#reperspectiving

Here is at least two lasting powers of psychedelic and mystical experiences: they reveal unconscious assumptions in our understanding of the world, and they facilitate the emotional resignification of facts about the world.

1. Unconscious assumptions: let’s take being at one with the universe. Is it true that a guy on mushrooms *is* the universe? No. But it’s not false either. The boundaries of the self are arbitrarily drawn. Usually, we think of the body as the self. But sometimes, we see the self as our executive capacity (“ego”, if you prefer), in opposition to other mental phenomena like feelings and impulses. In certain mystical practices, we dissolve our identification with the ego and identify only with consciousness itself. In the other direction, when we drive, we think of the car as an extension of ourselves. We identify with our accomplishments, with our family or friends, with our community. If you are a patriot, an offense to your country feels like a personal offense to you.

Edit to connect explicitly to the main point: the unconscious assumption that your self is definitely only one thing is not true and leads to suffering.

“Being at one with the universe” means nothing more than the feeling of extending that boundary of the self to encompass everything. Is it wrong? No, because it’s not exactly a proposition. It can’t pay rent in experience anticipation. But feels right, and it can make you feel a lot better about things that make people miserable like death and impotence and feeling small. This brings us to

2. Resignification. Let’s run through an example. You’re going to die someday. Chances are, you think of death as something frightening, associated with frightening feelings or impressions like darkness, isolation and helplessness, and this may cause you a lot of grief and anxiety.

Mystical experiences allow you to resignify death – to change your emotional relationship to it. Instead of associating it with darkness and horrible things, you can think of death as “an old friend”, like the third Peverell brother. *Is* death an old friend? No. But neither is it darkness, isolation and helplessness. This understanding is no more accurate than the old-friend understanding, and the old-friend understanding causes a lot less heartache.

Not sure I agree with this either, but it’s an interesting shift in perspective, and I wanted to share it with dataandphilosophy​, because it seemed relevant to his conversation from earlier:

[snip]

Against this backdrop of mental stress, distress, and misery, we are supposed to stand “mentally healthy,” as if life were a lark and as if sweet smiles were not only our birthright but also an obligation. Why should we be smiling? Why should we be “mentally healthy,” whatever that phrase is supposed to mean? For the whole history of our species, until very recently, your drinking water could kill you. In our age of good drinking water—which is only a reality for some percentage of our species—we have only had world wars and nuclear weapons to contend with. And what is life like for someone living under a dictator, where you can vanish for speaking? And how pleasant is your boring, taxing job? How pleasant, for that matter, is your own seething mind, packed with worries, regrets, resentments, and to-do lists?

But you are supposed to keep smiling. You are supposed to stay positive. No matter that every human right is a fight that must continually be fought for. No matter that in this modern age of plenty, which advertising tells us comes with beautiful homes, beautiful cars, and beautiful bodies, insomnia is an epidemic, obesity is epidemic, sadness is an epidemic, and meaninglessness is an epidemic. You must not notice the machinations of the powerful: none of that should affect your mental health. You must not notice your aging, your illnesses, or your mortality: none of that should affect your mental health. You may not even look in the mirror and announce that you might strive to be a better person: none of that!

Against this backdrop of great difficulty, stresses to our system, dangers as real as wars, famines, and pestilences, and a mind that clearly recognizes injustices and indignities, has grown a mental health establishment that takes none of that into account. It acts as if our baseline is “mental health” and that deviations from that unreal, made-up baseline are “mental disorders” or “mental diseases.” It calls the warehousing of distressed and difficult people, people who are no picnic and who are having no picnic, the “institutionalization of the mentally insane.” Its psychiatrists spend fifteen minutes with patients, not exploring human matters but prescribing and regulating chemicals. That is where we are.