Looking for the truth of Alan Watts most famous quote#
“If you get the message, hang up the phone.” ― Alan Watts
It’s a one-liner that is so seductively simple that you feel it has to be right. A teaching hook, used to get people to remember a point, but sometimes at the expense of a deeper understanding.
But was it right?
Taken at face value we might pick up some issues with this idea.
(a) The first is about the difference between static and dynamic information. The statement contains an underlying assumption that the message in psychedelics never changes, but is this true? If you had stocks and shares, or some crypto, you wouldn’t check the value once. If you want to test water in a river for quality, you do not do it once. While the water as a system or body remains self-similar (it remains a river), the content of the water shifts constantly.
So does the content of the psychedelic state share the same properties? Is it static or dynamic? I think we could use the river metaphor again. There seem to be underlying themes. The great oneness of everything, a sense that the “being that is me” persists beyond the body and death, a feeling that love is the underlying principle of all things. But the content seems to shift as well. Perhaps this is because we ourselves are dynamic systems.
Another reason for returning to the experience might be that, in the absence of any other practice, our minds begin to revert to comfortable cultural patterns. Could “the western mind” be tide-locked into a socially constructed reality that is deeply dissonant from whatever the truth is? This would be something that a lifetime of Buddhist practice can start to unpick.
(b) The second is about whether plant medicines are a practice or a pill. Both Alan Watts and Deepak Chopra left psychedelics in their past. What they took up instead was a deep and lifelong spiritual practice that placed a lot of importance on meditation. They combined this with a teaching practice that they brought back to the West.
Many people are attracted to plant medicines because they seek healing. Often, they know specifically what for. Anxiety, depression, addiction and trauma are particularly common. The medicine appears to do different things simultaneously, and we don’t yet have a deep medical understanding of what is going on. First, there is an experience of what it is like to have the brain flood with serotonin. For an anxious western mind that has not experienced deep meditation or anything similar, this is a game-changing experience. It demonstrates that a different mental state is possible. Secondly, there is the introspective journey into memory, which appears to both be healing in itself and to challenge the person to make changes, perhaps to heal relationships. Last of all, there is a loosening of the grip of the socially constructed world… the beginnings of an awareness that all is not as it seems to be.
Many western minds will approach plant medicine in the first instance with a medical model. Take the pill. Get better. For some this will work. Some get stuck here and struggle to integrate any further understanding. For others, healing takes longer. I was working with medicine for three years before I finally got to the truth about what was going on for me. But at this point, my work with the medicine had become a practice. I was not taking it to feel better, as that aspect of my journey happened within the first twelve months of work.
We see plant medicine being used as a practice in places where it has been used consistently for hundreds of years. For the Indigenous American Indians, or the Vegitalismo shaman of the Amazon basin for example, the use of psychedelic plants is a ritualised part of community life.
It is worth noting that Alan Watts himself would recognise this from his own tradition of Zen Buddhism. Meditation is not something you do once. You do not hang up the phone. It is a practice for precisely the same reason. The mind wants to wander into agitation, narrative and the safety of the socially constructed world.
(c) Another point might revolve around the world as it is today. As we look around, do we think that we have collectively “got the message?” Allan Watts was born in World War 1 and lived through World War 2, the Cold War, the Korean and Vietnam War to name just a few. As I write this there is war in Ukraine as Russia tries to annex more territory, a war between Israel and Palestine, ongoing tension between US and Iran, North and South Korea, conflicts in Yemen and Armenia. Equally concerning is an ongoing and deepening divide in attitudes between urban and rural areas across the globe, as well as an anti-liberal, partly anti-establishment populism in Western democracies which is often swinging wildly to the right. This is in the context of what might be argued as a broadly liberal technology revolution that has seen the rise of ubiquitous and covert surveillance through a combination of data sets aggregated from email, mobile phones (tower positioning, GPS logs and back-doors in communication software) as well as CCTV cameras using AI powered analysis.
While our technology and knowledge develops at an arguably exponential rate, so far our capacity for fear, greed, competition rather than co-operation remains unchanged. Conflict initiated by empire and inflexible ideology is underpinned by increasingly powerful military-industrial technologies.
Steven Pinker might argue a different perspective, and it is well worth looking at his view on the development of our capacity to build a better world. Nonetheless, I feel that we have a lot to learn as a people, especially in regard to the environment and our capacity to be compassionate and community centric in our behaviour.
People who take plant medicines for the first time sometimes jump to the conclusion that if everyone were to take them, the world would be a better place. This is not necessarily true. We have examples in the Inca of a community that used psychedelics regularly but was noted for its unparalleled brutality.
However, it is tempting to think that if more people had access to what is currently an often proscribed substance, we might start to slowly tip the balance as a society into a different way of being. The same could be said of meditation, demonstrating that there will be more than one pathway to peaceful coexistence.
(d) Terrence McKenna had a theory that the “fall into history” of the western mind, as he described it, was caused by our divorce from a practice of collectively eating psychedelic mushrooms. His thesis was that humans grew up in a symbiotic relationship to the plants that surrounded them, and particularly psychedelic plants, and that our intelligence, our social cohesion and our very sanity was dependent on this relationship.
Rather than hanging up a phone, perhaps he would think of humans as a race living down stream of a hydroelectric dam. Suddenly energy abundant and high-tech yet lacking the life giving waters that the community was based around. Thirsty and hungry, we start wandering the self-made desert, not realising that the dam is of our own making.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we are often given this quote out of the context of the paragraph in which it sat.
“If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen.” ― Alan Watts
In this, we see not an edict to drop psychedelic use entirely, but a call to action. The point being made was that psychedelic use in the absence of integration and then personal and community based action are without merit.