Cosmic Consciousness: Dr. Manhattan & Nietzsche’s Zarathustra

If our species has an objective, it can be summed up in one word: ‘Logos’. In Ancient Greek, it means ‘word’, ‘reason’ or ‘creative order’, but in Christian theology, Logos is another word for God.

One way of conceptualising Logos is as True Perception, or omniscience. We want to expand our knowledge — and our consciousness — across the universe. Know everything, be everywhere. Even when this was far beyond our ability, we put ourselves in league with entities that could (i.e. the gods).

We used the image of God as something to strive towards, and called the process Enlightenment. We found slow ways to achieve such a state (e.g. Asceticism, Science), but as with everything there are also shortcuts to Enlightenment; i.e. psychedelic drugs.

The problem with drug-induced Enlightenment is the problem with all shortcuts, the journey cannot prepare you. As Camille Paglia says of the Sixties generation, ‘drugs remade the Western world-view by shattering conventions of time, space, and personal identity’, but the ‘neurological risks of long-term drug use were denied or underestimated: the most daring Sixties questers lost the ability to articulate and transmit their spiritual legacy to posterity’.