A Christian Perspective on Psychedelic Experience
This article is second piece of a 2 part series on Revelation in the material world. If you’d like to read the first article follow this link to catch up on the conversation! https://andrewshumaker.medium.com/revelation-on-the-experience-of-truth-5eba90f78455
In exploring the human experience of Revelation we charted a path from the fundamental mediums of human experience, intuition and reason, recognizing that to call something a revelatory experience bears the connotation of being qualitatively distinctive and empirically verifiable, and that it is through the intuitive experience of inspiration we meet God in the form of Truth.
To stall any arguments on the nature of what truth is I have decided to try and deal with what constitutes the explicit experience of Truth. Truth is experienced subjectively, but it is an objective category of experience.
The Experiences of Induced Transcendence
There are categories of revelatory experience that can create the impression of insight or enlightenment. Psychedelics are a reliable method of inducing experiences of transcendence, divinity, or ego death. All three descriptors are reported by those with significant psychedelic experience and show correlation with specific sets of mental phenomena such as visions, direct psychic contact with archetypes or ancestors, and out of body experiences.
What is the Psychedelic Experience?
These substances affect our neurobiology, and it is no wonder these experiences can create the impression of enlightenment or revelation. Speaking specifically of the psychedelic mushroom psylocibe cubensis: After consuming the fungus, psylocibin is metabolised into psylocin whose chemical structure simulates that of serotonin, activating a series of receptors in the prefrontal cortex and inducing visual and auditory hallucinations, opening the individual to overwhelming sensory input and a slew of other physical responses. The only way I could describe what I felt is “subject to more of the sum total of information around me”. In concert with these physical responses, the chemical induces a state of mind something akin to hyperawareness or hypersenstivity to input data. The inhibitory structures that typically constrain neuronal firing are temporarily overridden by the flood of serotonin in the brain, which initiates new neural activity and causes increased connectivity amongst neurons. This overwhelming experience of sense data is what creates the experience of the “psychedelic trip”. In my experience, there begins a rising or bubbling of energy in the solar-plexus which fills the chest and results in a pleasant feeling of weightlessness. The experience eventually intensifies until various minute and specific phenomena demand your attention, keeping your interest indefinitely, or until your curiosity is sated. Often there are times of intense stillness and internal processing, rationalizing, or wonderment. And there seems to be a distinct emotional effect on the individual as they feel a general sense of connection with the world around them, invoking emotional response to the beauty and complexity of the natural world. The intensity of focus during the experience causes a disorienting effect of time seeming to dilate. If a high enough dose is taken, shapes appear concretely in the peripherals, colors blur, alter, and undulate, and patterns appear in similar shape and dimension to visual stimuli in the environment such as leaves, rocks, and flowing water.
It’s conflation with Revelation
The psychedelic experience should not be conflated with revelation more generally, despite its reliable capacity for producing a specific kind of revelation. The overwhelming nature of becoming acutely aware of just how much physical sense data your mind is processing can be extremely anxiety inducing, and the resulting ‘bad trips’ can be terrible, emotionally taxing experiences. This same overwhelming access to sense-data is what is conflated with Revelation. This hyperawareness can also lead to dissociation of the Self from the Self, and experiences of escaping temporal, spacial, or physical restraint. This experience of the escape from temporal restraint can be understood allegorically and most beautifully in terms of Goethe’s Faust. Faust, as a character being the penultimate Renaissance man, embodies the rational intellect and seeks from Mephistopheles das Augenblick. That is, the all-encompassing Moment. An experience so whole and perfected he might linger there forever, outside of time. It is Faust’s desire to escape temporal restraint and see, as only a god could, all of time in one great visionary Moment. In this way his ambition exceeds that of mere ascension or enlightenment, he aspires to the experience of being god in and of himself (Faust, Introduction by Peter Salm).
It is worth noting, the psychedelic experience produces no such Augenblick, this comparison is only sufficient metaphor to represent the kind of revelation that is conflated with True Revelation. Faust’s desire for the Augenblick is ultimately a reaction to his own despondence: “..Faust has reached the melancholy conclusion that he will never know what is truly worth knowing, that he would be blinded by the light of truth, and must therefore be resigned to live with mere reflections and counterfeit images.” (Faust, Salm, Introduction, Pg. X) This experience of the Ideals in their inherently abstract form is insufficient for Faust’s intellectual hunger, and he becomes a slave to his desire for Truth in the face of its perceived inaccessibility. For the modern day philosopher, it must be acknowledged that the Forms and Ideals we witness within the psychedelic experience must be sufficient in and of themselves, and remain representative of our internal experience, especially because of the nature of altered mind states. The hyperawareness produced by the altered mind state is just that, a temporary mind state resulting from chemical alteration, an inherently incomplete or partial access to human ontological experience. These experiences are revelatory, yes, but the category within which they reveal Truth is quite limited and pertains only to the Self’s experience of their own Self. The psychedelic experience is a wholly internal, individual, and psychic (as in “relating to the psyche”) experience. This does not mean the psychedelic experience cannot be revelatory, however. It just means the revelation these experiences produce must be kept in their proper context.
Its capacity for Revelation
While under the influence of these substances, the experience of hyperawareness is focused on the Self’s immediate interest and can lead to in-depth deconstruction of ideas, concepts, processes, or causal relationships. Whether this deconstruction is of a mechanical, musical, or philosophical nature (among other things that can be deconstructed) is partially dependent on the interests of the Self that is experiencing itself. I, being fascinated by logic at the time, came to the recognition that my unconscious processing was a bottom up, inductive process. This recognition of the ordered behavior of my subconscious mind was certainly a revelation.
This hyperawarness, coupled with an intense interest in introspection, can drive individuals to analyze their psyche in excruciating detail. This has the potential for great personal insight, while also bears the potential for great personal distress. I have spent hours in wonder and rapture at the beauty of nature, overwhelmed and humbled, coming away with revelations of personal needs. During my time experimenting with psylocibe cubensis I would often return from a mushroom trip with the same revelations: “read more”, “write more”, “pray more”, “give more”, “you lack humility”. Let it also be said, I have conversely spent hours singing along to a favorite album to remain sane while all the images of Darkness and Blood battled back and forth with images of Wind and Light in my mind. It was during an experience on Lisurgic Acid Dithylamide that I had a rational existential crisis and decided I believed in the Unmoved Mover, otherwise life is truly meaningless and it would be better I drown myself then and there. These experiences have the capacity for revelation, but it will always be an ego-centered revelation. The key understanding of psychedelic experience is the inherent ego-centeredness of the experience. It is a falling into one’s Self. In acknowledging the psychedelic experience for what it is, I feel it is only right to keep the class of experience in its proper context. These are not party drugs. These are tools of a chemical nature that provide the Self access to deep rooted notions and preconceptions the Self holds dear. They have been used throughout history to induce experience of and have convocation with the Divine. Their historical use in efforts to achieve individuation, coming of age ceremonies, and shamanic ritual speaks to the inherent connotation of cultural gravitas their usage demands.
Searle and Emergent Consciousness
In considering the impact on the psyche from chemical stimuli in the case of psychedelic experience, it requires acknowledging that there is a biological element to Consciousness. In recognition of this I turn to philosopher John R. Searle, who makes a biological case for an emergent conscious state. He argues for what he terms a Biological Naturalist Theory of Consciousness.
“Grant me that consciousness, with all its subjectivity, is caused by processes in the brain, and grant me that conscious states are themselves higher-level features of the brain. Once you have granted these two propositions, there is no mind-body problem left. The traditional problem arises only if you accept the vocabulary with its mutually exclusive categories of mental and physical, mind and matter, spirit and flesh.” — John R. Searle, Mind Language and Society. Pg. 52
It would seem, to the extent that conscious states can be categorized as biological phenomena since they can be directly manipulated with chemical stimuli, we can assume consciousness is an emergent, higher-order process of brain function.
This emergent consciousness does not invalidate Idealism as I understand it. It is still within reason that this emergent biological process gives access to an experience of Ideals. That is, a higher-order consciousness is required to mentally produce these very real representations, holistic in nature, that reflect the material world but are perfected. Why should the repeated experience of an object in its various instantiations not form an inexact yet consistent, therefore conceptually perfect, representation of the object? In this way, the experience of the Ideals also further patterns the conscious mind, their universality is given meaning by the repeated material experiences. Remember back to looking up at the night sky and seeing the boundlessness of space and feeling the weight of infinity. How else would words like Omnipotent, Omniscient and Omnipresent have any context? How would we grasp the idea of infinity if we could not experience it directly? It is direct experiences of transcendence in Nature such as these that also constitute Revelation.
In Conclusion
I have worked to reconcile the experiences of my youth with my knowledge of in the present. Perhaps this is a misguided attempt to justify the recklessness of my youth, or absolve myself of personal guilt through a literary enterprise. But I don’t feel this to be the case. This has been my opportunity actively process my experiences and, hopefully, provide others beneficial insight in to the nature of these experiences that are fundamentally human.
