I’m delighted to be giving a chat at Psychedelic Science 2025, the annual convention of the Multidisciplinary Affiliation of Psychedelic Research. The convention (June 17-20 in Denver) guarantees to be actually enjoyable and stimulating. If you can also make it, I’d like to say hello: registration isn’t low-cost, however you should use code SPEAKER15 to get 15% off your registration.
I’m particularly excited as a result of my speak is absolutely experimental, the sort of broad comparative work that will have gotten frowned on once I was in grad faculty. I’m nonetheless aiming to train scholarly warning to keep away from saying something false, attempting to remain moderately near what’s within the texts, however I’m writing about a number of thinkers whose supply languages (classical Chinese language and previous German) I don’t know effectively: one thing which I believe one has to do so as to examine human cultural commonalities, however which might have raised each eyebrow in my PhD program. It’s the sort of mission that an aspiring professor solely undertakes after getting tenure; in my case, I can do it as a result of I’m now not attempting for a college job.
The speak probes extra into similarities between psilocybin experiments, of the type explored by Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins, and classical mystical texts from three completely different contexts. However when one speaks about similarities alone, one invitations the query “who cares?”. It’s important to speak about why the similarities would matter – and so I deal with one specific approach by which I believe they do.
Particularly: central to most discussions of psychedelic use is the idea of integration. Psychedelic experiences may be very highly effective; 67% of Griffiths’s volunteers rated their psilocybin expertise among the many prime 5 most significant experiences of their lives, corresponding to the beginning of a primary baby or the loss of life of a mother or father. How then does one deal with or deal with such a robust expertise? Most typically, what does one do after such an expertise?
Within the scholarly literature on psychedelics, the rubric for answering such questions is “integration”. However, I argue, that literature too typically assumes the course of integration in a approach that doesn’t do justice to the expertise’s energy. “Integration” actually means making complete or combining into an entire – so what’s the complete? The psychologists led by Ingmar Gorman, for instance, declare that “Psychedelic integration is a course of by which the affected person integrates the insights of their expertise into their life.” However such an strategy is weak to Rachael Petersen’s highly effective query: “wait, I simply encountered an final actuality. Wouldn’t that suggest that I must combine myself into it?”
That’s the place the mystics are available. I have a look at three very completely different mystical approaches, from historical China, medieval Germany and classical India: the Zhuangzi’s passage on sitting and forgetting, Meister Eckhart’s dialogue of gezucket (“rapture”), and Gauḍapāda’s commentary on the “fourth state” of consciousness within the Māṇḍukya Upaniṣad. Throughout centuries and continents, all of those describe a state of consciousness that shares core parts with the psilocybin experiences described by Griffiths’s volunteers: one withdraws from on a regular basis notion, then ideas and phrases fall away, and one leads to a state that feels holy or sacred, characterised with reverence.
What’s essential, although, is that the states are additionally all characterised by self-transcendence, within the face of an underlying metaphysical actuality – “metaphysical” in Aristotle’s literal sense of “past physics”, one thing that lies beneath while you go previous the noticed regularities of nature and physics themselves. Griffiths’s volunteers skilled a way of “inner unity”, a way of merging into a bigger actuality. In Zhuangzi’s state of sitting and forgetting, one merges with the “nice pervader” (dàtōng 大通) – a phrase that later commentators affirm refers to dào 道, the cosmic approach. For Gauḍapāda, “When the thoughts doesn’t lapse into inactivity and isn’t distracted by needs, that’s to say, when it stays unshakable and doesn’t give rise to appearances, it certainly turns into braḥman” (Māṇdūkya Kārikā III.46) – the nondual final cosmic actuality. And Eckhart says, “When the soul is unified and there enters into whole self-abnegation, then she finds God as in Nothing.” (Maurice Walshe translation sermon 19, p140)
The theologian John Hick as soon as made the declare that “faith” was all about “the transformation of human existence from self-centredness to Actuality-centredness” (An Interpretation of Faith 300). Whereas Hick’s declare is laughably daring as a characterization of “faith” typically – there may be far, far an excessive amount of that it leaves out – I believe his phrasing may nonetheless be useful as a characterization of what’s happening in these numerous mystical experiences, whether or not classical or chemical. In all of those instances, one identifies much less with one’s on a regular basis empirical self, and extra with a bigger underlying actuality. The characterization of that actuality could be very completely different – dao pervades nature bodily, whereas Gauḍapāda takes bodily distinctions to be illusions that obscure braḥman – however however, one forgets oneself within the face of that actuality, no matter it’s.
The importance of all this, in a psychedelic context, is that it suggests a really completely different view of integration from Gorman’s, the place “Psychedelic integration is a course of by which the affected person integrates the insights of their expertise into their life.” In these texts, one’s life will not be the entire into which integration occurs. Quite, one integrates one’s life itself into an entire that’s greater than that life – and it’s the expertise itself that reveals that that should occur.
