By Author, not by Cybermonk. For scholarly commentary and markup, only; not for publication.
Contents:
- Introduction
- Analogy and the description of experience
- From analogy to cognitive phenomenology
- Mind manifestation and transformation of belief networks
- References
- Biography
- Motivation for this webpage
Introduction
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Psychedelic experiences typically involve intense temporary alterations in perception, and commonly lead to radical and permanent transformations in belief.
The LSD experience was described by Watts (1, p.44) as: “revelations of the secret workings of the brain, of the associative and patterning processes, the ordering systems which carry out all our sensing and thinking”,
similarly Grof (2, p.38) described the LSD experience as: “complex revelatory insights into the nature of existence…typically accompanied by a sense of certainty that this knowledge is ultimately more relevant and “real” than the perceptions and beliefs we share in everyday life.”
In this essay I will be examining the themes that are contained in descriptions of psychedelic tripping such as these.
I will present a generalised phenomenological model which relates psychedelic experience to the brain’s associative and patterning process, by examining the most standard and prominent features of such experiences and inferring general principles from them.
These standard features of tripping are the alterations in visual perception, and the strong tendency for transformation/reformation of core belief structures (‘life-changing’ experiences) during the course of psychedelic exploration.
My aim is to examine these features of psychedelic phenomenology
(that is, the subjective mental content of psychedelic trip experiences)
for the purposes of highlighting the underlying alterations in cognitive processing that are responsible for the psychedelic effect, and thereby to capture the original insight behind the label ‘psychedelic’ (or ‘mind-revealing’).
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A major theme in what follows is the phenomenological comparison of the ordinary (non-intoxicated) state of consciousness with the non-ordinary psychedelic state of consciousness, for the purposes of highlighting the specific peculiarities of the latter.
During a psychedelic trip session, the mind (or at least, certain major aspects of the mind) becomes explicitly manifested such that it is made available for conscious inspection; by implication then, the mind is not manifested in ordinary, sober consciousness.
The question arises, therefore, of what exactly is meant by the ‘mind’ in this specific context, and what it means to say that the mind becomes temporarily ‘manifested’ in the psychedelic state of consciousness;
what exactly is the thing that can be clearly perceived during intense psychedelic tripping, which is hidden during ordinary experience.
In what follows I will offer a substantive answer to this question.
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This essay is intended as a basic conceptual model of psychedelic experiencing, using the general approach of phenomenology (the study of conscious appearances).
It should be interpreted first and foremost as an approximation for the phenomenological content of experience, any metaphysical assertions are secondary to this main aim.
There are a few books dealing explicitly with the phenomenology of drug-induced altered states, these include Huxley’s (3) ‘Doors of perception’ and Shanon’s (4) ‘Antipodes of the Mind’.
Also, the literature in psychiatric phenomenology provides some useful concepts which can be applied to the drug-induced experiences, especially the writing of Sass (5 & 6) and Stanghellini (7).
Analogy and the description of experience
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Analogy is a very useful tool for understanding the cognitive dynamics of psychedelic tripping; likening mental phenomena to physical situations and occurrences elucidates the structure of the perceptual alteration.
I will now briefly run through several of the most pertinent analogies and explain how they can be applied to psychedelic altered-state phenomenology.
Plato’s (8) famous ‘cave allegory’ likens ordinary perception to staring at shadows on the back wall of a cave; a perspective that most people are fully immersed in most of the time.
It is only the philosopher who is privileged to get a glimpse of reality from the higher-dimensional perspective, when he turns his head around to see the light at the mouth of the cave and discovers that the shadows are actually flat lower-dimensional projections of a deeper, hidden actual reality.
Plato’s suggestion is that a person who had never seen beyond the shadows would come to believe that the mere shadows constitute actual reality itself (as opposed to a lower-dimensional projection of actual reality), the altered perspective experienced by the philosopher presents a radical challenge to that belief.
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In a similar vein, ordinary perception can be likened to to staring at reflections in the surface of a perfectly still pool of water (the mind) where the surface of the pool is invisible.
The reflections remain perfectly solid and convincing/realistic so long as the surface of the water/mind is undisturbed, the psychedelic trip-effect is like causing a splash in the water so that the surface is distorted and becomes visible;
the reflections then ripple, undulate and fragment, and reveal themselves to be mere reflections as opposed to being the actual things that they reflect.
Albert Hoffman (9), the discoverer of LSD, described how during his bicycle ride home after his first deliberate LSD self-administration: “Everything in my field of vision wavered and was distorted as if seen in a curved mirror”.
The same as in Plato’s example, a person who had only ever seen the reflections, and who had never experienced the surface-manifesting psychedelic ‘splash’ effect, would believe in the concrete reality of the reflections, and in the illusion of direct perceptual access to concrete reality.
—
Jackson (10) has written about the psychological effect of radically new experience; he constructs a thought-experiment involving a character ‘Fred’ who possesses the ability to perceive one additional colour (a subdivision of red) that nobody else can see.
This serves as an analogy for psychedelic tripping, because the discovery of the psychedelic perspective provides new information that is not available in the ordinary state of consciousness.
Jackson suggests that Fred would be unable to communicate his experience to anyone who had not seen the extra colour; in much the same way, a tripper cannot communicate meaningfully about his psychedelic experiences to someone who had never had the experience.
Verbal trip reports cannot fully convey what it is like to trip, to truly know the experience a person has to have it themselves.
It could be argued from a behaviouristic point of view that what one learns on discovering psychedelic tripping is simply an ability to recall and describe the experiences, a person who had never had the experience, will be unable to recall and describe it.
Hoffman (11) has similarly likened the discovery of psychedelic tripping to an adolescent’s discovery of the experience of sexual climax.
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Whether psychedelics cleanse the doors of perception or ripple the surface of consciousness, the value of these analogies lies in the overall picture they provide of how the psychedelic effect works to reveal the operational structures of the mind.
Analogies such as these serve to model and reflect the two core effects of psychedelic tripping; the temporary alteration in perception, and the permanent transformation of belief structures.
From analogy to cognitive phenomenology
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The various structural analogies can be translated into the language of philosophy of mind.
According to Marr’s (12) theory of visual perception, the 2-dimensional array of coloured light information on the surface of the eyes is translated by the mind into a complex, multi-levelled mental representation of the 3-dimensional physical environment.
Our external environment is illuminated by light which is reflected off of the surfaces of physical objects, some of the reflected light hits the surface of our eyes, and this 2-dimensional pattern of light of the surface of the eyes is processed and translated into a 3-dimensional mental image of the surrounding environment.
Fodor (13) makes a similar claim in his theory on mental modularity, according to which the brain contains dedicated modules for processing the information that is received as input from the body’s sensory organs; the output of these modules is the detailed mental image of the physical environment.
It is the mental image which is directly revealed to consciousness, so our ordinary conscious perception is inherently representational, we perceive 3-dimensional physical reality indirectly via mental symbols.
Hoffman (14) uses the terms ‘explicit representationalism’ and ‘dissociated cognition’ to describe the psychedelic perceptual/cognitive mode;
perception is representational at all times, but in the ordinary perceptual modality the mental representations behave so predictably and consistently (- they are so tangibly realistic) that they are tacitly conflated (or associated) with the mind-independent realities that they represent.
—
Hoffman (14) suggests that during a psychedelic trip the mind adopts the metaperceptive point of view, from this vantage point the distinction between the subjective mental representations and objective physical reality is explicitly revealed to the mind;
physical objects look less solid and realistic during a trip, they cease to appear as mind-independent objective entities and take on a cartoon-like character.
A psychedelic trip is induced by altering the brain’s endogenous chemistry via externally introduced chemicals, yet the altered visual effects are perceived as actual qualities of external objects (along with their shape, colour etc.).
Huxley (15, p.12) conveyed this idea in his description of his first mescaline trip, by describing how his trousers appeared to him in his altered state as follows:
“Those folds in the trousers-what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity! And the texture of the grey flannel-how rich, how deeply, mysteriously sumptuous!. . . the folds of my grey flannels were charged with ‘is-ness’.”
Note how Huxley directly attributes these fantastic qualities to his actual trousers, and not to his own perception of his trousers.
—
The physical surfaces of solid objects are commonly observed to flow, undulate and ripple like the surface of a liquid when psychedelic chemicals are introduced into the brain;
it follows logically from this that what the mind normally holds to be external, mind-independent concrete existence, is actually a deceptively detailed mental appearance.
There is no alternative way to account for the observation that an alteration of brain chemistry causes alterations in external reality other than by postulating that what we refer to as ‘external reality’ is in fact internal/mental in origin;
psychedelic visual alterations combined with basic reasoning conclusively demonstrate the principle of representationalism.
During a psychedelic trip, each person can observe for themselves that an alteration of internal neurochemistry results in a tangible alteration in the perceptual qualities of the external world, this naturally leads an inquiring mind to question the origin of perceptual phenomena, and the metaphysical status of the subject/object distinction.
This is why the temporary perceptual alteration can result in a permanent transformation of the mind’s conceptual framework; the psychedelic effect challenges our most basic assumptions about the nature of perception.
—
The phenomenologist Husserl (16) held that the ordinary (natural, habitual) manner in which the mind perceives reality is shaped by implicit background assumptions that give a coherent structure to our experience
(this idea is much in line with the general Kantian philosophical framework),
when these assumptions are made explicit and bracketed off by a process of private philosophical reflection which he called the phenomenological epoche, the mind’s ‘sphere of ownness’ is revealed, the raw subjective datastream prior to the mind’s conceptualising activity.
The psychiatrist Depraz (17) has likened Husserl’s phenomenological epoche to the process of psychotic mental dis-integration in schizophrenic patients,
suggesting that such experiences constitute a “phenomenological exploration of consciousness”, and that schizophrenia consists essentially in an “enhanced aptitude to perform the epoche”.
Freud (18, p.90) anticipated the comparison of psychosis and mind-manifestation when he compared the mind to a crystal, and used this comparison to suggest that observation of psychotic/schizoid mental processes can shed light on the structure of the sane mind.
According to Freud’s analogy a whole, undamaged crystal contains a complex internal structure which remains invisible so long as the crystal remains whole and undamaged.
However when a crystal shatters, the shape of the resulting shards of broken crystal reveal this (previously hidden) internal structure.
Similarly, the internal structure of the mind is invisible so long as it retains its wholeness and integrity; the mental shattering/fragmentation which occurs during periods of psychosis reveals its underlying structure in the “lines of cleavage” along which it falls apart.
According to Freud, the madman possesses a somewhat privileged perspective compared to a sane man because of his ability to perceive the hidden mental structures which are hidden to the sane man’s perspective.
This analogy of Freud’s is readily applicable to the phenomenological model of drug induced mind manifestation that I am outlining here.
—
The psychiatrist Osmond (19), who was one of the earliest scientific investigators of LSD and who is responsible for creating the word ‘psychedelic’, observed that the mental dynamics involved in schizophrenic psychosis have crucial similarities to psychedelic tripping.
It was for this reason that LSD was first labelled as ‘psychotomimetic’ (psychosis mimicking), and only later re-labelled ‘psychedelic’.
So Depraz’ (17) insight about the comparison of Husserl’s epoche to schizophrenic mental dis-integration can be extended to shed light on psychedelic mental alteration.
The heightened perspective of transcendental subjectivity, which is a new field of awareness that is revealed after exercising the epoche
(and, if Depraz’ comparison is valid, also during periods of schizophrenic psychosis)
is equivalent to the perspective of explicit representationalism that is revealed in a psychedelic trip;
the core implicit assumption that is made explicit and bracketed off is the assumption that consciousness is directly in contact with external objects, or equivalently, the assumption of straightforward identity between mental representations and their referents.
Sass (6) and Stanghellini (7) both employ the term ‘hyperreflexivity’ to describe the core peculiarity of the schizophrenic patient’s subjective experiences during periods of psychosis, and this term can be used equivalently to describe the temporary cognitive alteration of the psychedelic trip experience.
For Sass (6, p.37) cognitive hyperreflexivity contrasts with ordinary cognition because of its intensely inward-pointing orientation, such that: “the ego disengages from normal forms of involvement with nature and society, often taking itself, or its own experiences, as its own object”.
Similarly Stanghellini (7, p.165) suggests that in the hyperreflexive mind: “the ‘I’ breaks down into an experiencing I-subject contemplating an experienced I-object” such that: “the act of perception itself turns out to be an explicit intelligible object”.
Again here we see a clear indication of the general idea that altered state experience involves a specific kind of dissociation in the mind between symbol and referent, a cognitive process of representation which normally operates silently in the background is brought intensely into the foreground of awareness.
—
With this model of psychedelic experiencing in mind, it is worth pointing out that the word ‘hallucinogen’ which is sometimes used to denote psychedelic drugs is misleading, insofar as it implies that the effect of the drug is to induce hallucinations that are not present in the ordinary state of consciousness.
What is actually happening in a psychedelic trip is that a certain hallucinatory (or illusory, mistaken) aspect of our ordinary experience
(our tacit conflation of the mind-dependent internal perceptual image with the mind-independent external world)
becomes explicitly apparent, which is merely implicit (and therefore typically taken for granted and not noticed) during ordinary experience.
In his exhaustive compendium of phenomenological alterations that are observed in ayahuasca sessions, Shanon (4, p.205) includes:
“the assesment, very common with ayahuasca, that what is seen and thought during the course of intoxication defines the real, whereas the world that is ordinarily perceived is actually an illusion.”.
Similarly Watts (1, p.15) likens psychedelia to the transformations of consciousness that are undertaken in Taoism and Zen, which he says is:
“more like the correction of faulty perception or the curing of a disease…not an acquisitive process of learning more and more facts or greater and greater skills, but rather an unlearning of wrong habits and opinions”.
Psychedelic drugs are often referred to as ‘teachers’ (particularly the plant-based drugs such as ayahuasca and psilocybin mushrooms), so this can be understood as the core lesson that they teach,
– they reveal the fundamental cognitive operation of fusing together representation and referent, this is the sense in which ‘mind’ becomes ‘manifested’ during a trip.
—
Hoffman (20) states that the representational nature of mind is obscured in our ordinary perceptual modality by the high degree of stability and consistency in the way that mental representations behave
(for example, solid objects remain firmly solid), which creates the strong impression that mental phenomena are concretely existing (and therefore non-mental) entities,
and that consciousness directly perceives mind-independent reality so that perception is not mediated by mental representations; this is the real meaning of a ‘hallucination’ insofar as it applies to hallucinogenic drugs.
The hallucinatory aspect of perception is exposed by the psychedelic trip-effect because the ordinary stability and consistency of the representations is noticeably diminished during a trip, solid objects appear much less solid, physical reality takes on a fluid appearance.
Mind manifestation and transformation of belief networks
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In addition to the temporary perceptual alterations observed during psychedelic trip sessions, another important aspect of psychedelic phenomenology is a kind of radical psychological restructuring;
an [really, really, really] intense trip can be a life-transforming experience which leads to a major overhaul of a person’s internal framework of beliefs (Hoffman (21) calls this framework the mental worldmodel).
Thagard (22) has comprehensively modelled the process of psychological paradigm transformation;
when new information comes to light that cannot be accounted for or explained by an established belief network, the entire network must undergo revision in order to accommodate the new information.
For example, someone who had lived their entire life in a black-and-white environment would believe implicitly that there are no other colours since they have no way of perceiving them.
Such a person would experience a drastic disproof of that implicit belief, if they are suddenly exposed to the world of colour for the first time (like Jackson’s (10) thought-experiment character Mary, who is suddenly shown a red rose after spending a lifetime in black-and-white).
This is comparable to the mental transformation that is undergone when a person becomes acquainted with psychedelia;
the central difference between the pre and post psychedelic belief configurations, is that the new configuration accommodates the possibility of psychedelic experience
(it accommodates the perceptual dissociation between symbol and referent).
—
The epistemological dynamics that occur during the process of waking up from a vivid dream provide a close analogy for psychedelic mental transformation;
when fully immersed in a dream world one is not aware that one is dreaming, so the contents of dream-consciousness are taken to be simply real, the subject is not aware that his surrounding environment is a mentally projected and imaginary.
After waking up, when reflecting back on the dream, the mental contents are immediately re-interpreted as unreal, imaginary mental projections in light of the new experience of waking consciousness (“it was just a dream”).
Similarly, upon perceiving directly the symbol/referent distinction in the psychedelic state of consciousness, the phenomenal content of ordinary consciousness is reinterpreted in the light of the new information that is provided by the heightened psychedelic perspective.
Every psychedelic trip lasts for a certain duration then ends as the chemicals are metabolised by the body, so the psychedelic perspective which reveals manifest phenomena as projected mental representations is only experienced on a temporary basis,
but if a person is able to fully grasp and remember the psychedelic insights after the trip ends (and become generally acquainted with the intense altered experiential modality), then the mind is permanently transformed.
—
The psychedelic belief revision is held in place by the memory of the transformative psychedelic experience, this memory provides a constant reminder which prevents the old pre-psychedelic set of beliefs/assumptions from re-establishing itself.
The existence of the altered-state modality of dissociated/hyperreflexive cognition presents a fundamental overrider to pre-established belief networks, which forces an overhaul of those networks.
The axiomatic basis of the pre-psychedelic, experientially naïve mental worldmodel (essentially, the belief in straightforward identity between mental representations and their referents) is critically undermined by transformative psychedelic experience.
Per Thagard (22) this undermining of a metaphysical model necessitates a systematic restructuring of the model, adding crucial qualifiers to foundational assumptions;
in this case the qualifiers concern the existence of an experience which seems to disprove the assumed identity of representation and referent.
—
References
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1. Watts A. The Joyous Cosmology; Adventures in the chemistry of consciousness. Pantheon Books; 1962
2. Grof S. The Holotropic Mind; The three levels of human consciousness and how they shape our lives. San Francisco Harper; 1993
3. Huxley A. The Doors of Perception: And Heaven and Hell. Thinking Ink 2003
4. Shanon B. The Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience. Oxford University Press; 2003
5. Sass L. The paradoxes of delusion; Wittgenstein, Schreber and the schizophrenic mind. Cornell university press; 1994
6. Sass L. Madness and modernism. Basic books; 1992
7. Stanghellini G. Disembodied spirits and deanimated bodies; the psychopathology of common sense. Oxford university press; 2004
8.Plato. Cooper J editor. The complete works. Hackett publishing. 1997
9. Inventor of LSD Albert Hoffman’s first trip. The Guardian [internet]. 2008 1st May. Available from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/01/medicalresearch
10. Jackson F. Epiphenomenal Qualia. The Philosophical Quarterly 1982 April. 32(127): 127-136
11. Hoffman M. Determinism as Enlightenment [internet]. [place unknown]1985-2007. Available from: http://www.egodeath.com/DeterminismEnlightenment.htm
12. Marr A. Vision: A Computational Investigation into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman & Company; 1983
13. Fodor J. The modularity of mind. MIT press; 1983
14. Hoffman M. The Entheogen Theory of Religion and Ego Death [internet]. [place unknown]1985-2007. Available from http://www.egodeath.com/mobile.htm
15. Huxley A. The Doors of Perception. Flamingo; 1977
16. Husserl E. Cartesian Meditations. Kluwer academic publishers; 1999
17. Depraz N. Putting the epoché into practice: schizophrenic experience as illustrating the phenomenological exploration of consciousness. In Fulford B, Morris K, Sadler J, Stanghellini G editors. Nature and narrative, an introduction to the philosophy of psychiatry. Oxford University press; 2003
18. Freud S. New introductory lectures on psychoanalysis. Penguin, 1988
19. Obituary; Doctor Humphrey Osmond. The Telegraph [internet]. 2004 16th Feb. Available from: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1454436/Dr-Humphry-Osmond.html
20. Hoffman M. Mental Construct Processing [internet]. 1985-2007. available from http://www.egodeath.com/mcp.htm
21.Hoffman M. The Egoic and Transcendent Mental Worldmodels [internet]. 1985-2007. Available from: http://www.egodeath.com/egoictranscendentmentalmodels.htm
22.Thagard P. Conceptual Revolutions. Princeton University press; 1992
Biography
Author is a philosopher and psychonautical explorer, he graduated from college with PhD in Knowledge, hosted and produced the Podcast, and has given presentations on psychedelic phenomenology at universities.
Motivation for this webpage
What made me think about this excellent, useful, relevant article is this non-excellent article; I probably like Kant and find Continental Phen’y worthless and irrelevant despite Houot’s writings claiming that this sort of Phen’y is relevant:
Phenomenology for Psychedelic Researchers: A Review of Current Methods & Practices (Houot, 2021) – I considered making a page containing that article, but seems worthless.
I would only make such a page to confirm that that approach is worthless and cannot hold a candle to the present article, which is related to the Egodeath theory.
Houot has sure not succeeded in the slightest persuading me of his claims that such Phen’y is important for psychonauts.
The present Phen’y article is important for psychonauts.
This article is by Author, not by Cybermonk.
For scholarly commentary and markup, only; not for publication.
Not a backup; for markup.
I read this aloud on the Egodeath Mystery Show, and have read a few times.
It is an ideal, perfect treatment, though I can probably extend and highlight some points.
Article not found by me at Academia.edu now.
This page is not for accurate clone backup of article as its primary purpose.
https://egodeaththeory.org/?s=%22breaking+convention%22
The Egodeath theory 