FLOURISH - Psychedelic Mysticism

I’m interested in mystical and psychedelic experiences because they seem to evoke radically altered states of mind that are akin to spiritual awakening. They enable people to feel more at peace with the flow of existence and are often a portal to feelings of bliss. What's not to like about all that?  So, mysticism and psychedelics could be seen as forms of mental management that can help us to flourish as we age.  

In this episode I summarize previous episodes, discuss a couple of my own experiments with psychedelics and evoke Aldous Huxley’s characterization of psychedelics trips as journey’s to the “antipodes of the mind.”

Transcript

PSYCHEDELIC MYSTICISM

By Michael C. Patterson

Hi there. Welcome to the FLOURISH AS YOU AGE podcast series. We are exploring how we might be able to flourish, rather than flounder as we get older. This episode is going to explore a really heightened type of flourishing, what I’ll call psychedelic mysticism. 

In the first few  episodes of the FLOURISHING series, I’ve introduced some ideas about the nature of flourishing and floundering. I’ve described the hemisphere hypothesis, which I find to be a very useful framework for exploring why we flounder and how we might figure out how to flourish. In essence, we spend too much time stuck in the imaginary world of our conceptual mind and too little time in the real world as experienced by our sensory mind.  A lot of the strategies for flourishing, I believe, try to correct this imbalance. 

We have begun to explore important characteristics of flourishing.  I cited Richard Davidson’s research that leads him to believe that there are four key dimensions of wellbeing that need to be cultivated: attention, connection, insight and purpose. 

I am very intrigued with the state of flow and suggested that the more time we spend in a flow state, the more we flourish. I’ve also talked about the importance of equanimity, the ability to be even-tempered about both the challenges and opportunities of growing old. 

Then I pushed the idea  a bit further and introduced the idea of transcendent equanimity, in which is suggested that there might be an exalted state of equanimity that enable us to embrace all of existence as equally blissful. 

This blissful transcendence is, obviously, an extremely exalted state of flourishing, but I don’t think we should prematurely dismiss the idea that some form of transcendence might be attainable for all of us. With this in mind, we’ve begun an investigation of mysticism and how we might gain access to mystical insights. 

In this episode, I want to introduce the idea that psychedelics might be a reliable way to engage in mystical practice. 

In the summer of 2022, I wrote an article for 3rd Act Magazine in which I suggested that the one major trip I wanted to take before I died was a psychedelic trip on psylocybin. 

Here’s excepts from a reading of that article. 

PSILOCYBIN: THE ANTIPODES OF THE MIND

The one voyage I absolutely must take before I die will transport me not to exotic geographic locales, but to unexplored regions of my mind. I follow in the footsteps of Aldous Huxley who longed “to visit the mind’s antipodes and do some visionary sightseeing.”

I want to experience a trip on psilocybin.

I should explain, as an aside, that the antipodes refer to Australia and New Zealand so for someone like Huxley, who lived in England, it meant literally the other side of the world, distant territory rarely visited. Okay, back to the article. 

As I said, the big trip I want to take is a psilocybin trip. 

Psilocybin belongs to a class of non-addictive drugs called psychedelics, which includes LSD, mescaline, peyote, and ayahuasca. [Let me repeat that. Psychedelics are non-addictive, not at all like opioids, for example.]

Psychedelics have earned their notoriety because of their consistent ability to provide a transcendent and mystical experience. I’ll return to this topic in a bit.

This takes us back to Huxley’s “antipodes of the mind,” those mental territories so far from home they remain unexplored. I don’t want to leave this life having explored only the most familiar and accessible parts of my mind. I’m with Socrates that an unexplored life is not worth living. Leaving large swaths of exotic mental terrain unexplored seems a tragically wasted opportunity.

And psychedelics seem the perfect means of accessing mystical states. Guided psychedelics trips have proven to reliably evoke states of altered consciousness. Compared to other means of accessing mystical realms, psychedelics are like super-sonic jets. You are there and back in a single day. No sitting and meditating in a cave for decades. No need for religious conversion. No call for flagellation or sensory deprivation.

I experimented briefly with psychedelics back in my college days. My one LSD trip was entertaining and mind altering, but not particularly mystical. The highlight was my friends morphing into archetypal representations of themselves: One friend became The Viking in furs and horned helmet. Another became the Buddha.

It was mescaline that was mystical. Mescaline transported me to a new kind of reality where everything—myself included—became pixilated as though revealing its primal components. No borders. Object and field became one kaleidoscopic display of luminous chards of light and color. The odd thing was that I could still walk around without bumping into trees. I could still chat with my buddies. The visual world was transformed but was still navigable.

I loved the mescaline experience. Yet, curiously, I only tripped two, maybe three times. There was no craving to repeat the exhilarating experience. These are hallmarks of the psychedelic and mystical experiences. They are revelatory. They open your eyes to a new way of seeing the world. Once opened, there is no particular need for reinforcement. You were blind, but now you see. I have to tell you this is very strange language for a lifelong atheist and avowed skeptic.

The only other quasi-mystical experience I have had was also in college. It was brought on, I believe, by sleep deprivation. I had been working through the night as a stagehand at McCarter Theater in Princeton, NJ, getting ready for the opening of a new show. I reached a point of exhaustion, and was rather glum and lonely as I walked home alone through the perfectly empty Princeton campus. I felt a slight breeze and had the distinct impression that time had stopped. I looked into the black sky and saw a single pink magnolia blossom floating slowly into my hand.

Existence had paused for an instant to offer me this reminder of beauty and an assurance that all would be well. This makes no sense, of course. I don’t really believe existence paused on my account. The experience, nevertheless, had that “noetic quality” of being imbued with profound meaning and significance. It lifted the weight of loneliness and replaced the negative effect with a sense of peace and quiet joy.

Psychedelics are said to be mind-manifesting. They evoke and bring forth contents of our subconscious minds. The nature of the trip is highly influenced by the set and setting. In clinical settings, there are always helpful guides who prepare you for the trip, are present with you while under the influence of the drug, and also help you process the trip after it is done.

Having experienced a bit of the mystical in my youth, I’m curious to explore the antipodes of my mature mind, a mind that is jam packed with seven decades worth of knowledge, memories and experiences. It would be lovely to take a psilocybin trip and have all that roiling, boiling confusion brought into peaceful harmony.

It would be lovely to relinquish life with a smile. It is all one. It all makes sense. It’s all lovely. What a wonderful trip it was. 

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I have to admit that I have not yet taken a trip on psilocybin. I’m working on slower approaches to transcendence, doing yoga and meditation. I don’t really think these approaches will propel me into a state of transcendence. But I do think they will prepare my mind to embrace the state and be more at ease with whatever happens, when I finally take the plunge and take the trip to the antipodes of my mind.