Continuing my little series on causality in which we dive into the psychedelic experience today, shining a light on what these states can do to illuminate our understanding of cause and effect.
As I have relayed in many of my #floor-lessons thus far, there are states of awareness human beings can easily access with the help of plants and psychedelics that demonstrate how there really is no separate you from the rest of the cosmos. There is some kind of hugely strong connection that will catch first time trippers by utter surprise, not merely for its mighty impact but primarily for the keen sense that it is always there and always has been, we just plainly don't notice in our regular modes of consciousness.
When we get back from the experience the one thing that may persist (through the rest of your "sober" life even) is that sense of how everything was a giant "web" of interconnections, that the individual is not just a separate thingie in the cosmos being messed with by its surroundings... and I have integrated this aspect into my own life so much so that it's fair to say it has changed my life forever, for the better. It feels like rediscovering a long lost peace in oneself that enables one to deal with challenges in their life on a whole different level - a sense of ease and optimism because it's no longer "me against the world".
Though the jury is still out on what exactly that interconnection IS and how it works, there are some great contenders as to what it might be: anyone who had the experience of meeting other people on psychedelic states of the mind will be able to tell you that these states are often accompanied by the dawning realization that the "outer world" is as much a part of you as you are of it.
Let's try an example most people are familiar with to illustrate:
If you ever had a thought you will be able to understand this sensation quite simply. When you think a thought you can react to it. Let's say you are worried about something and the worry is slowly making you restless and anxious. You may start to try and calm yourself by reassuring yourself that your worry is unfounded and that everything will be alright, and despite your mind continously thinking thoughts that keep you worrying you may exert a great deal of effort to re-calm yourself, kind of "talking to yourself" in your own mind.
A psychedelic trip can be just like that, only that the moment you are worried - someone ELSE shows up telling you "don't worry, it will be alright". There is this keen experience that suddenly everything going on inside of you is totally transparent and readable to the world around you, and not only that: the "outer world" responds to it just as easily and effortlessly as you yourself might have. And that seems just too mindshattering to even consider until it happens again, and again and again, with any sort of thought or inner dialogue you could be having. Anything.
You may say: "well, being worried is easy to spot from afar" and you may be right. I had it happen that I just stood there on a psy festival thinking "I really would like some wine right now" and a second later a dude shows up, offering me his wine pouch with a smile as if he had read it on my t-shirt.
Eventually you will start to wonder whether you made the dude show up, or whether you wanted wine because he was going to offer it anyway but the dawning probability is kinda the same: There was one field or vibe in the air and every"one" responded with their take. My recent article about response-ability comes to mind, check it out here.
These states of mind can greatly mess with our certainty about one thing causing another simply because after having experiences like this for the 150th time the ego stops calculating the odds and simply goes into tilt-mode because it's just too damn unlikely to be chance or random, which is when the real magic actually starts. It is literally impossible to judge who set the chain of events into motion and the very notion that anyone "started" it all - totally isolated from the effects on him by his surroundings - seems just too insufficient to explain how things happen.
So, while I am still exploring what the mind is and probably will be for the rest of my life, I have long ceased to be certain of simplistic notions of causality simply because they fail the experiencial levels of experimentation and interaction of the inner and the outer on psychedelic states. There might be different ways to "explain" this but pretending things exist because we call them that and pretending that every "part" in the universe is a separate billard ball moving other billard balls just doesn't seem to cut it anymore if we want to get real.
Of course, as you may have noticed I use language just as anybody else and these conventions sit so deep that I'm not sure we will or SHOULD get rid of them, language does have its merit in our human game and the "physical" universe. It's just that when we think about guilt, shame or anything else that worries us to no end, we may take great liberation in considering that "things" may not be so plain and "mechanical" as we all make them out to be, as I have tried to explain in this series.
As I have written in the two previous parts our notions of origin of causation, our deep-sitting hang-ups on language and our devout convictions about our own individual separateness got us into this "mess" where we often feel alone and overwhelmed with the perceived seriousness of it all...
Psychedelic states of mind cannot and probably should not become the norm, they are valuable precisely because they are the exception. That said, one enormous permanent element to all of them seems to be its capability of reminding us, of showing us this mysterious interconnection of everything that we regularly do not notice anymore. Even people who have gone on many psychedelic journeys will still be surprised when they enter these states again after a while of absense because the connection and interaction of inner and outer, the correlation between subject and object is so profound and statistically unlikely that one trip can single handedly revert and cure many of our worries and problems we are usually facing in our lives and may have amassed over the years in our subconscious. It's like looking for an old book in a dark and messy basement and suddenly someone has turned on the light.
As long as we will prohibit the psychedelic state of mind I feel we will not move closer to a more factual understanding of causality, because without these experiences it is quite easy to take our common mode of perception as "all there is" and convince ourselves that things do things, and that the universe has no underlying connection, purpose or life when in fact that is precisely what most people find on psychedelic experiences - everything comes to life and starts "talking" to one another, where a human being is merely one of the players but not the only one. The entire "thing" is the player, seemingly divided into infinite aspects so that there can be a game at all.
The game of life pretending to be serious because we forgot about its interconnections on a deeper level...
These experiences are also enormously important to have as a human being on the search for answers and meaning because one suddenly starts to see how much energy has been invested by the current empire to hide their existence from humanity on a grand scale. And anything hidden that well surely has "a reason" for being hidden - whoops see I did it again. Slipped back into thinking causality was real, lol.
Part 2 - Boundless Boundaries & Thingifying the Totality
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