Philosophy and Psychedelics: Frameworks for Exceptional Experience 9781350231610, 9781350231641, 9781350231627

Table of contents :
Cover
Halftitle page
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
CONTENTS
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes and Christine Hauskeller
References
Chapter 1 TRANSPERSONAL GRATITUDE AND PSYCHEDELIC ALTERED STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS Taline Artinian
1 Transpersonal Gratitude
2 Experiences of Unity in Psychedelic Altered States of Consciousness
3 Psychedelic States, Ego, and Transpersonal Gratitude
4 Conclusion
References
Chapter 2 WHAT IS REAL(ITY)? John Buchanan
1 Philosophy and Psychology
2 Metaphysics of the Future
3 Radical Empiricism
4 Mode of Access
5 The Real Thing
6 A Depth Cosmology
References
Chapter 3 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF PSYCHEDELICS IN THE US Kyle Buller, Joe Moore, and Lenny Gibson
1 The History of Exceptional Experience
2 LSD Trajectory
3 Prohibition, Prejudice and Criminalization
4 Regulation
5 An American Way Forward
6 Psychedelic Decriminalization and Cultural Developments
7 Conclusion
References
Chapter 4 POWER AND THE SUBLIME IN ALDOUS HUXLEY’S DRUG A ESTHETICS Robert Dickins
1 Introduction
2 Burke’s Sublime
3 The Sublime and Drug Aesthetics
4 Aldous Huxley’s Drug Aesthetics
5 A Psychedelic Sublime
6 Conclusion
References
Chapter 5 DECOLONIZING THE PHILOSOPHY OF PSYCHEDELICS Osiris Sinuhé González Romero
1 Introduction
2 Decolonial Frameworks for Psychedelic Humanities
3 Philosophical Uses of Psychedelics
4 Decolonization and Indigenous Philosophies
5 Psychedelic Feminism
6 Conclusions
References
Chapter 6 MAKING YOUR SOUL VISIBLE Michael Halewood
1 Re-approaching the Soul
2 Narrowing Consciousness
3 The World Pro-Poses Itself
4 Entertaining Propositions and the Psychedelic
5 Entertainment
References
Chapter 7 INDIVIDUALIZATION AND ALIENATION IN PSYCHEDELIC PSYCHOTHERAPY Christine Hauskeller
1 Introduction
2 Alienation and Individualization
3 Medicalization Contexts
4 Limits of and Ethical Problems with the Medicalization of Psychedelics
5 Conclusions
References
Chapter 8 WALTER BENJAMIN AND HERBERT MARCUSE: PSYCHEDELICS AND REVOLUTION1 Fernando Huesca Ramon
1 Hegel and Marx as Basis for the Epistemology of Critical Theory
2 Walter Benjamin
3 Marcuse
4 Conclusions
References
Chapter 9 MARY ON ACID: EXPERIENCES OF UNITY AND THE EPISTEMIC GAP Jussi Jylkkä
1 The Knowledge Argument
2 This: Unitary Knowledge
3 Mary
4 Implications for Physicalism
5 Conclusion
References
Chapter 10 ARE PSYCHEDELIC DRUGS DISTORTING? Ole Martin Moen
1 Introduction
2 What Psychedelic States Can Be Like
3 Assessing Four Types of Psychedelic Mind-Alteration
4 A Thick and Curved Lens
5 Psychedelic Knowledge
6 Conclusion
References
Chapter 11 THE UNCONSCIOUS IN ZEN AND PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCE: A RESPONSE TO D. T. SUZUKI’S ZEN CRITIQUE OF DRUG-INDUCED SATORI Steve Odin
1 Introduction
2 Suzuki on Zen Satori as Awakening to the Cosmic Unconscious
3 Suzuki’s Critique of Drug-Induced Satori
4 Stanislav Grof on Psychedelics as a Gateway to the Unconscious
5 Conclusion: Opening the Doors to the Unconscious
References
Chapter 12 ALTERED CONSCIOUSNESS AFTER DESCARTES: WHITEHEAD’S PHILOSOPHY OF ORGANISM AS PSYCHEDELIC REALISM Matthew D. Segall
1 Altered Consciousness: An Interesting Subject for Study
2 Set and Setting: Descartes on Mind, Matter, and God
3 Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism: Toward a Psychedelic Realism
4 Psychedelic Consciousness as ‘Immersion into God’
References
Chapter 13 THE WHITE SUN OF SUBSTANCE: SPINOZISM AND THE PSYCHEDELIC AMOR DEI INTELLECTUALIS Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes
Introduction
1 Spinozism
2 Amor Dei Intellectualis
3 5-MeO-DMT Phenomenology
4 Coda
References
Chapter 14 JOURNEYING IN THE REALM OF THE UNCONSCIOUS: CARL JUNG’S LIBER NOVUS AND THE PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCE Johanna Sopanen
1 Soul’s Calling
2 Myth of Ego-Death
3 Dangers of Self-knowledge
4 Symbolic Meanings
5 Conclusion
References
Chapter 15 ARGUMENTS FOR THE PSYCHEDELIC CURE OF WESTERN PHILOSOPHY Michel Weber
1 Philosophy of Mind’s Prejudices
2 The Psychedelic Cure
3 The Psychedelic Anthropology
4 Conclusion
References
INDEX

Citation preview

PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHEDELICS

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Also Available from Bloomsbury An Existential Phenomenology of Addiction, Anna Westin Phenomenology and the Social Context of Psychiatry, ed. Magnus Englander The Bloomsbury Companion to the Philosophy of Consciousness, ed. Dale Jacquette

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PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHEDELICS

Frameworks for Exceptional Experience

Edited by Christine Hauskeller and Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Christine Hauskeller, Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes, and Contributors 2022 Christine Hauskeller and Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Charlotte Daniels Cover image: Space © Don Hughes All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

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978-1-3502-3161-0 978-1-3502-3162-7 978-1-3502-3163-4

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CONTENTS List of Contributors Acknowledgements INTRODUCTION

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Chapter 1 TRANSPERSONAL GRATITUDE AND PSYCHEDELIC ALTERED STATES OF CONSCIOUSNESS Dr Taline Artinian

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Chapter 2 WHAT IS REALITY? Dr John H. Buchanan

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Chapter 3 A CULTURAL HISTORY OF PSYCHEDELICS IN THE US Kyle Buller, Joe Moore, and Dr Lenny Gibson

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Chapter 4 POWER AND THE SUBLIME IN ALDOUS HUXLEY’S DRUG AESTHETICS Dr Robert Dickins

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Chapter 5 DECOLONIZING THE PHILOSOPHY OF PSYCHEDELICS Dr Osiris Sinuhé González Romero

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Chapter 6 MAKING YOUR SOUL VISIBLE Prof. Michael Halewood

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Chapter 7 INDIVIDUALIZATION AND ALIENATION IN PSYCHEDELIC PSYCHOTHERAPY Prof. Christine Hauskeller

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Chapter 8 WALTER BENJAMIN AND HERBERT MARCUSE: PSYCHEDELICS AND REVOLUTION Dr Fernando Huesca Ramon

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Contents

Chapter 9 MARY ON ACID: EXPERIENCES OF UNITY AND THE EPISTEMIC GAP Dr Jussi Jylkkä

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Chapter 10 ARE PSYCHEDELIC DRUGS DISTORTING? Prof. Ole Martin Moen

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Chapter 11 THE UNCONSCIOUS IN ZEN AND PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCE A RESPONSE TO D. T. SUZUKI’S ZEN CRITIQUE OF DRUGINDUCED SATORI Prof. Steve Odin

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Chapter 12 ALTERED CONSCIOUSNESS AFTER DESCARTES: WHITEHEAD’S PHILOSOPHY OF ORGANISM AS PSYCHEDELIC REALISM Dr Matthew D. Segall

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Chapter 13 THE WHITE SUN OF SUBSTANCE: SPINOZISM AND THE PSYCHEDELIC AMOR DEI INTELLECTUALIS Dr Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes

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Chapter 14 JOURNEYING IN THE REALM OF THE UNCONSCIOUS: CARL JUNG’S LIBER NOVUS AND PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCE Johanna Hilla Sopanen

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Chapter 15 ARGUMENTS FOR THE PSYCHEDELIC CURE OF WESTERN PHILOSOPHY Dr Michel Weber

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Index

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Dr Taline Artinian Taline Artinian is an honorary research fellow in philosophy at the University of Exeter. She holds a PhD in philosophy and has over a decade of professional experience as a clinical psychologist. Her interdisciplinary work has focused on questions of identity and the challenges of a meaningful engagement with the world after traumatic life experiences such as genocide and civil war. She has supported UNHCR projects in the Middle East, leading studies on the lives of migrant women and vulnerable persons. Her current philosophical research explores gratitude and its role in our understanding of the good life and its place in environmental ethics. She is also interested in the philosophy of psychedelics, virtue ethics, and character formation. Dr John H. Buchanan John H. Buchanan received his masters degree in humanistic psychology from West Georgia College, and his doctorate from Emory University. He has been trained and certified as a Holotropic Breathwork practitioner by Stan and Christina Grof. He is completing a book based upon his continuing interests in process philosophy and transpersonal psychology and was a contributing co-editor for Rethinking Consciousness: Extraordinary Challenges for Contemporary Science. Kyle Buller Kyle Buller is the Co-Founder and Director of Training and Clinical Education of Psychedelics Today, an online media and education platform exploring the therapeutic potential of psychedelics. Kyle earned his MS degree in clinical mental health counselling with an emphasis in somatic psychology from Prescott College and received his BA degree in Transpersonal Psychology from Burlington College. Kyle has been studying Dreamshadow Transpersonal Breathwork with Lenny and Elizabeth Gibson since 2010. His clinical background in mental health consists of working with at-risk teenagers in crisis and with individuals experiencing an early episode of psychosis, and providing counselling to undergraduate/graduate students in a university setting. www.psychedelicstoday.com www.settingsunwellness.com Dr Robert Dickins Robert Dickins is a literary historian and publisher (Psychedelic Press). His interests include the history and literature of psychoactive substances, with a particular focus on the twentieth century, and the role of writing in nineteenthcentury magical and spiritual communities. vii

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List of Contributors

Elizabeth Gibson Elizabeth Gibson is the co-founder of Dreamshadow Group, Inc., a Vermontbased non-profit which fosters the creative application of exceptional experience. She is certified as a Holotropic Breathwork facilitator by Stan and Christina Grof. Elizabeth is the editor of Stanislav Grof ’s The Ultimate Journey: Consciousness and the Mystery of Death and a contributor to the teaching manual MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy for the Treatment of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, both published by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. Dr Lenny Gibson Leonard Gibson is an independent scholar and the founder of Dreamshadow Group, Inc., a Vermont-based non-profit which fosters the creative application of exceptional experience. He holds a PhD in philosophy from Claremont University and a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Texas at Austin. Lenny trained and certified in Holotropic Breathwork with Stanislav and Christina Grof. He has over fifty-five years of experience working with exceptional experience, including teaching and psychotherapy. He is also a farmer and amateur musician. Prof. Michael Halewood Michael Halewood is a Professor in Social Theory at the University of Essex. His work lies at the intersection of philosophy and social theory and he is especially interested in the work of Alfred North Whitehead. His latest book, Language and Process. Words, Whitehead and the World (Edinburgh University Press) uses the work of Whitehead to retrace the role and status of language and the world in both analytic and continental philosophy as well as social theory. His previous books introduced the work of Whitehead to social theory (A.N. Whitehead and Social Theory – Tracing a Culture of Thought) and developed a novel philosophy of the social (Re-thinking the Social through Durkheim, Marx, Weber and Whitehead). Prof. Christine Hauskeller Christine is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Exeter. She specializes in the philosophy of biomedicine and moral and political philosophy with approaches from feminist theory and the Frankfurt School, as well as critical theory more generally. Christine has published ten books and journal special issues, and over 100 articles and chapters and is a member of medical research ethics commissions. Her main interests are studies in humanitarian ethics and in the complex relationships between power, economics, technology, individual and societal needs and ethics in medical innovation. Concerned with the disciplinary limitation in which academia has engaged with psychedelics, Christine has been exploring the different ways in which contemporary philosophy can address aspects of psychedelic experience and practice, and in turn how psychedelics can inform philosophy.

List of Contributors

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Prof. Fernando Huesca Ramon Fernando Huesca Ramon is Professor-Researcher for Philosophy at the Faculty for Philosophy and Letters at the Meritorius Autonomous University of Puebla (BUAP) and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He is also Professor-Researcher at the graduate programs for Aesthetics and Philosophy in BUAP. His lines of research include: German Idealism, Aeshetics, Political Economy, Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, and Bioethics. Huesca Ramon is a member of the International Leibniz Network, of the Hegelian Studies society Reason in History, of the society for consciousness studies via Synapsis, and a member of the National Researchers’ System in Mexico. He is co-organizer of the International Congress for Hegelian Studies in Mexico. Soon in print: Economía política clásica en Hegel: valor, capital y eticidad. Huesca Ramon recently published a translation of the introduction of Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics (1828/29) in the journal La lámpara de Diógenes. Dr Jussi Jylkkä Jussi Jylkkä is a philosopher and psychologist working at the department of psychology at Åbo Akademi University, Finland. He received his PhD in philosophy of language from the University of Turku in 2008 and completed his PhD in cognitive psychology at Åbo Akademi University in 2017. He has published research on philosophy of mind and language, experimental philosophy, metaphysics/epistemology, as well as moral psychology and cognitive psychology. His current research combines elements from neuroscience, transcendental philosophy, and Zen to explicate the relationship between science and consciousness. As to psychedelics, Dr. Jylkkä is particularly interested in how mystical insights can be compatible with physicalism and science. He is currently writing a book on consciousness and the scientific worldview and organizing the first Finnish interdisciplinary conference on psychedelic research. Prof. Ole Martin Moen Ole Martin Moen is Professor of Ethics at Oslo Metropolitan University. He finished a PhD in Philosophy at University of Oslo in 2013, with a dissertation on intrinsic value. Since 2017 he has been Principal Investigator of “What should not be bought and sold?”, a $1million project funded by the Research Council of Norway. Professor Moen’s recent publications include “The Ethics of Emergencies” in Philosophical Studies, “Pessimism Counts in Favor of Biomedical Enhancement” in Neuroethics, “Judicial Corporal Punishment” in Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy, and “The Unabomber’s Ethics” in Bioethics. Joe Moore Co-founder and CEO Joe Moore began exploring psychedelics after discovering the work of transpersonal psychology founder Dr Stanislav Grof when he was an undergraduate in philosophy in 2001. Joe has been studying and practicing Grof ’s Holotropic breathwork method at the Vermont-based Dreamshadow Group since

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2003 and co-founded Boston Holotropic to facilitate breathwork workshops throughout New England. Joe and Kyle Buller founded Psychedelics Today in 2016 to explore and discuss academic and scientific research in the psychedelic space and how they relate to human potential and healing. Prof. Steve Odin Steve Odin joined the University of Hawai’i in 1982 after completing his PhD degree in philosophy from State University of New York at Stony Brook. He has taught as a visiting professor at Boston University (1989), Tohoko University (1994–95) and the University of Tokyo (2003–04). His research and teaching areas include Japanese philosophy, East–West comparative philosophy, American philosophy, Whitehead’s process metaphysics, phenomenology, environmental ethics, and aesthetics. Among his publications are Process Metaphysics and HuaYen Buddhism (1982), The Social Self in Zen and American Pragmatism (1994), Artistic Detachment in Japan and the West: Psychic Distance in Comparative Aesthetics (2001). His latest book publication is titled, Tragic Beauty in Whitehead & Japanese Aesthetics (2018), and he is currently writing a book entitled, D. T. Suzuki on the Unconscious in Zen, Zen Art & Zen Aesthetics. Among his awards are one-year grants for teaching and research in Japan, including two Fulbright Awards (1994–95 and 2003–04), Japan Foundation Award (2001–02) and National Endowment for the Humanities (1987–88). He has also received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching at the University of Hawaii (1986). He is a member of the UH Center for Japanese Studies. Dr Osiris Sinuhé González Romero Osiris Sinuhé González Romero earned his PhD at Leiden University, in the Faculty of Archaeology – Heritage of Indigenous Peoples. In 2015 he was awarded the Coimbra Group Scholarship for Young Professors and Researchers from Latin American Universities. He is a founding member of Via Synapsis, an academic society focused on the organization of the University Congress of Psychoactive Substances hosted by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Faculty of Philosophy. Currently he is a postdoctoral researcher on cognitive freedom and psychedelic humanities at the University of Saskatchewan. He has been working on the book, New Essays on History and Philosophy of Psychedelics. Dr Matthew D. Segall Matthew D. Segall, PhD, is assistant professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where he teaches courses primarily on German Idealism and Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy. He is the author of Physics of the WorldSoul: Whitehead’s Adventure in Cosmology (2021) and has published journal articles and book chapters on a wide range of topics including panpsychist metaphysics, media theory, the philosophy of biology, the evolution of religion, and psychedelics. He blogs regularly at footnotes2plato.com. His current research

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focuses on the panpsychist turn in contemporary philosophy of mind and its implications for the scientific study of the origins of life and consciousness. Dr Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes is philosopher of mind and of metaphysics who specializes in the thought of Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Whitehead, and in fields pertaining to altered and panpsychological forms of consciousness. He is a research fellow and associate lecturer at the University of Exeter where he has co-founded the Philosophy of Psychedelics Exeter Research Group, the ambit of which includes taught modules, conferences, workshops, and publications. Peter publishes widely and gives talks internationally. He is the author of Noumenautics, and Modes of Sentience, the TEDx Talker on ‘Psychedelics and Consciousness’, and he is inspiration to the inhuman philosopher Marvel Superhero, Karnak. Johanna Hilla-Maria Sopanen Johanna Hilla-Maria Sopanen, currently a PhD candidate of Philosophy at the University of Exeter, has a background in both Psychology and Religious Studies (the University of Groningen, the Netherlands). She wrote her Master’s dissertation on the Red Book by Carl Jung while carrying out an internship at a Jungian centre Fundacion Vocación Humana, in Buenos Aires. Her thesis discussed the religious elements of the Red Book in the context of Jung’s other works. Furthermore, she has taught a course on the interlink between Depth Psychology and the psychedelic experience offered by the Psychedelics Today forum. Her other recent interests include nutrition, the gut microbiome, transpersonal psychology, holotropic breathwork, and process philosophy. She is on the board of Dreamshadow Inc, a non-profit organization focusing on transpersonal education and holotropic breathwork, and works part-time in the field of psychedelic education. Dr Michel Weber Michel Weber is Director of the Centre for Philosophical Practice (Brussels) and Adjunct Professor at the Department of Educational Foundations of the University of Saskatchewan. He is the author of fifteen monographs (e.g. The Political Vindication of Radical Empiricism, 2016) and the (co-)editor of some 50 books (e.g. with Will Desmond, Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought, 2008). Over the years, he has studied and taught most of the therapeutic disciplines (in the broad sense of the term) that have made the history of Western thought. To mention only those that have been the subject of some of his publications, and sometimes of a practice: the Whiteheadian, Socratic and Pythagorean philosophies, hypnosis, brief and systemic therapies, psychoanalyses (Freud, Lacan, Jung), ethnopsychiatry, ethology, gnosis, alchemy, and Amerindian shamanism. His current research program mainly addresses the Ayurvedic understanding of the anchoring of the mind in the body and of the expression of the body in the mind. A sample of his works is available here: http://chromatika.academia.edu/ MichelWeber.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We should like to thank the authors for their timely and collaborative work and the excellent chapters they produced under the often-challenging circumstances that the COVID-19 pandemic created for us all. Further, we thank Dreamshadow Group for their support, along with the Centre for Process Studies who helped enormously with the conference in April 2021 associated with this volume. We also thank the University of Exeter for supporting our evolving research group. A very special thank you goes to our editing partner Elizabeth Gibson for her skillful hard work and dedication. Furthermore, we wish to acknowledge the helpful contribution of the peer reviewers for their insightful feedback and also our friend and contributor Taline Artinian for her critical feedback on many of the chapters. Toby Squire and Joseph Crickmore also provided editing support that helped us to keep to our submission date – we thank you both. Further gratitude goes to Liza Thompson and Lucy Russell of Bloomsbury for their help and patience. Last, but not least, we thank our families for their patience and generosity when we missed yet another family dinner because we were enveloped in this project. The book cover image is a painting by the late Donald Hughes. We are grateful for the connection and for the privilege of presenting it. Thank you all.

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I N T R O DU C T IO N Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes and Christine Hauskeller

The title of this volume, Philosophy and Psychedelics, conjugates two words that each refer to a multiplicity of different discourses and practices. Just as philosophy denominates a vast range of perspectives and methods, so is there no single type of psychedelic experience, substance, or practice. There are varieties of each, and it is the myriad loci where philosophy and psychedelics overlap and potentially interact that is the ambit of this book. Our approach seeks to avoid the hierarchical perspective inherent in the many philosophies that are of a subject – there are many bi-directional relations where one side can inform the other. The overarching questions that inspire this volume and its area of discourse concern how philosophers can begin to comprehend the exceptional experiences that psychedelics afford various people in various cultures through the different forms of thought and analysis philosophy has to offer; and, moreover, how psychedelics in turn might inform, influence, and alter philosophy itself, in addition to other modes of thinking and forms of behaviour. The chapters herein adopt differing approaches to the theme of philosophy and psychedelics, drawing out different connections. Why has modern philosophy seldom addressed these fascinating questions? One part of an answer may lie in historical and contemporary suppression through ideology and prejudice. The intellectual archaeology of the remnants of the history of philosophers contemplating psychedelic-like states has hardly been unearthed. Western philosophy starts in Ancient Greece, a culture evidently enthralled to practices of altering states of consciousness.1 The Pre-Socratic philosopher Democritus provided a taxonomy of plants, Pliny tells us,2 that induce various 1. See Ustinova, 2018: ‘Greece was unique in its attitude to alteration of consciousness. From the perspective of individual and public freedom, the prominent position of the divine mania in Greek society reflects its acceptance of the inborn human proclivity to experience alteration of consciousness, interpreted in positive terms as god-sent’ (p. i). See also, Rinella, 2011. 2. Democritus’ texts on this are lost. Pliny (d. AD79) conveys Democritus’ findings in Volume 24 (§102) of his Natural History, where he also, more speculatively, claims that Pythagoras also provided such a taxonomy (Pliny, 1966, pp. 113–119).

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visions and exalted states of consciousness. Democritus himself became known for his ‘madness’ and was said to have ‘travelled in the boundless’, as Hippocrates apparently reported.3 Socrates, reports Plato, claimed that ‘madness, provided it comes as the gift of heaven, is the channel by which we receive the greatest blessings’.4 Intoxication and ecstatic states were celebrated in Greece, through the Dionysian festivals that entranced Nietzsche,5 as well as through practices and millennia-old institutions such as the Eleusinian Mysteries.6 These practices were closed down and prohibited by incoming power structures,7 structures to which Western philosophy became deferential until the Modern Age. Let us return philosophy’s gaze to that glimpsed by William James, Henri Bergson, Walter Benjamin, John R. Smythies, Henry H. Price, Aldous Huxley,8 and other philosophers who reflected on mind-altering substances. These substances were variously known as phantastica, hallucinogens, entheogens, psychotomimetics, or psychedelics. Though each name refers to the same set of substances, they are not synonyms because of their differing connotations. The interpretational frameworks connoted include illusion and divinity, psychology and metaphysics, as well as several modern medical sciences such as pharmacology, neuroscience, and psychiatry. The range of names and associations reflects the fact that the West has struggled to establish a common lens through which to make sense of and study the extraordinary phenomena these substances occasion. The following examples of extracts provide but a small flavour of the types of experience that psychedelics can induce, each of which carry the potential to evoke a flurry of philosophic reflections: ‘Ideas are distorted; perceptions are confused. Sounds are clothed in colours and colours in music. . . . Musical notes become numbers. . . . [Y]ou feel yourself vanishing into thin air, and you attribute to your pipe . . . the strange ability to smoke you.’9

3. See Ustinova, 2018, p. 341. 4. Phaedrus, §244a; Plato, 1973, p. 46. See Burkert, 1987, pp. 92ff, for more on Plato and intoxication. 5. See The Dionysian Worldview, The Birth of Tragedy, and the Dionysian references in his last works. 6. See Kerényi, 1967 [1962]; Partridge, 2018, pp. 301–307; Rinella, 2011, pp. 85–87; Burkert, 1987, pp. 89–114. 7. The Christian Roman emperor Theodosius I, for instance, closed down the Eleusinian Mysteries in the late fourth century (as reported by the concurrent historian Eunapius – see Banchich, 1998). 8. See especially, respectively, The Varieties of Religious Experience (James), The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Bergson), On Hashish (Benjamin), ‘The Mescaline Phenomena’ (Smythies), ‘A Mescaline Experience’ (Price), The Doors of Perception (Huxley). Note that Huxley referenced Bergson, via Charles D. Broad, as the basis of his ‘reducing valve’ theory. 9. Charles Baudelaire on hashish; in Baudelaire, 1996 [1860], p. 51.

Introduction

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‘[A] monistic insight, in which the other in its various forms appears absorbed into the One.’10 ‘[A] pronounced antipathy to conversing about matters of practical life, the future, dates, politics. You are fixated on the intellectual sphere . . .’11 ‘It is impossible to convey the horror of thus being threatened with sheer nothingness. . . . “[T]he fear of infinity” . . . . I wished I had the courage to try to find out where one is if one is nowhere.’12 ‘I knew that [the umbrella] wasn’t a vulture, but I couldn’t prevent myself from seeing it as one. . . . I had strange visions . . . . I immediately foresaw that all this was necessarily leading me to chronic hallucinatory psychosis.’13 ‘[A] marvellously enhanced appreciation of patterning in nature, a fascination deeper than ever with the structure of ferns, . . . the markings upon seashells . . . [and] the fairy architecture of seeds and pods . . .’14 ‘A shattering annihilation, a feeling of being inside an explosion, and being fragmented into countless tiny shards. . . . There were no feelings of fear, indeed no feelings at all, other than a kind of impersonal ecstasy.’15 ‘As I accepted my death and dissolution into God’s love, the insectoids began to feed on my heart, devouring the feelings of love and surrender. . . . They feasted as they made love to me. . . . it was extremely alien, though not necessarily unpleasant.’16 ‘They looked like jokers. They were almost performing for me . . . bells on their hats, big noses. However, I had the feeling they could turn on me, a little less than completely friendly.’17 ‘Then my whole life flashed in my mind from birth to the present, with every detail that ever happened, every feeling and thought, visual and emotional was there in an instant.’18 ‘Seeing the xapiri [ancestral spirits] come down to me for the first time, I truly knew what fear was! . . . The forest initially became an immense void, which was spinning around me without letting up. Then suddenly everything was immersed in a blinding brightness. The light exploded with a great crash.’19 ‘I am being inundated with “concepts” . . . . This is a truly conceptually exploding experience. How can one ever hope to record this kind of intellectual supernova?’20

10. William James on nitrous oxide; in James, 1985 [1902], p. 389. 11. Walter Benjamin on hashish: Note from 18 December 1927, in Benjamin, 2006, p. 21. 12. Richard H. Ward on LSD; in Ward, 1957, p. 58. 13. Jean-Paul Sartre on mescaline; Astruc and Contat, 1980, pp. 37–38. 14. Alan Watts on LSD; Watts, 2013 [1962], p. 55. 15. Ralph Metzner on 5-MeO-DMT; Metzner, 2013, p. 30. 16. ‘Rex’ on DMT; Strassman, 2001, p. 206. 17. ‘Cassandra’ on DMT; Strassman, 2001, p. 169. 18. ‘Eric S.’ on LSD; Sacks, 2012, p. 102. 19. Davi Kopenawa on yãkoana; Kopenawa, 2013 [2010], p. 87. 20. Alexander Shulgin, on Aleph-1 / DOT; Shulgin and Shulgin, 2019 [1991], p. 82.

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The wide typology of phenomena21 that such reports suggests ranges from the intensely emotional to the emotionless, from the extravagantly visual to the nonperceptual, from the super-conceptual to the non-cognitive, from disembodied mind to interconnected physicality, from the loss or expansion of one’s being to the intrusion of myriad apparent weird and wondrous beings, from the therapeutic to the threatening, from sublime love and light to the darkest of fears. What can induce such an eclectic yet profoundly exceptional set of experiences? If we begin by abstracting away culture, character, cosmos, life history, expectations, set, setting, and so on we reach the maximal abstraction, the isolated molecular type in which chemists define their objects. As such, ‘psychedelics’ often refer to the serotonergic22 molecule classes, notably phenethylamines and tryptamines that include molecules such as mescaline, psilocybin, DMT, and LSD.23 Yet more classes than these are referred to by the word ‘psychedelic’, a word coined by Humphry Osmond and made public by him in a paper of 1957.24 Osmond’s definition of ‘psychedelic’ was wide. It included non-serotonergic drugs such as hashish, muscimol, and nitrous oxide,25 as well as the unknown chemicals of the soma potion of Asia.26 Though a psychiatrist by profession, Osmond from the very start emphasised the philosophic ramifications of his newly classed ‘psychedelics’. In listing reasons for ascribing importance to psychedelics, Osmond writes that, beyond psychiatry, ‘perhaps most important: there are social, philosophical, and religious implications in the discoveries made by means of these agents’.27 As well as emphasizing this modern philosophical importance of psychedelics,28 Osmond also bequeaths importance and credit to the people of cultures far and wide who pioneered and developed ‘psychedelics’: think upon those nameless discoverers and rediscoverers, Aztec and Assassin, Carib and berserker, Siberian and Red Indian, Brahmin and African, and many

21. If such a typology is possible considering the’ ineffable’ epithet attributed to many such experiences (see James, 1902, p. 380). 22. I.e. molecules that act on the serotonin (5-HT) receptors of nerve cells. Of course, when we use the word ‘serotonergic’ we expand from chemistry into pharmacology, a word deriving from the Greek pharmakon, ϕάρμακον, meaning ‘drug’ (medicinal or toxic in vivo). 23. See Alexander and Ann Shulgin’s PiHKAL and TiHKAL. 24. Though he proposed it first in a letter to Aldous Huxley dated 24 March 1956. See Dickins, in this volume. 25. Osmond mentions nitrous oxide, N2O, in relation to William James’ experiments and reflections thereon (Osmond, 1957, p. 247). 26. See Clark, 2021, for the latest research on the proposed varying ingredients of soma/ haoma. 27. Osmond, 1957, p. 420. Note that Osmond later wrote a paper entitled, ‘Philosophical Aspects of Psychedelics’ (1971). 28. Osmond references in his 1957 paper his friends Huxley and Smythies, as well as William James and Henri Bergson.

Introduction

5

others of whose endeavors even scholars do not know. We inherit their secrets and profit by their curiosity, their courage, and even from their errors and excesses. Let us honor them. They do not appear in any list of references.29

Thus, in defining ‘psychedelics’ one must include the plants, foods, potions, and medicines relating to the multifarious exceptional experiences of cultures of farreaching places and times – even though the term is a product of the West’s twentieth century. Further still, ‘psychedelic’ as an adjective rather than as a noun can refer to states achieved without the intake of such chemicals – for instance through breathing techniques,30 meditation, recitation,31 repetitive motion, poetry,32 and diet. ‘Psychedelic’, literally meaning the mind or soul (psykhē´, ψυχή) being revealed (dēloun, δηλοῦν), stands for more than a set of defined molecules. In the past decade there has been a rush of interest and research into psychedelic cultures, and so we now find ourselves in the midst of the so-called ‘psychedelic renaissance’,33 wherein new spaces have opened up in need of philosophic analysis. The march of the clinical medicalization of psychedelics essential to this renaissance calls for methods of hermeneutics and political economic critique, addressing ethical issues such as patents, appropriations, and commodification, the power of psychiatry and ethics in the clinic-patient relationship, and the relation of science to notions of spirituality. The fast-developing chemistry, pharmacology, psychiatry, and thus neuroscience of psychedelics relates to the philosophies of mind, of religion, and of science – for instance through the hard problem of identifying the relation between neural and mental correlates. This, in turn, can relate to metaphysics, expanded notions of the ‘self ’, and the relation to Nature where aspects of normativity and attitude toward self, others, and the environment reappear. The mental and bodily phenomena themselves can be of beautiful and sublime significance, and thus one enters aesthetics and, more broadly, phenomenology. As well as the aesthetic value, the truth value concerning psychedelic experience brings the explorer into epistemology and the foundations of logic. All the facets of the wide discipline of philosophy can, in fact, be employed meaningfully in the endeavour to fathom psychedelia. As was stated at the start, this volume looks at the web of nodes that overlap and interact vis-à-vis philosophy and psychedelics and, just as a spider’s web has no clusters (unless the spider is on LSD),34 so has this volume no clusters of themes. Each node, each chapter, has relations to multifarious other chapters – and so we proceed alphabetically. The first chapter discusses the phenomenology of gratitude in relation to certain psychedelic states. More specifically, Taline Artinian analyses and applies dyadic gratitude – ‘thankfulness for a benefit without a source’ – to psychedelic experiences

29. Osmond, 1957, p. 419. 30. For instance, Grof. Breathwork and Sufi breathing meditation practices. 31. See Idel, 1988. 32. Consider Zen koans, cf. Jylkka in this volume. 33. Inaugurated in name through the Ben Sessa’s 2012 book, The Psychedelic Renaissance. 34. See Peter N. Witt’s chemical experiments on spiders (Witt, 1954).

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of ‘oceanic boundlessness’ that relate to feelings of connectedness and unity concomitant to the phenomenology of losing one’s ‘self ’. Gratitude is commonly conceptualized as triadic – where there is a giver, a gift, and a beneficiary. This has ethical implications with regard to giver-beneficiary expectations. In dyadic gratitude – transpersonal gratitude – there is no giver, no person to whom a beneficiary can respond to ethically. In certain psychedelic states such dyadic gratitude can be experienced, and yet, as Artinian shows, an ethical dimension emerges in one’s relation to Nature itself. Psychedelia enriches and informs the phenomenology of emotions and the values associated therewith. In the following chapter, John Buchanan reflects upon how psychedelics may enable an extension of the borders of epistemology by amplifying human perception, both inner and outer. Explicating an ontology based on the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead – a long-neglected philosopher whose process philosophy has much to offer philosophical analyses of psychedelia – we understand how our concepts of percepts have been curtailed by restrictive ontologies. From this approach to the question of what is real, the common dichotomy of ‘inner and outer’ perception is shown as misleading. Buchanan explains that, for Whitehead, perception involves more than the traditional ‘sensationalist doctrine’. Perception, at its primal core, involves the integration of feeling throughout the pulses or processes of experience that constitute reality: the outer becomes inner. When the strictures of traditional philosophy and science are lifted, certain psychedelic experiences can be understood as veridical, as ‘real’. The philosophy provides a frame for the experience; the experience, in turn, fortifies the frame. In Chapter 3, Kyle Buller, Joe Moore, and Lenny Gibson present a historical account of the West’s generally troublesome encounter with such exceptional experiences. Though acknowledging ancient Greek philosophy and The Mysteries as an ideal praxis transcending theoria, the chapter lays its focus upon the Modern Age and upon the history of US society – which was pivotal for the global power structures and legal frameworks that developed and entwined through ecclesiastical legacies. This focus brings to the fore a number of figures often overlooked, forging connections amongst seemingly divergent currents. Further emphasis is laid upon LSD in this history, acting as an alien, volatile substance that wrought ostensible societal disruption. But tracing an underground stream, the authors consider causes for the current decriminalization in certain US states, which may also spread and evoke new valuations of psychedelic substances. In philosophy, the study of value has traditionally been parted into questions of ethics and of aesthetics. The latter is often taken to be the study of what is considered beautiful and of the delightful terror of the sublime – as well as the study of art in all its manifestations. Psychedelic experiences are often noted for their extraordinary aesthetic aspects that may inform the study of aesthetics generally. In Chapter 4, Robert Dickins focuses on two figures who represent the sublime and the psychedelic related thereto – respectively the Irish political philosopher and aesthete Edmund Burke and the great British writer, Aldous Huxley. Dickins shows that Huxley’s Burkean framework informs value theory by effacing the distinction between aesthetics and ethics, exposing how psychedelic

Introduction

7

experiences can be actuated and thus understood as sublime by contextualizing the experience through powers political, personal, and religious. Since the 1970s, psychedelic use in the West has been largely prohibited and stigmatized, and any philosophy of psychedelics has been ignored. The War on Drugs is a recent instance of colonizing power politics that extract and extinguish ways of life, thought and action. A consequence of this is the narrow lens through which we now relate to psychedelics in Western culture: as clinical therapy or as spiritual flights of fancy. In Chapter 5, Osiris González Romero takes us beyond Hospital and Church, as it were, to open our eyes to the episteme and techne of Amerindian cultures – instructing our epistemology, phenomenology, metaphysics, and ethics. González Romero takes a decolonizing perspective, in both what and how he writes and what he writes about, developing the field of ‘psychedelic humanities’ as an integrative, respectful, and fair endeavour. This decolonizing approach offers an ethical imperative dimension and broadens our understanding of psychedelic spaces of practices and knowledges. In Chapter 6, Michael Halewood also seeks to redress the neglected value of psychedelics for philosophy and for life generally through an analysis of Alfred North Whitehead’s specific notions of potentiality, novelty, and the reoriented notion of a ‘proposition’. Halewood tells us that, for Whitehead, the ‘soul’ is not a static substance but a ‘mode of functioning’ that occasionally evokes consciousness. Yet the relation between that which we are conscious of in the world, and consciousness itself is not one of reality to appearance, but rather of a potential that pro-poses itself to our actual occasions of experience. Such propositions can result in novelty, new ways of perceiving and feeling the world – and this is their prime value. The truth value of a proposition expresses a set past and is, because of this, of less value than newly created configurations. Psychedelics allow for the extension of such propositions and, as such, do not present supernatural phenomena but rather emphasize novel ways in which to configure our place in the world. Our place in the world is explored from a different angle by Christine Hauskeller in Chapter 7. Drawing upon concepts of alienation, individualization and colonization developed in Frankfurt School Critical Theory and on the philosophy of medicine, Hauskeller examines the science and political economy shaping the ‘psychedelic renaissance’. She asks whether it can be sound medical science to induce madness for the purpose of curing madness. According to her analysis, clinical trials in psychedelic psychotherapy can be paradoxical and ethically problematic. Paradoxes lie within the basic concept of inducing madness to cure madness, and in attempts to quantify the ineffable; the contradictory undercurrents in the clinical experiments tempt some to pre-empt and steer participants’ experiences and study mystical experiences and non-materialist metaphysical beliefs as possible therapeutics. Three ethically problematic colonizations are immanent in the clinical appropriation of psychedelics, namely the instrumentalization of both extraordinary personal experiences and indigenous knowledge practices, and their commercial appropriation. Rather than liberating us from the alienation and disconnected individualization that a capitalist order breeds, the assimilation of psychedelics into the ‘medical industrial complex’ restricts individual freedom and proceeds through

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cultural appropriation. Misconstruing the cultural malaise as an individual illness, medicalization ringfences legitimate psychedelic use to the clinical space. The re-emerging interest in psychedelics in the twenty-first century has indeed, it seems, begun to reframe these substances as commodities to be integrated into a capitalist order. This attempted integration, however, brings about a friction because, as Fernando Huesca Ramon argues in Chapter 8, psychedelic experience itself can act as a catalyst for revolution against such an order. Drawing firstly upon the thoughts of Hegel and Marx, Huesca Ramon shows how capitalism brings about a distortion of the perception of values, antagonistic to genuine emancipation. He then focuses especially on works by Walter Benjamin with regard to his drug experiences and how they relate to his concept of ‘aura’: the re-perception and revaluation of things contingent on, to borrow an outside phrase, set and setting. And further he shows how Herbert Marcuse draws upon Freud to offer a critique of the capitalist order and the way in which it fosters ‘false needs’, aberrant valuations and perceptions. Psychedelics, as Marcuse suggests, can offer different ways of perceiving, and of reflecting on inculcated values and forms of experience. They can contribute to the necessary revaluation and emancipation from the socio-economic status quo. Analytic philosophy, too, has started to consider aspects of psychedelics especially in epistemology, the study of knowledge. What we may know is very much related to what may exist – thus epistemology relates to ontology, the study of being. In Chapter 9, Jussi Jylkkä explores a well-known philosophical thought experiment from Frank Jackson – ‘Mary’s Room’ – in relation to unitary psychedelic experiences. Jylkkä argues that the unitive psychedelic state can amplify our understanding of the distinction between knowledge that is relational and knowledge that is unitary and argues that this psychedelically-highlighted epistemology does not, contra Jackson, show that ‘physicalism’ is a false ontology. It does, however, pinpoint the limitations that empirical science can assert on the notion of the ‘physical’. The phenomenology of unitary psychedelic experience cannot be sufficiently understood by empirical science because it betrays in itself the very limitations of such science, as also shown from a different angle by Hauskeller. Contemplating psychedelic experience and philosophical thought experiments can sharpen our understanding of the nature of our experiential world. Psychedelic drugs are commonly believed to induce hallucinations and cognitive distortions in one’s perception of the world – consider the very word, ‘hallucinogen’. In Chapter 10, Ole Martin Moen continues this epistemic thread and argues that, in many instances, it is not justifiable to consider psychedelic experience to be hallucinatory, even though in some instances it may be. Moen demonstrates that judging psychedelics as distorting cognition is a view ultimately based upon ‘naïve realism’ – the ideology that the everyday, prosaic perception of the world is a true representation of the world as it objectively is. By discussing aspects of psychedelic experience as case studies – namely colour phenomenology, synaesthesia, beauty, and love and trust – Moen argues that it is generally a mistake to call psychedelic perceptions of reality distorted. To seek to understand psychedelic consciousness requires, in part, to understand what consciousness is, in itself and in its relation to the world – if such a division

Introduction

9

may even be staked. Different cultures have different understandings and frameworks into which such a question can be placed. In Chapter 11, Steve Odin looks at the rich cartography of the mind offered by the Zen Buddhist framework as presented by D. T. Suzuki, who drew upon William James as well as the psychoanalytic Western tradition in order to convey this Eastern understanding. Odin takes issue, however, with Suzuki’s criticism of Aldous Huxley’s claim that psychedelics can conduce to the Zen state of satori (no-mind, the Void), showing that Suzuki misread Huxley’s psychedelic phenomenology. The state of satori, or the ‘cosmic Unconscious’, Odin argues, can be achieved – perhaps even more assuredly – through psychedelic intake, along with other methods. To fortify this point, Odin showcases Czech psychiatrist Stanislav Grof as describing what are essentially satori experiences through his extensive work involving thousands of LSD participant sessions. On this basis, it may be the case that psychedelics advance our understanding of the capabilities of the mind, capabilities that have hitherto lain dormant in the West. René Descartes is often considered a founder of the modern philosophy and mathematics of the West. Descartes sought certainty through a thought experiment: he may be living in a hallucinatory world created by an evil demon, yet his own reality as a thinking thing could never be put in doubt as a delusion. In Chapter 12, Matthew Segall draws on psychedelic experiences and re-interprets Descartes’ demonic thought experiment as a bad psychedelic trip, one that is an inversion of Plato’s cave: that certainty is found in the darkest cavern rather than outside in the sunlight. The ramifications of such solipsistic meditations, Segall shows, were detrimental to culture because of the separation of body and mind that it invoked. Segall argues for the more enlightened understanding of organic realism as developed in process philosophy, because this approach makes more sense of reality and psychedelic experience than do the shadows of dualism and representationalism cast by Cartesian thought. Experiences of enlightened unity with Nature or with Deity are reported not only in the mystical literature of the past but also in contemporary accounts of the psychedelic adventurer. In Chapter 13, Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes seeks to fathom such reported states within the framework of the metaphysics of Benedict de Spinoza – a metaphysics encompassing monism, pantheism, panpsychism, and the eternal substance: the timelessness of pure Nature, God itself. God is Nature for Spinoza. To achieve this framework, the tenets of Spinozism are explicated with a culmination in the Intellectual Love of God, amor Dei intellectualis, where the finite mind and infinite intellect of Nature unite. Sjöstedt-Hughes then provides a phenomenological account of the unitive states occasioned by certain psychedelic substances, notably the ever-so potent 5-MeO-DMT, comparing these phenomenological elements to the ontological aspects of Spinozism. This comparative analysis will proffer a Spinozan-Psychedelic symbiosis: that certain psychedelic states can be understood through the Spinozan system, and that the Spinozan system can be intuited through certain psychedelic states – a blinding flash of Spinozism that can change one’s relation to oneself and to Nature itself, thereby promoting deep ecological benefits. Such radical psychedelic experiences are to be approached with caution. To the surprise of some, Carl Jung urged caution, even avoidance of psychedelic drugs. In Chapter 14, Johanna Hilla Sopanen shows us why and how this warning can now

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be more comprehensively understood, in view of the recent publication of Jung’s Liber Novus: The Red Book. This tome reports in text and illustration an intense, tormenting phase of exceptional dreams and visions that Jung sought and underwent. He understood such visions as emanating from what he called the Collective Unconscious, to which he later developed a method to induce access. This Collective Unconscious contained symbols that could, through careful analysis help the individual to develop greater self-realization. Sopanen argues that, in this way, it was Jung’s exceptional experiences that fostered his school of Analytic Psychology yet also, paradoxically, made him weary of psychedelics as risking access to profound realms of the unconscious without the labour of integration the exposure requires. With special regard to integration, however, Jung has much to offer those who seek and undergo psychedelic experiences. In addition to a potential realization of the self, psychedelics may also offer a potential realization of the contingency of the key axioms of logic. In Chapter 15, Michel Weber argues that Western philosophy (and, implicitly, science) has been crippled by two key components: traditional logic and a limited concept of empirical information. He argues that psychedelic experience allows one to overcome these crippling effects – notably by allowing for emancipation from the legislature of axioms, by which he means the laws of identity, contradiction, and excluded-middle. Such emancipation can free up logic and with it the structures of thought so that far greater adventures of ideas can be undertaken. In this volume philosophers from different traditions and backgrounds discuss the possible revolutionary potential of psychedelics regarding aspects such as liberating one from strictures of logic, ideology, epistemology, dogmatism, and habits of thought and behaviour. As we have seen, the variety of such experiential facets can be analysed, understood, and evaluated from different philosophical perspectives and sub-fields. Philosophical reflections and traditions can inform the emerging cultural debates about psychedelics and their legitimacy. At the same time, philosophy can enrich its ideas about human nature, truth, reality, and society when it permits the engagement with psychedelic experiences. Together, the chapters of this volume show strands of intersection and mutual influence between the kindred spheres of philosophy and psychedelics.

References Astruc, A. and Contat, M., eds. (1980) Sartre by Himself, trans. R. Seaver (New York: Urizen Books) Banchich, T. M. (1998) Nestorius ίερϕαντεῑν τεταγμένος, Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, 47:3, pp. 360–374 Baudelaire, C. ([1980]1996) Artificial Paradies, trans. S. Diamond (New York: Citadel Press) Benjamin, W. (2006) On Hashish, trans. H. Eiland, et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) Bergson, H. ([1932]1935) The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. A. Audra and C. Brereton (London: Macmillan)

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Burkert, W. (1987) Ancient Mystery Cults (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) Clark, M. (2021) Botanical Ecstasies: Psychoactive Plant Formulas in India and Beyond (London: Psychedelic Press) Huxley, Aldous ([1954/1956]2004) The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell (London: Vintage Classics) James, W. ([1902]1985) The Varieties of Religious Experience (London: Penguin) Kerényi, C. ([1962]1967) Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter (Princeton: Princeton University Press) Kopenawa, D. ([2010]2013) The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman, trans. B. Albert, N. Elliott and A. Dundy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) Metzner, R. (2013) The Toad and the Jaguar: A Field Report of Underground Research on a Visionary Medicine (Berkeley: Regent Press) Nietzsche, F. ([1872]1993) The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, trans. S. Whiteside (London: Penguin) Nietzsche, F. (1997) The Dionysian Worldview, trans. C. Crawford, Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 13, pp. 81–97 Osmond, H. (1957) A Review of the Clinical Effects of Psychotomimetic Agents, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 66:3, pp. 418–434 Osmond, H. (1971) Philosophical Aspects of Psychedelics, International Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, 5:1, pp. 58–64 Partridge, C. (2018) High Culture: Drugs, Mysticism, and the Pursuit of Transcendence in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press) Plato (1973) Phaedrus & Letters VII and VIII, trans. W. Hamilton (Harmondsworth: Penguin) Pliny (1966) Natural History, Vol. VII: Libri XXIV–XXVII, trans. W. H. S. Jones (Cambridge: Harvard University Press) Price, H. H. (1963) A Mescaline Experience, Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 58:1, pp. 3–20 Rinella, M. A. (2011) Pharmakon: Plato, Drug Culture, and Identity in Ancient Athens (Plymouth: Lexington Books) Sacks, O. (2012) Hallucinations (London: Picador) Sessa, B. (2012) The Psychedelic Renaissance: Reassessing the Role of Psychedelic Drugs in 21st Century Psychiatry and Society (London: Muswell Hill Press) Shulgin A. and Shulgin A. ([1991]2019) PiHKAL: A Chemical Love Story (Berkeley: Transform Press) Shulgin A. and Shulgin A. ([1997]2020) TiHKAL: The Continuation (Berkeley: Transform Press) Smythies, J. R. (1953) The Mescaline Phenomena, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 3:12, pp. 339–347 Strassman, R. (2001) DMT: The Spirit Molecule (Rochester: Park Street Press) Ustinova, Y. (2018) Divine Mania: Alterations in Consciousness in Ancient Greece (Abingdon: Routledge) Watts, A. ([1962]2013) The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness, 2nd edn. (Novato: New World Library) Witt, P. (1954) Spider Webs and Drugs, Scientific American, 191:6, pp. 80–87

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Chapter 1 T R A N SP E R S O NA L G R AT I T U D E A N D P SYC H E D E L IC A LT E R E D S TAT E S O F C O N S C IO U SN E S S Taline Artinian

Philosophical accounts of gratitude have traditionally focused on a triadic concept of thankfulness, and its moral and phenomenological aspects. This definition of gratitude in terms of a giver–gift–beneficiary triangle grounds it in social and personal contexts of duties and obligations, delineating the requirements of benevolence and appropriate returns. However, it does not account for dyadic instances of gratitude, i.e., thankfulness for a benefit without a source, and its associated phenomenology. While current philosophical discussions of dyadic gratitude1 attempt to provide a conceptual framework for gratitude in the absence of an intentional benefactor, the view that only directed thankfulness can be considered genuine gratitude2 is still the prevalent one. The central issue is that gratitude is conceptualised as a response to benevolent attitudes. Therefore, in the absence of a benefactor, we are merely in the presence of appreciation for a ‘beneficial state of affairs’.3 To address this issue, I have proposed elsewhere4 the concept of ‘transpersonal gratitude’ to refer to a kind of gratitude that arises in dyadic contexts where a personally significant benefit takes central place instead of the benevolent agent, resulting in feelings of connectedness to others and the world. This chapter explores phenomenological features of transpersonal gratitude through a comparison to altered states of consciousness in psychedelic experiences. It aims to further our insight into the workings of a gratitude that transcends the personal.

1. See, for instance, Walker, 1980, on the difference between gratitude and gratefulness, McAleer, 2012, on propositional gratitude, Lacewing, 2016, on existential gratitude and Chastain, 2016, on gifts without givers. 2. Manela, 2016, argues, for example, that non-directed gratitude is simply a form of appreciation. See also Hunt, 2021: Gratitude is only fittingly targeted towards agents. 3. Manela, 2016, p. 281. 4. Artinian, 2019, Transpersonal Gratitude: Nature, Links and Expressions.

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I start with an overview and discussion of dyadic contexts of gratitude as well as the concept of transpersonal gratitude. For the purposes of this chapter, I focus on the salience of the benefit and the feelings of connectedness, to compare them to experiences of unity in psychedelic states of consciousness. Oceanic boundlessness and ego-dissolution are of particular interest for a comparative analysis of feelings of connectedness. Finally, I look into the claim of the ‘reducing valve’ function of the brain5 and suggest, based on a discussion of ego-dissolution within a psychoanalytic framework, that transpersonal gratitude has a similar impact on ego integrity. I conclude with a few remarks on the notion of the ineffable associated with psychedelic experiences.

1 Transpersonal Gratitude 1.1 Dyadic Contexts Historically, until the eighteenth century, philosophical literature on gratitude was concerned with triadic thankfulness: gratitude for a benefit towards a benefactor. Gratitude was understood to be an obligation, a duty as well as a virtue, both in social and spiritual/religious terms.6 With the advent of positive psychology, preceded by humanistic psychology and before that moral sentimentalism,7 thankful emotions and affects became objects of philosophical examination as possible variables in moral choices and behaviour. Contemporary philosophy examines what it means to feel grateful and the place that emotions of thankfulness have in considerations of duty and obligation in return for generous actions, considerations of appropriate grateful behaviour and moral failures of ingratitude. Still, this philosophical concept of gratitude essentially refers to a triadic relation defined by the following main criteria: ●

The intention of the benefactor: the benefit must be given willingly, without any expectations of return and with a clear benevolent intention towards a particular beneficiary. Additionally, there must be some cost to the benefactor, confirming the intentional effort to help.8,9 This criterion focuses on the

5. Bergson, 1931; Huxley, 2021. 6. McConnell, 1993. 7. See Adam Smith, 2009, The Theory of Moral Sentiments where he links gratitude to sympathy. 8. McConnell, 1993. 9. For a discussion on gratitude when the cost is too high for the benefactor, see Manela, 2015, Negative Feelings of Gratitude.

1. Transpersonal Gratitude and Psychedelic Altered States of Consciousness

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15

intentional benefactor as the object of gratitude and excludes unwitting or begrudging agents who are not owed any thanks.10 The gift must be intended for the beneficiary and bring a significant good into their experience. It cannot be an earned benefit, i.e. it has to be something that one receives ‘through no merit’ of one’s own.11 This distinguishes gratitude from relationships of reciprocal exchange. The willing acceptance of the gift by the beneficiary and their recognition of the kind intention of the benefactor, eliciting a wish to make a return (a return made appropriate by being commensurate with the giver’s intention. Too much is overzealous and too little is ungrateful).

In considering such triadic relationships, philosophers can argue for certain duties and obligations of gratitude. If a drowning person is saved by a passer-by who takes the risk of jumping in the water despite it being shark infested, then the person who is saved will be said to owe gratitude towards his saviour. The absence of recognition (not even saying thank you, for example), would register as a clear case of ungratefulness and of moral failure on the part of the person whose life was saved. Gratitude thus has an important place in the normative regulation of interpersonal relationships, fostering generosity, trust, and humility.12 This focus on the social and moral role of gratitude as a regulating factor of our relationships with others (whether other humans or supernatural beings), accommodates a certain view of our relationship with the world, namely a triadic view where benefits are perceived to come from other human beings or God. If we look at the history of the concept of gratitude,13 we will find that our current understanding results from the combination of, on the one hand, the moral and social importance of generosity in ancient societies14 and, on the other, Christian values of praise and worship.15 Philosophical accounts of gratitude reflect this focus

10. The matter of felt gratitude towards accidental benefactors is treated in philosophical literature in terms of appropriateness of emotions as well as the difficulty to set requirements on certain ways of feeling. A plausible answer is developed by Weiss, 1985, offering a Kantian perspective on the requirement to cultivate a grateful disposition. 11. McCullough and Emmons, 2004. 12. Card, 1988. 13. This analysis applies to the history of ideas in the West. For more on this, see Leithart, 2014, Gratitude: an Intellectual History. 14. Cicero, but more prominently Seneca, have explored the importance of gratitude in terms of encouraging generous and benevolent acts, with the ultimate aim of fostering a virtuous society (See Cicero, De Officiis; Seneca, On Benefits). 15. We can see the influence of Seneca on Aquinas’ treatment of gratitude In The Summa Theologica, with the strong emphasis on the importance on intention. Aquinas, however, introduces a hierarchy of different types of gratitude, linking individuals to each other on a continuous scale of duties of gratitude and ultimately leading to God to Whom all gratitude is owed.

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on the intentional ‘other’ as a source of benefits. However, this perspective is not necessarily appropriate anymore in a reality where religious beliefs have loosened their grip on our view of the world. Whereas at one time we lived in a human being-life-God triangle, in many cases we now live in a dyadic world, defined by the relationship between human and the world. So, while personal gratitude is still a good concept to refer to exchanges within the context of benevolence among humans, imposing a triadic view of gratitude to our relationship to the world is reductionist at best, as it leaves out genuine cases of dyadic gratitude mistakenly taken to be expressions of gladness or appreciation. I have proposed to call such dyadic experiences ‘transpersonal gratitude’16, to differentiate it from the propositional form of being thankful that something is the case.17 Transpersonal gratitude is expressed in the form of ‘X is thankful for R’, R representing a personally significant and unexpected benefit. The next section discusses the specific features of transpersonal gratitude.18 1.2 A Phenomenological Profile Similar to cases of personal thankfulness, transpersonal gratitude requires a benefit that is gratuitous. In this context, it refers to a benefit coming from outside of the self. This benefit does not have to be a material one: any experience or object that adds some good to one’s life experiences is a benefit that can trigger gratitude. As emotions evaluate an object of experience in terms of the subject’s concerns,19 gratitude evaluates the benefit as being good for the subject and the phenomenological component of the emotion is (usually) pleasant. When there is an intentional benefactor, the evaluation of the source of the benefit, situated outside of the self, focuses on the benefactor. Further, it gives direction to the eventual expression of thankfulness. But it is unclear why we should claim that the formal object of the emotion (broadly put ‘that which benefits me with no merit on my part’) is and should be the intentional benefactor. If I survive a horrific accident, I might feel grateful for surviving. If someone saves me from the accident, I might be grateful to them for their action that helped me survive but, in both cases, the benefit is that I survived and that’s what I’m thankful for. In the second case, my gratitude will be directed towards my benefactor and, in the first case, towards no one in particular. But either way, I can feel grateful. The absence of a benefactor is not enough to argue that we must only speak of gladness or appreciation.

16. Artinian, 2019. 17. McAleer, 2012. 18. For the purposes of this chapter, I am focusing on the phenomenology of this type of thankfulness, although it does have moral, normative and prescriptive implications. 19. Appraisal theories of emotion in psychology and philosophical theories of emotions as evaluations suggest that part of the emotional process involves an evaluation whereby the object of experience is appraised as corresponding to/departing from the subject’s needs and goals, broadly speaking.

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In fact, we can argue that the centrality of the gift is the more important factor in an experience of gratitude and that the benevolent intention of the giver only colours the gift in a certain way. It is, in fact, features of the gift and the way it is perceived that define an experience of gratitude. Evidently, the benefit must bring some valued good into one’s life. But this is not enough for it to be perceived as such, or as a gift. While the benevolent intention of the giver highlights the gifted nature of the benefit, other features of the experience replace this impact and give salience to the benefit in dyadic contexts. The first of such features is the significance of the benefit. The good must be something that matters personally to the individual. There is a difference between recognising the beauty of a sunset and seeing it as a benefit to be grateful for. Therefore, the benefit must come as an answer to a need or desire, making it personally meaningful for the individual. Additionally, there must be an element of ‘surprise in gratitude’.20 In cases of personal thankfulness, this surprise is part of the ‘unmerited’ recognition by the benefactor: one feels somehow chosen to be the recipient of a benefit which one did not deserve nor work towards. In other words, it’s not a benefit to which one felt entitled and it comes as a surprise when it is given generously, without expectations of return. In his account of gratitude, Steindl-Rast explains the gratitude one feels towards God or the universe in these terms. It is the undeserved kindness that is at the centre of the experience of gratitude towards higher beings.21 The same could be said about transpersonal gratitude: the benefit is perceived as being a surprise, an unexpected good. But this time, it does not come as an expression of infinite kindness from a higher being, nor from a generous human being. Walker gives the example of unexpected good weather for which one can be grateful.22 When one feels grateful for a sunny day in the middle of winter, when one has an important event that could be disrupted by bad weather, then the gratitude we speak of in this situation is gratefulness: gratitude for something good in the absence of a benefactor because one feels ‘somehow favoured’.23 However, we need to add two more, albeit related, features to the ‘unexpected’ element. The benefit has to be unlikely as well as unexpected, thus bringing with it an awareness of ‘what might not have been’. This comparative stance is, I believe, crucial for the experience of gratitude. I can be very happy for bright skies on my wedding day in winter, but when I say that I’m grateful for it, it also means that I know it was unlikely and therefore, I recognise that it might have been different. This recognition brings the sense of being ‘somehow favoured’, which is an important component of the experience of gratitude as a response to a benefit that is perceived as targeting the beneficiary.

20. Watkins, 2014, p. 47. 21. Steindl-Rast, 2014; McCullough and Emmons, 2004. 22. Walker, 1981, p. 47. 23. Ibid., p. 49.

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Transpersonal gratitude, in contrast to personal kinds of thankfulness, has a transcendent dimension. I speak of transcendence here in the sense suggested by Peterson and Seligman, as a connection beyond the self, with the world at large, an experience that ‘reminds us how tiny we are but that simultaneously lifts us out of a sense of insignificance’.24 A benefit, significant and unexpected, coming from outside of the self and yet without an outside source, is such an event. It shows our dependence on others, nature, and good fortune25 and at the same time, gives us a sense of being favoured, significant. This opens the door to the recognition of something greater than the self and elicits feelings of connectedness to the world at large. It is those feelings of connectedness that foster a good will to give something back in return. The wish to make a return is a necessary component when speaking of gratitude. It is part and parcel of the experience of being thankful and in personal cases, this wish is directed towards the benefactor. In dyadic types of gratitude and specifically in the case of transpersonal gratitude, this wish is translated into a willingness to ‘pay it forward’, to borrow an expression from the psychology of gratitude. Thus, transpersonally grateful individuals find themselves inclined to help and support others in turn, wanting to share the experience of an unexpected and significant benefit. The phenomenological profile of transpersonal gratitude shows a genuine experience of dyadic gratitude in the absence of a benefactor, for a personally significant and unexpected benefit, bringing an awareness of ‘what might not have been’, fostering a sense of connectedness to the world. In the following section, I look into this sense of connectedness as experienced in psychedelic altered states of consciousness.

2 Experiences of Unity in Psychedelic Altered States of Consciousness There is considerable research being published on psychedelic-induced altered states of consciousness. While experiences can vary depending on the psychedelic substance that triggers it and other factors, there seems to be emerging what might be called a unified account of psychedelic experiences26, with certain sensory, emotional, and cognitive features consistently emerging during such altered states of consciousness. Connectedness is a defining feature of transpersonal gratitude. The comparison here between psychedelic altered states of consciousness and transpersonal gratitude aims at unearthing similarities in both experiences in the attempt to further our understanding of both.

24. Peterson and Seligman, 2004, p. 31. 25. McAleer, 2012, p. 60. 26. Swanson, 2018.

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2.1 Feelings of Connectedness Connectedness is a feeling of being linked, joined to another or others, without losing a sense of distinctiveness. It also comes with a feeling of being part of something bigger than the self.27 We saw that this experience is present in moments of transpersonal gratitude, and the literature on psychedelic altered states similarly reports that feelings of connectedness are a defining feature of those experiences.28 In most cases, it comes with a loosening of ego boundaries and might be accompanied with blissful emotions of oceanic boundlessness. In other cases, it is an indication of a therapeutic process, where disconnection in depressive states is gradually replaced by a sense of connection to others and the world.29 In all cases, it triggers a pleasant experience of being linked to something greater, be that a larger group of individuals all the way to the cosmos itself. Both oceanic feelings and ego-dissolution deserve further clarification, firstly because they are linked to feelings of connectedness and secondly, because they do not appear very often in reports of transpersonal gratitude. Their importance lies in furthering our understanding of altered states of consciousness and any links that transpersonal gratitude might have with them. 2.1.1 Oceanic Boundlessness. The first such feature is the oceanic feeling, or Oceanic Boundlessness (OBN)30 in its more contemporary appellation. Freud is famous for having analysed this feeling in Civilisation and its Discontents31, defining it as a transient regressive movement of the psyche into pre-oedipal narcissism. His approach was somehow dismissive of this feeling of unity and limitlessness as he did not think that there was a strong enough link between such emotional experiences and religious feelings as he understood them.32 Rolland, who coined the term ‘oceanic feelings’ and who had asked Freud to investigate them agreed that psychological religious feelings were not related to experiences of unity.33 However, he had a deeper interest in mystical states and he believed, based on his personal experiences as well as his research of Eastern practices of yoga and meditation, that the oceanic feeling was part and parcel of mystical experiences of unity with the whole world, the whole of existence, regardless of religious beliefs and orientations. In his Memoirs and other writings, he reports spontaneous moments of oceanic feelings, of immediate dynamic unity with nature and a dissolution of conventional 27. Gallagher et al., 2015. 28. Carhart-Harris, 2017. 29. Watts et al., 2017. 30. Roseman et al., 2018. 31. Freud, 2002. 32. An interesting argument from Ackerman (2017, p. 21) suggests that Freud’s reticence to further explore the oceanic feelings stems from his insistence on a triadic oedipal model and that the conceptualisation of the oceanic feeling as ‘an original, dyadic experience’ might threaten Freud’s argument. 33. Freud, 2002; Parsons, 1998.

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dualism of everyday consciousness.34 It is worth noting here that the nature of which Rolland speaks is Spinoza’s Nature as God, Spinoza having been one of the major influences on Rolland’s thought.35 Nature is perceived as a ‘living presence’, a ‘matrix through which all is interconnected’.36 This oceanic boundlessness as unity with the whole world and feelings of limitlessness is also one of the defining features of psychedelic-induced altered states of consciousness.37 For this reason, the latter are at times linked to mystical experiences, although this is not a necessary connection. In fact, under the umbrella term of altered states of consciousness, there are different types and categories of experiences. Some scholars suggest, for example, that daydreaming and creative thinking are naturally occurring altered states of consciousness, with differing degrees of ego-dissolution38 or a certain loss of sense of self in a state that’s different from the ordinary waking consciousness. Being engulfed in creative work to the point of ‘forgetting oneself ’ is an example of such a state. This is a reasonable notion, since it can be argued that psychedelic-induced altered states of consciousness have already shown us that the mind is capable of stretching beyond its everyday ordinary functionality limits. Therefore, we can accept that mystical experiences and psychedelic states of consciousness can be distinct experiences despite their considerable overlap, due to certain features that allow the unique individuation of each experience. In this case, mystical experiences always entail a sacredness component which is not always present in psychedelic states of consciousness.39 In all cases, oceanic boundlessness is a feeling of unity with the world (and further), combined with a sense of limitlessness as the self identifies with the (perceived) boundlessness of all that there is. Feelings of connectedness are closely related to this experience of unity, which promotes a sense of being part of something greater than the self. 2.1.2 Ego-dissolution. Ego-dissolution is another characteristic feature of altered states of consciousness and it can become very pronounced during psychedelic ‘trips’. The feeling is that of a loosening and alteration of ego-boundaries, leading ‘to a feeling of interconnection with other people, the entire planet, or even the universe at large’.40 However, the experience of ego-dissolution is not always pleasant. There is an inverse correlation between the intensity of the experience (most of the time linked to the dosage of psychedelic used) and its pleasant quality. When egodissolution isn’t extreme, there is a sense of relaxation of boundaries, allowing

34. Parsons, 1998. 35. See Sjöstedt-Hughes, in this volume. 36. Ibid., p. 509. 37. Carhart-Harris et al., 2017. 38. Fox et al., 2018. 39. Barrett et al., 2017. 40. Belser et al., 2017, p. 369.

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feelings of connectedness to emerge with a sense of expanded but coherent ‘observing’ self. If ego-dissolution is too intense, it becomes fragmentary and threatens emotional and cognitive integrity, inducing panic and a ‘bad trip’.41 At this point, it is important to clarify what is meant by the ‘observing’ self, if we are to give a coherent account of feelings of connectedness in altered states of consciousness. If we claim that such feelings are strongly linked to ego-dissolution, and that they are a characteristic feature of the psychedelic state of consciousness, we cannot leave out instances of anxious ego-dissolution where a sense of connectedness is replaced by disconnection and even disintegration. In other words, we must be able to explain the ‘observing’ self in relation to pleasant and anxious experiences alike. The difficulty here arises from the attempt to base an account of psychedelic states of consciousness on different psychometric categorisations. It is one thing to enumerate different features of the experience for the purposes of, for example, research into therapeutic applications or neurological correlates of ASC; it is another to offer a phenomenological account because the latter cannot be wholly based on the discovery of correlations between different elements of the psychedelic experience. If we are to attempt an answer to the question ‘What is a psychedelic experience like?’, we have to consider that each report is a personal, subjective interpretation of the experience and that such reports come together in a necessarily reductive conceptual framework42 to allow us to speak of ‘good and bad’ experiences of psychedelic states of consciousness (good and bad ‘trips’) marked by perceptual, cognitive and emotional changes. Good trips entail feelings of oceanic boundlessness, connectedness, and pleasant ego-dissolution whereas bad trips are marked by an unpleasant and sometimes terrifying sense of ego-fragmentation, disconnection, and dread. Both positive and negative experiences of connection (connectedness– disconnection), boundaries (boundlessness–loss of integrity) and union (unity– fragmentation) point to a form of self-consciousness, however minimal, that perceives the state the self is in. It is not my purpose here to discuss this minimal form of self-consciousness at length, but I suggest that the ‘observer’ self is better understood as a minimal form of self-consciousness constitutive of states of consciousness,43 including altered ones. Therefore, connection, as a concern of the self, is linked to ego-dissolution in both pleasant and anxious experiences, expressed as feelings of connectedness in the former and disconnection in the latter. Transpersonal gratitude is to be compared, in terms of feelings of connectedness, with psychedelic states of consciousness marked by pleasant ego-dissolution and

41. Preller et al, 2016, p. 226. 42. For a discussion of this interpretation as a ‘hermeneutic act’, see Letcher, 2013, Deceptive Cadences: A Hermeneutic Approach to the Problem of Meaning and Psychedelic Experience. 43. The concept of Perspectival First-Person Awareness as a minimal form of selfconsciousness recently proposed by M. A. Sebastian (Sebastian, 2020) is a promising approach to understand minimal self-consciousness in psychedelic experiences.

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oceanic boundlessness.44 In both cases, the self is experienced as expanded, connected to others and the world (and beyond) and part of something larger than the individual self. In the next section, I discuss the significance of those similarities and how they might add to our understanding of both transpersonal gratitude and psychedelic states of consciousness.

3 Psychedelic States, Ego, and Transpersonal Gratitude Several characteristic features of psychedelic states of consciousness have parallels in experiences of transpersonal gratitude: feelings of connectedness to others and the world at large, relaxation of ego boundaries and the sense of being part of something greater than the self. Both experiences are personally significant in the way they impact the individual, and yet bring a sense of connectedness to everything that lies outside of the self, triggering an experience of unity and oneness with all. What is interesting in this observation is that transpersonal gratitude, similar to psychedelic experiences, seems to give us a glimpse of what Huxley called the Mind-at-Large, through an inhibition of the ‘reducing valve’.45 3.1 Altered Consciousness Huxley suggested that the brain and the nervous system function as a device that limits our access to the ‘enormous possible world of consciousness’46, to sustain the everyday waking consciousness necessary for adaptation and survival. Psychedelic substances inhibit this ‘valve’ function and allow ‘the other world to rise into consciousness’.47 He also suggested that other occurrences such as ‘disease, emotional shock, mystical enlightenment and aesthetic experiences’ can have a similar impact on the brain’s reductive function, ‘each in its different way and in varying degrees’.48 Recent studies have produced significant neurophysiological evidence of correlations between psychedelic brain activity and the phenomenological and subjective experience of psychedelic states and some findings on the effects of psilocybin on the brain seem to be consistent with Huxley’s claim.49 However, other occurrences that Huxley mentions have not been investigated enough in terms of their ‘valve-inhibiting’ effect. I suggest that transpersonal gratitude is an

44. There could be interesting parallels between disconnection in psychedelic states of consciousness on the one hand, and ingratitude and resentment on the other. However, this is outside the scope of this chapter. 45. Huxley, 1994. 46. Huxley, 1953 in Swanson, 2018, p. 7. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49. Carhart-Harris et al., 2012, p. 2142.

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example of such experiences and that, while the neurological data that corresponds to this process is currently lacking, we can turn to psychoanalytic and psychological conceptual frameworks to describe how transpersonal gratitude can have an effect on Huxley’s ‘reducing valve’. 3.2. Transpersonal Gratitude and the Ego In psychoanalytical theories, the ego is a dynamic concept that represents the conscious part of the psyche that deals with the demands of external reality on the one hand, and with unconscious urges on the other. It is experienced as ‘I’, or the ‘self ’. In contrast to the Id, the ego is in contact with reality through perception. While the Id is unconscious and operates under the pleasure principle of instant gratification, the ego is mostly conscious and operates under the reality principle as integrator of demands of internal and external worlds. It is driven by what Freud called the secondary process, characterised by ‘order, precision, conceptual consistency, controlled emotion and rational thinking’.50 The Id, which is driven by the primary process, is characterised by ‘disorder, vagueness, conceptual paradox, symbolic imagery, intense emotions, and animistic thinking’.51 Magical thinking and fantasies are also characteristic of this process. The ego exerts control over the Id and constrains the primary process such that the fantastic contents of the unconscious are inaccessible in everyday waking consciousness. Freud initially attempted to give an account of the human psyche grounded in physiology. He theorised the ego as a ‘neural mass’, and the primary and secondary processes as ‘neural energy’, inhibition mechanisms in the nervous system. But the technology of the time did not afford him the possibility to further explore his thesis and he eventually had to give up. Recent advances in cognitive neuroscience and, more specifically, research into psilocybin-induced ego-dissolution, point to neural correlates of the ego ‘manifesting as one’s “self ” or “I” ’.52 When the control of the ego weakens, the primary process discharges into conscious awareness. Dream states are examples of such instances, marked by intense emotions, magical thinking, and perceptual inconsistencies. Psychedelics have a similar effect on the ego. They weaken its structural integrity, causing the primary process to ‘spill’ into everyday consciousness, causing vivid perceptual, cognitive, and emotional shifts.53 Altered states of consciousness, whether psychedelic induced, meditative, mystical, or dreamlike, always entail the weakening of the ego’s filtering and controlling mechanisms. With this in mind, I suggest that transpersonal gratitude might have a similar impact on the ego. Transpersonal gratitude is the recognition of an unexpected, unlikely, and significant good in one’s experience, that comes from outside of the

50. Swanson, 2018, p. 9. 51. Ibid. 52. Lebedev et al., 2015, p. 3137. 53. Grof, 1976.

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self and yet has no particular source. There is a feeling of being ‘somewhat favoured’ that cannot be attributed to anything in the external reality. As such, the experience cannot be interpreted within the framework of everyday awareness, nor in terms of social or religious contexts. This perception of an extraordinary demand from the external world is bound to overwhelm, or at least unsettle, the organisational principle of the psyche: the ego. The hold of the ego over the primary process, and its structural integrity weaken, resulting in a distortion of boundaries and feelings of connectedness to others and the world at large.54 With the help of the psychoanalytic conceptual framework, therefore, we can describe transpersonal gratitude as an experience with similar features to psychedelic states, that seems to inhibit the ‘reducing valve’. This is also in line with the distinction I have drawn between personal and transpersonal modalities of gratitude. The former is bound by social and interpersonal conventions that offer a context of interpretation and expression of the emotion. Research on the neural correlates of triadic gratitude shows that personal thankfulness is linked to areas of the brain associated with moral cognition, social reward, and interpersonal bonding as well as mind and emotion perception.55 It belongs in everyday consciousness without any interpretive tension. Transpersonal gratitude, on the other hand, lacks such social and interpersonal frameworks, and challenges the ordinary perceptions of the world and others. It is conducive to states of consciousness that bear similarities to psychedelic experiences. We can only speculate, at this time, that its neural correlates are probably different from those of triadic gratitude and our understanding of its impact on the ‘reducing valve’ in terms of brain functions must rely on insights we gain from comparisons with psychedelic altered states of consciousness. 3.3 Considerations from Transpersonal Gratitude Can the above considerations on transpersonal gratitude inform us about certain aspects of psychedelic experiences? While I drew parallels between certain features of both experiences, namely feelings of connectedness and being part of something greater than the self, transpersonal gratitude is not a complete departure from ordinary consciousness in the way psychedelic states can be. Still, I think that our understanding of this unique modality of gratitude can shed some light on an important characteristic of psychedelic states of consciousness: ineffability. Ineffability is not unique to psychedelic states. It is shared by other altered states of consciousness, such as mystical experiences and some mental states associated with pathologies. In William James’ words, ineffability refers to experiences that ‘defy expression’, whereby ‘no adequate report of its contents can be given in

54. It is worth noting that this sense of connectedness is part and parcel of the oceanic feeling. 55. Fox et al., 2015.

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words’.56 Certain contents and quality of altered states cannot be conveyed to others and attempts at such communication are reported as reductive exercise. After a session of LSD, H. Smith reports: . . . the experience is so fantastic in both is novelty and its power as to beggar all possibility of adequate depiction through words. The most that can be hoped for by way of description is an approximation and only those who have had the drug can know how far removed from actuality the approximation must be.57

This quote is a particularly precise and useful description of the ineffable quality of psychedelic mental states. It refers to the difficulty of putting them into words and highlights the main reasons behind ineffability: the overwhelming immediate nature of the experience. James called it ‘tremendous muchness suddenly revealed’58, in reference to mystical states of consciousness that occur as the ‘margin’ of consciousness expands immensely and suddenly.59 I focus here on the ineffability of psychedelic states, building on my earlier examination of similar features between them and transpersonal gratitude, with the understanding that any discussion of ineffability will in some way be applicable to most altered states of consciousness. Much has been said in the attempts to understand and explain ineffability. The general consensus seems to be that it has to do with the inability of language to capture certain qualitative experiences that cannot be grounded in the conceptual framework through which we understand ourselves and the world in ordinary consciousness. Some discussions point at the possible nature of the object of experience, and our limited abilities of perception. There is also recognition that defining ineffability is a paradoxical endeavour. If we can say that certain experiences are ineffable, we are already describing them in some way. Why, then, is the ineffability of psychedelic and other altered states a topic of discussion and investigation? Why does the experience of ineffability not disappear after consciousness returns to its ordinary state, and instead lingers in the mind of the subject? Almost all ‘post-trip’ reports mention this ineffable quality in some way, as an important phenomenological element. To say that an experience is ineffable, is to say more about it than ‘there are/can be no words for it’. To speak of ineffability in the post-experience narrative suggests that the ineffable nature of the experience has significance for the subject. We notice that the experience cannot be put into words, and this is something that matters. It might be that this recognition expresses the failure of a mental effort to categorise and label the experience. In that case, talking about the ineffability of an

56. James, 1982, p. 380. 57. H. Smith, ‘Recollection of LSD’, in Ulrich, 2018. 58. James, 1910, p. 87. 59. Ibid., p. 85.

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experience is simply a continued but unsuccessful effort at conceptualisation, and the frustration arising from it. I think there is more to it. In my discussion of transpersonal gratitude, I mentioned a comparative stance, an awareness of ‘what might not have been’ conducive to feelings of thankfulness. I suggest that there is something similar that gives ineffability its significance, this time in terms of a comparative awareness of ‘what can be’. The notion of ineffability represents the radical distinction between ordinary consciousness and altered states of consciousness, and it stays in our discourse recognised as such. It affords the subject with a point of reference for what consciousness is and what it can be and acts as a conceptual placeholder for what lies beyond systems of signification, in a space outside language, to borrow a Lacanian expression.

4 Conclusion The comparison between features of transpersonal gratitude and psychedelic states of consciousness in terms of experiences of unity and connectedness makes a significant contribution to our understanding of transpersonal gratitude. The examination of its more transcendent features, such as feelings of connectedness and being part of something greater than the self, reveals phenomenological similarities with psychedelic experiences of being connected to the world at large and a loosening of ego boundaries. This allows us to further clarify the concept of transpersonal gratitude as an experience grounded in ordinary consciousness while exhibiting features of altered states of consciousness. We can suggest that transpersonal gratitude inhibits the ego’s ‘reducing valve’ function in the same way psychedelics impact the brain. Further neurophysiological research into the neural correlates of transpersonal gratitude could consolidate this claim. As for considerations from transpersonal gratitude, they shed some light on the significance of the notion of the ineffability of certain psychedelic experiences. The importance of the concept might reside in its representation of the meaning of altered states of consciousness. As such, it does not just refer to something that cannot be put into words, but perhaps to something that should not be put into words. In any case, the alignment of specific features of psychedelic states of consciousness with those of a mental state mostly grounded in ordinary consciousness adds to our understanding of what consciousness is in terms of how it manifests and expands in a variety of ways. At the very least, it underscores the importance of examining such alignments and similarities for a deeper insight into who we are and the experiences that are open to us.

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Huxley, A. ([1954/1956]2004) The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell (London: Vintage Books) James, W. (1910) A Suggestion about Mysticism, The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 7:4, pp. 85–92 James, W. ([1902]1982) The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Penguin) Lacewing, M. (2016) Can Non-theists Appropriately Feel Existential Gratitude?, Religious Studies, 52:2, pp. 145–165 Lebedev, A. V., Lövdén, M., Rosenthal, G., Feilding, A., Nutt, D. J. and Carhart-Harris, R. L. (2015) Finding the Self by Losing the Self: Neural Correlates of Ego-Dissolution under Psilocybin, Human Brain Mapping, 36:8, pp. 3137–3153 Leithart, P. (2014) Gratitude: An Intellectual History (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press) Letcher, A. (2013) Deceptive Cadences, in: eds. D. Luke, C. Adams, A. Waldstein, B. Sessa and D. King, Breaking Convention: Essays on Psychedelic Consciousness (London: Strange Attractor Press) Manela, T. (2016) Gratitude and Appreciation, American Philosophical Quarterly, 53:3, pp. 281–294 McAleer, S. (2012) Propositional Gratitude, American Philosophical Quarterly, 49:1, pp. 55–66. McConnell, T. (1993) Gratitude (Philadelphia: Temple University Press) McCullough, M. and Emmons, R. (2004) The Psychology of Gratitude (New York: Oxford University Press) Parsons, W. B. (1998) The Oceanic Feeling Revisited, The Journal of Religion, 78:4, pp. 501–523 Peterson, C., and Seligman, M. E. P. (2004) Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (Washington/New York: American Psychological Association) Preller, K. H. and Vollenweider, F. X. (2016) Phenomenology, Structure, and Dynamic of Psychedelic States, in: A Halberstadt, F. Vollenweider and D. E. Nichols, Behavioral Neurobiology of Psychedelic Drugs (Berlin: Springer) pp. 221–256 Roseman, L., Haijen, E., Idialu-Ikato, K., Kaelen, M., Watts, R. and Carhart-Harris, R. (2019) Emotional Breakthrough and Psychedelics: Validation of the Emotional Breakthrough Inventory, Journal of Psychopharmacology, 33:9, pp. 1076–1087 Roseman, L., Nutt, D. J. and Carhart-Harris, R. L. (2018) Quality of Acute Psychedelic Experience Predicts Therapeutic Efficacy of Psilocybin for Treatment-Resistant Depression, Frontiers in Pharmacology, 8, p. 974 doi: 10.3389/fphar.2017.00974 Sebastian, M. A. (2020) Perspectival Self-consciousness and Ego-dissolution: An Analysis of (Some) Altered States of Consciousness, Philosophy and the Mind Sciences, 1:I, pp. 1–27. doi: 10.33735/phimisci.2020.I.44 Seneca, L. A. (63 ad) On Benefits, trans. from Latin by M. Griffin (2011) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) Sjöstedt-Hughes, P. (2022) The White Sun of Substance: Spinozism and the Psychedelic Amor Dei Intellectualis, in: eds. C. Hauskeller, P. Sjöstedt-Hughes and E. Gibson, Philosophy and Psychedelics (London: Bloomsbury Academic) Smith, A. (2009) The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 6th edn. (New York: Penguin Books) Steindl-Rast, D. (2014) Are You Thankful or Are You Grateful? Gratefulness. Available at: https://gratefulness.org/resource/thankful-or-grateful/ Swanson, L. R. (2018) Unifying Theories of Psychedelic Drug Effects, Frontiers in Pharmacology, 9:172. doi: 10.3389/fphar.2018.00172 Ulrich, J. (2018) The Timothy Leary Project (New York: Abrams Press)

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Walker, A. D. M. (1981) III – Gratefulness and Gratitude, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 81:1, pp. 39–56 Watkins, C. Ph. (2016) Gratitude and the Good Life: Towards a Psychology of Appreciation (New York: Springer) Watts, R., Day, C., Krzanowski, J., Nutt, D. and Carhart-Harris, R. (2017) Patients’ Accounts of Increased ‘Connectedness’ and ‘Acceptance’ after Psilocybin for Treatment-resistant Depression, Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 57:5, pp. 520–564 Weiss, R. (1985) The Moral and Social Dimensions of Gratitude, The Southern Journal of Philosophy, XXIII:4, pp. 491–501 Wood, A. M., Brown, G. D. A. and Maltby, J. (2011) Thanks, But I’m Used to Better: A Relative Rank Model of Gratitude, Emotion, 11:1, pp. 175–180.

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Chapter 2 W HAT I S R E A L  I T Y  ? John Buchanan

This chapter explores what impact the insights from psychedelic experience might hold for philosophy. It argues that Alfred North Whitehead’s unique metaphysical perspective provides a foundation for taking seriously the evidence from psychedelic states, as well as a means of understanding how extraordinary experiences can provide knowledge not only of the depths of the human psyche, but also real insights into the greater realities of our universe. In short, Whitehead’s philosophy offers a justification for the possibility of psychedelics producing ‘objective’ knowledge, while psychedelic experience holds a real potential for deepening our philosophical speculation and enriching our cosmological perspective.

1 Philosophy and Psychology Many years ago, I found myself dissolving into laughter as I listened (in an altered state) to a Firesign Theatre comedy album in which a raucous student shouts at the high school principal, ‘What is reality?’ Many experiences can lead one to ask this question, especially those that upend our traditional understanding of the concept. Psychedelics are particularly effective at challenging established ideas about reality, for they often transcend its supposed boundaries. The question of ‘the real’ is a critical issue to both psychedelic experience and philosophy. In my case, experience with the former led me to study the latter with this fundamental question in mind. This chapter examines how psychedelics might have real implications for our understanding of the metaphysical and cosmological constitution of our universe, as well as for the human psyche. While some might be inclined to dismiss these concerns as irrelevant, especially amidst the vagaries of some postmodern philosophizing or theorizing, I believe these issues are still of vital importance for society’s general concerns about how seriously to take the insights of extraordinary experience. This question is all the more pressing for the scientist and scholar trying to make sense of the psychedelic milieu. Does philosophical theory take the lead in this domain, guiding our interpretation of psychedelic experience and extraordinary states? Or should our 31

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philosophies bow before the extraordinary realities revealed by our excursions into the psychedelic realms? I am reminded of a final exam question from my undergraduate Philosophy of Psychology course: Which should come first, a philosophy of psychology or a psychology of philosophy? The ‘proper’ response – at least for this philosophy class – was that philosophy takes priority by furnishing a coherent metapsychological foundation for defining terms, delineating the parameters of an appropriate research methodology, and establishing a sound theoretical connection to the larger scientific enterprise. While this still strikes me as a valid position, I think this relationship deserves closer consideration, especially if the psychology in question wants to take into account the kinds of intuitions, insights, and revelations that emerge from psychedelic states. In short, the relationship between philosophy and psychology must go both ways. As William James and Carl Jung point out, the personal psychology – conscious and unconscious – of the individual theorist plays an important role in forming their philosophical inclinations.1 Being as aware as possible of the dominating events and personal characteristics that have shaped one’s perspective is important for obtaining at least some degree of intellectual impartiality. In the case of psychedelics, the consequences of a personal familiarity with these substances take on even more significance. The revolutionary nature of these psychedelic experiences can channel one’s thinking and orientation in fascinating new directions, both perceptive and deceptive. Whatever the case, for many people, psychedelic experiences inspire a radical re-evaluation of their understanding of the self and the world. At the same time, bringing a suitable philosophical system to bear on the issues and phenomena revealed by psychedelic journeys also has advantages. With powerful substances like psychedelics, keeping a sense of balance and connection with the everyday world provides a stabilizing effect that reduces the risk of being overwhelmed by the extraordinary experiences that are part and parcel of psychedelic states of consciousness. Finding a philosophical perspective capable of embracing and contextualizing the transpersonal realms can help in this regard.2 Of course, psychological stabilization can also be maintained through sympathetic friends and colleagues and other similarly grounding elements of everyday life, as well as through careful preparation of set and setting. But having a worldview capable of incorporating, or more accurately, interfacing with these extraordinary states of consciousness helps create a favorable environment for both personal and scholarly experimentation and explication. 1. For example, see Jung’s writings on Psychological Types (Jung, 1971) and Lecture One in James’s, ([1909] 1996). 2. Stanislav Grof, one of the founders of transpersonal psychology, writes that ‘transpersonal experiences can be defined as experiential expansion or extension of consciousness beyond the usual boundaries of the body-ego and beyond the limitations of time and space’ (Grof, 1988, p. 38). Thus, by using the term ‘transpersonal realm,’ I am referring broadly to that range of extraordinary experiences that often fall under the rubric of mystical, spiritual, and parapsychological, and used to be known more generally as ‘altered states of consciousness.’

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While having a philosophical perspective to interpret and understand these extraordinary experiences is important for making a place for them in our worldview, it is also important to be receptive to the new possibilities and insights they present. This leads us into the next question: Is personal mystical insight a necessary part of metaphysical speculation? One prominent transpersonal theorist has argued that this is definitely the case.

2 Metaphysics of the Future In Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality, transpersonal theorist Ken Wilber answers this question with an emphatic ‘Yes.’ Wilber essentially asserts that people who have deep mystical experiences will provide the experiential grounding and understanding for the metaphysics of the future, a meta-philosophy that is the outgrowth of personal psychospiritual insight (adjudicated by the shared experience of a community of spiritual adepts). Wilber argues that true transpersonallyinformed philosophies are not rationally deduced metaphysical systems but rather ‘the results of actual contemplative apprehensions and direct developmental phenomenology’.3 Therefore, ‘actual contemplative development (grounded in genuine spiritual experience) is the future of metaphysics.’4 Let us examine this claim more closely. Wilber’s basic intuition that transpersonal states provide experiences and perspectives that open one up to a much wider appreciation of the vicissitudes of human consciousness seems sound. Moreover, meditative insights into oneself and the deeper nature of reality can help reveal unconscious assumptions and biases that might otherwise keep one trapped in more limited modes of thought or frames of reference. However, although direct experience of spiritual or psychedelic realities can open one’s horizons in important ways, I do not believe it bestows ready-made solutions to life’s deepest philosophical questions and problems, much less the basis for a future metaphysics. Simply having mystical experiences does not mysteriously make one capable of sophisticated philosophical thought, any more than being ‘enlightened’ makes one an architect, mathematician, or gourmet cook. For if, as Wilber contends, the moral intuition of an enlightened master is not an absolute apprehension, but rather a generalized feeling, then we should not expect the mystics’ philosophical explications of their intuitions to be accurate in every detail either. Wilber acknowledges as much: That I clearly intuit Spirit in all I’s and all We’s and It’s does not mean that I automatically know all the details (scientific, philosophic, ethical, cultural, and otherwise) that must go into the final decision. In fact, I might have a fine

3. Wilber, 1995, p. 336. 4. Ibid., p. 680.

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Philosophy and Psychedelics intuition of Spirit but unpack it poorly owing to a lack of relative understanding and relative knowledge.5

Perhaps the disconnect here may be that Wilber is employing the term ‘metaphysics’ primarily to denote higher level mystical experiences such as those of the subtle and causal realms, whereas I would prefer (in the context of this chapter, at least) to use the term ‘metaphysics’ in the more traditional philosophical sense, as the fundamental structure or texture of all of reality.

3 Radical Empiricism Let us step back from Wilber’s ‘future of metaphysics’ and turn to this chapter’s central concern: the epistemological status of psychedelic experience and evidence. The pivotal question on the table, as I see it, is whether the use of psychedelics can provide important and reliable knowledge about our own minds, the universe, and the nature of reality. Is this information ‘real’? Needless to say, psychedelic experiences are ‘real’ in the most basic phenomenological sense that they occur as a part of someone’s experience and can be appreciated and described as phenomena appearing to consciousness. I do not think even the most hardened skeptic would take exception with that. (Well, perhaps some would argue that experience is not real, thereby contradicting their premise in the process.) But how far does this ‘phenomenological’ approach get us?6 The crucial point at hand is not whether these experiences exist, but whether they can reasonably be written off as hallucinations, delusions, mere imaginings, or figments of the mind. Do they, in fact, tell us something ‘objective’ about ourselves and the world? The answer to this query depends on at least two things: what evidence we decide to include in our assessment of the nature of reality and the manner in which we understand the nature of perception, the mind, and how we know the world. Of course, exploring the meaning of ‘the real’ could easily be a book in itself. But what I am trying to get at here, is whether psychedelic experiences are at least sometimes veridical, that is, whether what is revealed through these experiences can coincide with reality in way that provides us with accurate knowledge about the nature of things. The underlying challenge confronting insights from psychedelic experience is modernity’s narrow notion of empirical. This has a long and distinguished history. In brief, Descartes’s ghost not only haunts Western thought, it also reigns over it. His brilliantly imaginative ideas of a radical separation between mind and matter, and the geometrization of the external world, provided the basis for science’s

5. Ibid., p. 735. 6. For more on phenomenology, see Husserl, 1960 and 1962.

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quantification of the universe and the resultant rapid advances in theory and technology. An unintended consequence of this metaphysics of radical duality was that it set the stage for modernity ‘losing its mind’, as human experience slowly but inevitably (or so it seems) became of diminished importance and even of questionable reality. In particular, it left the range of human experiences that lie outside of sensory perception adrift. The possibility of parapsychological and mystical experience received an even more fatal blow when Father Mersenne – along with Newton, Huygens, and of course Descartes – championed seventeenth-century science’s rejection of actionat-a-distance.7 This effort was in part aimed at preserving Jesus’s sacred status by ruling out all miracles and psychic powers except those attributed to the Son of God, as well as reinforcing the position of the Church as sole mediator between God and man – in an effort to shore up the Church’s authority.8 Hume’s penetrating and galvanizing arguments for the primacy of sensory experience for all knowledge, what Alfred North Whitehead calls the sensationalist doctrine, paved the way for the eventual ‘victory’ of a positivistic science and helped usher in a mechanistic materialistic model as the Weltanschauung of the modern Western world. By making sense perception the sine qua non, vast areas of human experience slowly fell by the wayside for serious scientific and scholarly consideration. Broadly speaking, rational analysis of the sensory world became the privileged form of knowledge and evidence. As much as philosophers, theologians, and humanists of all shapes and colours have railed against the inadequacies, limitations, and dangers of this type of dogmatic sensory empiricism, it still dominates our world today, for better or worse, perpetuating a worldview devoid of value, purpose, and internal relations, that is, deep interconnectedness. Whitehead, in his philosophy of organism, abandons this ‘sensationalist doctrine,’ where conscious sense perception is considered the primary source of knowledge about the world and forms the foundation for all other modes of human experience. Hume’s notion of an enduring human subject with sense perception is replaced in Whitehead’s scheme by moments of subjective experience interconnected by the direct flow of unconscious causal feeling, constituting a primitive and more primary mode of perception. The philosophy of organism . . . rejects the sensationalist doctrine: hence its [i.e., the philosophy of organism’s] doctrine of the objectification of one actual occasion in the experience of another actual occasion. Each actual entity is a throb of experience including the actual world within its scope.9

7. See Griffin, 1997, pp. 17–20. 8. Ibid., p. 21. 9. Whitehead, [1929] 1979, p. 190.

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Whitehead’s novel approach is described in more detail below, as these ideas require some explication, especially for those unfamiliar with Whitehead’s work. There is, however, an alternative to this Humean vision of an empiricism that relies primarily on the objects of sense perception, especially visual objects. William James advocated passionately for just such an alternative approach, one which takes seriously all experience. Besides taking into account the phenomena traditionally studied by the sciences and positivistic philosophy, James’s radical empiricism is specifically open to all kinds of mystical, paranormal, and psychedelic experiences, as well as what we might call the phenomena of everyday life. To quote a pithy passage from William James on whether to include transpersonal phenomena in our theories of the world: ‘Without too much, you can never have enough of anything.’10 Whitehead, in a slightly more restrained manner, captures perfectly the broad inclusiveness and essence of radical empiricism – that all kinds of experience must be considered and accounted for: Nothing can be omitted, experience drunk and experience sober, experience sleeping and experience waking, experience drowsy and experience wide-awake, experience self-conscious and experience self-forgetful, experience intellectual and experience physical, experience religious and experience sceptical . . . experience in the light and experience in the dark, experience normal and experience abnormal.11

If he had been writing today, Whitehead might well have added: ‘Experience tripping and experience straight.’ The and of this dichotomy, and in all of the above, is necessary for a complete and balanced account of the full nature of the universe as we encounter it. For Whitehead, philosophy must draw evidence from all human experiential domains if the goal is to construct a metaphysics adequate to the whole of reality. As we saw earlier, Wilber suggests that the future of metaphysics consists of ‘actual contemplative development (grounded in genuine spiritual experience).’ But should not an adequate metaphysics apply to the entire range of experience? Whitehead’s process philosophy attempts to account for all experience and to provide a ‘coherent, logical, necessary system of ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted.’ Thus ‘this ideal of speculative philosophy has its rational side and its empirical side.’12 As we shall see when we examine Whitehead’s notion of an ‘actual occasion,’ Whitehead’s philosophy of organism is also a radical metaphysics of experience, making it highly amenable to an interface with psychology and the entire filed of extraordinary or transpersonal experience.

10. James, [1909] 1996, p. 316. 11. Whitehead, [1933] 1967, p. 226. 12. Whitehead, [1929] 1979, p. 3.

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Interestingly, Whitehead’s description of the ‘task of philosophy’ bears more than a casual resemblance to the kind of influence that transpersonal experience can evince: Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity. Each actual occasion contributes to the circumstances of its origin additional formative elements deepening its own peculiar individuality. Consciousness is only the last and greatest of such elements by which the selective character of the individual obscures the external totality from which it originates and which it embodies . . . . The task of philosophy is to recover the totality obscured by this selection.13

I would suggest that psychedelics can serve the same purpose. By deconstructing the ego’s habitually narrow patterns of interest, psychedelic experiences help open up awareness to the usually obscured flow of feelings, phenomena, and insights from the unconscious depths.

4 Mode of Access The other key philosophical notions pertinent to the possibility of objective knowledge involve the nature of perception and the nature of reality. Our understanding of these crucial problems will determine our ability to accurately assess the significance of psychedelic experience in particular and extraordinary experience more generally. It will be difficult to argue convincingly for the empirical significance of psychedelic insights without an alternative ‘mode of access’ to reality, that is, a way human beings might experience the world in a manner other than through conscious sensory perception – one which reveals ‘real’ information about the world. While we still could argue that these states reveal intriguing insights into the nature of the human mind, such intuitions would be viewed by many as applicable solely to the domains of psychology and religion. To transcend this limitation, it will be important to show how the human mind is related to its greater environment. Here we have the infamous mind-body and mind-world problems – what Schopenhauer called the ‘world-knot.’14 In accordance with the internal coherence of his philosophical approach, Whitehead’s theory of perception also affords insight into these knotty issues which, in turn, bear on the relevance of extraordinary experiences for our theories of the world.

13. Ibid., p. 15. 14. See Schopenhauer, [1813] 1999. For a detailed treatment of how Whitehead’s philosophy of organism is useful for reconceiving the mind-body relationship, see Griffin, 1998.

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One of Whitehead’s most important philosophical innovations concerns a mode of perception more primary than conscious sensory perception. Ever since Freud’s popularization of the significance of unconscious processes, and neurophysiology’s charting of the neurological pathways underlying sense perception, it should not be surprising that Whitehead calls conscious sense perception a ‘derivative’ mode. What is novel, however, is Whitehead’s unique delineation of this more primary mode of perception, which he calls prehension. Prehension involves a direct flow of causal feeling from one event to another (or within an event itself), thus providing the basis for ‘internal relations’ between the momentary pulses of experience that Whitehead hypothesizes make up all real entities in our universe. We are most directly aware of these ‘prehensive’ relations through our bodies, for example, when feelings of hunger, pain, or sexual arousal flood through the body and into consciousness. These primitive sensations circulating through the body and into conscious awareness give a sense of the underlying flow of causal feeling that pulses through all of existence. Memory is another prime example of where prehensive feelings are most experientially accessible, especially short-term memory, when the immediate past lingers on into the present, as when listening to music or following a moving image. Long-term memory is also germane here, especially in those instances where a scene from the past suddenly intrudes with such vividness and presence as to suggest an actual reliving of the incident. (This is not to assert that brain activity is completely by-passed in these situations; only that the neural contribution to memory is in at least some cases supplemented more or less by a direct flow of past events into present experience.) A heightened awareness of these causal feelings also appears during moments of intuitive insight and ideational inspiration, when others’ emotions or one’s own creative process erupts from the unconscious depths into conscious awareness. And, of course, those familiar with psychedelic states can add many of their own examples of this kind of direct flow of feeling from their bodies, the unconscious depths, and the world at large. Stanislav Grof ’s extensive research into extraordinary states provides support for a more primary mode of perception (as well as some of Whitehead’s novel ideas). He writes that, The existence and nature of transpersonal experiences . . . imply such seemly absurd notions as . . . nonlocal connections in the universe; communication through unknown means and channels; memory without a material substrate; nonlinearity of time; or consciousness associated with all living organisms (including lower animals, plants, unicellular organisms and viruses) and even inorganic matter.15

This more primary mode of perception, though more complex in humans, is metaphysically similar to the way that quantum level events create themselves by selecting and synthesizing the influence of past events. Whitehead attributes this 15. Grof, 1988, p. 162.

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same creative synthetic process to all momentary events, whether at the quantum, atomic, molecular, cellular, or human level.

5 The Real Thing The ‘really real’ of Whiteheadian metaphysics are actual (real) occasions (momentary pulses of integrative feeling). Each moment directly draws upon, and synthesizes, the feelings and data of past events, that is, ‘occasions of experience’ that have already completed their moments of creative integration.16 A critical point here is that Whitehead regards these momentary pulses, which compose the flow of actuality at all levels, as experiential in nature.17 This is not to say that these occasions of experience all possess consciousness; rather they are mostly or entirely unconscious by human standards. Nonetheless, Whitehead chooses the designation ‘experiential’ because these momentary pulses are characterized by their active incorporation, selection, integration, and transformation of data derived directly out of the flow of energy/feeling from past events. In this way, Whitehead’s radical empiricism embraces the vibrational activity of atomic and subatomic entities, the pulsating aliveness of molecules and cellular individuals, and the momentary occasions that underlie the flow of human experience – thereby bringing the full range of scientific and humanistic concerns under its aegis. The actual entities of the universe, the really real, are experiential, or feeling, in nature. It cannot be stressed enough that Whitehead is using the term ‘feeling’ in a specific metaphysical sense. Emotion and energy are two specific manifestations of feeling – which is the more comprehensive concept, denoting the direct flow of information and valuation between and within events. Whitehead’s novel idea of prehension as a direct flow of causal feeling between momentary events, when combined with his explication of all events as being made up of mostly unconscious feelings, provides a unique way of understanding the nature of human experience and its relation to its bodily matrix. According to this scheme, the brain’s neural events are in constant interaction with the human-level unifying events that constitute what might be called the

16. In this chapter, I use the terms ‘events,’ ‘moments of experience,’ and ‘actual occasions’ interchangeably. They all are used to refer to the momentary pulses of mostly (or entirely) unconscious feeling or experience that Whitehead understands as constituting all the actualities that make up our universe. 17. Unlike some currently popular Eastern and New Age philosophies, Whitehead does not attribute consciousness to all actualities, nor consider it to be a single universal field. Rather, consciousness is the ‘occasional crown’ of experience for certain high-grade organisms. However, in Process and Reality, Whitehead does suggest that, in addition to the individual occasions that exhibit episodes of conscious awareness, various philosophical and religious considerations support the idea of a central unifying Event, God, which would entail a conscious center that integrates all the experiences of the universe’s finite entities.

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personal order or ‘soul’ of the human being. Thus, human moments of experience are not the same as the brain matrix of neural events, nor are the mind and brain two aspects of the same underlying stuff. Rather, a new series of far more intricate experiential events arises largely out of its brain activities. This higher-order series of events generates the depth, complexity, and unity of the human psyche. I say ‘largely’ because, in Whitehead’s view, all events mirror the initial process by which quantum-level events are open to the entire past universe and, to some degree, take it all into account. This means that past moments of the psyche are also flooding into each new moment of psychic integration at the human level, thus furnishing the basis for an ongoing sense of identity, purpose, and continuity of experience – and at the same time recreating, moment-to-moment, the structural integrity of the unconscious mind.18 Most important to note for our purposes, this primary mode of perception provides access to all – not merely personal – events, thus bestowing a transpersonal mode of ingress for many of the kinds of experiences that belong to the phenomenology of psychedelic journeys: such as experiences of the aliveness and vibrancy of nature; enhanced awareness of auras and energy flows; heightened perception into the depth of natural phenomena and the history of the world and the universe; and encounters with spiritual entities of various types.19 Of course, the last might be characterized by some in terms of heightened perception into the psychic depths, accessing phenomena from the collective unconscious or mythic levels of the mind. In these psychic regions, there exists no simple boundary between the personal depth unconscious and the universe at large.20 Openings into the unconscious depths can reveal more than the architecture of the human psyche, though the resultant revelations about the shallowness of everyday awareness, the limitations of ego-consciousness, the fluidity of experience, and the protean creativity of the unconscious processes, are incredibly important in themselves. These openings into the unconscious can even reveal more than the extraordinary depth dimensions of the universe. Since the human-level event’s

18. A Whiteheadian interpretation of quantum events has been articulated by physicists such as Henry Stapp, Irvin Laszlo, and Timothy Eastman, and most explicitly developed by Epperson, 2004, and Epperson and Zafiris, 2013. 19. For a discussion of these kind of extraordinary perceptions, see Grof, 1988, pp. 110–111. 20. Whitehead himself has little to say about the existence of purely spiritual beings. He does indicate, however, that they are a possibility within the context of his metaphysical scheme, for example, see Whitehead, 1974, pp. 106–107. One of the intriguing aspects of transpersonal psychology is that it has the potential to fill in, or flesh out, some of the ‘spiritual’ dimensions of Whitehead’s cosmology. In this regard Whitehead writes, ‘There is no reason why such a question should not be decided on more special evidence, religious or otherwise, provided that it is trustworthy’ (p. 107).

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metaphysical structure is essentially similar to the structure of all other events in the universe, this kind of profound penetration into the underlying processes of the mind could also offer insight into the very nature of reality itself. Metaphysical revelations about this fundamental level of reality are described frequently by meditation adepts, most notably of the Buddhist traditions. An intriguing example is Daniel Goldman’s account of the Buddhist experience of nirvana. His description of ever-heightening perception of the rising and falling of the moments of experience correlates closely with Whitehead’s metaphysical description of the formation and dissolution of actual occasions: As this pseudonirvana gradually diminishes, the meditator’s perception of each moment of awareness becomes clearer. He can make increasingly fine discrimination of successive moments until his perception is flawless. As his perception quickens, the ending of each moment of awareness is more clearly perceived than its arising. Finally, the meditator perceives each moment only as it vanishes. . . . His detachment is at a peak. His noticing no longer enters into or settles down on any phenomena at all. At this moment, a consciousness arises that takes as its object the ‘signless, no-occurrence, no-formation’: nirvana. . . . That experience is a cognitive shock of deepest psychological consequence. . . . Decisive behavior changes follow from this state of consciousness, and the full realization of nirvana actuates a permanent alteration of the meditator’s consciousness per se. With the meditator’s realization of nirvana, aspects of his ego and of his normal consciousness are abandoned, never to rise again.21

I would suggest that, from a Whiteheadian perspective, this ‘permanent alteration’ in consciousness can at least in part be attributed to the radical disjuncture between the psyche’s moments of experience, which in turn causes a profound disruption in the inheritance of those patterns of feeling that moment to moment reproduce the psyche’s unconscious habits of emotion, action, perception, and thought. In sum, Whitehead’s novel conception of prehension makes it possible to take seriously the evidence from transpersonal experience: be it extraordinary phenomena, parapsychological faculties, or mystical insight into the nature of reality. It also means, more broadly, that we have a direct, underlying connection to reality at all times, with ‘reality’ defined in this case as the accomplished facts of past events. This stands in contrast to representationalism, where the world or reality that we experience is a mere replica or internally generated image of the ‘real’ world, which is never directly experienced.

21. Walsh and Vaughn, 1980, pp. 147–148.

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Thus, Whitehead’s epistemology is also a metaphysics, for how we know the world is also the essential nature of the actualities that make up our world: namely, the direct flow of feeling/data between occasions of experience. This dual function offers the basis for a correspondence theory of truth22 and a way out of the problems presented by an unqualified relativism. Objective knowledge of the world is established by how accurately a subjective experience corresponds to the elements of the past events it is trying to embody. The flow of data into the internal constitution of the psyche means that each new moment of experience begins with an initial input that involves a feeling of the objective past, with ‘objective’ meaning elements from accomplished past events. We arise out of this direct inner connection to the influences of the past, and then creatively shape these influences into a new expression of actuality.23 This also suggests that since our direct conduit to past events, to objective reality, comes in the form of feelings from the deepest levels of unconscious experience, things that promote heightened access to these feelings from the depths also provide a greater access to ‘things in themselves’. Thus, it could be argued not only that psychedelics can convey accurate information about the nature of the universe, but also that psychedelic experiences when properly utilized hold a privileged position for revealing hidden dimensions of reality normally obscured from human consciousness. In this vein, Grof has described psychedelics as revolutionary tools for investigating the psychic depths: ‘LSD is a catalyst or amplifier of mental processes. If properly used it could become something like the microscope or the telescope of psychiatry.’24

6 A Depth Cosmology In short, Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy provides a way of understanding how veridical psychedelic experiences could arise, and why such evidence should be taken seriously in our attempts to understand the more subtle aspects of our world. Regarding the latter, I believe that the insights and intuitions emerging from psychedelic experiences, and transpersonal experiences more broadly, have much to offer to philosophy, especially in the area of cosmology – and to psychology, religion, and ethics as well. For example, in Process and Reality, Whitehead indulges in some speculations (important ones I believe) about the ultimate nature of God. His philosophy also

22. Whitehead, [1929] 1979, pp. 190–191. 23. Creativity is the ultimate metaphysical principle for Whitehead, and it is the source of freedom from determinism and what allows for real adventure in the universe. Through its original response and synthesis of the data received from past events, the creative activity of each actual occasion adds a degree of final causation to the efficient causation of the past. 24. Grof, [1980] 2001, p. 299.

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provides the basis for delineating several other Ultimates, such as the World (animism) and Pure Being (Buddhist Emptiness) but has little to say about any other spiritual beings or dimensions. Supplementing Whitehead’s potent, but limited, demarcation of the spiritual dimensions of our universe, the phenomena revealed through psychedelic states have much to add concerning spiritual beings and realms, the subtle energies inherent in nature, and the mysteries alluded to in the mystical literature. In this way, psychedelics hold great potential for broadening and deepening our appreciation of the spiritual nature of our universe and the reality in which we live. Great care must be taken when interpreting and compiling experiences, insights, and revelations from the transpersonal realm. We all bring a personal perspective into even the most transpersonal of experiences, which colour not only our interpretation, but also the experience itself. A whole new empirical method for evaluating transpersonal evidence may need to be worked out if we are to be able to accurately and adequately evaluate the significance of these extraordinary phenomena. That said, Whitehead’s process philosophy shows us a way of understanding human perception and the nature of experience which indicates that psychedelic experience is not purely subjective in nature but in fact can reveal important information about the world. I will conclude by suggesting the opposite of Wilber’s assertion that only ‘mystics’ are capable of doing the real metaphysics of the future. Rather philosophers, and theorists of all schools, are needed to pluck the full fruits of mystical and psychedelic experience, in order to fathom their significance for humanity at large. As Whitehead (perhaps surprisingly) writes: If you like to phrase it so, philosophy is mystical. For mysticism is direct insight into depths as yet unspoken. But the purpose of philosophy is to rationalize mysticism: not by explaining it away, but by the introduction of novel verbal characterizations, rationally coordinated.25

Within Whitehead’s framework of the speculative method, philosophy should enjoy an ongoing relationship with psychology, rather than one or the other being more primordial. For as this philosophic method is seeking to rationally uncover and describe the essential elements of reality and our universe, it is also in dialogue with the more specialized areas of knowledge, adjusting its ‘novel verbal characterizations’ as new evidence arises or becomes accessible – such as that offered by psychedelic experience and its elucidation within transpersonal psychology.

25. Whitehead, [1938] 1968, p. 174.

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References Epperson, Michael (2004) Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (New York: Fordham University Press). Epperson, Michael and Zafiris, Elias (2013) Foundations of Relational Realism: A Topological Approach to Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Nature (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books). Griffin, David Ray (1998) Unsnarling the World-Knot: Consciousness, Freedom, and the Mind–Body Problem (Berkeley: University of California Press) Grof, Stanislav (1988) The Adventure of Self-Discovery: Dimensions of Consciousness and New Perspectives in Psychotherapy and Inner Exploration (Albany: State University of New York Press) Grof, Stanislav ([1980]2001) LSD Psychotherapy (Sarasota: MAPS edition) Husserl, Edmond (1960) Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers) Husserl, Edmond (1962) Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (New York: Collier Books) James, William ([1909]1996) A Pluralistic Universe (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press) Jung, Carl (1971) Psychological Types, Volume 6 of the Collected Works of C. G. Jung (Princeton: Princeton University Press) Schopenhauer, Arthur ([1813]1999) On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (Chicago: Open Court) Walsh, Roger N. and Vaughn, Frances, eds. (1980) Beyond Ego: Transpersonal Dimensions in Psychology (Los Angeles: J. P. Tarcher, Inc.) Whitehead, Alfred North ([1933]1967) Adventures of Ideas (New York: The Free Press, Macmillan Publishing Co. Inc.) Whitehead, Alfred North ([1938]1968) Modes of Thought (New York: The Free Press, Macmillan Publishing Co. Inc.) Whitehead, Alfred North ([1926] 1974) Religion in the Making (New York: New American Library, Meridian Books.) Whitehead, Alfred North ([1929]1979) Process and Reality; An Essay in Cosmology, Corrected edition: eds. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co; Free Press paperback edition) Wilber, Ken (1995) Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution (Boston: Shambhala Publications, Inc.)

Chapter 3 A C U LT U R A L H I S T O RY O F P SYC H E D E L IC S I N T H E U S Kyle Buller, Joe Moore, and Lenny Gibson

The designation ‘mystical’ derives from the ancient Greek mystes, meaning ‘initiate’ of ecstatic cults such as that at Eleusis.1 The philosopher and psychologist William James conceived the first characterization of mysticism that was independent of any specific religious orthodoxy.2 In this chapter we employ the centrality of James’s definition, which covers both methodologically fostered and spontaneous mystical experiences. However, we expand our purview to the wide range of exceptional experience, which encompasses experiences in addition to religious that are called psychedelic, shamanic, satori, altered states, expanded consciousness, nonordinary consciousness, etc. We include experiences facilitated by ingesting substances or by methods that range from meditation to breathing practices to dance to Vodoun3 and to bloodletting.4 Albert Hofmann’s synthesis of LSD-25 in 1943, and his discovery that it facilitates mystical experience, was culturally significant for several reasons. First, LSD is easily and cheaply manufactured on an industrial scale, using readily available biochemistry. Second, LSD requires no special cultural knowledge to acquire, find and prepare, unlike naturally occurring substances. Third, LSD is susceptible to use independently of culturally informed and managed settings. This latter was a major factor in the development of the counterculture in the United States that elicited the bane of criminalization. Hofmann’s discovery in the mid-twentieth century marked the start of a decisive development of interest in chemically isolating and analysing psychotropic elements from natural sources, bringing them under the rubric of scientific chemistry. Peyote and its mescaline derivative had been investigated in the West as

1. In turn, mystes is derived from μύειν, meaning ‘to close (the eyes or lips)’. 2. James, 1902, p. 379ff. 3. Davis, 2001. 4. Schele and Miller, 1986.

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early as 1897, but interest extended only to a small number of chemists and some of the first modern psychologists.5 But chemical compounds do not come with guidebooks regarding their use. When LSD found its way into the Western population at large, it burst into a culture that had no concurrent framework in which to integrate it. To understand the historical impact of LSD we must first consider some of the history of exceptional experience. The philosophy of psychedelics is in some ways new, at least in the West, but it builds on a range of traditions, and is influenced by the history of and cultural engagements with psychedelics in the West. These are, in turn, shaped by complex societal conditions and factors. In this chapter we discuss events and issues framing contemporary psychedelic philosophy from a US/American perspective. This particular focus is justifiable insofar as the US situation has its own peculiarities, yet its policies have resonated globally. Relevant characteristics include: (a) American publicity related to psychedelics has been prominent in Western media accounts; (b) the impetus for international criminalization came significantly from the United States government; (c) issues related to the war in Vietnam, a largely American initiative, were major factors underlying the American government’s push for criminalization; (d) the United States has a pointed history involving legal prohibition of alcohol; and (e) a United States incorporated charity, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), was established early to get the camel’s nose under the tent by demonstrating the efficacy of the mild psychedelic MDMA with treatmentresistant, post-traumatic stress syndrome in veterans of US wars.

1 The History of Exceptional Experience The term ‘mystical’ has long been applied to a relatively narrow set of experiences characterized as ‘religious’ by Western scholars. Scholarship since Hofmann’s inadvertent discovery of the psychotropic effects of LSD-25 reveals that mystical experiences are of a piece with a wide range of exceptional experience, facilitated not only by a variety of plant materials and synthetic chemicals, but also by religious and behavioural practices. Modern anthropology has discovered psychedelic substance use by stone age tribes.6 It has also revealed that such cultures used other practices such as drumming, dancing and chanting to facilitate exceptional experiences.7 Practices less compatible with modern sensibilities are

5. Hofmann was also solicited for the chemical analysis of the Psilocybe mexicana, mushrooms that Gordon Wasson had obtained as the first outsider after his experience with the curandera Maria Sabina (Hofmann, 2005, p. 124ff ). 6. Furst, 2005. 7. Harner, 2005.

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Mayan bloodletting and the American indigenous peoples’ Plains Culture Sun Dance.8 It involves young men painfully dancing around a pole to which they are fastened by ‘rawhide thongs pegged through the skin of their chests’. Selfflagellation is still practiced by some Shiite Muslims on Ashura. Living burial is practiced in the initiation of the Dagara of Burkina Faso and Ghan.9 Practices and exceptional experience have been thoroughly interwoven throughout history. Mystical experiences also occur spontaneously, however, without any identifiable physiological or behavioural antecedent. But the recently enabled ready availability of manufactured psychedelics has made possible the more methodological, experimental investigation of exceptional experience. This possibility has been furthered by William James’s identification of certain druginduced states as mystical. No one can be prevented from having a spontaneous exceptional experience but, historically, people have often been denounced, punished or killed for having such experiences. Joan of Arc is an exemplary victim, but she is not the only martyr, nor the only heretic identified by the Christian Church, to be burned or tortured to death. The heavy hand of the Church during the Middle Ages suppressed exceptional experience or at least suppressed reports of these experiences. Exceptional experiences of women especially meant that they were seen as witches and often killed.10 Behaviours that would have earlier in history led to accusations of witchcraft later fell under the diagnosis of hysteria, as it was devised by Jean-Martin Charcot. He supervised the Salpêtrière Asylum in Paris at the beginning of modern psychiatry and caused its bent toward conceptualizing abnormal experiences as brain diseases. Although spontaneous exceptional experience cannot be prevented, the development of powerful psychiatric medications in the twentieth century can act as powerful suppressants for the sort of exceptional experience that Stanislav Grof has characterized as ‘spiritual emergency’.11 For mainstream modern psychiatry, spiritual emergency is rarely differentiated from mental illness. Grof calls this into question: From ecstatic trances of shamans, or medicine men and women, to revelations of the founders of the great religions, prophets, saints, and spiritual teachers, such experiences have been sources of religious enthusiasm, remarkable healing, and artistic inspiration. All ancient and preindustrial cultures placed high value on nonordinary states of consciousness as an important means of learning about

8. Young, 2007. 9. Somé, 1994. 10. Wilby, 2005. 11. Grof and Grof, 1989.

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Stanislav Grof is one of the most important of LSD researchers. He characterizes LSD as ‘an unspecific amplifier of mental processes that brings to the surface various elements from the depth of the unconscious’.14 Based on his early research in Prague, he developed an extensive phenomenology of abnormal psychology in terms of stages of the human birth process. His later research led to the development of Holotropic Breathwork and also led him to expand his phenomenology to include, he argues, experiences of lives in past cultures. The disconnection of Western people from their own past cultures of mystical practice pointedly began with the conversion of Roman culture to Christianity in the fourth century. It was complicated by the conflict of Hebraic monotheism with the pluralistic polytheism of ancient Greece and Rome. Philosophy began in ancient Greece as a quest for the meaning of life. The Christian Church replaced the quest with the single goal of salvation. Mysticism was relegated to hermits on the margin of the Church or held in check by the regulated life of monasteries; the Mystery religions were ostracized and their temples destroyed.15 Access to transcendence was available to lay persons only through the mediation of the priests, governed by the bishops. The plural opportunities for ecstatic practice available to the ancient Greeks and Romans became progressively attenuated by medieval Christianity. With the advent of Medieval Scholasticism . . . we find a clear distinction being drawn between theologia and philosophia. Theology became conscious of its autonomy qua supreme science, while philosophy was emptied of its spiritual exercises . . . . Reduced to the rank of ‘a handmaid of theology,’ philosophy’s role was henceforth to furnish theology with conceptual – and hence purely theoretical – material. When, in the modern age, philosophy regained its autonomy, it still retained many features inherited from this medieval conception. In particular, it maintained its purely theoretical character, which even evolved in the direction of a more and more thorough systematization. Not until Nietzsche, Bergson, and existentialism does philosophy consciously return to being a concrete attitude, a way of life and of seeing the world.16 12. Ibid., pp. x–xi. 13. Grof has compared spiritual emergency to the kind of madness that Plato discusses in Phaedrus (Grof, 2006, p. 48). We can also identify it with the confusion experienced by the soul when it is freed from its chains in the Cave in Plato’s Republic and dragged forcibly up to the world above (Hamilton and Cairns, 1961, pp. 514A–517E). Grof ’s thinking compares with other modern psychiatrists such as R.D. Laing, 1967, John Weir Perry, 2005, and Thomas Szasz, 2003. 14. Grof, 1976, p. 8. 15. The temples of the Eleusinian Mysteries were destroyed by the Christianized Roman emperor Theodosius I in AD 392. 16. Hadot, 1995, pp. 107–108.

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The return, however, was spotty. Modern academic philosophy largely continued the ways it had adopted to accommodate Medieval Scholasticism rather than re-engaging its ancient spiritual concerns. It inclined toward theoretical abstractions and technicalities. As a result, it has become a minor discipline in the university. After the attenuation of mystical experience by the Church during the Middle Ages and the reduction of philosophy, the Industrial and Scientific Revolution further erased remaining hints of mysticism: Rationality became the ultimate measure of all things, rapidly replacing spirituality and religious beliefs. In the course of the Scientific revolution in the West, everything even remotely related to mysticism was disqualified as left over from the Dark Ages. Visionary states were no longer seen as important complements of ordinary states of consciousness that can provide valuable information about the self and reality, but as pathological distortions of mental activity. This judgement has been reflected in the fact that modern psychiatry tries to suppress these conditions instead of supporting them and allowing them to take their natural course.17

Whilst existentialism emerged in Europe from currents sourced from Descartes, Kant, Nietzsche, and others, American philosophy emerged from folk psychology and that country’s visionary tradition. William James was the godson of the close friend of Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Charles Saunders Pierce, James, Oliver Wendell Holmes and John Dewey developed the theme of the experiential transcendentalism into a uniquely American philosophy of pragmatism. James was an ardent supporter of Bergson against the scientism of Albert Einstein.18 Amidst the prosperity following the Second World War, the American Beat Generation rebelled against scientism, capital, industry and bureaucracy. After the launch of the first extraterrestrial satellite by the Russians, the Beats became characterized, in the late 1950s, by the American mainstream as ‘Beatniks’. The countercultural frisson of the Beatniks spawned the vibe of the hippies, to the distaste of exemplars like Kerouac and Burroughs. Alan Ginsburg, the most famous Beat, became, however, a comfortable darling of the hippies. His poem Howl has turned into a classic of American literature. He railed against capitalism and conformity and was one of the main bringers of Buddhism to America. Unfortunately, most academic philosophy in America distained the Beats and the hippies. Easily available LSD abetted the rise of hippie counterculture in the United States. The hippies made fumbling attempts to form tribes. In tribal and similar settings, no matter how extraordinary an individual’s experience might be, that person was surrounded by others who had familiarity with some similar kind of experience. When an experience subsided, the person came back to a familiar

17. Grof and Grof, 1989, p. xi. 18. Canales, 2015.

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context with others who could provide support. Mass culture, however, comprised a completely different situation. Flowing, throbbing psychedelic music provided hippies’ tenuous social bonds. But hippie tribalism lacked the coherence of traditional contexts. Groups in the larger culture, such as churches, clubs, civic and social organizations were beginning to fray. LSD brought to the fore a kind of inner experience that modernity had no place for. Spirituality had even disappeared from mainline churches, when they pushed the ‘holy rollers’ to the margins, as remarked by the prominent theologian John B Cobb, Jr, to his colleagues in a seminar at the Esalen Institute,19 in 1998.

2 LSD Trajectory The trajectory of LSD can be followed through a chain of individuals. It begins with Hofmann and his discovery of the substance, one that traced a slow growth of interest through psychological researchers, curious intellectuals, artists, and other creative types intuitively pursuing well-being. The vision of well-being gradually broadened to encompass community. The research of Grof in Prague, Czechoslovakia and Osmund and Hoffer in Saskatchewan, Canada yielded major insights into the nature of psychic dysfunction.20 Aldous Huxley, with partial psychedelic insight, wrote books with important lessons about how psychological, pharmaceutical manipulation of society threatened to control human behavior (Brave New World) or how the world might suffer the aftermath of nuclear war (Ape and Essence). Other, initially lesser-known individuals, from outside the intellectual tradition, were vectors that pointed LSD toward the hippies and also initiated legacies that would have profound impacts decades later. Ken Kesey was a model American teenager, good grades, a football player, then a collegiate wrestling champ. An injury kept him out of the military draft, but a fellowship got him into the Stanford University Writing Program. A friend persuaded Kesey to volunteer with him for a program testing psychomimetic drugs at the local veterans’ hospital for $20 per session. Some of the drugs were horrible for Kesey, but LSD and psilocybin were wonderful. Kesey took a job as a psychiatric aide on the graveyard shift. His previous writing efforts had stalled, but he began tapping out sketches about hospital life on a typewriter he was allowed to use on the ward during the nighttime doldrums. The sketches, he said, ‘came more easily to my hand than anything else before or since’.21 The result was the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest that has since

19. The Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, is a retreat centre and community hub established in 1962 to facilitate discussions on mind, body and other philosophic and spiritual issues. 20. Shroder, 2014. 21. Stevens, 1987, p. 227.

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become a classic, spawning plays and an Oscar-winning movie; even today, sixty years later, a major new prequel has just been made for television. It features Nurse Administrator Ratched, who has since become an iconic stereotype of the psychiatric nurse as an instrument of oppression. The novel’s critique of the mental ward as means of social suppression mirrored the contemporaneous claims of Michel Foucault and the sociological analysis of Erving Goffman.22 Another outsider was Stewart Brand, a student of biology at Stanford. Drafted into the army, he became a parachutist and thought to become a ranger, but he was put off by regimentation and became an army photographer instead. Stationed at Fort Dix, New Jersey, in off-duty hours he found his way into the New York art scene, where he encountered the work of John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg and Allen Kaprow. It gave him ideas about non-hierarchical worlds. He found his way into the art tribe USCO which developed electronic technologies for performances designed to change audiences’ consciousness. Psychedelics offered members of USCO a way to extend their communal work by engaging a mystical experience of togetherness. USCO’s performances spawned the hippie be-in. Inspired by Buckminster Fuller, Brand created the comprehensive design of the counterculture Trips Festival. Brand’s communal and LSD experience fostered a vision of the planet earth as a whole. He put the first photograph from space on the catalogue that was the analogue harbinger of the internet and pioneered a networking community that underlay the personal computer revolution.23 The spread of LSD into the counterculture was famously facilitated by Owsley ‘Bear’ Stanley. A high school dropout, he taught himself to master the exacting biochemical production process24, and he became the counterculture’s benevolent patron, dispensing the money he earned by parlaying his scientific aptitude into prolific production of the LSD tabs that became the trippers’ gold standard.25 Owsley also became the sound man for the rock band The Grateful Dead. Alienation due to capitalism, industrialization, and bureaucracy produced a tangle of major issues. The alienation of European bohemians was Americanized by hippie culture. Civil rights turmoil, the Free Speech Movement, the protest against the war in Vietnam, and its threatening military conscription, hyperstimulated youth. Following the baby boom, those under twenty-five years of age made up half of the total US population. Into this situation the psychedelic cat made its leap out of the bag into full public view. LSD bled from the hippies and counterculture into the antiwar movement. The government became afraid, and from its fear focused on ‘hallucinogenic LSD’. Sensational media attention amplified the fear – ‘Time magazine in March 1966 announced that America was in the midst of an LSD epidemic’.26

22. Stevens, 1987, p. 221ff. 23. Turner, 2006, p. 103ff. 24. Stanley, 2012, p. 47ff. 25. Stevens, 1987, p. 312ff. 26. Stevens, 1987, p. 273.

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The number of those identified as ‘hippies’ was magnified by media far beyond the genuine, core quantity. In that core were the Diggers, a group which sought to create a mini-society free of money and capitalism. They provided a free food service in the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco every day at 4pm, generally feeding about 200 people. Giving the lie to media exaggeration on numbers, they staged a funeral and declared the ‘Death of the Hippie’ in the summer of 1967. Media subsequently seized upon hippie imitators, day trippers and teenie boppers who reputedly came to San Francisco ‘with flowers in their hair’.

3 Prohibition, Prejudice and Criminalization In 1962, the White House convened a Conference on Narcotics that chiefly concerned marijuana and heroin. Psychedelics were a fringe phenomenon limited to ‘long hair and beatnik cults’.27 Four years later, the below-the-radar trajectory of LSD that had traced a line through individual artists and intellectuals had become amplified by the media. In 1966 halting the widespread use of LSD was a national political agendum. US senator Abraham Ribicoff, to promote the War Against Drugs, stated in a righteous manner that ‘only when you sensationalize a subject matter do you get reform’.28 Not scientific interest, not ethical consideration, but politics and publicity interrupted the trajectory toward a major development of knowledge and creativity that has taken fifty years to resume. It was easy for the government to focus on a substance because of the previous prohibition of alcohol and marijuana. When alcohol prohibition could not be sustained, marijuana became the next target. It was politically expedient to inflame fear about marijuana by associating it with Black and Mexican minorities. Slavery’s legacy was therefore carried on for Blacks and its racism, discrimination, and repression extended to the growing population of Mexican immigrants. Then, in turn, politicians readily incorporated psychedelics into the American epithet, ‘The War Against Drugs’. As we have seen, from Hofmann’s discovery of LSD in 1943, interest in the substance runs along a trajectory beginning with its significance for individual well-being and intellectual curiosity to its appropriation in the 1960s as a distraction from the social ills begotten by capital, industry and bureaucracy. What began as an interest of science and philosophy became reconceptualized as a criminal endeavour. The path picked up on a peculiarity of American culture that originated in Puritan New England and wore garments of sin pulled from the ragbag of Medieval theology. The Puritans had an ambiguous relationship with intoxication and ecstasy. For instance, a little bit was acceptable when it came with the breakfast

27. Stevens, 1987, p. 272. 28. Stevens, 1987, p. 276.

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served to Harvard students of two hunks of bread with butter and a half pint of beer.29 Generally, however, the dominant Christian church of Western culture discouraged and prohibited direct experience of transcendence unless it was mediated by the priesthood. Priests coordinated with the European conquest of the Americas and tried to extinguish indigenous religious practices that used psychedelic plants. It banned them as pagan worship of the gods, against which Moses delivered Yahweh’s decree, ‘You shall have no other gods before me’ (Exodus 20:2). This decree echoes in modern prohibition. In 1919, the Puritan antipathy, taken up by pietistic religions and realized in the temperance movement, secured ratification of the 18th amendment to the US Constitution, which prohibited ‘the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States’. Prohibition was promoted by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union as a means to lessen physical abuse by alcoholic husbands. Whether it did or not is unknown, but Prohibition was openly flouted. It created bootleggers, a black market and violent criminal gangs. Covert bars proliferated in the form of speakeasies that changed American culture forever – 30,000 or more flourished in New York City alone.30 Avowed moral inclination was the force behind prohibition, but ethical consideration was, in fact, questionable. Power struggles emerged when the 18th amendment was repealed in 1933, leaving Harry J. Anslinger, the Commissioner of the bureau overseeing it, with a severely diminished domain. Anslinger, backed by some industrial titans including WR Hearst, created an artificial panic around marijuana with sensational articles and incendiary films such as Reefer Madness.31 This propaganda film encouraged repression of black and Mexican people in the United States and fed a campaign that gained back power for Anslinger who conflated drug use, race and ‘Satanic’ jazz music that caused ‘white women to seek sexual relations with Negros and entertainers’. His efforts culminated in the passage of the Marijuana Tax Act in 1937, which effectively made marijuana illegal. Anslinger connived to be considered the preeminent expert on drugs in America. He remained at the helm of the Federal Narcotics Bureau until the Kennedy administration, and his ideas were swiftly adopted by successive administrations – always disproportionately to the detriment of people of colour.32 Thus, we can see that the criminalization of drugs became a major feature of twentieth-century American politics. Its War on Drugs has undermined the American community by abetting division, discrimination, broken minority families, poverty and a criminal class. It has promoted policies and executive

29. Ricks, 2020, p. 43. 30. Kusnic, 2020. 31. Gasnier, 1936. 32. Smith, 2018.

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actions that have led to mass incarceration thereby creating and maintaining a social underclass.33

4 Regulation A key technology facilitating the racist anti-drug enforcement is bureaucratic regulation and action. Bureaucracy developed as a means of governing the nation state and even the smaller political entities that comprise it. Max Weber’s critique above does not apply to bureaucracy per se, but only to excessive bureaucracy and especially regulation. Regulation is necessary in the functioning of the modern state, but it is necessary that regulation be applied discriminatingly to the activities it oversees. The question regarding psychedelics is the ethical appropriateness of regulation and the question as to who shall oversee that regulation. A useful role of regulation is to ensure purity of substances, as it does for alcohol or tobacco, and to prevent callous or ignorant harm to the community. But LSD was summarily labelled a drug, partly because Hofmann, who discovered it, was a chemist who worked for a pharmaceutical company. Also, he was actually searching for a medication to control blood pressure, not a substance with psychotropic effects. The first drugs specifically intended as psychotropics were not developed until later. Not only was LSD labelled a drug, but it was also classed with narcotic drugs, whose actions are very different. Additionally, it was labelled a ‘hallucinogen’, even though so-called hallucinations are only an incidental side effect – one that also occurs with numerous other drugs, including alcohol. Because LSD was labelled a drug, it came under the purview of the medical guild, particularly psychiatry. A major argument against regulating LSD as a drug is that it is not a treatment for any disease with a known aetiology. If it were to be considered a drug, it would have to be considered a treatment for the social disease of alienation that Max Weber identified, or perhaps a balm from Gilead to heal the sin sick soul.34

5 An American Way Forward The first amendment to the United States Constitution enshrines a broad right to religious freedom. It does not specify the meaning of ‘religion’ so it leaves the term open to constructive definition by precedent, ongoing and developing practice. The openness is further buttressed because the United States has never had a national church, and by the fact that the country was founded by people who wished to escape European constraints on religion. Unlike many European nations,

33. Foucault, 1977. 34. Glass, 1854.

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the United States has no history of religious wars. Furthermore, American psychology has, as mentioned, developed from its visionary tradition, not within the academy. America has a long history of a diverse folk visionary tradition and has harboured numerous mystics, visionary communities, and spiritual practices that have become even more various in contemporary times. The combination of varied spirituality and the unique history of psychology in America make the country fertile ground for establishing psychedelic exercise as a religious practice with a foundation in humanistic and transpersonal psychology, which have developed from New England transcendentalism and the human potential aspect of California’s counterculture.35 Prolific evidence that psychedelic substances facilitate mystical experience suggests that an appropriate venue for use is religious, rather than psychiatric. Of course, that could not be for a religion that prohibits use of psychedelics. Precedent can be found in the use of peyote which is allowed for the Native American Church under the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, or for ayahuasca by the Santo Daime, or by Uniao de Vegetal, which received a favourable ruling by the US Supreme Court on 21 February 2006. A potent movement to decriminalize LSD and other psychedelic substances has its origin in countercultural transpersonal psychology. Stanislav Grof came to the United States as a refugee escaping the quasi-religious constraints of communism. By great good fortune he connected with Walter Pahnke, another physician interested in the potential of LSD. Together they conducted a pioneering psychedelic programme to treat terminal cancer patients at the Maryland, US Psychiatric Research Center. Their team used LSD and other psychedelics to treat patients’ intractable pain and anxiety in the face of death. Conventional oncology had exhausted all its treatment resources for these patients. The treatment programme availed two premises: (1) psychedelics have analgesic properties diverse from narcotics, which were failing for the severe pain, and (2) the patients’ extreme anxiety and fear in the face of death came about because they lacked spiritual experience and resources. The results were dramatic and profoundly significant.36 Because LSD became criminalized, funds supporting Grof ’s programme ceased. Coincidently, Walter Pahnke died a premature accidental death. Fortunately, the aforementioned Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California created a scholar-in-residence position for Grof. In that position he had the opportunity to begin an extensive writing career. Esalen was, at the time, a thriving intersection of the counterculture that gave birth to the human potential movement. It nurtured and inspired Grof. Cutting-edge scholarly visitors, attracted by Esalen’s creative atmosphere, infused Grof intellectually. Esalen’s varied pallet of workshops demonstrated the latest techniques in American group psychology and ways of working with the human body to facilitate psychological expression. Indigenous

35. Taylor, 1999. 36. Grof and Halifax, 1977.

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practitioners and swamis, yogis and gurus visited. Esalen developed as a community seeking the classic Greek ideal of well-being (eudaimonia). Inspired by the community, Grof and his wife Christina conceived a technique they named ‘Holotropic Breathwork’ that facilitated exceptional experience without the use of substances. The technique was so successful that the Grofs created a training programme in response to participants’ desires to learn it. An early participant, Rick Doblin, came to this training programme because he was looking for a legal alternative to LSD. He began a journey leading to graduate credentials that gave him the means to meet the regulatory bureaucracy on its own grounds. He turned the ‘drug’ designation of psychedelics to his advantage, developing a series of clinical studies that are, at the time of writing, on the verge of securing the first licensure for therapeutic use of the psychedelic MDMA. Doblin created the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS.org) that raised the millions of dollars necessary to conduct the trials necessary to secure approval from the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA). That approval has been accelerated recently because MDMA-assisted psychotherapy has been declared a ‘breakthrough therapy’ by the FDA. Interestingly, however, psychiatric therapy is not Doblin’s ultimate goal. In his 2020 Annual Report to MAPS’ members he stated: We believe that the potential FDA approval of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD will be followed by regulatory approvals around the world. This will be followed by the establishment of thousands of psychedelic clinics with therapists cross-trained to provide therapy assisted by MDMA and other psychedelics . . . . Eventually in a post-prohibition world, there could be a licensed regulatory system for adults to legally access psychedelics to take on their own without supervision by therapists [and minors with permission].

6 Psychedelic Decriminalization and Cultural Developments The movement to decriminalize psilocybin in the United States began in the late 2010s; Denver, Colorado became the first city to decriminalize psilocybin in May 2019. The cities of Oakland and Santa Cruz, California, followed suit and decriminalized psilocybin in June 2019 and January 2020, respectively, followed by Somerville, Massachusetts, and the neighbouring town of Cambridge, in January 2021. Supporters of the movement have cited emerging research that indicates potential medical use for the drug. In November 2020, voters passed Oregon Ballot Measure 109, making Oregon the first state to both decriminalize psilocybin and legalize it for therapeutic use. The use, sale and possession of psilocybin in the United States, despite state laws, is illegal under federal law. The organization Decriminalize Nature has led the movement to decriminalize psychedelic plants.37

37. See Decriminalize Nature, 2020.

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To instance a change occurring in another state, in the case of State of New Mexico vs David Ray Pratt, New Mexico’s Court of Appeals found that if one grows psilocybin mushrooms for personal use, it is not considered ‘manufacturing of a controlled substance’ under state law. The court thus overturned Pratt’s felony drug trafficking conviction for growing psilocybin mushrooms in his home. These first governmental steps likely forecast future legal progress. Buttressing this forecast are developments in American culture. Books promoting the importance of psychedelics, such as Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind and Wheal and Kotler’s Stealing Fire, are major bestsellers. Significant companies are monetizing psychedelic festivals and concerts. Besides MAPS-sponsored research, major universities and institutions are investigating not only the psychiatric possibilities of psychedelic applications, but also the potential of psychedelics in religion and faith. All of this begins to stir that most American of concerns, commercial interest. The first psychedelic exchange traded fund (EFT) began trading on 27 January 2021. Horizons Psychedelic Stock Index ETF will trade on the Canadian NEO exchange under the ticker PSYK.38

7 Conclusion The maltreatment of psychedelics by American politics rent asunder the concept of a common good for individuals and communities first enunciated by Aristotle as eudaimonia. It deprived people of the right to pursue personal well-being by engaging exceptional experience in a predictable and self-chosen setting. American criminalization for possession of psychedelic substances was instituted as a political expedient. The rush to criminalization gave no consideration to a large body of research and a long history of safe and effective indigenous and religious practices that are, in principle, protected by the first amendment to the United States Constitution. Criminalization is an ethical failure similar to others consequent on a politics that has attended to the demands of capital, industry, racialized power politics and bureaucracy rather than the common goal of wellbeing for persons and community. Despite criminalization, individuals have covertly pursued psychedelic practice to beneficial effect for themselves that has also spilled over for community benefit in art, music, and technology. MAPS has even ironically subverted the mischaracterization of psychedelics as drugs by developing a major international organization that has availed bureaucracy to undermine prohibition. The aim of seriously pursued psychedelic experience is to discover the springs of well-being for people and for the human community. The future lies not in regulation, but in education. Psychedelic substances are as surely sacraments as tobacco for the Native Americans or wine as Christian communion. Promising applications of psychedelics include:

38. Christoforous, 2021.

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Scientific, philosophical, including metaphysical, research. Pursuit of self-exploration and self-knowledge. Encouragement to community after the manner of sacred groups and tribal shamanism. Promotion of attitude change and creativity necessary to address the planetary ecological crisis.

Our hope is to find new ways for community and its nourishing support that will carry us further on the adventure of ideas, curiosity and compassion that has led our growth from inkling ancestral dreams to our astounding present. This new psychedelic tool can be used to fashion technology that magnifies the personhood of the world and helps it claim its inherent value. It will not be easy, it will not avoid suffering and tears, but we can create new stages ample to engage the themes of our timeless drama. Let’s get to work.

References Ballesteros, V. (2018–2019) The Metaphysics behind Pharmacotherapy: Treating Depression with Conventional and Psychedelic Drugs, Psicologia, Conocimento y Sociedad, 7–28 Canales, J. (2015) The Physicist & The Philosopher (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press) Christoforous, A. (2021, 27 January) The-first-psychedelic-etf-is-ready-to-launch. Retrieved from: finance.yahoo.com: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/the-first-psychedelic-etf-isready-to-launch-135909326.html Davis, W. (2001) The Face of the Gods, in: W. Davis, Light at the Edge of the World (Washington, DC: National Geographic) pp. 83–103 Decriminalize Nature (2020) Retrieved from: www.decriminalizenature.org/ Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books) Furst, P. (2005) Ancient Altered States, in: R. Walsh and C. Grob, Higher Wisdom (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press) pp. 151–158 Gasnier, L. J. (Director) (1936) Reefer Madness [Motion Picture] Glass, W. (1854) The Sinner’s Cure (African American spiritual) Grof, S. (1976) Realms of the Human Unconscious (New York: E. P. Dutton) Grof, S. (2006) The Ultimate Journey (Ben Lomand, CA: Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) Grof, S. and Grof, C. (1989) Spiritual Emergency (Los Angeles: J. P. Tarcher, Inc.) Grof, S. and Halifax, J. (1977) The Human Encounter with Death (New York: E. P. Dutton) Hadot, P. (1995) Philosophy as a Way of Life (Malden, MA: Blackwell) Hamilton, E. and Cairns, H., eds. (1961) The Collected Dialogues of Plato (New York: Bollingen Foundation) Harner, M. (2005) Tribal Wisdom: The Shamanic Path, in: R. Walsh and C. Grob, Higher Wisdom (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press) pp. 159–178 Heisenberg, W. (1984) Physics and Beyond, in: K. Wilber, Quantum Questions (Boston: Shambala) pp. 33–73

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Hofmann, A. (2005) LSD My Problem Child (New York: MAPS) James, W. (1902) The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co.) Jay, M. (2019) Mescaline (New Haven: Yale University Press) Kusnic, P. (2020, 17 January) How New York City Speakeasies Changed American Culture Forever. Retrieved from: www.vice.com/en/article/wxeday/how-new-york-cityspeakeasies-changed-american-culture-forever) Laing, R. D. (1967) The Politics of Experience (New York: Ballantine Books) Massey, B. (2005, June 15) apmush06-15-05. Retrieved from: www.abqjournal.com/news/ state/apmush06-15-05.htm. Mullis, K. (1998) Dancing Naked in the Mind Field (New York: Random House Pantheon Books) Perry, J. (2005) The Far Side of Madness (Putnam, CT: Spring Publications, Inc) Psilocybin decriminalization in the United States (2021, 6 March) Retrieved from: https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psilocybin_decriminalization_in_the_United_States. Ricks, T. (2020) First Principles (New York: HarperCollins) Schele, S. and Miller, M. (1986) The Blood of Kings (New York: George Braxiller, Inc.) Shroder, T. (2014) Acid Test (New York: Penguiin Group) Smith, L. (2018, 28 February) How a racist hate-monger masterminded America’s War on Drugs. Retrieved from: https://timeline.com/harry-anslinger-racist-war-on-drugsprison-industrial-complex-fb5cbc281189 Somé, M. (1994) Of Water and the Spirit (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons) Stanley, R. (2012) Owsley and Me (Rhinebeck, NY: Monkfish Book Publishing Co) Stevens, J. (1987) Storming Heaven (New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press) Szasz, T. S. (2003) The Myth of Mental Illness (New York: HarperCollins Perennial) Taylor, E. (1999) Shadow Culture (Washington: Counterpoint) Turner, F. (2006) From Counterculture to Cyberculture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) Wilby, E. (2005) Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press) Whitehead, A. N. (1929) Process and Reality (New York: The Macmillan Company) Young, G. (2007) Sun Dance. Retrieved from Encyclodedia of Oklahoma History & Culture: https://web.archive.org/web/20121119163226/http://digital.library.okstate. edu/encyclopedia/entries/S/SU008.html

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Chapter 4 P OW E R A N D T H E S U B L I M E I N A L D O U S H U X L EY ’ S D RU G A E S T H E T IC S Robert Dickins

1 Introduction In March 1956, author Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) and psychiatrist Humphry Osmond (1917–2004) exchanged letters suggesting new terms for a class of drugs that had hitherto been described as hallucinogens, phantastica, or psychotomimetics. Three years previously Osmond had famously facilitated an experiment for Huxley with the drug mescaline, and as a result they believed existing terms were inadequate or misleading in respect of describing its effect. Writing to Huxley in jocular rhyme, Osmond wrote ‘To fathom Hell or go angelic / Just take a pinch of psychedelic’,1 and it was this term that caught on – to describe a form of psychiatric therapy (i.e. psychedelic therapy) and later as a cultural moniker when substances such as mescaline, d-Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), and psilocybin leaked out from the clinic into wider Western culture during the 1960s. Huxley, however, made a different suggestion: ‘To make this trivial world sublime / Take half a gramme of phanerothyme.’2 While ‘Phanerothyme’ was never adopted, his use of the sublime in describing the effect of certain drugs appeals to a deeper philosophical question about aesthetics. This chapter uses a reading of the sublime developed by Edmund Burke as a method of interrogating the psychedelic drug experience and its literary representation. As such, it broaches a space in which psychological, political, and aesthetic categories overlap. It is, however, beyond the remit of this piece to develop a fully cohesive survey in relation to the literary drug experience. Instead, it develops an analytical formulation of the sublime and power specifically in regard to Huxley’s drug writing. It argues that his drug aesthetic, which he began formulating in the 1930s, was used to explore a dialogue between personal liberty and different formulations of power: personal, socio-political, and divine. This 1. See Bisbee, 2018, pp. 266–267. 2. Ibid., p. 266.

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raises two important questions: in what ways do psychoactive drugs and power modify the self? And how are these modifications realised aesthetically within literature? Literary criticism began broaching the subject of psychoactive drugs in the early twentieth century, especially in relation to the connections between opium and Romanticism in the 1800s. In The Milk of Paradise (1934), the critic MH Abrams reviewed imagery used in literature written by known opium users with the intention of discerning a universal symbolism attributable to the drug’s visionary effects. Clearly this approach has serious limitations in so far as it presumes that an opium effect exists as a universal, one that supersedes literary subjectivity and its socio-historical context. This was later highlighted by Elisabeth Schneider in Coleridge, Opium and Kubla Khan (1953) and Alethea Hayter in Opium and the Romantic Imagination (1968). According to Hayter: ‘No clear pattern of opium’s influence on creative writing . . . has emerged in this survey. . . . Opium works on what is already there in a man’s mind and memory.’3 In other words, saying Coleridge writes like opium is as nonsensical as saying ‘Kubla Khan’ is an effect of opium. Questions are therefore more fruitful if they revolve around subjective mediation – how, and to what end, do authors communicate the drug aesthetic? The study of drug literature has taken a broader approach and formalized in regard to texts being artefacts of wider socio-cultural forces. The generic term ‘pharmacography’ was coined by David Lenson in On Drugs (1995), and points to a literary aesthetic that concerns itself with a specific (although not definite) form of subjectivity, namely one associated with drug-induced experiences. A more recent and comprehensive study is The Road of Excess (2002) by Marcus Boon. Boon proposes that pharmacography should be, ‘an open field of interdependent cultural activity, which would include both drugs and literature, one in which science, biography, literary analysis, and ethnography are used as necessary’.4 This chapter is broadly in line with Boon’s approach. It seeks to understand how Huxley uses the sublime in his writings, as an aesthetic and philosophical technique, to communicate questions related to the pharmasocial role of drugs – particularly the power dynamics of personal liberty.

2 Burke’s Sublime The concept of the ‘sublime’ has its roots in an Ancient Greek fragment titled Peri Hypsous (On the Sublime), which is usually attributed to Longinus. Unreferenced in extant texts from antiquity, it came to light in the sixteenth century, receiving critical attention after it was translated into French by the poet Nicolas Boileau in 1674. John Dennis (1658–1734) was the first person to critically develop the sublime in English, particularly in light of poetry, religion, and the emotional role

3. Hayter, 1968, p. 331. 4. Boon, 2002, p. 5.

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of terror. Inspired by the sight of the Alps, which elicited a sense of both beauty and terror in him, Dennis formulated the sublime as an experience of intense emotion and mixed pleasure. He argued that religious enthusiasm produced the most intense experience of the sublime, adding that the emotional aspect of terror was also chiefly derived from religious ideas.5 This, he believed, was the mark of the ‘greatest’ poetry. Following Dennis, the term popularized throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, centralizing the role of terror and mixed emotion in the sublime. In The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant (2015), Robert Doran surveys the major theorists of the concept. He argues that one of the sublime’s defining features, which emerges across different approaches, is that it has a ‘dualtranscendence structure’. It is a paradoxical structure, he writes, because while ‘an encounter with the transcendent, in art or nature, induces a feeling of inferiority or submission’ that is overwhelming, ‘it is precisely by being overpowered that a highminded feeling of superiority or nobility of mind is attained’.6 In Dennis’ writings, this meant the ability of poetry to provoke a divine submission through the overwhelming terror produced by religious ideas in the reader, yet also elevate a person’s fallen nature through the enthusiastic passions it invokes in the mind. In this sense, the dual structure of the sublime functions as a power dynamic that mediates a type of religious experience, shifting the self ’s relationship with the divine via the medium of poetry. It was in the writings of Edmund Burke (1729–1797) that this question of power and the sublime was first explicitly delineated. An Irish statesman and political philosopher, Burke is usually remembered for laying the foundations for ideological conservatism in his writings on the French Revolution.7 However, as a young man he made an important contribution to aesthetics when he wrote A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757/59). The text serves a bridge between the empiricism of early British criticism on the sublime and the philosophical aesthetics developed in Germany towards the end of the eighteenth century, exemplified in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790).8 A study focusing on the philosophical transformation of power and the sublime presents a fascinating opportunity, although it is beyond the scope here. Burke’s initial analysis of power’s role, however, is a useful entry point in our later discussion of Huxley. In order to understand Burke’s notion of power, it is necessary to first describe his empirical and aesthetic reading of the sublime. In A Philosophical Enquiry, Burke, like Dennis, argues for the centrality of terror and the role of mixed emotion in the sublime. It is an important aspect that he uses to distinguish the sublime from the beautiful. He writes,

5. Morris, 1972, pp. 47–78. 6. Doran, 2015, p. 10. 7. Maciag, 2013, pp. 19–20. 8. Doran, 2015, p. 141.

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Terror relies, he argues, on the instinctual desire for ‘self-preservation’, and manifests through an ‘apprehension of pain or death’.10 While pain and terror both derive from self-preservation, he differentiates them later in his treatise, which underlies the philosophical development of the sublime from empirical to aesthetic: ‘things that cause pain operate on the mind, by the intervention of the body’ he posits, ‘whereas things that cause terror generally affect the bodily organs by the operation of the mind suggesting the danger’.11 Therefore, in Burke’s empirical psychology, aesthetics primarily appeal to the mind and imagination. As noted, Burke’s sublime does not simply rest on the sole experience of terror, but also entails a mixed emotion with a form of what he calls ‘delight’. For, ‘when danger and pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful’.12 The sublime, then, is what he calls a ‘delightful horror’ and is designated by a balance between terror and delight. This, he argues, is ‘one of the strongest of all the passions’ because of its intrinsic relationship to selfpreservation. Adding, therefore, ‘Its object is the sublime. Its highest degree I call astonishment; the subordinate degrees are awe, reverence, and respect.’13 Through modification, a balance is struck to achieve the sublime, which raises the question of just how such a context emerges for Burke. Literary critic Sharon Ruston reads Burke’s sublime in light of contemporary medical discourse. She argues that Burke believed that ‘the mind and body are intimately connected’,14 but concludes that, ‘Burke’s sublime is an overpowering force that robs the mind of its independence; it denies to the self mastery, expansion, transcendence, and control’.15 In Burke’s aesthetic theory, however, this reading is actually the reverse. It is the body that is denied control through the interference of the mind, or imagination. Indeed, this is the tension in Burke’s enquiry – between his empirical presentation of complex pleasure and his aesthetic definition. As Doran notes, ‘it is by means of this tension between the scientific and the cultural that [Burke] defines a secular concept of transcendence based on sublime terror’.16 It raises questions, not only about the conditioning of the mind, but also the body, and it is upon this aesthetic that the dual-transcendence

9. Burke, 2015, p. 33. 10. Ibid., p. 47. 11. Ibid., p. 105. 12. Ibid., p. 34. 13. Ibid., p. 109. 14. Ruston, 2013, 141. 15. Ibid., p. 147. 16. Doran, 2015, p. 69.

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structure rests. As a result, therefore, this allows a reading of the sublime and power that has wider implications than Dennis’ religious reading, particularly in the secular realm. As he notes in several places already quoted, Burke’s sublime balance of delightful horror is struck through modifications of power. Indeed, he writes: ‘I know of nothing sublime which is not some modification of power.’17 Power is in fact, though not widely cited, a vital aspect of Burke’s sublime and is one of the longest sections in The Philosophical Enquiry (Part II, Section V). It is, he concludes, ‘undoubtedly a capital source of the sublime’.18 He points towards three particular spheres in which power operates: not only Dennis’ religious, but also the personal and political. Or, in his words, the beast, the sovereign, and the deity: Indeed so natural is this timidity with regard to power, and so strongly does it inhere in our constitution, that very few are able to conquer it, but by mixing much in the business of the world, or by using no small violence to their natural dispositions.19

Thus, it is through the modification of these three aspects, essentially a combination of actions and emotions in regard to them, that the sublime balance might be struck. As an aesthetic, however, it is a question of how these are suggested to the mind. For instance, ‘whilst we contemplate so vast an object, under the arm, as it were, of almighty power, and invested upon every side with omnipresence, we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and are, in a manner annihilated by him’.20 The contemplative aesthetic of such power elevates or transcends the self and yet simultaneously annihilates it. Thus, the dual-transcendence structure functions through both secular and religious spheres in Burke’s sublime.

3 The Sublime and Drug Aesthetics Interestingly, the question of psychoactive substances is briefly raised by Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry during a discussion of the relationship between mind and body in inducing the passions. He writes, ‘As an opiate, or spirituous liquors shall suspend the operation of grief, or fear, or anger, in spite of all our efforts to the contrary; and this by inducing in the body a disposition contrary to that which it receives from these passions’.21 There are certain specific problems with this reading. For instance, liquor is of course just as capable of exacerbating feelings of grief or anger as it at dispelling them. Nevertheless, what this underlines is that

17. Ibid., p. 53. 18. Burke, 2015, p. 58. 19. Ibid., p. 55. 20. Ibid., p. 56. 21. Ibid., p. 107.

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Burke believed exogenous substances can influence the passions by modifying the body. If one then takes into account the question power, as he conceived it, then a drug aesthetic is a useful tool for interrogating the social function of the sublime. During the Romantic period the sublime was a widely explored aesthetic in literature and was placed in relation to drug experiences. The most famous example being the self-confessed English opium-eater, Thomas de Quincey (1785–1859).22 Another similar figure in respect of the sublime is the Cornish chemist Sir Humphry Davy (1778–1829). Davy, along with the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and others, experimented with the psychoactive gas nitrous oxide at the turn of the nineteenth century.23 Influenced by the writings of Burke, Kant, and Joseph Priestly on the sublime, Davy widely employed the term, leading critic Joseph M Gabriel to coin ‘the chemical sublime’.24 Ruston argues that while Burke exerted some influence on Davy, Kant was more important because his theory held a sense of empowerment after the sublime experience, while Burke ‘downplayed reason in favour of the body in the sublime encounter’.25 As noted earlier, an examination of the role of power might shed new light on this question. Critic Neşe Devenot has also examined the aesthetics of self-experimentation and nitrous oxide in Davy’s writing. Like Ruston, she convincingly argues that there is a deep connection between the projects of science and Romanticism in mapping new realms of subjective experience. Through reading accounts of nitrous oxide inhalation in Davy’s Researches, chemical and philosophical chiefly concerning nitrous oxide, or diphlogisticated nitrous air, and its respiration (1800), she identifies the sublime as a key point of aesthetic correspondence between poetic and scientific readings. However, she argues that ‘From its usage in the Researches, it is clear that the sublime serves as a placeholder for extraordinary experiences’.26 Aside from the interdisciplinary nature of the term during this period, there is no delineation about the function of the sublime as an aesthetic – particularly in relation to its dual structure, secular power, and the role of mixed emotion. Subsequent writers and critics have also placed a great deal of significance on the religious reading of the sublime. Not only that it was merely being used as a placeholder for the extraordinary, but that it was also limited by the fascination of the Romantics with forms of nature mysticism. This is often true of twentiethcentury drug aesthetics as well. RA Durr was among the earliest critics to examine the question of literary aesthetics in relation to psychedelic substances. In Poetic Vision and the Psychedelic Experience (1970) he argues that psychedelic writings are firmly within the Romantic tradition, claiming that ‘psychedelic’ and ‘imagination’, ‘refer to a fundamentally identical power of apprehension, or mode

22. Quincey, 2013. 23. Jay, 2009. 24. Gabriel, 2010. 25. Ruston, 2013, p. 150. 26. Devenot, 2015, p. 68.

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of being’.27 By employing Burke’s reading of the sublime, however, it provides the opportunity to analyse psychedelic writings in regard to both religious and secular forms of power. This has the advantage of historically contextualizing drug aesthetics in regard of social, political, and cultural forces, not merely as literary tradition. Therefore, to reiterate our guiding questions in regard to Huxley’s pharmacography: in what way do psychoactive drugs modify power in relation to the self? And, specifically here, how does the sublime function aesthetically in Huxley’s pharmacography?

4 Aldous Huxley’s Drug Aesthetics The question of drugs was a growing preoccupation for Aldous Huxley during the last thirty years of his life. As early as 1931, he wrote ‘A Treatise on Drugs’, having read the German pharmacologist Louis Lewin’s survey of psychoactive substances Phantastica (1924). After noting the destructive qualities of substances such as opiates and alcohol, and the failures of prohibition, he concluded that, The way to prevent people from drinking too much alcohol, or becoming addicts to morphine and cocaine, is to give them an efficient but wholesome substitute for these delicious and (in the present imperfect world) necessary poisons. The man who invents such a substance will be counted among the greatest benefactors of suffering humanity.28

This exemplifies the concern of his discourse, revolving around what might be termed the pharmasocial, i.e. the role that drugs play in society. Interestingly, Huxley had always associated drugs and the ‘masses’ of people, at least through metaphor. ‘There is intoxication to be found in the crowd’, he wrote at the beginning of ‘Democratic Art’ in 1923.29 Elsewhere, he describes the ‘auto-intoxication’ of modern pleasure, arising ‘from the fact that every kind of organized distraction tends to become progressively more and more imbecile’.30 For early Huxley then, the intoxicating effect of drugs, modern, mechanised society and crowds were all inextricably linked and led, for him, to the stifling of individual liberty. While he explored these themes more variously in his essays, it is this basic analytical dynamic that he used to inform his most famous work: the utopian novel Brave New World (1932). It is there that he develops a more thoroughgoing literary drug aesthetic. The book is a satire on the radical ideas of futurism associated with Fabian socialism, notably in the writings of HG Wells and George Bernard Shaw, while

27. Durr, 1970, p. ix. 28. Horowitz, 1999, p. 5. 29. ‘Democratic Art’ in Huxley, 2000, pp. 354–361. 30. ‘Pleasure’ in Huxley, 2000, pp. 354–358.

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also novelizing arguments made by Bertrand Russell in The Scientific Outlook (1931).31 The novel describes a future in which the planet is run by a ‘World State’ that strictly controls the population. Their methods include eugenics, social conditioning, and the use of mass consumption – of goods, services, and carefully controlled bodies of knowledge. Critic John Carey describes Brave New World as the ‘classic denunciation of mass culture in the interwar years’.32 Although set in a future London, the book also reflects contemporary anxieties in Britain brought about by the Great Depression and the widespread political uncertainty in Europe. In the novel, Huxley famously describes a miraculous drug called soma. Named after an unidentified ritual substance in the Rig-Veda, which was used by Vedic priests to achieve ecstasy, soma functions in the novel as an instrument of power. As such, it provides in interesting analytical dimension in regard to Burke’s sublime. In the story, soma is used by the World Controllers in order to manage people’s emotions: there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a half-holiday, a gramme for a weekend, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon.33

In some respects, it is the opposite of what one might describe as a sublime substance. Soma’s primary function is to shut down feelings of terror, and mixed emotions generally, creating a placid form of happiness. People voluntarily and indiscriminately take it, resulting in a self-placated population. Crucially, it is also used ritually as part of their religion: ‘Fordism’ – a satirical take on the centrality of mass consumption in the World State. Under the political and religious power of the future State, soma is ritualized in order to dispel individualism and promote solidarity. On ‘Solidarity Service’ days, twelve chairs are arranged in a circle, with ‘Twelve of them ready to be made one, waiting to come together, to be fused, to lose their separate identities in a larger being’.34 Hymns are sung to Ford, soma is passed around, people chant ‘I drink to my annihilation’ and ‘I drink to the Greater Being’.35 Afterwards, the character Fifi Bradlaugh’s raptured emotional state is described, Hers was a calm ecstasy of achieved consummation, the peace, not of mere vacant satiety and nothingness, but of balanced life, of energies at rest and in equilibrium. A rich and living peace. For the Solidarity Service had given as well as taken, drawn off only to replenish. She was full, she was made perfect, she was still more than merely herself.36 31. ‘Letter to Edith Wharton’ in Sexton, 2007, p. 267. 32. Carey, 2002, p. 86. 33. Huxley, 2004, p. 49. 34. Ibid., p. 72. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., p. 76.

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It is telling that Fifi’s experience is so emotionally one-dimensional. She lacks any sense of terror, or horror, with her blanket ecstasy leaving her ‘more’ than herself, even after the ritual. Contrast this with the protagonist, Bernard Marx, who ‘was as miserably isolated now as he had been when the service began. . . . Separate and unatoned, while the others were being fused into the Greater Being’.37 If the sublime is said to be a mixed emotion, achieved through a modification of power, then it exists as a literary aesthetic between the emotional poles of these two characters, and it is soma that is the agent of this modification. The sublime aesthetic is achieved here by Huxley through juxtaposition, and he repeats the technique elsewhere in the book. For example, Bernard and the character Lenina fly home together in a helicopter after a night out. Bernard insists that they hover over the English Channel, looking out under a moonlit, cloudy sky. Lenina is horrified, appalled ‘by the rushing emptiness of the night’,38 and turns their radio on. For Bernard, it made him feel ‘as though I were more me, if you see what I mean. More on my own, not so completely a part of something else. Not just a cell in the social body’.39 Together they exemplify horrific delight, and what’s more, it is the balance between their opposite reactions to the disconnection with society that underlines a central theme in the book, political power and the individual. Returning to the question of soma, therefore, it is not whether the substance itself produces a sublime experience, but rather the context in which it is taken. The drug aesthetic, isolated in the ritual situation, is straightforwardly a religious ecstasy in Brave New World. What soma reveals is that the power balance is actually imperfect—too much delight for Fifi, too much horror for Bernard—and this reflects the dystopian nature of the society. Its overemphasis on the centralized, mass-manufactured and coerced pleasure has all but vanquished individuality. This personal liberty is defined by the hope of a minority, like Bernard, who wish to have the choice to think, behave, and even experience emotions as they personally desired. However, this is also a problem in reverse, which Huxley again illustrates using a drug aesthetic. Later in the novel, the characters Bernard and Lenina travel to Mexico, where one of the few ‘Reservations’ exist. Unable to leave, the people inside are not subject to the mechanisms of the World Controllers and exist in a state of nearanarchy and poverty. There, they meet Linda who, although from London, had become trapped in the Reservation years before. Recalling her experiences, she tells them, What I had to suffer – and not a gramme of soma to be had. Only a drink of mescal every now and then. . . . But it makes you feel so bad afterwards, the mescal does, and you’re sick with the peyotl; besides, it always made that feeling of being ashamed much worse the next day.40 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., p. 80. 39. Ibid., p. 81. 40. Ibid., p. 108.

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Leaving aside Huxley’s questionable take on the efficacy of these psychoactive plants, it is clearly in tune with his earlier drug treatise. Like soma, there is a deepseated desire within humanity to use psychoactive substances. However, in the context of the Reservation it is centred in a pattern of poverty and abuse, ultimately failing to relieve the agonies of society, instead compounding them. If the drug aesthetic is to be sublime, it must therefore lie in a socio-political position between anarchy and total control. While Huxley’s soma is hardly the tool of a great benefactor, as a literary drug aesthetic it implicitly points towards the role power plays in the nature of drug experience on a social and political level. The tension that lies at the heart of Huxley’s pharmasocial discourse, therefore, revolves around beneficently resolving the desire of individuals to self-medicate (for whatever reason), the type of drug, and the ultimate goals of those who facilitate this aspect of society. Clearly, it is a deeply political question through which individual liberty functions as the barometer of success or failure.

5 A Psychedelic Sublime The previous section’s analysis of Huxley’s drug aesthetics in Brave New World, using power and the sublime as an analytical tool, demonstrated how psychoactive substances were intrinsically linked to their socio-political context. It was also, for Huxley, a purely literary exercise. However, this would soon change. In the 1950s, a psychopharmacological revolution was taking place in medicine, with the development and research of many psychoactive substances. This situation inadvertently provided Huxley the opportunity to experiment with drugs himself – to place himself and his writings within the context of his existing drug discourse. Furthermore, the author had also become increasingly interested in spirituality, notably exploring forms of mysticism and religious belief in The Perennial Philosophy (1945). This provided a crucial new context for his post-war exploration of drug aesthetics. Around 1950, Humphry Osmond and his colleague, neurophilosopher John Smythies, were working together at St George’s Hospital in London. They were interested in investigating the hallucinogen mescaline and its relationship with mental illness, but after initial research were unable to secure further support for their work. Dissatisfied by the direction of British psychiatry, Osmond relocated to the Saskatchewan Mental Hospital in Weyburn, Canada, in 1951, where a more facilitating research atmosphere proliferated.41 As a result, along with Osmond’s new colleague, biochemist Abram Hoffer, Osmond and Smythies were able to continue their mescaline research. In papers, the group postulated the ‘M-substance hypothesis’: noting the similar chemical structure of mescaline and adrenaline, they hypothesized that an endogenous substance could be the biochemical cause of hallucinations associated with what was then described as schizophrenia.42 This 41. Dyck, 2008, pp. 16–19. 42. Hoffer et al., 1954, pp. 29–45.

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approach to hallucinogenic drugs was termed ‘psychotomimetic’, i.e. psychosis mimicking, and was popular at the time. Huxley read the group’s early papers. He was already familiar with mescaline from Lewin’s writing, along with being aware of its ritual use in the form of the peyote cactus by the Native American Church, and the earlier research of psychologist Havelock Ellis and physician Weir Mitchell.43 Intrigued, Huxley wrote to Osmond expressing his appreciation for their work. Over a course of letters in early 1953, it transpired that Osmond would be near Huxley’s home in California, and they decided to conduct a mescaline experiment.44 The author described what transpired during his role as mescaline subject in The Doors of Perception (1954), later expanding his ideas in Heaven and Hell (1956). It was the first of almost a dozen experiences Huxley underwent with various psychedelic substances, including LSD and psilocybin, over the following decade. The Doors of Perception is a very analytical text, remarkably emotionless on the whole, and eschewing of any explicit self-analysis other than what he presumably believed about himself already. Huxley is led by Osmond to analyse his reactions to art, music, and different spaces – the garden or a drug store, for instance. He expected to find rich interior landscapes, but on introspection, he saw a world of ‘plastic or enamelled tin’ which he likened to below the deck of a ship, adding that it was ‘in some way connected with human pretensions’.45 Instead, his experience was characterized by a heightened view of colour and meaning in his external environment. When he looked at flowers, he saw ‘a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning’.46 While the book widely explores religious themes, Huxley claimed that this original experience was not straightforwardly mystical, but only verged upon it with its visionary qualities.47 Interestingly, however, Huxley believed that he did achieve a mystical state in later drug experiences, and similarly these, too, resolved in love and beauty. According to a letter he sent to Osmond dated 24 October, 1955: What came through the door was the realization – not the knowledge, for this wasn’t verbal or abstract – but the direct total awareness, from the inside, so to say, of Love as the primary and fundamental cosmic fact.48 The result was that I did not, as in the first experiment, feel cut off from the human world. I was intensely aware of it, but from the standpoint of the living, primordial cosmic fact of love. And the things which had entirely occupied my

43. See Jay, 2019, for more details on indigenous North American, scientific and artist approaches to mescaline and peyote. 44. Bisbee, 2018, pp. 5–11. 45. Huxley, 2004, p. 26. 46. Ibid., p. 7. 47. Ibid., p. 46. 48. Bisbee, 2018, pp. 216–217.

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Superficially, Huxley’s drug aesthetic appears to share more of a commonality with what Burke would describe as the ‘beautiful’. According to Burke, beauty and love are inextricably linked: ‘By beauty I mean, that quality or those qualities in bodies by which they cause love, or some passion similar to it. . . . I likewise distinguish love, by which I mean that satisfaction that arises to the mind upon contemplating any thing beautiful.’50 However, terror and power play a crucial role in The Doors of Perception and it demonstrates a much deeper engagement with the sublime in his drug aesthetic. ‘Visionary experience’ Huxley notes, ‘is not always blissful. It is sometimes terrible. There is hell as well as heaven’.51 In The Doors of Perception there are two intriguing occasions where Huxley reports confronting terror. They revolve around encounters with madness and the divine. In the first, he is listening to Gesualdo’s madrigals: The whole is disorganized. But each individual fragment is in order, is a representative of a Higher Order. The Higher Order prevails even in disintegration . . . You have to rely on your immediate perception of the ultimate order. So in a certain sense disintegration may have its advantages. But of course it’s dangerous, horribly dangerous. Suppose you couldn’t get back, out of the chaos . . .52

Huxley senses the danger of disintegration into chaos and he compares it with the Mysterium tremendum: ‘In theological language, this fear is due to the incompatibility between man’s egotism and the divine purity, between man’s selfaggravated separateness and the infinity of God.’53 As such, a form of religious sublime emerges in his drug aesthetic in which his heightened visionary state is tempered by the divine’s power to disintegrate the self. The second occasion infers an engagement with a secular form of power, namely the scientific/medical context of his experience. Asked by Osmond to walk in his garden, Huxley becomes deeply and sensually absorbed by the scene: Garden furniture, laths, sunlight, shadow – these were no more than names and notions, mere verbalizations, for utilitarian or scientific purposes, after the

49. Ibid., p. 217. 50. Burke, 2015, p. 71. 51. Huxley, 2004, p. 86. 52. Ibid., p. 30. 53. Ibid., p. 34.

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event. The event was the succession of azure furnace-doors separated by gulfs of unfathomable gentian. It was inexpressibly wonderful, wonderful to the point, almost, of being terrifying. And suddenly I had an inkling of what it must feel like to be mad.54

His experience is thus embedded in mixed emotion: both ‘wonderful’ and ‘horrifying’. A dual-transcendent structure also emerges in relation to a sanity/ insanity binary which, given the psychotomimetic context of his experience, centres the power dynamic within a socio-medical reading. This is the binary that underpins the Heaven and Hell title of his follow-up book to The Doors of Perception. In conclusion, therefore, the drug aesthetic is given its sublimity here through both divine and secular contexts in which it is placed. In 1956, when Huxley suggested to Osmond that substances such as LSD and mescaline might be characterised as sublime, it marked a fruition in his thinking. This is made plain when he re-examined the drug question in Brave New World Revisited (1958). After noting the rise of psychopharmacology, he wrote, ‘They [drugs] may help the psychiatrist in his battle against mental illness, or they may help the dictator in his battle against freedom. More probably (since science is divinely impartial) they will both enslave and make free, heal and at the same time destroy’.55 As agents of power, psychedelic drugs inferred a dual potential, to both enrich and destroy any given individual. No longer only the pure ecstasy of soma, nor the horrors he described of other substances, but sublime in their mixed potential. In his final novel Island (1962), Huxley once again deals with the subject of utopias and the drug aesthetic, however he does so in light of his own drug experiences. The book describes the protagonist, a cynical journalist called Will Farnaby, exploring the fictional island utopia of Pala. Pala’s culture is a synthesis of Western science and Eastern spirituality, which entails the islanders ritualistically taking a psychoactive mushroom, the moksha medicine, as a rite of passage. While Farnaby is ostensibly there to secretly scope out the forbidden island on behalf of the oil industry, he slowly falls in love with its culture. Unlike Brave New World’s nightmarish vision of a highly centralised State control, Pala’s community-centred outlook instead attempts to strike a balance of power. This is no more obvious than in the role of moksha. It is not indiscriminately taken in order to control a population en masse but, instead, as a rite of passage, is used to guide individuals through their life. Ultimately, Pala’s sovereignty is doomed as political and military forces outside its control move in. The novel ends on a deeply sublime note – while Farnaby is undergoing a revelatory spiritual experience with the moksha medicine, Pala is invaded:

54. Ibid., p. 32. 55. Huxley, 1958/1994, p. 98.

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Farnaby’s moksha experience is deeply attuned to those that Huxley had had, imbued with a deep sense of love and beauty. Yet the author chooses to place it within the context of a threat of violence and terror, not only to the island culture, but also to the physical well-being of the inhabitants, including Farnaby. As a literary aesthetic, therefore, it is a close approximation of power and the sublime – one in which the sublime is no longer juxtaposed between two characters, underpinning imbalance, but resolves completely in Farnaby’s own liberating arc.

6 Conclusion Returning to the two guiding questions of this chapter – viz. In what ways do psychoactive drugs and power modify the self? And how are these modifications realised aesthetically within literature? – it is clear that, for Huxley, any given drug experience cannot be separated from the power dynamics of the world in which it is undergone. Using power and the sublime as an analytical tool reveals that his earlier drug aesthetic was centred on the political question of the freedom of the self, individual liberty. No one character achieved a sublime experience in Brave New World; it was instead by creating a division between them that Huxley demonstrated the dystopian nature of his futuristic world. Soma was a tool of power that maintained this imbalance through the authority of the World State and, denied the liberty to experience both terror and delight, it was a world that damned individuals to either one or the other. The crux of Huxley’s drug aesthetic lay in its religious aspect, which stems in part from his own experiences. Soma was used ritually to subsume the individual into the secular body of Fordism, bending a person to society’s requirements. Conversely, the moksha medicine in Island is part of an individual’s rite of passage through life and used the divine to transcend society. This difference is exemplified in his original naming suggestion: ‘To make this trivial world sublime / Take half a gramme of phanerothyme’. Phanerothyme, from the Greek ‘phanein’ meaning ‘to reveal’ and ‘thymos’ meaning ‘mind’ or ‘soul’, implicitly suggests that self-revelation might modify power. As such, the religious sublime can be read as inextricably linked to Huxley’s regard for the sanctity of individual liberty in society.

56. Huxley, 1962, p. 285.

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References Abrams, M. H. ([1934]1971) The Milk of Paradise: The Effect of Opium Visions on the Works of De Quincey, Crabbe, Francis Thompson, and Coleridge (New York: Octagon Books) Carson, C., Bisbee, P., Dyck, E., Farrell, P., Sexton, J. and Spisak J. W. (2018) Psychedelic Prophets: The Letters of Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond (London: McGill-Queens University Press) Boon, Marcus (2002) The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs (London: Harvard University Press) Burke, Edmund ([1757/1759]2015) A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (Oxford: Oxford World Classics) Carey, John (2002) The Intellectuals and The Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers) Devenot, Neşe (2015) Altered States/Other Worlds: Romanticism, Nitrous Oxide, and the Literary Prehistory of Psychedelia [University of Pennsylvania. Unpublished PhD dissertation] Doran, Robert (2015) The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Durr, R. A. (1970) Poetic Vision and the Psychedelic Experience (New York: Syracuse Press) Dyck, Erika (2008) Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD from Campus to Clinic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press) Gabriel, Joseph M. (2010) Anesthetics and the Chemical Sublim, Raritan Quarterly, 30:1, pp. 68–93 Hayter, Alethea (1968) Opium and the Romantic Imagination (London: Faber and Faber) Hoffer A., Osmond H. and Smithies J. (1954) Schizophrenia: A New Approach. II. Result of a Year’s Research, The Journal of Mental Science, 100:418, pp. 29–45 Horowitz, Michael and Palmer, Cynthia, eds. (1999) Moksha: Aldous Huxley’s Classic Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience (Rochester: Park Street Press) Huxley, Aldous (1962) Island (London: Chatto and Windus) Huxley, Aldous ([1932]1994) Brave New World (London: Grafton Books) Huxley, Aldous ([1958]1994) Brave New World Revisited (London: Vintage) Huxley, Aldous (2000) Complete Essays Volume 1: 1920–1925, eds. Robert S. Baker and James Sexton (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee) Huxley, Aldous ([1954/1956]2004) The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell (London: Vintage Classics) Jay, Mike (2009) The Atmosphere of Heaven: The Unnatural Experiments of Dr Beddoes and his Sons of Genius (New Haven: Yale University Press) Jay, Mike (2019) Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic (New Haven: Yale University Press) Kant, Immanuel ([1790]1987) Critique of Judgement (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing) Maciag, Drew (2013) Edmund Burke in America: The Contested Career of the Father of Modern Conservativism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press) Morris, David B. (1972) The Religious Sublime: Christian Poetry and Critical Tradition in 18th-Century England (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky) Quincey, Thomas de ([1821]2013) Confessions of an English Opium-eater and Other Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press) Ruston, Sharon (2013) Creating Romanticism: Case Studies in the Literature, Science and Medicine of the 1790s (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan) Sexton, James, ed. (2007) Selected Letters of Aldous Huxley (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee)

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Chapter 5 DECOLONIZING THE PHILOSOPHY OF P SYC H E D E L IC S Osiris Sinuhé González Romero

1 Introduction Cultural colonization prevails inside a wide array of universities, academic institutions, and research centres worldwide. It is manifested by the lack of recognition of philosophical diversity in study programs. For example, the philosophy of psychedelics, indigenous philosophies, or feminist philosophies play a marginal role and are rarely considered in international debate, even though the lack of recognition has several consequences in the ‘lifeworld’ of millions of people worldwide. Epistemic and ontological violence has been justified by hegemonic philosophy1, and for this reason it is crucial to recognize this legacy of how cultural colonization served power structures, patriarchy, social injustice, and discrimination. The aim of this chapter is towards developing a decolonial analysis of some epistemic values existing in mainstream philosophy, mainly internal colonialism which undermines the recognition of different worldviews and cultures. How would it be possible to do this? In order to move forward from cultural colonization and the lack of recognition of philosophical diversity, a wide array of literature and authors not usually integrated in the canon will be included, especially indigenous and women researchers. Also decolonizing the philosophy of psychedelics implies the critical reflection on frameworks and methodologies, but also about sensitive issues such as biopiracy, epistemological extractivism, discrimination, and the dispossession of indigenous lands. Also, the lack of recognition caused by internal colonialism has undermined cognitive liberty and could be considered one of the main obstacles in developing critical thinking, and especially a philosophy of psychedelics. What exactly is meant by this term ‘cognitive liberty’? Law lecturer and cognitive liberty advocate Charlotte Walsh responds thus: ‘Cognitive liberty is in one sense synonymous with freedom of thought, yet more precisely evokes the idea that this should be 1. Dotson, 2011.

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read to acknowledge the fact that individuals should have the right to autonomous self-determination over their own brain chemistry, a right that is currently infringed by the prohibition of psychedelics’.2 The undesirable effects of prohibition do not merely represent a theoretical issue but have practical and material consequences in the ordinary lives of men, women, and indigenous peoples. Furthermore, colonization is attached to the implementation of a politics of punishment3 that involve large populations worldwide. These politics of punishment have social consequences such as violence, murders, forced disappearances, imprisonments, and discrimination. An important impact of the internal colonization prevalent in mainstream philosophy is how it has limited the exploration of the philosophical aspects of psychedelic experience, a fundamental issue that has been largely overlooked. For example, the scientific literature commonly highlights three different types of uses of psychedelic substances: (1) spiritual or religious uses, (2) therapeutic or medical uses, and (3) ludic or recreational uses.4 But philosophical uses are less frequently addressed.5 In a broader sense, the philosophical meaning of the psychedelic experience is beyond the control of priests, lawyers, spiritual leaders, physicians, psychiatrists, and psychotherapists. So while it is important to recognize the value of spiritual and therapeutic uses of psychedelics, it is also crucial to encourage and develop the philosophical uses from the perspective of cognitive liberty. Given the chemical nature of human thought processes, controlling the chemicals that can lawfully be ingested – prohibiting psychedelics – can be seen as an interference with cognitive liberty, with these substances being the necessary precursors to particular styles of thinking. Prohibition can thus be viewed as a form of censorship, a series of psychopharmacological filters, curtailing the mental landscapes available.6

New scholarship in psychedelic studies is beginning to recognize some particular styles of thinking related to the philosophical and therapeutic uses of psychedelics and their consequences in a twenty-first-century context7 and to more fully recognize the power relations and social issues which are embedded in the medicalization of psychedelics.8 To develop a decolonial analysis to achieve a broader overview of the psychedelic mental landscapes, this chapter is organized as follows. The first section addresses

2. Walsh, 2016, p. 83. 3. Foucault, [1975] 2005, pp. 73–103. 4. Escohotado, 1999, p. 1184. 5. Langlitz, 2016. 6. Walsh, 2016, p. 83. 7. Letheby, 2017; Sjöstedt-Hughes, 2016. 8. Noorani, 2019; Hauskeller, in this volume.

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how it is possible to figure out decolonial frameworks for psychedelic humanities and a wide array of philosophical methodologies. The second is devoted to a brief explanation of the philosophical uses of psychedelics. The third section is focused on the analysis of indigenous philosophies and the implementation of decolonial theory in philosophical anthropology to challenge the lack of recognition, dispossession of the land, and epistemological extractivism.9 Finally, the last section will be devoted to explaining the importance of developing a gender approach, which will recognize and encourage the role of women in psychedelic research. Furthermore, throughout this chapter, the development of a decolonial perspective will be helpful to critically reflect on certain important issues such as the effects of psychedelic capitalism, the medicalization of psychedelic experience, and the politics of prohibition that have undermined cognitive liberty for several decades. To conclude, this chapter will highlight the significance of taking into account the category of psychedelic justice10 to address crucial topics such as gender, sexual and cultural diversity, sustainability, and reciprocity.

2 Decolonial Frameworks for Psychedelic Humanities To develop the necessary decolonial perspective in the philosophy of psychedelics we must clarify some ambiguities regarding the meaning of the term ‘decolonization’. Decolonization implies a shift of social, cultural, and scientific paradigms – an absolute substitution as Frantz Fanon put it: At whatever level we study it – relationships between individuals, new names for sports clubs, the human admixture at cocktail parties, in the police, on the directing boards of national or private banks – decolonization is quite simply the replacing of a certain ‘species’ of men by another ‘species’ of men. Without any period of transition, there is a total, complete, and absolute substitution.11

In the field of philosophy, this implies a shift in frameworks and methodologies developed over centuries in the academic institutions of imperialist nations. The first step in developing a decolonial perspective in the philosophy of psychedelics is to move forward from internal colonialism which prevails in mainstream philosophy. The other form of colonialism that is attended to by postcolonial theories and theories of coloniality is internal colonialism, the biopolitical and geopolitical management of people, land, flora and fauna within the ‘domestic’ borders of the imperial nation. This involves the use of particularized modes of control – prisons, ghettos, minoritizing, schooling, policing. . . . Strategies of internal

9. González Romero, 2021. 10. Labate and Cavnar, 2021. 11. Fanon, 1963, p. 35.

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The second step is to highlight that scientific research is not an innocent or neutral activity. ‘Science is a contextable text and a power field’13; moreover, colonial science could be attached to social inequality.14 For this reason, we must reflect critically on frameworks and methodologies from a decolonial perspective, especially if we are interested in how indigenous knowledge about psychedelic plants has been gathered. According to the Maori scholar, Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2008, p. 3), ‘research is not an innocent or distant academic exercise, but an activity that has something at stake and that occurs in a set of political and social conditions’. This statement is a necessary reminder to avoid a naïve approach to certain controversial issues such as the medicalization of psychedelics, psychedelic tourism, biopiracy, and the epistemological extractivism faced by indigenous peoples related to the cultural appropriation of ancestral knowledge on psychedelic plants.15 A decolonial approach could be understood as a counterweight to the display of a naïve ‘psychedelic renaissance’ mainly focused on the medicalization and commercialization of psychedelics.16 Also, a decolonial approach could be helpful in building the foundations of a psychedelic humanities, which represent a third way, to avoid the false dilemma between religious and therapeutic uses. Psychedelic humanities would represent a new avenue of research, broad in scope that would require a collective effort in such philosophical disciplines as bioethics, epistemology, phenomenology, philosophical anthropology, and feminist philosophy, amongst others. For instance, the use of psychedelics, psychotropics and narcotics in terminal patients is an issue that can be considered from a bioethics perspective and not only from the perspective of politics of punishment. A significant gap exists in this area of public policy because the politics of prohibition have undermined cognitive liberty, resulting in unnecessary suffering and pain to the ill. A dignified death, euthanasia, and assisted suicide remained as a taboo in the vast majority of countries, in spite the fact of the great amount of scientific and philosophical literature focused in these issues. This taboo has undermined the development of public policies because certain philosophical uses of psychedelics and narcotics would be required to address this topic adequately. The epistemology of psychedelics focuses on the question as to what kind of knowledge it is possible to achieve through the psychedelic experience? Dealing with this complex question will require an interdisciplinary approach, one which considers the improvements made by the cognitive sciences. However, a

12. Tuck and Yang, 2012, pp. 4–5. 13. Haraway, 1988, p. 577. 14. Hardig, 2009. 15. González Romero, 2021. 16. Noorani, 2019.

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philosophical perspective necessitates new frameworks, as stated by Chris Letheby (2017, p. 55): ‘I have argued elsewhere that psychedelic states can be a means of gaining direct knowledge of the potential of one’s mind and the contingency of one’s sense of self.’ The knowledge gained during the psychedelic experience is an open question requiring further investigation (see Moen, in this volume). For instance, knowledge related to the interconnectedness between human beings and nature, knowledge from the self, knowledge of different worldviews and cosmologies. To decolonize mainstream philosophy, it is crucial to recognize that psychedelic experience is a source of knowledge and not only a series of hallucinations. Psychedelic phenomenology is another avenue of research that could be helpful to achieve a better understanding of this philosophical approach: ‘Psy-phen allows one escape from the epistemology inculcated throughout one’s life. The marvels of nature become wondrous once more because they do not automatically get swept into pre-formed epistemic categories of thought’.17 This type of phenomenology could be grounded in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Edmund Husserl, but it also is possible to broaden the understanding with a complementary crosscultural approach, as it is possible to appreciate in the proposal developed by the Tewa researcher Gregory Cajete (2004), which will be explained below. Other steps in the process of decolonization is to challenge the politics of punishment from the perspective of cognitive liberty. The ‘war on drugs’ and the policies of prohibition associated with it have undermined freedom of thought for several decades, not only ‘individual freedom’ but also the cognitive liberty of research communities and institutions worldwide. Unfortunately, the ‘war on drugs’ has coincided with policies of punishment that have also disproportionately affected some regions and communities more than others. Recent decriminalization efforts with cannabis and psychedelics have begun challenging this logic, revealing other consequences of historical prohibitions. The ‘war on drugs’ has interrupted scientific progress, while underground activities have given rise to organized crime networks and undermined cognitive liberty and philosophical research.

3 Philosophical Uses of Psychedelics As mentioned above, internal colonialism prevalent in mainstream philosophy has limited the exploration of philosophical aspects of psychedelic experience. Such reflection on philosophical concerns is a vital topic of research that mainstream philosophers have not engaged with, even those supporters of the so-called ‘psychedelic renaissance’.18 In academic conferences regarding psychedelic research, the philosophical considerations of psychedelic experience are rarely discussed, even though this topic was suggested fifty years ago by Humprey Osmond (1971). But what does it mean to talk about philosophical uses of psychedelics? Here it is necessary to point out that in psychedelic research the ‘legitimate’ uses are 17. Sjöstedt-Hughes, 2015, p. 3. 18. Sessa, 2012.

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mainly religious or therapeutic. However, this categorization is a false dichotomy because these ‘legitimate’ uses are tied mainly to churches, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies. One example is the recent debate about psilocybin. On the one hand, some psychiatrists, such as James Rucker and Alan Young (2021), rely mainly on clinical trials to bring psilocybin to public use, yet deny other possibilities. On the other hand, Alexander Beiner (2021) emphasizes that psilocybin has spiritual, therapeutic, and countercultural significance. While this debate is valuable, it suggests that psychedelics are caught in a false dichotomy between dogmatic medicalization and spiritual and countercultural uses, or between hospitals and churches. But it is possible to figure out a ‘third way’ or, even from a philosophical approach, ‘multiple ways of thinking’ which are helpful to open new avenues of research in the philosophy of psychedelics.19 And moving forward with a decolonial approach, we can develop a new branch of knowledge that may be called, as mentioned, psychedelic humanities. Moreover, moving beyond a narrow perspective, we must reflect on the hedonistic, aesthetic, ludic, and recreational uses of psychedelics, and how these uses relate to a philosophical approach. One question here is: How is it possible to reflect from a hedonistic perspective, avoiding the ‘trivialization’ of psychedelic experience? Taking a philosophical approach in this context does not mean to discount pleasure; for example, the stigmatization of pleasure is at the root of the politics of prohibition, which extends back to colonial times. Nevertheless, we must avoid a naïve perspective if we are to be aware of the trivialization of the psychedelic experience caused by consumerism and psychedelic capitalism. Studying the links between pleasure, philosophical hedonism, and psychedelics will be a critical avenue of research, once we have moved beyond the politics of punishment, which were attached to the establishment of colonial regimes centuries ago and which still feed paradoxes and contradictions through the ‘war on drugs’. To avoid the trivialization of psychedelic experience, from a philosophical perspective it is a requisite to consider the aesthetic uses of psychedelics. The aesthetics of psychedelics is related to topics concerning the enhancement of creativity and imagination, the changes in perception and sensitivity, and the development of visionary and psychedelic art. Aesthetic pleasure is not taken into consideration very often in the debates related to the legitimate uses of psychedelics – in spite of the fact of the individual works of Pablo Amaringo, Alex Grey, José Benitez Sánchez, not to mention the collective works of indigenous peoples.

4 Decolonization and Indigenous Philosophies To analyse the role of indigenous philosophies within psychedelic science we must first deal with the very difficult consequences of colonialism that are imbedded

19. Letheby, 2017.

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here. ‘From an indigenous perspective, psilocybin research and drug development tells a story of extraction, cultural appropriation, bioprospecting, and colonisation’.20 In fact, cultural decolonization pervades all of the other considerations: the development of collaborative research methodologies, the recognition of the rights of indigenous peoples, critical reflection on epistemological extractivism, cultural appropriation, biopiracy, and the participation of indigenous researchers, women, and people of colour in the recognition of political and sexual diversity. A major example of cultural appropriation shows how deeply this theme runs through the recent history of psychedelic use: In 1957, Life magazine published one of the most impactful articles in modern history about psychedelics. “Seeking the magic mushroom” was written by a former J. P. Morgan banker named R. Gordon Wasson. Within two years of the story’s publishing, psilocin and psilocybin, the main active compounds in the mushrooms, were isolated, characterised, synthesised and named by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann at the Sandoz pharmaceutical company. Sandoz quickly patented the extraction procedure and a method for “therapeutic tranquillisation”, marketing pills under the trade name Indocybin.21

Despite this history, pharmaceutical companies still have not reached any reciprocal agreement with the Mazatec people or any other indigenous communities in Mexico. This is why a decolonial perspective must be developed: not only to raise awareness of the undesirable economical and political consequences attached to the psychedelic renaissance, but also to recognize their cultural heritage and learn from indigenous philosophies. Since decolonization in this area of research involves critical reflection about the framework used in the analysis of indigenous philosophies, a new type of philosophical anthropology must be developed, one with an intercultural/cross-cultural perspective that will help us avoid misunderstandings, hasty generalizations, such as the universalizing approach across a species from a normative Northern perspective and the exoticisation of indigenous knowledge: Intercultural philosophy, therefore, proceeds methodologically as follows: it does not unnecessarily give privileged treatment to any philosophy, culture, or religion. It also rejects the idea of a mere hierarchical gradation of cultures and philosophies. It takes seriously the idea of cultural plurality and deems it valuable. Any study of philosophy from an intercultural perspective situates itself beyond all centrisms – be it Asian, European, or Chinese, to name just a few.22

20. Gerber et al., 2021, p. 573. 21. Ibid. 22. Mall, 2000, pp. 5–6.

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With this perspective we can more objectively analyse indigenous scholars’ contributions. A very enlightened proposal was developed by the Tewa researcher Gregory Cajete, especially in two topics of interest for a philosophy of psychedelics. The first is the development of a phenomenological approach, which is helpful to understand the relations between human beings and nature, especially interconnectedness. The second is recognizing ‘altered states of being’ as a legitimate means of gathering knowledge. In the conceptual framework of philosophy, Native American science may be said to be based upon perceptual phenomenology, the philosophical study of the phenomena. The central premise of phenomenology roots the entire tree of knowledge in the soil of direct, physical and perceptual experience of the earth. From a phenomenological viewpoint . . . Edmund Husserl, the original promulgator of phenomenology, believed that lived experience, or the “lifeworld” was the ultimate source of human knowledge and meaning.23

Gregory Cajete highlighted an important area of common ground between indigenous philosophies and Western philosophy. Perceptual phenomenology is a fundamental matter for the philosophy of psychedelics because it will deepen our understanding of the psychedelic experience, especially the relationship between the human being and nature, not only individual experience but also the collective one. Therefore, the development of an intercultural perceptual phenomenology is an avenue of research that deserves exploration. Another crucial topic is the knowledge to be imparted from the indigenous visionary tradition and ‘altered states of being’: There is then a visionary tradition involved with these understandings that encompasses harmony, compassion, hunting, growing, technology, spirit, sing, dance, color, number, cycle, balance, death, and renewal. The mind and body can be used for careful, disciplined, and repeatable observation. Knowledge is gathered through the body, mind, and heart in altered states of being, in songs and dance, in meditation and reflection, and in dreams and visions.24

A profound reflection on these ‘altered states of being’ is a core topic for the philosophy of psychedelics. Many psychedelic plants and fungi, such as peyote, psilocybe mushrooms, ayahuasca, iboga, and ololiuhqui, have been used by indigenous peoples for millennia. But the knowledge associated with these practices has become endangered because of colonialism. The deep value of these visionary traditions can be a crucial antidote to the epistemicide25 caused by intolerance and narrow-minded perspectives embedded in the politics of

23. Cajete, 2004, p. 45. 24. Ibid., p. 52. 25. De Soussa Santos, 2016.

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punishment. The most important topic recognition of the spiritual relationship with the land developed by indigenous peoples, because of its legal and philosophical implications: This differentia specifica of indigenous peoples, the collective spiritual relationship to their land, is what separates them also from other groups generally, and diffusely, denominated “minorities”, and what has created the need for a special legal regime transcending the general human rights rules on the universal and regional planes.26

The spiritual relationship with the land is closely related to the knowledge of psychedelic plants. For example, among the indigenous peoples from Mexico (mainly the wiraritari people), hikuri (peyote) is considered as a plant and an inherent part of the territory. Moreover, this spiritual relationship with the land is linked with some crucial issues such as the struggles to defend indigenous territories against the neo-colonial strategies and to achieve a better understanding of the relationship between indigenous peoples and nature: Native American philosophy of science has always been broad-based ecological philosophy, based not on rational thought alone, but also incorporating to the highest degree all aspects of interactions of “man in and of nature”, i.e. the knowledge and truth gained from interaction of body, mind, soul, and spirit with all aspects of Nature.27

Critical reflection of these interactions between human beings and nature is at the core of the philosophy of psychedelics; to achieve a better understanding an ‘ontological turn’ is needed. The significance of appreciating different types of ontologies was highlighted by Philippe Descola (2013/2005), who identified four different types of ontologies: naturalism, animism, totemism, and analogism. Analysing how indigenous peoples conceive their relationship with nature and the environment is of the utmost importance if we are to grasp one of the central and most commonly misunderstood features of indigenous philosophies. Without this understanding, we run the danger that: ‘attempts, including most contemporary ones, to understand other worldviews have been used to legitimise colonial oppression, exploitation and discrimination’.28 Indigenous philosophies view the air, earth, fire, water, mountains, and stars as animate entities, i.e., endowed with life. Thus, according to this cultural trait, while there is a distinction between the human being and the world, neither can be considered without the other. There is a relationship of reciprocity and immanence between human life and the becoming of nature.

26. Wiessner, 2011, p. 129. 27. Cajete, 2004, p. 46. 28. Laack, 2020, p. 2.

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With the help of heuristic tools this cultural trait can be explored irrespective of indigenous philosophies. Some of these heuristic tools are prosopopeia, personification, panpsychism, anthropomorphism, and animism. These tools have an experimental character and are not interpreted literally or as absolute truth, as in the example of animism: The word “animism” perpetuates a modern prejudice, a disdain, and a projection of inferiority toward the worldview of Indigenous peoples. But if as the French phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty contends, perception at its most elemental expression in the human body is based in our participation with our surroundings, then it can be said that “animism” is a basic human trait common to both Indigenous and modern sensibilities.29

From a philosophical perspective, the psychedelic experience has dramatically changed our understanding of interactions between human beings and nature. The philosophical uses of psychedelics will be helpful to restore the broken ties between human beings and nature. People who live in urban areas experience a ‘deficit’ of nature. The ecological movement and indigenous knowledge have common interests. Their cultural roots are slightly different, but their concerns are shared. Indigenous philosophies could be understood as an antidote to this deficit of nature, but this will not be possible without an ontological turn and decolonization of the framework used by philosophical anthropology.

5 Psychedelic Feminism A decolonial approach also requires us to point out that women’s roles and contributions in psychedelic research have been overlooked. Political, economic, and social differences regarding women contra men are undeniable. Feminism and decolonization have some concerns in common: both critically address oppression, discrimination, gender violence, and lack of recognition, and they challenge the power relations and the epistemology embedded in patriarchy. However, there are a diversity of feminisms which it is necessary to take into account to achieve a better understanding of decolonial feminism. ‘The argument is that women in non-Western societies have been marginalized and their voices distorted by Western patriarchies, third world patriarchies, colonialism, imperialism, and globalization, as well as by Western feminist theory and research’.30 On the one hand, Western feminisms such as liberal feminism, radical feminism and the Marxist socialist feminism theory are grounded in well-known frameworks and take the West as the norm. On the other hand, decolonial feminisms do not

29. Cajete, 2004, p. 50. 30. Bagele, 2012, p. 215.

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necessarily reject Western feminisms, but appropriate them to critique all forms of patriarchal oppressions and, in addition, critique Western feminisms for marginalizing the voices of non-Western women. Some examples are African feminism, Black feminism, borderland-Mestizaje feminism, and indigenous feminism. We can reflect on psychedelic feminism from a cross-cultural perspective and challenge the power relations embedded in race, gender, and class. Although I am not attempting to develop an extensive explanation about its theoretical grounds, this section will highlight some critical topics at the core of a decolonial approach. For instance, psychedelic feminism is related to eco-feminism and the third wave of feminism. Regarding the psychedelic experience, it can be stated that: In the process of delving into the subjective psychedelic experience, psychedelic feminism also promotes experiential knowledge of interconnectivity, a feeling of being connected to realms beyond oneself. These elements of participatory consciousness and connectedness are foundations of psychedelic psychospiritual work, revealing that psychedelic feminism is the core of psychedelic psychospiritual work. Although especially important for women, this feminist core functions regardless of the gender of participants.31

There is no one single type of feminism, so it is very important to recognize cultural diversity. There are, for example, significant differences between liberal feminism and black feminism. Also, the cultural context of indigenous feminism requires a minimum understanding of some specific cultural traits.32 Nevertheless, despite this diversity psychedelic feminism faces some problems common to all types, such as gender violence, sexual harassment, lack of recognition, and discrimination. As mentioned above, a decolonial approach requires us to consider the contributions of women in psychedelic research. Some examples are Valentina Pavlovna Wasson, Dobkin de Los Ríos, María Sabina, Mercedes de la Garza, Erika Dyck, and Kim Hewitt, among others. However, the vast majority of women’s contributions are found in history, anthropology, and gender studies. The contributions of Valentina Pavlovna Wasson could be cited in the fields of mycology and history. She was a pediatrician, earned a PhD, and had a professional knowledge of mushrooms – her contributions in the 1950s provided the ground for future research. Her book Mushrooms, Russia and History, was a pioneering work grounded in a rigorous methodology, especially Chapter III, ‘Mushrooms and History’. She used the terms mycophilia and mycophobia to describe academically a wide array of cultural attitudes regarding mushrooms.33 Her work represents a major contribution to the study of ancient uses of mushrooms in Mexico, mainly because of her systematic explanation of the

31. Hewitt, 2019, p. 76. 32. Bagele, 2012, pp. 215–236. 33. Wasson, and Wasson, 1957, pp. 335–351.

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historical sources and archaeological evidence. She tried to develop a secular approach in her writings about the psychedelic experience with psilocybin mushrooms. Unfortunately, she was not present at the first encounter between her husband Robert Gordon Wasson and Maria Sabina the Mazatec sage. Of course, there were major differences in the contributions of both women. Without denying the value of Valentina Pavlovna Wasson’s work, we must appreciate from a decolonial perspective some paradoxical situations to avoid a naïve understanding. For example, some of her observations were controversial, for instance her description of the experience that her husband and his photographer had with the mushrooms: ‘They enjoyed the feelings of supreme happiness and well-being that explained the age-old powers these “sacred mushrooms” exercise over this remote and primitive people’.34 A decolonial perspective must also incorporate the contribution of indigenous women, despite the lack of any academic qualification. Usually, their wisdom and knowledge are also overlooked. Nevertheless, ancestral knowledge has been transmitted among generations of women outside institutional spaces, even clandestinely. Due to colonization, these wise women were often considered witches or sorcerers and they were jailed, punished, and killed. For this reason, the knowledge of medicinal plants, ritual uses of psychedelics, contraceptive knowledge, and midwife techniques were kept concealed. A famous example is the case of Maria Sabina, the Mazatec sage devoted to the ceremonial uses of psilocybin mushrooms. ‘She is undeniably the best known Mazatec sage, but despite her notoriety, she remains poorly understood’.35 Indigenous knowledge of psychedelics has deep roots that extend for millennia. Maria Sabina was one among countless others, most of whom remain unknown. All are keepers of this ancestral legacy. A remarkable fact is that this legacy of wisdom appeared to Maria Sabina during a mushroom ceremony in the form of a book. According to her testimony, the Principal Beings surrounded a table on which an open book appeared and then grew to the size of a person. It was a white book, so white that it glowed, and on its pages were letters. However, it was not just any book. ‘One of the Principal Beings spoke to me and said: Maria Sabina, this is the Book of Wisdom. It is the Book of Language. All in it is for you. The Book is yours, take it to work with’.36 Marlene Dobkin de Ríos also made significant contributions to psychedelic research. Her works, mainly in the form of articles, addressed many topics. Her field of expertise was the use of ayahuasca (1971), but she also wrote about ‘the influence of psychotropic flora and fauna in Maya religion’ (1974) and ‘LSD and creativity’ (1989). Some of her writings were controversial due to the methodologies applied. Even so, her research has been valuable in opening new avenues of

34. Wasson, 1957. 35. Gonzalez Romero, 2021. 36. Estrada, 2005, p. 42.

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research, including issues of interest from a decolonial approach, especially those related to psychedelic tourism and cultural appropriation. While legitimate use of ayahuasca as a sacrament is permitted in new religions like the UDV, and others in Brazil, there is also a disturbing development in Europe, the United States, and Canada – we call this phenomenon “drug tourism.” It has been around for more than 40 years and has been getting worse each year. Westerners take tours throughout areas of the Amazon and experience “borrowed mysticism.” The drink ayahuasca is given to them by new, often false shamans – so-called “technicians of ecstasy” – charlatans who are on the lookout to profit from altering their clients’ consciousness.37

Her research is very significant in that it addresses non-indigenous uses of psychedelics, a critical issue to be considered when developing a philosophical approach because of the ethical concerns related to cultural appropriation. This is why a philosophical approach is beneficial: to avoid a naïve perspective in regard to the ‘psychedelic renaissance’. Mercedes de la Garza is another notable researcher who developed a rigorous and systematic approach in the field of history. Her book Sueño y extásis. Visión chamánica de los Nahuas y los Mayas (2012), is a major contribution to the use of psychedelics in Mesoamerican civilizations. The rigorous methodology displayed in her research shows how it is possible to join the archaeological evidence with historical sources and set the grounds to work with the iconography of ancient codices. According to de la Garza, an historical approach must be combined with ethnographic studies and the information found in contemporary indigenous communities through oral history, sacred narratives and ceremonies performed by ritual specialists or ‘shamans’. Her groundbreaking work has established her as one of the leading researchers in Mexico; currently, she is part of the team of researchers of the first funded project in Mexico devoted to the study of cultural and therapeutic uses of psilocybin mushrooms. The Canadian scholar Erika Dyck is also an historian, and her early research focused on the therapeutic uses of LSD, especially in the middle of the twentieth century. Her work Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD from Clinic to Campus (2008) offers important insights into the social and political context of psychedelic research before and during the boom of psychedelics during the 1960s. In recent years, she has developed a series of research materials addressing the role of women in the history of psychedelic plants. Unfortunately, even a brief look at the contributions that women have made to psychedelic research quickly shows that their efforts have been consistently overlooked, not only the teachings and practices of indigenous women, but also women in the global North, including academics.

37. Dobkin de Ríos and Rumrill, 2008, p. 2.

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The work and support of the wives of famous male researchers is not mentioned in papers, books or research studies; women such as Jane Osmond, Maria Huxley, Rose Hoffer, or Laura Huxley remain unknown to the general audience and even for researchers: ‘My historical research suggests that women were almost always involved in the counseling sessions, recruitment, etc., but are very rarely identified in the published work. The legacy of that history continues to distort our understanding of who does the work, and what kind of work is valued’.38 From a decolonial perspective, it is important to reflect critically on what kind of work is valued. The lack of recognition and discrimination are cultural traits with a long tradition in psychedelic research. Future researchers must be aware of these facts in order to move forward from a colonial epistemology that does not consider the contributions of women, people of colour, immigrants, and indigenous peoples. Developing a decolonial approach grounded in psychedelic justice is linked with crucial issues such as gender, diversity, sustainability, and reciprocity.

6 Conclusions To decolonize the philosophy of psychedelics we must confront several issues that have only been touched on in this chapter. First, we must move forward from the internal colonialism that prevails in mainstream philosophy in order to reflect on the philosophical uses of psychedelics. To decolonize mainstream philosophy it must be recognized that psychedelic experience is a source of knowledge and not only a series of hallucinations. Secondly, a critical analysis of epistemic values embedded in internal colonialism is needed so to achieve an absolute substitution of frameworks and methodologies which have undermined cognitive liberty. In that sense, the philosophy of psychedelics would be a useful tool to challenge and replace the politics of punishment to achieve a full decriminalization of psychedelics and to move forward from the trivialization of psychedelic experience. Thirdly, we must encourage the recognition of indigenous philosophies’ value and raise awareness about the undesirable consequences related to the current ‘psychedelic renaissance’ such as biopiracy, epistemological extractivism, and cultural appropriation. Furthermore, decolonizing the philosophy of psychedelics implies reflection on the violence and dispossession of indigenous lands related to the ‘war on drugs’ and the cultural appropriation attached to the implementation of psychedelic capitalism. The fourth task is the recognition of the works and contributions of women in psychedelic science because they have been overlooked for centuries. This means that gender violence and discrimination should be abolished in the so-called ‘psychedelic renaissance’. This is an ethical demand for philosophy to do justice

38. Dyck, 2021.

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and recognize all its contributors and their different contributions. Diversity, sustainability, and reciprocity form the basis for figuring out an inclusive idea of psychedelic justice capable of shifting the hegemonic paradigm that prevails nowadays. Sexual and cultural diversity, philosophical hedonism and harmreduction policies are crucial in shaping a decolonial perspective for the future of the philosophy of psychedelics. Finally, decolonizing the philosophy of psychedelics implies the issuing of new questions and avenues of research to replace the internal colonialism which prevails in mainstream philosophy by another type of philosophy based on cognitive liberty and one capable of opening our thought to a diversity of mental landscapes. To move beyond the false dichotomy of hospitals and churches, it is necessary to critically address the philosophical uses of psychedelic experience.

References Beiner, A. (2021, 10 May). Who’s in charge of psilocybin. Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines [online]. Available at: https://chacruna.net/who_owes_psilocybin/ (Accessed 27 June 2021) Cajete, G. (2004) Philosophy of Native Science, in: ed. A. Waters, American Indian Thought: Philosophical Essays (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell) Chilisa, B. (2012) Indigenous Research Methodologies (Los Angeles: SAGE Publications) De la Garza, M. (2012) Sueño y éxtasis. Visión chamánica de los nahuas y los Mayas (México: UNAM-Fondo de Cultura Económica) De Soussa Santos, B. (2016) Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide (New York: Routledge) Descola, P. ([2005]2013) Beyond Nature and Culture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press) Dobkin de Rios, M. (1971) Ayahuasca – The Healing Vine, International Journal of Social Psychiatry, 17:4, pp. 256–269 Dobkin de Rios, M. (1974) The Influence of Psychotropic Flora and Fauna in Maya Religion, Current Anthopology, 15:2, pp. 147–164 Dobkin de Rios, M. and Rumrrill, R. (2008) A Hallucinogenic Tea Laced with Controversy. Ayahuasca in the Amazon and the United States (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group) Dotson, Kristie (2011) Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing, Hypatia, 26:2, pp. 236–257 Dyck, E. (2008) Psychedelic Psychiatry. LSD from Clinics to Campus (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press) Dyck, E. (2021) How Women have been Excluded from the Field of Psychedelic Science, in: eds. Bia Labate and Clancy Cavnar, eds., Psychedelic Justice on Gender, Diversity, Sustainability, Reciprocity and Cultural Appropriation (Sant Fe: Synergetic Press) Escohotado, A. (1999) Historia general de las drogas (Madrid: Espasa Calpe) Estrada, A. (2005) Vida de María Sabina. La sabia de los hongos (México: Editorial Siglo XXI) Fanon, F (1963) The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press)

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Foucault, M. ([1975]2005) Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books) Gerber, K., Flores, I. G., Ruiz, A. C. and Ali, I. (2021) Ethical Concerns about Psilocybin Intellectual Property, ACS Pharmacol. Transl. Sci., 4, pp. 573−577 González Romero, O. (2021, May 27) María Sabina, Mushrooms, and Colonial Extractivism. Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines [online]. Available at: https://chacruna.net/maria-sabina-mushrooms-and-colonialextractivism/?fbclid=IwA R3UXmA36RHdQUiR8I0ZWPRXx8Ew_-kqtdbVqz10DqrYTiURSxgsE-3Rj0U (Accessed 27 Jun 2021) Haraway, D. (1988) Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege on Partial Perspective, Feminist Studies, 14:3, pp. 575–599 Harding, S. (2006) Science and Social Inequality: Feminist and Postcolonial Issues (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press) Hewitt, K. (2019) Psychedelic Feminism: A Radical Interpretation of Psychedelic Consciousness? Journal for the Study of Radicalism, 13:1, pp. 75–120 Janiger, O. and Dobkin de Rios, M. (1989) LSD and Creativity, Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, 21:1, pp. 129–134 Laack, I. (2020) The New Animism and Its Challenges to the Study of Religion, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 2, pp. 115–147 Labate, B. and Cavnar, C. (2021) Psychedelic Justice on Gender, Diversity, Sustainability, Reciprocity and Cultural Appropriation (Santa Fe: Synergetic Press) Langlitz, N. (2016) Is there a place for Psychedelics in Philosophy? Common Knowledge, 22:3, pp. 373–384 Letheby, Ch. (2016) The Epistemic Innocence of Psychedelic States, Consciousness and Cognition, 39, pp. 28–37 Letheby, Ch. (2017) The Philosophy of Psychedelic Transformation (Adelaide: The University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, PhD Thesis) Mall, R. (2000) Intercultural Philosophy (Philosophy and the Global Context) (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield) Noorani, T. (2019) Making Psychedelics into Medicines: The Politics and Paradoxes of Medicalization, Journal of Psychedelic Studies, 4:1, pp. 34–39 Osmond, H. (1971) Philosophical Aspects of Psychedelics, Int J Clin Pharmacol, 5:1, pp. 58–64 Rucker, J. and Young, A. (2021) Psilocybin: from Serendipity to Credibility? Frontiers in Psychiatry, 12, 659044. DOI=10.3389/fpsyt.2021.659044 Sessa, B. (2012) The Psychedelic Renaissance: Reassessing the Role of Psychedelic Drugs in 21st Century Psychiatry and Society (London: Muswell Hill Press) Sjöstedt-Hughes, P. (2015) Philosophy and Psychedelic Phenomenology, in: ed. P. McCoy, Radical Mycology (Portland: Chthaeus Press), pp. 429–432 Sjöstedt-Hughes, P. (2016) The Psychedelic Influence on Philosophy, High Existence, 8. Available at: https://philpapers.org/rec/SJSTPI. Reprinted in P. Sjöstedt-Hughes (2021) Modes of Sentience: Psychedelics – Metaphysics – Panpsychism (London: Psychedelic Press), pp. 65–86 Tuhiwai, L. (2008) Decolonizing Methodologies. Research and Indigenous Peoples (London: Zed Books) Tuck, E. and Yang, K. W. (2012) Decolonization is Not a Metaphor, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society, 1:1, pp. 1–40 Walsh, Ch. (2016) Psychedelics and Cognitive Liberty: Reimagining Drug Policy through the Prism of Human Rights, International Journal of Drug Policy, 29, 80–87

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Chapter 6 M A K I N G YOU R S OU L V I SI B L E Michael Halewood

In this chapter, I will take the term psychedelic at face value. Rather than starting with the usual connotations of the word ‘psychedelic’, in terms of ‘altered states of consciousness’ or ‘hallucination’, I will use the work of A. N. Whitehead to investigate what is involved in ‘making one’s soul visible’, at the philosophical level at least. The recent coinage of this term is an advantage in this respect, in that the choice to meld two terms – psyche (‘soul’ or ‘mind’) and delos (‘make visible’ or ‘manifest’) was both deliberate and perhaps provocative. I want to argue that instead of regarding the psychedelic as some kind of rare or exceptional phenomenon, the seeds of psychedelic experience are located within the very possibility of human experience. That is to say, psychedelic experiences are not ‘add-ons’ to everyday experience but represent an intensification of that which is present or possible within the experience of being human. Focusing upon this intensification of possible experience is what I mean by both ‘making the soul visible’ and the psychedelic, as will hopefully become clearer as the chapter unfolds. There are various reasons for the choice of Whitehead. First, although he does not have a theory of the soul, as such, throughout his writings he makes use of this term to outline the spontaneity involved in being a person. His choice of the term ‘soul’, as opposed to that of ‘mind’ enables him to avoid some of the pitfalls and strictures of traditional approaches to the philosophy of mind. Although he does not deny the existence of consciousness, Whitehead does not prioritise it or see it as foundational: ‘consciousness is the crown of experience, only occasionally attained, not its necessary base’.1 Second, the choice of ‘soul’ is unexpected, perhaps it even carries a risk, in that it might suggest some unwanted theological legacy. At the very least, it is designed to make us stop and think. In this way, a further advantage of focusing on the soul, as opposed to consciousness, is that we may assume that we know what we mean by consciousness, but we are surely less certain when it comes to the soul. This trepidation is to be welcomed. (And as may become clear throughout this chapter, perhaps we should also be less confident

1. Whitehead, [1929] 1978, p. 267.

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that we actually know what is involved in consciousness; this is especially pertinent if we are interested in something like ‘altered states of consciousness’). Third, and as indicated by the quotation given above, for Whitehead, what matters is experience. Philosophy, in its modern quest for knowledge and truth, has tended to ignore the breadth of experience which makes up human life. Whitehead gently mocks the narrowing of philosophy to questions of truth and falsehood as follows: ‘It is difficult to believe that all logicians as they read Hamlet’s speech, ‘To be, or not to be: . . .’ commence by judging whether the initial proposition be true or false, and keep up the task of judgment throughout the whole thirty-five lines’.2 This is not to suggest that Whitehead thought that logic was irrelevant or impossible; symbolic logic was Whitehead’s first and enduring academic interest after all. Whitehead aims to broaden the scope of philosophy so that it can accomplish its original remit and encompass more not less. Clarifying how this applies to matters of the psychedelic is one aim of this chapter. Whitehead is at pains, throughout his work, to refuse any divisions between a supposedly factual world and its epiphenomenal ‘perception’ by the human mind. He calls this unwarranted and problematic division the ‘bifurcation of nature’ (see, for example, Whitehead, 1964: 19–30) which ‘enfeebles [modern thought] by reason of the inconsistency lurking in the background’.3 Whitehead’s approach can be likened to John Dewey’s refusal to make a strict division between the world and experience, in order not to explain away certain unlikely or unwanted experiences as ‘supernatural’. As Dewey puts it, if the facticity of the world is given priority and separated from the emotional, physical or cognitive reactions made to such facticity then ‘psycho-physical and mental functions became inexplicable anomalies, supernatural in the literal sense of the word.4 The literal sense of ‘supernatural’ is ‘above’ or ‘beyond’ of nature. The separation of a factual nature from the ‘psychic addition[s] furnished by the perceiving mind’5 has led to a range of experiences, including those of the psychedelic, being dismissed by philosophy as lacking any grounding in reality and therefore as irrelevant. They are mere fictions, they are super-natural. This chapter will follow Whitehead’s lead, by attempting to place psychedelic experience within ‘nature’ rather than above or beyond it. Psychedelic experience does not grant access to some hidden realm but does expresses an intensification of an aspect of possible human experience. This refusal to set a hierarchy to experience is set out in Whitehead’s surprising assertion that ‘Philosophy may not neglect the multifariousness of the world the fairies dance, and Christ is nailed to the cross’.6 Whitehead is not concerned, at this stage, with the truth or falsehood of either fairies or Christ (whether they exist or not); but to deny that belief in fairies or Christ is a possible element of human experience

2. Ibid., p. 185. 3. Whitehead [1925] 1932, p. 94. 4. Dewey, [1925] 1958, p. 265. 5. Whitehead, [1920] 1964, pp. 29–30. 6. Whitehead, 1978, p. 338.

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which philosophy should be able to encompass is to place overly strict limits on thought and life. This chapter is divided into five sections. It will start by providing more detail on Whitehead’s concept of the soul, it will then turn, briefly, to Whitehead’s attempt to both narrow the scope and field of consciousness and to render it as a ‘positive negation’. This leads to a discussion of ‘propositions’ which is then used to consider the philosophical status of the psychedelic through the notion of ‘entertainment’. The chapter concludes with a word of caution regarding the question of making our souls visible.

1 Re-approaching the Soul Although the first main chapter of Whitehead’s book Adventures of Ideas is titled ‘The Human Soul’,7 he does not provide an explicit definition of the soul. Instead, Whitehead sets out the ongoing problem of the status of the soul, since the time of Plato, remarking that in Plato’s later works the ‘Psyche is, of course, the Soul’.8 This identification of psyche with the soul is important for the purposes of this chapter. In Ancient Greece, psyche was also the word used for butterfly and the connotation of flitting is apt. For, as Whitehead puts it: ‘spontaneity is the essence of soul’.9 The soul expresses novelty. It is not an enduring entity which inhabits the human mind or body; it is an aspect of our existence which enables us to go beyond the mere contemplation of fact, or judgements of truth and falsehood: ‘the soul of a man [sic] is mainly concerned with the trivialities of existence [. . .] it catches the gleam of the sunlight as it falls on the foliage. It nurtures poetry’.10 While Whitehead uses the word ‘trivialities’ here, this does not mean that these elements of existence are trivial, in any demeaning sense. Indeed, they are of the utmost importance, for the enjoyment of a gleam of sunlight, the very existence of poetry, are vital elements which constitute us as human. This is not some simplistic recourse to questions of beauty and art, however. If it were, Whitehead would be reiterating the traditional split between science and the humanities, between facts and values, indeed to the bifurcation of nature, which has dogged much of recent Western thought. The role that Whitehead assigns to the soul is beyond fact or value. Both logic and aesthetics concentrate on the closed fact. Our lives are passed in the experience of disclosure. As we lose this sense of disclosure, we are shedding that mode of functioning which is the soul.11

7. Whitehead, 1933, pp. 11–31. 8. Ibid., p. 354. 9. Ibid., p. 64. 10. Whitehead, 1938, pp. 42–43. 11. Ibid., p. 87.

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Rather than being an enduring entity, the soul is a ‘mode of functioning’. It is exhibited in moments of ‘disclosure’, which could also be read as ‘revelation’. These moments of sheer disclosure bypass the operations of rationality or reason. They are the immediate experience of something new. ‘These functionings of the soul are diverse, variable, and discontinuous’.12 As a result, it is not ‘a mere question of having a soul or of not having a soul. The question is, How much, if any?’.13 We do have souls but only on occasions. A better way of putting it might be that we are occasionally soulful.14 Quite what it means to have an occasional soul, and how this links to the notion of the psychedelic will be taken up in the sections which follow. The key point to remember at this stage is Whitehead’s linking of the soul to psyche, and his opening up of a crucial arena of human experience which does not rely on the operations or priority of reason, rationality or consciousness. At the same time, some analysis of Whitehead’s outline of consciousness is required.

2 Narrowing Consciousness Consciousness flickers; and even at its brightest, there is a small focal region of clear illumination, and a large penumbral region of experience which tells of intense experience in dim apprehension. The simplicity of clear consciousness is no measure of the complexity of complete experience. Also this character of our experience suggests that consciousness is the crown of experience, only occasionally attained, not its necessary base.15

Consciousness is not the foundation or base of human experience. Rather, it is an occasional outcome of other experiences. Unlike those philosophers, especially some philosophers of mind, who seek to isolate and understand consciousness as either the guarantor of experience and knowledge, Whitehead has a different starting point, for, as he makes clear: ‘Experience has been explained in a thoroughly topsyturvy fashion, the wrong end first’.16 What interests Whitehead is the ‘large penumbral region of experience’, out of which consciousness intermittently arises and flickers. Importantly, although in partial shadow (‘penumbral’) that region of experience which is not clearly illuminated by consciousness is still an effectual and ‘intense’ experience, albeit dimly apprehended. I will return to the importance of intensity later on; what is worth noting at present is that Whitehead’s decision not to start his investigation with the question or notion of consciousness enables his philosophy to take seriously phenomena such as hallucinations, without reducing them to ‘mistakes’.

12. Ibid., p. 222. 13. Whitehead, 1933, p. 267. 14. See Halewood, 2016, for more on this. 15. Whitehead, 1929, p. 267. 16. Whitehead, 1978, p. 161.

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The seed of consciousness, according to Whitehead, lies in the experience of a contrast between what is and what might be: ‘the feeling of this contrast is consciousness’.17 Consciousness is an experience, one which needs to be explained, not assumed. To reiterate: Whitehead describes the experience of consciousness as an experience of a contrast between what is and what might be. Crucially, this notion of ‘what might be’ involves both potentiality and a very specific form of negation. Having a (conscious) perception of the world in which things are perceived simply as they are (‘I see a grey stone’) does not exemplify the full operations of consciousness. Having a perception of the world which involves experiencing, or experimenting with, alternatives is the core of conscious activity: ‘negative perception is the triumph of consciousness. It finally rises to the peak of free imagination, in which the conceptual novelties search through a universe in which they are not datively exemplified’.18 This mention of ‘negative perception’ does not lead Whitehead down any neo-Hegelian dialectic, where consciousness has to move out of itself, to recognize an ‘other’ (consciousness) which it is not, in order to constitute itself as a self. Whitehead’s version of negation is a ‘positive’ one. The recognition that the grey stone did not have to be grey (to take Whitehead’s rather banal example) unleashes a wealth of alternatives, of other possibilities, of potentiality. This grey stone could have been white, or brown, or pink, or covered in red polka dots and images of dancing elephants. This is the triumph of consciousness, that it can narrow in on what something could not have been – and this leads to a host of other possibilities. In this way, Whitehead grants conscious experience and hallucinations the same ontological basis and justification. Rather than envisaging consciousness as the accurate capturing or depiction of the world, consciousness is the occasional recognition of the role and importance of potentiality, of things possibly being what they are not. This can be linked to the operations of the soul as an element which both enables and enhances the operations of consciousness; in that it invokes a spontaneity which can bring what might first appear trivial to the centre of attention. Whitehead ‘conceives the thought as a constituent operation in the creation of the occasional thinker’.19 As with the soul, he does not see thinking or consciousness as a continuous or substantial entity; instead, it is an occasional experience, arising out of more basic modes of thinking, feeling and bodily functioning. This has implications for a notion which, for many commentators, is a marker of the psychedelic, namely, the notion of ‘altered states of consciousness’. Whitehead would not deny the possibility of psychedelic experiences involving altered states of consciousness but would want to change the emphasis by asking us to approach the matter the other way around. It is not so much a matter of consciousness being altered, but altered experiences producing different moments of consciousness. In a sense, for Whitehead, consciousness is premised on alteration and is always

17. Ibid., p. 267. 18. Whitehead, 1928, p. 161. 19. Whitehead, 1978, p. 151.

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altered. It is the more fundamental experience of the potentiality, and the extension of this aspect, prior to any conscious judgement, which characterizes the psychedelic. Consciousness never remains the same; this is its strength, that it is the product of novel experiences and thoughts, it bears witness to the inescapable novelty which suffuses existence, the world, and life. It does so through the operations of an occasional soul which expresses and enables spontaneity. The following section will revisit the role of spontaneity in terms of novelty and potentiality through a discussion of Whitehead’s very specific rendering of the philosophical term ‘propositions’.

3 The World Pro-Poses Itself For Whitehead, the term ‘proposition’ is a technical one and his choice of this specific word is instructive. In early twentieth-century philosophy, when Whitehead was writing, the term ‘proposition’ was widely used but hotly disputed by the likes of Bertrand Russell, the early Wittgenstein and members of the Vienna Circle. As is often the case, Whitehead takes a word, one which we might think we are familiar with, and reorientates it. Within analytic philosophy, ‘propositions’ refer to the thought content of a statement or sentence. Propositions are characterised as true or false and do not consist of words although they are expressed in words. The same proposition can be expressed in different sentences . . . while the same sentence can be used to express different propositions.20

Whitehead recognizes this shade of meaning of ‘propositions’ but argues that it points to only one aspect of their status and function. Whitehead insists that: ‘in the realization of propositions, “judgement” is a very rare component, and so is “consciousness” ’.21 Once again, philosophy’s focus on truth and falsehood misses out much that needs to be and should be included. The key to this idea (and to Whitehead’s choice of the word ‘propositions’) is that reality pro-poses itself to us. Existence is not mute or inert; it is replete with possibilities and these are evidenced in the propositions in which we find ourselves immersed. The world offers itself to us, in various ways (it pro-poses itself). It is a marker of the importance of the concept of propositions that Whitehead returns to them again and again in Process and Reality. The actualities of the world are not passive, not something we are given in a brute manner. They are not simple facts. There is more to knowledge that a simple judgement as to the truth or falsehood of a proposition. This ‘is one of the reasons why the logicians’ rigid alternative,

20. Mitchell, 1964, p. 13. 21. Whitehead, 1978, p. 184.

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“true” or “false,” is so largely irrelevant for the pursuit of knowledge’.22 There is more to knowledge and experience than truth and falsehood. ‘A thought is a tremendous mode of excitement. Like a stone thrown into a pond it disturbs the whole surface of our being’.23 Whitehead challenges the commonplace understanding of such an instance, where we identify the stone as a simple object which causes certain disturbances or ripples in us subjects. Instead, we need to take these both together, as one ‘event’. So much so that ‘we should conceive the ripples as effective in the creation of the plunge of the stone into the water’.24 Or, as Stengers puts it: ‘To ask for the meaning of a proposition is to confuse the creation of the stone-plus-ripples event with a deduction of the ripples from the stone’s impact’.25 Propositions do not have a specific meaning. The whole point of the notion of ‘propositions’ is to clarify the possible contrasts between what ‘is’ and ‘what could be’. Such experiences, such thoughts, come all together, at once. The plunging of the stone cannot, on this occasion, be separated from the ripples which it elicited. They are part of the same event. In this sense, the ripples created the plunge of the stone as much as the stone created the ripples. Whitehead shifts the emphasis from truth and falsehood to the quality of experience. In doing so, he democratizes and broadens the range of possible experiences. He also links thought to excitement and maintains that such excited thought can ‘disturb the whole surface of our being’. In doing so, as will be seen in a later section of this chapter, he paves the way for an inclusion of psychedelic experience within philosophy, one which deals not with stones, ponds, and ripples, but with more unusual versions of the world. To return to propositions – they require to be felt, rather than simply thought or judged as true or false. We need to ‘substitute the broad notion of “feeling” for the narrower notions of “judgement” and “belief ” ’.26 When we are faced with an actuality, a situation, an event, we do not just calmly and passively assess it. We feel it. ‘A proposition is entertained when it is admitted into feeling. Horror, relief, purpose, are primarily feelings involving the entertainment of propositions’.27 I will return to the notion of entertainment below, after turning to the distinction between conformal and non-conformal propositions.

4 Entertaining Propositions and the Psychedelic The role of propositions is to account for the ‘flash of novelty among the appetitions of its [a living occasion’s] mental pole’28 and this mention of novelty and spontaneity 22. Ibid., p. 11. 23. Whitehead, 1938, p. 50. 24. Ibid. 25. Stengers, 2005, p. 53. 26. Whitehead, 1978, p. 187. 27. Ibid., p. 188. 28. Ibid., 184.

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should remind us of the role of the soul in Whitehead’s work. For Whitehead, what he calls ‘non-conformal’ propositions are more important, and more interesting, than conformal propositions. An example might help explain Whitehead’s point. Someone is looking for a corkscrew in order to open a bottle of wine. They look around the kitchen and are unable to see one, they keep looking and keep looking. The person’s friends are waiting in the other room. This person looks around again and sees a knife on the table, momentarily they mistake the knife for a corkscrew and pick it up. They then realize that it is not a corkscrew but realize that they could use it anyway to open the wine. This they manage to do. This situation or event is an example of a non-conformal proposition being realized. The knife is not a corkscrew; in this sense, an error or mistake has been made. This error, however, leads to the sheer disclosure or revelation that the knife could act as a corkscrew and could change the world which this person currently inhabits (the wine can be opened). This revelation, this novelty, is an example of the operation of Whitehead’s version of the soul (as discussed previously). What was initially an error unleashes potentiality in the world and the occasion and produces a novel outcome. Again, this is one role of the soul. Whitehead is against the traditional (logical) view that ‘non-conformal propositions are merely wrong, and therefore worse than useless’.29 As such, a non-conformal proposition ‘may be good or bad. But it is new, a new type of individual, and not merely a new intensity of individual feeling’.30 The main point of non-conformal propositions is to ‘pave the way along which the world advances into novelty’.31 Whitehead maintains that philosophy has, on the whole, ignored the role and importance of non-conformal propositions. Instead, it has focused upon what he calls ‘conformal propositions’. These are the kind of propositions that philosophers have assessed in terms of their truth or falsehood; they are especially appealing to logicians: The fact that propositions were first considered in connection with logic, and the moralistic preference for true propositions, have obscured the rôle of propositions in the actual world.32

A conformal proposition replicates the past. This is what makes it true. ‘That is a grey stone’ is a proposition in which both the stone conforms (it is grey) and so does the statement itself (‘that stone is grey’). This may allow logicians to ply their trade but this is not, according to Whitehead, either very interesting or indeed a reflection of the complexities of experience and existence. Conformal propositions conform to the past and to the world as it is now. In doing so, they do not exhibit the novelty which Whitehead is at pains to insert into both his philosophy and the

29. Ibid., p. 187. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., p. 259.

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world. Non-conformal propositions are therefore vital, in that they express a range of possibilities. They allow for a consideration of what might be but is not, as yet. For, when ‘a non-conformal proposition is admitted into feeling, the reaction to the datum has resulted in the synthesis of fact with . . . alternative potentiality’.33 Another of Whitehead’s examples is more telling of the role of non-conformal propositions than that of a corkscrew. He mentions the Battle of Waterloo: ‘the possibilities of another course of history which would have followed upon his [Napoleon’s] victory, are relevant to the facts which actually happened’.34 The Battle of Waterloo did not simply happen. It is not a dead fact of history, in the past, which has had its effect on European history and politics. It is still, in a sense, alive. That which did not happen constitutes a penumbra of possibilities which still surround and infect the modern states of Europe. What was not the case, what is not the case, is neither a negation nor negligible for current and future experience. The possible and the potential haunt our world and our lives. To risk repeating the point; this is something that has been neglected by much of philosophy, and this neglect makes it difficult to allow for or to take seriously the role and status of psychedelic experience. In order to allow for such experiences, we need to allow for our soulfulness, on occasions at least, in order to be able to account for the novelty and spontaneity which clearly inhabit the world but which philosophy has traditionally found so difficult to explain. This soul does not have to be taken in any religious or theological sense but as enabling philosophy to incorporate and take seriously all the possible experiences and perceptions which humans have the capacity to enjoy or endure. It is now time to turn to a more direct discussion of such matters.

5 Entertainment Throughout his discussions of propositions, Whitehead makes extensive use of the word ‘entertain’.35 This is a slightly unusual usage of the term and refers to its root meaning, that is, to ‘hold together’ or to ‘hold among’. The act or experience of being immersed in the world involves holding together elements which were previously diverse. More than that, it involves experimenting, playing even, with the interrelations of facts and possibilities or potentiality. ‘Is this a knife or is it a corkscrew.’ Whitehead is not, unlike many philosophers, distracted by the simple and uninteresting distinction between appearance and reality. Such a distinction assumes a factual basis to existence which is divorced from its possible perception by humans. Such humans are, it is supposed, fallible creatures and are likely to misrecognize this factual reality; mistakenly taking an appearance to be what is really real. Not only does Whitehead insist that reality is process, as signalled in the

33. Ibid., p. 187. 34. Ibid., p. 185. 35. See, for example, ibid., pp. 43, 147, 188, 193, 195, 197, 258, 259.

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title of his major metaphysical work – Process and Reality36 – but he also holds that the narrow philosophical question of the correspondence of appearances to reality, their truth and falsehood, both limits philosophy and misses out on a crucial and widespread aspect of existence and experience which can be summed up in one word – ‘novelty’: propositions ‘pave the way along which the world advances into novelty. Error is the price which we pay for progress’.37 And novelty and spontaneity express the operations of an occasional soul. In this way, Whitehead allows for a philosophy of ‘error’, with error granted a possibly positive contribution. It also allows for the role and status of hallucination to be reconsidered. Hallucination is not an exception to the usual mode of experiencing the world. Clearly, it does not conform to the usual or everyday reception of the world, but it is certainly not exempted from the manner and demands of human experience. It is certainly not ‘supernatural’ (in the sense that Dewey sets out). Instead, hallucinations represent an intensification of the experience of potentiality; of the world being possibly otherwise. ‘Intensity is the reward of narrowness’.38 Hallucinations focus on specific elements of experience and extend such experiences, prior to any judgement being made about the truth or falsehood of a proposition, in the Whiteheadian sense of the term; ‘that fly is (or could be) a fairy’. The psychedelic element involves an entertaining of potentiality, and extending this entertainment, so that the question of the truth or falsehood of the experience, and the perceptions involved, is irrelevant. ‘The primary mode of realization of a proposition [. . .] is not by judgment, but by entertainment.’39 What the entertainment of a proposition highlights is possibility. Such experiences will be intense (this is a direct result of Whitehead’s emphasis on ‘intensity as the reward of narrowness’). Such experiences can be unnerving. We are used to the comfort of seemingly knowing what something is, what constitutes our surrounding. An inhibition of familiar sensa is very apt to leave us a prey to vague terrors respecting a circumambient world of causal operations. In the dark there are vague presences, doubtfully feared; in the silence, the irresistible causal efficacy of nature presses itself upon us; in the vagueness of the low hum of insects in an August woodland, the inflow into ourselves of feelings from enveloping nature overwhelms us; in the dim consciousness of half-sleep, the presentations of sense fade away, and we are left with the vague feeling of influences from vague things around us.40

Remaining in and with the possibility and potentiality offered by propositions is the hallmark of hallucinations, and allows for the psychedelic element to be

36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., p. 187. 38. Ibid., p. 112. 39. Ibid., p. 188. 40. Ibid., p. 176.

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understood, philosophically speaking at least. As to whether such an experience is ‘enjoyable’ is a different question. As has been seen, Whitehead has a specific understanding of the notion of ‘entertainment’. Although we often expect entertainment to be enjoyable, it does not necessarily follow that it is. For Whitehead, enjoyment refers to a different aspect of experience. It concerns the completion of an experience and is related to ‘satisfaction’ where ‘all indeterminations respecting the potentialities of the universe are definitely solved so far as concerns the satisfaction of the subject in question’.41 The hallucinatory element inhabits those experiences which are prior to any such satisfaction. Whitehead was no moralist, and although he did not talk of psychedelic experiences or focus on the role of hallucination, he would neither praise nor condemn them. ‘Such feelings, divorced from immediate sensa, are pleasant, or unpleasant, according to mood’.42 For him, psychedelic experiences would represent a segment of the possible panoply of (human) experience. The judgement of the worth, or not, of any experience is to be assessed in terms of the contribution it makes to both the individual and the world. This cannot be decided in advance. But it must take seriously that which is often dismissed by certain philosophers – namely, error, hesitation and even hallucination, for: ‘whatever we do think of, thereby in some sense “exists”’.43 That which humans (or other entities) entertain in thought, as a possibility, as an alternative to what is, should not to be dismissed as mere ephemera or imagining; our thoughts exist, and what is thought in such thoughts has a form of existence. It might be going too far to argue that we need to hallucinate in order to develop a genuinely novel idea. However, experimenting with possibilities in thought as real realities should not be seen as simply thinking a range of alternatives to the facts of the matter as they are now. Whitehead’s point is stronger than that; positive errors involve novelty and can help create new worlds. If, as is suggested by the title of this chapter, the intensification of experience, through the entertainment of sheer potentiality, is a marker of the psychedelic, then, as has been argued throughout this piece, it also involves that mode of functioning which Whitehead calls ‘the soul’: the entertainment of experience and possibility do not come from nowhere; the capacity to entertain the possibilities involved in an experience; the very potentiality of the world, prior to any judgement being made regarding the truth or falsehood of such experiences; the experience of sheer disclosure and revelation beyond the narrow confines of matters of fact – all these express the mode of functioning which Whitehead calls the soul. It is in these terms that the psychedelic involves making one’s soul visible. Whitehead’s concept of the soul reminds us, or invites us, to linger upon those moments of spontaneity, hesitation, potentiality and even uncertainty which are vital elements of human experience, beyond the mere factual. This lingering could certainly be construed in terms of making your soul visible.

41. Ibid., p. 154. 42. Ibid., p. 176. 43. Ibid., p. 135.

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Yet, if the psychedelic really does involve making your soul visible, then this raises two important questions: to whom is the soul visible? And what risks are involved in making one’s soul visible? Whitehead would urge caution; opening up our souls to the scrutiny of others, or the world, or even our own self, could be problematic if not dangerous. This is not the place to answer such questions; indeed, Whitehead would argue that it is not possible to provide once and for all answers to such questions in advance. But they need to be asked. The danger would be as much in providing a wholesale celebration of the psychedelic as it would be to dismiss or denigrate it. Philosophy’s role is not neutral but nor is it that of an advocate. It is, rather, to allow for a width and depth of possible experience but also to help situate these within wider concerns.

References Halewood, M. (2016) Do Those Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease Lose their Souls? The Sociological Review, 64, pp. 786–804 Mitchell, D. (1964) An Introduction to Logic (London: Hutchinson and Co.) Stengers, I. (2005) Whitehead’s Account of the Sixth Day, Configurations, 13:1, pp. 35–55 Whitehead, A. N. ([1920]1964) The Concept of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Whitehead, A. N. ([1925]1932) Science and the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Whitehead, A. N. (1929) Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology (Gifford Lectures of 1927–1928) (New York: Macmillan & Company) Whitehead, A. N. ([1929]1978) Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology (Gifford Lectures of 1927–1928). Corrected edition, eds. D. Griffin and D. Sherburne (New York: The Free Press) Whitehead, A. N. (1933) Adventures of Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Whitehead, A. N. (1938) Modes of Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

Chapter 7 I N D I V I DUA L I Z AT IO N A N D A L I E NAT IO N I N P SYC H E D E L IC P SYC HO T H E R A P Y Christine Hauskeller

Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence – whether much that is glorious – whether all that is profound – does not spring from disease of thought – from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.1

1 Introduction Inducing madness to cure madness is an evocative way of describing what psychotherapists do when prescribing their patients psychedelic experiences. This chapter’s central question is whether inducing madness to cure madness can be sound medical research and, if so, what the scientific characteristics of such research are. Psychedelic experiences are characterized as leaving one’s everyday ordinary modes of mental and physical states, instead experiencing, even exploring, mind and self, past experiences, and sensory perceptions differently. Ineffability – the inability to fully grasp or express with words such an experience – is a characteristic commonly found in trip reports.2 The experience is largely unpredictable and radically individual – we cannot know in advance how a person will respond. But a safe set and setting may provide the conditions under which possible experiences of terror and existential anxiety or panic can be reflected on and worked through. Psychedelic psychotherapy proliferates evidence that such experiences support recovery from mental illnesses and help the overcoming of severe anxiety. The clinical development of psychedelic treatments began in the mid twentieth century3 and was disrupted when the substances were criminalized and their uses, including in research, relegated to the fringe of science and society. The revival of 1. Poe, 1842, p. 1. 2. For instance, in James, 1902. 3. For more information see, for example, Richert and Dyck, 2020.

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using psychedelic drugs in psychotherapy accelerates at present in the form of many, mostly small, clinical trials. Furthermore, public as well as investor interest is increasing, and the companies involved in this drive, such as Compass Pathways, are filing patent applications and are negotiating with regulators. Psychedelics are framed as a magic bullet in biomedical psychotherapy.4 Over its 100-year history, psychotherapy has shown an underwhelming ability to cure severe anxiety, major depression or addiction disorders, and the number of people who suffer from symptoms of these mental illnesses is rising. Why are these symptoms so common? Frankfurt School Critical Theory offers analyses of the fraught relationships between individual and society, nature and culture, instrumental and communicative rationality,5 which can be helpful for addressing this question as well as for addressing what the remedies might be. I apply methods and viewpoints from Critical Theory and the philosophy of medicine to reflect on contexts of psychedelic psychotherapies. These methods help to examine whether the promised therapeutic potential is likely to be liberating and, to focus this emphatic question more onto everyday practicalities, how clinical licensing might support or hinder the decriminalization of psychedelic-stateinducing substances that many ask for.6 Critical inquiry puts the finger on the power relations in the medicalization of psychedelics. They concern a psychotherapy that uses drugs to induce patient trust, the social order in which a clinical exemption maintains the general prohibition of the personal freedom to explore states of consciousness, and the commodification and colonization of both very intimate individual experiences as well as knowledges and practices developed over centuries in cultures of the global South. Because of the legal prohibition, the global North has developed the capacity to extract and mass-produce chemical compounds that induce psychedelic states, but it lacks cultural and communal practices or rituals that help the psychical integration of psychedelic experiences – all we offer is psychological counselling. In this chapter I draw on Critical Theory because its concepts of alienation, individualization, and instrumental rationality are invaluable for analysing this situation and, moreover, notions of the meaningfulness of human existence aid my

4. For more detail see, for instance, Langlitz et al., 2021. 5. In Habermas, [1981] 1984, he distinguishes these two types of rationality. Communicative rationality stems from human interaction and recognizes human interconnectedness. It serves the free change of ideas and fair decision-making. Instrumental rationality is a technique of commodification to reach personal goals. Market capitalism and bureaucratic processes are forms of instrumental rationality. 6. E.g. Nutt et al., 2010 and Walsh, 2010. Drug policy differs in parts of the world depending on, among other factors, the coverage of health care and regulation as well as cultural legacies and histories of drug policing. Whilst I will reference US actors in my discussion, my general view on the question of liberalization stems from experience with UK and European practices of drug and medical research legislation and implementation of new treatments.

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inquiry.7 This philosophical tradition has articulated the contradictions between scientific methods and ethical concerns. Here I draw on this critique especially regarding both the limitation of exceptional experiences to the clinical sphere and the appropriation of extracted knowledge practices from marginalized peoples. Problematized are power relations and questions of justice and recognition regarding claims of epistemic authority, forms of ownership and valorization, and respect in a global perspective. My outline of a critical philosophy of psychedelics covers a large discursive space, remaining cursory at times. After presenting the Critical Theory approach, I focus on medicalization and philosophical critiques of the psychiatric sciences. I then briefly examine aspects of the clinical trials and elaborate what I call the psychedelic psychiatric paradox. This leads to a discussion of reasons why individuals and communities will suffer if psychedelics are handed over to the stewardship of medical experts. The ethical considerations arising concern restrictions on individuals and uses of psychedelics as well as the appropriation of communal knowledge-practices, mostly in the global South, through the medical and pharmaceutical industrial complex that is largely controlled by, and enriching to, some in the global North.

2 Alienation and Individualization The concept of alienation was introduced by Gottlieb W. F. Hegel. In his system of dialectic development, alienation is the antithesis of identity-stages and leads to self-consciousness.8 Subsequently, the concept plays an important role in both its metaphysical and materialist aspects in philosophy. The metaphysical approach understands alienation as the default state of individual social existence, it is found especially in existentialist thought, which challenges Hegel’s optimism that all entities are, in principle, able to reach self-recognition.9 The materialist approach takes a more critical stance. Karl Marx and Max Weber are among the philosophers concerned with the human condition in a world organized by a capitalist political economy and by powerful bureaucratic institutions.10 It is in rejecting aspects of Hegel’s conception of alienation as a transient stage in the dialectical process that Marx establishes the usage of alienation as a critical concept through which to assess the individual-social world relation under a distinct socio-economic-political system. More specifically: capitalism.11

7. See, for example, Fromm, 1941 and Frankl, 1956. 8. Hegel, [1820] 2005. 9. See, for instance, Kierkegaard, [1849] 2008, Heidegger, [1927] 2000, and Sartre, [1943] 2003. 10. See Karl Marx, [1932] 2004; Max Weber, [1904] 2017. 11. Puusalu, 2018, p. 37.

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Here alienation does not figure as ontologically necessary, but rather as an effect of the material social conditions under which individuals live. Marx and Weber both argue that the division of labour and the lack of influence of individuals on their living conditions cause alienation. For Marx, individuals cannot overcome alienation independently and without changes in the material social world, change requires a revolution. Humans need authentic connection and engagement with the world. Such engagement with nature has become profoundly distorted, because of technological divisions of labour and commodification of the products. Labour becomes work and its value reduced to the pay equivalent. A revolution against the resulting alienation is historically inevitable for Marx. Weber is more pessimistic, his emphasis is on alienation through rationalization and disenchantment which seem inescapable, because he sees them as ossified in the abstracting sciences of calculation and their co-agents, the apparatus of bureaucratic institutions of power. Frankfurt School Critical Theory12 builds on these philosophical theories as well as the psychoanalytic theory of the ontogenesis of individual consciousness and character by Sigmund Freud.13 I limit the following introduction mostly to Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s joint work Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) and the discussion of alienation in the context of rationalization and individualization; the aspects most relevant for analysing the medicalization of psychedelics in psychotherapy. Myth becomes enlightenment and nature mere objectivity. Human beings purchase the increase in their power with estrangement from that over which it is exerted. Enlightenment stands in the same relationship to things as the dictator to human beings. He knows them only to the extent that he can manipulate them. The man of science knows things to the extent that he can make them. Their “in-itself ” becomes “for him”. In their transformation the essence of things is revealed as always the same, a substrate of domination.14

Dialectic of Enlightenment is a reflection on the conditions under which the civilized bourgeois society of Germany in the 1930s dismantled itself to serve fascism and commit grave atrocities against humanity. Adorno and Horkheimer examine the nature of human reason and existence. The rationalist, capitalist hierarchical society feeds the desire for total domination over nature and fate for profit. It distorts humanness into fatalist disaffection. The term alienation is not

12. Frankfurt School Critical Theory evolved in the context of the interdisciplinary Institute for Social Research, first founded in 1923 in Frankfurt on Main in Germany. The Institute closed when the Nazis came to power in 1933 and was re-established at Columbia University in New York. It was re-opened in Frankfurt in 1951. 13. This school of philosophy also sparked so-called Freudo-Marxism. An umbrella term for diverse theories that analyse the ills of society drawing on Marx’s critical political economy and Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. 14. Horkheimer and Adorno, [1947] 2002, p. 6.

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often used nor defined in this work yet, as Axel Honneth notes: ‘No concept has been more powerful in defining the character of early Critical Theory than that of alienation, for the first members of this tradition the concept was taken to be so self-evident that it needed no definition or justification.’15 Reason and myth are not opposites but variations of the human ability and need to make sense of and to control fate and nature. Enacting reason is engaging in activities that stabilize and bind the subjects of such engagement, with increasing technological rationality reconfiguring them as passive matter. The practice of objectification creates the human as domineering over events, over other humans, and over animals and plants as well as himself by cunning, by using reason instrumentally to achieve ends, not by using it to acquire genuine understanding. The dialectic of objectification and self-oppression that is linked to alienation is extreme under conditions of industrial capitalism because the controlling use of rationality is valued above all other human abilities and needs. Detachment and instrumental use turn reason that can be engaging into reason for ruling over oppression; in effect hollowing out intersubjective and self-relations. Like Odysseus, who has himself tied up, binding his nature to not succumb to the song of the sirens that he is also desperately eager to enjoy hearing, individuals are disciplined to control their needs and deny or compensate for their vulnerability, their inevitable lack of self-understanding and their intersubjective dependency16 – all core features of the human condition. These supposed autonomous agents, believing to own themselves, are alienated from what makes them individuals, marionettes of a system that replaces meaningful relations with fetishes of success. Alienation is linked to existential states such as discontent, melancholia, detachment, desperation – often unacknowledged affective dispositions which political demagogues, the advertising and the entertainment industry exploit for their ends, be they nationalist or fascist politics or rampant consumerism. Simply identifying these existential affects with psychiatric diagnoses such as major depression, anxiety or addiction would be a category mistake. The latter is a schematic (if in parts still hermeneutic, especially psychiatry) process of identifying sets of defined traits in another that are deemed symptomatic of a specific illness. By contrast, affective states are highly subjective appellative descriptions about one’s own condition. Yet phenomenologically, a family resemblance between both is evident, not least because patients’ own accounts are the critical factor in arriving at a psychiatric diagnosis. The liberalist, competitive notion of human nature enables economic growth, but it posits every individual against all others. Each for themselves, individuals

15. Honneth, 2014, p. vii. 16. The psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious as well as the ontogenesis of individuality are important ethical concepts in this context. That and why we can never fully understand ourselves and the ethical effects this realization should have has been unpacked by Judith Butler in her Adorno Lectures, published as Giving an Account of Oneself (Butler, 2005).

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are labouring and struggling for the basic means to live, for a voice in society, for recognition and love. In order to succeed in this rat race, human nature must be suppressed and the pain resulting from this violation sublimated into physical and mental discipline and compliance with expectations of civilized behaviour and good taste. But, Horkheimer and Adorno argue, if nature is the other that needs to be controlled and dominated, in the outside world as well as in us, the price of individuation is subordination, a loss of self-determination and of the self as a connected and communal way of being. Domination over nature entails selfdomination and coproduces violence of humans against themselves, others, and nature at large. Importantly, especially in the context of a discussion on psychedelic cultures, a revival of pre-modern rituals is no reprieve. Traditional or indigenous cultures are, if to a lesser degree or just differently, also, forms of controlling fate and nature. They entail narrations of the human-nature relationship and practices of social hierarchy as well as discipline in the performance of rituals.17 Medicine has not been the only academic discipline engaging with psychedelics: theologians interested in mysticism study religious uses, and cultural and social anthropologists who study indigenous communities.18 Each discipline contributed to the othering and simultaneous romanticization of psychedelics in its own way, framing trips as magical cures, mystical experiences, or unbridled liberation from alienation to experiences of wholeness.19 This chapter problematizes the revival of psychedelics within medicine, arguing that methods of psychiatric science make the incommensurable and subjective measurable, in order to fit its evidentiary needs. In the process, intimate subjective experiences are instrumentalized and knowledge-practices developed in marginalized communities colonized so that they become profitable within the global order of techno-industrial capitalism. Many recent critical theorists have analysed medicine as a force that infuses society with individualization and rationalization, often called anti-psychiatrists.20 The following introduction to some of their arguments raises epistemic and ethical concerns against the role of psychiatry within societal dynamics.

3 Medicalization Contexts The concept of ‘medicalization’ arises from the empirical observation of a medical function creep, that more and more common human conditions, physical, mental,

17. An excellent introduction to the human-nature relationship and scientification is provided by Carolyn Merchant, 1980. 18. See, for example, Zaehner, 1957. 19. Huesca Ramon analyses Frankfurt School critics of such idealizations in ‘Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse: Psychedelics and Revolution’, in this volume (2022). 20. Authors such as Michel Foucault, Robert D. Laing, and Thomas Szasz are listed among the anti-psychiatrists.

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or developmental, become matters for medical experts.21 Medicine expands its space in and hold on society. It is the authoritative social institution which classifies what is healthy and normal, who has full capacity in society, who is a little broken, and who needs emergency or long-term special attention. Body, mind, and behaviour are subject to the medical gaze, diagnosis, and therapy. Tehseen Noorani describes this medicalization, writing: The resurgence of the applied science of psychedelics has in fact always been oriented toward medicalization, seeking application in areas such as addiction, palliative care, obsessive–compulsive disorder, PTSD, and social anxiety. Psychedelics are commonly referred to as “tools”, inviting their mastery and a sense of automaticity, suggesting the effects of clinic-based psychedelic administration follow a linear causative model typical of pharmaceutical explanation. The mystical experience has in recent years been modelled, quantified, and coveted as the key mediating variable in the successful treatment of therapeutic targets.22

For many, including practitioners who had used psychedelics in psychotherapy before psychedelic substances were classified as Class A drugs, prohibition was disappointing and some continued the work to establish them as effective therapeutics underground, justifying a clinically based change of regulations as the only way forward. The drug laws make non-clinical activity illegal23 and, in consequence, medicine becomes the obvious societal institution to achieve change. It has the authority to legitimize. Clinical science can produce facts that may alter public and regulatory assessment. Adding stringent studies supplementing clinical evidence with the newest methods in neuroscience and imaging technologies adds to findings on the efficacy of psychedelics collected before prohibition. Carefully curated impressive-looking new data and brain images may sway the political debate and counteract fifty years of ideological drug classification and public disinformation.24 Arguments from clinical medicine should de-toxify and rerationalize the political and regulatory judgment on psychedelics. Indeed, psychiatry seems the right habitat for a legally controlled and socially conformist re-introduction of exceptional experiences on prescription. The configuration of institutions driving medicalization, namely psychiatry, politics, and the pharmaceutical industry, form a forceful matrix of power. This constellation of interests will consume and transform the liberating and possibly idealized but well-known potential of psychedelic experiences for individual development. The axis of institutions is ideally placed to exert social control over the use of psychedelics and to draw vast profits from it. The social disturbances of the hippie

21. Conrad, 2007. 22. Noorani, 2020, p. 35. 23. Rucker and Young, 2021. 24. See Nutt, 2012 and Walsh, 2019.

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days are prevented, not least because clinical users will be patients, marked with a stigma.25 A mutually enabling alliance of psychiatry and criminal law can ringfence psychedelic use to medical care through regulatory exemptions for clinical use. Without decriminalizing psychedelic state-inducing substances both the pharmaceutical industries and the field of psychotherapy can benefit greatly from them. Jürgen Habermas coined the expression colonization of the lifeworld in his studies of contemporary societal crises. His emphasis lies on the ways in which institutional powers produce alienation and undermine the basis of a democratic society. He has argued convincingly why a democratic order depends on institutional transparency and truthful discourses in which all voices are listened to and considered in decision-making processes about the future.26 Distortions of truthfulness in digital communication, for example, increase alienation and undermine democracy. In the medical takeover of psychedelics, many voices are silenced. Adopting this concept, I argue that the medicalization of psychedelics entails at least two different kinds of colonization: One is that the substances that induce psychedelic states are transformed into ‘drug products’. A drug product is a standardized bio-chemical laboratory good, proprietary and geared toward the prescription pharmaceuticals market. A whole bioeconomy and regulatory regime governs and thus ensures the transformation of compounds that can be found in plants or have been produced in traditional practices into market goods for which Western industries can obtain intellectual property and licenses for use. Second, yet another modality of individual experience, extraordinary states of consciousness, are appropriated. Can psychiatry, the discipline that distinguishes between the rational and reasonable on the one side, and on the other the irrational, crazy, or mad, do justice to the radical individuality of extraordinary states? And can the experiences be abstracted enough to allow for standardized, measurable, and quantifiable effects in order to fit into the repertoire of routine psychotherapeutic treatments? What makes medicine the best habitat for advancing psychedelics in society also makes it problematic. Four features of the psychiatric science space make medicalization ethically and socially problematic: (a) psychiatry identifies the people

25. This is much more likely in the UK context than in the US context at present. In the UK the conservative governments of the past twelve years have tightened drug laws, whereas some US states have lifted prohibition and allow wider clinical as well as public use. The cultural understandings of personal freedom may play a role in this divergence, but also the specific commercialization pathways in different health care regimens. A general public health care system provides a beneficial businesses environment where one provider controls drugs and treatments. In the US healthcare is more a consumer market and profits can be larger under conditions of de-regulation. 26. Habermas, [1981] 1984.

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it works on by diagnosing mental illness. This precondition to access treatments means it demands that people surrender to clinical regimes of stigmatization and control (diagnosis and treatment plan) to be offered psychedelics; (b) the diagnosis requirement also limits access and use to both patients as well as healing purposes. The use of psychedelics for self-directed experiments in living, for fun or thrill, or personal self-care and enrichment may remain illegal; (c) psychiatry is part of the medical and pharmaceutical industrial complexes, in which profit is a major motive; and (d) psychedelic psychotherapy is built on the appropriation of indigenous ways of knowing and practicing botany, healthcare, and community rituals. These are recalibrated to fit the setting and profit mechanisms of the psychiatric space – their previous forms become delegitimized in the process. Below I discuss two strategic moves that enable the medical appropriation of psychedelic experiences: The location of the problem in the individual, a form of individualization and, in the same process, an alienation of the subjective experience through classifying them. Awareness of this dual movement of focusing on individuals and report-classifications prompts recognition of several paradoxes of psychedelic psychotherapy. These paradoxes are immanent contradictions that arise in the scientific re-articulation of non-ordinary experiences, the induction of madness to cure madness. From a Critical Theory perspective, other injustices, ethical issues, and colonizations include especially the commodification of radically subjective experiences, and the profit orientation driven by the alliance of medicine and pharmaceutical industries with the policy and regulation sectors. Further colonizations include the epistemic injustice committed when medical appropriation de-legitimizes traditional knowledge practices predominantly from the global South to transform them into proprietary market goods in the hands of few in the global North. Critical research into these developments is only beginning in ethics, moral, social, and political philosophy.27 The following discussion of the epistemic instability in current psychedelic science can contribute an element to examining the ‘psychedelic renaissance’. 3.1 Individualization: Diagnosis identifies the illness and its causes within the patient Hubert Dreyfus politicized psychiatry via alienation. He writes: The ultimate form of alienation in our society is not repression and exclusion of the truth but rather the constitution of the individual subject as the locus of pathology. . . . All forms of psychotherapy can at best provide only isolated and temporary “cures”. As manifestations of our everyday cultural practices, all psychotherapies solve individual problems without combating our general malaise.28 27. At Exeter University we started an international research group on decolonizing psychedelic discourses in philosophy and the social sciences, see Gonzales Romero, 2022, in this volume. 28. Dreyfus, 1976, p. xxxvii.

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Psychiatry is the human science concerned especially with delineating the supposed normal human state of mind and emotions. It establishes this ex negativo, that is by identifying and cataloguing mental illness and classifying individuals as normal or not.29 First, one has to subject one’s social status to expert judgment. A positive diagnosis can provide relief and access to treatments, but it also certifies that one is not, at present, a fully functioning, ‘normal’ human being. One’s status is reclassified respectively as sick, disabled, or mad to which social stigma is attached, especially when a severe mental disorder, such as psychosis, is diagnosed. Diagnosis can undermine social standing and lead to the withdrawal of responsibilities and the personal right to take decisions. Because of the serious possible consequence of losing one’s autonomy, the prosect of losing one’s mind is frightening. Foucault’s analyses of the historical configurations of power-knowledge that have shaped the History of Madness and The Birth of the Clinic30 show Mental Illness and Psychology31 as inventions for the purposes of establishing and maintaining the bourgeois, capitalist social order. The psych sciences close in on mental illness and enforce the ideological belief in the ‘normal person’ as a rational agent in an enlightened society. Institutions that discipline and punish are the modern modality of political rule and domination. The psych sciences provide a powerful service towards governing populations. They discipline individuals, body and mind, to conform to expectations of rationality, good sense, and respect for the rule of merit.32 Questions about one’s state of mind engender suspicions of unreliability, risk of inadequate or harmful behaviours, and more – questions that can reverberate for life. Asking for a diagnosis is risky. Psychiatry’s expansion creep engendered a shift from the focus on madnessversus-reason in the eighteenth century to a focus on mental wellbeing as moral conformity.33 Medical diagnosis seeks the cause for the ill-fitting behaviour or emotions within the patient. The patient may lack the ability to cope, or to instil discipline and mental self-control. Techniques to train patients to think in a more

29. ‘Diagnosis is integral to the system of medicine and the way it creates social order. It organises illness: identifying treatment options, predicting outcomes, and providing an explanatory framework. Diagnosis also serves an administrative purpose as it enables access to services and status, from insurance reimbursement to restricted-access medication, sick leave and support group membership and so on.’ (Jutel, 1994, p. 1). 30. Foucault, [1961] 2006 and [1963] 1973. 31. Foucault, [1962] 1976. 32. Foucault, [1975] 1991. 33. Foucault finds that (non-)adherence to moral norms is the decisive criterion for diagnosis of madness as well as recovery ‘The practice of internment at the beginning of the nineteenth century coincides with the moment when madness is perceived less in relation to delusion than in relation to regular, normal behavior; when it appears no longer as disturbed judgment but as a disorder in one’s way of acting, of willing, of experiencing passions, of making decisions, and of being free; in short, when it is no longer inscribed on the axis truth-error-consciousness but on the axis passion-will-freedom’ (Foucault, 1994, p. 42).

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effective way, such as cognitive behavioural therapy, are standard treatments. Patients may also be mentally ill because of biological anomalies. Neurophysiological differences may be genetically inherited or acquired through head injury, for example. In any case, the cause for the mental illness is considered to lie within the patient and if a treatment is available, it aims to improve this single person. Bonnie Burstow writes about PTSD diagnosis: ‘It looks as if the anxiety itself is being understood as inherently and necessarily problematic. This understanding of anxiety is then applied to other feelings and other ways of coping that are not intrinsically pleasant. . . . What is not pleasant becomes a symptom and, as such, pathologized.’34 Anti-psychiatrists have criticized that psychiatry is epistemologically problematic,35 blinding itself and others to examining societal causes for illness and harmful or destructive behaviour. Its knowledge technology is designed to render irrelevant systemic societal causes such as sexism or racism. Burstow makes this case forcefully regarding PTSD diagnosis following sexual abuse trauma. In psychedelic psychiatry, too, a there is a matter-of-fact way of reporting that more than 50% of patients in a PTSD MDMA trial suffer from childhood trauma, and that psychedelics can help them.36 Most trauma is human-made and only ever treating those individuals who cannot cope because of it, allows systemic violence and discrimination to continue. Instead, the psych sciences use their power to uphold normative ideas of rationality, and respective compliant behaviour. When a person feels or acts not as they should, a diagnosis, subordination to the status of patient, is demanded and even enforced if deemed necessary to protect others or the person themselves. This institutionalized, systematic individualization through diagnosis effectively silences critique on societal ills. Resistance to norms and imperatives has often been construed as mental derangement.37 Before discussing the alienating move in the method of clinical research, it should be stressed that I do not deny or play down widespread mental suffering. The suffering is real and help is needed, but beyond alleviating individual suffering, prevention and change are needed. The normative judgment in psychiatric diagnosis, especially of madness or psychosis looks at the individual patient. Alternatively, psychiatry could strive for social change to prevent suffering and make itself superfluous. Yet, the entrenched commercial structures provide

34. Burstow, 2005, p. 431. For other relevant works see Laing, 1960, Szasz, 1962 and 1970 and Deleuze and Guattari, 1983 and 1987. 35. This might be a simplistic criticism against medicine in general and psych sciences especially. Often both a clinical and a social critical perspective are taken, see Sigmund Freud, who tried to combine a critique of the morals of his time, especially sexual repression, and liberating individuals from the resulting suffering. 36. See, for example, Mitchell et al., 2021. 37. Pathologizing to stigmatize non-conforming people has been a feature of antifeminism since the beginning of feminism and is similar for other groups who demand change or to live differently, including the hippie culture.

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incentives to retain the narrow focus and make people fit into specific pockets of the societal environment instead. 3.2 Alienation as Part of the Scientific Method Identifying mechanisms and patterns, and ideally determining causalities, is the scientific method in the mechanical age – and mental illness is no exception. In order to be scientific about diseases and the efficacy of psychiatric treatments, a methodology is needed that enables systematic observations and experimental designs in which effects can be judged, recorded, compared, and measured. In the words of Carolyn Merchant: Rational control over nature, society, and the self was achieved by redefining reality itself through the new machine metaphor. As the unifying model for science and society, the machine has permeated and reconstructed human consciousness so totally, that today we scarcely question its validity.38

In the diagnostic encounter, the individual is tested for symptoms and is the locus of the causes for their illness and the sole target for treatments. At the same time, diagnosis classifies each patient into one of the diagnostic manual’s disease clusters. Diseases are defined as sets of symptoms and characteristic of a specific type of mental disorder, such as a mood disorder, or a psychotic or neurotic condition. This classificatory work is crucial for the following discussion because the scientific methods to test psychedelic psychotherapy always trial them on narrowly defined disease clusters. Recruitment is a highly selective process, as evidenced in the trial reports. Controlled clinical trials (CCTs) are the experimental method of measuring the comparative efficacy of a treatment. The basic idea is that as many parameters as possible in a test setting are strictly defined across the experiment and patient group. The individual patients are selected for the features they have in common, individual differences rendered irrelevant. Differential diagnosis and other factors are considered to establish a small or large patient group that is identical in all these defined respects. Then the effects of the new treatment can be measured and compared between placebo and treatment group.39 Medicine generally struggles to standardize patients, as its objects are living organisms, individuals from diverse biological and cultural environments. Such 38. Merchant, 1980, p. 193. 39. That the procedures used to blind patients and a medical team from knowing who is and who is not receiving the placebo are fraught when the treatment is of perceptible effect, such as experiencing a trip, has been noted in some CT reports: ‘It is difficult to see how blinding can be maintained because the subjective effects of [the] drug were so florid. There was some uncertainty in the ratings by support staff, who supervised the sessions blind to dosing. However, one must assume the patients were usually unblinded by their experience on the active drug.’ (Carhart-Harris and Goodwin, 2017, p. 2109)

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standardization is peculiarly difficult in psychiatry, where the diagnosis relies heavily on subjective data such as patient-reported suffering and behaviour, the judgment of family and friends and importantly, the psychiatrist’s assessments. A treatment that is found safe in phase I trials and is shown beneficial to patients compared to standard care in phase II and in a large phase III trial will be proposed for general use and licensing approvals, if the average health benefit and the cost of the treatment are in balance. In practice, a CCT is at the same time a scientific method to evidence the ‘truth’ about a treatment and a bureaucratic exercise that aims at satisfying the politicalpractical and economic demands for very specific kinds of evidence that will make the new treatments commercially successful.40 The scientific ideals of measurability and methodological rigour in clinical research align and collude with the capital interests of the pharmaceutical industrial complex. After standardizing the drugs, the patients also need to be standardized and that is primarily achieved by using their differential diagnosis and health records as well as other social identity markers, such as age, gender, race, previous drug experience, type of trauma, etc. The challenges to standardizing people and a clinical counselling setting are compounded by the need to standardize the originally plant-derived substance, or, nowadays, preferably a chemical substance produced under controlled laboratory conditions.41 Many, mostly phase II, CCTs are underway to produce evidence in favour of incorporating psychedelic substances, primarily psilocybin, MDMA, and LSD,42 into psychiatry’s arsenal of pharmaceuticals. As experiments these trials are weak because of the many variables that cannot be controlled. The evidence only suggests indicative correlations between the treatment and improved patient wellbeing. They are geared not so much at providing clear-cut evidence, because they cannot do that, but at creating an evidence-base within the expert sphere of clinical medicine that is strong enough to re-negotiate with lawmakers and regulators clinical

40. CTs for treatments that do not promise commercial benefits because they do not involve industrial drug products or devices are rarely funded. If they go ahead and show good results, the treatments are difficult to implement, especially if they are staff and labour intensive without exceptional benefits (Hauskeller, 2019). 41. In order to retrieve the effects of such therapy, the following conditions should be standardized: the origin, chemical composition, quality, and dosage of the drug; the participant diagnosis and detailed inclusion criteria, the exact number, length, and ideally content of the counselling sessions, the qualifications of the counsellors, and more. For statistical significance many trial participants are needed to evidence reliably the degrees to which the treatment is, for this patient group, risk-free, efficacious, and without undesirable side-effects. 42. An insightful presentation with several examples for early clinical trials is in Grinspoon and Doblin, 2001.

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exemptions for use. Quantitative and qualitative effects of the treatments will be considered in relation to the cost of the illnesses to society, especially by health insurers or health system providers. The treatments have to be efficacious enough to reduce the cost, that is the loss of contributions as well as the need for care and welfare, that PTSD, depression, drug addiction, etc., have on society and grossdomestic product. Because the expensive part of the treatment, the hours of professional time in sessions, is fairly small in the current protocols – usually between ten and twenty hours – this calculation could come out in favour of those therapies. Yet, questions have been raised about the intensity and quality of patient care and the lack of responsiveness to individual needs. Anecdotal evidence suggests there are unresolved problems arising from the conflict between the standardized setting and its limited number of counselling sessions on the one hand, and the often dramatic induced extraordinary and subjective experience patients undergo on the other, that might need more work to integrate. Tehseen Noorani43 reports meeting former patients from CCTs in the psychedelic support groups he studied, where they are seeking more support, sometimes desperately. This warrants doubts regarding the sufficiency of the guardianship and safekeeping.44 It also raises the question of whether the separation of the psychiatric treatment from the patient’s normal life and social community, the conditions of the clinic itself, creates problems that might arise less in other settings for psychedelic experiences – such as group treatments, familiar environments, or in the company of good friends. Hence, it has been questioned whether, given the centuries during which different cultures have used psychedelic substances for many purposes and the research conducted in the 1950s and 60s, these trials evidence something new or instead confirm what is already known.45 They certainly mobilize the instruments and language of contemporary standards for CCTs, including narrowly defined patient inclusion criteria, differential data collection, and detailed reporting practice. But it is ambivalent whether we judge the practice as creating new knowledge or as translating and transforming existing knowledge into the language and parameters of the medical industrial sector so that it can be owned and controlled. 3.3 Paradoxes of a Psychedelic Psychotherapy From a Critical Theory perspective, one of the most curious phenomena of contemporary psychedelic clinical science are the paradoxes that arise. This merits

43. Noorani, 2020. 44. Ethical issues of therapist and/or guide or sitter responsibility is thematic also when discussing more recreational uses and psychedelic tourism clinics – see Molnar, 2019. 45. A few expressed, for example, by Stan Grof, 1998; yet rejected by Carhart-Harris and Goodwin, 2017, p. 2110, who do acknowledge, however, that, scientifically and pragmatically, the best treatment would be drug only, with little to no counselling, if only that were safe, and that repurposing psychedelics can meet major unmet needs in medicine.

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deeper analysis, but I will introduce it here briefly. It illustrates how as Horkheimer and Adorno write, ‘with every step, enlightenment entangles itself ever more deeply with mythology’.46 The surface paradox in the approach I provocatively called inducing of madness to cure madness is entangled with three others paradoxical configurations relating to alienation, commodification and measurement applied to myths and the metaphysical. Inducing Madness to Cure Madness For a genealogically clear vision we should keep in mind that medicine considered psychedelic trips to be experiences of insanity and madness. The language and the concepts of scientific psychiatry are organized to judge, to create hierarchies, and to distinguish the healthy and reasonable from the insane. To illustrate, one may recall the pragmatic use of psychedelics in the training of young psychiatrists in the mid-twentieth century,47 when psychiatrists tried psychedelics in order to understand their patients’ troubled states of mind. Implicitly, psychedelic trips are conceptualized as providing the othered experience of madness yet, at the same time, they are seen as fairly safe for the sane – otherwise trainees and their teachers would not have chosen to expose them. The supposedly wide gulf between ordinary states of consciousness and mental sanity on the one side, and madness, illness, and extraordinary states on the other, is more a small brook that can be crossed readily and safely. In order to endorse extraordinary states as therapy, scientific psychiatry must accept the irrational as part of its rationality and all it can rationally do is measure the effects. My finding, in the analysis of the current literature, is that the institutionalization of psychedelics is in contradiction with what scientific explanation would require. Psychiatry and madness, including psychedelic states, are dialectically tied together. The clinical practice individualizes, conceptualizing the mental suffering as intrinsic to the patient, and then classifies the individuals into defined disease clusters to serve the methodologies that make clinical experiments scientific. Within the trials, the singularity encountered in the patient and their experience is recognized only as much as is necessary to keep them safe. Medical teams involved in CCTs have tried to address these issues by reframing them, for instance by speaking not of patients but of participants – a thin veneer given that a psychiatric diagnosis, and hence certified patient status, is a prerequisite to any participation. Another method is to shift the role of the psychedelic experience in the clinical setting from main factor to supporting element, reflected in the commonly used name for these treatments, ‘psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy’. But since giving a psychedelic substance is the single difference between this therapy and other counselling offers, the name is misleading. It

46. Horkheimer and Adorno, [1947] 2002, p. 8. 47. Grof, 1998, names being participant in a psychedelics trial when a postgraduate student of psychiatry in Prague.

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presents the psychedelic substance and derived experience as a little helper. But if the improvement of the patient’s mental health and wellbeing is owed causally to this unexplained ineffable experience, then these experiments should refer to counsellor-assisted substance-induced psychedelic experience as a treatment. The agency lies in the unpredictable interaction between the drug and the patient, safeguarded by the clinical setting.48 Quantifying the Ineffable In their performance and reporting, the CCTs gesture toward the hard facts and causal explanations, as well as statistically significant large data sets, the desired rigour, that is seen as underpinning the credibility of CCTs as the method for creating evidence in medicine.49 However, despite describing the counselling element as the safe setting for the patient and the integration of extraordinary experiences, most trial reports also admit that it is the experience as such which changes the outlook on life. The new neuroscientific imaging methods, too, are drawn upon as secondary evidence that something exceptional is happening in the brain during a trip, that brain activity changes, and that it changes in a spectacular and unique way. The observed changes in brain physiology do not directly correlate to those ineffable experiences either, even when the usual forms of sectional neural processing appear to be overruled and the brain is active all over;50 or, in the language of the non-clinical literature: doors of perception open or the reducing valve is removed.51 Exceptional includes hallucinatory, delusional, out-of-body or self-loss experiences, and feeling of detachment and interconnectedness, enchantment and terror. Intense yet unpredictable experiences that seem to have the power to change people’s outlook on life. The clinical literature, too, agrees that what happens during a psychedelic trip is largely ineffable; unique to the person, reflecting and judged by cultural values and ideas, often coloured by individual desires and memories, phantasies, and sensual perceptions.52

48. Richards, 2017, gives many examples of uncontrollability, of encounters between participant and drug that did not go at all as the patient had expected. 49. For more on the philosophy of medicine concept thought collective and related thought styles see Fleck, [1935] 1979. Much can be extracted from the above regarding the elements of the thought style, but here is not the space to further expand this aspect. 50. See Artinian, 2022, in this volume. 51. Huxley, 1954. 52. ‘It is a fundamental misunderstanding to consider most psychedelic drug therapy a form of pharmacotherapy, which must be regarded in the same way as prescribing lithium or phenothiazines. The claims of psychedelic drug therapy are subject to the same doubts as those of psychodynamic and other forms of psychotherapy. The mixture of mystical and transcendental claims with therapeutic ones is another aspect of psychedelic drug therapy troubling to our culture. Pre-industrial cultures that made use of psychedelic plants were willing to tolerate more ambiguity with regard to the psychedelic healing process as both religious and medical.’ (Grinspoon and Doblin, 2001, p. 686)

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The epistemology of the science of mental illness, its methods of diagnosis and treatment, is built on distinguishing reason from madness. This seem to create fascination with those features of a trip that are inexplicable yet can contribute to or trigger profound change. This is the central paradox of psychedelic psychotherapy as scientific enterprise: alongside all the measuring, classifying, and standardizing, the treatment agent, namely the psychedelic or extraordinary experience, is neither understood nor measurable. A Clinical Science of Mysticism? In their attempts to rationalize the ineffable in psychedelic states, psychiatry and psychology mobilize physical brain science but also social and emotional aspects and try to quantify them. I will give a few examples of current trials that are trying to square these circles of turning individual difference into sameness and explore the causal connections between exceptional experiences and personality changes to explain treatment effects. Alan Davis and colleagues report53 from a trial that uses the following setting: Psilocybin was administered in opaque gelatin capsules with approximately 100 mL water. Both facilitators were present in the room and available to respond to participants’ physical and emotional needs during the day-long session, with the exception of short breaks taken by 1 facilitator at a time. During the session, participants were instructed to lie on a couch in a living room-like environment, and facilitators encouraged participants to focus their attention inward and stay with any experience that arose. To enhance inward reflection, music was played (the playlist is provided in the eMethods in Supplement 2) and participants were instructed to wear eye-shades and headphones.

This quotation illustrates the attempts at standardization through sensory deprivation, with eye shades and headphones, which play from a set playlist. Yet, the same music can trigger different associations and feelings, especially when the listeners are in a non-ordinary perceptive state in which pre-conscious memories and experiences might be activated.54 The fascination with psychedelic experiences goes beyond clinical applications. Trials have been designed to find out whether a patient’s ‘mystical experience’ during a trip correlates with deep personality changes in the period after the trip, especially more ‘openness’. MacLean and colleagues find that patients who underwent a ‘complete mystical experience’ became much more open.55

53. Davis et al., 2021, p. 438. 54. Richards, 2017, p. 334. 55. ‘Follow-up t-tests for the five facets showing significance confirmed that the complete mystical experience group increased in these facets while the other group did not.’ MacLean, Jonson and Griffiths, 2011, p. 1457.

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When asked in a questionnaire how mystical an experience was on a scale of 1 to 10, and the different facets that are defined as components of a complete mystical experience, most patients in a clinical study will tick something instead of rejecting the framing outright, even if they would not have chosen this rhetoric if free to choose the words to share what it was like. Since adequate language is missing, the clinicians offer a rhetoric and express expectations. Other dimensions of the experience might remain unspoken in a setting, for participants conform to perceived expectations by paying back and using the given framework of sensemaking.56 That in the Western context mystics and mystical experiences are part of the pre-enlightenment world of religion-infused ways of experiencing oneself in the world is just one oddity of this ‘scientific’ enterprise.57 It also shows how obsessed psychiatry can get with that which does not lend itself to its classifications and judgments. Important is that the mystical experience be related to better health outcome. The scientific practice of CCTs throws a veil of tangential evidence over the fact that a radically individual, inevitably mysterious process causes betterment. The clinical setting for it is prone to predefine the kind of experience patients can report, and to re-calibrate and limit the intensity of the experience. The method aims to digest and absorb complex unique experiences that cannot be broken down into standardizable and measurable datapoints. Psychedelic psychiatry emerges as a paradoxical ‘science’: the specialism that defines madness induces a psychological state that is defined as mad in order for this experience of madness to induce sanity in patients that have been classified as mad. Scientific Evidence that a Non-materialist Worldview Improves Wellbeing? A decade after co-conducting the aforementioned trial on mysticism, Matthew Johnson reflects on the ethical challenges in psychedelic psychotherapy. He warns

56. That the buzz and subversive cloud around MAPS’ trials has this effect on at least some participants is reported by Dickinson and Mugianis (2021, p. 15), whose interviewee Mel said: ‘ “I wanted to be fixed,” they said, “and I felt great responsibility. At the time I felt that if I didn’t get better then the FDA was not going to approve it. I was going to fuck up their numbers and then it wasn’t going to be legal, and millions of people were not going to have access to it.” As a result, Mel said, they “only gave them the good stuff that was happening. I really omitted a good number of things that were challenging and difficult . . . It was more of reporting how things were getting better, because that’s what I really wanted, and part of me really believed that too. That’s what I wanted so badly that maybe I could convince myself.” ’ 57. For a discussion of language and metaphors used in speaking private experiences and the mysticism trials see also Letcher, 2014.

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that a ‘danger is scientists and clinicians imposing their personal religious or spiritual beliefs on the practice of psychedelic medicine’.58 Psychedelic psychotherapy, especially if shaped with worldviews residual in paternalistic monotheist cultural traditions, might be prone to veer between its love for the hard and cold light of reason and rational orders, and yet find itself under the spell of that which it cannot grasp, endorsing its alienated other. In simpler words, we might see that which calls itself science as recommending mysticism as the empirically evidenced path to mental health. I am not speculating; a recent trial demonstrates this interest. The trial was designed to study not a specific health issue, but wellbeing, exploring whether ‘Psychedelics Alter Metaphysical Beliefs’. In their trial report the team directly link psychedelic trip experience with a shift in the participants’ worldviews. The results show increased wellbeing because the psychedelic experience supposedly reorientates people away from a hard materialistic perspective: ‘A significant positive correlation was found between shifts away from hard-materialism (the NPB factor) and changes in well-being. The correlation was significant at 4 weeks and at 6 months postretreat.’59 It seems a less materialist perspective helps one to find meaning in one’s life and to preserve a distance from the tight normative expectations, judgments, and impositions of our social order. We are arriving at a similar point to where I started this chapter. The tension between enlightenment rationality and the loss of individuality and creative self-realization in our controlled, rationalistic, and materialistic world is very alienating. Filtering this experience through monetized medicalization exposes and subordinates it to be dismantled by powers alien to it.

4 Limits of and Ethical Problems with the Medicalization of Psychedelics The nature of psychedelic exceptional experiences is anathema to the scientific rationality of psychiatry. One special psychedelic experience is the experienced expansion of the self – feeling at one, a unity of one’s self with others, the

58. This text can be read as being in agreement with my judgment that testing for mysticism is an imposition on the patient, pre-framing their experience. Johnson continues ‘My advice is rather that they should not bring up these personal beliefs and insert them into therapeutic practice. It also does not mean that participants should not bring their own belief systems to their therapy. It is not uncommon for people having psychedelic sessions to touch on what I call the “big questions,” e.g., the nature of reality and the nature of self. Patient beliefs often play a large role in her or his meaning making from sessions. . . . The goal of the clinician should be a create an open and supportive environment where the patient can make her or his own meaning, if any, from such experiences.’ (Johnson, 2021, pp. 579–580). 59. Timmermann et al., 2021, p. 11.

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non-human environment, and the universe.60 The dialectic of whether or not such experiences can inform politics and contribute to or help instigate a revolution in perception was addressed among others by the Critical Theorist Herbert Marcuse:61 [An] established society imposes upon all its members the same medium of perception . . . The ’trip‘ involves the dissolution of the ego shaped by the established society – an artificial and short-lived dissolution. But the artificial and “private” liberation anticipates, in a distorted manner, an exigency of the social liberation: the revolution must be at the same time a revolution in perception which will accompany the material and intellectual reconstruction of society, creating the new aesthetic environment. Awareness of the need for such a revolution in perception, for a new sensorium, is perhaps the kernel of truth in the psychedelic search.62

It is the counter-alienation experience. At this point it is time for more nuance in the phrase inducing madness to cure madness. Psychedelic psychotherapy diagnoses common responses to a violent and oppressive social order and then provides an intense, very intimate, and powerful experience. This experience bears characteristics usually deemed signs of psychotic illness, such as self-loss, or the feelings of boundlessness and interconnectedness, visions, voices, and other heightened and exceptional sensory perceptions – and some of them are minimized in the clinical trial settings. In light of these conundrums, the recent literature indicates that practitioners meander along paths that veer between two alternatives. The first is to clean the psychedelic experience of its radical individuality and hallucinatory elements by abstraction, with neuroimaging and fMRI scanning among the techniques that provide secondary proxy-indicators to suggest that the incommensurable has become measurable. The second route is loosening the scientific aspirations and endorsing experiences that psychiatry still deems mad or hallucinatory in diagnosis and other settings. Admitting to and relying on a magic bullet, with the emphasis on the magical, does however pose reputational risk. Mimicking the pathways of contemporary biomedical science allows pursuing the well-trodden paths to approval for these therapies and the new drugs by regulatory authorities and, with it, legitimacy and health insurance reimbursement. But once a drug has been licensed, by authorities such as the European Medicines Agency (EMA), the US FDA, the UK MHRA, or equivalent regulators worldwide, off-licence use by physicians becomes an option, too. The option to use drugs off-licence is important for psychedelics. It means that (a) once a psychedelic is licensed as a therapeutic, physicians can prescribe it

60. See also Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes in this volume. 61. For more on this specific question, see Fernando Huesca-Ramon in this volume. 62. Marcuse, 1969.

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under hospital exemption rules to patients with other mental health conditions, and (b) only the approved and licensed pharmaceutical can be prescribed thus. If one of the synthetic psilocybins are accredited, only this product can subsequently be prescribed. This administrative rule fosters competition to be first in the race for licenses and to accumulate the profits. For people who believe they could benefit from psychedelic experiences this is bad news. The medicalizing psychedelic experiences can bring them under the control of the authorities even more firmly than they are. If psychedelic use is not generally decriminalized but instead brought under the rule of psychiatry, then access to substances that induce non-ordinary experiences is tightly controlled. To legally access psychedelics as pharmaceuticals requires seeing a physician in order to obtain a diagnosis. One must be labelled the right kind of ill to qualify for the treatment. As Edgar Allen Poe notes, the general intellect dispenses with madness as a disease of thought, also with experiences of glorious or profound insight. If taking psilocybin in a safe setting can make people connect better, is the psychiatric clinic the best environment for both individuals and society to enable such betterment? A major motive for favouring tight control over psychedelics is the likely economic gain. Fortunes can be made, if suffering from existential alienation can be identified as a mental disorder and sufferers become patients in the emerging psychedelic psychiatric cage.63

5 Conclusions The principles of profit and its maximation have suffused all societal institutions and organization. This colonization has also deformed the art of medicine. It is not enough to apply knowledge and skill to help suffering people. Research especially is a race, and riches await those who first reach the finish line of patenting and regulatory accreditation. The directions of research, too, are decided not by humanitarian need but by what promises large profits. In the wake of the successes with medical cannabis, the monetization of psychedelic psychiatry is underway.64 In this chapter I have focused on some problematic aspects in the medicalization and colonization of psychedelics, especially the limitations of access and the quality of experiences that come with the clinical space, and the incorporation of a non-alienation cultural technique of improving life and communities which is instrumentalized to serve the oppression of self-determined living. In the clinic, substance-induced exceptional experiences are rationed, given on prescription and under observation. Exceptional experiences are exempt from criminal prosecution if given to psychiatric patients and the trip is part of a

63. Several companies have already obtained patents for lab-produced psilocybin, e.g. Compass Pathways, Psilocin. 64. See, for instance, Sanabria, 2021.

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controlled and licensed clinical treatment programme. Only individuals who submit to the stigmatized social position of psychiatric patient and accept therapeutic supervision will have them, and only in a directed way. Communal practices of drug use, safekeeping, and integration have existed for a long time in many cultural contexts.65 Why it should be that psychiatrists decide who receives treatment, when and how? With knowledge of the importance of set and setting, people can benefit just as much from psychedelic experience in the company of friends including an experienced guide, and in a self-chosen environment – and all this without a diagnosis, prescription, and the presence of a paid-for clinical psychiatric team that counts the hours of supporting the services they provide. And yet, the incommensurable should not become fitted to the framework of alienating conditions. What makes psychedelic experiences exceptional for many, is the expansion of the self, feeling one, a unity of self with others and with the nonhuman environment.66 Filtering this experience through monetized medicalization subjects the experience to the instrumental logic and the externally defined purposes of the medical institutions and their power practices. It subordinates the experience to the very powers that it juxtaposes. Psychedelic experiences are instrumentalized, used to sustain an alienating order and system of power. The ideology of liberal individualism that denies the need for human community and connection. The basic principle in the capitalist order is that the value of an action, a behaviour, or a person can be measured in terms of their contribution to society and especially to gross domestic product. These established social conditions can be non-idiopathic reasons for symptoms of alienation such as anger, anxiety, sadness, loneliness, desperation. The existential interconnections between humans, animals and nature, including the elation to one’s own nature, are severed. Such a general state of alienation is a good condition for consumer capitalism. The lone and vulnerable individual is more easily directed to buy and to fetishize surrogate gratifications. Many goods, activities, or event experiences promise to temporarily fill the void. Consumer capitalism thrives on the emotional exploitation of individuals, and they are sold anything, bread and games, things and events, drugs, surgeries, and psychotherapy. Psychedelic psychotherapy appears both paradoxical and ethically problematic. It is paradoxical because the science that defines what is mad induces states of such madness for patients to overcome the very madness psychiatrists previously attested them. It is ethically problematic because psychedelic psychotherapy instrumentalizes individuals, their intimate extraordinary experiences, as well as botanical, nutritionist knowledges and community practices of care that have been refined throughout recorded history and are an evolving element in both indigenous and socially marginalized ways of life. Psychedelic psychotherapy does

65. For examples, see Luna and White, 2016; Jay, 2019; Partridge, 2018; Papaspyrou, Luke and Baldini, 2019. 66. Letcher, 2014, takes such an experience as the starting point of his essay.

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not give due credit to this legacy nor does it trouble itself to critically examine the hegemonial power dynamics it promotes or its likely effects on covert psychedelic users in society. Concerns should be directed toward the exploitation of vulnerable people, the likelihood that existing epistemologies are invalidated, and the realistic possibility that the individual freedom to explore one’s mind and consciousness will be restricted and accessible only on prescription.

References Artinian, T. (2022) Transpersonal Gratitude and Psychedelic Altered States of Consciousness, in this volume Burstow, B. (2005) A Critique of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and the DSM, Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 45:4, pp. 429–445 Butler, J. (2005) Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press) Carhart-Harris, R. L. and Goodwin, G. M. (2017) The Therapeutic Potential of Psychedelic Drugs: Past, Present, and Future, Neuropsychopharmacology, 42, pp. 2105–2113 Compass Pathways (2021) Available at: https://compasspathways.com/our-research/ psilocybin-therapy/about-psilocybin-therapy/ Conrad, Peter (2007) The Medicalization of Society: On the Transformation of Human Conditions into Treatable Disorders (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press) Davis, A. K., Barrett, F. S., May, D. G. et al. (2021) Effects of Psilocybin-Assisted Therapy on Major Depressive Disorder: A Randomized Clinical Trial, JAMA Psychiatry, 78:5, pp. 481–489 Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1983 and 1987) Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and a Thousand Plateaus (London: Bloomsbury Revelations) Dickinson, J. and Mugianis, D. (2021), Why Mental Health Researchers are Studying Psychedelics All Wrong, Salon, 6 March. Available at: www.salon.com/2021/03/06/ why-mental-health-researchers-are-studying-psychedelics-all-wrong/ Dreyfus, H. ([1954] 1976) Foreword, in:M. Foucault, Mental Illness and Psychology, trans. A. Sheridan (Oakland: University of California Press) Fleck, L. ([1935] 1979) Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, trans. F. Bradley and T. J. Trenn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) Foucault, M. ([1961] 2006) Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, Librarie Plon [English: History of Madness], trans. J. Khalfa (London: Routledge) Foucault, M. ([1962] 1976) Mental Illness and Psychology, trans. A. Sheridan (Oakland: University of California Press) Foucault, M. ([1963] 1973) The Birth of the Clinic. An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. Sheridan (London: Routledge) Foucault, M. ([1975] 1991) Discipline and Punish, trans. A. Sheridan (London: Penguin Press) Foucault, M. (1994) Psychiatric Power, in: ed. P Rabinow, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (New York: The New Press) Frankl, V. E. ([1946] 1959) Man’s Search for Meaning, trans. I. Lasch (New York: Vintage Publishing) Fromm, E. (1941) Escape from Freedom (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). Fromm, E. ([1955] 1991) The Sane Society (Abingdon: Routledge) Gonzales, R. and Osiris, S. (2022) Decolonizing the Philosophy of Psychedelics, in this volume

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Grinspoon, L. and Doblin, R. (2001) Psychedelics as Catalysts in Insight-oriented Psychotherapy, Social Research, 68:3, pp. 677–695 Grof, S. (1998) The Cosmic Game. Explorations of the Frontiers of Human Consciousness (New York: State University of New York Press) Habermas, J, [1981] 1984 Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge: Polity Press) Hauskeller, C. (2019) Between the Local and the Global: Evaluating European Regulation of Stem Cell Regenerative Medicine, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 61:1, pp. 42–58 Hegel, G. W. F ([1820] 2005) Philosophy of Right, trans. S. W. Dyde (New York: Dover Publications Inc.) Heidegger, M. ([1927]) Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing) Honneth, Axel (2014) Foreword, in: Rahel Jaeggi, Alienation, trans. F. Neuhouser (New York: Columbia University Press) Horkheimer, M., and Adorno, T. W. ([1947] 2002) The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. J. Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press) Huesca Ramon, F. (2022) Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse: Psychedelics and Revolution, in this volume James, W. (1902) The Varieties of Religious Experience. A Study in Human Nature (London: Penguin Books) Jay, M. (2019) Mescaline: A Global History of the First Psychedelic (New Haven: Yale University Press) Jutel, A. (2009) Sociology of Health & Illness, 31:2, pp. 278–299 Kierkegaard, S. ([1849] 2008) The Sickness to Death, trans. A. Hannay (London. New York: Penguin Group) Langlitz, N., Dyck, E., Scheidegger, M. and Repantis, D. (2021) Moral Psychopharmacology Needs Moral Inquiry: The Case of Psychedelics, Frontiers in Psychiatry, 12:680064. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2021.680064 Letcher, A. (2014) Deceptive Cadences: A Hermeneutic Approach to the Problem of Meaning and Psychedelic Experience, in: C. Adams, D. Luke, et al., Breaking Convention: Essays on Psychedelic Consciousness (Berkeley: North Atlantic Press) Luna, L. E. and White, S. F., eds. (2016) Ayahuasca Reader: Encounters with the Amazon’s Sacred Vine, new edition (Santa Fe: Synergetic Press) MacLean K. A., Johnson, M. W. and Griffiths, R. R. (2011) Mystical Experiences Occasioned by the Hallucinogen Psilocybin Lead to Increases in the Personality Domain of Openness, Journal of Psychopharmacology, 25: pp. 1453–1461 Marcuse, Herbert (1969) An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press) Marx, Karl ([1932] 2004) Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, in: E. Fromm, Marx Concept of Man, trans. T. B. Bottomore (London and New York: Continuum Press) Merchant, C. (1980) The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, (New York: Harper & Row) Mitchell, J. M., Bogenschutz, M., et al. (2021) MDMA-assisted Therapy for Severe PTSD: A Randomized, Double-blind, Placebo-controlled Phase 3 Study, Nature Medicine, 27, pp. 1025–1033 Mithoefer, M. (2017) A Manual for MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy in the Treatment of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, MAPS Treatment Manual. Available at: https:// s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/mapscontent/research-archive/mdma/ TreatmentManual_MDMAAssistedPsychotherapyVersion+8.1_22+Aug2017.pdf

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Molnar, E. (2019) The Bioethics of Psychedelic Guides: Issues of Safety and Abuses of Power in Ceremonies with Psychoactive Substances, in: eds. M. Papaspyrou, C. Baldini and D. Luke, Psychedelic Mysteries of the Feminine (Rochester: Park Street Press) Noorani, T. (2020) Making Psychedelics into Medicines: The Politics and Paradoxes of Medicalization, Journal of Psychedelic Studies, 4:1, pp. 34–39 Nutt, D. ([2012] 2020) Drugs without the Hot Ai:, Minimising the Harms of Legal and Illegal Drugs (Cambridge: UIT Cambridge) Nutt, D. J., King, L. A. and Phillips, D. (2010) Drug Harms in the UK: A Multicriteria Decision Analysis, The Lancet, 376:9752, pp. 1558–1565 Partridge, C. (2018) High Culture: Drugs, Mysticism, and the Pursuit of Transcendence in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press) Poe, Edgar Allan Poe (1842) Eleonora, p. 1. Psilocin Corp (2021) Our products. Available at: https://psilocinpharma.com/pipeline/. Psilocin Corp (2021) Revive Therapeutics Acquires Unique Psilocybin Assets, 17 February. Available at: https://psilocinpharma.com/2021/02/revive-therapeutics-acquiresunique-psilocybin-assets/ Puusalu, J. (2018) Overconnected, Under-engaged: When Alienation Goes Online. Dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, University of Exeter, September 2018 Richards, W. D. (2017) Psychedelic Psychotherapy. Insights from 25 Years of Research. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 57:4, 323–337 Richert, L. and Erika, D. (2020) Psychedelic Crossings: American Mental Health and LSD in the 1970s, Medical Humanities, 46, pp. 184–191 Rucker, J. J. and Young, A. H. (2021) Psilocybin: From Serendipity to Credibility? Frontiers in Psychiatry. Available at: doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2021.659044 Sanabria, Emilia (2021) Vegetative Value: Promissory Horizons of Therapeutic Innovation in the Global Circulation of Ayahuasca, BioSocieties, 16, pp. 387–410. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41292-020-00222-4 Sartre, J. P. ([1943] 2003) Being and Nothingness. An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. H. E. Barnes (London: Routledge) Sjöstedt-Hughes, P. (2022) The White Sun of Substance: Spinozism and the Psychedelic amor Dei intellectualis, in this volume Szasz, Thomas (1962) The Myth of Mental Illness (New York: Harper and Row) Szasz, Thomas (1970) The Manufacture of Madness (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press) Timmermann, C., Kettner, H., Letheby, C., Roseman, L., Rosas, F. E. and Carhart-Harris, R. L. (2021) Psychedelics Alter Metaphysical Beliefs, PsyArXiv, 25 June Walsh, C. (2010) Drugs and Human Rights: Private Palliatives, Sacramental Freedoms and Cognitive Liberty, The International Journal of Human Rights, 14:3, pp. 425–441 Walsh, C. (2019) Psychedelics, Self-creation, and Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights: A Feminist Perspective, in: eds. M. Papaspyrou, C. Baldini and D. Luke, Psychedelic Mysteries of the Feminine (Rochester: Park Street Press) Weber, Max ([1905] 2017) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (Vigeo Press) Zaehner Robert. C. (1957) Mysticism: Sacred and Profane (Oxford: Clarendon Press)

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Chapter 8 W A LT E R B E N JA M I N A N D H E R B E RT M A R C U SE : P SYC H E D E L IC S A N D R EVOLU T ION 1 Fernando Huesca Ramon

Cultural anthropologists have widely recorded mankind’s close relationship with psychoactive substances since the beginnings of civilizatory processes. Sumerian, Greek, Aztec, and many other mythological imaginaries carry metaphors of death, passage, initiation, fertility, etc., associated with sacred plants that contain chemical substances, which, interacting with the human brain, elicit altered states of consciousness. From the perspective of Critique, as a philosophical tradition, it is striking and alarming, that it is only with the developing of the capitalist mode of production and its moral values and social institutions, that an epistemic and political monopoly is formed around sacred plants, psychedelics, and psychoactive substances in general.2 From a Marxian perspective, hegemonic epistemology, and institutions around theories of consciousness, mental and public health, and psychopathology would tend to adopt the commodity form (that is, to be produced and consumed around private markets), and the commodity-purpose concerning the role of human beings in this mode of production (that is, that human beings are considered and shaped as commodity producers and consumers). Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse identified clear elements in the theory and praxis of psychedelics that were relevant around countercultural perception, emotion, and cognition. Therefore, their reflections on psychedelics should prove relevant for the theory and praxis of Revolution and the updating of a Marxian theory of society.

1. I thank Christine Hauskeller and Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes for the active dialogue, exchange and patience around this chapter. 2. For more discussion of appropriation and commodification see also the chapters by Osiris Gonzales Ramirez and Christine Hauskeller in this volume.

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1 Hegel and Marx as Basis for the Epistemology of Critical Theory Hegel was productive for Marx’s intellectual development in at least two fundamental senses: first, his dialectics – that is, a theory of contradiction, of the unity of opposites at logical, natural, and spiritual levels, and of the perpetual movement of the substance-subject3 – offered a framework to understand the logic and structure of the modern Capitalist State, as well as its genesis through World History. Secondly, his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), offered a style and philosophical perspective, which inserts self-consciousness4 into the production and consumption of philosophical texts and into World History as well. Judged from the perspective of contradiction, and from the perspective of self-consciousness – which, in itself, includes the Kantian-Fichtean concept of freedom of the will – capitalist society is intrinsically problematic. In its monumental production of material wealth, it cannot deal with spiritual and material scarcity: It hence becomes apparent that despite an excess of wealth civil society is not rich enough, i.e. its own resources are insufficient, to check excessive poverty and the creation of a penurious rabble.5

It is evident, that capitalist economies, to this day, grow quantitatively year after year – discounting big crises, violent contractions, and periods of severe unemployment. Nevertheless, concomitantly it is manifest – as in the case of pandemics such as COVID-19 – that, despite science, technology, and massive production of commodities, from the perspective of human welfare and basic human rights to health and knowledge, capitalist societies are challenged with respect to balancing economic growth with community welfare. For Hegel the only ‘solution’ to this dilemma was public institutions – in a Republican sense: universal, free, and rational public policy which, if needed,

3. Hegel’s dialectics has the following sites of exposition: in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) the actor of the narrative by contradiction is human consciousness; in the Science of Logic the subject matter is the development of pure being; the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences (1817) exposes the developmental narratives and logics of pure being, of Nature and of Spirit (Culture). 4. Concerning self-consciousness Hegel highlights intersubjectivity and a concrete situated-character; that is: the I is a we, ego exists only by and through mediation of Otherness: A self-consciousness for a self-consciousness is first immediate, as an Other for an Other. I contemplate in the I, myself in an immediate way, but also an object which exists in an immediate way, as an object which is absolutely autonomous with respect to the I. This contradiction, that I am only I, as negativity of immediate existence, results in the process of recognition (Anerkennens). (Hegel, 1817, p. 231) 5. Hegel, 2008, p. 222.

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would place in hazard the interests of capital accumulation, in order to promote human health.6 Hegel, just as much as Marx, was a systematic and historical thinker7 of alienated labour and automatization of human subjectivity under capitalist societies.8 For instance, the perverse alliances between medical, economical, and religious power, evidenced by Marx, Foucault, and others, are glimpsed by Hegel, in a close analysis of the economic and ideological development of capitalist England.9 After all, the Hegelian model of the modern State, includes cognitive freedom in a radical way. Marx did not intend, as Hegel did, to pursue academic Philosophy and Science, or to contribute to the Enlightenment and the rationalization of the Prussian State Apparatus. Karl Löwith credits Marx with the ethos of a Themistocles, that is a Marshal, who in this case intends to found ‘an entirely new kind of Philosophy’.10 Marx’s ‘Theory of praxis’11 implied an inversion of Hegel’s idealism to materialism, a critical review of the History of Philosophy from the perspective of class division and class struggle in society, a critique of alienated labour and society, and a programme for social organization around scientific socialism.12 Indeed, Rousseau’s

6. Ebenso ist es in Rücksicht der Apothekerwaaren, Arznei ist ein allgemeines Bedürfniß, aber ob sie gut ist oder die rechte, das kann das Individuum nicht beurtheilen, das müssen die Pharmazeuten thun. So ist es auch ganz zweckmäßig daß die Polizei die Aufsicht über die Gezundheit des Viches führt, es sind in neuerer Zeit ganze Gegenden durch den Verkauf des Fleisches von krankem Vieh vergiftet «worden». Diese Aufsicht kann grosse Schwierigkeiten haben und kann lange Zeit unnütz sein, aber beim Verdacht einer Epidemie muß zie zein. (Hegel, 1974, p. 597) 7. It may be added that Giambattista Vico in his New Science (1725) puts forward an analysis of historical and cultural developments which echoes Hegel’s conception of selfconsciousness, Marx’s theory of history as a succession of class struggles, and Freud’s Psychoanalysis. 8. One wonders if Marx would have been more generous in his youth to texts of Hegel, had he testified the radical and historical contents that the German Professor was teaching in his courses and which are also part of his young writings on religion and politics. Now the critical edition of Hegel’s collected works of the Hegel-Archive offers a bibliographical basis for updated Hegelian historical and political research. 9. So ist es mit dem Tee- und Kaffeetrinken, wogegen Ärzte, Finanziers, Geistliche sich vielfältig aufgelehnt haben. Man kann nun allerdings von solchen Bedürfnissen sich befreien (wie z. B. jetzt eine gewisse Klasse von Menschen in England sich des Bieres u. dgl. enthalten), und man kann moralische und ökonomische Gründe dafür haben. Dies ist die Sache der Einzelnen (Hegel, 1983, p. 154) 10. Löwith, 2004, p. 43. 11. Löwith, 2004, p. 44. 12. The Communist Manifesto (1848) clearly defends communism being different from reformism and utopianism. In a prologue to Engel’s The Development of Socialism from Utopia to Science from 1880, Marx (1987) still defends this conceptual distinction under the notion of ‘scientific socialism’ (p. 185). This text could count as a continuation and enrichment of the didactic intention of the Communist Manifesto.

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Second Discourse (1755) is a fundamental source for the critique of civilization and for satirical philosophical literature. Nevertheless, Marx stems from the French Revolution, Classical Political Economy, and German Idealism. That makes him especially relevant for the critique of capitalist societies, insofar as he integrated the most advanced scientifical and political development of his days, which in turn were processes of capitalism and reactions to it. The whole first volume of Capital is dedicated to the exposition of the logic of commodity production, its historical processes, and its implications for human subjectivity: A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference. Neither are we here concerned to know how the object satisfies these wants, whether directly as means of subsistence, or indirectly as means of production.13

There is bread production in pre-capitalist societies and of factors of production such as tools and raw materials, as already theorized in the physiocratic economic model;14 what is specific around capitalist production and its particular division of use value and exchange value, is that the direction of factors of production, including human labour, to the cyclic expansion of the production of means of production (that is tons of iron, machinery, etc., not meant for household daily consumption) is accompanied by a diminishing of human consciousness to the level of automatized obedient response to the political given: ‘This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.’15 This means concretely for Marx, that things are valued more than persons, artifacts more than living things, economic expansion more than both community welfare, and the conservation of ecosystems and autonomous regions (as in the case of indigenous communities). For Benjamin (2008) for instance, ‘[its] self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure’ (p. 42). Indeed, volumes II and III of Capital contain a theory of the expanded reproduction of

13. Marx, 1887, p. 8. 14. In this model there are three social classes: farmers, artisans, and landlords. Farmers are the only productive class. Artisans transform land products into fabricated goods consumed by farmers and landlords. Farmers live on their own product and exchange (mediated by money) land-product for fabricated goods. Landlords receive land rent, which enables their global consumption. The model is expressive of a simple reproduction, that is an economic cycle without growth and losses in material wealth. See Quesnay, 1894. 15. Marx, 1887, p. 35.

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capital,16 that implies reflections on the necessity of overproduction, its historical effects on militarism, colonialism, and imperialism, and on the way surplus product in the economy is distributed not only on production-needs, but also on consumer needs, like daily goods and cultural industry. That Mankind could ‘evolve’ to an automatized mass for the enjoyment and production of goods such as in the dystopias of Huxley and Orwell, is one of Marx’s prognosis theses around the continuation of the capitalist mode of production. Critical Theory, as a school – initiated and sustained by The Frankfurt Institute for Social Research as an institution, in the modern sense – implied a generalized refusal and denunciation of human exploitation and the destruction of nature caused by productivist ideology (that is, establishing the expansion of the economy as an ultimate end) and the material requirements for capitalist production. Freud’s novel paradigm in psychology offered a complement to this materialist economic analysis, revealing the interiorization of the requirements of capitalist production and society into the unconscious. ‘Instrumental reason’ was a concept which led critical theorists such as Benjamin, Horkheimer, Adorno, and others to reject the Promethean ideology behind the enthusiasm for modern science and technique,17 which can be found in philosophers of the Enlightenment such as Adam Smith. It can be said that Critical Theory has, to date, studied the effects of the fetishism of the commodity on daily life, daily language, cultural markets, the unconscious, the body, ecosystems, and many experiential spaces, which were not studied systematically in Marx’s Capital.18

2 Walter Benjamin In general, Critical Theorists have operated apart from official political parties or parliamentary forces; the general intention around their work is to make writing a

16. In The Accumulation of Capital (1913), Rosa Luxemburg exposed the contents of volumes II and III of Capital, the therefore a reflection on the schemes of expanded reproduction and on the necessity of militarization and colonization for capitalist states. See Luxemburg, 1923. 17. Gandler, 2009. 18. There is still work to be done around differentiating between Marx’s and Engels’ conception on body politics; for instance, Marx’s lifestyle and attitude towards sexual diversity in the Greek world is distinctly more open and non-Victorian in comparison to Engels: ‘Karl Marx and Frederick Engels arrived at a commitment to socialist politics, and to women’s liberation as they understood it, by quite different routes. Marx, son of a lawyer, descendant of rabbis, and educated for a professional career, began from the perspective of a student of philosophy. By contrast, Engels, who was born into a securely established bourgeois family, started from his own experience as a clerk in the family textile firm in Manchester, England, where he served the apprenticeship expected of a future German industrialist. Having set out separately, each man initially approached the problem of women’s oppression in a distinctive way’ (Vogel, 2013, p. 43).

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medium of resistance to the advancement of totalitarian tendencies around capitalist production, and to explore cultural tendencies in science, art, and politics, which have gathered around a subjective rejection of the destructive tendencies of Modernity under capitalism. In the case of Benjamin his works, since his youth studies on Romanticism, manifest a constant exploration on the aesthetic reaction to the modern world via the work of art and literature. It can be said that, with the aid of Marx’s critique of capitalist society, Benjamin understood that Baudelaire’s satanic reaction to French conservative nineteenth-century society through poetry, Rimbaud’s vanguardist art and Eros, the Paris Commune, and Kafka’s grey imaginary were part of a cultural continuum around the automatized production of commodities under capitalism: ‘Dialectic of commodity production, the newness of the product acquires (as a stimulus to demand) a hitherto unheard-of significance, the ever-always-the-same appears palpably in mass-production for the first time’.19 Structurally, capitalist economies need to expand cyclically, regardless of psychological, social, and ecological costs; the appearance of new and ever more coloured commodities and cultural imaginaries in cinema (the new), goes hand in hand with the petrification of the economic structure around massive production and the ever more perfected and automatized production of packed commodities (the eternal return of the same). Benjamin’s thesis that markets of entertainment could ‘trigger a therapeutic release of unconscious energies’20 for the collective unconscious, adds up to the models of expanded capital reproduction of Marx’s Capital – accompanying an economy of permanent colonial war, an economy of permanent-war-aesthetic-imaginaries,21 is added the spheres of capital expansion.22 Certainly, Benjamin was no cultural pessimist like Freud and Schopenhauer; heavy machinery expansion in the nineteenth century goes hand-in-hand with social exclusion and pauperization in capitalist societies; this, in turn, leads to counter-cultural organization (such as the Communist League, the Paris Commune, the surrealist circles, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, etc.) and theorization (such as anarchism, socialism, and maybe even Benjamin’s disdained theosophy). In other words, the production of self-destruction under capitalism, produces the creators of radical social transformation (in Marcuse’s words, Revolution): 19. Benjamin, 1979, p. 48. 20. Benjamin 2008, p. 38. 21. During Benjamin’s days, Riefenstahl’s movies may have been considered as an archetype of cultural industry of permanent war. In our own days, aliens, terrorists, narcos, deadly viruses, zombies, and even refugees, offer constant contents for series, movies, and diverse aesthetic markets. 22. Based upon the schemes of reproduction and the thesis on alienation one may conclude that the tendency of the expanded reproduction of capital, in concrete World History, would mean the automatization of the massive production of production goods and war goods, accompanied by the production of consumer goods tendentially fitted for massive circulation and consumption. It may be self evident that packed bread is far from the aesthetics of fresh baked bread.

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When Marx undertook his analysis of the capitalist mode of production, that mode was in its infancy. Marx adopted an approach which gave his investigations prognostic value. Going back to the basic conditions of capitalist production, he presented them in a way which showed what could be expected of capitalism in the future. What could be expected, it emerged, was not only an increasingly harsh exploitation of the proletariat but, ultimately, the creation of conditions which would make it possible for capitalism to abolish itself.23

As we shall see in the next section, Marcuse openly discussed psychedelics accompanying radical political processes. Benjamin did not call for a psychedelic revolution or even a Dionysian science and life, as it may be inferred from the works of Hegel and Nietzsche; rather, his view on the role of psychoactive substances (drugs, crocks)24 concerning socialist politics was quite moderate and even spartan: But the real creative sublation of religious illumination lies, of course, not in drugs, but in a profane illumination, in a materialist, anthropological inspiration, for which hashish, opium or other drugs, would only have a propaedeutic function (although a dangerous one). The lesson of religions is more strict.25 To add to the revolution the forces of drunkenness: around this, runs surrealism in all its books and projects. In this consists its most specific task. It is not about, indeed, asserting a drunkenness component, which, as we know, works on every revolutionary act. This component is identical to anarchic drunkenness. To focus on it only, would mean to neglect completely the disciplinary and methodical preparation of revolution, in favour of a praxis which would oscillate between training and anticipated celebration.26

The abolition of fetishization of the word, of the body, and of social life was aided by surrealist praxis, including its use of psychoactive substances for the expansion of consciousness; nevertheless, as Marcuse will later remark, anarchy needs to be sublated into revolutionary discipline, and permanent drunkenness has to make way to rational distribution of libidinal and political energy (it may be recalled that gentile democratic and military societies such as the Spartans and the Aztecs had strong legislation and institutions concerning drunkenness and use of psychoactive media). Now, in praxis, Benjamin was quite open and experimental concerning controlled and assisted drug use; it may even be said, that the concept of aura in the essay on the technical reproducibility has its origin in Benjamin’s psychoactive

23. Benjamin, 2008, p. 19. 24. See Benjamin, 2000, p. 57. 25. Benjamin, 2013, p. 35. 26. Ibid., p. 49.

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experiences (a hashish experience in this case), pointing to a psychoactive dialectics of image-contemplation: These statements concerned the nature of aura. Everything I said on the subject was directed polemically against the theosophists, whose inexperience and ignorance I found highly repugnant. And I contrasted three aspects of genuine aura – though by no means schematically – with the conventional and banal ideas of the theosophists. First, genuine aura appears in all things, not just in certain kinds of things, as people imagine. Second, the aura undergoes changes, which can be quite fundamental, with every movement the aura-wreathed object makes. Third, genuine aura can in no sense be thought of as a spruced-up version of the magic rays beloved of spiritualists and described and illustrated in vulgar works of mysticism. On the contrary, the characteristic feature of genuine aura is ornament, an ornamental halo [Umzirkung], in which the object or being is enclosed as in a case.27

Benjamin’s reports on hashish use (2006) expose the well-documented and scientifically researched effects of marijuana, via the mosaic interaction28 of cannabinoids: ‘beatific humor dwells all the more fondly on the contingencies of the world of space and time’ (p. 49), ‘a continual alternation of dreaming and waking states’ (p. 117), ‘the feeling of loneliness is very quickly lost’ (p. 48), ‘it is as though they have a cathartic effect on one another’ (p. 85), and the ‘falling away of neurotic-obsessive anxiety complexes’ (p. 19). Concerning a psychedelic in the strict pharmacological sense – such as mescaline, the psychoactive substance in peyote, a cactus used in ancestral environments in the Wixarika culture in Mexico29 – Benjamin confirms, amidst the particularity and situated character of his experience, some universalities that are common in psychedelic literature from Hofmann and Huxley, to trip reports on webpages and contemporary psychedelic media (e.g. the sense of wonder in the experience of daily objects, an ambivalence towards affections, increased sensibility – and, in the case of Benjamin, a yearning for a more sylvatic setting): On F’s return, B describes his impression of the window in the following words: ‘If a dead man were to feel longing for some object from his former life – this window, for example – then it would appear to him just as I see it now. The dead and present objects can awaken a longing such as we otherwise know only at the sight of someone we love.’30

27. Benjamin, 2006, p. 58. 28. See Carchman, 1979, p. 227. 29. See Chapela, 2014. 30. Benjamin, 2006, p. 86.

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Frankel, meanwhile, speaks about his state as ‘naughtiness’. He tries a psychological deduction of naughtiness; he characterizes it as a ‘mist world of affections’, and means that in earlier life stages, affections are not differentiated sharply one from the other, and what one later characterizes as ambivalence, represents the rule . . . . During this time, it develops in permanent grade [in the experimentation subject] a growing immense sensibility to acoustic and optical stimuli. At the same time, he expresses critically, that the experimentation conditions are uncomfortable. Such an experiment should be successful in a palm forest. Finally, the doses obtained [20mg subcutaneous] for Benjamin [Frankel reports] may have been too low . . . . Upon pulse check, it makes itself evident that Benjamin is extremely sensitive towards the softest touch (pulse itself remains unchanged).31

Finally, the psychotomimetic effects of psychedelics were widely studied in the 1960s and continue to offer a fertile quarry for biomedical and psychopathological research. Benjamin reflected on ‘catatonia’ while he was under the effects of mescaline: The interpretation of catatonia is now as follows: The test subject compares the fixed position of his hand to the outline of a drawing which a draftsman has set down once and for all just as it is now possible for the draftsman, by means of innumerable modifications in the hatching, to keep making changes or adding nuances to his picture, so also it is possible for the catatonic, through tiny modifications in innervation, to alter the sphere of ideas associated with the catatonic state. The extraordinary economy of this procedure makes for a gain in pleasure. This gain in pleasure is what matters to the person in a catatonic state.32

Benjamin was interested in radical, that is revolutionary, uses of art (like in Surrealism), of drugs (like in the chemical initiation for the profane illumination, or the technical report of a psychoactive-assisted experimentation), and of technique (like in Vertov’s cinema).33 Marx, Freud, Breton, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and a myriad of other sources, such as Scholem, Lukács, Kracauer, et al., helped Benjamin construct a critical concept of psychoactive substances and the cultural industry of his time. His legacy points to the appropriation of drugs for Revolution hand-in-hand with Hebraic messianism, communism, and mass-pedagogy; to win for Revolution the forces of drunkenness, of the expansion of perception, emotion and cognition mediated by chemicals and of the mediations of Western science and

31. Benjamin, 2000, pp. 129–130. 32. Benjamin, 2006, p. 93. 33. Vertov’s Three Songs on Lenin (1934) counts as a masterpiece of socialist realism and soviet vanguardism. Three ideas in the film are clear: Lenin’s works and praxis were welcome in popular and feminine sectors among Russia during the Soviet Period; Lenin was a cultural icon who in theory and praxis stands in complete antagonism with Stalinism; during actual Leninism in the Soviet Union a genuine and active worker’s culture was developed and gained aesthetical exposition in Vertov’s work.

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indigenous peoples and gentile societies and remnants, may be a motto which echoes Benjamin’s, Marx’s and Engels’ late anthropological writings.

3 Marcuse Herbert Marcuse’s engagement in parliamentary and hegemonic politics was discouraged early on by the ‘failure of the German revolution’ and even before that with the ‘murder of Karl [Liebknecht] and Rosa [Luxemburg]’.34 So, by the 1920s, Marcuse had opted, like the rest of the Frankfurt School, for philosophical analysis, rather than direct political engagement. Hegel and Heidegger35 are two philosophical sources which establish a growing intellectual path towards dialectics, historicism, and finally, Marxism and Psychoanalysis. One can state that Marcuse was greatly interested in the history of philosophy and the writing of critical monographs and didactical essays; for instance, his book on Hegel’s Reason and Revolution counts as a classic – along with Lukács’ The Destruction of Reason – in the history of Marxist history of philosophy and critical philosophical historiography. Marcuse was an outstanding intellectual biographer of Hegel. For instance, he was state-of-the-art with concern to the development of Hegel’s logic and its implications on self-consciousness theory: Hegel’s first logic already manifests the endeavour to break through the false fixity of our concepts and to show the driving contradictions that lurk in all modes of existence and call for a higher mode of thought. The Logic presents only the general form of the dialectic, its application to the general forms of being. The more concrete applications appear in Hegel’s Realphilosophie, particularly in his social philosophy.36

We also read: ‘Hegel’s idea of negativity was not moral or religious, but purely philosophical, and the concept of finitude that expressed it became a critical and almost materialistic principle with him’.37 And finally: [Hegel] says self-consciousness has yet to demonstrate that it is the true reality; it must actually make the world its free realization. Referring to this task, Hegel declares the subject to be ‘absolute negativity’, signifying that it has the power to negate every given condition and to make it its own conscious work.38

34. Marcuse, 2018, p. 19. 35. Marcuse was a student and personal assistant of Heidegger’s in Freiburg and is credited with being part of the circle of Jewish friends close to Heidegger, namely Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, and Karl Löwith. 36. Marcuse, 1986, p. 73. 37. Ibid., p. 137. 38. Ibid., p. 95.

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It is this insistence on the falsity of the fixed, on negativity as an intrinsic tendency in all realities to movement and development, and on the active role of the human subject in society and history, that allowed Marx to understand the genesis and logic of capitalism, its inherent ideological and material tensions, and the latent possibilities in modern societies for evolution and radical change. Hegel understood, with the aid of this logic, that human subjectivity gets impoverished and alienated,39 along with the production of commodities and the orientation of economic processes to profit-gaining. Marx did not have access to the most radical utterances from Hegel concerning the ‘dulling’ of human consciousness under capitalist division of labour and the alienating effects concerning social division between the extreme-rich and the extreme-poor.40 Nevertheless, even though Hegel’s school was in contact with Saint-Simonist radicals in France and modern workers’ conditions in England, engaged critical intellectuals such as Gans, continued to think along with Hegel in the lines of the Sittlichkeit – social life – concept, and State-directed public policy and institutions for the tackling of poverty. For Marx, the capitalist State was nothing else than an ‘administrative bureau, which manages the common business of the whole bourgeois class’,41 and idealist concepts such as Sittlichkeit and Idea of the State – fundamental for Hegel and for the history of metaphysics – part of the fetishism of the commodity itself.42 Simply said, for Marx the belief of freedom under capitalism and the consciousness operating in favour of capitalism, were symptomatic of insufficient knowledge of statistics concerning health, education, nutrition and housing, and of deficient conceptual analysis concerning economics.

39. ‘And the consciousness of the factory workers is degraded to the ultimate dullness, and the connection of the singular type of labour with the entire infinite mass of necessities becomes completely unfathomable, and a blind dependence; so that a far operation, often makes superfluous and useless the work of an entire class of men, who before found their needed satisfied. This labour now stagnates.’ (Hegel, 1975, p. 324) 40. Envy and hatred emerge, so, amongst the poor against those who have something . . . . The rich considers everything as buyable in itself, as he knows himself as the power of particularity of self-sconsciousness. Wealth can, thus, lead to the same mockery and shamelesness, as in the case of the poor populace. (Hegel, 1983, p. 196) 41. Marx, 2008, p. 44. 42. One could also point to Danto’s and Fukuyama’s Great Appraisal of capitalist culture as an instance of commodity fetishism: liberal intellectuals are unable or unwilling to include counter-cultures and radical political movements into their ‘history of freedom’ as forces of movement and change; their epistemologic basis takes for granted private markets and commodity exchange as natural, democratic, and free. Gans, in the critical spirit of Hegel, had already interpreted freedom-to-contract under English capitalist society as freedom-to-starve-to-death: Is it not slavery when man is exploited (exploriirt) like a beast, even though man is free to starve to death otherwise? Is it not possible to give these miserable proletarians (Proletarier) a dime of ethical life (Sittlichkeit)? (Gans, 1836, p. 100).

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The self-contradictory character of expanded capital accumulation and its use of human flesh as a medium for the obtaining of private profits, makes evident the need of radical alternatives, which could account for a social organization different from the modern State, and for economies which have different goals from infinite quantitative expansion. For Marcuse, as for Benjamin, the Paris Commune was a part of the continuum of the history of capitalism and its accompanying brutalities – along with its correspondent struggles and rebellions. Despite its defeat, it should count as evidence of the human rejection of alienated life and the mechanization of time, and of the awareness and intention to change the worlds of perception and labour in a radical way: Walter Benjamin quotes reports that during the Paris Commune, in all corners of the city of Paris there were people shooting at the clocks on the towers of the churches, palaces and so on, thereby consciously or half-consciously expressing the need that somehow time has to be arrested; that at least the prevailing, the established time continuum has to be arrested, and that a new time has to begin – a very strong emphasis on the qualitative difference and on the totality of the rupture between the new society and the old.43

The fact that economic production is oriented towards indefinite expansion, regardless of human and ecological costs, is manifest for Marcuse on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The type of libidinal economy44 which is required for this mechanical way of dealing with the capitalist mode of production,45 leads to destructive tendencies, despite supposed sexual freedoms,46 as Eros lies diminished under productivist culture – that is, ‘Surplus-repression’47 is a rule in productivist societies, so massive material wealth production is accompanied by extreme violence and institutional brutality assisted by technology. It is a central thesis in One Dimensional Man, that capitalism (as Marx already had stated already) cannot be reformed from within, nor can new ideological or material economic tendencies be introduced from outside, in order to mitigate or diminish its destructive

43. Marcuse, 2005, p. 78. 44. ‘Surplus-repression: the restrictions necessitated by social domination. This is distinguished from (basic) repression: the “modifications” of the instincts necessary for the perpetuation of the human race in civilization’ (Marcuse, 1956, p. 35). For instance, the historical exclusion of homosexuality of erotic and sexual practices, and of psychoactive substances from daily life. 45. Marx’s late anthropology enriches his early theory of capitalist production with Morgan’s imaginaries of stone tools, pottery, war technology and types of nutrition along human material history. The economic basis is made, therefore, of products of the hand and not of products of the head. 46. In general, the Frankfurt School, and even Lukács, conceded that Freud’s psychoanalysis was of a revolutionary character concerning the theory of the psyche. 47. Marcuse, 1956, p. 35.

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tendencies. Rather ‘Communism in living’48 or a ‘communal constitution’49 such as that of the Paris Commune, should replace market economies and political aristocracies, for which barbarian societies offer an archetypical model. It is a simple and elegant thesis, that human needs under capitalism are adapted to the needs of capital expansion and that life and use-values lie outside the sphere of private markets, the capitalist State, and profit-orientated social processes. Indeed, concerning the theory of consciousness, Marx’s rejection of the commodity-form would inspire Marcuse in exonerating ‘hippies’ and psychoactive and psychedelic substance use during the 1960s: This is the Hippie subculture: ‘trip’, ‘grass’, ‘acid’, and so on. But a far more subversive universe of discourse announces itself in the language of black militants. Here is a systematic linguistic rebellion, which smashes the ideological context in which the words are employed and defined, and places them into the opposite context – the negation of the established one. Thus, the blacks ‘take over’ some of the most sublime and sublimated concepts of Western civilization, desublimate them, and redefine them.50

For Freud’s psychoanalytic tradition, ‘pot’, ‘acid’, can only be counted as ‘narcotic’,51 as substances which dissociate the subject from the established principle of reality, and/or anesthetize him in order to stabilize him enough for the operation amongst and within hegemonic values and institutions. Marcuse’s revolutionary appropriation of psychoanalysis offers conceptual tools, in which altered states of consciousness, especially those which in a substantial way negate current repressive social tendencies. For instance, the formation of a competitive and aggressive ego, the idea of sharp boundaries between the self and diverse environments, the obsession with unidimensional language and conduct, and the orientation of communication systems around private property, are seen as a rupture and emancipation from the continuum of violence and brutality, which is human history, and a temporary use of sensibility in a non-instrumental way: Consequently, the rupture which the continuum of aggression and exploitation would also break with the sensibility geared to this universe. Today’s rebels want to see, hear, feel new things in a new way: they link liberation with the dissolution of ordinary and orderly perception. The ‘trip’ involves the dissolution of the ego shaped by the established society – an artificial and short-lived dissolution. But the artificial and ‘private’ liberation anticipates, in a distorted manner, an

48. Marx 1974, p. 108. 49. Marx, 1962, p. 340. 50. Marcuse, 1969, p. 35. 51. See Freud, 1992, p. 78.

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exigency of the social liberation: the revolution must be at the same time a revolution in perception which will accompany the material and intellectual reconstruction of society, creating the new aesthetic environment.52

Although, unlike Benjamin, Marcuse was no sensibility-scout himself,53 he could sympathetically report and interpret the altered states of consciousness under THC and LSD, and legitimate it as a valid way of using the senses in a counterhegemonic way. It may be noted that what Marcuse called ‘false needs’54 in One Dimensional Man is identical with what Marx (2016) criticized in Capital around ‘use value’ and ‘exchange value’ (p. 3), and its confusion under classical political economy. Therefore, there is no question here, from a Marxist materialist perspective, of health hazards categorized as such by hegemonic healthcare discourse, of legality concerning the status of X or Y substance, or compromising of the body for productivist use.55 Marx’s thesis of the fetishism of the commodity also implies, that the human body could tend to be sacralized as a mechanical way of circulating commodities, reproducing the capitalist social body and respecting the established law and order. The hippie subculture, and its use of these substances – now categorized as soft drugs – teach how to insert chemical emancipation into the social field. However, as a strict Marxist analyst, Marcuse was clear that, separated from disciplined political organisation and praxis, and orientated only towards immediate pleasure and detachment, these kind of chemicals and the ‘revolution in perception’ which they opened, could just as well insert themselves into the commodity-system, and therefore lose all of their emancipatory potential: Intentionally noncommitted the withdrawal creates its artificial paradises within the society from which it withdrew. They thus remain subject to the law of this society, which punishes the inefficient performances. In contrast, the radical transformation of society implies the union of the new sensibility with a new rationality.56

However, in balance, the Essay on Liberation offers an updated picture of countercultures and a positive valuation of their tactics. In One Dimensional Man, written a couple of years earlier, the diagnosis of beat-culture is quite dismal:

52. Marcuse, 1969, p. 37. 53. Arnold Farr from the Marcuse Society reports no anecdotes concerning Marcuse and drugs such as marijuana and LSD. It is just known (aside from his passion for tobacco), that Marcuse was fond of whisky. 54. Marcuse, 2007, p. 7. 55. For instance, much of the social fear against marijuana use, besides the racist and classist imaginaries reproduced by the cultural industry, has to do with negative indexes in productivist tests, such as those for attention and learning in prison-like environments 56. Marcuse, 1969, p. 37.

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As modern classics, the avant-garde and the beatniks share in the function of entertaining without endangering the good conscience of the men of good will. This absorption is justified by technological progress: the refusal is refuted by the alleviation of misery in the advanced industrial society. The liquidation of high culture is a by-product of the conquest of nature, and of the progressing conquest of scarcity.57

Concerning a supposed psychedelic revolution, Marcuse was sceptical. In general, concerning social struggles and student movements, he always highlighted the necessary ‘discipline of the mind’58 and sublation of anarchism into ‘political discipline and organization’.59 Concerning, for instance, new wave interest in psychedelics and social change, Marcusian and Marxian materialist theory and practice, point to a critique of commodity fetishism,60 an exploration of use-values outside capitalist markets (see hongo sagrado culture around Mazatec people in Mexico),61 and socialized ways of production and consumption of psychoactive and psychedelic goods (for instance, collectives in Uruguay and Mexico, which participate in socialized use of marijuana and cannabinoids). It may be recollected that Marx himself pointed to the appropriation of the most progressive elements of bourgeois culture, which leads to progressive legislation and defence of individual cognitive freedom and socialized and ancestral uses of natural resources. Finally, given that current uses and research of psychedelics such as LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline lead to psychotherapeutic uses – such as the analysis of unconscious behaviour and conduct-patterns, resignification, the re-evaluation of autobiographies, and the enriching of phenomenological attitudes and capacities62 – it is relevant to quote Marcuse’s late writings on ecology, which manifests his interest in applied political psychoanalysis: Radical change I define as a change, not only in the basic institutions and relationships of an established society, but also in individual consciousness in such a society. Radical change may even be so deep as to affect the individual unconscious. This definition enables us to distinguish radical change of an entire social system from changes within that system. In other words, radical change must entail both a change in society’s institutions and also a change in the character structure predominant among individuals in that society.63

57. Marcuse, 2007, p. 74. 58. In the original German: die Anstrengung des Begriffs (Marcuse, 1972, p. 131). 59. Ibid., p. 132. 60. See also, for example, Slavoj Žižek’s critique of green capitalism (2021). 61. See Rodriguez, 2017. 62. See Letheby, 2020. 63. Marcuse, 2019, p. 8.

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Marcuse’s critical theory of society, in the end, includes a critique of hegemonic productivist mentality and economic structures, an anthropological review of what counter-cultural groups were doing in theory and praxis around drugs, and a radical conception around social psychoanalysis, which points to radical change in the interior of individual subjectivity as a necessary part of a macro-social process of structural economic transformation. Although in daily life a sober German professor, in thought he was close to the Dionysian ethos found within the work of Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, and Rimbaud. He was also widely sympathetic to the Paris Commune, to the psychedelic hippies, and to Black Panther Party activists, such as Angela Y. Davis – Marcuse’s most prominent PhD student. Angela Davis’ life and works concerning the struggles of liberating society from gender, race, and class64 are also concerned with developing new imaginaries of liberation in revolutionary politics. Political engagement in Marcuse includes the integration of psychedelics and psychoactive substances into daily praxis towards social evolution out of the capitalist mode of production.

4 Conclusions Marx criticized, in a scientific way, the economic discourse of his day65 and how ‘social conditions of labour’66 are falsified under termini such as ‘value in use’ and ‘value in exchange’.67 He maintained that there is always more value added to the commodity via human labour, than paid out as wage-incomes; that what counts in commodity production are profits and market-sales independently of the quality required in the good to satisfy a human need; that the workers cannot decide upon the structure and functioning of the production process, or orientate surplus production towards socialized uses, such as health, capitalization in another place, or even festivals. As many phenomenologists, especially those in the twentieth century such as Heidegger and Ortega y Gasset, have pointed out, in the modern capitalist world, things (capital in Marx) are valued more than human beings. Material wealth is desired more than spiritual development or genuine vital life; productivity in the economy matters more than a homeostatic and non-predatory relationship with Nature. Marx’s particular contribution in economic theory and politics in general, is his materialist, dialectical, class-oriented ontology. Official ideology is with the material conditions of capitalist production, so that countercultural theory and practice is required in order to defend life, the human body, and progressive cultural legacy in general.

64. Davis’s book Women Race and Class (1982), is a key work of intersectional feminist philosophy. Davis is Professor Emerita at University of California, Santa Cruz, and a leading public intellectual on freedom, liberation, and the fight against racial and gender discrimination. 65. Locke, Petty, Hume, Smith, et al. 66. Marx, 2016, p. 61. 67. Smith, Say, Ricardo, et al.

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Concerning psychoactive substances and psychedelics in particular, it must be recollected that Marx, along with the philosophers of the Enlightenment, praised Philosophy and Science’s triumph over superstition, idolatry, servilism, and cognitive despotism; Kant’s motto Sapere aude! – Dare to use your own Reason! – has medical connotations, which do not imply any compromise to a given discourse or existent institution. Marx distrusted hegemonic medicine and doctors as well as Kant, so his legacy, beyond a defence of some bourgeois liberties (the freedom of the person, freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom of the press – what one could name cognitive freedom), can be expressed in the critique of the commodity-form as a feasible way to deal with human needs. This points to a critique of the reduction of psychoactive substances and psychedelics to commodities, capitalist markets, positivist discourses, and technocratic institutions. As a late contribution of Marx to social theory and psychedelic research, The Ethnological Notebooks offer some insights on Marx’s reading of the anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan, who himself was an enthusiast of societies such as the Aztecs and the Iroquois. Marx’s late theory of history considers the passage from savagery, barbarism, and civilization as organically as Darwinian evolution and as structurally and historically given, as it is described in Vico’s science of history. For instance, Marx commented on pulque use among the Aztecs68 and opium or datura use in religious rituals and human sacrifices amongst the Khonds of Central India,69 without catechizing, moralizing, or ridiculing (his satirical pen is directed rather against ‘civilized donkeys’).70 Concerning substance use and abuse, Marx is not concerned with moral and legal judgements, but about socialized structures and practices. For example, the communal uses of psychedelics such as psilocybin and mescaline, as sacred plants, among Wixarika and Mazatec cultures in Mexico, offer at least a rich source for further materialist, anthropological, economic, and historical research. The successors of Marx, Benjamin’s, Marcuse, the Black Panthers, and the hippies, in the social struggle for emancipation,71 must deal with new ideological,

68. ‘To maize, beans, squashes and tabacco, now it was added cotton, pepper, tomato, cacao and the care of certain fruits. A beer was made by fermenting the juide of the maguey (mexican Agave). The Iroquois had though, a similar drink, produced by fermenting maple sap (Ahonart)’ (Marx, 1974, p. 131). 69. ‘At 3 hours in the morning, the victim receives some milk to drink, when the presiding priest implores the goddess to shower her blessings on the people etc. etc. The priest recounts the origin and advantage of the rite . . . and concludes by stating that the goddess has been obeyed and the people assembled etc. After the “mock” ceremony, nevertheless, the victim is taken to the grove, where the sacrifice is to be carried out; and, to prevent resistance, the bones of the arms and legs are broken, or the victim drugged with opium or datura, when the janni wounds his victim with his axe . . . . The crowd now press forward to obtain a piece of his flesh, and in a moment, he is stripped to the bones’ (Marx, 1974, p. 348). 70. See Marx, 1974, p. 340. 71. E.g. Class, Gender, Race theory and practice.

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epistemological, economic, biotechnological, and historical conditions for Revolution, radical social change or evolution-towards-freedom. Multidisciplinary historical research around psychoactive substance is needed if one is to avoid instrumental uses and alienating tendencies. The conjunction of an exploratory attitude towards drugs with group discipline and organization may render them a powerful social force for consciousness-change for the pacification of society, and for the remediation of ecosystems.

References Benjamin, W. (2000) Über Haschisch (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp) Benjamin, W. (2003) La obra de arte en la época de su reproductibilidad técnica, trans. Andrés E. Welkert (México: D. F: Ítaca) Benjamin, W. (2006) On Hashish, trans. H. Eiland and M. Boon. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) Benjamin, W. (2008) The Work of Art in its Age of Technological Reproducibility, trans. E. Jephcott, R. Liovingstone, H. Eiland et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) Benjamin, W. (2013) El surrealism, trans. Paul Laindon (Madrid: Casimiro) Carchman, R. A., End, D. W. and Parker, M. R. (1979) Marihuana and Cell Function, in: eds. Gabriel G. Nahas and Sir William D. M. Paton, Marihuana Biological Effects, Analysis, Metabolism, Cellular Responses, Reproduction and Brain (London: Pergamon Press) Chapela, L. M. (2014) Wixárika, un pueblo en comunicación (Mexico City: SEP/CGEIB) José Luis Etcheverry, ed. (1978–1985) Vol. 3 of Sigmund Freud Obras completas (Buenos Aires: Amorrort) Davis, Angela Y. (1982) Women Race and Class (New York: Random House) Engels, F. and K. Marx. (1987) Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft. Werke. Vol. 19 of the Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels Werk (ed.) Institut Für Marxismus-Leninismus Beim Zk Der Sed (Berlin: Dietz Verlag 1956–1968) Freud, S. (1992) El malestar en la cultura. Vol. 21 of Sigmund Freud Obras completas. Gandler, S. (2009) Fragmentos de Frankfurt (México: D. F. Siglo XXI) Gans, E. (1836) Rückblicke auf Personen und Zustände (Weimar: J. B. Metzler) Hegel, G. ([1824/1825] 1974) Vorlesungen über Rechtsphilosophie (1818–1831), Philosophie des Rechts nach der Vorlesungsnachschrift K.G. v. Griesheims 1824/25 Vol. IV (Stuttgart: Frommann-holzboog) Hegel, G. ([1804/1805] 1975) Jenaer Systementwürfe I. Vol. 6 of Hegel Gesammelte Werke, eds. Klaus Düsing and Heinz Kimmerle (Düsseldorf: Meiner. 1956–2016) Hegel, G. (1983) Philosophie des Rechts, Die Vorlesung von 1819/20, in: Einer Nachschrift [Rechtsphilosophie und Politik] (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp) Hegel, G. ([1819/1820] 2000) Vorlesungen über die Philosophie des Rechts, Berlin 1819/1820, eds. Emil Angehrn, Martin Bondeli and Hoo Nam Seelmann (Berlin: Meiner) Hegel, G. ([1820] 2008) Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford World Classics) Letheby, Chris (2020) Naturalizing Psychedelic Epistemology (Lecture, VII Congreso Universitario sobre Sustancias Psicoactivas de la FFyL de la UNAM, Zoom Plataform (11 November 2020). Available at: www.facebook.com/ViaSynapsis/ videos/662296621167230.

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Löwith, Karl (2004) Weltgeschichte und Heilgeschehen (Weimar: J. B. Metzler) Luxemburg, Rosa (1923) Die Akkumulation des Kapitals (Berlin: Vereinugung Internationaler Verlags-Anstalten) Marcuse, Herbert (1956) Eros and Civilization (Boston: The Beacon Press) Marcuse, Herbert (1969) An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press) Marcuse, Herbert (1972) Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press) Marcuse, Herbert (1986) Reason and Revolution (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul) Marcuse, Herbert (2005) The New Left in the 1960’s. Vol 3 of the Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, ed. Douglas Kellner (New York: Routledge) Marcuse, Herbert (2007) One Dimensional Man (New York: Routledge) Marcuse, Herbert (2018) Filosofía radical, Conversaciones con Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas, Karl Popper, Ralf Dahrendorf y otros, trans. Gustau Muñóz (Madrid: Gedisa) Marcuse, Herbert (2019) Ecology and the Critique of Modern Society (Santa Barbara: University of California at Santa Barbara) Marx, Karl (1887) Capital: Volume One, trans. Moore and Aveling, Marx/Engels Internet Archive (marxists.org) 1995, 1999. Available at: Marx, Karl (1962) Werke Band 17 (Berlin: Dietz) Marx, Karl (1974) The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx, ed. Lawrence Krader. (Amsterdam: Van Gorcum Assen) Marx, Karl (2008) Manifiesto Comunista (Madrid: Alianza) Marx, Karl (2016) Das Kapital, Band I, Der Produktionsprozess des Kapitals (Hamburg: Nikol). Available at: www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ (accessed 28/06/21) Rodríguez, V. Citlali (2017) Mazatecos, Aniños santos y güeros en Huautla de Jiménez, Oaxaca (México City: UNAM) Vogel, L. (2013) Marxism and the Oppression of Women (Chicago: Haymarket Books) Žižek, S. (2011) The Delusion Of Green Capitalism. Video. Available at: www.youtube. com/watch?v=yzcfsq1_bt8..

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Chapter 9 M A RY O N A C I D : E X P E R I E N C E S O F U N I T Y A N D T H E E P I ST E M IC G A P Jussi Jylkkä

Could Mary, an expert neuroscientist who has only ever seen in black and white, know what it is like to see colours if she knew everything about neurophysiology? This well-known thought experiment demonstrates a gap between experiental and scientific knowledge. To better appreciate how these types of knowledge differ, I focus on psychedelic experience (PDE): Could Mary know what it is like to undergo an acid trip based on neuroscience alone? I focus on a key aspect of PDE, namely a sense of unity or ego dissolution, where the experienced boundary between subject and object vanishes. I argue that such experiences constitute knowledge that is not about anything. I call this ‘unitary knowledge’, or simply ‘This’. I illustrate This with the help of Zen philosophy, which emphasizes the non-duality and ineffability of experience. Science cannot capture what experiences feel like because that knowledge is unitary, whereas scientific knowledge is always relational and distinct from what it is about. Through catalysing unitary experiences, psychedelics can help us see this difference. What Mary knew prior to her own experience was relational knowledge about the experience, but what she gains through her own experience is unitary knowledge that is constituted by the experience itself. Thus, PDE shows how the epistemic gap is the difference between experiences themselves and descriptions about them. I conclude by discussing the implications this has for physicalism.

1 The Knowledge Argument Frank Jackson’s Mary thought experiment (1982, 1986), or the Knowledge Argument, is an argument against physicalism, i.e., against the ontological thesis that all that exists, including experiences, is physical: Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe 153

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tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal chords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’ . . . . What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a colour television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then is it inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. Ergo there is more to have than that, and Physicalism is false.1

This thought experiment can be criticized on a practical basis: e.g., Mary could produce colour sensations by pressing her eyelids, she could look at her own blood, etc.2 To overcome such difficulties, we can imagine that Mary is congenitally completely colour-blind, due to lack of certain neural structures such as visual cortex V4, also known as the ‘colour centre’. The question is, then, whether Mary would learn something when her condition is cured (when a functioning V4 is formed in her). Similar real-world examples of acquiring a completely new type of experience include persons with cochlear implants who gain the capacity to hear or, as I will discuss here, taking a dose of a psychedelic substance such as lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD or ‘acid’). Jackson’s conclusion that physicalism is false is widely disputed,3 but what is quite uncontroversial is that the Mary case (and similar arguments such as Nagel’s (1979) bat or Chalmers’ (1996) zombies) demonstrate the existence of an epistemic gap4 between what could be called experiental knowledge and scientific knowledge. The only approach that denies the epistemic gap is eliminativism or illusionism,5 which makes the radical claim that Mary does not learn anything when she sees red for the first time: she already knew everything about red experiences from science. More generally, eliminativism holds that experiences do not include phenomenal properties (‘qualia’) and there is nothing it is like to undergo them: all that takes place is causal-functional processes that science can exhaustively describe.6 Eliminativism does grant that when Mary sees red for the first time, a

1. Jackson, 1982, p. 130. 2. For an introductory discussion of the Knowledge Argument, see Nida-Rümelin and O Conaill, 2019. 3. e.g., Nida-Rümelin and O Conaill, 2019. 4. Levine, 1983. 5. Dennett, 1991; Frankish, 2017. 6. We have previously argued (Jylkkä and Railo, 2019) that eliminativism is compatible with the thesis that experiences ‘feel like something’ and that science can indeed exhaustively model – but just model – experiences. The point is that science is limited to modelling (i.e., representing and describing) and can never tell what the modelled thing or process is, in itself, beyond our models and observations of it. This is also the main point here.

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novel physical-functional process (e.g., V4-activation) happens in her, but this does not afford her new knowledge. She already knew everything about V4processes prior to her own experience. Here, I will argue to the contrary that the brute happening of the experience constitutes unitary knowledge. Such knowledge is particularly vivid in unitary experiences that are catalysed by psychedelics.7 In this chapter, I examine a modification of the Mary case: Could Mary infer from neuroscience what it is like to undergo an acid trip before subjectively having one?8 This case avoids many of the problems associated with the case of Mary in the black-and-white room: The psychedelic experience (PDE) is attainable to anyone, and we can know their phenomenological characteristics. More importantly, PDE has features that are important for understanding the epistemic gap. Here I will focus on one key aspect of PDE, namely that it can include a strong sense of unity or ‘ego dissolution’, where the difference between the subject and object of experience vanishes. I argue that PDE can constitute unitary knowledge, This, which is not about anything – unlike scientific, relational knowledge which is about something exterior to itself. This knowledge is constituted by the happening of the experience. Although This is brought forth or amplified by PDE where the subjectobject distinction vanishes, I propose that all experience ultimately constitutes unitary knowledge.9 Unitary PDE renders this fact explicit. Science, in turn, only gives what can be called relative knowledge, i.e., knowledge that is distinct from what it is about. Whereas I can know my own experiences through being them, I can know external objects only through being related to them – e.g., through perceiving or thinking about them. Thus, my aim is to show that the epistemic gap is the difference between a thing or process in itself and how it appears to us. What Mary learns when she experiences the PDE is unitary knowledge that is constituted by the happening of the PDE. What she knew before was relational knowledge about other people’s PDEs: how they are scientifically or otherwise described or represented. The unitary PDE highlights this important distinction. It highlights, beyond ordinary perception, that all experience constitutes This, unitary knowledge. Thus, the epistemic gap is distinctness between an experiencein-itself and scientific theories about it. Science is limited because it cannot yield unitary knowledge, which can only be gained in direct experience. However, this does not necessarily disprove physicalism as the ontological thesis that everything,

7. For a general literary account of LSD experience, see Ward, 1957. 8. Letheby, 2019, discusses from a more general perspective whether PDE can afford new knowledge, focusing on Knowledge That, Knowledge How, and Knowledge by Acquaintance (KBA). The type of knowledge I am concerned with is unitary knowledge, and it is different from these; including KBA, which is relational (see section 2.4). 9. In our previous paper (Jylkkä and Railo, 2019) we argue that knowing what an experience feels like is constituted by its happening. Thus, in knowing what an experience feels like, there is no knower and known, but instead the brute happening of a process. I am this process, whereas science merely models it. Here I aim to elaborate on this notion of unitary knowledge, which was left unclear by the previous paper.

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including consciousness, is physical – it merely shows that science does not fully reveal what the physical is.10 Thus, my focus in this chapter is on epistemology, but I will briefly discuss possible metaphysical implications in section 5.

2 This: Unitary Knowledge A central characteristic of PDE is experienced ego dissolution or loss of sense of self.11 In these ‘ego death’ experiences, one typically feels unity with one’s surroundings and experiences the loss of self or ego as something distinct from other things. Here I am concerned with the dissolution of the subject-object division, an experience where one feels complete unity with one’s experience. This is illustrated by the following report by the journalist Michael Pollan (2018), describing his experience of listening to Bach’s cello suites on psilocybin (a classic serotonergic psychedelic found in so-called ‘magic mushrooms’): [I] lost whatever ability . . . to distinguish subject from object, tell apart what remained of me and what was Bach’s music . . . I became a transparent ear, indistinguishable from the stream of sound that flooded my consciousness until there was nothing else in it.12

Over 200 years previously, William James described the effects nitrous oxide produced in him: It is impossible to convey an idea of the torrential character of the identification of opposites as it streams through the mind in this experience. I have sheet after sheet of phrases dictated or written during the intoxication, which to the sober reader seem meaningless drivel, but which at the moment of transcribing were fused in the fire of infinite rationality. God and devil, good and evil, life and death, I and thou, sober and drunk, matter and form, black and white, quantity and quality, shiver of ecstasy and shudder of horror, vomiting and swallowing, inspiration and expiration, fate and reason, great and small, extent and intent, joke and earnest, tragic and comic, and fifty other contrasts figure in these pages in the same monotonous way.13

We could add ‘subject’ and ‘object’ to James’ list of opposites that become unified in PDE. Similar experiences of unity or losing one’s ‘self ’ can happen in meditation and in non-drug induced mystical experiences.14 Common to all of these is a sense

10. Strawson, 2019. 11. e.g., Carhart-Harris et al., 2014; Huxley, [1954] 2009; James, 1882; Pollan, 2018; Ward, 1957. 12. Pollan, 2018, p. 254. 13. James, 1882, pp. 206–207; emphasis added. 14. Griffiths et al., 2019.

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of becoming one with what one is sensing or doing.15 The dissolution of the boundary between subject and object amounts to the experienced vanishing of subject and object as distinct things. 2.1. The External Perspective Even if the person undergoing PDE experiences personally that they become one with the universe, from an external, neuroscientific perspective they are not dissolved with their environment. Instead, the PDE can be considered as a biochemical process, not radically different from waking consciousness. My focus in this chapter is on the epistemological differences between the internal and external perspective, but it is impossible to discuss this without taking a stand on how the two perspectives are metaphysically related. Following Strawson (2019), I distinguish between the ontological thesis that everything, including consciousness, is physical, and the epistemological thesis that science can exhaustively capture what the physical is, or what Strawson calls ‘physicSalism’. I accept physicalism, while rejecting physicSalism. I consider human consciousness as identical with a specific kind of physical process, which could be called ‘neural correlate of consciousness’ (NCC) or ‘constitutive mechanism of consciousness’ (CMC).16 These terms refer to that empirically observable process which correlates perfectly with consciousness and is isomorphic with it, such that every change in phenomenology corresponds to a change in the NCC or CMC.17 Instead of the term ‘consciousness’, which is not a count noun, I will mainly speak of experiences, which I take to mean individual moments or instances in a person’s consciousness. When I say that an experience E is identical with its constitutive mechanism CME (say, a neural process), I mean that the thing-in-itself that the term ‘CME’ refers to is the experience E. Our modelling it as ‘CME’ is merely the way the experience appears to external observers. That is, the concrete process ‘out there’ in the world that underlies our observations of, e.g., certain kinds of fMRI readings, is literally an experience in the subject who is being studied.18 A more detailed presentation of this approach can be found in Jylkkä and Railo (2019).

15. See also Sjöstedt-Hughes, in this volume. 16. Some theories argue that consciousness is not limited to the brain, but instead ‘embodied’ or ‘situated’ (Varela, Thompson and Rosch, 1991). Here I focus on the internal component of experiences, which I consider as necessary and sufficient for the occurrence of the experience (for a more extensive discussion on internalism and externalism, see Revonsuo, 2006). 17. Jylkkä and Railo, 2019. 18. I simplify greatly, because in real experiments several persons are tested, so that the fMRI image is a statistical average of several research participants. However, it is possible to observe an experience even in a single participant (see, e.g., Owen et al., 2006). In principle, you could personally go into the fMRI scanner and voluntarily produce different kinds of activity patterns by, say, imagining different things. What produces the images would be your experience.

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From the external perspective, a psychedelic experience where the subject– object distinction is experienced to dissolve is a neural process, which we may call CMP, constitutive mechanism of psychedelic experience. There are certain differences between normal, waking, CMCs and CMPs. For example, whereas a central component of normal waking consciousness is the so-called Default Mode Network (DMN), this network becomes less active during PDE, as well as in experienced meditators.19 The DMN is associated with mind-wandering and egocentric processes. The diminishing activity of the DMN corresponds to the subjectively felt loss of self, or the dissolution of the subject-object boundary that is associated with PDE. Another, related, neural signature of PDE is increased informational entropy, where processes are less pre-determined and less predictable.20 The neuroscientific details are not important here. What is important is that, from the external perspective, a subject undergoing PDE is not dissolved or unified with their environment. The experienced subject-object dissolution or experience of unity happens phenomenologically, within the internal perspective. It is the internal perspective that is central in understanding what Mary learns when she undergoes a psychedelic experience. By considering experiences of unity, we can see that the brute undergoing of an experience constitutes unitary knowledge that is not about anything. 2.2. The Internal Perspective What remains after the collapse of subject and object? At least we can say that experience or consciousness remains, although it becomes altered (from the external perspective we can say that waking CME transforms into psychedelic CMP). But saying that ‘experience’ or ‘consciousness’ remains is of little help, given the widely disparate definitions of these terms. There are two large questions at stake here: First, what is consciousness? Second, what is psychedelic consciousness and the experience of unity that remains after subject and object vanish? Depending on whom is asked, consciousness is defined in a wide range of ways, as ‘qualitative’, ‘phenomenal’, ‘non-structural’, ‘physical’, ‘functional’, etc. However, consciousness as a concrete process exists and has whatever nature it has irrespective of all these definitions.21 Any introspective or reflective characterization of an experience is separate from the experience itself and can be mistaken. For example, I may characterize my current mood as ‘frustrated’, but I might actually be tired. The challenge is how to refer to experience itself, beyond reflective judgments about it that are distinct from it. Following the Zen tradition, I will use the term ‘This’ (with capital ‘T’) to refer to experience or consciousness beyond any reflective descriptions I may have of it. Given that it is an indexical, I use the term ‘This’ to refer to my own consciousness, because anyone else’s consciousness

19. Brewer et al., 2011; Carhart-Harris et al., 2012. 20. Carhart-Harris et al., 2014. 21. Jylkkä and Railo, 2019.

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is already something beyond and distinct from This.22 Right now, This, my current experience, could be verbalized as ‘conceptual reflection’. However, it was not ‘conceptual reflection’ before I conceptualized it in that way. This is experience when it is not characterized in any way.23 PDE can be approached similarly, although characterizations about it are even more diverse than those about normal, waking consciousness. Although many would consider PDE simply as an ‘experience’, others conceptualize it as ‘meeting God’, or ‘knowing the nature of ultimate reality’,24 or becoming ‘Mind at Large’.25 All these are nothing but descriptions or words and what they refer to, the concrete thing itself, is distinct from them. When it happens, it can be referred to as ‘This’, although even this is too much, as it implies a reflective standpoint from which the utterance is made, distinct from the referent of ‘This’. Yet everything is This; we always know consciousness in itself through being it. All experience, be it meditative, psychedelic, reflective, conceptual, or whatever, is ‘This’ at the moment it happens. The process I undergo right now while writing these words is This. All experience is This, but PDE helps us realize what This is. In psychedelic experience, consciousness is manifest in itself as This. PDE brings forth the concreteness and absoluteness of experience beyond and independent of conceptualizations of or about it. In its ineffability, PDE forces us to acknowledge how experience in itself is always distinct from any characterization about it. Thus, PDE brings forth the gap or distinctness between scientific models of experience and the experience in itself. Scientific models are always about their objects and distinct from them, whereas unitary knowledge (This, consciousness) is a process that happens and is not about anything. The unitary character of experience can be noticed not only in PDE, but in any experience where one loses one’s self and is completely present without reflection; where there is only This. ‘This’ means consciousness when it is not considered as

22. Specifically, anyone else’s experience is of necessity token-distinct from mine, although they could, in principle, be type-identical. Token-identity of x and y means that x and y are numerically identical, or literally the same thing. Type-identity, in turn, means that x and y belong to the same kind or category. For example, two glasses of water are token-distinct but type-identical, whereas Venus and Morning Star are token-identical (and, trivially, type-identical). Different persons’ experiences can be, at least to some degree and in certain cases, type-identical, although they are always token-distinct. These notions could be used to elaborate on the feeling of unity or ego dissolution: On a certain level of composition, one is indeed type-identical with the rest of the universe, because everything, including consciousness, are forms of the same energy/matter that originated in the Singularity (‘Big Bang’). 23. To be precise, even conceptual reflection is This when it happens, that is, when there is no second-order reflective consciousness where it is defined as ‘conceptual reflection’. Any conscious process is always This, although even the word ‘This’ fails to capture what This is. 24. Griffiths et al., 2019. 25. Huxley, [1954] 2009.

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‘consciousness’, nor even as ‘This’. This is the way in which a bat knows what it is like to be a bat; This is the way I know what it is like to feel the summer breeze on my skin and see the swaying trees. A similar notion is ‘mindfulness’ or bringing attention to the present moment without judgment. However, ‘attending to the present’ implies a subject who attends to the object, which brings in duality. What I mean by ‘This’ is completely non-dual and beyond concepts, it is the brute happening of experience. The notion of ‘This’ is paradoxical, as nothing is ‘This’ although everything is. The word ‘This’ is like Schopenhauer’s or Wittgenstein’s ladder which is to be thrown away after one has climbed up. 2.3. This In Zen PDE is similar to a meditative state of unity that is described in Zen philosophy.26 Or, rather, because This is ineffable, Zen is not the process of describing anything, but rather the process of making one see beyond words. In Zen, there is no philosophy distinct from meditation, but instead, philosophy is subordinate to meditation – the philosophy is empty words without the concrete, meditative experience. Zen philosophy essentially tries to make itself redundant, because once This is noticed, the philosophical concepts can be thrown away. Here I rely on Zen to illustrate what This is. Zen also makes metaphysical implications, which I will not address here; rather, I focus on the type of experience that Zen speaks of – an experience similar to PDE. What is beyond subject and object, perceiver and perceived, and all other dualities? Zen scholar Seng-t’san from the sixth to the seventh century AD writes: The object is an object for the subject, The subject is a subject for the object: Know that the relativity of the two Rests ultimately on one Emptiness.27 The relativity or duality of subject and object rests on one Emptiness, also denoted by the terms ‘The Mind’, ‘The One’, or ‘The Way’. The term ‘This’ is also commonly used.28 All these terms mean the same thing, they refer to experience as brute happening, when it is not called or conceptualized as ‘experience’. The paradox of these notions, and of Zen philosophy generally, is that This is always present, yet it vanishes when one tries to actively reach for it. As Yoka Daishi from the eighth century writes: [This] is right here with us, ever retaining its serenity and fulness; it is only when you seek it that you lose it.

26. See Odin on the notion of satori, in this volume. 27. Qtd in Suzuki, 1935. 28. Watts, [1958] 1973.

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You cannot take hold of it, nor can you get rid of it; While you can do neither, it goes on its own way; You remain silent and it speaks, you speak and it is silent; The great gate of charity is wide open with no obstructions whatever before it.29 This is right here with us, beyond concepts, in brute existence. My writing this is This, although This is ineffable. This involves no ‘subject’ or ‘object’, no ‘experiencer’ and ‘experienced’; there is merely the brute happening of what could be conceptualized as ‘an experience’. 2.4. This is Not Knowledge by Acquaintance This resembles Russell’s knowledge-by-acquaintance (KBA), and This might very well be what Russell implicitly had in mind (maybe every thought has already been thought). However, Russell’s KBA is explicitly relational and not unitary in my sense: I say that I am acquainted with an object when I have a direct cognitive relation to that object, i.e., when I am directly aware of the object itself. . . . I think the relation of subject and object which I call acquaintance is simply the converse of the relation of object and subject which constitutes presentation.30,31

This relativity makes KBA problematic. As Letheby (2019) writes, ‘acquaintance is a relation, and anyone who thinks the self is illusory may wonder: who or what becomes acquainted with [the experience]?’ (p. 47) The notion of ‘subject’ that knows experiences easily leads to the homunculus problem and the threat of regression: If there is a subject that is acquainted with an experience, must not the subject already be conscious? These problems are avoided if we note the illusoriness of the ‘subject’. In This, unitary consciousness, there is no subject that becomes acquainted with an experience, there is simply the happening of an experience, the occurrence of a process, This. Through enabling ‘us’ to see the illusion of ‘subject’ who knows their experiences, PDE enables ‘us’ to see how consciousness is known simply through being it. It is this kind of unitary knowledge that William James might have thought of when he wrote as follows: A blind man may know all about the sky’s blueness, and I may know all about your toothache, conceptually . . . but so long as he has not felt the blueness, nor I the toothache, our knowledge, wide as it is, of these realities, will be hollow and

29. Qtd in Suzuki, 1935. 30. Russell, 1910/11, p. 108; emphasis added. 31. However, see Russell, 1917, on the unity in mystical experiences.

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inadequate. Somebody must feel blueness, somebody must have toothache, to make human knowledge of these matters real.32

To really know blueness, toothache, etc., requires ‘having’ them, or when the subject-object distinction is dropped, being them. Unitary knowledge is not about experiences, it is constituted by experiences. Science cannot afford this kind of knowledge because scientific observations and theories are always about something external and distinct. Neuroscientific knowledge is about an experience, but the experience itself is distinct from the scientific knowledge. The (unitary) knowledge constituted by the experience itself is outside the totality of (relational) knowledge that science can possibly give. As Russell writes: There will thus remain a certain sphere which will be outside physics. To take a simple instance: physics might, ideally, be able to predict that at such a time my eye would receive a stimulus of a certain sort; it might be able to trace the physical properties of the resulting events in the eye and the brain, one of which is, in fact, a visual percept; but it could not itself give us the knowledge that one of them is a visual percept. It is obvious that a man who can see knows things which a blind man cannot know; but a blind man can know the whole of physics. Thus the knowledge which other men have and he has not is not part of physics.33

It is noteworthy that Russell is making an epistemological point here, not ontological: the knowledge that the blind person lacks is not part of the knowledge that physics or other sciences can give. This is because science merely gives relative knowledge about what moves its pointer readings,34 whereas experience constitutes unitary knowledge that is non-intentional. It is an independent question whether we consider experiences as physical or not – that is, whether we decide to apply the term ‘physical’ to This.

3 Mary Now we are in a position to see what Mary learns. What Mary knew before her psychedelic experience was information that one can have about psychedelic experiences through empirical science. We may even allow that Mary knew subjective, phenomenological reports of PDEs, had seen psychedelic paintings and movies, and heard psychedelic music. However, ex hypothesi, she has not had a PDE herself. She has not had an experience of ego dissolution or a state of unitary

32. James, 1890, §2.7; emphasis original. 33. Russell, 1927, ch. XXXVII. 34. See Eddington, 1929, pp. 258–60.

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consciousness, where the distinction between the knower and the known, the subject and object vanishes. She may know everything about unitary experiences: How they are correlated with increased informational entropy and the diminishing of the activity of the DMN, as well as how people introspectively describe them. When she takes LSD, she personally undergoes the process about which she already knew all the possible descriptions. The happening of the LSD-experience constitutes non-intentional35 knowledge that is not about anything, unlike her previous knowledge about PDEs. What she gains is unitary knowledge that is identical with, not relational to, the PDE. She does not gain new knowledge about PDEs, but instead a PDE happens in her; for a moment she becomes a PDE (or whatever is denoted by the term ‘PDE’). She becomes the thing-in-itself that is the ‘hidden cause’36 of her previous observations of increased entropy in fMRI or decreased activity of the DMN. All these were merely representations about the very process that is now happening in her. When it is happening, the PDE is not represented, it is present. Or so I have argued. An eliminativist would deny that the brute happening of an experience constitutes knowledge. They hold that Mary does not learn anything new. But who decides if anything is learnt or not? If Mary undergoes a full-blown mystical experience during her PDE, the odds are that she herself considers the experience as strongly veridical, even life changing, and would consider it to constitute knowledge in the strongest possible sense.37 She has acquired a mystical experience that has, as James puts it, noetic character: Mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge. They are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after-time.38

In line with James, I have argued that PDE constitutes unitary knowledge or This. In fact, as Zen emphasizes, all experience is This. In everyday experience, This goes easily unnoticed because we are too accustomed to it, but PDE amplifies This so that it cannot go unnoticed. As Huxley would say, PDE bypasses the ‘reducing valve’ of one’s ego and brings about Mind at Large.39 Simply put, PDE enables one to see experience as it is in itself, not merely as it represents something else.

35. Sjöstedt-Hughes, in this volume. 36. This word is used in the predictive processing framework to refer to the external causes of observations (Hohwy, 2013). In this case, the observation is scientific (e.g., images on the screen of an fMRI device), and what produces them are the research participant’s (i.e., the one who is in the fMRI tube) mental processes. 37. Griffiths et al., 2019. 38. James, 1902, Lectures XVI and XVII, §2; emphasis added. 39. See Odin, in this volume.

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By showing how all experience constitutes This, unitary knowledge, PDE shows what Jackson’s original Mary in the black-and-white room lacked: it was unitary knowledge constituted by colour experiences. She knew everything about colour experiences, but when she experiences colours for the first time, she becomes the colours. She becomes that thing-in-itself which she previously knew merely through observations and theoretical models. She can then say ‘This is colour’, although she knows colours non-conceptually even without making this statement.40 In sum, through enabling a state of unitary consciousness where the subjectobject difference dissolves, PDE shows how all experience constitutes knowledge that is non-conceptual and non-intentional, not about anything. Thus, PDE aids us to see what it is that Mary learns when she sees colours for the first time: The knowledge she gains is the experience. PDE can show that all experience constitutes This, ineffable consciousness. As Huxley writes: What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescalin, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time. His perception is not limited to what is biologically or socially useful. A little of the knowledge belonging to Mind at Large oozes past the reducing valve of brain and ego, into his consciousness. It is a knowledge of the intrinsic significance of every existent. For the artist as for the mescalin taker draperies [or any mundane object] are living hieroglyphs that stand in some peculiarly expressive way for the unfathomable mystery of pure being.41

PDE enables us to see that consciousness is This, and that This is distinct from what science says about it.

4 Implications for Physicalism Jackson originally intended the Mary case to disprove physicalism, i.e. the ontological thesis that even experiences are physical. However, it is suspicious to draw metaphysical conclusions from epistemological premises. If we could explain what Mary learns without making metaphysical statements, we should do so already for parsimony’s sake. In this chapter, I have argued that the Mary case

40. By contrast, according to the so-called phenomenal concepts strategy (e.g., Stoljar, 2005), what Mary learns is constituted by phenomenal concepts, whose possession requires having the experience. In contrast, on my approach we know what our experiences feel like non-conceptually, through undergoing them. Thus, the bat knows what it is like to be a bat (Nagel, 1979), even though it lacks phenomenal concepts. The epistemic gap is not the difference between two kinds of concepts, like the phenomenal concepts strategy holds, but rather the difference between experiences themselves and any kinds of concepts. 41. Huxley, [1954] 2009, p. 33.

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demonstrates the existence of two kinds of knowledge: unitary knowledge that is constituted by experience, and relational knowledge which science gives.42 The scenario demonstrates how science is limited to modelling entities in the world based on observations but cannot say anything of their nature beyond the models. Following the nineteenth-century physicist Arthur S. Eddington (1929), we may ask what ‘moves the pointer readings’ of physics, and we can join the cosmologist Stephen Hawking (1988) in wondering what ‘breathes fire’ into the equations of physics.43 However, in our own case, we know that the physical is This; This is what moves the pointers of fMRI-devices, This is what breathes the fire into the neuroscientific models of consciousness. Given that science cannot capture This, we must reject the thesis that science can fully reveal the nature of reality. Is this not an ontological conclusion? Does this not disprove physicalism? Not necessarily. No reasonable physicalist would deny that the job of science is limited to modelling entities. It can even be argued that physicalism is compatible with the neo-Kantian thesis that science cannot tell anything of what the entities it models are in themselves, beyond the scientific models – as Hawking and Mlodinow (2010) note, science is ‘shaped by a kind of lens, the interpretative structure of human brains’ (p. 46). But can we say something positive about the intrinsic nature of any other entities besides specific kinds of brain processes?44 Can we infer from our own case to what other entities are in themselves, as Schopenhauer suggested?45 This question is beyond the scope of this article, but an answer could be sketched along the following Strawsonian lines. We may assume a parallelism between scientific models of reality and reality in itself: the models somehow correspond to reality. If this were not the case, it would be literally a miracle that scientific models are so successful in predicting phenomena.46 Now suppose that consciousness can be modelled as ‘neural process X’. Based on the models of science, we know that there is a smooth continuum from neural processes to neurons, molecules, atoms, and quarks. Neural processes are made of the same matter as everything else in the universe; consciousness is a form of the same energy that originated in the purported Singularity (‘Big Bang’). At no single point from quarks to consciousness is there a categorical leap or gap.

42. It is important to note, however, that reading scientific literature, making scientific observations, etc., are also This when they happen. For example, my thinking of how hydrogen and oxygen form water is a conscious-cognitive process in my mind. In this sense, even science can constitute unitary knowledge. However, that knowledge is not about the objects that science describes, but instead constituted by science as a conscious process. 43. See also Hawking and Mlodinow, 2010, p. 46. 44. Note a caveat: How could we say something about the intrinsic nature of anything, given that words are already distinct from what they refer to? Strictly speaking, this is impossible, and we should be silent. 45. ‘We must learn to understand nature from ourselves, not ourselves from nature’ (Schopenhauer, [1844] 1958, p. 196). 46. Putnam, 1975.

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Consciousness is literally made of atoms, just like everything else in the universe. Thus, everything belongs to the same continuum as consciousness; everything belongs to the same ontological category as consciousness. The above reasoning could be objected because it applies to any physical process, such as wetness: everything is continuous with wetness, or belongs to the same ontological category as wetness, leading to ‘panwetnessism’. This is true. However, to say that everything is continuous with wetness does not reveal anything new about the physical, given that we do not have knowledge of wetness that transcends the scientific descriptions. However, we do have such knowledge (i.e., unitary knowledge) in the case of consciousness, which makes it exceptional. Everything is continuous with This, which I know from my own case, and which is an instance of that single substance that constitutes the whole of reality. If we consider this as panpsychism, then we must agree with Strawson (2006) that physicalism entails panpsychism.47

5 Conclusion In this chapter, I have shown how psychedelic experience can demonstrate the difference between scientific knowledge and experiental knowledge. I have argued that psychedelic experience can show how consciousness always constitutes unitary knowledge that is non-conceptual and non-intentional. In particular, it is not knowledge that a ‘subject’ has about their ‘experiences’, but rather knowledge that is constituted by the brute happening of the experience itself. Science, in turn, merely gives relational knowledge that is distinct from what it is about. Psychedelic experiences of unity, where the distinction between subject and object dissolves, enable us to see what consciousness is in itself, beyond our models of it or concepts that refer to it. It is not ‘consciousness’ or ‘neural activation’, it is merely This (although

47. ‘But wait, clearly physicalism is the opposite of panpsychism! No scientist in their right mind would believe that consciousness in any form is fundamental. It is completely ridiculous to consider stones and atoms as somehow conscious – there is no scientific evidence for that!’ It is correct that there is no scientific evidence that atoms would be conscious. However, there is no scientific evidence that anything is conscious, including living human brains. From purely empirical premises it cannot be inferred with logical certainty that even living human brains are conscious (as it can be inferred that hydrogen and oxygen are liquid when they are suitably combined) (Chalmers, 1996). Matter in itself is a mystery, but assuming monism, whatever it is, it must be continuous with This. Again, to say that everything is continuous with This is to say very little about the nature of fundamental reality. The paradox is that the intrinsic essence of the world cannot be captured in concepts, which only give relational knowledge about their objects. Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes discusses in this volume how a specific kind of psychedelic experience can afford non-conceptual and non-intentional knowledge that reveals the essence of reality (which could be conceptualized as ‘Glory’, or ‘white light’, or ‘illumination’).

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saying this is already too much). To undergo an experience is already to know what it is and ‘what it feels like’. Crucially, this kind of unitary knowledge is in contrast to scientific knowledge, which is always relational and distinct from what it is about. Through bringing forth this difference between consciousness in itself and models about it, psychedelic experience can show what is the relationship between the physical and consciousness: Consciousness is part of the concrete reality-in-itself which science models as ‘physical’. Thus, the Mary case does not imply that physicalism is false, it merely shows that we do not know through science alone the full truth about the physical, a limitation that psychedelic experience brings to light.

References Brewer, J. A., Worhunsky, P. D., Gray, J. R., Tang, Y. Y., Weber, J. and Kober, H. (2011) Meditation Experience is Associated with Differences in Default Mode Network Activity and Connectivity, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108:50, pp. 20254–20259. https://doi.org/10.1073/ pnas.1112029108 Carhart-Harris, R. L., Erritzoe, D., Williams, T., Stone, J. M., Reed, L. J., Colasanti, A. et al. (2012) Neural Correlates of the Psychedelic State as Determined by fMRI Studies with Psilocybin, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 109:6: pp. 2138–2143. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1119598109 Carhart-Harris, R. L., Leech, R., Hellyer, P. J., Shanahan, M., Feilding, A., Tagliazucchi, E. et al. (2014) The Entropic Brain: A Theory of Conscious States Informed by Neuroimaging Research with Psychedelic Drugs, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8:20. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00020 Chalmers, D. (1996) The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press) Dennett, D. (1991) Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown and Co) Eddington, A. (1929) The Nature of the Physical World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Frankish, K. (2017) Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness (Exeter: Imprint Academic) Griffiths, R. R., Hurwitz, E. S., Davis, A. K., Johnson, M. W. and Jesse, R. (2019) Survey of Subjective ‘God Encounter Experiences’: Comparisons among Naturally Occurring Experiences and those Occasioned by the Classic Psychedelics Psilocybin, LSD, ayahuasca, or DMT, PLoS ONE. Public Library of Science. https://doi.org/10.1371/ journal.pone.0214377 Hawking, S. (1988) A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam Books) Hawking, S. and Mlodinow, L. (2010) The Grand Design (New York: Bantam Books) Huxley, A. ([1954] 2009) Doors of Perception (New York: Harper Perennial) Hohwy, J. (2013) The Predictive Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press) Jackson, F. (1982) Epiphenomenal Qualia, The Philosophical Quarterly, 32:127, pp. 127–136 Jackson, F. (1986) What Mary Didn’t Know, The Journal of Philosophy, 83:5, pp. 291–295. https://doi.org/10.2307/2026143 James, W. (1882) On Some Hegelisms, Mind, 7, pp. 186–208 James, W. (1890) The Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt and Company) James, W. (1902) The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (London: Longman, Green and Co)

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Jylkkä, J. and Railo, H. (2019) Consciousness as a Concrete Physical Phenomenon, Consciousness and Cognition, 74:102779. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2019.102779 Letheby, C. (2019) The Varieties of Psychedelic Epistemology, in: Psychedelicacies: More Food for Thought from Breaking Convention (London: Strange Attractor Press) Levine, J. (1983) Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 64, pp. 354–361. Available at: www.newdualism.org/papers/J.Levine/ Levine-PPQ1983.pdf Nagel, T. (1979) What it is Like to be a Bat?, in: Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) pp. 165–180 Nida-Rümelin, M. and O Conaill, D. (2019) Qualia: The Knowledge Argument, in:The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ qualia-knowledge/ Odin, S. (2022) The Unconscious in Zen and Psychedelic Experience: A Response to D. T. Suzuki’s Zen Critique of Drug-Induced Satori, in this volume Owen, A. M., Coleman, M. R., Boly, M., Davis, M. H., Laureys, S. and Pickard, J. D. (2006) Detecting Awareness in the Vegetative State, Science, 313:5792, p. 1402. https://doi. org/10.1126/science.1130197 Pollan, M. (2018) How to Change Your Mind (New York: Penguin Books) Putnam, H. (1975) What is Mathematical Truth?, in: ed. H. Putnam, Mathematics, Matter and Method. Collected Papers Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) pp. 60–78 Revonsuo, A. (2006) Inner Presence: Consciousness as a Biological Phenomenon (Massachusetts: MIT Press) Russell, B. (1910/1911) Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 11, 108–128 Russell, B. (1917) Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd) Russell, B. (1927) The Analysis of Matter (London: Kegan Paul) Schopenhauer. ([1844] 1958) The World as Will and Representation (Volume II) (New York: Dover Publications Inc.) Sjöstedt-Hughes, P. (2022) The White Sun of Substance: Spinozism and the Psychedelic Amor Dei intellectualis, in this volume Stoljar, D. (2005) Physicalism and Phenomenal Concepts, Mind and Language, 20:5, pp. 469–494. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0268-1064.2005.00296.x Strawson, G. (2006) Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 13:10–11, pp. 53–74 Suzuki, D. T. (1935) Manual of Zen Buddhism (Boston: Marshall Jones Company) Varela, F. J., Thompson, E. and Rosch, E. (1991) The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (New York: MIT Press) Ward, R. H. (1957) A Drug-Taker’s Notes (London: Victor Gollancz) Watts, A. (1973) This Is It and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience (New York: Vintage Books)

Chapter 10 A R E P SYC H E D E L IC D RU G S D I ST O RT I N G ? Ole Martin Moen

1 Introduction What, exactly, is supposed to be wrong with the use of psychedelic drugs? One possible explanation is that the use of psychedelic drugs is wrong because doing so is illegal. Presumably, however, that is not the whole reason, since if it were, the problem would end if we ended prohibition – and it seems that most of those who oppose the use of psychedelics, whether they view it merely as a private vice or think that it should (continue to) be a punishable offence. For this view to be justified, there would have to be something about what these drugs do that gives rise to reasons for worry. An explanation that appeals to something more substantive is the view that is wrong to use psychedelic drugs because of the medical risks that it involves. Psychedelic drugs, however, have a low toxicity and addiction potential.1 In a ranking of the harm potential, per user dose, of various drugs published in The Lancet, psychedelics were ranked as much safer than alcohol.2 Moreover, we do not regard activities that involve much higher risks of harm (think, for example, of parashooting, mountaineering, and combat sports) as wrongful in any way close to the way in which the use of psychedelics is regarded as wrongful. Someone who advocated the criminalization of such activities for adults would be regarded by most as excessively paternalistic. So where, exactly, is the problem supposed to lie in the case of psychedelic drugs? The worry that I will discuss in this chapter is the worry that psychedelic drugs are distorting – that they work by cutting users off from reality, by making them see things that are not real and by believing things that are wrong. While this objection has, to my knowledge, never been considered explicitly and in detail, variants of are prevalent in writings about psychedelics. For examine,

1. For a useful overview, see Elsey, 2017, pp. 1–11. 2. Nutt, King and Phillips, 2010, pp. 1558–1565.

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Michael Pollan, in considering the anxiety-relieving effects on LSD in terminally ill patients writes the following: It’s one thing to conclude [from having taken LSD] that love is all that matters, but quite another to come away from a therapy convinced that ‘there is another reality’ awaiting us after death . . . or that there is more to the universe—and to consciousness—than a purely materialist world view would have us believe. Is psychedelic therapy simply foisting a comforting delusion on the sick and dying?3

Similarly, Owen Flanagan and George Graham have argued that the cognitive effects produced by psychedelics are ‘metaphysical hallucinations’.4 In one of the harshest recent criticisms, Timothy Hsiao suggests that psychedelic drugs (alongside other drugs) ‘impair, destroy, or otherwise frustrate the functioning of [one’s] cognitive faculties’.5 On such a view, the mind-altering effects produced by psychedelics are like the effects produced on a TV screen by shaking the TV antenna. Although shaking the antenna might produce amusing lines and colours on the screen, and although some people would rather be amused by those lines and colours than to be confronted with the content of the programme, the result is nevertheless a distorted signal. Do psychedelics work by distorting users? In order to answer that question, I will start by briefly looking at some accounts of what psychedelic mind alterations might be like. Then I examine, in more detail, four different types of mindalteration that are produced by psychedelics, and consider, for each, whether this type of alteration amounts to a distortion.

2 What Psychedelic States Can Be Like The altered mental states produced by psychedelic drugs can vary significantly from one person to another and, depending on ‘set and setting’, can also vary significantly for a single person from one session to another. Nevertheless, certain alterations are very prevalent in the literature. Albert Hofmann, the chemist who first synthesized LSD, described the visual and auditory alterations he experienced during his first intentionally induced LSD trip: Little by little I could begin to enjoy the unprecedented colours and plays of shapes that persisted behind my closed eyes. Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me, alternating, variegated, opening and then closing themselves in

3. Pollan, 2015. 4. Flanagan and Graham, 2017,. pp. 293–313. 5. Hsiao, 2017, pp. 605–614.

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circles and spirals, exploding in coloured fountains, rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant flux. It was particularly remarkable how every acoustic perception, such as the sound of a door handle or a passing automobile, became transformed into optical perceptions. Every sound generated a vividly changing image, with its own consistent form and colour.6

The writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley reported on his experiences with the psychedelic drug mescaline. Huxley wrote that, contrary to what he had expected, he ‘saw no landscapes, no enormous spaces, no magical growth and metamorphosis of buildings, nothing remotely like a drama or a parable’. Rather, he had a very simple experience: Looking at a small glass vase with three flowers, he wrote that he felt as if he were ‘seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation – the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence’ and that he took an experience of this kind to be ‘what Catholic theologians call “a gratuitous grace”.’7 In the case of emotional alterations, psychedelic experiences can be neutral, but they can also be on the extreme sides of the affective spectrum. Simone de Beauvoir reports that Jean-Paul Sartre (her husband) formed his influential concept of ‘existential nausea’ under a horrific mescaline trip.8 Others report very positive experiences. Psychiatrist Sidney Cohen, a pioneering researcher of psychedelic substances, wrote about an experience with LSD: ‘The entire experience seemed to charge with value and significance; the world and its occupants seemed enormously beautiful, delightful and harmonious and I was included within that general harmony.’9 In the same direction, a cancer patient who received psilocybin in a recent trail at Johns Hopkins reported that she was: overcome with love and all the love that I have for my family and my friends. I felt that it was coming from them; also I felt that I was bathed in it. And if I were religious it definitely would have been a religious experience, I would have said bathed in God’s love. And I don’t think English really has a way to say this without using that word ‘God’, maybe bathed in transcendent love. Bathed in universal love. It was such a strong feeling.10

6. Hofmann, 1980, Chap 1. 7. Huxley, 1954, p. 73. For those interested in reading more firsthand reports of psychedelic experiences, I recommend Erowid, an online repository which includes thousands of trip reports. See https://erowid.org/experiences/ 8. de Beauvoir, 1965, pp. 209–10. 9. Cohen, 1970, pp. 102–3. Thanks to Chris Letheby for bringing this work to my attention. 10. Swift, Belser, Agin-Liebes, Devenot, Terrana, Friedman, Guss, Bossis and Ross, 2017, pp. 488–519.

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3 Assessing Four Types of Psychedelic Mind-Alteration Some of the common attributes of psychedelic experiences mentioned in the quotations above include: (1) alterations in colour phenomenology, (2) the mixing of different sensory modalities, (3) a heightened sense of beauty, and (4) increased feelings of love and trust. Are such alterations distortions? 3.1 Alterations in Colour Phenomenology Imagine that you are looking at a leaf. It looks green, the way leaves usually do. Then you ingest a psychedelic drug, close your eyes, and wait an hour. When you open your eyes again, the leaf looks different. While it might still be recognizably green, it is now more intense, glowing, rich, and saturated. Would this be a distortion? Admittedly, it could lead to a distortion. If, as a result of taking the drug, you came to believe that the surface of the leaf had changed – that it now reflected light at a different wavelength – you would be mistaken. Let us say, however, that you formed no such belief. Would your experience of the colour of the leaf nevertheless be distorted? It seems that it would be a distortion given the premise that the colour of the leaf is intrinsic to the leaf, and that the way it looks to us humans under normal conditions is the one right way to see it. It is doubtful, however, that this is how colour perception works. Although our minds evolved to present light waves in the range of 495–570 nm as what we, phenomenally speaking, call green, it is not clear that phenomenal green is the only way this kind of light can be represented. It seems possible that a cat, an elephant, or a bat (or for that matter, another human) can have a different phenomenology of light waves in this part of the spectrum and, if they do, it does not follow that they are mistaken. They would merely, due to the nature and condition of their visual system, be representing light in this range differently, and there is presumably a range of phenomenologies of light in this spectrum that are all equally truthful. Notice that if we accept this, we must accept that, at least in the case of colour phenomenology, there is some room for alteration without distortion. Although there is, presumably, a statistically normal way for humans to experience light in the 495–570 nm range, and it is true that a deviation from this could result in practical problems (think of reading traffic lights), it seems that we are not justified in holding that the way light reflected from the leaf looks to a human being under the influence of a psychedelic is less faithful to the real colour of the leaf than the way it looks to the average human being. If we humans had faced different reproductive pressures in our ancestral environments, what is now the phenomenology of light in the 495–570 nm range under the influence of a psychedelic drug could have been the norm. That would, presumably, not have been a distorted form of consciousness. (If one thinks it would be distorted, imagine that in that alternatively evolved world, someone discovered a drug that, when ingested, made colours look the way they do to us today. If one believes that colour is intrinsic, and that we are now uniquely right, it

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seems that one would be committed to believing that, in such a world, the use of drugs could give people privileged access to the true nature of things.) 3.2 The Mixing of Different Sensory Modalities Imagine, next, that you are listening to a recording of one of Bach’s organ concertos. It sounds nice, as it usually does. Then you ingest a psychedelic drug, stop the recording, and wait for an hour. When you restart the recording, the experience is different. While it is still recognizably Bach’s concerto, the sound is now accompanied by cascading colours dancing around in the space around you (imagine something like an old screen saver on a computer). Would this be a distortion? Admittedly, this could also lead to a distortion. If you came to believe that colourful objects had entered the room, you would be distorted. But let us say that you formed no such belief. Would your experience of the music nevertheless be distorted? It seems that it would be a distortion only on the premise that the air vibrations that we call sounds are intrinsically auditory, and just auditory, so that to get visual impressions from them is to experience the vibrations differently from how they really are. Here again, however, it seems that other animals could experience the vibrations differently and, that if they did, it would not follow that they were mistaken. If we concede that, it seems we must concede, in the case of synesthesia as well as in the case of altered colour phenomenology, that there can be alteration without distortion. 3.3 Enhanced Beauty Imagine that you are looking at three flowers on a table, as Aldous Huxley did. They look nice, as flowers usually do. Then, like Huxley, you ingest a psychedelic, close your eyes, and wait for an hour. When you open your eyes again, the flowers are stunningly beautiful. Would this be a distorted representation of the flowers? It would be distorted if we take beauty to be an intrinsic property of the flowers. Perhaps the flowers are just four out of ten on the beauty scale and, under our normal mode of functioning, we are given truthful information about their beauty. When, under the influence of a psychedelic, we think they score nine out of ten for beauty, we are mistaken. But this, presumably, is not how beauty works. Although there might be an objective fact about how beautiful a particular flower looks to a particular subject under particular conditions, there is presumably no objective fact about how beautiful a flower should look to any subject in any condition. So here again it seems that we can have alteration without distortion. 3.4 Enhanced Love and Trust Finally, imagine that, as a result of ingesting a psychedelic drug, you felt significantly elevated levels of love and trust. Would your feelings then be distorted? Admittedly, these feelings might be distorted if, due to the influence of the drug, you believed that those around you had stronger feelings towards you than they really had, or

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perhaps that they felt exactly what you were feeling. That, however, would be a conclusion that you might, or might not, draw, depending on how the drug affected your power of judgment more generally. Would, however, the significant elevation of feeling love and trust be a distortion? While such a level of love and trust could bring one out of tune with customary ways of interacting, insofar as these have developed to organize the interaction of individuals with lower levels of love and trust, it seems that the normal human level (or range) of love and trust is contingent. It is shaped, by the levels of love and trust that were most adaptive in the lives of one’s ancestors. Had factors in ancestral environments been different in relevant ways, the evolved levels of love and trust in today’s humans might have been different than they are today. Presumably, however, humans in that possible world would not have been systematically distorted.

4 A Thick and Curved Lens My aim in considering the above examples is to illustrate that, at least in the case of some mental states, there can be alteration without distortion. In order to be justified in holding that alteration is sufficient for distortion, one must hold a naïve realist view of human cognition, according to which we perceive the objects around us just the way it is, in itself, and that any divergence from our perception is thereby a distorted perception of reality.11 A useful illustration might be to say that, on the naïve realist view, we see the world, under normal conditions, as if through a thin, straight glass. This glass, we can imagine, adds nothing, subtracts nothing, skews nothing; it shows us the world just as it is on the outside. In this picture, if we start doing things with the glass – stretch it, push it, twist it – the result will always be that we are placing ourselves in an inferior epistemic situation: To alter is then to distort. Consequently, if this is how one views the human mind, it should be expected that one takes any alteration to the mind to imply distortion. Given what the last century of psychological research has taught us about the human mind and its many biases, however, it is evident that the human mind is not at all like a thin and straight glass; rather, it is like a thick and curved glass (think of a fun-house mirror). If we concede this, however, we cannot be justified in holding that alteration implies distortion.

11. For more on naïve realism, see McDowell, 1994; see Brewer, 2011, on perception and its objects.

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5 Psychedelic Knowledge If we accept the conclusion of the previous section, a further question might be asked: Could alterations to the lens also be cognitively beneficial? This seems, at least, to be a possibility. Sticking to the metaphor, if you looked at a landscape through a thick, curved glass, it seems that you would be able to learn more about that landscape if you could make alterations to the glass. While making alterations to the glass could lead to more distortion, it could also help you see, for example, that two things that you thought were wide apart are, in fact, close to each other, or to discover something that you had previously overlooked. This, moreover, is not something that just works in the metaphor; it is uncontroversial that much of what we have learned from science has been learned by manipulating the lenses of microscopes and telescopes. So, can users also gain new knowledge from the use of psychedelics? To provide a comprehensive answer to this question would require an in-depth discussion beyond what I can do in this chapter. I would like to point out, however, that this suggestion could help explain an otherwise puzzling finding in research into psychedelic therapy. Over the last decade, psychedelic drugs have shown promising results as an aid in, for example, the treatment of addiction and obsessive-compulsive disorder, as well as in relieving anxiety and depression in terminally ill patients.12 A noteworthy finding is that, in contrast to other psychopharmacological interventions, onetime exposure can occasion change that lasts for months or even years. What could explain this? In light of the discussion in this chapter, it seems that one explanation is that, by being exposed to a psychedelic drug, the patients come to gain new knowledge –about themselves, about the world around them, and/or about the valuesignificance of their actions and priorities. If a significant part of the benefit of the therapy comes from the gaining of new knowledge, this could explain why one-time exposure seemingly is enough to have a lasting effect. In the case of knowledge gains, it is very common for one-time exposure to have a lasting effect. If you learn something new, especially something that you take to be highly important, a one-time exposure will often be enough for that item of knowledge to be with you for the rest of your life. The view that there are cognitive benefits to the use of psychedelics seem like a radical proposal. It is important to keep in mind that the view that there are cognitive benefits to using psychedelics is not the view that psychedelic states are overall cognitively superior to non-psychedelic states. Most likely, we would be cognitively much worse off if we were continually in psychedelic states. The claim, however, is not that psychedelic states are cognitively superior. The claim is rather that, in many cases, the experience of psychedelic mental states in addition to normal mental states is cognitively superior to having always only normal mental states. This is a moderate claim, not a radical one.

12. Scott and Carhart-Harris, 2019, pp. 1–8.

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6 Conclusion In this chapter I have considered the objection that psychedelic drugs are distorting, that they work by cutting users off from reality, by making them see things that are not real, and by believing things that are wrong. Although it is difficult to estimate the extent to which this is a prevalent and influential objection (that is a sociological question that lies beyond the scope of this chapter), I suspect that it accounts for more of the opposition to psychedelics than has hitherto been acknowledged in the literature. Irrespective of how influential or common it is, it is an important and interesting objection that is worth considering in the philosophy of psychedelics. I have argued that the distortion objection is forceful only if one adopts an overly simplistic view of the human mind: The naïve realist view according to which we perceive the world around us just the way it is, objectively, and that any divergence from how our perception is, is hence distorted. Once this presumption is rejected, one must acknowledge that there can be alteration without distortion. Building on this, I further argued that there are reasons to believe that there are cognitive benefits associated with the use of psychedelics and that this, in turn, has the power to explain how, in psychedelic theory, one-time exposure seems to be able to cause long-lasting effects. Let me end by pointing briefly to two practical implications of what I have argued – one for research and one for broader societal discussions about psychedelics. On the research side, the view that I have defended gives rise to an empirically testable hypothesis, namely that holding a naïve realist view of the human mind is predictive of being dismissive of psychedelics. It would be interesting to explore whether researchers who work empirically on attitudes towards psychedelics would test this prediction. On the societal side, one implication of what I have argued is that, in discussions about psychedelics, we might be well advised to pay more attention to the oftenimplicit assumptions about the human mind that are brought into the discussion. If these are at the root of many disagreements, addressing assumptions about the human mind head on might be what is needed in order to move the discussion about psychedelics forward.

References Brewer, B. (2011) Perception and Its Objects (Oxford: Oxford University Press) Cohen, S. (1970) Drugs of Hallucination (London: Paladin Books) De Beauvoir, S. (1965) The Prime Life, trans P. Green (Harmondsworth: Penguin) Elsey, J. W. B. (2017) Psychedelic Drug Use in Healthy Individuals: A Review of Benefits, Costs and Implications for Drug Policy, Drug Science, Policy and Law, 3, pp. 1–11 Erowid Experiences Vault (1995) Available at: https://erowid.org/experiences Flanagan, O. and Graham, G. (2017) Truth and Sanity: Positive Illusions, Spiritual Delusions and Metaphysical Hallucinations, in: eds. J. Poland and S. Tekin,

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Extraordinary Science and Psychiatry: Responses to the Crisis in Mental Health Research (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) Hofmann, A. (1980) LSD – My Problem Child (New York: McGraw-Hill) Hsiao, T. (2017) Why Recreational Drug Use Is Immoral, The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, 17:4, pp. 605–614 Huxley, A. (1954) The Doors of Perception (New York: Harper & Row) McDowell, J. (1994) Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) Nutt, D. J., King L. A. and Philips L. D. (2010) Drug Harms in the UK: A Multicriteria Decision Analysis, The Lancet, 376:9752, pp. 1558–1565 Pollan, M. (2015) The Trip Treatment, The New Yorker [online] 2 February. Available at: www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/09/trip-treatment Scott, G. and Carhart-Harris, R. L. (2019) Psychedelics as a Treatment for Disorders of Consciousness, Neuroscience of Consciousness, 5:1, pp. 1–8 Swift, T. C., Belser, A. B., Agin-Liebes, G., Devenot, N., Terrana, S., Friedman, H. L., Guss, J., Bossis, A. P. and Ross, S. (2017) Cancer at the Dinner Table: Experiences of Psilocybin-assisted Psychotherapy for the Treatment of Cancer-Related Distress, Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 57:5, pp. 488–519

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Chapter 11 T H E U N C O N S C IOU S I N Z E N A N D P SYC H E D E L IC E X P E R I E N C E : A R E SP O N SE T O D. T. S U Z U K I’ S Z E N C R I T IQ U E O F D RU G  I N DU C E D S AT O R I Steve Odin

1 Introduction In this chapter I analyse the function of ‘the unconscious’ in both Zen enlightenment and psychedelic experience. Zen was introduced to the West by the lectures and books of Suzuki Daisetsu Teitarō (1870–1966), better known as D. T. Suzuki. In order to adapt Zen Buddhism to his western audience, Suzuki gave Zen a modern psychological interpretation based on his Zen doctrine of the Unconscious. First the chapter examines D. T. Suzuki’s psychological interpretation of Zen enlightenment as awakening to the cosmic Unconscious. This is followed by Suzuki’s Zen critique of drug-induced satori in Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception. The chapter concludes with the view of psychiatrist and transpersonal psychologist Stanislav Grof MD, who argues that psychedelics open a gateway into the depths of our unconscious mind.1

2 Suzuki on Zen Satori as Awakening to the Cosmic Unconscious D. T. Suzuki argues that Zen meditation and enlightenment can be understood as an event whereby one becomes conscious of no-mind or the Unconscious. The key Zen Buddhist term mushin (Chinese wuxin, 無心) is commonly translated as ‘nomind,’ or ‘empty-mind’. However, Suzuki argues that, psychologically speaking, mushin is best rendered as ‘the Unconscious’. Just as Suzuki psychologically interprets Zen no-mind as the Unconscious, he describes the Zen experience of satori (悟り) or ‘enlightenment’ as awakening to the Unconscious. Suzuki proclaims:

1. This chapter is an abbreviated and revised version from a chapter in my forthcoming book, D. T. Suzuki on the Unconscious in Zen, Zen Art & Zen Aesthetics.

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‘Satori is the raison d’être of Zen without which Zen is not Zen’.2 Moreover, he describes satori in psychological terms: ‘satori is to realize the Unconscious’.3 He adds: ‘As far as the psychology of satori is considered, a sense of the Beyond is all we can say about it. . . . I have called it elsewhere the Unconscious, though this has a psychological taint’.4 Suzuki develops a Zen map of the human psyche as a multi-leveled spectrum including: (I) consciousness; (II) semi-consciousness; (III) the unconscious; (IV) the collective unconscious; and (V) the cosmic Unconscious.5 Moreover, Suzuki interprets Zen satori as awakening to the cosmic Unconscious: Psychologically speaking, satori is super-consciousness, or consciousness of the Unconscious. The Unconscious is, however, not to be identified with the one psychologically postulated. . . . it is the cosmic Unconscious.6

As indicated here, Suzuki’s Zen concept of the Unconscious is not to be equated with notions of the unconscious postulated by western psychology, including the individual unconscious of Freudian psychoanalysis, or the collective unconscious of Jungian analytical psychology, but instead signifies a deeper transpersonal level of mind that he terms the ‘cosmic Unconscious.’ Moreover, for Suzuki Zen, satori is that of becoming fully conscious of the cosmic Unconscious in ‘superconsciousness’. Suzuki defines his Zen concept of the cosmic Unconscious in such terms as the Void, the abyss of absolute nothingness, and emptiness: ‘This Unconscious is a metaphysical concept, and it is through satori that we become conscious of the Unconscious. . . . The cosmic Unconscious in terms of space is “Emptiness” (´sūnyatā)’.7 He traces back this Zen concept of no-mind (Chinese: wuxin) or nothought (wu-nien) as the Unconscious to Huineng (638–713), known as the Sixth Patriarch of Chinese Chan/Zen Buddhism: ‘The doctrine of the Unconscious (wunien) . . . was the chief topic of interest in the days of Hui-nêng and his followers. . . “the Unconscious” is the Chinese way of describing the realisation of Emptiness (´sūnyatā)’.8 Suzuki’s interpretation of the cosmic Unconscious as emptiness can further be analyzed in terms of the ‘three bodies’ (tri-kāya) of Buddha doctrine central to Mahayana and Tantrayana Buddhism. This doctrine asserts that the Buddha has three bodies: (1) the physical and historical body, called nirmanakaya; (2) the subtle dreamlike energy body of a god or goddess, called sambhogakaya, and (3) the very subtle wisdom body of emptiness or nothingness, called

2. AIZB 95. 3. EZB II, 21. 4. EZB II, 19. 5. ZJC 242–243. 6. AZL 62; LZ 88. 7. AZL 62; LZ 88. 8. EZB III, 18.

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dharmakaya. The depth psychology of C. G. Jung uses this ‘three bodies’ theory as a framework to classify different levels of the unconscious psyche.9 According to Jung, Freud’s personal unconscious of repressed instincts designates the physical level of nirmanakaya, whereas his own notion of the collective unconscious as the repository of archetype images that organize human experience represents the dreamlike imaginal realm of sambhogakaya. However, Suzuki identifies his own Zen concept of the cosmic Unconscious with the dharmakaya or wisdom body, signifying the Void of emptiness or absolute nothingness. Suzuki further explains his Zen concept of the cosmic Unconscious in terms of Yogacara Buddhist depth psychology, where the human mind is divided into eight levels of consciousness, the deepest level of which is the ‘storehouse consciousness’ (alaya-vijñāna), which is the Buddhist equivalent to the unconscious mind. For transpersonal psychologist Ken Wilber, the eight levels of consciousness in Yogacara Buddhism as presented by D. T. Suzuki represents the full ‘spectrum of consciousness’.10 In Zen and Japanese Culture, D. T. Suzuki maintains that Zen Buddhism in Japan culminated in a ‘Zen aestheticism’,11 which historically developed out of ‘Japanese art culture’.12 According to Suzuki’s philosophical psychology, Zen aestheticism is itself rooted in no-mind (mushin) as the cosmic Unconscious, which functions as the principle of creativity and the source of all Zen-inspired arts. In Suzuki’s words: The Cosmic Unconscious is the principle of creativity. . . . All creative works of art. . . come from the fountainhead of the Cosmic Unconscious.13

Moreover, he asserts that no-mind as the cosmic Unconscious ‘is where all arts merge into Zen’.14 Suzuki further argues that the Zen-inspired arts, including swordsmanship, ink painting, noh drama, haiku poetry, and the tea ceremony, all spring from their source in the cosmic Unconscious which, as the abyss of absolute nothingness, is the inexhaustible fountain of unlimited creative possibilities.

3 Suzuki’s Critique of Drug-Induced Satori In Hallucinating the End of History: Zen, Nishida and the Psychedelic Eschaton, Eric Cunningham explains ‘the term “psychedelic” as originally coined by Dr. Humphry Osmond in 1957 . . . was intended to refer to a quality that “could bring to the fore

9. Jung, 1978, p. 123. 10. Wilber, 1993, p. 157. 11. ZJC 27. 12. ZJC 19–37. 13. ZJC 242–243. 14. ZJC 94.

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whatever was latent in the subconscious” ’.15,16 Moreover, Cunningham argues that D. T. Suzuki provided a new Zen terminology capable of describing psychedelic experience, leading to a ‘fusion of cultural vocabularies’, as seen when Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary referred to the psychedelic experience of LSD as ‘drug-induced satori’.17,18 D. T. Suzuki, however, has strongly criticized the notion of drug-induced satori, wherein Zen enlightenment is mistakenly conflated with hallucinations produced by psychedelic drugs. In his Preface to The Gateless Barrier translated by R. H. Blyth, Suzuki claims that Zen has been the subject of gross misunderstanding and fantastic interpretation by those who have never actually had the Zen experience. Among such interpreters we count the modern addicts to uses of so-called psychodelic [sic] drugs.19 That the visions have really nothing to do with Zen, psychologically or spiritually, is ascertainable when one carefully studies for instance, Case XIX of this book.20

One of Suzuki’s recurrent themes is that Zen mushin or ‘no-mind’ (mushin) as the cosmic Unconscious is identical to the ‘ordinary mind’ (heijōshin) of everyday life. Suzuki here attempts to distinguish the illusions of hallucinatory drug-induced psychedelic experience from authentic Zen experience by reference to Case 19 of The Gateless Barrier, which teaches: ‘ordinary mind is the way’ (heijōshin kore dō, 平常心是道). The teaching of ‘ordinary mind’ is the key doctrine characterizing Zen mysticism. Zen does not seek transcendence in an otherworldly paradise but returns to everyday life. For this reason, Zen does not value fantastic visions, dreams, and hallucinations, but instead endeavours to see the ordinary things of nature and everyday life as they really are in their emptiness–suchness. The Zen doctrine of ordinary mind is exemplified by the traditional Japanese tea ceremony, which cultivates an aesthetic appreciation of wabi (侘び)as the simple beauty of the ordinary, the plain, and the everyday. In the philosophical psychology of Suzuki, Zen no-mind or the Unconscious in its function as ordinary mind, is the deeper subliminal awareness that underlies all of the commonplace activities of everyday life, such as eating when hungry and drinking when thirsty. Likewise, in Suzuki’s Zen aestheticism, it is no-mind or the cosmic Unconscious acting as the ordinary mind that guides the lightening-fast sword of the samurai, the

15. Osmond, 2007, pp. 23–24. 16. See my review article, ‘Eric Cunningham’s Hallucinating the End of History: Nishida, Zen and the Psychedelic Eschaton’, Journal of Japanese Philosophy. Vol. 3, 2015 pp. 117–129. 17. Osmond, 2007, p. 32. 18. Similar to what Timothy Leary calls ‘drug-induced satori’, Dr Rick Strassman speaks of ‘DMT-induced “enlightenment experience” ’. See R. Strassman, ‘DMT Dharma’ in Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics (Badiner: 2015, 94–101). 19. LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, etc. 20. SWS I, liv.

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spontaneous brushstrokes of the inwash painter, the effortless gestures of the noh actor, and the graceful movements of the tea master. For Suzuki, then, realization of Zen satori as opening to the cosmic Unconscious itself culminates in an illumination of the quotidian, thereby to realize the ordinary as extraordinary. The Zen-coloured notion of ‘pure experience’ devoid of subject–object dualism as articulated by D. T. Suzuki and his closest friend, the modern Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945), was itself derived from the radical empiricism of William James. Also, Suzuki’s notion of Zen satori as insight into the Unconscious was influenced by James’ psychological account of the mystical experience of cosmic consciousness as an influx of the subconscious into consciousness articulated in his 1902 work Varieties of Religious Experience.21 Influenced by James, Suzuki came to view the Unconscious as the psychological mechanism or ‘subliminal door’ by means of the divine wisdom and creative power of Buddha nature flows into the human mind during the mystical experience of satori or sudden illumination. However, in Varieties of Religious Experience, James also discusses his own experiments with mind-altering intoxicants, including peyote used in Native American religious ceremonies, as well as anesthetic pharmaceutical drugs such as ether and nitrous oxide: Nitrous oxide and ether, especially nitrous oxide, when sufficiently diluted with air, stimulate the mystical consciousness in an extraordinary degree. Depth beyond depth of truth seems revealed to the inhaler . . . in the nitrous oxide trance we have a genuine metaphysical revelation.22,23

The proceedings from a symposium on Zen and psychedelics, published in The Eastern Buddhist,24 an academic English language journal founded by D. T. Suzuki himself, contains Suzuki’s essay titled ‘Religion and Drugs’,25 wherein he underscores the differences between Zen satori and psychedelic experience.26 Suzuki begins his essay with the insight: ‘Strangely, religion and drugs are closely associated. Karl Marx who founded the “School of Communism” called religion an opiate, but for that matter the communism which he advocated is also a kind of religion and

21. James, 1982, pp. 512–513. 22. Ibid., p. 387. 23. A 2016 CD titled CURRENTS by the rock group Tame Impala provides a synaesthetic audio-visual expression of psychedelic experience chemically induced by nitrous oxide in their song and online video titled ‘Nangs’, a slang word for nitrous oxide cartridges. 24. New Series, vol. 4. no. 2, Oct. 1971. 25. RD 128–133. 26. See ‘ “Drugs and Buddhism”—A Symposium’ in The Eastern Buddhist. Vol. 4, no. 2, October 1971. New Series. A revised Japanese language version of this essay has been released as a popular work, Zen no tsurezure (禅のつれずれ, Idle Thoughts on Zen, 2017), including a chapter titled ‘LSD and Zen’ (ZTZ 78–83; also, pp. 45–52).

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therefore a drug, no doubt’.27 Suzuki discusses especially what he calls ‘mystical drugs’, or psychedelics: By mystical drugs I refer to soma used in Vedic India, haseesh among the Arabs, peyote among the American Indians, and so on. Alchohol may be included. . . In Japan, sake is offered to the gods. . . However it (sake) has yet to produce the sort of hallucinatory images induced by taking peyote, haseesh, etc. It is to peyote and other and other related mystical (that is, psychedelic) drugs that I want to give close attention.28

He adds, ‘Chemical analysis of peyote has recently led to the development of various drugs in the United States, among which the most well known is LSD’.29 For Suzuki, however, ‘mystical drugs’ such as LSD and other psychedelics do not lead to Zen enlightenment, but only give rise to maya-like hallucinations. Suzuki’s essay ‘Zen and Drugs’ goes on to criticize Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, an account of Huxley’s pioneering experiments with mescaline, the active ingredient of the peyote cactus plant, taken as a sacrament for millenia in the sacred rituals practiced by Native Americans. Suzuki claims that the hallucinations induced by mescaline reported by Huxley have no connection at all with the authentic Zen experience of satori: In his book The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley described his own experience with the drug [mescaline]. He saw a hithero unknown world upon opening this ‘door.’ He then tried to relate this experience with that of Zen. Though Mr. Huxley had taken an interest in Zen, he did not have the guidance of a Zen teacher. He thus sets forth to writing a detailed description of the world of illusory vision brought on by mescaline.30

According to Suzuki, then, Huxley mistakes the ‘world of illusory vision brought on by mescaline’ with the true experience of Zen satori or awakening. Suzuki continues: ‘Zen experience is quite often confused, even by some so-called Zen people, with the hallucinatory state (makyō)’.31 The main point in Suzuki’s essay is that it is a mistake to confuse Zen satori or enlightenment with the illusory state of delirium known as makyō (魔境), and then, to further identify makyō with the hallucinations of psychedelic experience, thereby to erroneously infer that Zen satori and psychedelic experience are the same. For Suzuki mind-altering psychedelic drugs produce hallucinations, but they do not lead to Zen no-mind, which is the ordinary mind of the true self.

27. RD 129; SWS III, 233. 28. RD 129; SWS III, 234. 29. RD 129; SWS III, 234. 30. RD 129; SWS III, 234. 31. RD 129; SWS III, 234.

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Suzuki criticizes Huxley’s The Doors to Perception in an effort to discredit any association between Zen and ‘drugs.’ He thereby endeavors to distinquish the artificial drug-induced hallucinations of mescaline allegedly described by Huxley, from the natural and authentic Zen experience of satori, which is the realization of dharmakaya as the emptiness-suchness of things just as they are by the ordinary mind of the true self in everyday life. However, it is clear that Suzuki has seriously misresented Huxley for the sake of his argument. At the outset of his work, Huxley reports: The other world to which mescaline admitted me was not the world of visions; it existed out there, in what I could see with my eyes open. The great change was in the realm of objective fact.32

Next, Huxley emphasizes that his spiritual experience under the influence of mescaline was the Istigkeit or ‘Is-ness’ of Meister Eckhart, the great via negativa Christian mystic who teaches that the Godhead of nothingness is the isness of things.33 Huxley discusses the Zen tradition of Huineng and Hakuin, Japanese landscape painting and haiku poetry, as well as the Zen mysticism of D. T. Suzuki himself. Indeed, in an effort to describe his psychedelic experience, Huxley adopts the Zen vocabulary of D. T. Suzuki, including Dharma-Body (dharmakaya or the wisdom body of emptiness), Suchness (tathata), Not-self (anatman), Void (sunyata), Mind (citta), Liberation (moksha), and Nirvana. As said by Zen scholar Alan Watts in his book on psychedelic experience titled The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness: ‘The Westerner must borrow such words as samadhi or moksha from the Hindus, or satori or kensho from the Japanese, to describe the [psychedelic] experience of oneness with the universe’.34 As Huxley begins to experience the surging psychotropic effects of mescaline, he ponders a Zen koan (paradoxical question) from Suzuki’s writings: And then I remembered a passage I had read in one of Suzuki’s essays, ‘What is the Dharma-Body of the Buddha?’ (The Dharma-Body is another way of saying Mind, Suchness, the Void, the Godhead.) The question is asked in a Zen monastery to an earnest and bewildered student.35

In this koan the student asks, ‘What is the Dharma-Body of the Buddha?’ to which the Zen master responds: ‘The hedge at the bottom of the garden’.36 As Huxley clarifies, this means that the Dharma-Body of the Buddha, or the dharmakaya of

32. Huxley, 2009, p. 16. 33. Ibid., p. 17. 34. Watts, 2013, p. 107. 35. Huxley, 2009, pp. 18–19. 36. Iibid., p. 19.

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emptiness, refers to the concrete particular things of everyday life in their suchness or isness. In this context, Huxley emphasizes that his mystical experience of the Mysterium tremendum induced by mescaline intoxication was not characterized by illusory dreams, visions, or hallucinations, but by an immediate experience of the Dharma-Body of Buddha as ‘the Void’: In their art no less than in their religion, Taoists and the Zen Buddhist looked beyond visions to the Void, and through the Void at ‘the ten thousand things’ of objective reality.’37

Thus in the phenomenological account of his mescaline-induced psychedelic experience, Huxley never reports artificially produced hallucinations, but always describes his encounter with ‘the Void’ as the dharmakaya of emptiness – suchness, wherein the ten thousand things are revealed just as they are in their isness. Moreover, Huxley describes this perception of things in their isness as the Zen experience of Not-self: This is how one ought to see, how things really are.. . . if one always saw like this, one would never want to do anything else. Just looking, just being the divine Not-self of flower, of book, of chair, of flannel . . . I was now a Not-self, simultaneously perceiving and being the Not-self of the things around me.38

Huxley further explains his understanding of Suzuki’s Zen mysticism in a June 1957 letter to Dr. Humphry Osmond, included in a collection of his writings on psychedelic experience titled Moksha: I also saw dear old Suzuki in New York. . . . Have you read his most recent book on Mysticism, Christian and Buddhist? It is very good. And even better is a little pamplet published by the London Buddhist Society, called the Essence of Buddhism. This last is really admirable. It makes one realize how much subtler these Far Eastern Buddhists were, in matters of psychology, than anyone in the West. They know all about ‘existential experiences’ and the horrors of the human situation as described by Sartre, Camus and the rest—and they know how to come come through to the other side, where every relative manifests absolute Suchess and where Suchness is identical with mahakaruna, the Great Compassion.39

Huxley thus emphasizes that in Suzuki’s Zen philosophy, psychology, and mysticism, the aim is to counter the absurdity, anguish, and nihilistic despair of the human situation described by existentialism, not by escaping into hallucinations,

37. Ibid., 47. 38. Ibid., pp. 34–35. 39. Osmond, 1999, p. 132.

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but through direct realization of the emptiness-suchness of all things and compassion for all sentient beings. Huxley goes on to explain psychedelic experience in terms of a psychology of the unconscious. In his analysis of the effects of mescaline on the human mind, Huxley describes how the psyche can be divided into various layers, including ‘consciousness’, the ‘personal unconscious’, the ‘collective unconscious’ with its archetypes, and ‘the world of Visionary Experience’.40 By ‘the world of Visionary Experience’, Huxley clarifies that he does not refer to illusory hallucinations, but instead signifies the beatific vision of light, or what in The Tibetan Book of the Dead is the Clear Light of the Void. Moreover, by the vision of light he refers both to the light of the mind as well as the radiance of all phenomena shining from within. For Huxley, the mystical illumination experience of dharmakaya as the Clear Light of the Void, is ‘experiencing consciously something of that which, unconsciously, is always with us’.41 Huxley further states: ‘The way to the superconscious is through the subconscious, and the way, or at least one of the ways, to the subconscious is through the chemistry of individual cells’.42 While he discusses a variety of methods for bypassing the ‘cerebral reducing valve’, including meditation, fasting, isolation, deep breathing, sensory deprivation, chanting, and hypnosis, Huxley views mescaline and other psychedelics as the most direct means of access to the subconscious and the superconscious, and from there to dharmakaya emptiness as Clear Light of the Void. Thus, like D. T. Suzuki’s Zen notion of satori as awakening to the cosmic Unconscious, Huxley analyzes mystical experience of illumination as opening to the depths of subconscious, unconscious and superconscious levels of the mind. But, as Huxley states above, the way to the superconscious is through the subconscious and one way to the subconscious is to alter brain chemistry through psychedelic catalysts such as mescaline. Finally, it should be noted that in the 2006 documentary film A Zen Life: D. T. Suzuki, Ms Okamura Mihoko, the longtime personal secretary for Suzuki until the end of his life, reveals that at 85 years of age, after hearing so much about similarities between Zen satori and LSD-induced psychedelic experience, Suzuki often requested LSD. Moreover, the psychiatrist Dr Albert Stunkard MD, a serious Zen practitioner and D. T. Suzuki’s long-time personal physician in Japan, reports how Suzuki frequently requested LSD, but that those around him always declined, using the excuse of his high blood pressure, fearing that the psychedelic experience of LSD would be too overwhelming for him in his later years.

4 Stanislav Grof on Psychedelics as a Gateway to the Unconscious Stanislav Grof is an eminent psychiatrist, medical physician, and a cofounder of transpersonal psychology. At the outset of his career, Grof conducted decades of 40. Huxley, 2009, pp. 84–85. 41. Ibid., p. 106. 42. Ibid., p. 145.

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legal research on LSD therapy at universities and clinics in Prague and the USA. Also, in his later research he investigates the unconscious through altered states similar to psychedelic experience induced by his neo-shamanic method of Holotropic Breathwork, which uses rapid accelerated breathing while listening to music with hypnotic rhythms.43 According to the research of Dr Grof, LSD and other psychedelics are the quickest way to open the subliminal doors of our unconscious mind. Grof describes his efforts to ‘map’ the unconscious mind over decades of legally sanctioned LSD-research and LSD-therapy in his essay on psychedelic medicine titled ‘Observations from 4,000 LSD Sessions’: We were doing something we called psycholytic therapy, which was a large number of medium dosages [150 to 200 micrograms] of LSD . . . We were able to remove layer after layer and map the unconscious, moving from the Freudian individual or personal unconscious, through what I call the ‘perinatal unconscious,’ related to the memory of birth, to what Jung called the collective unconscious—both its historical and mythological, or archetypal aspects.44

In his 1975 work Realms of the Human Unconscious (republished in 2009 as LSD: Doorway to the Numinous) Grof develops at length his ‘new map of the unconscious’ based on his groundbreaking research on LSD psychotherapy. For Grof, psychedelics function to make subliminal contents of the deeper unconscious mind surface into consciousness: ‘The phenomena observed in psychedelic sessions are manifestations of deep areas of the unconscious unknown to and unacknowledged by contemporary science’.45 Again, ‘These [psychedelic] substances seem to function as relatively unspecific amplifiers that increase the cathexis (energetic charge) associated with the deep unconscious contents of the psyche and make them available for conscious processing’.46 Thus, for Grof, psychedelic experience opens up a superhighway the unconscious. In Grof ’s words: ‘Freud once said of dreams that they were the via regia or royal way to study the unconscious: to an even greater degree this seems to be true for the LSD experience’.47 Summing up his new map of the unconscious, Grof writes: ‘I have attempted to outline the cartography of the human unconscious as it has been manifested in LSD sessions of my patients and subject’.48 He continues:

43. Grof, 2009, p. xxiii. 44. 2017, p. 50. 45. Grof, 2009, p. xx. 46. Ibid., xv. 47. Ibid., p. 220. 48. Ibid., p. 32.

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The description of the new model of the unconscious based on LSD research . . . reflects a multidimensional and multilevel continuum of mutually overlapping and interacting phenomena . . . we can delineate for the purpose of our discussions the following four major levels, or types, of LSD experience and the corresponding areas of the human unconscious: (1) abstract and aesthetic experiences, (2) psychodynamic experiences, (3) perinatal experiences, and (4) transpersonal experiences.49

Explaining these four aspects in his new model of the unconscious based on LSD therapy,50 Grof first emphasizes how the psychedelic experience is often a profoundly aesthetic experience giving new insights into beauty, creativity and art. Second, he describes psychodynamic experiences based on Freud’s notion of the ‘individual unconscious’ as the level of repressed sexual and aggressive instincts. Third, he explains perinatal experiences of the unconscious associated with what Otto Rank called ‘birth trauma’. Grof sees the perinatal experience in which the infant moves from the darkness of the womb through the birth canal into the light at the moment of birth as the prototype for mystical experiences, such as neardeath-experiences (NDE) whereby the soul journeys through a dark tunnel into the light, or a kundalini awakening of psychical energy rushing up the hollow inner tube of the central channel into the light of the crown centre, as variants of the BPN or basic perinatal complex. Fourth, he describes the transpersonal experiences of the unconscious, partly informed by Jung’s ‘collective unconscious’ and its primordial archetypes. In his exploration of transpersonal levels of the unconscious based on psychedelic experience, Grof examines the temporal expansion of consciousness through fetal experiences, ancestral experiences, collective and racial experiences, phylogenetic evolutionary experiences, and past-incarnation experiences. This is followed by spatial expansion of consciousness through identification with other persons, groups, nature, animals, plants, matter, planets, stars, and the cosmos, as well as ESP experiences such as out-of-body experience, clairvoyance, clairaudience, prophecy and telepathy. Finally, Grof describes the ultimate transpersonal experience as what he terms ‘the supracosmic or metacosmic Void’: The last and most paradoxical transpersonal phenomenon to be discussed in this context is the experience of the supracosmic and metacosmic Void, of the primordial emptiness, nothingness, and silence.51

He adds, ‘the Void and the Universal Mind are perceived as identical and freely interchangeable; they are two different aspects of the same phenomenon. The Void

49. Ibid., pp. 32–33. 50. Ibid., pp. 159–160. 51. Ibid., 208.

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appears to be emptiness pregnant with forms, and the subtle forms of the Universal Mind are experienced as absolutely empty’52 Having outlined his new cartography of the human unconscious based on LSDinduced psychedelic experience, Grof asserts: [T]he maps of consciousness emerging from my LSD work are fully compatible and sometimes parallel with other existing systems. Examples of this can be found in C. G. Jung’s analytical psychology, Roberto Assagioli’s psychosynthesis, and Abraham Maslow’s studies of peak experiences, as well as religious and mystical schools of various cultures and ages.53

Among the world’s various mystical schools compatible with his transpersonal psychology, Grof sometimes mentions the tradition of Zen Buddhism.54 Although he never discusses D. T. Suzuki’s Zen psychology of the cosmic Unconscious, Grof similarly describes the deepest transpersonal level of the unconscious as ‘the experience of the supracosmic and metacosmic Void, of the primordial emptiness, nothingness, and silence’.55 Likewise, Suzuki writes: ‘The cosmic Unconscious in terms of space is “Emptiness” ’.56 Again, Suzuki asserts: ‘ “the Unconscious” is the Chinese [Chan/Zen] way of describing the realisation of Emptiness (´sūnyatā)’.57 Moreover, Suzuki often describes the cosmic Unconscious as ‘the Void’ of emptiness or nothingness.58 Although Grof ’s LSD psychotherapy explores all levels of the psyche, his view that the deepest transpersonal level of the holotropic unconscious is the supracosmic Void of emptiness or nothingness approximates Suzuki’s Zen concept of the cosmic Unconscious.

5 Conclusion: Opening the Doors to the Unconscious This chapter has demonstrated how D. T. Suzuki reinterprets Zen satori or awakening in terms of his modern philosophical psychology of the Unconscious: ‘Some think that there is still an unknown region in consciousness . . . . It is sometimes called the Unconscious or the Subconscious . . . . [W]hat Zen awakens in our consciousness may be that [the Unconscious]. . . . “Satori” is the popular name given to this opening or this awakening’.59

52. Ibid., p. 208. 53. Ibid., p. 32. 54. Ibid., p. 142. 55. Ibid., 208. 56. AZL 62; LZ 88. 57. EZB III, 18. 58. WZ 95. 59. EZB I, 32.

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Similar to D. T. Suzuki’s notion of Zen satori as opening to the cosmic Unconscious, both Huxley and Grof analyse the beatific experience of mystical illumination as opening the doors to our unconscious mind, thereby achieving superconsciousness. At the level of practice it has been seen that Freudian psychoanalysis accesses the id or individual unconscious with its repressed libidinal instincts through the interpretation of dreams, while Jungian depth psychology encounters the collective unconscious and its archetypes through active imagination. D. T. Suzuki, however, advocates the Rinzai Zen koan practice of focusing our whole bodymind on the keyword Mu (nothingness) in the lower abdomen as the quickest path for realizing satori as opening to the cosmic Unconscious, which he defines in Mahayana Buddhist terms as the nondual Void of nothingness or emptiness-suchness. Indeed, using the phrase made famous by Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, Suzuki explains how concentration on the Mu koan triggers Zen satori as a breakthrough to the cosmic Unconscious, at which time ‘the doors of perception open’.60 Huxley and Grof, like Suzuki, endeavour to access the lowest regions of the subliminal mind, going beneath the individual and collective strata, down into the transpersonal and superconscious levels of the unconscious psyche. But, as said by Huxley, the way to the superconscious is through the subconscious, and the most direct way to the subconscious is by altering brain chemistry with psychedelic catalysts such as mescaline.61 Likewise, in his work LSD: Doorway to the Numinous, Grof asserts that LSD is the chemical key which unlocks the portals to our unconscious. Thus while Suzuki claims that concentration on Mu and other koans is the shortcut path to sudden enlightenment as opening to the cosmic Unconscious in superconsciousness, for Huxley and Grof it is the chemically-induced psychedelic experience that most quickly opens the doors to our unconscious mind, the deepest level of which is the supracosmic Void of emptiness, nothingness, and silence EZB AIZB AZL ZBIJC LZ RD ZDNM ZJC ZP AZL SWS ZK ZB M ZTZ

Essays on Zen Buddhism, 3 Volumes An Introduction to Zen Buddhism, Foreword by Carl Jung A Zen Life: D. T. Suzuki Remembered, ed. Abe Masao Zen Buddhism and Its Influence on Japanese Culture Living by Zen ‘Religion and Drugs’ The Zen Doctrine of No Mind Zen and Japanese Culture Zen & Psychoanalysis A Zen Life: D. T. Suzuki Remembered, ed. Abe Masao Selected Works of D. T. Suzuki (3 Volumes) The Zen Koan As A Means to Attaining Enlightenment Zen Buddhism: Selected Writings of D.T. Suzuki, ed. W. Barrett 無心と言うこと、Mushin to iu koto 禅のつれずれ、Zen no tsurezure

60. SWS I, 169. 61. Huxley, 2009, p. 145.

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References Badiner, Allan and Grey, Alex, eds. (2015) Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics, new edition (Santa Fe, NM: Synergetic Press) Cunningham, Eric (2007) Hallucinating the End of History. Nishida, Zen and the Psychedelic Eschaton (Ghent: Academia Press) Grof, Stanislav (2009) LSD: Doorway to the Numinous (Vermont: Park Street Press). Originally published in 1975 by The Viking Press, New York, under the title Realms of the Human Unconscious Huxley, Aldous (1999) Moksha: Aldous Huxley’s Classic Writings on Psychedelics and the Visionary Experience, eds. M. Horowitz and C. Palmer (Vermont: Park Street Press) Huxley, Aldous ([1954] 2009) The Doors of Perception (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics) James, William (1996) Essays in Radical Empiricism (Lincoln: Nebraska University Press) James, William ([1902] 1982) The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Penguin Books) Jung, Carl Gustav (1978) Psychology and the East (New Jersey: Princeton University Press) Odin, Steve (2015) Hallucinating the End of History: Nishida, Zen and the Psychedelic Eschaton, Journal of Japanese Philosophy Vol. 3 Suzuki, Daisetsu Teitarō (1927) Essays on Zen Buddhism (First Series) (London: Luzak & Company. Published for the Eastern Buddhist Society, Kyoto Japan) Suzuki, Daisetsu Teitarō (1933) Essays on Zen Buddhism (Second Series) (London: Luzak & Company) Suzuki, Daisetsu Teitarō (1949) Essays on Zen Buddhism (First Series), paperback edition (New York: Grove Press) Suzuki, Daisetsu Teitarō (1964) Introduction to Zen Buddhism, with a Foreword by C. G. Jung (New York: Grove Press) Suzuki, Daisetsu Teitarō (1969) Essays on Zen Buddhism (Third Series) (London: Luzak & Company) Suzuki, Daisetsu Teitarō (1971) Religion and Drugs, pp. 128–137, in: ed. Nishitani Keiji, The Eastern Buddhist Vol. IV, No. 2, October Suzuki, Daisetsu Teitarō ([1950] 1972) Living by Zen. , ed. Christmas Humphreys (New York: Samuel Weiser) Suzuki, Daisetsu Teitarō (1979) Zen and Japanese Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press) Suzuki, Daisetsu Teitarō (1980) The Awakening of Zen, ed. Christmas Humphreys (Boulder, CO: Prajna Press). Suzuki, Daisetsu Teitarō (1988) Japanese Spirituality (New York: Greenwood Press). First published 1972 Suzuki, Daisetsu Teitarō (1994) The Zen Koan as a Means of Attaining Enlightenment (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle). Originally published by Ryder & Company in 1950, in: ed. Christian Humphreys, Essays in Zen Buddhism (Second Series) Suzuki, Daisetsu Teitarō (2006) A Zen Life: D. T.Suzuki, a documentary by Michael Goldberg: Japan Intercultural Foundation. Suzuki, Daisetsu Teitarō (2012) 無心と言うこと [Mushin to iu koto] (Tokyo: Daitō shuppansha). First printing 1939 Suzuki, Daisetsu Teitarō (2015) Selected Works of D. T. Suzuki. Volume I; Zen, ed. Richard M. Jaffe (Oakland, CA: University of California Press)

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Suzuki, Daisetsu Teitarō (2015) Selected Works of D. T. Suzuki. Volume II; Pure Land Buddhism, General Editor, Richard M. Jaffe; Volume Editor, James C. Dobbins (Oakland, CA: University of California Press) Suzuki, Daisetsu Teitarō (2016) Selected Works of D. T. Suzuki. Volume III; Comparative Religions, General Editor, Richard M. Jaffe; Volume Editors, Jeff Wilson and Tomoe Moriya (Oakland, CA: University of California Press) Suzuki, Daisetsu Teitarō (2017) 禅のつれずれ [Zen no tsurezure, Idle Thoughts on Zen] (Tokyo: Kawade shobo shinsha) Watts, Alan (2013) The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness (Novata, CA: New World Library) Wilber, Ken (1993) The Spectrum of Consciousness (Wheaten, IL: Quest Books)

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Chapter 12 A LT E R E D C O N S C IOU SN E S S A F T E R D E S C A RT E S : W H I T E H E A D’ S P H I L O S O P H Y O F O R G A N I SM A S P SYC H E D E L IC R E A L I SM Matthew D. Segall

1 Altered Consciousness: An Interesting Subject for Study Modern science and natural philosophy since Descartes have been saddled with the same problem: the measurable motions of matter and the invisible cogitations of mind appear to be of two entirely distinct ontological kinds. For this reason, the so-called ‘hard problem of consciousness’ remains one of today’s most hotly contested scientific and philosophical frontiers.1 In this chapter, I argue that finding a solution requires deconstructing the frame that creates the problem in the first place: understanding the place of consciousness in Nature first requires dissolving the problematic Cartesian framework that continues to shape contemporary research. I further argue that the philosophically informed chemical alteration of consciousness can aid in the dissolution of the dualistic frame by directly revealing the experiential inadequacy of Descartes’ rationalistically enforced mind-matter dualism. After briefly reviewing the Cartesian residues in contemporary consciousness studies, I return to the origins of the problem in Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy by analogizing his famous thought-experiment to a psychedelic trip. I show how Descartes’ ‘bad trip’ helped lay much of the epistemological groundwork for the last several hundred years of modern techno-scientific thinking about external Nature and its relationship, or lack thereof, to a disembodied rational mind. Unfortunately, Descartes’ ingenious phenomenological demonstration of the necessary existence of an infinite divinity subtending both finite minds and Nature has been less enduring. Aiming to resuscitate this aspect of Descartes’ Meditations, I lean on the widely acknowledged ‘entheogenic’ potential of

1. Chalmers, 1995, pp. 200–219.

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psychedelics2 while reimagining the nature of the divine ground in Whiteheadian process theological terms. There is much of value in Descartes’ meditative exercises, but especially in light of the evidence of psychedelic experience, his substance dualism must be critiqued and reconstructed in light of Whitehead’s process-relational philosophy. I argue that Whitehead’s organic reformulation of consciousness more adequately addresses and incorporates the metaphysical significance of psychedelic experience, opening up the possibility of a psychedelic realism that allows consciousness researchers to take the ontologically revelatory nature of such experiences seriously. While the Cartesian approach has left a deep imprint on contemporary science and culture, it is also the case that explicitly criticizing Descartes’ mind-matter dualism has become obligatory for acceptance into the ranks of professional neuroscientists and philosophers of mind. With a few notable exceptions,3 most neuroscientists take it as a matter of course that one way or another the mind is ultimately reducible to brain activity. This is a paradigmatic assumption following from the materialist metaphysics undergirding contemporary neuroscience, rather than a scientific finding resulting from said research. Philosophers such as Daniel Dennett give voice to the metaphysical mainstream by arguing that consciousness is merely a ‘user-illusion’4 emergent from neural patterns. But recent ethnographic research has revealed how many neuroscientists, having convinced themselves that mind is illusory and that only matter is real, nonetheless continue to go on living their lives outside the laboratory as if they were genuine selves capable of meaningful thought and purposeful action.5 Cartesian dualism is thus proudly dismissed in theory only to be quietly reaffirmed in practice. As Whitehead once quipped, ‘Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study.’6 A major part of Whitehead’s response to the modern ‘enfeeblement of thought’7 resulting from the incoherence of Descartes’ substance dualism and its contemporary residues is his pragmatic and radically empirical method: whatever is found in practical experience must be integrated into our metaphysical scheme. If our scientific accounts of the nature of consciousness (whether ordinary or chemically altered) fail to include what in practice we experience and instinctually affirm, then our ontological categories are inadequate and require revision.8 The value of

2. That is, on their tendency to ‘generate the divine within’ those who ingest them. See Pollan, 2019, p. 416. See also Griffiths, Richards, Johnson, McCann and Jesse, 2008, pp. 621– 632. See also MacLean et al., 2011, pp. 1453–1461. 3. Such as neuroscientist Christof Koch, who argues for a panpsychist version of integrated information theory. See Koch, 2019. 4. See Dennett, 2017, p. 222. 5. See Langlitz, 2016. See also Langlitz, 2013. 6. The Whitehead 1929 p. 9. 7. Whitehead, 1967, p. 78. 8. Whitehead, 1978, p. 13.

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psychedelics for philosophy is precisely that the mind-altering, boundary dissolving, world-enchanting experiences they precipitate force the issue. Consciousness reveals itself to be less like the on/off switch for a ghost-like observer hidden somewhere inside the skull, and more like a transcranial kaleidoscope with a variety of experiential modalities, each revealing a new facet of reality. Our normal, culturally conditioned mode of consciousness provides us with only one rather narrow aperture on the world. As William James famously argued, ‘no account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded’.9 As psychedelic chemistry made its way back into public consciousness during the twentieth century, cracks in the Cartesian firewall separating thinking selves from the rest of Nature grew wider. To draw upon Aldous Huxley’s famous example, shortly after drinking ‘four-tenths of a gram of mescaline dissolved in half a glass of water’, he turned to a vase of flowers in his study and began to perceive: what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were—a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence.10

Huxley goes on to describe a transformed perception of reality, his mind no longer enforcing abstract spatial categories such as Descartes’ geometrical extension upon the fractal textures of the enveloping world. Instead, he found himself ‘perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern’.11 As for time, Huxley’s experience metamorphosed into ‘a perpetual present made up of one continually changing apocalypse’.12 Huxley came to view his sense of ego identity, not as the existential foundation of all scientific knowledge, but as a rather flimsy evolutionary survival strategy, important for navigating the external world of solid bodies, but impotent before the incomprehensible yet inescapable Great Fact of divine infinity scintillating just below the surfaces arrayed before our normal consciousness. And yet, despite his transformed sense of self and spacetime, even the mescalinized Huxley could not, in the end, escape the deeply enculturated sense of mind-body dissociation.13 While psychedelic experiences can open us to alternative realities, their character is also shaped by cultural expectations. Indeed, rather than questioning the epistemically tenuous and psychologically fragile nature of the sceptical ego, many modern neuroscientists interpret their own and others’ chemically altered psychedelic experiences of ecstatic dissolution of the mind-matter barrier as merely

9. James, 1936, p. 379. 10. Huxley, 1954, pp. 12, 18. 11. Ibid., p. 20. 12. Ibid., p. 21. 13. Ibid., p. 52.

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delusional. Worse, researchers from the beginning of the twentieth century through to the present day (Huxley included14) have claimed that psychedelic experiences provide an ‘artificial model of psychosis’.15 Some go so far as to say that psychedelic chemicals induce schizophrenia.16 Still others, such as the eliminative materialist Thomas Metzinger, take the even more radical step of reducing all experience, whether ordinary or altered, to a neurochemical hallucination.17 In contrast to such dismissals, Whitehead’s process philosophical approach allows researchers to take entheogenic consciousness seriously as revelatory of realities ordinarily hidden by our mistaken self-conception as skin-encapsulated egos (to use psychedelic philosopher Alan Watts’ favorite phrase). Psychedelic modes of experience tend to be emphatically participatory and incarnational in orientation and effect, terms inspired by Whitehead that I define later. So, it is no surprise that the modern rational mind, first formed in the seventeenth century by Descartes’ doubting and disembodied imaginations, would tend to dismiss or pathologize such effects. But what if Descartes’ conjuration of a deceitful demon – and the ontological, psychological, and somatic alienation that has followed in its wake – is itself the paranoid hallucination? What if his doubting ego need not be our bedrock existential identity, but merely a knotted thought in need of metaphysical massage?

2 Set and Setting: Descartes on Mind, Matter, and God In contrast to the depersonalized, objectifying techno-scientific methods of modelling Nature that he has inspired, Descartes’ original meditations took the form of an intellectual autobiography. Rather than publishing his philosophy as Scholastic disputations by tediously listing opposing pro and con arguments as had remained the custom up until his day, Descartes philosophized in a new key by aiming to rely only on what he himself had experienced to be true. His philosophical meditations were in this way more like spiritual exercises than logical arguments. ‘I have no business’, he tells us, ‘except with those who are prepared to make the effort to meditate along with me and to consider the subject attentively’.18 It is thus natural to analogize not only his own meditative experience, but also the reader’s experience of his textual account to the ingestion of a psychedelic catalyst: Descartes’ text is an invitation to bracket our assumptions

14. Ibid., p. 54–57. 15. Beringer, 1927. Seine Geschichte und Erscheinungsweise. Monographie Neurol. Psychiat. H 49. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. 16. Paparelli, Di Forti, Morrison and Murray, 2011, p.1. https://doi.org/10.3389/ fnbeh.2011.00001 17. See Metzinger, 2003. See also Langlitz, 2016, p. 377. 18. Descartes, 2008, p. 101.

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and follow him on a transformative journey beyond the edges of consensus reality. Like many contemplative practitioners before him, and in alignment with the Whiteheadian psychedelic philosopher Terence McKenna’s advice,19 Descartes advocated social isolation and the withdrawal of the mind from the senses as preconditions for beginning the journey of discovery toward the truth. His method is a kind of soul spelunking, paradoxically affirming by inverting Plato’s heliotropic allegory20 by returning to the darkness of the cave, snuffing out his senses, and allowing his soul to adjust to the inner light of the eternal Idea, the infinite Godform upon which all finite things above and below will be found to depend. Descartes did not have access to a float tank such as that invented by psychedelic scientist John Lilly.21 Nor, for that matter, did he have access to LSD-25, psilocybin, 5-MeO-DMT, ayahuasca, or mescaline.22 In Descartes’ case, wrapping himself in a warm winter gown and lounging in a comfortable armchair by the fire seems to have done the trick.23 The set and setting of his epistemological method thus provisioned, Descartes councils us to let go of our long-held habits of thought so that we may plunge into the depths of the soul to there discover the unshakeable foundation upon which the entire edifice of scientific knowledge might be built. Descartes initiates his meditations by trying to induce a state of confusion and anxiety in his readers, deliberately blurring the distinction between dreaming and waking consciousness, and between madness and sanity. He gazes out his window at people walking along the street below, questioning whether the hats and coats he sees belong to actual people or are just draped over automatons. He questions all his sensory experience, and even whether his knowledge of logic and mathematics may not be delusive. With his will securely anchored by an unshakable faith in God, his intellect is free to continue down the path of doubt without risking eternal damnation. Rather than doubt the existence of God ‘who is perfectly good and the source of truth’, Descartes imagines instead a cunning evil demon who devotes all his effort to deceiving him:

19. See Gabriel, 1993. Descartes, ‘Mr. McKenna disapproves of taking hallucinogens, which remain illegal, for mere recreational purposes. He advocates they be taken in dark and quiet places in a spirit of exploration, in doses high enough to “flatten the most resistant ego” ’. 20. See Plato’s Republic, 514a–520a. 21. See Langlitz, 2013, p. 216. 22. Some have speculated, however, that Descartes experimented with cannabis, raising the spectre of an untold psychedelic history of philosophy. See Watson, 2007, and Pagés’, 1996. 23. Descartes, 2008, p. 13. While this is the scene Descartes depicts in his Meditations, in his earlier work, Discourse on Method, he says the experience first occurred while he spent the winter in Bavaria in 1619–1620 shut up in a ‘poêle’ (literally, a ‘stove’), making the comparison with a float tank somewhat more apt. But most commentators agree this was just shorthand for a room heated by a tile stove (see Descartes, 1987, p. 157 n 11).

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I will think that the sky, the air, the earth, colors, shapes, sounds, and all external things are no different from the illusions of our dreams, and that they are traps he has laid for my credulity; I will consider myself as having no hands, no eyes, no flesh, no blood, and no senses, but yet as falsely believing that I have all these.24

Descartes admits that it is difficult to maintain an attitude of absolute doubt. Long experience and familiarity have all but enslaved him to assent to the evidence of his senses and customary habits of thought. He describes his reluctance to continue the exercise as like that of a prisoner who would rather sleep and dream of freedom than awake to find himself still locked in a cell. Nonetheless, he recommits to the experiment by continually reminding himself that everything he experiences is uncertain and potentially unreal. Even if he cannot in this way discover any truth, at least he will avoid being deceived. At this point, there is no turning back. The only way out is through. Descartes has plunged himself into an epistemic whirlpool: ‘I can neither touch bottom with my foot nor swim back to the surface.’25 A century-and-a-half later, Kant would begin his Critique of Pure Reason caught in a similar web of perplexity, burdened by questions which he cannot dismiss, for they are essential to his own existence, but which he also lacks the power to answer.26 Descartes, nearly drowning in doubt, flails about in search of something that the deceitful demon, Lord of Doubt, cannot touch. Having already convinced himself that there is nothing at all that is certain in the world, ‘no sky, no earth, no minds, no bodies’, Descartes becomes increasingly dizzy as he is pulled down into the abyss. Finally, when doubt has twisted his mind nearly to breaking point, he realizes in a flash of insight that he himself must exist, for who else could be deceived? The demon ‘will never bring it about that I should be nothing as long as I think I am something’.27 The demon can torture my body, confuse my senses, and even delude my understanding, but no demon could ever disavow me of myself. Descartes then first utters his famous statement, ‘I am, I exist’. It is not meant in this context as a mere logical proof. He is not deducing the necessary end of a chain of reasoning about experience. He is rather annunciating the experientially verified free creation of an intellectual intuition. Descartes’ more commonly quoted ‘I think, therefore I am’ does not occur in the Meditations. He phrases it in this more syllogistic way in other works for different audiences and purposes.28 His statement in Meditations – ‘I am, I exist’ – is more akin to a magic spell or spiritual incantation declaring his own existence under God.29 It is an act of faith that is at the same time indubitable, functioning as an autochthonous nexus or

24. Descartes, 2008, pp. 16–17. 25. Ibid., p. 17. 26. Kant, 1998, p. 99. 27. Descartes, 2008, p. 18. 28. See Descartes,’ 1998, p. 18; see also Descartes, 2012, p. 5. 29. See Josephson-Storm, 2017, p., 42. Josephson-Storm argues that Descartes’ method is ‘the popularization of a previously secret occult tradition’.

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ouroboric chiasm wherein the cognitive powers of willing and knowing (as well as their proper ends, the Good and the True) coincide and co-generate. Descartes intends his Cogito to be taken as a finite reflection of the fact that we as human creatures are created in the image of an infinite divine Creator. That we are finite is obvious: we regularly err and are deceived. What is less obvious is that our very finitude and imperfection can be read as divine signs pointing us beyond ourselves toward infinite perfection. Descartes: ‘I am so constituted as a medium term between God and nothingness.’30 I could not know myself in my finite existence as a thing amongst things unless I also had some idea of infinite perfection with which to compare myself. Descartes asks: ‘Where does this idea come from, if not from the infinite itself? Surely, I, a finite creature, could not have implanted such an infinite idea in myself. For I am just its pale imitation. I am only because God is. I enjoy no thought or perception that cannot be doubted except that I am, that I exist. Only I am adamantine enough to withstand the fires of demonic doubt, because I am myself a flame ignited by God. Every shape or colour or motion that dances before my mind’s eye can be melted like wax into the transparent idea-stuff of pure extension, while I remain inwardly untouched.’ Descartes’ makes his point brilliantly. It cannot be doubted that whenever I am doubting, I exist. In this act of self-realization, I partake in my finite allotment of divine power as an imago Dei. That I exist is clear and distinct enough, but what am I, exactly? No ordinary image, surely. I am not anything extended, nothing shaped or coloured, or in motion through space. I am not anything sensed or imagined. Rather, for Descartes, ‘I am a thinking thing’.31 By ‘thinking’ Descartes means to include not only abstract reasoning, but doubting, believing, understanding, wishing, imagining, and perceiving. I am not the thing thought, but the thing that thinks. I am a thinking substance. Outside and opposed to me is the extended substance of the physical bodies around me, including my own bodily organism. Descartes goes on to argue that the true essence of these external bodies is not perceived by the senses, which reveal only accidental secondary qualities, but by the thinking mind alone: ‘what I thought I saw with my eyes, I in fact grasp only by the faculty of judging that is in my mind’.32 A charitable interpretation of his methodological discovery is that Descartes has successfully anchored scientific knowledge in his own thinking activity. But there is a good deal of epistemic sleight of hand in his manoeuvre, as he can just as easily be understood to have escaped the demonic whirlpool of scepticism by grasping hold of a rope dropped from heaven. Whether anchoring in himself or accepting God’s hand, Descartes’ Meditations helped to inaugurate the modern scientific research programme. Nature was to be understood as a machine obeying mathematically determined laws of motion, and the human mind as set above and divinely predisposed with just the right ideas to reverse engineer it. Descartes proposed a divided

30. Descartes, 2008, p. 39. 31. Ibid., p. 19. 32. Ibid., p. 23.

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world of two substances linked only by divine fiat. Contemporary scientific materialists may have done away with Descartes’ infinite divinity and finite mental substance, but they still unwittingly perform his mind–matter dualism and retain his representationalist theory of cognition. Representationalism is the theory of cognition which posits that mind (whatever it may turn out to be) comes to have knowledge of external material reality only through its own internal representations or ideas.33 The apparent world we experience is thus at best a virtual one with no direct connection to the real world beyond us. Residually Cartesian representationalist accounts of cognition inevitably lead to claims such as Metzinger’s that all consciousness, whether ordinary or chemically altered, is hallucinatory. In this context, Whitehead complained nearly a century ago that ‘[s]ome people express themselves as though . . . brains and nerves were the only real things in an entirely imaginary world’.34

3 Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism: Toward a Psychedelic Realism Whitehead celebrates Descartes’ discovery that ‘subjective experiencing is the primary metaphysical situation which is presented to metaphysics for analysis’35 but he rejects Descartes’ substance dualism and representationalist mode of thought. Descartes’ concepts of mind, matter, and God must all be re-imagined. This section thus brings Whitehead’s metaphysical scheme into conversation with Descartes’ in search of a more concrete and experientially grounded account of reality, natural and divine. If Descartes’ Meditations were just a bad trip, the solipsistic consequences of which he escaped only by recourse to a Deus ex machina, what other avenues might be open for a psychedelically informed philosophy to re-imagine the place of consciousness in Nature? Whitehead’s organic realism provides one especially promising route. In the wake of the perceived excesses of British idealism and the profound challenge to mechanistic materialism resulting from the early twentiethcentury revolution in physics, Whitehead sought to construct a more adequate account of the human mind’s relationship to a creatively evolving cosmos. In contrast to the Cartesian representationalist epistemology, which sceptically abstracts the knowing mind from the mechanical Nature it claims to know, Whitehead’s organic, participatory, and incarnational approach reminds scientists that all their knowledge of Nature not only presupposes bodily engagement and energetic transaction with concrete natural processes, but their conscious knowing must itself also be an expression of these same energetic processes. While Descartes falls back on the absurdity of an omnipotent God who arbitrarily correlates the representations of our mind to the machinations of matter,

33. For more on the anti-realism implied by representational accounts of human cognition, see Segall, 2017. 34. Whitehead, 1967, p. 91. 35. Whitehead, 1978, p. 160.

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Whitehead reconstructs the foundations of human knowing on aesthetic, rather than conceptual grounds. In other words, feeling becomes the basis of our cognitive powers, rather than disembodied reflection upon abstract ideas. Whitehead coins the term ‘prehension’ to elaborate his new theory of knowing-as-feeling. On this theory, currents of unconscious feeling or prehensions are understood to pervade the physical world, with human consciousness being a particularly intense and elaborate form of contrasted feelings supported by the evolution of our complex nervous systems. Rather than conceiving of Nature as a collection of inert material particles, Whitehead reimagines the universe in light of twentieth-century quantum and relativity theories as a network of creative events, wherein all events are felt experiences. Neither abstract isolated minds nor mechanically colliding atoms are what are finally real, but occasions of experience that vary widely in intensity. Whitehead intends his novel, amphibious (i.e., both mental and physical) concept of prehension to replace Descartes’ dualistic conception of mental representation. Prehension, rather than being a special capacity reserved solely for the mental substance of humans, is a process of feeling that bridges the bifurcated Cartesian categories of mind and matter. Whereas Descartes isolates mental cognition from physical causation, Whitehead’s notion of prehension allows us to understand causation as itself the relaying of feelings from one occasion of Nature to the next. Our experience of the sun is thus not a private idea without intelligible connection to its astrophysical source, but the transmuted light radiating from an actual star.36 In simpler entities such as hydrogen atoms, the flow of feelings tends to be highly repetitive, which is why physics can describe their behaviour with a great degree of mathematical precision (but even at this scale, descriptions of Nature can only be probabilistic). In more complex entities such as living cells, elephants, and especially human beings, the ability to creatively reinterpret the prehensive currents streaming into us from the world is dramatically enhanced. Replacing Descartes’ abstract analysis of the attributes of two entirely unrelated kinds of substance with a more concrete analysis of experiential reality is the first step towards understanding Whitehead’s metaphysical innovations. From Whitehead’s point of view, if Descartes is right that ‘the enjoyment of experience [is] the constitutive subjective fact’, then the old divided categories of mind and matter ‘have lost all claim to any fundamental character in metaphysics’.37 Our practical experience is intrinsically relational and purposeful: we feel we are in direct contact with a real world, not a mere representation of it, and we instinctively believe that our thoughts are effective in a world beyond themselves. Rejecting the extremes of subjective idealism and objective materialism, Whitehead’s organic realism is a protest against the modern ‘bifurcation of Nature’ which, for several centuries, had enforced an incoherent division between ‘the nature apprehended in awareness and the nature which is the cause of awareness’.38

36. Ibid., p. 76. 37. Ibid., 159. 38. Whitehead, 1920, p. 31.

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Rather than reducing our conscious perceptual experience to the status of a mere dream or hallucination that somehow floats, ghostlike, atop the conjectured reality of a mechanical Nature, Whitehead argued that ‘the red glow of the sunset should be as much part of nature as are the molecules and electric waves by which men of science would explain the phenomenon’.39 What modern science had thought of as a mechanical universe obeying fixed causal laws becomes instead an organic process of growth that, while conditioned by stubborn habits, is nonetheless uplifted by a principle of unrest whereby there is ‘creative advance’ and ‘emergent evolution’.40 On Whitehead’s reading, rather than a pre-existing subject qualified by its representation of an entirely alien mechanical world, our conscious thinking activity marks our participation in a vibratory flowing or ‘vector’ transition between the subjective and objective poles of reality. As Whitehead describes it: ‘The creative process is rhythmic: it swings from the publicity of many things to the individual privacy; and it swings back from the private individual to the publicity of the objectified individual.’41 In other words, rather than the thinking ego, or Cogito, remaining aloof from the world and alienated from its own body, Whitehead reimagines our consciousness as part of the same reality it is attempting to know. My thinking arises out of and perishes back into a cosmic network of creative events. Reality is not split in two but oscillates between subjective and objective phases of its becoming. It follows that humans are not the only thinking things in an otherwise dumb universe. Whitehead invites us to step out of Cartesian solipsism into a panpsychic cosmic process wherein everything becomes a kind of thinking thing, or better, an interrelated occasion of experience.42 Whitehead’s account of prehensive experience is meant to heal the ‘fatal gap’ resulting from Descartes’ representational epistemology, wherein the mind with its private ideas or mental symbols loses all intelligible connection with the physical entities supposedly symbolized. We are not ‘solitary substances, each enjoying an illusory experience’; rather, ‘we find ourselves in a buzzing world, amid a democracy of fellow creatures’, reflecting the fact that experience necessarily involves ‘the self-enjoyment of being one among many, and of being one arising out of the composition of many’.43 Whitehead coins another neologism, ‘concrescence’, to describe the process whereby a novel occasion of experience grows out of the composition of its prehensions of other entities.

39. Ibid., p. 29. 40. Whitehead, 1978, pp. 229–230. 41. Ibid., pp. 150–151. 42. Ibid., p. 41. As Whitehead notes, Descartes himself equates feeling (sentire) to thinking in his Meditations (2008), p. 21. 43. Ibid., pp. 50, 145.

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4 Psychedelic Consciousness as ‘Immersion into God’ The history of philosophical inquiry as well as sound pedagogical practice dictates that first things are best saved for last. Creativity is Whitehead’s process–relational alternative to the medley of other available metaphysical ultimates peddled by modern substance-based philosophies. Theists offer a totally transcendent God as their ultimate. Materialists prefer the pure immanence of mass or energy. In either case, the ultimate character of God or of Nature is assumed to be unchanging. God is eternal, already perfect, fully actualized; and matter, whatever else it may turn out to be, must be determinable without remainder in terms of some definite set of mathematical formulae. In contrast to such typically modern views, wherein what we are as conscious creatures is determined in advance by laws of Nature or divine decree, Whitehead’s category of Creativity invites us to reinhabit reality as an openended evolutionary adventure. Creativity signals our immersion into a no longer supremely mighty but eminently relational God, ‘the fellow-sufferer who understands’44 what it is to be born and to die as a creature in a world of becoming. It is here that Whitehead’s philosophy can be understood not only as a psychedelic phenomenology (as both Lenny Gibson45 and Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes46 have skillfully suggested) but as psychedelic realism. Whereas philosophies of the Cartesian strain imagine both God and the human mind as transcendental onlookers upon a world in which they do not really belong, Whitehead reminds us of the ‘dim background’ in our experience ‘from which we derive and to which we return’: We are not enjoying a limited doll’s house of clear and distinct things, secluded from all ambiguity. In the darkness beyond there ever looms the vagueness which is the universe begetting us.47

In the Cartesian mode of thought, the entire environing world in all its concrete particularity, qualitative complexity, and aesthetic ambiguity is reduced to the uniform geometrical idea-stuff of res extensa. It is as though Descartes, in order to avoid drowning in doubt, found it necessary to transmute everything real between earth and sky into something ideal and thus more conceptually manageable. Descartes’ method thus reduced Nature to the human mind’s quantitative representation of it as mere extension, a geometrical grid. The vectors of feeling intrinsic to the organic life of the cosmos thus ‘degenerated into a mechanism entirely valueless’ (except, of course, for those aspects of Nature that could serve as raw material for modern industry).48 Whitehead’s metaphysical intervention is not merely theoretical. The viability of human life on planet earth hangs in the balance. Though his dualism has been

44. Ibid., p. 351. 45. See Gibson, 1998. 46. Sjöstedt-Hughes, 2015, pp. 33–58. 47. Whitehead, 1948, p. 123. 48. Whitehead, 1967, p. 195.

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tremendously influential, Descartes cannot himself be blamed for the subsequent course of modern history, for the moral decay resulting from increasingly privatized minds or the ecological catastrophe resulting from the profit-driven extraction of vitality from Nature. After all, despite his insistent incredulity, Descartes never became unmoored from his Catholic faith in the infinite Creator of all finite minds and bodies. He did not foresee that our contemporary secular mentality would lead more and more people to view God not as a perfect and so necessarily existent Being, but as a fantasy projection. Descartes’ idea of God was that of necessary existence. God is that most perfect of all ideas, so perfect as to be unblemished by the defect of failing to actually exist. As was detailed above, Descartes reasoned that, without this divine essence or infinite God-form implanted in our souls before birth, the reality of even our own consciousness of ourselves, not to mention our bodies and the surrounding world, could be doubted indefinitely, dissolved into the smoke and shadows conjured by a demonic imagination and deceitful suite of senses. To be fair, while Whitehead is critical of Descartes’ unwarranted assertion of divine power, even he could not avoid invoking God, albeit a god of more relational and organic rather than substantial and mechanical form: ‘A recurrence to the notion of ‘God’ is still necessary to mediate between physical and conceptual prehensions’ in Whitehead’s scheme. ‘Conceptual prehensions’ are more pronounced in complex animals and humans than they are in hydrogen atoms or rocks and can be understood as anticipatory feelings of future possibilities; whereas ‘physical prehensions’ are inherited feelings of the already actualized past. Whitehead describes his God as akin to a cosmic poet, beckoning rather than commanding all finite actual occasions of experience toward the most beautiful possible future. God’s power is thus won through persuasion, rather than coercion or the threat of punishment. In contrast to Descartes, Whitehead’s process-relational notion of God as mediator of ideal possibilities does not function ‘in the crude form of giving a limited letter of credit’ to our representational knowledge of Nature.49 Without Descartes’ divine insurance policy, consciousness might be nothing but illusion, human persons nothing more than machines driven mad by the thought that they are more. Descartes argument from perfection fails, in Whitehead’s view, because ‘it abstracts God from the historic universe’ and because it neglects the evident fact that ‘we and our relationships are in the universe.’50 For Whitehead, God is not merely an abstract idea to be believed in, proven, or refuted. Nor is the reality of my living body and the surrounding world of other organisms a mere conjecture for a doubting ego to ponder and pass judgment upon. In a Whiteheadian universe, it would be more accurate to say that we exist as members of God’s body, and that God perceives the world through our consciousness. Indeed, the naive way in which Descartes imagines his mind’s

49. Whitehead, 1978, p. 49. 50. Whitehead, 1968, p. 155.

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association with his body is not unrelated to the failure of his argument for God’s existence. I am not merely accidentally related to my body. In Whitehead’s view: Our bodily experience is the basis of experience . . . our feeling of bodily-unity is a primary experience . . . so habitual . . . that we rarely mention it. No one ever says, Here am I, and I have brought my body with me.’51

Nor is my body merely accidentally related to its world: my body is in fact ‘only a peculiarly intimate bit of the world,’ and its experiential functioning is the starting point for all my knowledge about that world.52 Mind and body constitute a complex unity with the world, the living body functioning as a ‘complex amplifier’ that inherits and interprets the world as a network of self-organizing feelings.53 God, now incarnate in the historic universe, becomes the primary experiential fact granting the very possibility of inter- and intra-bodily orientation, the aesthetic lure latent in the nature of things that goads each ever deeper into relationship with all. I exist by virtue of God’s immersion into me.54 In this sense, Whitehead is in agreement with Descartes that, though we are rarely conscious of the fact outside of certain states of grace or without chemical catalyzation, ‘the perception of God [is] prior to that of myself ’.55 But rather than making God the world’s solitary supreme judge and the guarantor of all scientific knowledge of a merely mechanical nature,56 Whitehead invokes a process-relational divinity and way of knowing compatible with our incarnate existence within a ‘democracy of fellow creatures.’ God becomes the Eros initiating each moment of experience and the Beauty shining through all of them in concert. God is the endlessly reiterating process of compositional concrescence whereby many become one and are increased by one: ‘The world lives by its incarnation of God in itself.’57 Just as the world gains its life through divine incarnation, Whitehead suggests that God achieves consciousness only through relationship with the finite creatures of the world. We are thus participants in the divine nature, co-creators rather than passive creations. Sjöstedt-Hughes speculates that psychedelic experiences allow

51. Whitehead, 1968, p. 156. 52. Whitehead, 1978, p. 81. 53. Ibid., p. 119. 54. Sjöstedt-Hughes, 2015, p. 50. 55. Descartes explains the reason: ‘For how could I possibly understand that I doubt, and that I desire, that is, that there is something lacking in me, and that I am not completely perfect, if there were no idea in me of a more perfect being, by comparison with which I could recognize my own shortcomings?’ (2008, p. 33). 56. Whitehead refers to Descartes argument that an all-powerful God secures the veracity our judgments as ‘the crude form of giving a limited letter of credit to a “judicium” ’ (1978, p. 49). 57. Whitehead, 2011, p. 149.

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us to attain heightened awareness of this participatory reality. We do not become God so much as vector into God: ‘It is an apotheosis qualified by symbiosis.’58 Shortly after his mescaline-induced apotheosymbiosis with the infinite beauty enfolded in a vase of flowers, Huxley reflected upon how psychedelically catalyzed ego dissolution grants us ‘an obscure knowledge that All is in all – that All is actually each’.59 For Huxley, this perennial wisdom was as close as the finite mind could ever come to perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. It is akin to Whitehead’s incarnational and participatory rendering of Descartes’ notion of divine perfection, which is rooted in ‘our sense of value, for its own sake, of the totality of historic fact in respect to its essential unity’: For example, take the subtle beauty of a flower in some isolated glade of a primeval forest. No animal has ever had the subtlety of experience to enjoy its full beauty. And yet this beauty is a grand fact in the universe. When we survey nature and think however flitting and superficial has been the animal enjoyment of its wonders, and when we realize how incapable the separate cells and pulsations of each flower are of enjoying the total effect – then our sense of the value of the details for the totality dawns upon our consciousness. This is the intuition of holiness, the intuition of the sacred, which is at the foundation of all religion. In every advancing civilization this sense of sacredness has found vigorous expression. It tends to retire into a recessive factor in experience, as each phase of civilization enters upon its decay.60

If our troubled civilization is to flower again, it may depend upon a reinvigoration of this sense of holiness underlying our everyday consciousness. I have argued that Whitehead’s psychedelic realism has an important philosophical role to play in catalyzing such a renewal. In addition to offering a novel reframing of the place of consciousness in a no longer bifurcated Nature, Whitehead critiqued the professionalized university system and put forward educational and research programs inclusive not only of specialized training in mathematics and science, but also of ‘aesthetic growth’ in the capacity for ‘intuition without an analytical divorce from the total environment’.61 For philosophers like Whitehead, still attuned to wisdom’s original calling, learning can never be just the memorization of facts and figures. The aim of all human learning must be to increase our ability to appreciate ‘the infinite variety of vivid values achieved by an organism in its proper environment’.62 The proper environment of the university is the universe. By cultivating Whitehead’s sense of relational organic value in our research, contemporary philosophers might

58. Sjostedt-Hughes, 2015, p. 51. 59. Huxley, 1954, p. 26. 60. Whitehead, 1968, pp. 164–165. 61. Whitehead, 1967, p. 199. 62. Ibid., 199.

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finally come to heal the metaphysical divide between mind and Nature first solidified in the seventeenth century and unwittingly reproduced by contemporary neuroscience’s residually Cartesian understanding of consciousness. Psychedelics are not a required ingredient in this pursuit, but given the proper set and setting, they may serve as potent metaphysical medicines.

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Metzinger, T. (2003) Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003) Pagés, F. (1996) Descartes et le Cannabis (Paris: Mille et une nuits) Paparelli, A., Di Forti, M., Morrison, P. D. and Murray, R. M. (2011) Drug-induced Psychosis: How to Avoid Star Gazing in Schizophrenia Research by Looking at More Obvious Sources of Light, Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 5:1. Available at: https:// doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2011.00001 Plato, Republic Pollan, M. (2019) How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us about Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence (London: Penguin Books). Segall, M. T. (2017). Retrieving Realism: A Whiteheadian Wager, International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 36:1. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/https://doi.org/10.24972/ ijts.2017.36.1.39 Sjöstedt-Hughes, P. (2015) Noumenautics: Metaphysics – Meta-Ethics – Psychedelics (Falmouth: Psychedelic Press) Watson, R. (2007) Cogito Ergo Sum: The Life of Rene Descartes (Boston, MA: Godine) Whitehead, A. N. (1920) The Concept of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Whitehead, A. N. (1929) The Function of Reason (Princeton: Princeton University Press) Whitehead, A. N. (1948) Essays in Science and Philosophy (New York: Philosophical Library) Whitehead, A. N. (1967) Science and the Modern World (Cambridge: The Free Press) Whitehead, A. N. (1968) Modes of Thought (Cambridge: The Free Press) Whitehead, A. N. (1978) Process and Reality (Cambridge: The Free Press) Whitehead, A. N. (2011) Religion in the Making (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

Chapter 13 T H E W H I T E S U N O F S U B STA N C E : S P I N O Z I SM A N D T H E P SYC H E D E L IC A MOR D E I I N T E L L E C T UA L I S Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes

Introduction The seventeenth-century philosopher Benedict de Spinoza was branded both as a figure ‘God-intoxicated’1 and as the most monstrous of atheists.2 Such polarity was characteristic of a man who, without equal, equalized apparent contraries: mindmatter, theism-atheism, freedom-necessity, past-future, good-evil, God-Nature. He was thus, above all, a monist, the absolute monist whose general solution to Descartes’ dualism was final: mind and matter are not two substances that mysteriously interact but are rather two (of an infinity of) expressions of the same substance – a substance he names God or Nature, Deus, sive natura.3 God is Nature. The epithet of ‘pantheism’ was thus coined to classify Spinoza’s divine equation, twenty years after his death.4

1. By Novalis (1772–1801) – ‘Spinotza is ein gotttrunkener Mensch’, in Novalis, 1960, p. 651. 2. For instance, by the otherwise-tolerant scholar Pierre Bayle. He called Spinozism (in his 1697, 1702 Historical and Critical Dictionary), ‘The most monstrous hypothesis, diametrically opposed to the ideas most evident to the mind.’ Theologian Antione Arnauld 1612–1694) reportedly attacked Spinoza as ‘the most impious and the most dangerous man of this century’ (as reported by Leibniz in a letter to Ernst von Hessen-Rheinfels-Rotenburg of 4/14 August 1683; https://spinozaweb.org/people/385, accessed 14 June 2021). 3. Ethics, IV, Pref.; Spinoza, 1985, p. 544. 4. Coined by British astronomer and champion of Newton, Joseph Raphson in 1697 (see below). The word was used again in 1705 by John Tolland (see Curley, 2013), who had read Raphson. It should be noted that the Cambridge Platonist Henry Moore (1614–1687), who was born two decades before Spinoza (1632–1677), might also now be classified as a pantheist because, as he wrote in a letter of 1649 to Descartes, ‘God seems to be an extended thing’ (see Wolfson, 1934/1965, I, p. 224). Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) may also be classified as a pantheist (see Bruno, [1584] 1998, Fifth Dialogue, pp. 87ff ).

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Yet we do not commonly perceive this deific Nature in its unified state. We bifurcate Nature into mind and matter, restrict mind to complex animal matter, and then puzzle over their relations.5 These are errors human, all too human, resulting in part from our prosaic cognitive apparatus6 with supplementation by philosophies sympathetic thereto. Spinoza, however, culminates his masterwork, the Ethics,7 with a declaration that beyond this standard bifurcated human form of knowledge gained through senses, and through reason, there exists a rare, third kind of knowledge – intuition – that becomes cognizant of fundamental essences sub specie æternitatis, under the aspect of eternity: from the perspective of timelessness. In these exceptional insights we feel ourselves eternal, and in this lies our immortality: not as a soul enduring beyond the corpse, but as a mind collapsing into eternity, even if such eternity is fleeting. The vertex of such intuitive experience Spinoza names ‘the intellectual love of God’, amor Dei intellectualis. This eternal love, I shall argue, is a bliss that is exposure to God or Nature or Substance – existence – in its unabstracted, essential eternal perfection. It is an experience that seemingly divulges a rare, direct cognizance of Spinozism in its general unitive, monistic framework, and is an experience that bears the authenticity stamps of the ‘mystical experience’:8 As well as touching upon immortality, it appears noetic, ineffable, passive, and transient (meeting William James’ criteria);9 it also encompasses experiences unitive, timeless, and beyond good and evil (meeting Bertrand Russell’s criteria).10 Even psychiatrist R. M. Bucke includes Spinoza’s peak states in his classic 1901 tome, Cosmic Consciousness.

5. In recent decades this puzzle has been named the Explanatory Gap and the Hard Problem of Consciousness (see, respectively, Levine, 1983, and Chalmers, 1995). For a more detailed understanding of this mind-matter mystery, see Kim, 2005. 6. See Henri Bergson’s masterpiece, Matter and Memory for the practical bent of perception and consciousness – an analysis that Aldous Huxley referenced in relation to his ‘reducing-valve’ concept (in Huxley, [1954/1956] 2004, p. 10). 7. The full title is Ethics: Demonstrated in Geometric Order (1677; Spinoza, 1985, pp. 408–617). 8. Spinoza commentators differ on this point as to whether the Intellectual Love of God can be considered ‘mystical’. This chapter, with its reference to Spinoza’s texts, literature on mysticism, and to direct altered states of consciousness, can act as a weight on the side of interpreting Spinoza’s peak state as being legitimately classified as ‘mystical’. I share this interpretation with the great Spinozan scholar, Frederick Pollock (1880, pp. 184, 291ff.), E. E. Harris (1971), and T. L. S. Sprigge (1984) amongst many others. 9. James, [1902] 1985, pp. 380–382. 10. Russell, [1914] 1951, pp. 1–32.

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If we maintain with William James,11 James Leuba,12 Frits Staal,13 and many others,14 that certain psychedelic states are qualitatively similar if not identical to certain mystical states – for there are vast varieties of both psychedelic and mystical states15 – then one may ask whether Spinoza’s intellectual love of God or Nature, considered as a type of mystical state, might be occasioned16 by certain psychedelic substances. Below I shall provide a phenomenological analysis of the state instantiated by the highly potent psychedelic substance 5-MeO-DMT, a chemical known to elicit profoundly unitive states, and compare this to Spinoza’s account of the intellectual love of God, and its relation to the Spinozist cosmology generally. I shall seek to show that the state is indeed aligned to the Spinozistic metaphysic, thereby suggesting veridicality above delusion, and a Psychedelic-Spinozan Symbiosis: certain psychedelic states can be understood through the Spinozan system, and the Spinozan system can be intuited through certain psychedelic states. A full personal integration of such unitive states requires philosophy in addition to the intense experience because, to borrow and buckle an old phrase, the rational system without the intuition is empty; the intuition without the rational system is blind. An individual may have this blinding singular intuition of what can otherwise be intellectualized as a thriving complexity of interrelated concepts. Deleuze puts it thus: Spinoza . . . is a philosopher who commands an extraordinary conceptual apparatus, one that is highly developed, systematic, and scholarly; and yet he is the quintessential object of an immediate, unprepared encounter, such that a nonphilosopher, or even someone without any formal education, can receive a sudden illumination from him, a ‘flash’. Then it is as if one discovers that one is a Spinozist . . .17

By receiving Spinozism in a flash, Deleuze is referring to the words used by the French writer, Nobel laureate Romain Rolland who also expressed his Spinozan

11. James, [1902] 1985. 12. Leuba, 1925, pp. 8–36 13. Staal, 1975, pp. 148–158. 14. Including perhaps, most popularly, Aldous Huxley, [1954/1956] 2004. For opposition to this identification, see Zaehner, 1957. 15. I shall not enter the debate regarding perennialism as against contextualism: i.e. the debate concerning whether, respectively, psychedelic experiences (rather than their interpretations) are qualitatively identical regardless of one’s life and culture, or whether, on the other extreme, they are completely conditioned by one’s life and culture. I take a middle position for most cases. Cf. Katz, 1978. 16. I use the word ‘occasioned’ here to indicate a trigger rather than a sufficient cause, thereby maintaining metaphysical neutrality at this stage. 17. Deleuze, [1970] 1988, p. 129.

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illumination as le soleil blanc de la substance, the white sun of substance.18 As well as a writer of various fields of literature, Rolland was also considered a mystic, one who is known for his amorous yet critical correspondence with Freud. Rolland differentiated, against Freud at the time, ‘spontaneous religious sentiment’ – which Rolland coined as ‘oceanic’ – from religion.19 In a letter to the psychoanalyst from 1927, he insists that: totally independent of all dogma, all credo, all Church organization, all Sacred Books, all hope in a personal survival, etc., [there exists] the simple and direct fact of the feeling of the ‘eternal’ . . . [the] oceanic, as it were . . .20

Especially with note of the blinding white light that 5-MeO-DMT first elicits to the mind, there seems to be no other more appropriate chemical substance to bring about a flash of intuition of the core eternal Substance/Nature/God of Spinozism – a drug evoking encounter with ‘the white sun of substance’ itself.21 In that which follows an outline of Spinozism will be provided to understand it as a rational system that still today can be viewed as superseding many contemporary worldviews in terms of its harmony, parsimony, and general rationality. This explication will culminate with Spinoza’s description of the amor Dei intellectualis, including the concept’s aetiology with particular note of Aristotle and Maimonides. Thereafter we shall turn our attention to certain unitive psychedelic states with a focus on those evoked by 5-MeO-DMT. A comparative analysis between the phenomenology attributed to the drug and Spinozism will then seek to show that the state is indeed aligned to the Spinozan metaphysic, thereby suggesting veridicality above delusion, and the Psychedelic-Spinozan symbiosis. We shall see that such a symbiosis has potential not merely for personal integration, but for ecological enrichment.

1 Spinozism Bento, Baruch, and later still, Benedict de Spinoza, was born in Amsterdam in 1632 and buried in The Hague in 1677. He was of Sephardic Jewish descent. The Sephardim, the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula, had been forced, from the fifteenth

18. Rolland, [1924] 2014 (L’Éclaire de Spinoza, i.e. The Flash of Spinoza), pp. 93ff. See also Rolland, [1942] 1959. 19. See Artinian, in this volume. I thank Dr Taline Artinian for bringing to my attention the relationship between Freud, Rolland, and Spinoza. 20. 5 December 1927. All correspondence between Rolland and Freud is translated in Parsons, 1999, pp. 170–178. 21. 5-MeO-DMT is not exclusive in occasioning such radiance, however – as we shall with LSD below. It should also be noted that though the sun can enlighten and nourish, it can also also blind and burn: 5-MeO-DMT should be approached very cautiously, if at all.

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century, to convert to Christianity or leave Spain, then Portugal. Many, ostensibly at least, converted; suspicions of feigned conversion instigated the Spanish Inquisition. Others left to more liberal cities in northern Europe, including that of Spinoza’s city of birth. Heresy was in his blood. Spinoza was brought up in the Sephardic community but was excommunicated in his twenties for his views. An assassination attempt was made upon him.22 He was published anonymously and posthumously; his books became banned by the Church. Only a century after his death, following the Pantheismusstreit, the ‘Pantheism Controversy’ of the 1780s, did his writings become openly studied and appreciated. In 1835, the writer and poet Heinrich Heine braved the claim that ‘Pantheism is the secret religion of Germany’.23 Spinoza published works on Descartes’ philosophy, on politics and theology – including a highly controversial book involving biblical criticism24 – but of most importance were his writings on metaphysics. The Ethics was his last work, and his masterwork wherein is contained this metaphysics, this system of explaining reality – a system that had an influence on many thinkers, including Goethe, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Wordsworth,25 Coleridge, Humphry Davy,26 George Eliot,27 Nietzsche,28 Haeckel, Borges, Whitehead,29 Naess, Deleuze, and Einstein, who called Spinoza, ‘the greatest of modern philosophers’.30 The following are the basic tenets of Spinozism, or, more specifically, of Spinoza’s metaphysics. 22. See Silverman, 1995, pp. 13ff. 23. In Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland: ‘It is the religion of our greatest thinkers, our best artists . . . . Nobody says it, but everyone knows it: pantheism is an open secret in Germany. We have in fact outgrown deism. We are free and want no thundering tyrant. We are grown up and need no fatherly care. And we are not the botchwork of a great mechanic. Deism is a religion for slaves, for children, for Genevans, for watchmakers. Pantheism is the secret religion of Germany’ (quoted in Gerrish, 1987). 24. The anonymously published Theological-Political Treatise of 1670, in Spinoza, 2016, pp. 65–354. 25. Note especially Wordsworth’s 1798 poem, Tintern Abbey (or, Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour) – in Wordsworth, 1994, pp. 205–208. 26. See Sjöstedt-Hughes, 2019, reprinted in 2021, on this particular influence. This article includes Davy’s poem, ‘The Spinosist’. 27. George Eliot, the nom de plume of Marian Evans, is believed to have created the first translation of Spinoza’s Ethics, in 1856 (see Carlisle, 2020, pp. 1ff ). 28. In a letter to Franz Overbeck of 30 July 1881, Nietzsche wrote: ‘I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted. I have a precursor, and what a precursor! I hardly knew Spinoza: that I should have turned to him just now, was inspired by “instinct” ’ (Middleton, 1969, p. 177). He later changed his tone, however. 29. Whitehead writes, for instance: ‘In the analogy with Spinoza, his one substance is for me the one underlying activity of realisation individualising itself in an interlocked plurality of modes. Thus, concrete fact is process’ (Whitehead, [1925] 1935, pp. 102–103). 30. Stated in an interview for Viereck, 1930, p. 373.

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1.1 Monism Substance There is but one substance,31 one underlying fundamental reality, that can be expressed in an infinite number of ways. Attributes These expressions, abstractions, or aspects are named Attributes. Each Attribute is infinite in itself. Humans have access to only two Attributes: Thought and Extension, which are roughly speaking, Mind and Matter or, better, Sentience and Physical Space. However, there are an infinite number of other infinite Attributes, of which we humans are not cognizant.32 Modes Each particular instance is called a mode. A particular physical object is a mode of the Attribute of Extension. A particular mental state is a Mode of the Attribute of Thought. Note: For Spinoza, mind and matter are not two separate substances, as was advanced by Descartes (as ‘substance dualism’), but rather mind and matter are two ways of grasping the very same substance. Thus, there can be no interaction, emergence, or downward (mental) causation, between mind and matter – just as there can be no interaction between Hesperus and Venus, as both names refer to the same planet. 1.2 Pantheism This one substance Spinoza calls God or Nature, in part because this one existent reality must have the Attribute of Extension (infinite space) in parallel with Its Attribute of Thought (infinite intellect). That is, Spinoza adds the Attribute of physicality to the notion of the perfect being, thereby completing It, perfecting It, rendering God immanent rather than transcendent. In Goethe’s words, ‘Spinoza does not have to prove the existence of God; existence is God.’33 Spinoza’s contention that all (pan) is God (Theos) was named ‘Pantheism’ by mathematician Joseph Raphson twenty years after Spinoza’s death.34 Raphson

31. John Locke defines ‘substance’ thus: ‘The idea then we have, to which we give the general name “substance”, being nothing but the supposed, but unknown, support of those qualities we find existing, which we imagine cannot subsist sine re substante, without something to support them, we call that support substantia; which, according to the true import of the word, is, in plain English, standing under or upholding’ (Locke, [1690] 1964, p. 186). 32. In a fragment of a letter of 1675 (Letter 66), Spinoza ambiguously suggests that the other non-human Attributes each have a complementary alien form of mind (Spinoza, 1985, pp. 440–1). 33. Letter to Jacobi, 1785 (Simmons, 1891, p. 53). 34. In De spatio reali (1697), as pantheismus. See Thomas and Smith, 1990.

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contrasted pantheism to panhylism,35 the view that everything is insentient matter – today we generally refer to this as materialism or physicalism.36 Note 1: By identifying God with Nature, Spinoza was accused of atheism – even by Hume.37 However, considering the ‘infinite intellect’ as an aspect of the universe should suggest otherwise. In the words of Ernest Renan, ‘there is no enlightened mind that does not acknowledge Spinoza as the man who possessed the highest God-consciousness of his day . . . a free faith in the Infinite . . .’38 The Attribute of Thought is both finite (as, say, the mind of an animal) and infinite (the mind of Nature/God) – and this in the relation part to whole: ‘the human Mind is a part of the infinite intellect of God’.39 A pantheist could accept a mind of Nature, an atheist could not. As Pollock put it, ‘God has not been reduced to Nature, but Nature exalted to God’.40 However, Spinoza’s God was not personal.41 The infinite intellect is as similar to the human mind as infinite space is similar to the human body – i.e. radically dissimilar. Note 2: Spinoza’s ‘Nature’ is not, then, merely physical, but also includes the infinity of other Attributes including Thought. Thus, those accusing Spinoza of being a materialist, or panhylist, were also off the mark. Pantheism is not panhylism.42 Matter is but one expression of reality, it is but an abstraction or extraction – i.e. a part. Likewise, those calling Spinoza an idealist are also off the mark as Mind is not productive of matter, but equally expressive of the fundamental substance. Note 3: Substance/Nature/God are thus synonyms.

35. The word ‘panhylism’ was re-coined, apparently without knowledge of its first coinage, by William Pepperrell Montague in 1912, p. 268. 36. Some thinkers distinguish physicalism from materialism, asserting that the former refers to that studied in post nineteenth-century physics. Others, such as Karl Popper and Galen Strawson, classify panpsychism (see below) as a form of physicalism or materialism. For this reason, ‘panhylism’ is a useful term as it excludes panpsychism, whereas ‘physicalism’ or ‘materialism’ need not. 37. In A Treatise of Human Nature, bk. 1, pt. IV, §V; Hume, [1739] 1985, p. 289: ‘the atheism of Spinoza is the doctrine of the simplicity of the universe, and the unity of that substance, in which he supposes both thought and matter to inhere . . . [a] hideous hypothesis. . .’ 38. In Knight, 1882, p. 149. 39. Ethics, IIP11c; Spinoza, 1985, p. 456. 40. Pollock, 1880, p. 355. 41. See, e.g. Ethics, VP17c; Spinoza, 1985, p.604: ‘strictly speaking, God loves no one, and hates no one’. T. L. S. Sprigge, in this respect, wrote that ‘What people tend to feel is missing in Spinoza’s God is love for men and goodness. . . . [Spinoza finds] something to reverence in the terrifying side of nature. . .’ (1984, p. 158). 42. In his letter (Ep. 73/71) to Henry Oldenburgh of 1 December 1675, Spinoza writes against a concurrent misunderstanding of his metaphysics: ‘some people think [my work] rests on the assumption that God is one and the same as Nature (by which they understand a certain mass, or corporeal matter). This is a complete mistake’ (Spinoza, 2016, p. 467). 43. Lundborg, 2014, p. 87.

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Note 4: According to the late Swedish author on psychedelic culture, Patrick Lundborg: ‘Pantheism is . . . [a] psychedelic core value.’43 This he claims in his final article, ‘Note Towards the Definition of a Psychedelic Philosophy’ wherein he summarises the findings of his research and experience on psychedelic experiences, showing that the intuition of pantheism is a common occurrence. ‘The concept behind pantheism says that everything that is alive is charged with the same presence. . .’44 1.3 Panpsychism All matter then, not just complex animal matter, is but one expression, or Attribute, of Substance/Nature/God. Therefore all (pan) that exists physically must have its parallel mental Attribute (psyche). An Attribute is an expression, and an expression is an abstraction – it is not the full, concrete reality which it expresses. The portrait is not the person. Our perception of matter is but a portrait. Consequently, we see that Spinoza’s monism implies a panpsychism – that all things have mind. Spinoza is explicit: [We] understand not only that the human mind is united to the body, but also what should be understood by the union of mind and body. . . . For the things we have shown so far are completely general and do not pertain more to man than to other individuals, all of which, though in different degrees, are nevertheless animate. . . . And so, whatever we have said of the idea of the human body must also be said of the idea of any thing.45

Because they are fundamentally identical, mind cannot have emerged from matter in the animal past, nor can mind emerge from matter in the present – neither diachronically within gestation nor synchronously from extensive brain to thinking mind. Such common belief betrays an inherent and unwitting dualism. Because mind and matter are but different expressions of the same underlying reality, one would expect to find neural correlates of consciousness, and mental change accompanying bodily change through brain damage, chemical ingestion, etc. – as is the case. At its core there is nothing unscientific about Spinozism,46 so long as one distinguishes science as a method from any dogmatic belief system, such as the panhylist (and thus unwittingly dualist) tendency still observed in the

44. Ibid. 45. Ethics, IIP13s; Spinoza, 1985, pp. 457–458. 46. Ernst Haeckel even goes so far as to say that Spinozan ‘pantheism is the world-system of the modern scientist’ (Haeckel, [1895/1899] 1905, p. 190, his italics). 47. The late philosopher of mind Jaegwon Kim wrote in that, ‘cognitive science seems

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special sciences – a manifestation of the Cartesian legacy that continues to permeate Western approaches.47 Note 1: Such panpsychism, or parallelism, animates Nature: all is alive. We note in passing here how this suppressed Western philosophy, somewhat revived of late,48 bridges to animism – not only of the European pagan past, but to the Amerindian ontologies of past and present that are, in relation to animism, interdependent upon the cultural use of psychedelic substances, and other practices that conduce to exceptional experiences.49 Note 2: Such panpsychism offers much value in our general approach to Nature with regard to the ecological crisis in which we find ourselves – it is for this reason that Deep Ecology is explicitly founded upon Spinozism. As the movement’s founder Arne Naess claimed, ‘No great philosopher has so much to offer in the way of clarification and articulation of basic ecological attitudes as Baruch Spinoza.’50 In fact, the very word ‘ecology’ was coined51 in 1866 by the artist, zoologist, popularizer of Darwin’s thought in Germany, and devoted Spinozist, Ernst Haeckel, who wrote that Spinozism was ‘the loftiest, profoundest, and truest thought of all ages’52 – and that this was ‘the new sun of our realistic monism, which reveals to us the wonderful temple of nature in all its beauty’.53 1.4 Value A mind, and thus a being, is essentially individuated through its having a conatus: a striving to persevere in its own being.54 The fathoming of good and evil are relative to this conatus: what is good to a being is what helps that being persevere, what is evil is that which hinders this conatus. As Spinoza writes: As far as good and evil are concerned, they also indicate nothing positive in things, considered in themselves, nor are they anything other than modes of

still in the grip of what may be called methodological epiphenomenalism’ (Kim, 2005, p. 11). Epiphenomenalism is the view that substance is matter, and that mind emerges from it yet has no causal efficacy in itself. 48. Notably by Galen Strawson, e.g. 2009. 49. See Luna and White, 2016; and Kopenawa and Albert, 2010/2013. 50. Naess, 1977, p. 54. 51. As oekologie, in Haeckel, [1866] 1988. 52. Haeckel, [1895/1899] 1905, p. 141. 53. Ibid., p. 250, my italics. 54. For a good aetiology of the concept of the conatus from Aristotle onwards, see Wolfson, [1935] 1966, II, pp. 195–208. With regard to Spinoza’s use, Wolfson writes that ‘[w]hen related to the mind alone, the conatus is called will (voluntas), but when it is related at the same time both to the mind and the body, it is called appetite (appetitus)’ (p. 203). 55. Ethics, IV, Preface; Spinoza, 1985, p. 545.

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thinking, or notions we form because we compare things to one another. For one and the same thing can, at the same time, be good, and bad, and also indifferent.55

There is no absolute, objective good or evil that exist outside Substance/Nature/ God, as this is all that exists. Spinoza is a nominalist rather than a Platonist in this respect. As opposed to traditional religion, such a morally relativist view is reported as prevalent in mysticism – Bertrand Russell, for instance, writes that ‘[m]ysticism maintains that all evil is illusory . . . [a] position to be found in Spinoza’.56 Spinoza notes, however, that altruism often serves the conatus via reciprocity, thus kindling the possibility of civilization. Friendship and merriment, trade and infrastructure, kindness and nobility, all frequently aid both the individual and society. But ultimately, might is right.57 Joy is the affect, and effect, of power, and as such ‘good’ can only be subjective: ‘Joy consists in the fact that man’s power, insofar as he consists of mind and body, is aided or increased, all things that bring Joy are good.’58 Spinoza’s ethics are descriptive and naturalistic, not prescriptive and transcendental.59 1.5 Neutral Monism Because mind and matter are parallel it is fair, then, to call Spinozism a panpsychism as all things have minds. However, considering that Substance/Nature/God has an infinity of infinite Attributes other than mind and matter, the term neutral monism also serves as a fair designation of Spinozism. Mind and matter are equally fundamental Attributes of reality, yet reality (Substance/Nature/God) with its other equally fundamental but unknown Attributes, is more than mind and matter. Thus the ‘neutral’ prefix for Spinozism does not refer to something other than mind or matter, but to something more than mind or matter. As a consequence,

56. Russell, [1914] 1951, p. 26. 57. In The Theological-Political Treatise Spinoza writes that ‘each individual has a supreme right to do everything it can, or that the right of each thing extends as far as its determinate power does’ (ch. 16; Spinoza, 2016, p. 282). 58. Ethics, IV, Appx., XXX; Spinoza, 1985, p. 593. We see such thought reflected in Nietzsche: ‘What is good? – All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power. . . . What is joy? – The feeling that power increases – that a resistance is overcome’ (The Antichrist, §2; Nietzsche, [1889/1895] 1968, p. 115). 59. That is to say that in Spinoza’s system, there can be no moral standards (ideals, Forms) that lie objectively outside Nature, because Nature is all. This has the consequence that normative propositions (ought-statements) are merely conditioned upon (unwittingly or not) conative personal preferences or cultural norms rather than upon objective truth (see Sjöstedt-Hughes, 2015, ch. VII: ‘Neo-Nihilism’, pp. 75–98). 60. Ethics, IIP35s; Spinoza, 1985, p. 473.

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there is no contradiction in holding concurrently here a panpsychism and a neutral monism, as part to whole (see Figure below). 1.6 Determinism There are two main reasons why Spinoza rejects free will and endorses a determinism and fatalism. Firstly, as regards determinism, free will is rejected because Substance/Nature/God is perfect, complete, and thus has inviolable laws of Nature that cannot be freely transgressed. Though today we often formulate these laws in purely physical terms, because the physical is parallel with the mental, these laws also pertain to the mind. Spinoza writes that though we are mostly ignorant of the causes of our actions and thoughts, this is not a licence to believe that our actions and thoughts are uncaused, undetermined, and therefore free – in his own words: ‘men are deceived in that they think themselves free, an opinion which consists only in this, that they are conscious of their actions and ignorant of the causes by which they are determined.’60 For Spinoza, both mind and matter are not transparent, they are both insufficiently known – both in themselves and in their aetiology. Mind and matter are both abstractions of a more complete, more concrete, substantial reality that has a set nomology that no being is free to alter. Free will is rejected by the same principle by which miracles are rejected. 1.7 The Eternal The second reason Spinoza rejects free will is due to the fatalism that accrues because Substance/Nature/God in its human-mind-independent reality is eternal, timeless: perfect thus complete, indivisible, immutable being.61 Duration is merely our way of perceiving this eternal reality through Extension and Thought.62 We do not have scope to look at the intricate arguments for the ultimate unreality of time, such as those maintaining that the essential aspects of time are only subjective – e.g. the length of the specious present; the speed of time; the relativity of time to one’s relation to gravity, space, and velocity; the differentiation of the past, present, and future, etc. The last point is the basis of J. M. E. McTaggart’s celebrated 1908 paper, ‘The Unreality of Time’. This paper was anticipated and no doubt inspired by Spinoza who writes that ‘in eternity, there is neither when, nor before, nor after’.63 McTaggart, in fact, fortifies his paper at the start by charging that ‘time is

61. Ethics, IP19; Spinoza, 1985, p. 428: ‘God is eternal’. 62. See Letter 12: ‘The difference between Eternity and Duration arises from this . . . it is only of Modes [of Thought and Extension] that we can explain the existence by Duration. But [we can explain the existence] of Substance by Eternity, i.e. the infinite enjoyment of existing. . .’ Spinoza, 1985, p. 202. See also Ethics, VP23d; Spinoza, 1985, p. 607. 63. Ethics, IP33s2; Spinoza, 1985, p. 437. See also Spinoza’s exquisite Letter 12 of 1663, on the nature of the infinite (Spinoza, 1985, pp. 200–205). 64. McTaggart, 1908, p. 457.

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treated as unreal by Spinoza’.64 Elsewhere McTaggart linked this unreality to Spinoza’s virtue ethics: ‘Spinoza . . . held that all that is real is really timeless. And he held that this fact made death insignificant, and freed those who realized it from the fear of death.’65 Spinozism is a monism not only of God and Nature, and Mind and Matter, but also a monism of past and future. Consequently, our minds are not free to alter what we conceive as the future, as it already exists. Note 1: There is no free will, but there is mental causation, just as there is physical causation. Physical causation is determined therefore mental causation must be determined as they are parallel. But one must add that by ‘mental causation’ is not meant psychological-to-physical causation, as this would imply a psycho-physical dualism. There is neither psycho-physical (downward) causation, nor physicopsychological (upward) causation, but only a (lateral) psychophysical-topsychophysical causation (as far as humans are concerned). Such causal parsimony is a tonic to many current problems in the philosophy of mind. Note 2: Spinoza advocates that one gain ‘freedom’ over the affects, or the emotions that make one suffer, i.e. the ‘passions’. This freedom is determined by reading and reasoning about one’s and others’ psychological issues. The Ethics contains much analysis of such issues, and thus presents itself in part as an early modern psychology text, anticipating later studies of the workings of the subconscious. Yet, more fundamentally than today’s practice, Spinoza symbiotically interweaves psychology with a greater fatalistic metaphysic. Seemingly paradoxically, the more one realizes that everything is necessary, the more free one becomes – because one frees oneself from suffering from remorse, blame, anger, envy, etc. Nothing is itself to blame for anything because everything that happens is necessary not contingent. Of course, reading and reasoning about these things is itself determined by prior causes. Therefore, freedom is determined by necessity, and realizing necessity determines freedom. Spinoza’s masterpiece is called the Ethics because it advances a virtue ethics promoting a powerful, stable state of mind, a blessed, virtuous peace of mind. As Spinoza states, virtue is power – returning the term to its origins.

65. McTaggart, 1927, p. 502. 66. Ethics, VP23; Spinoza, 1985, p. 607.

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2 Amor Dei Intellectualis Because there is no dualism of mind and body, there can be no mind, no soul, that exists as such after the death of the body. This is a consequence of the mind-matter parallelism that Spinoza’s monism entails. However, towards the end of the Ethics, Spinoza unleashes a line that has vexed many Spinoza scholars. Spinoza writes: ‘The human Mind cannot be absolutely destroyed with the Body, but something of it remains which is eternal.’66 The term ‘eternal’, as stated, does not denote an infinity of time, but rather an absence of time, existence without duration. The Roman statesman Boethius expressed it thus: ‘the eternal . . . embraces the whole of time in one simultaneous present’.67 For Spinoza, God/Nature/Substance is, in itself, the eternal.68 Further, our minds are part of the mind of God/Nature/Substance, as there is but one substance – we are part of Nature, both physically and mentally: ‘the human Mind . . . is a part of Nature . . . the human Mind is a part of a certain infinite intellect’.69 Our intellect, however, is mostly restricted to our finite body – what Spinoza calls the first and second kinds of knowledge, respectively relating to perception/imagination/opinion and, secondly, to the addition of inference and conceptualization (i.e. reason and science).70 But there is, Spinoza claims, a difficult and rare third kind of knowledge that he names ‘intuition’. In the fifth part of the Ethics, he writes that the ‘third kind of knowledge proceeds from an adequate idea of certain attributes of God to an adequate knowledge of the essence of things’.71 That is to say, we shift from understanding things through the abstractions that are Thought and Extension, to a concrete, real cognizance of the essence of existence – a raw, unmediated exposure – which is eternal, timeless, and infinite rather than finite: the part fuses into the whole.72 Insofar as the Mind conceives the present existence of its Body it conceives duration . . . . But eternity cannot be explained by duration . . . . But the things we conceive in this second way as true, or real, we conceive under a species of eternity, and to that extent they involve the eternal and infinite essence of God.73

For Spinoza, such a fusion achieved beyond abstraction is the summum bonum. In his earlier Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, Spinoza writes that ‘the

67. Boethius, [524] 2008, p. 166 (ch. V, §VI). 68. ‘Eternity is the very essence of God’ (Ethics, VP30d; Spinoza, 1985, p. 610). 69. Letter 32, of 1665; Spinoza, 2016, p. 20. 70. Ethics, IIP40s2; Spinoza, 1985, pp. 477–478. 71. Ethics, VP25d; Spinoza, 1985, p. 608. 72. T. L. S. Sprigge calls it ‘an intuitive grasp of reality in the concrete’ (Sprigge, 1984, p. 173). 73. Ethics, VP29d&s; Spinoza, 1985, pp. 609–610. 74. Emendation, §13; Spinoza, 1985, p. 10.

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highest good is to arrive . . . [at] the knowledge of the union that the mind has with the whole of Nature’.74 And this union he names the ‘Intellectual Love of God’, amor Dei intellectualis.75 Through the Intellectual Love of God, you (body/mind) become God; God becomes you. The intuition is the identification; there is no subject-object dichotomy. The Intellectual Love of God is the infinite intellect bonding, loving, uniting with the finite mind. God is eternal, thus you become eternal. Moreover, ‘the Mind’s intellectual Love of God is part of the infinite Love by which God loves himself ’.76 One becomes a vessel for the self-consciousness of Nature/God/ Substance when one enters such a state of existence. (Here we hear echoes of Aristotle’s God, the Prime Mover, Who, in Its cosmic narcissism, is perfect thought thinking about itself as perfect thought.)77 There are thus two parallelisms: the mind and the body, and the mind and God/ Nature/Substance. Spinoza is more explicit on this in the Short Treatise on God, Man, and His Well-Being: ‘the Soul can be united either with the body . . . or with God’.78 He calls such a second parallelism ‘Rebirth’,79 and refers this ultimate state of being80 to the term ‘glory’81 in the Scriptures (Latin: Gloria; Hebrew: Kavod),82 even though he is generally dismissive of the understanding of these texts.83 Thus, one cannot enjoy life after death, though one can enjoy eternal existence – death occasions Rebirth, from duration to eternality. Consequently, acquaintance with the third kind of knowledge can assuage the fear of death (thanatophobia)84 as McTaggart noted. It is a blissful taste of death – this is where the metaphysics informs the virtue ethics: peace of mind acquired through reason (the second kind of knowledge) and, more rarely but effectively, intuition (the third kind). It may be objected that it is more reasonable to insist that without time, there can be no experience, as it is a condition thereof. Deleuze differs: ‘the soul’s eternity can indeed be the object of a direct experience’.85 But recall that this is not the experience of any afterlife – as Pollock puts it: ‘Spinoza’s eternal life is not a continuance of

75. The term is first used in Ethics, VP32d; Spinoza, 1985, p. 611. 76. Ethics, VP36; Spinoza, 1985, p. 612. 77. Book Lambda in The Metaphysics; Aristotle, 2004, pp. 353–388. 78. Short Treatise, ch. XXIII: ‘On the Immortality of the Soul’; Spinoza, 1985, p.141. 79. Ibid., ch. XXII; p. 140. 80. A comparison can be made here to the Eastern concepts of, respectively, Maya and Brahman (see Tiebout, 1956, p. 520). 81. Ethics, VP36s; Spinoza, 1985, p. 612. 82. The Hebrew term kavod can also be translated as ‘radiant light’ (see Kellner, 2006; Strassman, 2014). Exodus 40:34 reads: ‘Then a cloud covered the tent of the congregation, and the glory [kavod] of the Lord filled the tabernacle.’ 83. It should be reiterated that the ‘soul’, or mind, is not separate from the body or the cosmos (God), but an expression of it. 84. See Ethics, VP38; Spinoza, 1985, p. 613. 85. Deleuze, [1968] 2013, p. 314. 86. Pollock, 1880, p. 294 (my italics). E. E. Harris conveys it similarly: ‘The eternity of the

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existence but a manner of existence.’86 It is perhaps better referred to as a state of existence than as an experience, as it goes beyond the human mind and body, and beyond the perception associated only with the first and second kinds of knowledge. If time is unreal, and if experience can be veridical, then timelessness can be experiential.87 Such non-dualistic immortality has a history that reaches back to at least Plato88 and the neo-Platonists.89 We also see a Peripatetic lineage: in Aristotle’s De Anima (On the Soul), he writes that ‘there is an intellect characterized by the capacity to become all things. . . . It is, further, in its separate state that the intellect is just that which it is, and it is this alone that is immortal and eternal’.90 Influenced by Aristotle, the twelfth-century Jewish thinker, Maimonides (Rambam) echoed that, ‘it is said: “when thy righteousness goes before thee, the glory of the Lord shall gather thee in” (Isaiah 58:8). Once it has entered upon eternal life, that intellect remains permanently in one state’.91 Spinoza was well-versed in these thinkers92, 93 and it has been claimed that the Peripatetic-Maimonidean lineage’s ‘logical outcome is Spinoza’s love of God’.94 Maimonides, who spoke of our human, closed ‘gates of perception’95 that only allowed through ‘flashes of illumination’96 – long before Spinoza, Rolland, and Huxley – argued that such illumination

“immortal” part of the human mind . . . [is] not a continued duration after the death of the body, but a quality of being’ (Harris, 1971, p. 673 (my italics)). 87. See Moreau, [1994] 2021 (Experience and Eternity in Spinoza) for an expansive analysis of this issue. 88. Consider especially the Timaeus, §37 (Plato, [c.360 BC /1965]1976, pp. 94–95). 89. Plotinus, for instance, writes of his own heightened experiences: ‘how can we represent as different from others what seemed, while we were contemplating it, not other than ourselves but perfect at-oneness with us? This, doubtless, is what is back of the injunction of the mystery religions which prohibit revelation to the uninitiated’ (Plotinus, 1964, p. 87; sixth Ennead). 90. De Anima, Bk. III, ch. 5; Aristotle, 1986, p. 204 (my italics). 91. Maimonides, [1190] 1952, p. 195 (my italics). 92. There is evidence that Spinoza read Maimonides’ Guide as he wrote the Ethics (see Harvey, 1981, p. 169). 93. Another Jewish thinker that had reportedly had a significant though indirect influence on Spinoza was Prophetic Kabbalah founder Abraham Abulafia (1240–1291), a commenter on Maimonides’ Guide. Abulafia even spoke of ‘divine intellectual love’ (see Idel, 1988a, p. 20; Harvey, 2007). Other Jewish influences include Abraham Ibn Ezra, Levi Gersonides, Joseph ibn Kaspi, Isaac Polle-gar, Hasdai Crescas, Judah Leon Abravanel, and Abraham Shalom (see Green, 2015). Gentile influences include notably Giordano Bruno and René Descartes. 94. Stated by Julius Guttman, in his Introduction to Maimonides, [1190] 1952, p. 33. 95. Ibid., p. 56. 96. Ibid., p. 43. 97. E.g. Ibid., p. 189 (bk. III, ch. LI, excursus).

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through unity, which he also called ‘the love of God’,97 is ‘the point of all religious practices’.98 If, with James, we identify intoxicants (including psychedelics) as parallel to religious practices as means to achieve the same goal – the ‘mystical state of consciousness’99 as he calls it – and if we classify the amor Dei intellectualis as such a state,100 then it follows that certain psychedelic states may be identified with the Intellectual Love of God. Let us open the gates to see.

3 5-MeO-DMT Phenomenology 5-Methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine, or 5-MeO-DMT for short, is a molecule first synthesized in 1936101 but used traditionally in snuffs from the bark resin of certain Virola trees by Amerindian cultures, who have referred to it as the ‘semen of the sun’.102 The substance is also found in the secretions of the Sonoran Desert Toad, Bufo alvarius.103 These secretions, or their synthetic cousin, are often dried, heated and inhaled as a vapour. The state such inhalation occasions lasts, from a prosaic temporal perspective, for about ten minutes. Though 5-MeO-DMT is a tryptamine, along with the ‘classic’ psychedelics drugs (LSD, psilocybin DMT, etc.), it is, in contradistinction to them, hardly visual, in fact hardly sensible at all. Yet the experience is profound. In the Shulgins’ wide and comprehensive tomes on the chemistry, context, and phenomenology of hundreds of psychoactive substances, 5-MeO-DMT is firmly placed in the class of the most potent psychedelics. The following report therein is typical: [25 mg smoked 5-MeO-DMT] began with a fast-rising sense of excitement and wonder, with an undertone of ‘Now you’ve done it,’ but dominated by a sense of, ‘WOW, This Is IT!’ There was a tremendous sense of speed and acceleration. In perhaps 10 more seconds these feelings built to an intensity I had never

98. Ibid., p. 196 (bk. III, ch. LII). Abraham Abulafia, aforementioned, wrote three handbooks on how to achieve exceptional experience through religious practice (see Idel, 1988b). 99. James, [1902] 1985, p. 379. That James’ conceptions of mystical states align with what Spinoza speaks of, we can begin to show with statements from James such as: ‘In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness.’ (Ibid., p. 419.) 100. As mentioned, R. M. Bucke ([1901] 1957, pp. 276–282) and T. L. S. Sprigge (1984, p. 173), amongst others, have classified it thus. 101. Hoshino and Shimodaira, 1936. 102. Metzner, 2013, p. 12. See also Shulgin and Shulgin, [1997] 2020, pp. 535–538. 103. See Ken Nelson’s seminal text, Bufo alvarius: The Psychedelic Toad of the Sonoran Desert ([1984] 2021). 104. Shulgin and Shulgin, [1997] 2020, pp. 533–534.

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experienced before. The entire universe imploded through my consciousness. It’s as if the mind is capable of experiencing a very large number of objects, situations and feelings, but normally perceives them only one at a time. I felt that my mind was perceiving them all at once. There was no distance, no possibility of examining the experience. This was simply the most intense experience possible; a singularity, a white-out (as opposed to a black out). . . . Here I had the feeling . . . of being part of the universe of beings . . . with a longing for a single group/organism awareness. . . In a few minutes it faded to a . . . strong feeling of gratitude toward the universe in general. . .104

Another account from the Shulgins’ book reveals not only the power but also the potential danger of 5-MeO-DMT: (with an unknown but large amount, smoked) I observed the subject pass very quickly into an almost coma-like state. Within seconds his face became purple and his breathing stopped. I pounded his chest, and breathed for him, and he seemed to emerge in consciousness, with the comment, ‘This is absolute ecstasy.’ . . . In the awake condition he [became] increasingly lucid, but on closing his eyes he became possessed with, what he called, ‘The energy of terror.’ He could not sleep, as upon closing his eyes he felt threatened in a way he could not tolerate. Three days later, medical intervention with antipsychotic medication was provided . . .105

Such darkness is rare yet there. More often, the state is illuminating. The white light reported above commonly inaugurates the state of the 5-MeO substance. A more recent initiate reports that: It’s like a Supernova suddenly exploding silently in the centre of your head . . . like looking at the centre of the Sun at mid-day . . . . You are a drip in the ocean, that suddenly becomes the entire ocean, and then you are the entire ocean in a drop.106

Sun, supernova, ocean – all metaphors for an intensive state of existence that is near impossible to convey through our language, based as it is on ordinary, common concepts and percepts. Music may act as a better metaphor. One can approach such experiences from dismissing them as hallucinatory to accepting them as veridical – i.e. approaching them as illusions or as realities. I shall here explore the latter approach by comparing the 5-MeO state with Spinozism, the latter of which I consider to be a more parsimonious and harmonious

105. Ibid., p. 534. 106. Matthews, 2020, pp. 62–63. 107. A lineage can be traced from Christianity and the dualism of mind and matter to

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approximation to reality than the dualism and panhylism that still haunt the Church and the Academe (to the detriment of the Earth).107 There are certain aspects common to both the 5-MeO state and Spinoza’s amor Dei intellectualis, viz. the eternal/timeless, the non-sensible, the non-rational, the non-conative, the non-intentional, the apophatic, and the post-anti-thanatophobic. Let us compare them. 3.1 The Eternal/Timeless Though the state lasts ten minutes or so to an outside observer, to the inner explorer the 5-MeO state seems to occur in some kind of immediate flash. But by this is not meant a ‘momentary’ flash. The 5-MeO state seems not ten minutes, not a fraction of a second, and not an everlasting infinity of duration. It is more akin to a break away from duration, not a moment therein. After the event one is often surprised and sceptical of the time suggested by the clock. Stepping outside of time is a stepping outside of standard sentience. One has a consciousness of the white sun for a few seconds at the start, but then consciousness is lost, yet, paradoxically, the state entered into is supremely intense – a ‘white-out’ rather than a blackout, as reported above. One enters what seems to be a state of excessive non-time, the eternal. Such a state is common, perhaps essential, to reports of ‘mystical states’,108 and also known through other psychedelic compounds. For instance, in R. H. Ward’s 1957 book on his LSD trips, he notes that he had the ‘suggestion of the infinite as something eternally standing behind a life-time. Once more I was in terror of being annihilated in the infinite’.109 This appears as a heightened sense of Spinoza’s eternality that envelops our lives, in the shadows. Spinoza writes that ‘though we do not recollect that we existed before the body, we nevertheless feel that our mind . . . is eternal, and that this existence it has cannot be defined by time or explained through duration’.110 I suggest that this intuition can be brought to the fore of the mind through 5-MeO, and certain other psychedelic substances in sufficient dosage. If time is but an abstraction forged by our finite minds, then the fathoming of the eternal via psychedelics can be seen as a variant of Spinoza’s intellectual love of God/Nature.

mechanism (a seventeenth-century form of panhylism), physicalism (modern form of panhylism), and industrialization, to the ecological crisis (see, e.g. Haeckel, [1895/1899] 1905; Klages, [1913] 2013, White, 1967; Naess, 1977; Merchant, 1980; Matthews, 1991). There is much to say about the Church’s suppression of Spinozism, the apotheosis of Nature, and the emergence of the ecological crisis. 108. See Russell, [1914] 1951, pp. 21ff. 109. Ward, 1957, p. 65. Interestingly Ward related such experiences to the thoughts of Russian thinker P. D. Ouspensky. 110. Ethics, VP23s; Spinoza, 1985, pp. 607–608. 111. Ethics, IIP40s2; Spinoza, 1985, p. 477.

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3.2 The Non-Sensible Psychedelics commonly inaugurate experiences closely associated with radical visualization, augmenting outer perception and fostering inner perceptions. Often there is a fusion of percepts and concepts, with additions of states of mind hitherto unknown. For Spinoza, such experience per se would generally constitute a special type of the ‘first kind of knowledge’, experience ‘mutilated, confused, and without order’.111 The 5-MeO state, however, is distinct as a psychedelic as it is not consciously visual – bar the initial white light that dominates over all other sensations. One loses all the senses, all concepts and reason (the ‘second kind of knowledge’) – one is cut off, as it were, yet something profound remains. Spinoza’s ‘third kind of knowledge’, intuition, like this experience, is non-sensible, non-conceptual, and non-inferential (non-rational, not irrational) – though it is cognitive. 3.3 The Non-Conative But the state is not conative, that is, the conatus essential to our finite being, the drive to persevere in our being, is lost. The core element of the self is lost. There is no will or appetite. Emotions, for Spinoza, are derivative of conatus: joy comes with the successes of the conatus, sadness with its failures of achievement. Thus, without conatus, there is no self and no emotions associated therewith. Spinoza’s God (Nature) is without conatus or emotion, and not bound to a particular body. The experience of 5-MeO in this manner again aligns with these ontological aspects of Spinoza’s system. The finite mind is lost through its forging into the mind of Nature. This union is the highest virtue,112 though it is a bliss (‘blessedness’) without necessary relation to the body’s conatus. 3.4 The Post-Anti-Thanatological There are thus teloi beyond the needs, desires, and emotions of the finite body. It is this acquaintance, this unity, momentary yet eternal, that is, after the event, antithanatophobic: one begins to lose the fear of death, because one knows it to be not annihilation but fusion. Attaining tranquillity of mind through this state and later (second-kind) reflection is the final stage of Spinoza’s virtue ethics:113 the mastery of the ‘passions’, the negative emotions, which include, finally, the fear of death, that afflicts mankind. Associating psychedelics with such metaphysics grounding virtue ethics shows us the potential modern-day end-of-life therapeutic value such substances hold.

112. ‘[The] greatest virtue is understanding things by the third kind of knowledge.’ Ethics, VP25; Spinoza, 1985, p. 608. 113. Ethics, VP38; Spinoza, 1985, p.p. 613ff. 114. Brentano, [1874] 2015, pp. 92–93.

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3.5 The Non-Intentional Though the 5-MeO state, and the amor Dei intellectualis, are cognitive, they are so more as a ‘state’ than as an ‘experience’, as the latter carries connotations of perception, conception, emotions, duration, memory, desires, and – linked thereto – intentionality. What is of perhaps special note to the phenomenologist is that the state we are referring to exists without the common framework of subject to object, of knower to known. The fusion of the finite and infinite mind inhibit this, but without inhibiting mind as such. Many have accepted German philosopher Franz Brentano’s claim that a necessary condition for mentality is that mentality must have an object. As Brentano says: ‘Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself . . . . In presentation something is presented, in judgement something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on.’114 To distinguish the mental from the physical, Brentano claims that, ‘the reference to something as an object, is a distinguishing characteristic of all mental phenomena’.115 5-MeO, however, falsifies such a claim. There can be mentality without intentionality. There are no concepts, percepts which could act as objects; moreover, there is no knower distinct from known – the fusion effaces the subjectobject dichotomy. Deeper, or higher, states of mind reveal the limitations of proposing conditions and essences of what the mind is or can be. The ambit of any philosopher of mind should encompass these higher regions. 3.6 The Profound The preceding comparative aspects are mostly apophatic: they describe what the state is not, rather than what it is. Through this via negativa I have sought to show the similarities between the 5-MeO state and the state Spinoza calls the amor Dei intellectualis. I should not say that the two states are qualitatively identical, but rather that the former is a more immersive variant of the latter – these exceptional states are not binary but rather lie on a spectrum. On a lower end of this spectrum of the unity of the finite mind with the infinite one, lies nature connectedness – finite inter-mind fusion: the extended mind (yet not extended ad infinitum). Panpsychism and pantheism both lie on an experiential line ranging from the finite to the infinite – they differ in degree, not kind, in terms of merged experience. What 5-MeO and amor Dei intellectualis both share, however, is a feeling of immense profundity. As mentioned, the conatus is lost, and with it the emotions, except, if one can classify it as an emotion, this sublime feeling116 of importance, though an importance without relation to an object of importance (without intentionality). The trail of this feeling can persist for weeks, months, a lifetime. There is nothing more profound than the cosmos, Nature, itself; it is the non-

115. Ibid., p. 102. 116. See Dickins, in this volume. 117. Jonas, 1973, p. 52.

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religious blessedness Spinoza speaks of, associated, however, with the notion of Gloria in the religious tomes. Hans Jonas argues that we require a new ethics to counter our ecological issues, one that must now factor Nature as a vulnerability and prime value. This cannot be achieved, he writes, without ‘restoring the category of the sacred, the category most destroyed by the scientific enlightenment’117 – but, prima facie paradoxically, the restoration of the sacred cannot be achieved by religion, which is anthropocentric and ‘dead’ to us.118 Spinoza’s identification of God and Nature, and his identification of finite and infinite mind in the amor Dei intellectualis, offers us a route out of our alienation from Nature,119 providing us with a secular approach to the sacred, one that would thus meet Jonas’ aspiration to address planetary concern.120

4 Coda As we saw Deleuze observe, Spinozism can come via a long study of a nexus of concepts, or via a flash of intuition. One might speculate that Spinoza started with the intuition and proceeded to explicate it through his ‘geometric order’, à la Descartes.121 In other words, the ‘intuition’ spoken of is not an appendage to the end of the Ethics, but rather its inception. The intuition sparks the system, the system substantiates the intuition. If we now identify the intuition with certain psychedelic states, we can then proffer the Spinozan-Psychedelic Symbiosis: certain unitive psychedelic states are an intuition of the Spinozan system; the Spinozan system can, in turn, substantiate the psychedelic state. This flash of Spinozism benefits not only our tranquillity as individuals but also, potentially, advances the solution to the ecological crisis of the world. The white sun of substance is the radiant sustenance to our orbiting planet.

References Aristotle (2004) The Metaphysics, trans. H. Lawson-Tancred (London: Penguin) Artinian, T. (2022) Transpersonal Gratitude and Psychedelic Altered States of Consciousness, in: eds. C. Hauskeller and P. Sjöstedt-Hughes, Philosophy and Psychedelics (London: Bloomsbury Academic)

118. In the Nietzschean sense. 119. On alienation, see Hauskeller, in this volume. 120. Ernst Haeckel had already proposed this in the late nineteenth century. See Haeckel, 1892/1894, and [1895/1899]1905, ch. XVIII: ‘Our Monistic Religion’, pp. 217–226. See also Holt, 1971. 121. Descartes was inspired to his philosophy through an intuition in a dream (see Maritain, 1946).

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Bayle, P. ([1697/1702] 1826) An Historical and Critical Dictionary, Selected and Abridged from the Great Work of Peter Bayle. With a Life of Bayle, in Four Vols. – Vol. III (London: Hunt and Clarke) Bergson, H. ([1896]1999) Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books) Bruno, G. ([1584]1998) Cause, Principle and Unity, trans. R. J. Blackwell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Boethius ([524]2008) The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. H. R. James (East Bridgewater: Signature Press) Brentano, F. ([1874]2015) Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, trans. L. L. McAlister, et al. (Abingdon: Routledge) Bucke, R. M. ([1901]1947) Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co.) Carlisle, C. (2020) George Eliot’s Spinoza: An Introduction, in: B. Spinoza, Ethics, trans G. Eliot (Princeton: Princeton University Press) Chalmers, D. J. (1995) Facing up to the problem of consciousness, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2:3, pp. 200–219 Curley E. (2013) How Spinozistic Was Toland’s Pantheism?, in: eds. J. Diller and A. Kasher, Models of God and Alternative Ultimate Realities (Dordrecht: Springer), pp. 643–653 Deleuze, G. (1968/2013) Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. M. Joughin (New York: Zone Books) Deleuze, G. (1970/1988) Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. R. Hurley (San Francisco: City Light Books) Dickins, R. (2022) Power and the Sublime in Aldous Huxley’s Drug Aesthetics, in: eds. C. Hauskeller and P. Sjöstedt-Hughes, Philosophy and Psychedelics (London: Bloomsbury Academic) Gerrish, B. A. (1967) The Secret Religion of Germany: Christian Piety and the Pantheism Controversy, The Journal of Religion, 67:4, pp. 437–455 Green, A. (2015) A Portrait of Spinoza as a Maimonidean Reconsidered, Shofar, 34:1, pp. 81–106 Haeckel, E. (1892/1894) Monism as Connecting Religion and Science: The Confession of Faith of a Man of Science, trans. J. Gilchrist (London: A. and C. Black) Haeckel, E. ([1866] 1988) Generelle morphologie der organismen. Allgemeine grundzüge der organischen formen-wissenschaft, mechanisch begründet durch die von Charles Darwin reformirte descendenztheorie, 2 vols. (Berlin: De Gruyter) Haeckel, E. ([1895/1899] 1905) The Riddle of the Universe – at the Close of the Nineteenth Century, trans. J. McCabe (New York and London: Harper and Bros.) Harris, E. E. (1971) Spinoza’s Theory of Human Immortality, The Monist, 55:4, pp. 668–685 Harvey, W. (1981) A Portrait of Spinoza as a Maimonidean, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 19:2, pp. 151–172 Hauskeller, C. (2022) Individualization and Alienation: Paradoxes in Psychedelic Psychotherapy, in: eds. C. Hauskeller and P. Sjöstedt-Hughes, Philosophy and Psychedelics (London: Bloomsbury Academic) Holt, N. R. (1971) Ernst Haeckel’s Monistic Religion, Journal of the History of Ideas, 32:2, pp. 265–280 Hoshino T. and Shimodaira K. (1936) Über die synthese des bufotenin-methyl-äthers (5-methoxy-n-dimethyl-tryptamin) und bufotenins (synthesen in der indol-gruppe. xv), Bull Chem Soc Jpn, 11:3, pp. 221–224 Hume, D. ([1739] 1985) A Treatise of Human Nature (London: Penguin)

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Huxley, A. ([1954/1956] 2004) The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell (London: Vintage Books) Idel, M. (1988a) Studies in Ecstatic Kabbalah (New York: SUNY) Idel, M. (1988b) The Mystical Experience in Abraham Abulafia, trans. J. Chipman (New York: SUNY) James, W. ([1902] 1985) The Varieties of Religious Experience (London: Penguin) Jonas, H. (1973) Technology and Responsibility Reflections on the New Tasks of Ethics, Social Research, 40:1, pp. 31–54 Katz, S. T. (1978) Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism, in: S. T. Katz, ed. Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (London: Sheldon Press), pp. 22–74 Kellner, M. (2006) Kavod, Shekhinah, and Created Light, in: M. Kellner, Maimonides’ Confrontation with Mysticism (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press), pp. 179–215 Kim, J. (2005) Mental Causation and Consciousness: Our Two Mind–Body Problems, in Physicalism, or Something Near Enough (Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp. 1–31. Klages, L. ([1913] 2013) Man and Earth, in: L. Klages (2013) The Biocentric Worldview: Selected Essays and Poems by Lugwig Klages, trans. J. D. Pryce (London: Arktos), pp. 26–44 Knight, W., ed. (1882) Spinoza; Four Essays by Land, Kuno Fischer, J. Van Vloten, and Ernest Renan (London: Williams and Norgate) Kopenawa, D. and Albert, B. (2010/2013) The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman, trans. N. Elliot and A. Dundy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) Levine, J. (1983) Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 64, pp. 354–361 Leuba, J. H. (1925) The Psychology of Religious Mysticism (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, & Co.) Locke, J. ([1689] 1964) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 5th edn. (London: Collins Sons and Co.) Luna, L. E. and White, S. F. (2016) The Ayahuasca Reader: Encounters with the Amazon’s Sacred Vine (Santa Fe: Synergetic Press) Lundborg, P. (2014) Note towards the Definition of a Psychedelic Philosophy, The Fenris Wolf, 7, pp. 77–92 Maimonides ([1190] 1952) The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. C. Rabin (Indianapolis: Hackett) Maritain, J. (1947) The Dream of Descartes, trans. M. L. Andison (London: Editions Poetry London) Matthews, F. (1990) The Ecological Self (London: Routledge) Matthews, J. (2020) My First Trip: 5-MeO and Me, Psychedelic Press Journal, XXXI, pp. 61–65 McTaggart, J. M. E. (1908) The Unreality of Time, Mind, 17:68, pp. 457–474 McTaggart, J. M. E. (1927) The Nature of Existence, Vol. II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) Merchant, C. (1980) The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York: HarperCollins) Metzner, R. (2013) The Toad and the Jaguar: A Field Report of Underground Research on a Visionary Medicine (Berkeley: Regent Press) Middleton, C., ed. and trans. (1969) Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche (Indianapolis: Hackett) Montague, W. P. (1912) A Realistic Theory of Truth and Error, in: E. B. Holt, W. T. Marvin, W. P. Montague et al. (1912) The New Realism: Coöperative Studies in Philosophy (New York: Macmillan), pp. 252–300

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Moreau, F-P. ([1994] 2021) Experience and Eternity in Spinoza, trans. R. Boncardo (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press) Naess, A. (1977) Spinoza and Ecology, Philosophia, 7, pp. 45–54 Nelson, K. ([1984] 2021) Bufo alvarius: The Psychedelic Toad of the Sonoran Desert (Venom Press) Novalis (1960) Novalis Schriften: die Werke Friedrich von Hardenburgs, Vol. 3 (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer) Nietzsche, F. ([1889/1895] 1968) Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin) Parsons, W. B. (1999) The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling: Revisioning the Psychanalytic Theory of Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press) Plato ([c. 360 bc /1965] 1976) Timaeus and Critias, 2nd edn., trans. D. Lee (Harmondsworth: Penguin) Plotinus (1964) The Essential Plotinus: Representative Treatises from the Enneads, trans. S. J. Elmer O’Brien (Indianapolis: Hackett) Pollock, F. (1880) Spinoza: His Life and Philosophy (London: Kegan Paul & Co.) Rolland, R. ([1924] 2014) Empédocle suivi de L’Éclaire de Spinoza, ed. R. Dadoun (Paris: Éditions Manucius) Rolland, R. ([1942]1959) Le Voyage intérieur, new edn. (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel) Russell, B. ([1914] 1951) Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd) Shulgin, A. and Shulgin, A. ([1997] 2020) TiHKAL: The Continuation (Santa Fe: Transform Press) Silverman, R. M. (1995) Baruch Spinoza: Outcast Jew, Universal Sage (Northwood: Symposium Press) Simmons, L. (1891) Goethe and Religion, Publications of the English Goethe Society, 6:1, pp. 52–65. Sjöstedt-Hughes, P. (2015) Noumenautics: Metaphysics – Meta-Ethics – Psychedelics (Falmouth: Psychedelic Press) Sjöstedt-Hughes, P. (2019) The First Scientific Psychonaut Sir Humphry Davy: NitroIdealism, Spinozism, and Encounters Alien-Ethereal, Psychedelic Press Journal, XXVI, pp. 7–32 Sjöstedt-Hughes, P. (2021) Modes of Sentience: Psychedelics, Metaphysics, Panpsychism (London: Psychedelic Press) Spinoza, B. (1985/1988) The Collected Works of Spinoza, Vol. I, ed. and trans. E. Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press) Spinoza, B. (2016) The Collected Works of Spinoza, Vol. II, ed. and trans. E. Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press) Sprigge, T. L. S. (1984) Theories of Existence (Harmondsworth: Penguin) Staal, F. (1975) Exploring Mysticism (Harmondsworth: Penguin) Strassman, R. (2014) Kavod: God’s Glory, in: R. Strassman, DMT and the Soul of Prophecy (Rochester: Park Street Press), pp. 194–202 Strawson, G. (2009) Real Materialism: and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press) Tiebout, H. M. (1956) Deus, Sive Natura, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 16:4, pp. 512–521 Thomas, D. J. and Smith, J. M. (1990) Joseph Raphson, F.R.S., Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 44:2, pp. 151–167 Viereck, G. S. (1930) Glimpses of the Great (New York: Macauley)

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Ward, R. H. (1957) A Drug-Taker’s Notes (London: Victor Gollancz) White, L. (1967) The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis, Science, 155:3767, pp. 1203– 1207 Whitehead, A. N. ([1925] 1935) Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmillan) Wolfson, H. A. ([1935] 1966) The Philosophy of Spinoza: Two Volumes in One (New York: Meridian Books) Wordsworth, W. (1994) The Works of William Wordsworth (Ware: Wordsworth Editions) Zaehner, R. C. (1957) Mysticism Sacred and Profane: An Inquiry into some Varieties of Praeternatural Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

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Chapter 14 J OU R N EY I N G I N T H E R E A L M O F T H E U N C O N S C IOU S : C A R L J U N G’ S L I B E R N OV U S A N D T H E P SYC H E D E L IC E X P E R I E N C E Johanna Sopanen

As Alfred North Whitehead once suggested, the true method of discovery takes flight in the ‘thin air of imaginative generalisation’, and when discussing a topic as complex and vast as psychedelics, that must be our starting point, too. Although this kind of inductive reasoning may seem simplified for some, regarding the phenomenology of the psychedelic experience it is our only option. During the past decades our understanding of psychedelic substances has increased exponentially. We know that by altering the brain’s neurochemistry psychedelics can have profound effects on people’s way of perceiving the world. Yet, a veil of mystery still hangs over the experience and its ontological implications. While science has been a wonderful tool for revealing some aspects of these mysterious substances, we remain humbled by the depth of philosophical and spiritual questions that psychedelics inevitably present. Carl Jung is known as one of the founding figures of the psychoanalytic movement, as well as one of the most unorthodox psychiatrists of the past century. He is also known as a very original thinker, whose theories on dreams, imagination, and intuition are unparallelled. Jung’s legacy has resurfaced during the recent years, in part due to the publication of his magnum opus The Red Book: Liber Novus in 2009, and the subsequent publication of the associated notebooks, the Black Books, in 2020. These intimate accounts of Jung’s visionary journeys have opened up the opportunity for his theories to be examined in an entirely new light – that of altered states of consciousness. Although it seems unlikely that Jung experimented with psychedelics, the Red Book reveals the foundational importance of visionary states for Jung’s work, and promotes the need for re-evaluation of his ideas from this perspective. In this chapter, I will examine the relevance of Jung’s experiences and his writings for the ongoing discussion on psychedelic experiences. I will evaluate how Jung used mind-altering states to fuel his creativity; and how they created the foundation for his later works. Based on this, I examine the ways in which his 237

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stance may be relevant and valuable for contemporary psychedelic explorers. More specifically, I argue that Jung’s writings on the ego, and his personal experiences may offer us insight into underying dynamics of altered states. In addition, his symbolic approach to the unconscious provides an alternative system for examining the psyche and challenges certain premises of present psychological research on mind-altering states. Jung’s work reminds us that our psyches are endlessly complex systems with unfathomable capacities for healing and growth. Furthermore, his theory opens up an opportunity to view altered states as tools by which the potential of the personality can be manifested, while offering a nuanced perspective their effects. I believe this is why his contribution may prove vital for realizing a comprehensive psychology of altered states of consciousness that supports a sustainable and holistic evolution of the personality.

1 Soul’s Calling Scott J. Hill (2017), a pioneering author on Jungian psychology and psychedelics, argues that Jung’s radically inquisitive approach to the psyche, in combination with his openness to visionary experiences, has already made him an established figure within the field of psychedelic psychotherapy and psychedelic research in general. Although studies on psychedelic substances utilizing Jung’s body of work are scarce, some preliminary research on the application of his theory in a therapeutic context has been conducted.1 Furthermore, as will become evident in this chapter, Jung was to the very core ‘a psychonaut’ (from the Ancient Greek ψυχή psychē ‘soul, spirit, mind’ and ναύτης naútēs ‘sailor, navigator’ – ‘sailor of the soul’).2 His efforts to contextualize the workings of the imagination, combined with his lifelong practice of psychiatry, make him a notable authority for studying philosophical questions relating to altered states of consciousness. Since the beginning of his career, Jung suspected that immeasurable potential lay in any foreign state of consciousness that arose in the psyche. He was well acquinted with the trance-states of the mediums he studied during the early part of his career, and was among the first psychiatrists to suspect that the rambles of schizophrenic patients may hold something of value.3 It can even be argued that his open-mindedness towards altered states of consciousness saved him during the most crucial period of his life. In 1912, shortly after Jung’s notorious collaboration with Sigmund Freud came to a close, Jung withdrew from public life. He gave up his position at Burghölzi hospital and began a private practice at his new home in Küsnacht, at lakeside near Zürich. Around that time he became tormented by unsettling dreams and visions, which would cause severe disruption to his day-to-day life. The visions were physically straining, and lasted hours, often

1. Cohen, 2017; Mahr and Sweigart, 2020. 2. Blom, 2010. 3. Jung, 2014, p. 353.

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leaving him shaken and confused. In October 1913, on a train journey to Schaffhausen, Jung had his first significant vision, of Europe drowning in blood. This vision was followed by another, and a few months later by a series of intense dreams.4 According to Jung, only when the First World War broke out in August 1914 did he realize that he had not been losing his mind, but that his visions were messages from his unconscious and concerned the collective situation of Europe.5 From there on he began to deliberately approach the unconscious by practicing a technique now known as active imagination. Drawing on his prior research into trance states, Jung learned to hypnotise himself in order to reach a state in which he was fully overtaken by unconscious material. This enabled a flood of profoundly symbolic and mythological material to surface from his unconscious, bringing into creation the visionary Black Books. He later transcribed the material in great detail to a large, red leather notebook, now known as The Red Book. The meticulous task of writing down his experiences in Latin and German calligraphy, as well as creating vivid paintings, took Jung seventeen years (although the most intense period of writing the notebooks was between 1912 and 1917). He later referred to the time of writing The Red Book as ‘the most difficult experiment of his entire life’.6 Jung did not want The Red Book or the associated notebooks published in his lifetime, likely because he realized that the prevailing cultural climate was not yet prepared for his discoveries. However, he regarded them as his most important works as they had created the foundation for his psychological theory. At the time, Jung reached towards the unconscious, because he was convinced that his pursuit held great significance. Yet he was never fully devoid of doubt, and frequently questioned himself. Years later, he told the infamous historian of religions Mircea Eliade: ‘As a psychiatrist I became worried, wondering if I was not on the way to ‘doing schizoprenia’, as we said in the language of those days. . .’7 Yet he continued suspecting that his advances into the unconscious would ultimately shine light on various ‘hidden’ aspects of the psyche, which would consequently unlock important aspects of the personality. Initially, Jung viewed his experiences as a psychological experiment but, by the end, his life had been radically transformed as he realized that the fantasy reality that he encountered in his visions represented an archaic modality of consciousness which had been predominantly lost in the modern era; his role was to create the foundations for a new psychology that incorporated this vision. Jung came to understand that the prevailing element across cultures was mythology and that the importance of its symbolic meanings for human consciousness was no longer recognized. At the heart of the matter was the phenomenological encounter with the Other, the collective unconscious. These direct encounters with imaginal realms had been the ‘myth’ of the primitive man,

4. Jung, 2009, p. 29. 5. Jung, 2011. 6. Jung, 2009, epigraph. 7. Jung, 2020, p. 37.

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and consequently Jung thought they were the means through which the modern man could find healing. Later Jung argued that one without a myth or the ability to understand the symbols was uprooted, and did not possess true link between their past-, and the contemporary human society.8 Therefore, the task that Jung believed befell not only him, but all modernity, was the revival of a personal myth, which Jung later denoted as the quest for the ‘Self ’. This integration of his experiences to his later works began in 1916 lecture ‘The Structure of the Unconscious’ in which Jung differentiated three layers of the psyche: (1) consciousness, or the ego; (2) the personal unconscious; and (3) the collective unconscious, which he also later called the ‘true basis of the individual psyche’.9 He asserted that a fulfilling psychological life was always a product of individuation, of a successful communication between these layers. Individuation, which would later become one of the cornerstones of his psychology, stood for this lifelong ‘collaboration with the unconscious’. Through this process the personality progressed towards clarity and wholeness. Individuation always entailed tension between the opposites which. in Jung’s case. manifested as the chaos and uncertainty that arose at the peak of his professional life. The visions demanded he destroy his intellect, the aspect of his personality that he most valued. As a consequence, he was forced to turn to the opposite – the unknown shadow, another concept which later became a key element for his theory. By learning about the chaos abiding in himself, Jung ultimately, and seemingly paradoxically, was able to develop personally and professionally. Only when he gave up his pride and recognition was he given the access to the intuitive wisdom of the soul – an act that required the re-evaluation and humbling of his ego.

2 Myth of Ego-Death Since Jung’s death in 1961, it has become widely accepted that psychedelic experiences have an impact on the ego, the conscious experience of the self. Several recent scientific studies specifically measure ego-alterations during psychedelic experiences induced by a substance.10 The default-mode network is frequently seen as a neurobiological correspondent of the ego, due to findings that suggest certain levels of disintegration of the network during the experiences.11 Although the ego in most psychological research simply stands for the conscious centre of the personality, the ego in relation to psychedelic substances has, throughout the years, gained its own particular meaning. Ego, in this case, is often seen as a set of ideas and experiences that belong to a particular person, and frequently as something that stands in the way of spiritual attainment. Hence, many

8. C. G. Jung, 2015a, p. xxix. 9. Jung, 1969, p. 152. 10. Lebedev et al., 2015; Letheby and Gerrans, 2017; Nour et al., 2016. 11. Letheby and Gerrans, 2017.

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people still view the so-called ‘ego-death’ as the most desirable outcome of a psychedelic journey. It is assumed that ego-loss temporarily frees a person from their learned standards of personhood, and creates space for a rebirth of the personality. The notion of the ego-death became pervasive through perhaps the most famous trip guidebook ever written: The Psychedelic Experience, A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, published in 1964 by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner. The guidebook, loosely based on a translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead (TBD), argues that LSD models the Tibetan funerary ritual in which the initiate goes through the experience of death before being spiritually reborn. This symbolic death, which in the manual is seen as the death of the ego, is framed as a necessary step for the new life to begin.12 Presuming that psychedelics do decondition the ego, this created an unnerving scenario where psychedelic highs were approached with a sincere belief that they open a portal to a mystical consciousness. This belief has created a sustained myth around psychedelic use and spirituality, creating unrealistic expectations without taking into account the context beyond the experience. It is not surprising that the psychedelic pioneers’ decision to conceptualize psychedelic experiences with a spiritual practice of a distant and completely foreign culture has been criticized. Religious studies scholar Morgan Shipley argues that by viewing psychedelics as a direct access point to the mystical insights of the East, one risks partaking in a distinct form of Orientalism, in which the original orthodox context is left behind while certain aspects are being freely appropriated and applied as a counterpoint to modernity. ‘One could go further and argue, as Harry Oldmeadow hints, that such appropriation simply reifies the commodity/consumption model of modern capitalism – in turning East, the sixties counterculture bought into life they barely understood’, he notes.13 A second important consideration is the weight that people placed on gaining a mystical or transcendental ego-loss experiences. In the foreword to the 2007 edition of the Psychedelic Experience, Daniel Pinchbeck argues that, in this context, the psychedelic experience of transcendence may be a trade off for structures that guide morality. He regards the manual as ‘an important cultural artifact’ with no real value for navigating psychedelic states. In contrast, Pinchbeck argues: ‘While psychedelics allow us to access different states of awareness, their use does not necessarily compel a transformation that would turn the developmental possibilities glimpsed in those states. . . into positive character traits. Ego-inflation and distorted judgment can be the result’.14

12. Leary et al., 1964, p. 5. 13. Shipley, 2015, p. 153. 14. Leary et al., 2007, pp. xi–xii.

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3 Dangers of Self-knowledge Jung, who wrote the initial foreword to the first German translation of the TBD in 1935, had a different outlook on the rise of Eastern practices in the West. In the foreword he warned westerners against blindly adopting customs of eastern traditions. He believed eastern and western consciousness were fundamentally different, and framed this as our cultures’ unintegrated understanding of dualism. He believed that Westerners had a tendency to differentiate between metaphysics and psychology, which the Tibetan book does not do. In this way, Jung assumed that any Westerner would struggle to grasp the nuance of the Tibetan tradition due to our differentiated psychological and cultural framework. He admired the Buddhist understanding, in which the creative potential of the psyche was considered the basis of metaphysics. He also acknowledged that the Bardo Thodol was not only a book for the dying, but equally represented the life of the unconscious, and spiritual rebirth.15 Yet, he did not believe that Western culture was prepared to understand the depths of the experience. ‘The soul is assuredly not small, but the radiant Godhead itself. The West finds this statement either very dangerous, if not downright blasphemous, or else accepts it unthinkingly and then suffers from theosophical inflation. Somehow we always have a wrong attitude to these things’, he conveyed in the foreword.16 At the time, Jung’s criticism was dismissed because the Harvard psychonauts believed his understanding of mystical states to be limited. His cautionary approach was regarded as lacking the ultimate experience, which the authors felt they had undergone.17 Their arrogance has had far-reaching implications which still influence psychedelic explorers today. By diminishing the value of nonsubstance-induced psychedelic states, the authors created a division between naturally occurring altered states and those induced by substances. (This distinction has later been brought into question by practices such as holotropic breathwork, which suggests that substance-induced states may have more in common with the so-called ‘naturally occurring’ altered states than previously thought).18 They also were naïve enough to believe that psychedelics would have a consistent effect independent of cultural context or the individual psychology. Jung, on the contrary, would have most likely avoided recommending Tibetan funerary rites as a psychological model for Western psychedelic users. Although he believed that communication with the unconscious could enable the individual to discover new depths in themselves, and even open up a wholly different outlook on reality, he remained cautious about anyone’s desire for expansive experiences. ‘Even self-knowledge, assumed by all wise men to be the best and most efficacious, has different effects on different characters’ Jung wrote.19

15. Evans-Wentz, 1936. 16. Evans-Wentz, 1936, p. xxxvi. 17. Leary et al., 1964. 18. Grof and Bennett, 1993; Taylor, 2011. 19. Tacey, 2012, p. 100.

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For Jung, altered states were the vehicle through which he could explore the depths in himself, and in the collective psyche of man. He believed this process to be very similar to what the ancient Gnostics had experienced while obtaining ‘gnosis’, the divine insight of spiritual mysteries.20 Yet, he did not want to openly admit that his personal advances towards the unconscious were a spiritual practice. Only privately, in an unpublished essay written in 1916, Jung referred to the method he used to access the unconscious as ‘the transcendent function’. In short, the ‘means by which the unity or self-archetype is realized’ and by which the Self-archetype, the perfected personality, can come into being. This indicates that Jung did indeed believe that his experiences had a divine quality. Yet, naming his spiritual experiences was not his intention. Rather, he wished to create a framework within which people could conceptualize symbolic narratives by which the unconscious communicated. Furthermore, having experienced the full force of the unconscious while writing The Red Book, Jung had gained a certain respect and reverence for the unconscious, and understood that its mysteries were not for everybody. In the essay Jung also argued that the ‘method’ he used to access altered states was not without its dangers, and ought to be practiced with great caution. He argued that the unconscious can ‘flood’ the conscious mind, which could result in one of the two conflicting modes of reaction. In the first, the individual may feel burdened by the new and overwhelming experience and run the risk of becoming depressed. In the second scenario, the individual may become filled with selfimportance and confidence, in actuality to conceal a profound sense of impotence. Jung related this state of psychological inflation to Goethe’s and Adler’s notion of ‘godlikeness’, which is characterized by the individual attributing a number of omnipotent qualities to themselves.21 In this case, the person mistakes the collective and personal layers of the unconscious, and susequently views their ego as identical with the experience. This can, in turn, result in an inflation of the personality towards religious frenzy, megalomania, and delusional ideation. This conclusion is, again, most likely drawn from his personal experiences. In the Red Book, Jung is frequently overtaken by unconscious material. Consequently, his writing becomes filled with grandiosity and self-importance. For instance, in one of the chapters Jung learns that he is ‘the Christ’, and that his destiny is to die on the cross. Jung is horrified and resists the blasphemous image, but at the same time a part of him believes that he is the new saviour of mankind. After Jung has been confronted with his grandiose shadow, he understands that insanity, too, must be grappled with, and that only with the help of the ego can one’s sanity be retained. Years after the experience Jung came to view his crucifixion as the ultimate test of the ego, a strikingly similar test that Nietzsche also had to undergo. He came to realize that the crucifixion was to be understood as a symbolic image, not as a literal experience. According to Jung, this is where he and Nietzsche

20. Segal, 2013. 21. Jung, 1973, p. 2918.

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differed.22 For him, Nietzsche’s madness was an example of what could happen if the symbolic nature of the image was not understood as such. The authors of The Psychedelic Explorers’ Guide were quick to disregard Jung’s warnings based on the fact that he had (supposedly) no experience with psychedelic substances. Their ignorance reflects the dangers that self-assuredness can have, and that can, at times, be accentuated during and after psychedelic states. Jung asserted that the key not only for successful experiences, but also for successful integration, was the sufficient preparation of the conscious personality, the ego. In a 1957 lecture series, Jung noted: ‘It depends entirely on the preparedness and attitude of the conscious mind whether the irruption of these forces and the images and ideas associated with them will tend towards construction or catastrophe’.23 Unlike the psychedelic pioneers who believed that the conscious self must die for the spiritual rebirth to happen, Jung believed that a certain continuity of the ego was necessary, and that the ego, too, had to be protected against the forces of the unconscious.24 He viewed the ego as a mediator between the unconscious and the conscious mind, as an infinitesimally small fragment of the totality of the psyche, yet a vital element of self-realization.

4 Symbolic Meanings The Liber Novus is essentially the story of Jung regaining his soul and overcoming feelings of alienation. After all, Jung finally realized that he had not gone insane, rather that his madness served a purpose. His task, as he finally came to see it, was to find a solution for the disquietude he observed in the psychology of modern man. Jung came to view himself as a ‘guinea pig’ for an entirely new mode of psychotherapy, the kind that was not focused on healing a psychopathology, but rather bringing about radical changes in the individual. Sonu Shamdasani, the scholar and the translator of Jung’s visionary works, claims that Jung’s experiences entirely changed his outlook.25 He no longer believed that the presence of mythological fantasies were indicative of psychopathology. Rather, through his self-experimentation, he began to consider that what was significant was not the presence of any particular content but the attitude of the individual towards it.26 Jung understood that his experiences in The Red Book were likely to seem like madness to the superficial observer, but that if one could look deeper, this would be the beginning of a journey towards self-realization. The challenge of his work has ever since been the limitation of language. Jung insisted that he was only interested in ‘psychological facts on the border of

22. Jung, 1969, p. 162. 23. Jung, 2013, p. 75. 24. Jung, 2015. 25. Jung, 2020, 39. 26. Ibid., pp. 39–41.

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knowable’, and that his job was not to assert metaphysical or theological facts.27 In his opinion, psychological science was absurdly limited in its methods and terminology. The biggest underlying dilemma that Jung spent the rest of his career circulating, and which his works on synchronicity and a-causality touch upon, was that there seemed to be no clear distinction between consciousness and the unconscious. Instead of a separation, what he found was a liminal space in which consciousness sometimes obtrudes on the unconscious (as when one realizes they are dreaming while in a dream), and vice versa (when the unconscious becomes apparent in a conscious reality in the form of a synchronicity). This is the same conundrum to which Jung referred to when he warned Westeners against adopting Eastern traditions too lightly. He asserted that the experience in itself was always merely an introduction to the responsibility that the individual had to later bear. The real challenge was to successfully integrate the unconscious images without experiencing inflation, a task that would be impossible without the ego. This was also why Jung held a certain prejudice against psychoactive substances. He knew that encounters with the unconscious could require years of persistent integrative work. ‘It is really the mistake of our age: We think it is enough to discover new things, but we don’t realize that knowing more demands a corresponding development of morality’, he would later express in a letter to Victor White.28 Finally, Jung’s stance poses a major challenge for psychological research on altered states today. Jungian literary critique Susan Rowland writes in her book Taking the Soul’s Path that the psyche cannot be fully known, therefore psychological research that does not acknowledge this truth is, in itself, fuelled by an ego-inflation. An inflated ego can acknowledge no Other, and is therefore bound to treat the unconscious as an object.29 The present challenge is to conduct psychological research that acknowledges this intricate communication between the researcher and the object of the study, the psyche. Jung knew that true objectivity was not possible. Henceforth, he chose to view his experiences as symbolic abstractions, as it was particularly the liminality of symbol that preserved psychological wholeness. ‘The symbol is neither abstract nor concrete, neither irrational nor rational, neither real or unreal. It is always both’, he would later write.30 His last book Man and his Symbols (1958) was his final attempt to communicate to a mainstream audience the importance of the symbols and their role for a future psychology.

5 Conclusion Recent publications of Jung’s visionary works have enabled the examination of his work in the light of altered states of consciousness. They reveal that the source of his

27. Jung, 2015a, foreword. 28. Jung and White, 2007, p. 81. 29. Rowland, 2019, p. 71. 30. Jung, 1968, p. 403.

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later creativity was a period of madness during which he became acquainted with what he later called ‘the collective unconscious’. This episode led to the formulation of his most important ideas. Jung believed that he encountered an archaic modality of consciousness that could act as a tool for healing the existential crisis of the modern era. He came to understand that communication with the unconscious via intuition and dreams was an important part of the evolution of the personality, as it enabled one to learn about their personal myth. Eventually Jung learned to deepen the ‘collaboration with the unconscious’. Although he later noted that this practice unleashed his creativity, he also warned against the unconscious, and believed his method was not for everyone. Ultimately, Jung argued that symbols were the primary tool by which the unconscious communicated information to consciousness, and their function was to preserve psychological wholeness. In this chapter I have outlined the origins of Jung’s work and illustrated the importance of his contribution for realizing a comprehensive psychology of altered states of consciousness. I believe, Jung’s example offers an intriguing approach for the integration of profound mind-altering states, as well as challenges and questions prevailing standards of psychological research. In essence, The Liber Novus is an inductive study of the empirical nature of the psyche-, the starting point for Jung to generalize his discoveries of the unconscious to a systematic corpus. At the dawn of a new era in which the study of altered states of consciousness is returning to the fields of psychology and philosophy, Jung’s legacy is evermore important and timely. His work serves as a foundation for understanding the importance of altered states of consciousness for the evolution of human consciousness throughout history, and at present. Furthermore, his work reminds us that what is important is not necessarily the experience, but rather the approach of the individual, and the subsequent process of integration. As such, his legacy is an invaluable for our understanding of altered states of consciousness as a tool for psychological wholeness.

References Blom, J. D. (2010) A Dictionary of Hallucinations, in: A Dictionary of Hallucinations. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-1223-7 Cohen, I. (2017) Re-turning to Wholeness (San Francisco: California Institute of Integral Studies) Grof, S. and Bennett, H. Z. (1993) The Holotropic Mind: The Three Levels of Human Consciousness and How They Shape Our Lives (San Francisco: HarperOne) Jung, C. G. H. (2020) The Black Books; Philemon Series, ed. S. Shamdasani (New York: W. W. Norton & Co) Jung, C. G. H. (2015a) Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 14: Mysterium Coniunctionis, in: Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 14: Mysterium Coniunctionis. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400850853 Jung, C. G. H. (2015b) Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation, in: Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400850945

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Jung, C. G. H. (2015c) Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 9 (Part 1): Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, in: Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 9 (Part 1): Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Available at: https://doi. org/10.1515/9781400850969 Jung, C. G. H. (2014) The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, in: The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature (Abingdon: Routledge) Jung, C. G. H. (2013) The Undiscovered Self, in: The Undiscovered Self (Abingdon: Routledge Classics) Jung, C. G. H. (2011) Memories, Dreams & Reflections, ed. A. Jaffe (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group). Jung, C. G. H. (2009) Philemon Series. The Red Book: Liber Novus, ed. S. Shamsadani (New York: W. W. Norton & Co). Jung, C. G. H. (1969) Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 8: Structure & Dynamics of the Psyche, eds. G. Adler and R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Jung, C. G. H. and White, V. (2007) The Jung–White Letters, ed. M. Stein (London: Routledge). Leary, T., Metzner, R. and Alpert, R. (1964) The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead (London: Penguin) Lebedev, A. V., Lövdén, M., Rosenthal, G., Feilding, A., Nutt, D. J. and Carhart-Harris, R. L. (2015) Finding the Self by Losing the Self: Neural Correlates of Ego-dissolution under Psilocybin, Human Brain Mapping. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.22833 Letheby, C. and Gerrans, P. (2017) Self Unbound: Ego Dissolution in Psychedelic Experience, Neuroscience of Consciousness. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/ nix016 Mahr, G. and Sweigart, J. (2020) Psychedelic Drugs and Jungian Therapy, Journal of Jungian Scholarly Studies, 15:1, pp. 86–98. Available at: https://doi.org/10.29173/jjs127s Nour, M. M., Evans, L., Nutt, D. and Carhart-Harris, R. L. (2016) Ego-dissolution and Psychedelics: Validation of the Ego-dissolution Inventory (EDI), Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2016.00269 Rowland, S. (2019) C.G. Jung in the Humanities: Taking the Soul’s Path, in C. G. Jung in the Humanities: Taking the Soul’s Path. Available at: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003006510 Tacey, D. (2012). The Jung Reader (Abingdon: Routledge). Available at: https://doi. org/10.4324/9780203721049 Taylor, K. (2011). Holotropic Breathwork: A New Approach to Self-Exploration and Therapy, Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 43:1, pp. 108–112.

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Chapter 15 A R G UM E N T S F O R T H E P SYC H E D E L IC C U R E O F W E ST E R N P H I L O S O P H Y Michel Weber

Philosophy of mind has been crippled, since its very beginnings, by two main prejudices. First, the blind implementation of the traditional Western logical framework, that boils down to Aristotelian logic; second, the perennial neglect of crucially relevant empirical data, in so far as, in most arguments, sense-perception is reduced to sight alone. We can overcome these crippling effects if we take into account data coming not only from the other external senses (exteroception), but also from internal senses (interoception and proprioception),1 as well as what is gathered in altered states of mind. This completely redefines the limits and possibilities of knowledge, both from the systematical (hence logical) and the empirical points of view.

1 Philosophy of Mind’s Prejudices 1.1 The Boolean Version of Aristotelian Logic Philosophy of mind has been weakened, first, by the blind implementation of the traditional Western logical framework, that boils down to the Boolean version of Aristotelian logic.2 Aristotelian logic is traditionally defined by three principles: the principle of identity, the principle of non-contradiction, and the principle of excluded middle. The principle of identity states simply that we come to know all things in so far as they have some enduring unity and identity.3 It has to be linked with the substanceattribute ontology granting permanence amid flux. The principle of contradiction is somewhat the negative side of the principle of identity: it claims that the same

1. Terms that are explained in section 2.1, below. 2. Cf. Weber, 2003. 3. See Aristotle’s Metaphysics, B4.

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attribute cannot, at the same time and in the same respect, belong and not belong to the same subject (Metaphysics, G3; Posterior Analytics I, 77a10–22). For Aristotle, it is ‘the most certain of all principles’, the ‘natural starting-point for all the other axioms’ – so much so that he does not believe that Heraclitus has ever really maintained that contrary attributes belong at the same time to the same subject. According to the principle of excluded middle (or tertium non datur), there cannot be an intermediate between contradictories: of one subject we must either affirm or deny any one predicate (Metaphysics, G7; Posterior Analytics I, 77a22–25). From a formal point of view, the difference between a contradiction and a paradox is straightforward enough. A contradiction is a statement that is always false – and everybody agrees that it is so because some mistake must have occurred in the chain of reasoning. A paradox, as its etymology shows, is a contradiction that has the appearance of truth. As a result, there are numerous opinions regarding the way of understanding them; no consensus prevails. A distinction should be made between those who claim that paradoxes could be solved through a more thorough understanding of their internal dynamic (think of Bertrand Russell’s quest), those for whom finite reason generates, at least in some (circumscribed) circumstances, paradoxes (such as Kant’s antinomies), and those who claim that reason is inexorably paradoxical, and so is Nature (such as Hegel’s dialectic). In the first case, paradoxes are nothing but (stubborn) temporary difficulties; in the second, they point to the unavoidable blind spot of reason; in the third, they are fully part of the mundane ontological structure. In any case, the decision can be made to try to formalize them, and this can be achieved with or without modifying the three Aristotelian principles mentioned above. 1.2 The Reduction of Sense-perception to Sight Alone The neglect of crucially relevant empirical data appears obvious, in so far as senseperception has been reduced to sight alone by Western philosophy. Whitehead claimed, before Jonas, but after Maine de Biran, that philosophers ‘have disdained the information about the universe obtained through their visceral feelings, and have concentrated on visual feelings’.4 Whitehead’s withness of the body has been indeed somewhat anticipated by Biran’s inward sense of willed bodily movement (‘sens intime de l’effort voulu’ – Biran, 1859). More importantly, it has been explored, from a phenomenological perspective, by Hans Jonas when he questioned the proverbial Greek nobility of sight. Hearing and touch have been totally marginalized in philosophical discussions. The paradoxical gain was to secure the concept of objectivity at the price of causality. In sum, the mind has gone where vision prompted.

4. Whitehead, 1978, p. 121.

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2 The Psychedelic Cure As a result, taking into account data coming not only from all external senses (exteroception), but also from internal senses, as well as perceptions in altered states of mind, such as those disclosed in psychedelics, completely redefines the stakes, both from the systematical (hence logical) and the empirical points of view. 2.1 Opening the perceptive doors Taking into account data coming from external senses other than sight, from internal senses (interoception and proprioception), as well as what is gathered in altered states of mind amounts to practicing a radical empiricism. As far as Whitehead is concerned, sense-perception is a by-product of ‘prehension’.5 Sense perception is actually a very simplified (though sophisticated) projection established on the wealth of data in which the subject is immersed – better, that constitutes the subject. A first step towards these roots is made by considering interoceptive and proprioceptive data, that both occur at the fringes of our normal state of consciousness. Interoception names the internal sensitivity complementing the exteroceptive one. Its messages, coming from receptors housed by all organs and tissues, are, through reflex (i.e. non-conscious) action, the source of a harmonious bodily life. One can distinguish internal pains (cephalalgia, colic, etc.), internal taste (chemical sensitivity ruling various reflex activities), and internal touch (sensitivity to variations of pressure, such as distension of the bladder or the rectum, stomach contractions, antiperistaltic contractions of the œsophagus, determining the feeling of nausea).6 Proprioception names the messages of position and movement allowing, with the help of the internal ear’s semi-circular canals, a spatialisation – i.e., a full (ap) propriation – of the body. Proprioceptive perception grows from sensorial receptors7 delivering data about the position and the relative movements of the different parts of our body. Through reflex action, it regulates the muscular tone and helps us to localize ourselves in space and to create a sense of depth (stereognosy). Proprioception also includes the muscular sensitivity that complements exteroceptive touch in offering estimates on the weight and volume of the prehended and/or moved object. The structuration of our proprioceptive field provides for the fundamental organic anchorage of our identity.

5. ‘Prehension’ for Whitehead is a primal form of perception whereby that which is perceived constitutes part of the perceiver. 6. Bergson alludes to these messages when he speaks of ‘sensations de “toucher intérieur” émanant de tous les points de l’organisme, et plus particulièrement des viscères’ (Bergson, 1959, p. 883). 7. Articular capsule, periosteum, tendons, joints, and muscles house sensitive corpuscles and nerve endings similar to those on the skin. See Sherrington, 1947, pp. 132–133 and 1940, p. 309.

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Whitehead’s withness of the body can be said to emerge out of the togetherness of all three of these perceptive modes, internal as well as external. Hence the motto and starting point for philosophers should be ‘Meditate on your viscera’.8 There remains, however, a third cognitive field that has been scrutinized, a bit shyly, by Whitehead’s Religion in the Making (1926) and explored, this time extensively, by James’ Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) and Bergson’s Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932): the altered states of consciousness that pave the way to mysticism (James’ first-hand religious experiences) and thereby ground religion itself (second-hand religious experiences). At the fringes of the Mediterranean beauty of exteroception lays not only the cognitive and emotional vagueness of the withness of the body but also, beyond it, the psychedelic Dark Night, during which one embraces the void and its heirs (Angela of Foligno’s nihil videt et omnia videt). 2.2 Overcoming the Principle of Excluded Middle For a long time, we have been told that there is no third possibility: either the cat is alive, or it is not. Whether you consider that logic is abstracted from facts, that it formalizes facts, or even that it strictly matches reality (the Hegelian wager), when factuality is enlarged, logic is redefined. The Theory of Types, for instance, proposes a solution to paradoxes involving no real modification of the Boolean principles: it ‘simply’ uses a sharp distinction between levels of abstraction.9 But the appeal to a contradictory logic, or the dismissal of the principle of excluded middle are other possible paths that have been variously taken: Buddhist logic accepts tetralemma, Graham Priest promotes a transconsistent logic where some contradictions are true (he speaks then of ‘dialetheias’); the quantic logic, framed by Garrett Birkhoff and John von Neumann to cope with the advances in microphysics, revokes, for its part, the excluded middle (Birkhoff and von Neumann, 1936; cf. Jammer, 1974 and, from a more ‘classical’ perspective, Hartshorne, 1965 and the Rescher-

8. ‘Over the door of Emerson Hall, the Philosophy Building at Harvard, there is an inscription. I have quite forgotten what it is; I only remember that it is something very highminded. Whitehead said to his class, “You will have noticed that motto over the door. I commend to you as a more suitable motto and starting point for philosophers ‘Meditate on your viscera’. He insisted that philosophers have disdained the information about the universe obtained through their visceral feelings, and have concentrated on visual feelings’(Emmet 1948). The inscription over the door is from the Bible. Psalm 8, reads: ‘What is man that Thou art mindful of him?’ The Philosophy faculty chose a quotation from Protagoras: ‘Man is the measure of all things.’ Harvard President Charles William Eliot substituted the biblical passage without consulting with the faculty. 9. Whitehead actually questions this in one of his last papers (1934), reprinted in Whitehead, 1947 (see, e.g., p. 321) and Grattan-Guinness, 2000, pp. 527–528. 10. Priest, 1987

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Brandom (1980) theory of inconsistent worlds). All this debate occurs, of course, within the territory of Western philosophy and its Quinean legacy.11

3 The Psychedelic Anthropology When the doors of perception are opened, the Aristotelian logic is revoked and its ontological counterpart – substance ontology – relativized. Doing so reframes the epistemological and metaphysical puzzles and, unsurprisingly, fosters a process anthropology that has been foreseen by the first humanism, that manifested itself in perhaps its most acute form during the Renaissance. Humans should not be considered as the centre from which all meaning radiates (this being the second humanism of the Modernity, also called the Classical Age), but as an expression of the micro/macro-cosmic correlation. Let us pinpoint here two of its facets: cosmological and psychological. 3.1 Cosmology The immediate consequence of the opening, or cleansing, of the perceptive doors is a process cosmology: ‘Everything gestures. Tables are tabling, pots are potting, walls are walling, fixtures are fixturing – a world of event instead of things’.12 This means that enlarged (sense-)perception resuscitates the world and re-enchants it (without supernaturalism), as Griffin (2001) has claimed. This can be understood in a rather immanent fashion, or with a degree of transcendence, such as the one that has apparently been claimed lately by all forms of religiosity. Warrior, or hunting shamanism, belongs to the first type; in that case there are, so to speak, parallel worlds that can be visited provided one is cunning enough to use seduction when needs be and balanced transaction otherwise. Each world, in general, and each soul within these worlds, in particular, can be the prey of the others. Agriculturalist, or pastoralist shamanism, belongs to the second type; here the metaphor is no longer horizontal but vertical; life is structured by superposed worlds; it requires veneration for the dead souls and praise for the high spirit(s).13 According to the Varieties14, the religious life necessarily involves three cosmopsychological keys: ‘more’, ‘flux’, and ‘union’.15 James uses Gustav Fechner’s threshold theory (1860) and William Blake’s speculations (1885). There is first a structural

11. It would be very instructive to question also Buddhist logic and its relation with dependent co-origination (pratîtya samutpâda). 12. Watts, 1962, p. 69. 13. Hamayon, 2003. 14. James, 1902. 15. Cf. Weber, 2004.

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thesis: on the one hand, ‘the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe from which it draws its chief significance’. In other words, the world of everyday experience is inscribed in a broader world and this world is not alien to our world at all: it is simply, but significantly, more spiritual. On the other hand, the gate existing between the worlds is understood with the help of a concept borrowed from Fechner’s psychophysics and that has had a strong legacy: the subliminal door. Second, as a result, these worlds are not bifurcated, their doors are not closed. Spiritual energy flows in both directions, which means that communication with the higher powers is possible, and especially that prayer is empowered with an efficacy of its own kind. Third, ‘union or harmonious relation with that higher universe is our true end’. When James underlines that ‘there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand’, he makes plain that this uneasiness is due to our disconnection with our true Self, our fellows humans. . . and eventually the Totality: we are saved from the wrongness ‘by making proper connection with the higher powers’.16 To live in unison with the higher powers has a transformative virtue that brings meaning, peace, and safety to one’s life.17 3.2 Psychology Psychological consequences are equally powerful. If mental phenomena, answerable or not to the concept of soul, are actually processes rather than states of an underlying material structure, all existential issues can be reassessed. Transformation and co-creation are the rules. From a therapeutic point of view, change becomes implementable – and thinkable – since it is the constitutive (ontological) feature of our world. In sum: freedom only makes sense in a process universe. This being said, egolessness is equally thinkable: self-surrender, ego death, ego-loss, psychic death, now means that the egoic process is (momentarily) interrupted. If one chooses to try to comprehend the epistemological stakes, a clear ontological standpoint needs to be adopted. To (over)simplify, we have the choice between substantialism (materialistic or idealistic), pluralism or monism, laminar

16. James, 1902, p. 508. 17. Later James sums up ‘in the broadest possible way the characteristics of the religious life, as we have found them, it includes the following beliefs: 1. That the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe from which it draws its chief significance; 2. That union or harmonious relation with that higher universe is our true end; 3. That prayer or inner communion with the spirit thereof – be that spirit “God” or “law” – is a process wherein work is really done, and spiritual energy flows in and produces effects, psychological or material, within the phenomenal world. Religion includes also the following psychological characteristics: 4. A new zest which adds itself like a gift to life, and takes the form either of lyrical enchantment or of appeal to earnestness and heroism. 5. An assurance of safety and a temper of peace, and, in relation to others, a preponderance of loving affections’ (James, 1902, pp. 485–486).

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or atomic processes, and contiguism – the later being exemplified in Whitehead’s organicism.18 Phenomenologically, one must decide between extasis and enstasis.19 Basically, Eliade tends to interpret all forms of shamanism as archaic techniques of extasis, while blends of yoga are, equally archaic, techniques of enstasis. In the first case, there is a dissociation with the body that allows what is traditionally called the shamanic flight; in the second, the association of the mental process with the bodily processes is such that a dissolution of the poles is possible. Enstasis is probably more relevant to process philosophy lato sensu. James did some pioneering work in the philosophy of nootropes and psychotropes when he used chloral hydrate (in 1870), amyl nitrite (in 1875), nitrous oxide (in 1882), and peyote (in 1896) to probe the margins of consciousness. His concept of surrounding Mother-sea or Reservoir of consciousness can be found, e.g., in his ‘Confidences of a “Psychical Researcher” ’ (1909), that is anchored in Fechner’s speculations (1851). Interestingly enough, the metaphor was later conceptualized by Romain Rolland (1929) and echoed in Freud’s ozeanisches Gefühl or Ewigkeitsgefühl.20 You are an infinite ocean; the universe is a wave. An encyclopaedia could be written on the shades and hues of the oceanic feeling in question, starting with the import and significance of jada samâdhi or nirvikalpa samâdhi in Advaitavedânta (nondualistic Vedânta), of course, but one wonders what Plato had in mind when he evoked in the Symposium and the Republic the vast sea of beauty. Grof ’s Basic Perinatal Matrices (1975), especially the first one, are more straightforward.

4 Conclusion It should be obvious that taking the psychedelic experience into account radically modifies the applicability of Boolean logic and transforms the philosophy of mind. The political consequences also deserve to be mentioned. As soon as one broadens the scope of experience, three ecologies of mind converge: the environmental ecology that is concerned about our biotope, the social ecology that seeks to reinvent communities, and the mental ecology that fosters creative becoming.21 This synergy, recently debated by Guattari (1989), nurtures all traditional worldviews.

18. Weber, 2006 and 2011. 19. Eliade, 1951. 20. On the Freud/Rolland correspondence, especially the 12-05-1927 letter, see Masson, 1980, and Parsons, 1999. See also Artinian and Sjöstedt-Hughes, in this volume. 21. Weber, 2016.

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References Aristotle (1957) Prior and Posterior Analytics: A Revised Text with Introduction and Commentary, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press) Aristotle (1999) The Metaphysics, trans. from the Greek with an introduction by H. Lawson-Tancred (Harmondsworth: Penguin) Bergson, H. (1959) Œuvres. Textes annotés par André Robinet. Introduction par H. Gouhier (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France) Eliade, M. ([1951] 1968). Le Chamanisme et les techniques archaïques de l’extase, deuxième édition, revue et augmentée (Paris, Éditions Payot, Bibliothèque scientifique) Emmet, D. M. (1948) A. N. Whitehead: The Last Phase, Mind, 57, pp. 265–274 Fechner, G. T. (1851) Zend-Avesta, oder, Über die Dinge des Himmels und des Jenseits vom Standpunkt der Naturbetrachtung, 3 Vol.: I. Theil: Ueber die Dinge des Himmels; II. Theil: Ueber die Dinge des Himmels; III. Theil: Ueber die Dinge des Jenseits (Leipzig: Voss) Fechner, G. T. (1860) Elemente der Psychophysik (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel) Grattan-Guinness, I. (2000) The Search for Mathematical Roots, 1870–1940. Logics, Set Theories and the Foundations of Mathematics from Cantor through Russell to Gödel (Princeton: Princeton University Press) Griffin, D .R. (2001) Reenchantment without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press) Grof, S. (1975) Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research (New York, Viking Press) Guattari, F. (1989) Les Trois écologies (Paris: Éditions Galilée) Hamayon, R. (2003) Chamanismes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France) Huxley, A. (1954) The Doors of Perception (London: Chatto & Windus Ltd) James, W. (1902) The Varieties of Religious Experience. A Study in Human Nature. Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion delivered at Edinburgh in 1901–1902 (New York, London, Bombay and Calcutta: Longmans, Green, and Co.) James, W. ([1909] 1986) Confidences of a ‘Psychical Researcher’, in: W. James, Essays in Psychical Research, F. H. Burkhardt, gen. ed.; F. Bowers, text. ed.; I. K. Skrupskelis, ass. ed. (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press) Jonas, H. ([1954] 1966) The Nobility of Sight in The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press), pp. 135–156 Jonas, H. ([1969/1971] 1974) Sight and Thought: A Review of ‘Visual Thinking’, in: Philosophical Essays. From Ancient Creed to Technological Man (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press), pp. 224–236 Maine de Biran, P. ([1812] 1859) Essais sur les fondements de la psychologie, édition Naville (Œuvres inédites de Maine de Biran) (Paris: Dezobry) Maine de Biran, P. ([1804] 1952) Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée. Précédé de la Note sur les rapports de l’idéologie et des mathématiques, introduction et notes critiques par P. Tisserand (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France) Masson, J. M. (1980) The Oceanic Feeling: The Origins of Religious Sentiment in Ancient India, Preface by G. Devereux (Dordrecht: D. Reidel) Parsons, W. B.(1999) The Enigma of the Oceanic Feeling. Revisioning the Psychoanalytic Theory of Mysticism (New York: Oxford University Press) Rolland, R. (1929) Essai sur la mystique et l’action de l’Inde vivante. Tome I: La Vie de Ramakrishna (Paris: Éditions Stock)

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INDEX 5-MeO-DMT 3, 9, 199, 213–214, 226–231 acid see LSD addiction 108, 111, 113, 120, 169, 175 Adorno, T. W. 110–112, 121, 137 aesthetics 5, 6, 22, 61–74, 82, 97, 126, 136, 138, 141, 146, 181–182, 189, 203, 205, 207–208 alcohol 46, 52–54, 67, 169 see also drunkenness; prohibition alienation 7, 107–129, 136, 138, 198, 231, 244 Amerindian 4, 7, 47, 51, 53–55, 57, 77–91, 219, 226 see also Aztec; Mayan; Mazatec; Native American Ancient Greece 1, 6, 45, 48, 62, 97, 238 animism 43, 85–86, 219 see also panpsychism anthropology 46, 79–80, 83, 86–87, 144, 253–255 archetype 138, 181, 187, 189, 191, 243 Arendt, H. 142 Aristotle 57, 214, 219, 224–225, 249–250 atheism 211, 217 ayahuasca 55, 84, 88–89, 199 Aztec 4, 133, 139, 149 beauty 5–6, 8, 17, 63, 71–72, 74, 97, 171–173, 182, 189, 206–208, 219, 252, 255 Benjamin, W. 2–3, 8, 133, 135–150 Bergson, H. 2, 4, 14, 48–49, 212, 251–252 Blake, W. 253 breathwork 5, 48, 56, 188 Buddhism 49, 179–191 Burke, E. 6, 61–74 cannabis 81, 127, 199 see also marijuana capitalism 8, 49, 51–52, 79, 82, 90, 108–109, 111–112, 128, 136, 138–139, 143–147, 241

Christianity 2, 6–7, 15, 35, 47–50, 53, 57, 82, 91, 96, 185–186, 214–215, 227–228, 243 Christian mysticism 185–186 Protestantism 110 Puritanism 52–53 Roman Catholicism 171, 206 see also God; Mazatec, Native American Church; Santo Daime; Uniao de Vegetal colour perception 2, 8, 71, 153–154, 164, 170–173, 201 connectedness 6, 13–14, 18–22, 24, 26, 87 interconnectedness 35, 81, 84, 108, 122, 126 nature connectedness 230 contextualism 213 cosmic consciousness 181, 183, 212 critical theory 7, 107–129, 134–137, 148 Davy, H. 66, 215 de Quincey, T. 66 death 3, 47, 55, 64, 80, 84, 133, 143, 156, 170, 189, 222–225, 229, 241 see also ego loss decolonization 7, 77–91, 115 decriminalization 6, 55–57, 81, 90, 108, 114, 127 see also legalization deep ecology 219 Deleuze, G. 117, 213, 215, 224, 231 delusion 9, 116, 170, 213–214 depression 108, 111, 120, 175, 243 see also mental health Descartes, R. 9, 34–35, 49, 195–209, 211, 215–216, 225, 231 determinism 42, 118, 201, 205, 221 Dewey, J. 49, 96, 104 divine 1, 61, 63, 72–74, 183, 186, 196–197, 201–202, 205–208, 211, 225, 243 DMT 3–4, 182, 200 see also 5-MeO-DMT

259

260

Index

Doblin, R. 56, 119, 122 dreams 10, 58, 84, 182, 186, 188, 191, 237–239, 246 drunkenness 36, 139, 141, 156 see also alcohol dualism 9, 20, 183, 195–196, 202, 205, 211, 216, 218, 222–223, 227–228, 242 see also Descartes, R. ecology 33, 147, 219, 255 see also deep ecology ego see personhood; self) ego loss 14, 19–26, 32, 37, 41, 126, 145, 153, 155–156, 159, 162, 208, 223–226, 240–241, 254 see also personhood; self Eleusinian Mysteries 2, 48 Eliade, M. 239, 255 eliminativism 154 empiricism 8, 10, 34–39, 63, 125, 157, 166, 176, 183, 196, 249–251 entity encounter 3, 15, 17, 40, 43, 85, 88, 104, 253 epiphenomenalism 96, 219 epistemicide 84 epistemology 5–8, 10, 80–81, 86, 90, 123, 134–137, 156, 202, 204 eternal 9, 212, 221–225, 228 see also time ethics 5–7, 13–16, 24, 33, 42, 80, 115–116, 133, 142, 149, 206, 220, 222, 224, 229, 231 bioethics 80 biopiracy 77, 80, 83, 90 cognitive liberty 77–81, 90–91 criminalization 45–46, 52–53, 55, 57, 80, 107, 169 see also decriminalization; prohibition cultural appropriation 8, 80, 83, 89–90 legalization 56 nihilism 212, 219–220 patents 5, 127 value 5–8, 15, 17, 47, 58, 77–78, 84, 88, 90, 97, 110–111, 122, 128, 133, 136, 139, 145–148, 171, 175, 182, 196, 205, 208, 218–219, 229, 231, 238, 240–242 virtue ethics 14, 222, 224, 229

explanatory gap see hard problem of consciousness fear 3–4, 51–52, 55, 65, 72, 104, 187, 222, 224, 229 feminism 77, 86–90, 117, 148 fetish 111, 128, 137, 139, 143, 146 Foucault, M. 51, 112, 116, 135 Frankfurt School see critical theory free will see freedom freedom 42, 74, 77, 81, 108, 114, 116, 129, 134–135, 143–144, 147–150, 200, 221–222, 254 Freud, S. 8, 19, 23, 38, 110, 117, 137–138, 141, 145, 180, 188–189, 191, 214, 238, 255 gender 79, 86–87, 90, 119, 148–149 god(s) 3, 9, 15–17, 20, 35, 39, 42, 53, 156, 159, 171, 180, 198–202, 205–208, 211–231, 243, 254 goddess 149, 180 godhead 185, 242 gratitude 5–6, 13–26, 227 Grof, S. 5, 9, 32, 38, 40, 42, 47–50, 55–56, 120–121, 179, 187–191, 242, 255 see also breathwork Habermas, J. 108, 114 hallucination 2–3, 8–9, 34, 51, 54, 61, 70–71, 80, 90, 95, 98–99, 104–105, 122, 126, 169–176, 181–187, 198–199, 202. 204, 227 hard problem of consciousness 153–167, 195, 212, 216 heaven 2, 71, 73, 201 Hegel, G. W. F. 8, 109, 134–135, 139, 142–143, 148, 215, 250, 252 Heidegger, M. 109, 142, 148 hell 61, 71–73 hippies 49–52, 113–114, 117, 145–146, 148–149 Hofmann, A. 45–46, 50, 52, 54, 83, 140, 170–171 Hume, D. 35–36, 148, 217 Huxley, A. 2, 4, 6, 9, 22–23, 61–74, 122, 137, 140, 156, 159, 163–164, 171, 173, 179, 184–187, 191, 197–198, 208, 212–213, 225

Index Huxley, L. 90 hypnosis 187 idealism 15, 63, 66, 135–136, 143, 202–203, 217, 254 see also Hegel; Kant; McTaggart; Schopenhauer imagination 62, 64, 66, 82, 99, 198, 206, 223, 237–239 immortality 170, 212, 224–225 individualization 7, 107–129 industrialization 51, 228 ineffability 4, 7, 14, 24–26, 107, 122–123, 153, 159–161, 164, 212 infinity 3, 9, 17, 72, 143–144, 156, 197, 201–202, 206, 208, 216–217, 220–201, 223–224, 228, 230–231, 255 instrumentalize 112, 127–128 intentionality 162, 164, 166, 228, 230 intuition 32–34, 37, 42, 200, 208, 212–214, 218, 223–224, 228–229, 231, 237, 246 Jackson, F. 8, 153–167 James, W. 2–4, 9, 24–25, 32, 36, 45, 47, 49, 107, 156, 161–163, 183, 197, 212–213, 226, 252–255 Jonas, H. 142, 230–231, 250 Jung, C. 9–10, 32, 180–181, 188–191, 237–246 kabbalah 225 Kant, I. 15, 49, 63, 66, 134, 149, 165, 200, 213, 250 knowledge argument 153–156 Kopenawa, D. 3, 219 Leary, T. 182, 241–242 love 3–4, 8–9, 71–74, 112, 140, 170–174, 212–213, 217, 224–226, 228 LSD 3–6, 9, 25, 42, 45–46, 48–52, 54–56, 61, 71, 73, 88–89, 119, 145–147, 153–155, 163, 170–171, 182–184, 187–191, 199, 214, 226, 228, 241 McKenna, T. 199 McTaggart, J. M. E. 221–222, 224 see also time

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Maimonides 214, 225 Marcuse, H. 8, 112, 126, 133–150 marijuana 52–53, 140, 146–147 see also cannabis market 53, 83, 108, 114–115, 133, 137–138, 143, 145, 147–149 Marx, K. 8, 86, 109–110, 133–139, 141–149 Mary’s Room see Jackson, F. materialism see physicalism Mayan 47, 88, 184 Mazatec 83, 88, 147, 149 see also Sabina, M. MDMA 46, 56, 117, 119 medicalization 5, 8, 78–80, 82, 108–110, 112–114, 125–129 meditation 5, 19, 41, 45, 84, 156, 160, 179, 187, 198 memory 38, 62, 188, 212, 230 mental causation 216, 222 see also free will health 122, 125, 127 see also depression Merchant, C. 112, 118, 228 mescaline 2–4, 45, 61, 70–71, 73, 140–141, 147, 149, 171, 182, 184–187, 191, 197, 199, 208 mindfulness 160 moksha 73–74, 185–186 monism 9, 166, 218–223, 254 morality see ethics mycology 87 see also psilocybin mystical experience 35, 45, 49, 51, 55, 113, 123–124, 163, 183, 186–187, 212 mysticism 28, 43, 48–49, 66, 70, 89, 112, 123–125, 140, 182, 186, 212, 220, 252 see also Eleusinian Mysteries; mystical experience Naess, A. 215, 219, 228, 234 Native American 57, 71, 84–85, 183–184 Church 55, 71 naturalism 85, 220 see also physicalism neuroscience 2, 5, 23, 27, 113, 153, 155, 167, 177, 196, 209

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Nietzsche, F. 2, 48–49, 139, 148, 215, 220, 231, 243–244 nirvana 41, 72 nitrous oxide 3, 4, 66, 156, 183, 255 noetic 163, 212 novelty 7, 25, 97, 100–105 oceanic feeling 19, 20–22, 24, 26, 214, 255 ontology 6, 8, 148, 249, 253 openness 54, 123, 238 Osmond, H. 4–5, 61, 70–73, 81, 90, 181–182, 186 Pahnke, W. 55 panpsychism 9, 86, 166, 217–221, 230 pantheism 9, 211, 215–218, 230 perception 2, 6, 8, 23–25, 34–38, 40–41, 43, 71–73, 82, 86, 96, 99, 103–104, 107, 122, 126, 133, 141, 144–146, 155, 164, 171–172, 174, 176, 179, 184–186, 191, 197, 201, 207, 212, 218, 223, 225, 230, 233, 249–251, 253 perennialism 213 personhood 58, 241 see also ego; self peyote 45, 55, 71, 84–85, 140, 183–184, 255 phenomenology 5, 9, 13, 16, 33–34, 40, 48, 80–81, 84, 134, 157, 172–173, 205, 214, 226, 237 philosophy of mind 95, 222, 249, 255 physicalism 8, 153–155, 157, 164–167, 217, 228 see also naturalism Plato 2, 9, 48, 97, 199, 211, 220, 225, 255 Plotinus 225 post-traumatic stress syndrome 46 prehension 33, 38, 41, 64, 66, 98, 203–204, 206, 251 process philosophy 6, 9, 36, 43, 255–256 prohibition 46, 52–53, 56–57, 67, 78–82, 108, 113–114, 169 proprioception 249, 251 psilocybin 4, 22–23, 50, 56–57, 61, 71, 82–83, 88–89, 119, 123, 127, 147, 149, 156, 171, 182, 199, 226

psychedelic psychotherapy 7, 115, 118, 120, 123–126, 128, 238 therapy 61, 170, 175 psychiatry 2, 4–5, 42, 47, 49, 54, 70, 89, 111–117, 119, 121, 123–127, 238 psychosis vii, 3, 71, 116–117, 198 PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) 56, 113, 117, 120 qualia 154 race 53, 87, 119, 127, 144, 148–149 realism 8–9, 141, 174, 195–196, 202–203, 205, 208 reducing valve 2, 14, 22–24, 26, 122, 163–164, 187, 212 renaissance 5, 7, 80–81, 83, 89–90, 115, 253 revolution 8, 10, 32, 42, 49, 51, 63, 70, 110, 112, 126, 133, 136, 138–139, 141–150, 202 Rolland, R. 19–20, 213–214, 225, 255 Romanticism 62, 66, 138 Russell, B. 68, 100, 161–162, 212, 220, 228, 250 Sabina, M. 46, 87–88 Santo Daime 55 Sartre, J.-P. 3, 109, 171, 186 satori 9, 45, 160, 179–185, 187, 190–191 schizophrenia 70, 198 scholasticism 48–49 Schopenhauer, A. 37, 138, 160, 165, 215 scientism 49 self 5–6, 10, 16, 18, 20–24, 26, 32, 49, 58, 62, 65–67, 74, 81, 99, 106–107, 112, 118, 112, 125–127, 145, 156, 158–189, 161, 184–186, 197, 229, 240, 242–244, 254 see also personhood; ego self-consciousness 21, 109, 134, 142, 224 serotonin 4 shamanism 58, 253, 255 Shulgin, A. & A. 3–4, 226–227 Smythies, J. R. 2, 4, 70 socialism 67, 135, 138 soul 5, 7, 40, 48, 54, 74, 85, 95, 97–106, 189, 199, 206, 212, 233–235, 238, 240–245, 253–254

Index specious present 197 see also time Spinoza, B. 9, 20, 211–226, 228–231 spirituality 5, 49–50, 55, 70, 73, 241 subconscious 183–183, 187, 190–191, 222 sublime 4–7, 61–74, 145, 230 Suzuki, D. T. 9, 160–161, 179–187, 190–191 synaesthesia 8, 173 terror 6, 63–64, 68–69, 72, 74, 104, 107, 122, 227–228 time 9, 32, 38, 140, 144, 197, 212, 221–225, 228 see also eternal; specious present timelessness see eternal transpersonal 6, 13–26, 32–33, 36–38, 40–43, 55, 180–181, 189–191 trip reports 2–3, 25, 69, 71–73, 126, 139–141, 156, 164, 170–171, 185, 197, 226–228 unconscious 9–10, 23, 32–33, 35, 37–42, 48, 111, 137–138, 147, 179–183, 187–191, 203, 238–240, 242–246 see also subconscious

263

Uniao de Vegetal 55 unity 6, 9, 14, 18–22, 26, 40, 125, 128, 153, 155–156, 158–161, 166, 207–208, 217, 226, 229–230, 243, 249 veridicality 213–214 void, the 9, 128, 180–181, 185–187, 189–190, 252 war against drugs 52–54 Wasson, G. & V. P. 46, 83, 87–88 Watts, A. 3, 19, 160, 185, 198, 253 Weber, M. 54, 109–110, 249, 253, 255 Whitehead, A. N. 6–7, 31, 35–43, 95–106, 196, 198–199, 202–209, 215, 237, 250–252, 255 Wilber, K. 33–34, 36, 43, 181 Zaehner, R. C. 112, 213 Zen 5, 9, 153, 158, 160, 163, 179–187, 190–191

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