Feb 22, 2023 02:12 AM
(This post was last modified: Feb 22, 2023 07:11 PM by C C.)
Psychedelic experience isn’t just brain chemistry
https://iai.tv/articles/ricky-williamson...-auid-2395
EXCERPTS: Sceptics may be wondering why this is a question at all. Surely psychedelics only offer hallucinations, the result of what is essentially brain-poisoning – there’s nothing transcendent about that. [...] to call something a ‘hallucination’ does little to tell us of the reality of what is being hallucinated, especially given the popular line spun by neuroscientists today that even the empirical reality we perceive is itself a ‘hallucination created by the brain’.
Finally, whether we think these psychedelic experiences are worth exploring or not, what is certain is that many who have them rate them in the top 5 most meaningful experiences of their lives – up there with the birth of a child, or death of a parent. An experience that’s valued so highly is surely worth exploring – even if we do think it’s ultimately all smoke and mirrors.
To lay my cards on the table, I have had what at least seemed like a transcendent experience after taking psychedelics. The famous white light. Bliss. Cosmic laughter. Even two Beings – which matched the two Beings described by Carl Jung and John C Lily in their accounts of their (seemingly) transcendent experiences.
From “the believer’s” perspective, it’s tempting to call what seemed to be transcendence, ‘transcendence’ and be done with it...
[...] But a copy is not the original. A statue is not the saint. A replica is not the Rembrandt. I, and many others, want to know if what they experienced on psychedelics was something truly transcendent, or ‘just’ a trick of the brain. It’s not unreasonable to want to know whether you met God or whether it was just your bedroom lights flickering and your brain having gone funny.
[...] This unobservable nature of consciousness means that consciousness can only be known subjectively, from the ‘inside’. This unobservableness has the knock-on effect that no argument, no linguistic theory or mathematical or logical formula, no computer code, can be put together, and on the other end consciousness will demonstrably spit out. As, even if consciousness was produced, we would never be able to tell.
Creating consciousness via mathematical formula, computer code or something similar, would be analogous to me writing some words in this article, such as ‘consciousness = em2’, and then the article suddenly becoming conscious...
[...] If consciousness itself cannot be explained by reference to brain chemistry, the psychedelic experience cannot be fully explained by it either. Psychedelic experience is just a different experience with different brain chemistry, but you still can’t reduce one to the other.
Another thing acting against the true transcendence hypothesis is the logical argument that it is impossible to experience something that lies outside experience, something that transcends it, because if you did indeed experience it, then by definition it’s not transcendent.
For this reason, some spiritial Gurus are against the idea of transcendent experiences. For they see it as just another experience among other experiences, and therefore not the really real thing...
[...] On the other hand, there are those who argue that what we call ‘the psychedelic experience’ is wrongly labelled as an experience. What we call experience is structured in a particular way: it contains a subject of experience, and the object of experience. The subject is you, the ‘I’, the thing experiencing. The object is the thing being experienced by you, the subject.
However, as psychedelic scientist at Imperial College London, Dr. Chris Timmerman, and others attest, one of the most powerful psychedelics, 5-MeO-DMT, can reliably induce what he calls “non-dual consciousness,” in which subject and object are undifferentiated.
Without a subject and an object, an experiencer and an object being experienced, can we accurately describe the psychedelic ‘experience’ as experience at all? For there is nobody experiencing, and no thing (no object) being experienced.
[...] The 5-MeO-DMT experience (apparently, I have not done it, yet) has the quality of nothingness; of being a non-experience. This then could be what we are searching for when looking for true transcendence, for an experience beyond experience. The 5-MeO-DMT experience certainly seems to be of a strange quality, an experience of transcendence that cannot really be called an experience at all.
[...] Kant split the world into phenomena and noumena. Phenomena is everything that can be known. Objects, things, people, thoughts, feelings. Noumena is the unknown. That which is beyond experience and un-experienceable. When we are looking for noumena then, we are looking for transcendence too.
This unknowable noumena also refers to Kant’s ‘thing-in-itself’. The things we see in the world, the world of phenomena, are always mediated by our particular way of experiencing them. The experiencer always brings something to the thing experienced. We do not see things as they are. To see the thing-in-itself would be to see a thing unmediated by our own experiencing of it.
[...] In mystical traditions Self is capitalised, in order to reference this noumenal, transcendent picture of ourselves. Our everyday personality, our thoughts, feelings, all the phenomena of the world, in this view, are aspects of the self, small s. Our individual, everyday selves. But the big S Self refers to our thing-in-itself-ness, our Being as transcendent beings, our consciousness.
And this could make sense of that non-experience of nothingness induced by 5-MEO-DMT. For what might be (non-)experienced is the Self; the thing experiencing. And so rather than a subject experiencing an object as in normal experience, the subject experiences the subject, and so has, in a sense, no-experience of nothing at all.
This suggests that what psychedelics are doing is removing the conceptual, object-oriented veil from our minds, and offering us a pre-conceptual experience of subjectivity itself. A subjectivity that is always there but is most of the time clouded by the goings on in our lives and minds. And possibly this gives reason to the quality of the psychedelic experience that feels like a ‘coming home’, like a realisation of something that we have always known – for we come home to ourselves.
[...] We ourselves are transcendent, we are not an object of our experience... (MORE - missing details)
RELATED TOPICS (scivillage): Whatever happened to mescaline? ...... On hearing the voice of God
https://iai.tv/articles/ricky-williamson...-auid-2395
EXCERPTS: Sceptics may be wondering why this is a question at all. Surely psychedelics only offer hallucinations, the result of what is essentially brain-poisoning – there’s nothing transcendent about that. [...] to call something a ‘hallucination’ does little to tell us of the reality of what is being hallucinated, especially given the popular line spun by neuroscientists today that even the empirical reality we perceive is itself a ‘hallucination created by the brain’.
Finally, whether we think these psychedelic experiences are worth exploring or not, what is certain is that many who have them rate them in the top 5 most meaningful experiences of their lives – up there with the birth of a child, or death of a parent. An experience that’s valued so highly is surely worth exploring – even if we do think it’s ultimately all smoke and mirrors.
To lay my cards on the table, I have had what at least seemed like a transcendent experience after taking psychedelics. The famous white light. Bliss. Cosmic laughter. Even two Beings – which matched the two Beings described by Carl Jung and John C Lily in their accounts of their (seemingly) transcendent experiences.
From “the believer’s” perspective, it’s tempting to call what seemed to be transcendence, ‘transcendence’ and be done with it...
[...] But a copy is not the original. A statue is not the saint. A replica is not the Rembrandt. I, and many others, want to know if what they experienced on psychedelics was something truly transcendent, or ‘just’ a trick of the brain. It’s not unreasonable to want to know whether you met God or whether it was just your bedroom lights flickering and your brain having gone funny.
[...] This unobservable nature of consciousness means that consciousness can only be known subjectively, from the ‘inside’. This unobservableness has the knock-on effect that no argument, no linguistic theory or mathematical or logical formula, no computer code, can be put together, and on the other end consciousness will demonstrably spit out. As, even if consciousness was produced, we would never be able to tell.
Creating consciousness via mathematical formula, computer code or something similar, would be analogous to me writing some words in this article, such as ‘consciousness = em2’, and then the article suddenly becoming conscious...
[...] If consciousness itself cannot be explained by reference to brain chemistry, the psychedelic experience cannot be fully explained by it either. Psychedelic experience is just a different experience with different brain chemistry, but you still can’t reduce one to the other.
Another thing acting against the true transcendence hypothesis is the logical argument that it is impossible to experience something that lies outside experience, something that transcends it, because if you did indeed experience it, then by definition it’s not transcendent.
For this reason, some spiritial Gurus are against the idea of transcendent experiences. For they see it as just another experience among other experiences, and therefore not the really real thing...
[...] On the other hand, there are those who argue that what we call ‘the psychedelic experience’ is wrongly labelled as an experience. What we call experience is structured in a particular way: it contains a subject of experience, and the object of experience. The subject is you, the ‘I’, the thing experiencing. The object is the thing being experienced by you, the subject.
However, as psychedelic scientist at Imperial College London, Dr. Chris Timmerman, and others attest, one of the most powerful psychedelics, 5-MeO-DMT, can reliably induce what he calls “non-dual consciousness,” in which subject and object are undifferentiated.
Without a subject and an object, an experiencer and an object being experienced, can we accurately describe the psychedelic ‘experience’ as experience at all? For there is nobody experiencing, and no thing (no object) being experienced.
[...] The 5-MeO-DMT experience (apparently, I have not done it, yet) has the quality of nothingness; of being a non-experience. This then could be what we are searching for when looking for true transcendence, for an experience beyond experience. The 5-MeO-DMT experience certainly seems to be of a strange quality, an experience of transcendence that cannot really be called an experience at all.
[...] Kant split the world into phenomena and noumena. Phenomena is everything that can be known. Objects, things, people, thoughts, feelings. Noumena is the unknown. That which is beyond experience and un-experienceable. When we are looking for noumena then, we are looking for transcendence too.
This unknowable noumena also refers to Kant’s ‘thing-in-itself’. The things we see in the world, the world of phenomena, are always mediated by our particular way of experiencing them. The experiencer always brings something to the thing experienced. We do not see things as they are. To see the thing-in-itself would be to see a thing unmediated by our own experiencing of it.
[...] In mystical traditions Self is capitalised, in order to reference this noumenal, transcendent picture of ourselves. Our everyday personality, our thoughts, feelings, all the phenomena of the world, in this view, are aspects of the self, small s. Our individual, everyday selves. But the big S Self refers to our thing-in-itself-ness, our Being as transcendent beings, our consciousness.
And this could make sense of that non-experience of nothingness induced by 5-MEO-DMT. For what might be (non-)experienced is the Self; the thing experiencing. And so rather than a subject experiencing an object as in normal experience, the subject experiences the subject, and so has, in a sense, no-experience of nothing at all.
This suggests that what psychedelics are doing is removing the conceptual, object-oriented veil from our minds, and offering us a pre-conceptual experience of subjectivity itself. A subjectivity that is always there but is most of the time clouded by the goings on in our lives and minds. And possibly this gives reason to the quality of the psychedelic experience that feels like a ‘coming home’, like a realisation of something that we have always known – for we come home to ourselves.
[...] We ourselves are transcendent, we are not an object of our experience... (MORE - missing details)
RELATED TOPICS (scivillage): Whatever happened to mescaline? ...... On hearing the voice of God
