In this section, I’d like to reflect on my experiences with psychedelics and share my conclusions.
The experience
It was my first experience with psilocybin, and I was interested in exploring this particular state of mind. I had some background in meditation and Eastern philosophy, and at that time in my life, a long series of events had led me to be both curious and willing to try it. Hiking in Nordic nature and listening to music such as the legendary Black Medium Current had already opened some mental doors for me, so I thought it would be interesting to explore it further.
I took a fairly substantial dose of psilocybin in its organic form (magic mushrooms) and waited. In the beginning, I experienced some mild visual artifacts, but nothing substantial. After a while, mental spaces began to open up, and my experience of time and consciousness started to shift.
I was flooded with emotions (and I’m usually not), and I realized I had a choice: either hold them back or let them flow through me. The first wave was sadness and sorrow—some kind of mental pain—but strangely, it wasn’t frightening or unwelcoming. I ended up chasing that feeling, and mentally I found myself in a very dark place. I experienced it as some kind of origin in space and time: a dark, small, condensed “outer space” place. Then I began to feel the peak of negative emotion—yet with an underlying positive sensation that I can only describe as a kind of mental orgasm. I experienced both “opposites” of negative and positive emotion at the same time so intensely, that I had to later redefine their relations with some bigger principle.
Later, I understood those two forces as part of a chiasmic experience (χίασμα—when two perspectives or realities cross and interpenetrate, blurring the boundary between self and world). I felt as though I was experiencing time on a vast scale, stretching back to the very origin of the universe: a great dark emptiness. At the same time, I experienced its opposite—the sheer beauty of everything that has ever existed, the universe developing and unfolding as time, as duration. These two opposing experiences merged into one, making me feel as if the power of life itself—vitality—was flowing through me in a deeply physical way. For me, vitality was composed of two opposites: Evanescence or loss, time devouring everything (the loss of beauty and experience) and time as Becoming, creation, time, the creator of everything (the birth of life and form, Efflorescence).
Later, I had another experience, cyclic in nature but stranger. I had brought some grapes with me, and when I began to eat them, I experienced something unlike anything before. It seemed as though the grapes themselves had consciousness, and I was somehow experiencing it. (I still don’t believe grapes or inanimate objects are conscious, but I’m now certain we can experience something like that. Something further than Umwelt) I could visualize and feel the grape growing—its relationship to the earth, air, and sky; the changing seasons; the smells; the tastes; the web of complex relations that led to the complex flavors I was now sensing. The taste and texture—the dry peel squashing between my teeth and tongue, the juices bursting out—felt magnified 50,000 times. I don’t know if I will ever have an experience like that again.
I’ve been thinking since about experiencing something like conciseness or animated traits of organic or inanimate organisms and ‘objects’ (beyond human), and my conclusion is that the concept of consciousness needs revision. In short : many ‘exterior’ components of the world take part in what we call ‘our own’ ‘consciousness’. I don’t think that it is fully ours, we don’t have full control. Our cognition which became object oriented is blocking that exteriority for some reasons (read about it in other posts). Psychedelics, also from the scientific view these days, opens up to exteriority by lowering the active defenses, the rationalizations, the objectification process. What we get is de-individuation, we see the world alive, animated, in that world we are not parts anymore, we are whole in what we mistakenly sometimes call ‘the rest1‘.
Another moment came when I chose to focus on something deeply familiar: my home, my house that is. I had always asked myself what makes a place special and assumed the answer lay in its physical properties. I was wrong. I began to experience my home as a living, animate being—not in a creepy way, but as if I shared the same consciousness with it. I realized that everything in my home, down to the radiator pipes, had been present in all of my happiest moments. If my walls, my space, the objects in my home were conscious (again, I don’t believe they literally are), they would be part of life because they are part of my memory, my feelings, my joys and sorrows. I experienced this in a beautiful and calm way, filled with a serene power. Later I had to again reflect about the day-to-day state of consciousness that doesn’t allow us the experience the world as alive, as animate, as taking more active roles in our consciousness, our cognition, our feeling, our memories, our experience, our imagination. I realized that experiencing something like this, can be exercised through meditation or psychedelics, and maybe preferably both. I realized that our definition of self, universe, and everything that has to do with emotion, experience, imagination became very limited in our time, and learning from the past a huge potential lies in the future. A new integral consciousness.
The whole journey lasted only a few hours, with more experiences than I can recount here, yet it felt like I was there forever. From within the experience, the impact was so great that I was completely convinced life would never be the same, since I had been exposed to so many new truths. It never felt like a hallucination. I think these type of unique experience gets really deep into a part of consciousness, which we realize its not fully ours, we share it with the universe. There is no room for doubt, when we experience something cosmically universal. That feeling of no doubt, translates to being at home in the world. Many people experience it.
When the experiences began to fade, I took a walk outside. It was dark, and the sky was full of stars. I was a bit afraid. I had no control over what I was experiencing, yet it was true. I had to face a new world. A cold wind drifted through, and I wasn’t dressed properly. Yet I felt an intense connection to everything. The wind was cold, but in a good way. The stars shone, in a way I never experienced before. The future—just around the corner—felt good, too. Since that day, I have never experienced cold in a negative way. Since that day, I have never felt alienated under the stars. I feel that every place under the stars is a place I can call home.
Implications
I have to say : I don’t believe in the supernatural in a superstitious way. I don’t believe in Panpsychism – that everything has consciousness. I am not religious. I don’t believe in deities. I would call myself spiritual.
Certain experiences cannot be ignored, especially the ones that have to potential to make our experience of life so much better, without any constant use of mind altering substances. The only thing we need for that is a glimpse at another type of possible truth.
When I was thinking about it I realized that for me spirituality is dimension of experiencing reality which is above the emotional and the rational, though it includes the emotional and rational. Through tapping in to it, there comes a point where good and bad, sadness and joy, pleasure and suffering, become just vitality. There is no value judgement in that dimension and it is very much an aesthetic dimension, a meta universe on its own.
The rational and schematic understanding of structure and symbols of the universe, allows to see the beauty of things, the complexity. The emotional part in the -natural- reaction to the passage of time, destruction and change.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty uses the term “chiasm” in The Visible and the Invisible to describe how the seer and the seen, or the subject and the world, are not separate but cross over into each other. When you touch your own hand, you are both the toucher and the touched — two roles crossing in one moment. This creates a felt sense of reversibility: you are inside the world, and the world is inside you.The boundaries between observer and observed blur. Two seemingly separate realities meet in a mutual exchange. You become aware of the interwoven nature of things. There is more to that exercise.
The particular vs the universal and cosmic
I have no doubt that the core of my psychedelic experiences are just coming in touch with the universal and cosmic. For that all the particular noise has to be filtered : our egos, our objective perspective (materialism), everything that we see in our shape instead of its own otherness. The are many way to achieve that type of filtering, and to coming in touch with otherness.
When letting go of our egos we are no longer the center of things, then we can start experience things as nature. It is something impossible to describe in words, but it is something like we realize our consciousness has in an interior and it suddenly becomes open to an exterior. When we let nature triumph over us and invite it to our consciousness we experience its a saturation of presence. It announces itself as a force that is felt before it is thought. The body is the site of its arrival: a virtal and heightened sense of reality.
This force does not appear as “something other” but as the intensification of one’s own being. It is experienced as vitality: a gathering of energy, a rising of intensity, brightness to perception, and density to time itself.
Our lifestyle and culture made us blind to the fact that we are nature, and not a separate part of it. Our culture nurtures and sponsors our egos to create these cognitive barriers that would disallow us from accessing our own (potential) totality. This is something you can very much reflect upon and translate into practical exercises, to access more of the totality of consciousness.
Beyond experience
Late research shows that psychedelics actually reduce brain activity. We can postulate that the decrease in brain activity would decrease the activity of disassociation : meaning that all active brain processes that make us feel distinct from other things would reduce their effect.
The dissociative always-active processes is a form of defense. When this defense lowers down, our consciousness is exposed to experiences beyond this line of defense, leaving us exposed to trans-personal experiences.
Sources :
Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge by Terence McKenna
The Invisible Harvest: A Microhistory of Heretical Herbs by Bethany van Rijswijk
The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries by R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, Carl A.P. Ruck
- For clarification : I am not specifically talking about humans, I don’t associate myself here with any ideological and or political connotations and or interpretations. ↩︎