DeConick A.D

165
GNOSTIC ALTERED STATES
called by the Hinchi the First Flower because it prompts visions of the
primordial and trips to the First Soul, the Unborn Stuff, the Void. To
meet the original self, Eddie combines this ancient Indian drug therapy
with trips in his modern isolation tank, where he floats for hours in complete
silence and stillness, high.
That is when really weird things begin to happen. Primate sounds
come out of the tank. Eddie is removed from the tank listless, with blood
smeared across his face. Has he bitten his tongue or has he undergone
some genetic transformation into an apelike ancestor? We aren’t sure, until
the next trip to the tank, when Eddie emerges as a small primate and
tears through the lab, nearly killing two guards. He is found later in the
local zoo, transformed back into a human being after gorging on an antelope.
These altered states of consciousness are getting out of hand. They
aren’t just matters of the mind. Eddie’s mind is transforming his matter.
Very literally, he is experiencing the evolution of the human self. And it
is terrifying.
Separation Anxiety
Altered States is a modern manifesto on the death of God. It grapples with
the meaning of human life after God has died. We are presented with two
options. Emily is convinced that human life has no great truths. We are all
born into doubt and we spend our lives persuading ourselves that we are
really alive by loving each other. Eddie thinks that life is about the pain
that we inflict on each other. He wants to strip away all attachments so he
can suffer the pain alone as the singular self. He wants to get down to the
embedded rock of life, the bare and barren soul. In this way, Eddie is a
modern Gnostic, convinced that the natural condition of the human soul
is suffering. He thinks that if he can return to the primal condition, he can
find out the truth about the soul, what happened to it, how it came to be
in its present state of terror.
The second-century Gnostic Christians that we will be meeting in the
next three chapters believed that the soul’s state of terror was caused by
its separation from its original source, and they believed that they could
use ritual therapies to heal it. Second-century Gnostic initiation and its
religious ritual therapies represent our earliest form of psychotherapy. Before
Freud, Jung, the behaviorists, and the cognitive psychologists of our