Admittedly, this is a broad topic, and one that I'm not completely positive has it's place in the "Books" forum (Admins, please feel free to move to a more appropriate place). I don't have a specific question, nor a particular avenue for debate, but would much rather open this thread for a wide and general discussion of psychedelics, transformative experience and altered perception in relation to Tolkien and his works.
Such writers, doctors, ethobotanists and philosophers as Dr. Andrew Weil, Terence McKenna, Stanislav Grof, Giorgio Samorini, and others have long postulated a fourth human drive (in addition to sustenance, survival and procreation) to seek, at times, altered states of consciouness and perception. While this could certainly be a discussion in and of itself, there is much in Tolkien's work that falls very much in tune with both this hypothesis and with the associated experiences described...
I am currently beginning a re-reading of
The Lord of the Rings and my reading of my favorite chapter
Three Is Company (coincidence that the "Three" might also describe the three Elven rings, as well as the three Hobbits?) prompted me to consider this topic.
There is much in Frodo's encounter with Gildor that resembles a traditional psychedelic experience, and the prose is poetically replete with descriptions that lend themselves to the experience of altered consciousness. For example:
"The hobbits sat in shadow by the wayside. Before long the Elves came down the lane toward the valley. They passed slowly, and the hobbits could see the starlight glimmering on their hair and in their eyes. They bore no lights, yet as they walked a shimmer, like the light of the moon above the rim of the hills before it rises, seemed to fall about their feet. They were now silent, and as the last Elf passed he turned and looked toward the hobbits and laughed."
The Elves behavior, and attitude towards the Hobbits in this scene also perfectly describes a state of altered perception. They are at once both perfectly in tune with nature and the woods around them, and at the same time aloof and detached. Tolkien describes the scene, several times, as, "being in a waking dream."
So much of this scene is surreal, from the unlikely appearance of the wooded hall in the greenwood, the beds prepared for the Hobbits in the boughs of the trees, the Elven drink... it's a timeless moment. And one that echoes of the dream world, the under mind, and altered perception. In the trilogy no other scene (save perhaps Lothlorien) speaks as powerfully of the subtly strange and different---and psychedelic---mindset of the Elves as does this.
I'd like to open this thread to a discussion of altered states of consciousness in Tolkien's life and his work.