For those who aren’t familiar with the term, an Entheogen is a psychoactive substance that is used to facilitate a spiritual experience. These substances are associated with all sorts of ancient traditions from Amazonian shamanism to Greek mystery religions.
Starting in the 1960’s several hallucinogenic drugs were discovered or rediscovered by Western society and a lot of people became interested in trying them. Some of those people started using these drugs to achieve heightened spirituality in a way similar to the ancient traditions.
I am, as you might say, inexperienced. So I don’t really know what I am talking about. But I have been trying to sort through my thoughts and develop an opinion regarding whether Entheogens should play an important role in society (and in my own life).
First off I want to explain what I think psychedelic drugs do. Basically, I buy the ego dissolution theory. There is a part of our brain that filters our consciousness in order to focus on a very particular kind of point of view. This point of view tends to limit our sense of identity in space (i.e., to our body) and expand it in time (i.e., connect us to our future and past selves). Taking psychedelic drugs reduces activity in the part of the brain that serves this filtering function, thereby resulting in an expanded sense of self spatially (i.e., feeling like you are unified with the universe) and limited sense of self temporally (i.e., focused more on observing the moment than trying to change the future to suit our future self).
In the book Psychedelic Explorers Guide, James Fadiman describes this as happening in four ways:
- concentration on the present
- awareness of “polarity” (i.e., things that seem different are two sides of the same coin
- awareness of relativity (i.e., our self is just one perspective on the universe)
- awareness of eternal energy (i.e., the same life force pervades everything)
Another kind of filter that seems to be reduced is the part of our brain that decides common things are not interesting. Thus, during a psychadelic experience, we might have a feeling that what we are thinking or feeling is of very great importance. Here’s an interesting quote from Scott Alexander:
Either psychedelics are a unique gateway to insight and happiness, maybe the most powerful ever discovered. Or they have a unique ability to convince people that they are, faking insight as effectively as heroin fakes happiness. Either one would be fascinating: the first for obvious reasons, the second because it convinces some pretty smart people. If the insight of LSD were fake, its very convincingness could tell us a lot about the mind and about how rationality works.
I would like to distinguish the reduced filter version of psychedelic experience from what I call the creative fantasy version. That version would be that psychedelic drugs overstimulate parts of our brain and create a bunch of stuff that wouldn’t be there otherwise. In other words, I think that by reducing our filters, psychedelics make us more aware of stuff that is going on in our brain all the time, but which get filtered out by our ego, rather than creating new thoughts out of thin air.
So what implications does this have for using Etheogens to induce religious experiences? Like Scott Alexander there is a part of me that wonders whether the religious experience created by Entheogens is somehow fake. They just make us more aware of all these thoughts and feelings that couldn’t really make the cut to be important enough for everyday consciousness, and then make us think these cast-off thoughts and feelings are somehow very profound.
After all, our conscious brain, and all of the filters that come with it, are the result of millions of years of evolution. It stands to reason that these filters do a pretty good job of keeping us alive. So why would we purposefully put our guard down, so to speak?
On the other hand, since the use of Entheogens is such an ancient practice, maybe psychedelics were with during the course of our evolution, and societies that developed ways to periodically let down their conscious ego had a survival advantage over those that didn’t? Maybe our brains actually evolved enhanced susceptibility to psychedelic drugs in order to facilitate these experiences. Perhaps the great success of the Greek city states, for example, had something to do with the fact that many of the greatest minds participated in the annual Eleusinian Mysteries, which likely involved something akin to LSD.
In any case, reasoning from evolutionary fitness is not going to answer the question. An alternative is just to ask myself what would be some potential purposes of altering my own mental framework in a fundamental way.
This question reminds me of one of my all time favorite movies, Memento.
In the film, the main character has a mental condition where he has no long term memory. Every morning he wakes up and doesn’t know who he is. So he writes a bunch of notes to himself, and for really important things, gets a tattoo. Eventually, however, we start to question whether he is purposefully altering his story to manipulate his future self.
The concept is pretty mind-bending. But we should realize that in a sense, this is what our ego is doing. We are constantly filtering our story and only allowing ourselves to see those things our ego wants us to see.
In any case, we now know that we can alter our future awareness in a fundamental way by choosing to use psychedelic substances. And the choice of whether we want to do so depends on our current mental state. So the question is kind of circular. In my current framework for understanding my self and the universe, is there any reason why I would want to change my framework for understanding my self and the universe?
I think the answer is a conditional yes, for a few reasons. First, I think it should be pretty uncontroversial that psychedelic drugs and Entheogenic experiences can have a therapeutic effect. There is a growing body of research about this, but one example might be that these experiences might help people overcome an unhealthy fear of dying, or heal psychological trauma.
But another reason for why Entheogenic experiences might be important is that perhaps our culture conditions us in ways that tend to result in an overactive ego, and periodically looking past our ego can help us maintain a better psychological balance. In other words, maybe our ego is lying to us a bit about how much we really need to be concerned about all the things a modern consumer/citizen is supposed to be concerned about.
Fadiman says this about the impact of the modified way of looking at things that comes from psychedelic experience:
From the pragmatic standpoint of our culture, such an attitude is very bad for business. It might lead to improvidence, lack of foresight, diminished sales of insurance policies, and abandoned savings accounts. Yet this is just the corrective that our culture needs. No one is more fatuously impractical that the “successful” executive who spends his whole life absorbed in frantic paperwork with the objective of retiring in comfort at sixty-five, when it will all be too late. Only those who have cultivated the art of living completely in the present have any use for making plans for the future, for when the plans mature they will be able to enjoy the results.
I am pretty sympathetic to this point of view. I think the American Standard Model of Happiness is deficient. However, I do have a slightly different view of the “corrective” that our culture needs. I think our brains are ill adapted to modern culture. I think the high marginal utility experienced by middle class is essentially a constant moderate stress that is not normal (i.e., it is a modern invention). Thus, I think we need to build a “bubble” of sorts to protect ourselves from the modern world (specifically, to mitigate the constant economic and social stress we experience).
Part of building this bubble requires us to expand our identity a little bit. I don’t think we can do it if we are so focused on our own personal welfare that we don’t let other people in. However, I think that expanding our identity to everything is overdoing things. My theory is that our brain has some natural limitations, and that it is designed to work really well in certain social circumstances where we identify closely with a small group of people.
An existential threat can trigger a patriotic impulse where our identity expands out to the size of our folk, or tribe. But for the most part, I think it is much healthier to focus our social energy on a much smaller group. The idea of allowing my sense of identity to be forcefully expanded to the whole universe strikes me as being pretty dangerous.
Maybe the danger is justified by the extreme degree to which modern society promotes development of the ego. The big question for me is whether an Entheogenic experience can help us find a happy medium between total self-centeredness and complete ego dissolution. Or maybe a better approach would be to seek smaller doses of “expanded consciousness” by doing more mundane things like attending church, reading good books, studying physics and spending time as a family.
