Notes on the Way Upward explained

What happens

Themes in this chapter

• Hashish and Altered States of Consciousness

  The chapter centers on the aftermath of hashish use, the narrator's withdrawal into lethargy, and his defense of insights gained from such altered states.

• Addiction and Emancipation

  The narrator describes his struggle to free himself from hashish dependence, the painful withdrawal, and his eventual turn to intellectual analysis as a means of recovery.

• Visionary Experience and Imagination

  The narrator argues that extraordinary mental states, including those induced by hashish, can reveal truths about the mind and reality that ordinary consciousness cannot.

Characters to notice

• The Narrator

  Describes his own descent into a state of total nullity and lethargy after ceasing hashish use, and his subsequent turn to analyzing his accumulated mental experiences.

• Buddha

  Referenced via the title 'The Stagnant Calm' from 'The Golden Dagon,' which the narrator feels applies to his own experience, suggesting he might have been an incarnation of Buddha.

• Hashish

  The removed stimulus that had previously fueled the narrator's fiery activity and imaginative sense; its absence leads to his lethargic state.

Key passages

• “It is the author of 'The Golden Dagon,' one of our most original and interesting American books of travel, who gives to Buddha, as the deity of eternal absorption, the most appropriate title with which he has ever, to my knowledge, been glorified. He calls him 'The Stagnant Calm.'”

  The narrator notes that the author of 'The Golden Dagon' fittingly called Buddha 'The Stagnant Calm,' a title that resonated with his own experience.

  Introduces the concept of a Buddhist state of absorption that mirrors the narrator's own lethargy.

• “Gradually, after having for a long time known what it was to say, 'Now I am perfectly wretched,' occurred seasons whose intervals constantly lessened when I said, 'Now I am totally null.'”

  Over time, the narrator's periods of utter wretchedness gave way to a growing sense of complete emptiness and nullity.

  Describes the progression from active suffering to a passive, numb state.

• “There remained for me but one expedient. This was to take the facts already secured, and discover, if possible, their meaning, their relations to each other; to crystallize them around the axis of some hypothesis, and determine what they taught of the operations of their source, the mind.”

  The only remaining option was to analyze the mental facts he had gathered, seeking their meaning and connections to understand the mind's workings.

  The narrator's turn to intellectual analysis as a way to combat lethargy and find purpose.

• “I only wish to be understood as believing that into some subjects the insane man can look farther than the sane. Let not idiocy here be confounded with insanity. The former is the extinction of all faculties; the latter, the extraordinary development of one faculty or a group of faculties, while the others lie comparatively dormant.”

  The narrator argues that insanity, unlike idiocy, can involve heightened perception in certain faculties, allowing deeper insight than ordinary sanity.

  Defends the value of insights from altered states against accusations of madness.