The Dialectics of Awakening

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Below is an excerpt from Breaking Open the Head on one of my favorite thinkers: Walter Benjamin, a German Jewish philosopher and critic who wove Mysticism and social theory together in an extraordinary way. Benjamin explored the “dialectics of awakening” as a historical process, in which humanity moved from one “dream world” to another. He saw drug experiences as “profane illuminations” which gave us access to different levels of consciousness, providing insights into the nature of reality:

Walter Benjamin’s writing flashes between poles of revolution and revelation. A scholar of threshold experiences, states of intoxication, and failed philosophies, he is brilliant on the subject of drugs: “The most passionate examination of the hashish trance will not teach us half as much about thinking (which is eminently narcotic), as the profane illumination of thinking about the hashish trance,” he wrote. “The reader, the thinker, the flaneur, are types of illuminati just as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic. . . . Not to mention that most terrible drug — ourselves — which we take in solitude.”

He saw thinking as a form of intoxication. He recognized that drug-exploration, the pursuit of visionary experience, could be an extension of a rational and intellectual quest: “The dialectics of intoxication are indeed curious,” he wrote. "Is not perhaps all ecstasy in one world humiliating sobriety in that complementary to it?”

Writing in the 1920s and 1930s, Benjamin smoked hash, tried mescaline, and enjoyed his own trips: "I thought with intense pride of sitting here in Marseilles in a hashish trance; of who else might be sharing my intoxication this evening, how few.” Thinking under the influence of hashish was like unrolling a ball of thread through a maze: “We go forward; but in so doing we not only discover the twists and turns of the cave, but also enjoy the pleasure of this discovery against the background of the other, rhythmical bliss of unwinding the thread.”

On hashish, he saw the elaborate furnishings of the nineteenth-century bourgeois interior concentrating “to Satanic contentment, Satanic knowing, satanic calm ... To live in these interiors was to have woven a dense fabric about oneself, to have secluded oneself within a spider’s web, in whose coils world events hang loosely suspended like so many insect bodies sucked dry. From the cavern, one does not like to stir.” The narcotic trance revealed an occult and sinister undercurrent to the bourgeois love of comfort and exotic decor.

For the society as well as the individual, Benjamin realized "the importance of intoxication for perception, of fiction for thinking.”

The new consumer culture of the nineteenth century induced a widespread trance in the public, as capitalism breathed supernatural power into its products. The World Exhibits, the Belle Epoque’s celebrations of global commerce, “open up a phantasmagoria that people enter to be amused. The entertainment industry facilitates this by elevating people to the status of commodities. They submit to being manipulated while enjoying their alienation from themselves and others.” The euphoria induced by these spectacles was like a drug that robbed the masses of their will, that taught them how to enjoy being transformed into objects of exchange.

NASA experiment giving different drugs to spiders

Intoxicated, entranced by the new world of commodities, the West lost its contact with the communal “ecstatic trance," those archaic Dionysian festivals and annual Mysteries celebrating the transformation of primordial chaos into order. The loss of rituals that compelled “ecstatic contact with the cosmos” posed a threat to humanity: "It is the dangerous error of modern men to regard this experience as unimportant and avoidable ... it is not; its hour strikes again and again, and then neither nations nor generations can escape it.” Humanity needed such periodic rites of regeneration to avoid hypnotic episodes of feverish destruction, which served the same purpose at a much greater cost. For Benjamin, this was the real significance of the First World War, "an attempt at a new and unprecedented commingling with the cosmic powers.”

He worried that mankind’s alienation from itself was deepening “to such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”

Benjamin’s fusion of sociological, psychoanalytical, and mystical levels of insight reminded me of the integrated vision of myself that I took back from the iboga trip. He saw that no revolution could succeed unless it transformed the inner realm of thought — the meaning of perception, the relationship of the senses to the physical world — as well as economic relations. He was always on the lookout for the secret core of primitive ritual and magical belief hidden within the seemingly "rational” processes of modernity.

He called his great uncompleted work The Arcades Project “an experiment in the technique of awakening.” On the personal level, awakening is, of course, something we do every morning without a thought. We suddenly emerge into ourselves, arriving in our beds from the evanescent dream dimensions. Occasionally we remember vivid narratives and scenes from our unconscious meanderings. At other times we can reconstruct the stories only with an effort, searching inside our minds for clues to patterns that quickly fizzle out and disappear if we don't pursue them, if we don’t make the effort to retrace our steps through the labyrinth. Most often, we don’t remember anything at all, and we are happier for it.

Benjamin describes awakening as a historical and generational process as well as an individual one. History is the effort made by each age to bring the “not-yet conscious knowledge of what has been” into awareness. Waking is a “dialectical moment" suspended between the dreamworld of the past and the transformative energy locked within the present. For Benjamin, history advances in sudden flashes and leaps. It is a series of awakenings into deeper and more profound levels of awareness, or falterings into deeper states of hypnosis and trance.

This "dialectic of awakening” has no end point. Just as the individual slips between sleep and waking, reaching different intensities of awareness during the day, generations and epochs also fluctuate between levels of consciousness and unconsciousness. Advertisements, popular entertainment, public architecture are natural expressions of the unconscious desires of the “dreaming collective.”

Unseduced by the ideology of modernist progress, he described capitalism as “a natural phenomenon with which a new dream-filled sleep came over Europe, and, through it, a reactivation of mythic forces.” Those reactivated mythic forces ended up destroying him: He committed suicide in 1940 while trying to flee the Nazis.

He died before he could begin a projected book on drugs. It would have perfectly fit his intention to “cultivate fields where, until now, only madness has reigned.” Paradoxically, Benjamin's work suggests that only intoxication — ecstasy that is also “humiliating sobriety," an apt description of tripping — can awaken the individual by snapping him or her out of the monotonous trance of modern life.

The creation of the modern Western consciousness required a violent repression of our archaic heritage. That heritage includes the ability to explore sacred and magical realms through spontaneously occurring trance states, through rituals of initiation, or through the visionary compounds found in certain plants. For many thousands of years, direct knowledge of the sacred was a natural and universal part of human existence, as it remains today in tribal cultures. With the rise of the modern state and the Church, interaction with mystical realities was alienated from the masses and explicitly demonized. Communion with the sacred was reserved for the priests. During the Inquisition, cavorting with the spirits of nature or contacting the souls of the dead became heresies. The punishment for these crimes was severe.

The Inquisition

The dialectical process that created the possessive mind-set of the capitalist and the “rational” outlook of the technocrat required destruction of the premodern vestiges of communal and animistic beliefs, whether these beliefs were found in isolated pockets of Europe or in the indigenous populations of the New World. This destruction was part of the process that Karl Marx described as the alienation of all of our physical and intellectual senses into one sense: the sense of having. Of course, "the sense of having” is not really a sense — it is an illusion of fulfillment that seems to extend outside of the self. Modernism caused a profound shift in the way we use our senses.

In his book Myth and Meaning, Levi-Strauss admitted his initial shock when he discovered that Indian tribesmen were able to see the planet Venus in daylight, with the naked eye — "something that to me would be utterly impossible and incredible.” But he learned from astronomers that it was feasible, and he found ancient accounts of Western navigators with the same ability. "Today we use less and we use more of our mental capacity than we did in the past,” he realized. We have sacrificed perceptual capabilities for other mental abilities — to concentrate on a computer screen while sitting in a cubicle for many hours at a stretch (something those Indians would find "utterly impossible and incredible”), or to shut off multiple levels of awareness as we drive a car in heavy traffic. In other words, we are brought up within a system that teaches us to postpone, defer, and eliminate most incoming sense data in favor of a future reward. We live in a feedback loop of perpetual postponement. For the most part, we are not even aware of what we have lost.