Adar - The Problem with Maps
The first psychedelic book I ever bought and owned was famed psychedelic psychiatrist and theorist Stanislav Grof’s “The Cosmic Game.” A summary of the work of an innovative thinker who helped pioneer a new approach to psychology, it is also a complete world picture, or myth which explains the possibility and meaning of “non-ordinary states of consciousness.” While Grof’s weaving of multiple religious traditions’ (mostly Eastern) cosmologies attempted to universalize these phenomena, his limited knowledge of the mystical maps of my tradition made me wonder what new project would have to exist in order to include them in a holotropic framework?
While much of Jewish wisdom is transmitted through textual traditions and study, our sacred texts themselves derive from people’s direct experience of reality, refracted and translated through the prism of their innermost being. From the collective prophetic moment at Mount Sinai in which the entire nation experienced divine revelation, to our ancestors’ direct divine encounters, to the teachings of sages and mystics throughout the generations who engaged in deep spiritual practice and contemplation - Jewish wisdom and teachings emerge from states of expanded consciousness. The teachings and practices that our ancestors have passed on to us are not only jewels brought back from these prophetic states – they are also doorways leading back to the realms from which they emerged. When we approach our ancestral traditions with this awareness, they can be catalysts for psychedelic (“mind” or “soul manifesting”) and entheogenic (“allowing the divine to come into being”) experiences.
This is the work we have begun, mostly behind the scenes, at Shefa since its inception, and is the driving force of almost every offering and resource we produce. We believe that a serious Jewish—communal and national—encounter with psychedelic plants and compounds must include deep engagement with the mystic-mythic maps of consciousness, reality, and the human spirit, left to us from our ancestors, so that our knowledge may be anchored in context.
And yet, we understand, as the Polish-American scholar wrote in his paper on mathematical semantics:
A.) A map may have a structure similar or dissimilar to the structure of the territory.
B.) Two similar structures have similar ‘logical’ characteristics. Thus, if in a correct map, Dresden is given as between Paris and Warsaw, a similar relation is found in the actual territory.
C.) A map is not the actual territory.
D.) An ideal map would contain the map of the map, the map of the map of the map, etc., endlessly…We may call this characteristic self-reflexiveness.
These maps of consciousness and reality, conceived by notably gifted individuals and schools of scholars and students over centuries, do not actually contain the territory they attempt to capture, merely the representations of them. We may study the whirling circles of Abulafia, the light-soaked poetry of Madame Colette, the Kabbalistic Beard Chart based on the Zohar, but how much would truly comprehend without great contact with living teachers of these traditions, much more living in a context where these “texts” were alive, within and around us?
The next full moon will bring Purim with it, the holiday which begs us to remove the veils of social conventions and culture, taken off even past our very own consciousnesses. Perhaps, for the Jewish psychonaut, Purim can be the reminder that all of our preparation and integration never makes us fully ready for the journey out and back home, but merely standing by for the trip we have not taken yet.
