The Acid Diaries (Christopher Gray) / quote 124 of 125
Eleusis and Plato's Forms
Did Eleusis birth the basic concepts of Western and Near Eastern metaphysics—the “Forms,” the “Ideas,” the “Archetypes”? The concept of another world, prior to, more pristine than this, from which we journey forth and to which we return in a richer, more highly evolved form? That was as high as I was to get anyway. During one of those last trips at Judges Walk, I remember gazing spellbound at a single blade of grass. “The first and last blade of grass,” I wrote, “the original stroke of genius.” That stalk of grass held a different cosmic status to anything I had ever known. Literally, it was The Idea of a blade of grass: I could no longer distinguish the thought of it from its full-blown material reality. It participated equally in two dimensions of reality, like a revolving door. Furthermore, discovering the archetypal world was inseparable from discovering what holds us apart from it. In Plato’s cosmogony, this role is played by what he named anamnesis: his theory was that we have always been aware of, have always been at home in this prior world . . . but have merely forgotten. Here again there would seem to be an explicit tie-up with the conscious reliving of birth at the heart of the psychedelic experience. Surely, by and large, birth is the worst pain we as individuals undergo—and as such could present a plausible etiology for our universal state of posttraumatic amnesia.