“Enlightenment could be defined as the absence of resistance to what is, the total intimacy with whatever is taking place, without any desire to reject or replace it.”
-Rupert Spira
At the core of the revised value proposition is my claim that drinking coffee can induce entheogenic experiences. I’d like to spend a little time with that claim and expand upon it a bit to give a clearer sense of what I mean.
First, I’ll clarify what I mean when I’m talking about entheogenic experiences, and how I distinguish these from other spiritual or mystical experiences.
I have no formal training as a psychologist or shaman and formed my understanding of entheogenic phenomena mostly through my own direct experiences, which I’ve then tried to make sense of through reading the works of other explorers, thinkers, devotees and gurus who are more knowledgeable or experienced.
Given that, I’m going to first present a framework for distinguishing entheogenic experiences that I’ve synthesized based mostly on what I’ve gleaned from the works of William James, Alan Watts, Rupert Spira, Prem Rawat, and the many teachers at Landmark Worldwide, all of whose understanding of human experience far surpasses my own. Their ideas have enlivened and re-enchanted my world, and shimmer throughout this chapter. I further shaped and honed my understanding over eighteen years spent as a member of the intentional community at Breitenbush Hot Springs Retreat and Conference Center, a truly life-changing experience whose effects permeate my being.
Once I’ve established a context for discussing these experiences, I’ll elucidate through providing narratives of some of my own direct experiences as well as those of others in order to demonstrate specifically what I purport to be the particular experience available through the use of caffeine, and especially coffee, as an entheogen.
Entheogenic experiences are extraordinary, but not uncommon. In fact, you’ve very likely had multiple entheogenic experiences, though you may not have recognized them as such. To begin building a framework for understanding these, I’m first going to turn to the work of a person who is widely recognized as the founder of the study of the psychology of religion, William James.
In his seminal work, “The Varieties of Religious Experience”, James proposes four criteria for what he calls “mystical” experiences which I am appropriating here to form a starting point in my effort to distinguish entheogenic experiences:
- Ineffability: These experiences defy expression or description, and cannot adequately be conveyed to another in words. To be understood, they must therefore be experienced directly.
- Noetic quality: They are accompanied by an “aha” moment, of knowledge or insight into “depths of truths unplumbed by the discursive intellect.” They are illuminations or revelations full of import that nonetheless defy articulation.
- Transience: They don’t last long. Typically, once they have faded, recollection of them is like an imperfect echo, though they can always be recognized when they happen again, and in the intervening time from one occurrence to the next they can develop and mature viz a viz a sense of increased inner richness and profundity.
- Passivity: Even though one may create circumstances conducive to entheogenic experiences, they happen of their own accord, beyond your will, and as if you were under the control or influence of a higher power.
While this is a solid foundation for describing mystical experiences in general, I feel there is more to understand about what makes entheogenic experiences a special class of mystical experience. For this next part, I’ll be referring to the work of Rupert Spira, an English spiritual teacher, philosopher and proponent of a modern “no-nonsense” interpretation of the ancient “Direct Path” teachings of Advaita – or non-dualism, and his lectures about the way we experience understanding, love and beauty.
Rupert describes the experiences of understanding, love and beauty, as being like “cracks” or interventions in our experience of time. Now, to many that may seem to be esoteric and fanciful, so let’s drill down into this statement a bit to unpack what he means by this.
First, consider that the past and the future do not exist. The past only exists in memory, and the future has not yet arrived. Thus, all that truly exists is the present. The word we use to indicate the present moment is “now”. For clarity, I’m going to capitalize the word “Now” to distinguish a special usage of the word that I’m trying to evoke here that may be different from our ordinary everyday way of thinking about it. There is only one Now, and Now has no duration, no time component, and is thus eternal. Now is not a point that travels along some abstract timeline, because there is no past from which it emerges, and no future into which it travels. Nobody has ever left the eternal Now for even a moment. Everything that has ever happened and will ever happen is alway happening Now.
This flies in the face of the way most humans ordinarily think about and experience their lives. It is not consistent with the reality that thought, perception and sensation presents to us. We tend to think of our experience of now as a product of past experiences. Who I am and what I think and feel now is a product of everything that has come before me in a continuous string of cause and effect stretching back to my birth, and before that to the beginning of the universe. Everything I do now projects consequently into the future to become who I will be and what I will experience in the future, stretching out to my death and thence to the end of time.
But, as Rupert explains, thought and time are abstractions that mind imposes on our experience of reality. The human mind cannot think about eternity or about a zero-duration of now without contextualizing it within time. Thus, the very act of thinking about Now creates our experience of time. Seen from this perspective, our experience of time is like a story that we tell ourselves about reality.
We constantly seek and create meanings and stories about ourselves and everything we encounter. We rely on meaning and story to help us make sense of and navigate through a reality that appears to be defined by an experience of separateness. Because we experience being a separate self, we need a way of defining what that self is and what it is not. The mechanism of self definition occurs through the actions of sensations, perceptions and thoughts about those sensations and perceptions, and as we’ve seen above, thoughts cannot happen without the presumption of time. As Spira says, thought and time are nearly synonymous. You could say that our experience of time is a byproduct of the existence of a limited localized awareness – of ego.
In our effort to construct a sensible view of the world and of our place in it, we rely on past experience, our “priors”, to predict the future. In other words, we take our past and project it into the future, allowing it to govern our actions and our experiences in the present. From this perspective, we can see that our present experience, who we are right now, is not actually a product of our past, but rather is shaped and determined by the future that we have projected. It seems to us that we are governed by our past, but only because we have put that past ahead of us in our future. And incidentally, I must give credit for this insight to the teachers at Landmark Education, who use this simple but profound insight as one of the primary foundations for their work.
In this constant activity of meaning, story and projection, we typically do not experience the present moment. Instead of experiencing the present, mostly what we experience is the impact of the stories we tell ourselves about what the present means, based on the past that we have projected into the future, and into which we are barreling headlong.
When Rupert describes our experience of understanding, beauty and love as being like “cracks in time,” what he’s describing is an interruption or intervention into this cycle of projection and meaning. In those moments of intervention, thought briefly “comes to an end”, and in that moment we are free from the past, the future, and all of the meaning and significance we have attached to them. When this happens we become present, here, and aware of Now, we become open, vulnerable and accept our experience fully, without judgment. Letting go of the weight of judgment of the past and worry of the future leaves us feeling light, free, joyful.
Anything that can trigger an experience of understanding, beauty or love can create such a “crack in time”: an idea, a shaft of sunlight, a flower, a poem, a piece of music, or our beloved. A couple of real world examples may be useful here.
Like many philosophers and teachers, Rupert provides the example of a joke. In the lead up of a joke, a good storyteller will stretch out the experience and wind up the audience’s expectations in anticipation of the future punchline. Once the punchline is delivered, the audience arrives at a point of understanding in which their tensions and expectations of the future are released. The experience of understanding “brings the mind to an end” of contemplation and anticipation. In that moment of release, the mind experiences a brief interruption in its experience of the flow of time and literally becomes present, aware only of Now. Rupert describes this awareness of Now as an awareness of eternity, the eternal Now, and points out that it transcends mind, generating sensation: our bodies “come along” for the moment of realization, and we experience joy and laughter. It is for this reason that some Bhuddist teachers have described humor and jokes as a form of enlightenment – what some might describe as an inherently entheogenic experience.
Consider also our experience of being in love. One way I’ve learned to distinguish my experience of love comes to me again via Landmark Worldwide. In one of their classes, the leader asked us to consider that being in love is an experience of acceptance. When we are “in love”, we accept another “for all that they are, and all that they are not, with no need for them to be any other.” Rupert similarly describes our experience of love as being a “collapse of relationship”, by which he means a dissolution of the experience of separateness, such that we experience ourselves as one with the other. While there’s arguably more to love than just acceptance and oneness, this can nonetheless serve as a useful starting point for understanding love as an entheogenic experience.
At the start of our lives, and for a short while after we are born, we are essentially without an ego, without a sense of ourselves as a separate being. We experience all as self. At some point we experience a break in our experience of universal being. According to the work of Landmark, we experience this break as a “failure in being” – a failure of something that we expected or took for granted. This failure is personal, in fact it is the very genesis of personhood. It marks the beginning of our experience of ourselves as a separate being, and becomes an internalized sense of fundamental failure. In other words, the very ground of our being is born from our experience that “something is wrong here”, and furthermore, that something is intrinsically connected to a fault within ourselves.
Similar experiences of fundamental “failures to be” occur throughout our childhood, and become the source of coping mechanisms we develop to deal with the intolerable feelings of existential angst these failures generate. These coping mechanisms and our deep need to avoid repeating the devastating experiences of separation we associate with them come to form the basis of our ego and personality, unconsciously governing our thoughts, decisions and actions. We hide behind our coping strategies out of a fundamental need to prevent anyone from discovering that, deep down, we are essentially broken.
For me, this experience of break, separation and compensation has strong ties to the Christian myth of the fall of Man and expulsion from Eden I learned as a child. In our knowledge of separate self, we are forever barred from the grace of God.
When we fall in love, something quite miraculous happens. In that moment of acceptance, we find that we no longer need to hide behind our coping mechanisms. Faced with total acceptance, they are no longer needed. Like the punchline at the end of the joke, we are freed from the concerns of past failure that we have projected into the future, and we are free to simply *be here now* – to just be ourselves.
At this point, most people make an understandable error: they assume that these feelings of freedom, of completeness, oneness and joy are coming from the other person, and are thus dependent upon their acceptance of us. In other words, we have handed them the keys to our Eden. In truth, these feelings and experiences are coming from within ourselves, and are the result of our own acceptance, or perhaps more accurately, from releasing ourselves from our own self judgment and fear.
When we fall in love, we briefly return to our essential state of being, and once again get to feel ourselves as one with the world, whole, complete and perfect. Being in love is literally a return to ourselves as we were at the beginning of time. Is it any wonder that so many have described the feeling of being in love as an experience of being in touch with something heavenly or divine?
From these narratives, I have gleaned two more markers that I add to James’ list to further delineate entheogenic experiences as a subclass of mystical experience:
- Timelessness: We experience a break in our experience of time as a function of past concerns projected into the future that govern present experience, and instead experience the eternal now, free from concerns of the past and fear of the future.
- Acceptance: we experience a release from judgment, assessment and critique.
I believe these six markers are sufficient for distinguishing entheogenic experiences, but before moving beyond them, I think it’s worth mentioning one marker that is curiously absent. You will note that nowhere in the list of markers is there any explicit mention of God, neither generally as a concept, nor specifically to any particular deity. One might puzzle over this seemingly contradictory omission, since presumably the very roots of the word entheogenic refer to an awareness of the “divine.” Does not such a sentiment presuppose the existence of a God to whom our awareness is being opened?
For answer, I will turn once again to William James and his definition of religion:
“That personal attitude which one finds themselves compelled to take up towards what they apprehend to be the divine.”
I adore the simple pragmatism of this definition, as it relies solely on the judgment of the individual to discern the nature of their own experience. From this foundation we may allow that an entheogenic experience of timeless oneness and freedom from judgment and fear may be experienced by some as a communion with God, while others need no such intercessor between the universe and their experience of it, and yet both may in their turn describe such an experience as “divine”, or not, as their preference dictates.
Several reviewers of William James’ work have traced the lineage of his ideas to those of his father, Henry James Sr., who was a devotee of the 18th century philosopher, mystic, theologian, scientist and inventor Emmanuel Swedenborg. Some go so far as to claim that James’ entire lecture on mysticism, which I quote heavily above, was drawn almost entirely from the mystical experiences of Swedenborg who, in 1741 at the age of 53, began to experience powerful spiritual dreams and visions. His experiences culminated in a “spiritual awakening” in which he received what he claimed was a revelation that Jesus Christ had appointed him to write a book, “The Heavenly Doctrine”, to reform Christianity. According to the visions reported in “The Heavenly Doctrine”, the Lord had opened Swedenborg’s spiritual eyes so that from then on he could freely visit heaven and hell to converse with angels, demons and other spirits. This and later writings would later serve as the foundational revelations for the formation of The General Church of the New Jerusalem and The Swedenborgian Church of North America.
Notably, Swedenborg was also famously a connoisseur of fine coffee, which he drank frequently. Author and historian Devin Zuber, associate professor of American Studies, Religion, and Literature at the Center for Swedenborgian Studies, Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, writes,
“This coffee drinking was accompanied by an equally prodigious use of snus, or tobacco snuff, which so caked and layered Swedenborg’s manuscripts that later archivists would marvel at how well it had preserved them. Fueled by all this nicotine and caffeine, Swedenborg’s modern form of mysticism must be seen as entheogenic – a spiritual experience facilitated by psychoactive substances – and his prolific flurry of writing while in these trance states produced the largest body of single-author manuscripts in the 18th century (over 42,000 folio pages)”
Now, with an understanding of the scope of entheogenic experience adequately circumscribed and the pedigree of my understanding squarely established in the firmament of caffeine-induced revelation, I feel sufficiently girded by the validation of academia to engage in an exploration of the promise nestled within the revised value proposition via a deep dive into my own personal subjective experience.
Any discussion of the ineffable is, by definition, difficult, if not impossible. As Lao Tzu famously wrote, “The Tao that can be spoken of is not the eternal Tao”, but, as frequently lamented by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, sitting in silence is likewise an inadequate form of transmission for all but those who already understand what’s being shared. And so, given that I can’t claim anything even close to an approximation of the wisdom and depth of experience of such masters, I must begin by acknowledging that even my beginning is doomed to failure. And yet, begin I must, and will perhaps arrogantly endeavor to walk where even gurus fear to tread.