new graduate student in anthropology at Berkeley, we did not achieve any real closeness until I too was ostracized from the hallowed halls of Kroeber for putting on a poor act of grinning and foot-shuffling fo' de Massas what runs de professorial plantation. In the course of our work together, we collaborated on a book, a play, a screenplay, and many underground press articles. Later in our association we clashed, and finally had a parting of ways several months before his death.
On my desk is Allan's obituary, clipped from the San Francisco Chronicle. The article mentions the 1966 Meetings of the American Anthropological Association in Pittsburgh at which he organized a special session on ‘Psychedelic Anthropology’. According to the Chronicle, ‘Dr. Coult caused a flurry (at the meetings) when he said his own use of drugs had convinced him the experience helped him understand the mainsprings of human culture’. Then a member of the faculty of the State University of New York, he said:
'The anthropologist's first field trip should not be to Africa or South America or Japan, but into the hidden primitive layers of his own mind.’ The clipping triggers memories...
At those meetings I was hanging around with Allan and wearing a beat-up old hat. Allan pulled me aside. 'Take off the stupid hat', he said. 'What,' I replied, 'do you want me to look like the rest of those penguins in their brown suits and white shirts?’ ‘A hat is not an important thing to fight for’, he said. ‘Dress like them so they'll listen to you. Then you can fight for your ideas, if you have any.’ And so, fully decked out in his brown suit, white shirt, and tie, Allan proceeded to do battle for his heretical brand of science.
In his opening remarks he made a plea to revive methods dismissed nowadays as ‘introspection’ — the attempt of the mind to experience and understand itself. Only by striving to enter the secret and often forbidden rooms of his own mind, he maintained, could the social scientist hope to comprehend anything about the ways of the human species. He claimed to have experienced ancient ceremonies and mystery rites during LSD trips, and found a cross-cultural, trans-temporal unity in all such ceremonies and their accompanying mythologies. To those who scoffed at his ‘imaginary’ methods, he urged that they try psychedelic drugs themselves to see what he had seen, although he never recommended the indiscriminate use of drugs by anyone. His rejoinder was usually dismissed by his colleagues with a nervous, condescending snort. ‘These people would have burned Galileo’, he told me, ‘they refuse to look through the telescope.’
He believed that the psychedelic experience was universal to all mankind and that it was the kernel of all myth and religious ritual throughout the world. Those few of us who did dare to ‘look through the telescope’ came to agree with him.
Although he believed his own theories, he emphasized at that meeting that he didn't care whether his particular anthropological views became accepted or not, but did care that psychedelic research become open and accepted as a means of learning about man. To this end he founded the International Society for Psychedelic Anthropology, but increasing Government repression of psychedelic research soon caused the Society to fizzle out. It was inconceivable to him that such a powerful research tool as LSD would not be fully and freely utilized by those claiming to seek insights into human culture and behavior. All this and more he told the anthropologists as he stood there in his brown suit. It is ironic that several years later, while trying to revolutionize the underground Berkeley Barb, which he published and edited for five months, he was criticized in the magazine Rolling Stone for his apparel, which the writer thought was not ‘hip’ or ‘revolutionary’ enough. Somehow Allan managed to antagonize the Underground Establishment as well as the Establishment Establishment. He was a phenomenon: a loner, an independent thinker in pursuit of the life of the mind wherever it led and whether he was paid for his efforts or not. (Usually, he wasn't.)
Often he was frustrated when he arrived at an academic party eager to discuss anthropological theory with colleagues who were ‘relaxing’ and wanted only to discuss the latest movie or the antiquing of furniture.
On many occasions he was told that it was more important to ‘get along’ with colleagues than to engage in intellectual discussion, a view which of course enraged him. Sometimes he took to insult or startling statement to get a reaction, like the Zen master who hits people on the head to help them become enlightened. Most didn't appreciate this technique.
In private he was often a delight, as his brilliant sense of humor satirized everything and everyone, including himself. One of his favorite self-parodies was the role of the ‘mad genius’. He would muss up his hair and speak in a fantastic Russian accent about the sexual ‘therapy’ he proposed to give to lady patients: ‘Bee-lyiv me, Lady, dis voodn't hurt a bit. Dis iss all for da terr-a-pee. Bee-lyiv me, I voodn't feel ah ting.’ While laughing at this routine, it struck me that Allan really was feared as some kind of sexual, drug-taking, Jewish ‘mad genius’, and he knew it. His joke was really his insight into the paranoia of his colleagues.
Allan would let his mind run for hours, spinning out brilliant patterns of logic and illogic in the air. My brain had to stretch and contort just to keep up with him. One evening he taught me his secret for creative thinking: ‘Don't worry about whether it's true or not. Just let your mind run and see what it spins out. You've got a million trips in there. Go along with the trip, suspend your judgment. After that, there's plenty of time to decide whether or not it's true. It's all just words. Don't be afraid of them.’
He had a strong romance with words. His passion for reading (in several languages), writing, and speaking were unparalleled. Last year (1968 – 1969) he gave a dazzling series of lectures in Kroeber Hall which was packed by interested students. (Many of his colleagues stayed away, as usual.) Although he dearly loved to talk and argue, he well knew that words and so-called ‘rational’ thought were not conducive to the ‘mystic’ enlightened state he prized above all else. In the middle of a monologue he was apt to catch himself, break off the brilliant verbal flow, and exclaim, ‘What am I talking about? I gotta get outta here’, meaning he wanted to transcend this earthly plane of words and word-created dualities.
‘You know what a real mystic is’, he once asked me. ‘Someone who has complete faith that his methods will work even though he has never seen or heard of them working. Look at the Lowie Museum, for instance, all that stuff they've collected. Those people have a mystic faith that somehow all those broken pots and arrowheads will give them real insight into mankind if only they collect enough of it in one place. They've got graduate students in there who spend all day piecing broken pots together. When they gather “data” on psychedelics they give you the Latin name of the mushroom, describe the pots and spoons the Indians use to make it — but never bother to have the experience for themselves. Yet they believe that “someday” a theory will mystically emerge from that garbage dump. Nowadays they've also got hundreds of people on big grants studying monkeys to learn about man, and they come up with their own minds — “dominant and subordinate males” in a monkey hierarchy based on power and fear. Wherever man looks out on the natural world he sees himself.’ He said the world of action could be best understood if you imagined everyone as a little kid, that most people spent their adult lives not in striving to attain new and higher levels of awareness and understanding, but in trying to recoup their frustrations or hangups as children. He explained academic departments this way, in terms of fathers (professors) and sons (students). The ingratiating son would try to emulate his father who, in a quest to perpetuate himself, would take the son into his ‘business’ via recommendations and introductions to the ‘right’ people. He never recovered from his disappointment that academia was not a true ‘aristocracy of merit’, but merely another father-son aristocracy based on the arbitrary distribution of prestige. He was shocked to find no more real intellectual activity in ‘name’ schools than in unknown ones, and was horrified by the shallowness and pretentiousness of the ‘famous’ professors he met.
Allan's written output was prolific. In addition to his thesis on the Hualapai Indians, he compiled a computer-based analysis of trait correlations from the Human Relations Area Files, and produced a steady stream of articles, critiques, and book reviews. He was an outspoken critic of ‘ethnoscience’, which he regarded as an intellectual fraud, and generated much controversy in the learned journals.
His magnum opus, ‘Psychedelic Anthropology’, still unpublished, is the most comprehensive expression of the results of his explorations into the nature of man. Time and again he was struck by the consistency of esoteric teachings, and by how the doctrines of Yoga, Zen, and other ancient philosophies fitted with the independent work of unconventional Western thinkers such as Reich and Ouspensky. ‘Psychedelic Anthropology’ is a masterly and successful attempt to synthesize these sources, to use the resultant synthesis as a basis for interpreting myth and ritual, and to point the way for an anthropology which is genuinely relevant to the lives of its readers. It is a unique, profound, and mind-expanding document. One hopes this book will soon be available to all who seek access to Allan Coult's hard-won knowledge.
– Richard Milner
San Francisco, California”

• • •

“Bibliography of Allan D. Coult [compiled by Richard Miller]

•Tongan authority structure: concepts for comparative analysis. Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers 20:56-70.

•Conflict and stability in a Hualapai community. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.

•The determinants of differential cross-cousin marriage. Man 62: 34-36.

•Analysis of Needham's critique of the Homans and Schneider theory. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 18(4): 317-335. (with Robert W. Habenstein)

•The study of extended kinship in urban society. Sociological Quarterly 3(l): 141 – 145.

•Unconscious inference and cultural origins. American Anthropologist 65(1): 32 – 35.


•Terminological correlates of cross-cousin marriage. de Taal-, Land-, en Volkenkunde 121: 120 – 139.

•Causality and cross-sex prohibitions. 266-277.

•American Anthropologist 65(2): 1963 (with Robert W. Habenstein)

•Exogamy and American kinship. Social Forces 43(2): 174 – 180. 1963 (with E.A. Hammel) A corrected model for patrilateral cross-cousin marriage.

•Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 19(3): 287 – 296.

•Role allocation, position structuring, and ambilineal descent. American Anthropologist 66(1): 29 – 40. 1965.

•A note on Fisher's exact test. American Anthropologist 67(6):1537-1541. 1965 (with Robert W. Habenstein) Cross tabulations of Murdock's world ethnographic sample. Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press1965 (with Robert W. Habenstein)

•The functions of extended kinship in an urban milieu. Kansas City: Community Studies, Inc. 1965 (with Richard R. Randolph).

•Computer methods for analyzing genealogical space. American Anthropologist 67(l): 21 – 29. 1965 (with Keith T. Kernen)

•The cross-generation relative age criterion 1966

•On the justification of untested componential analyses. Anthropologist 68(4): 11014 –1015. 1966

•A simplified method for the transformation analysis of kinship terms. American Anthropologist 68(6): 1476 – 1483.

•Lineage solidarity, transformation analysis, and the meaning of kinship terminologies. Man 2(1): 26 – 47. (with Richard R. Randolph)

•A computer analysis of Bedouin marriage. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 24(l): 83 – 100.

•Of kinship terminology. 148-154. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 21(2): 1966 The structuring of structure. American Anthropologist 68(2): 438 – 443.

•Uses and abuses of computers in anthropology. Centre de Calcul de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme.
.
•The Ikualapai.

•Psychedelic anthropology. Unpublished manuscript.

•The complete book of Zen. Unpublished manuscript.” https://digitalassets.li.../ucb/text/kas043-006.pdf
*[“Richard Milner [UC Berkeley] is an American historian of science and a **singer** who stars in the musical Charles Darwin: Live & in Concert.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Milner_(historian)]

https://i.imgur.com/YciNrMt.jpg

[Psychedelic anthropology: the study of man through the manifestation of the mind]

Allan Coult seems like he was my kind of guy. Amazing stuff.




“There is a way of manipulating matter and energy so as to produce what modern scientists call 'a field of force'. The field acts on the observer and puts him in a privileged position vis-à-vis the universe. From this position he has access to the realities which are ordinarily hidden from us by time and space, matter and energy. This is what we call the Great Work."
― Jacques Bergier, quoting Fulcanelli
 
 
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