A Psychedelic Experience - Fact or Fantasy?
Alan Watts
This essay appeared in LSD, The
Consciousness-Expanding Drug
David Solomon, Editor, G.P. Putnam's Sons, New York ©David Solomon 1964
Since at least 1500 B.C. men have, from time to
time, held the view that our normal vision of the world is a
hallucination—a dream, a figment of the mind, or, to use the
Hindu word which means both art and illusion, a maya. The
implication is that, if this is so, life need never be taken
seriously. It is a fantasy, a play, a drama to be enjoyed. It
does not really matter, for one day (perhaps in the moment
of death) the illusion will dissolve, and each one of us will
awaken to discover that he himself is what there is and all
that there is—the very root and ground of the universe, or the
ultimate and eternal space in which things and events come and
go.
This is not simply an idea which someone
"thought up," like science fiction or a philosophical
theory. It is the attempt to express an experience in which
consciousness itself, the basic sensation of being "I,"
undergoes a remarkable change. We do not know much about these
experiences. They are relatively common, and arise in every part
of the world. They occur to both children and adults. They may
last for a few seconds and come once in a lifetime, or they may
happen repeatedly and constitute a permanent change of
consciousness. With baffling impartiality they may descend upon
those who never heard of them, as upon those who have spent years
trying to cultivate them by some type of discipline. They have
been regarded, equally, as a disease of consciousness with
symptoms everywhere the same, like measles, and as a vision of
higher reality such as comes in moments of scientific or
psychological insight. They may turn people into monsters and
megalomaniacs, or transform them into saints and sages. While
there is no sure way of inducing these experiences, a favorable
atmosphere may be created by intense concentration, by fasting,
by sensory deprivation, by hyper-oxygenation, by prolonged
emotional stress, by profound relaxation, or by the use of
certain drugs.
Experiences of this kind underlie some of the great
world religions—Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism in particular, and,
to a much lesser extent, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. As
expressed in the doctrines of these religions, they purport to be
an account of "the way things are" and therefore invite
comparison with descriptions of the universe and of man given by
physicists and biologists. They contradict common sense so
violently and are accompanied with such a powerful sense of
authenticity and reality (more real than reality is a
common description) that men have always wondered whether they
are divine revelations or insidious delusions.
This problem becomes all the more urgent now that
the general public has become aware that experiences of this type
are available, with relative ease, through the use of such
chemicals as the so-called psychedelic drugs—LSD-25, mescaline,
psilocybin, hashish, and marijuana, to name only the better
known. The reality status of the modes of consciousness induced
by these chemicals becomes, then, a matter of most serious
concern for the guardians of our mental health, for psychiatrists
and psychologists, philosophers and ministers, for every
scientific investigator of the nature of consciousness, and,
above all, for a large section of the general public curious and
eager to get "the experience" for reasons of all kinds.
A proper study of the question runs, at the very
beginning, into two obstacles. The first is that we know very
little indeed about the structure and chemistry of the brain. We
do not know enough of the ways in which it gleans information
about the outside world and about itself to know whether these
chemicals help it (as lenses help the eyes) or confuse it. The
second is that the nature and use of these chemicals is
surrounded with an immense semantic fog, whose density is
increased by people who ought to know better. I mean
psychiatrists.
What we know, positively and scientifically, about
psychedelic chemicals is that they bring about certain
alterations of sense perception, of emotional level and tone, of
identity feeling, of the interpretation of sense data, and of the
sensations of time and space. The nature of these alterations
depends on three variables: the chemical itself (type and
dosage), the psycho-physiological state of the subject, and the
social and aesthetic context of the experiment. Their
physiological side effects are minimal, though there are
conditions (e.g., disease of the liver) in which some of them may
be harmful. They are not physiologically habit-forming in the
same way as alcohol and tobacco, though some individuals may come
to depend upon them for other (i.e., "neurotic")
reasons. Their results are not easily predictable since they
depend so largely upon such imponderables as the setting, and the
attitudes and expectations of both the supervisor and the
subject. The (enormous) scientific literature on the subject
indicates that a majority of people have pleasant reactions, a
largish minority have unpleasant but instructive and helpful
reactions, while a very small minority have psychotic reactions
lasting from hours to months. It has never been definitely
established that they have led directly to a suicide. (I am
referring specifically here to LSD-25, mescaline, the mushroom
derivative psilocybin, and the various forms of cannabis,
such as hashish and marijuana.)
Thus what we know for certain implies that these
chemicals cannot be used without caution. But this applies
equally to antibiotics, whiskey, household ammonia, the
automobile, the kitchen knife, electricity, and matches. No
worthwhile life can be lived without risks, despite current
American superstitions to the contrary—as that passing laws can
prevent people from being immoral and that technological power
can be made foolproof. The question is therefore whether the
risks involved in using these chemicals are worthwhile, and it
seems to me that what is worthwhile should be judged not only in
terms of useful known edge or therapeutic effect, but also in
terms of simple pleasure. (I have heard addiction to music
described in just the same vocabulary as addiction to drugs.) If
it turns out that psychedelics offer valid ways of exploring
man's "inner world," the hidden ways of the mind and
brain, we should surely admit that new knowledge of this inmost
frontier may be worth quite serious risks. Psychoses and
compulsive delusions are, after all, no more dangerous than the
Indians and the mountain ranges that stood in the way of the
first settlers of the American West.
Psychiatrists often wonder why colleagues in other
branches of medicine and specialists in other fields of science
do not take them quite seriously. A typical reason may be found
in their haste to define the nature and effects of these
chemicals in terms which are simply prejudicial, and which boil
down to nothing more than gobbledygook with an authoritative
rumble. For example, the chemicals in question are commonly
classified as "hallucinogenics" or
"psychotomimetics." The first word means that they
generate hallucinations, and the second that their effects
resemble, or mimic, certain forms of psychosis or insanity. Only
rarely do they give the impression of events in the external
world which are not actually happening (i.e., hallucinations) and
the ten-year-old notion that they induce "model
psychoses" such as temporary schizophrenia has long been
abandoned by those who are still in active research. But even if
these findings were to be contested, the words
"hallucination" and "psychosis" are loaded:
they designate bad states of mind, whereas a clean
scientific language should say only that these chemicals induce
different and unusual states of mind.
It is almost a standard joke that psychiatry has
pejorative or "put-down" words for every human emotion,
as "euphoric" for happy, "fixated" for
interested, and "compulsive" for determined. The
discussion of psychedelic chemicals, both in the scientific
literature and the public press, is thoroughly swamped with
question-begging language of this kind in articles that purport
to be impartial and authoritative. Right from the start the very
word "drug," when used in this connection, evokes the
socially reprehensible image of people who are
"drugged" or "doped"—glassy-eyed, staggering,
or recumbent wrecks of humanity, withdrawn from reality into a
diabolical paradise of bizarre or lascivious dreams. The image of
the Fu Manchu opium den, with screaming meemies at the end of the
line.
Thus it is most common to find the action of
psychedelics called "toxic" (i.e., poisonous), and the
sensory and emotional changes induced referred to as
"distortions," "delusive mechanisms,"
"dissociations," and "regressions," or as
"loss of ego structure" and "abnormal perception
of body image." This is the language of pathology. Used
without explicit qualification, it implies that a consciousness
so changed is sick. Likewise, when—in the context of a scientific
article—the writer reports, "Subjects experienced religious
exaltation, and some described sensations of being one with
God," and leaves it at that, the implication is plainly that
they went crazy. For in our own culture, to feel that you are God
is insanity almost by definition. But, in Hindu culture, when
someone says, "I have just found out that I am God,"
they say, "Congratulations! You at last got the point."
Obviously, the word "God" does not mean the same thing
in both cultures. Yet psychiatrists toss off such utterly damning
remarks without scruple, and feel free to use their diagnostic
jargon of mental pathology for states of consciousness which many
of them have never even bothered to experience. For they expect
to get accurate information about these states from subjects
untrained in scientific description, fearing that if they
themselves entered into any new mode of consciousness it would
impair their scientific objectivity. This is pure scholasticism,
as when the theologians said to Galileo, "We will not look
through your telescope because we already know how the universe
is ordered. If your telescope were to show us anything different,
it would be an instrument of the devil."
Similarly, so many practitioners of the inexact
sciences (e.g., psychology, anthropology, sociology) let it be
known most clearly that they already know what reality is, and
therefore what sanity is. For these poor drudges reality is the
world of non-party: it is the reduction of the physical universe
to the most banal and desiccated terms conceivable, in accordance
with the great Western myth that all nature outside the human
skin is a stupid and unfeeling mechanism. There is a sort of
"official psychiatry" of the army, state mental
hospital, and of what, in California, they call
"correctional facility" (i.e., prison), which defends
this impoverished reality with a strange passion.
To come, then, to any effective evaluation of these
chemicals and the changed states of consciousness and perception
which they induce, we must begin with a highly detailed and
accurate description of what they do, both from the standpoint of
the subject and of the neutral observer, despite the fact that in
experiments of this kind it becomes startlingly obvious that the
observer cannot be neutral, and that the posture of
"objectivity" is itself one of the determinants of the
outcome. As the physicist well knows, to observe a process is to
change it. But the importance of careful description is that it
may help us to understand the kind or level of reality upon which
these changes in consciousness are taking place.
For undoubtedly they are happening. The dancing,
kaleidoscopic arabesques which appear before closed eyes are
surely an observation of some reality, though not,
perhaps, in the physical world outside the skin. But are they
rearranged memories? Structures in the nervous system? Archetypes
of the collective unconscious? Electronic patterns such as often
dance on the TV screen? What, too, are the fern-like structures
which are so often seen—the infinitude of branches upon branches
upon branches, or analogous shapes? Are these a glimpse of some
kind of analytical process in the brain, similar to the wiring
patterns in a computer? We really have no idea, but the more
carefully observers can record verbal descriptions and visual
pictures of these phenomena, the more likely that neurologists or
physicists or even mathematicians will turn up the physical
processes to which they correspond. The point is that these
visions are not mere imagination, as if there had ever been
anything mere about imagination The human mind does not just
perversely invent utterly useless images out of nowhere at all.
Every image tells us something about the mind or the brain or the
organism in which it is found.
The effects of the psychedelics vary so much from
person to person and from situation to situation that it is well
nigh impossible to say with any exactitude that they create
certain particular and invariable changes of consciousness. I
would not go so far as to say that the chemical effects are
simply featureless, providing no more than a vivid mirror to
reflect the fantasies and unconscious dispositions of the
individuals involved. For there are certain types of change which
are usual enough to be considered characteristic of psychedelics:
the sense of slowed or arrested time, and the alteration of
"ego boundary"—that is, of the sensation of one's own
identity.
The feeling that time has relaxed its pace may, to
some extent, be the result of having set aside the better part of
a day just to observe one's own consciousness, and to watch for
interesting changes in one's perception of such ordinary things
as reflected sunlight on the floor, the grain in wood, the
texture of linen, or the sound of voices across the street. My
own experience has never been of a distortion of these
perceptions, as in looking at oneself in a concave mirror. It is
rather that every perception becomes—to use a metaphor—more
resonant. The chemical seems to provide consciousness with a
sounding box, or its equivalent, for all the senses, so that
sight, touch, taste, smell, and imagination are intensified like
the voice of someone singing in the bathtub.
The change of ego boundary sometimes begins from
this very resonance of the senses. The intensification and
"deepening" of color, sound and texture lends them a
peculiar transparency. One seems to be aware of them more than
ever as vibration, electronic and luminous. As this feeling
develops it appears that these vibrations are continuous with
one's own consciousness and that the external world is in some
odd way inside the mindbrain. It appears, too, with overwhelming
obviousness, that the inside and the outside do not exclude one
another and are not actually separate. They go together; they
imply one another, like front and back, in such a way that they
become polarized. As, therefore, the poles of a magnet are the
extremities of a single body, it appears that the inside and the
outside, the subject and the object, the self and the world, the
voluntary and the involuntary, are the poles of a single process
which is my real and hitherto unknown self. This new self has no
location. It is not something like a traditional soul, using the
body as a temporary house. To ask where it is, is like
asking where the universe is. Things in space have a where, but
the thing that space is in doesn't need to be anywhere. It is
simply what there is, just plain basic isness!
How easily, then, an unsophisticated person might
exclaim, "I have just discovered that I am God!" Yet
if, during such an experience, one retains any critical faculties
at all, it will be clear that anyone else in the same state of
consciousness will also be God. It will be clear, too, that the
"God" in question is not the God of popular theology,
the Master Technician who controls, creates, and understands
everything in the universe. Were it so, a person in this state
should be able to give correct answers to all questions of fact.
He would know the exact height of Mount Whitney in millimeters.
On the other hand, this awareness of a deeper and universal self
would correspond exactly with that other type of God which
mystics have called the "divine ground" of the
universe, a sort of intelligent and superconscious space
containing the whole cosmos as a mirror contains images...
though the analogy fails in so far as it suggests something
immense: we cannot picture sizelessness.
Anyone moving into completely unfamiliar territory
may at first misunderstand and misinterpret what he sees, as is
so evident from the first impressions of visitors to foreign
lands where patterns of culture differ radically from their own.
When Europeans depicted their first impressions of China, they
made the roofs of houses exaggeratedly curly and people's eyes
slanted at least 45 degrees from the horizontal. Contrariwise,
the Japanese saw all Europeans as red-haired, sunken-eyed goblins
with immensely long noses. But the unfamiliarities of foreign
cultures are nothing to those of one's own inner workings. What
is there in the experience of clear blue sky to suggest the
structure of the optical nerves? Comparably, what is there in the
sound of a human voice on the radio to suggest the formations of
tubes and transistors? I raise this question because it is
obvious that any chemically induced alteration of the nervous
system must draw the attention of that system to itself. I am not
normally aware that the sensation of blue sky is a state of the
eyes and brain, but if I see wandering spots that are neither
birds nor flying saucers, I know that these are an abnormality
within the optical system itself. In other words, I am enabled,
by virtue of this abnormality, to become conscious of one of the
instruments of consciousness. But this is most unfamiliar
territory.
Ordinarily, we remain quite unaware of the fact
that the whole field of vision with its vast multiplicity of
colors and shapes is a state of affairs inside our heads. Only
eyes within a nervous system within a whole biological organism
can translate the particles and/or waves of the physical world
into light, color, and form, just as only the skin of a drum can
make a moving hand go "Boom!" Psychedelics induce
subtle alterations of perception which make the nervous system
aware of itself, and the individual suddenly and unaccustomedly
becomes conscious of the external world as a state of his own
body. He may even go so far as to feel a confusion between what
other people and things are doing, on the one hand, and his own
volition, on the other. The particular feeling, or
"cue," attached to thoughts and actions normally
understood to be voluntary may then be attached to what is
ordinarily classified as involuntary. (Similarly, in deja vu
or "hasn't-this-happened-before?" experiences,
perceptions of the immediate here and now come through with the
cue or signal usually attached to memories.)
Under such circumstances the naive observer might
well take these impressions so literally as to feel that the
universe and his own body are in fact one and the same,
that he is willing everything that happens, and that he is indeed
the God of populartheology. If that were all, the psychedelics
might certainly be dismissed as hallucinogens. We might conclude
that they merely confuse the "wiring" of the nervous
system in such a way that volition or "I-am-doing-
this" signals get mixed up with messages about the external
world.
Yet the problem cannot be set aside so simply. Let
us suppose that a biologist wants to make a very detailed and
accurate description of the behavior of some particular organism,
perhaps of a sea bird feeding on the beach. He will be unable to
describe the behavior of the bird without also describing the
behavior of the water, of the sandworms or shellfish which the
bird is eating, of seasonal changes of tide, temperature, and
weather, all of which go together with the behavior of the bird.
He cannot describe the behavior of the organism without also
describing the behavior of its environment. We used to attribute
this to the fact that organisms are always reacting to things
that happen in their environments, and are even determined by
their environments in all that they do. But this is to speak as
if things were a collection of perfectly separate billiard balls
banging against one another. Today, however, the scientist tends
more and more to speak of the behavior of the organism and the
behavior of the environment as the behavior of a single
"field," somewhat awkwardly named the
"organism/environment." Instead of talking about
actions and reactions between different things and events, he
prefers to speak of transactions. In the transaction of buying
and selling, there is no selling unless there is simultaneously
buying, and vice versa. The relation of organism to
environment is also considered a transaction, because it has been
found that living creatures exist only in a balanced relationship
to one another. The present natural state of this planet
"goes with" the existence of human beings, just as
buying goes with selling. In any radically different environment,
man could survive only by becoming a different type of being.
The implications of this organism/environment
relationship are somewhat startling, for what is really being
said is this: The entity we are describing is not an organism in
an environment; it is a unified field or process, because it is
more simple and more convenient to think of what the organism
does and what the environment does as a single
"behavior." Now substitute for "entity we are
describing" the idea of the self. I myself am not just what
is bounded by my skin. I myself (the organism) am what my whole
environmental field (the universe) is doing. It is, then, simply
a convention, a fashion, an arbitrary social institution, to
confine the self to some center of decision and energy located
within this bag of skin. This is no more than the rule of a
particular social game of cops and robbers, that is, of who shall
we praise and reward, and who shall we blame and punish? To play
this game, we pretend that the origin of actions is something
inside each human skin. But only force of long ingrained habit
makes it hard to realize that we could define and actually feel
ourselves to be the total pattern of the cosmos as focussed or
expressed here. This would be a sense of our identity
consistent with the scientific description of man and other
organisms. It would involve, too, the sensation that the external
world is continuous with and one with our own bodies—a sensation
very seriously needed in a civilization where men are destroying
their environment by misapplied technology. This is the
technology of man's conquest of nature, as if the external
world were his enemy and not the very matrix in which he is
brought forth and sustained. This is the technology of the dust
bowls, of polluted air, poisoned streams, chemical chickens,
pseudo-vegetables, foam-rubber bread, and the total Los
Angelization of man.
Yet how is this long-ingrained sense of insular
identity to be overcome? How is twentieth-century man to gain a
feeling of his existence consistent with twentieth-century
knowledge? We need very urgently to know that we are not
strangers and aliens in the physical universe. We were not
dropped here by divine whim or mechanical fluke out of some other
universe altogether. We did not arrive, like birds on barren
branches; we grew out of this world, like leaves and fruit. Our
universe "humans" just as a rosebush
"flowers." We are living in a world where men all over
the planet are linked by an immense network of communications,
and where science has made us theoretically aware of our
interdependence with the entire domain of organic and inorganic
nature. But our ego-feeling, our style of personal identity, is
more appropriate to men living in fortified castles.
There seems to me a strong possibility that the
psychedelics (as a medicine rather than a diet) may help us to
"trigger" a new sense of identity, providing the
initial boost to get us out of the habit of restricting
"I" to a vague center within the skin. That they make
us aware that our whole knowledge of the external world is a
state of our own bodies is not a merely technical and trivial
discovery. It is the obverse of the fact that our own bodies are
functions, or behaviors, of the whole external world. This—at
first—weird and mystical sensation of "unity with the
cosmos" has been objectively verified. The mystic's
subjective experience of his identity with "the All" is
the scientist's objective description of ecological relationship,
of the organism/environment as a unified field.
Our general failure (over the past three thousand
years of human history) to notice the inseparability of things,
and to be aware of our own basic unity with the external world,
is the result of specializing in a particular kind of
consciousness. For we have very largely based culture and
civilization on concentrated attention, on using the mind as a
spotlight rather than a floodlight, and by this means analyzing
the world into separate bits. Concentrated attention is drummed
into us in schools; it is essential to the three R's; it is the
foundation of all careful thought and detailed description, all
high artistic technique and intellectual discipline. But the
price we pay for this vision of the world in vivid detail, bit by
bit, is that we lose sight of the relationships and unities
between the bits. Furthermore, a form of attention which looks at
the world bit by bit doesn't have time to examine all possible
bits; it has to be programmed (or prejudiced) to look only at significant
bits, at things and events which are relevant to certain
preselected ends—survival, social or financial advancement, and
other fixed goals which exclude the possibility of being open to
surprises, and to those delights which are extra special because
they come without being sought.
In my own experience, which is shared by very many
others, the psychedelics expand attention. They make the
spotlight of consciousness a floodlight which not only exposes
ignored relationships and unities but also brings to light
unsuspected details—details normally ignored because of their
lack of significance, or their irrelevance to some prejudice of
what ought to be. (For example, the tiniest hairs on people's
faces and blotchy variations of skin color, not really supposed
to be there, become marvelously visible.) There is thus good
reason to believe that the psychedelics are the opposite of
hallucinogens insofar as they decrease the selectivity of the
senses and expose consciousness to events beyond those that are
supposed to deserve notice.
Time after time, this unprogrammed mode of
attention, looking at things without looking for
things, reveals the unbelievable beauty of the everyday world.
Under the influence of programmed attention, our vision of the
world tends to be somewhat dusty and drab. This is for the same
reason that staring at things makes them blurred, and that
trying to get the utmost out of a particular pleasure makes it
something of a disappointment. Intense beauty and intense
pleasure are always gratuitous, and are revealed only to senses
that are not seeking and straining. For our nerves are not
muscles; to push them is to reduce their efficiency.
What, finally, of the strong impression delivered
both by the psychedelics and by many forms of mystical experience
that the world is in some way an illusion? A difficulty here is
that the word "illusion" is currently used
pejoratively, as the negative of everything real, serious,
important, valuable, and worthwhile. Is this because moralists
and metaphysicians are apt to be personality types lacking the
light touch? Illusion is related etymologically to the Latin ludere,
to play, and thus is distinguished from reality as the drama is
distinguished from "real life." In Hindu philosophy,
the world is seen as a drama in which all the parts—each person,
animal, flower, stone, and star—are roles or masks of the one
supreme Self, which plays the lila or game of hide and
seek with itself for ever and ever, dismembering itself as the
Many and remembering itself as the One through endless cycles of
time, in the spirit of a child tossing stones into a pond through
a long afternoon in summer. The sudden awakening of the mystical
experience is therefore the one Self remembering itself as the
real foundation of the seemingly individual and separate
organism.
Thus the Hindu maya, or world illusion, is
not necessarily something bad. Maya is a complex word signifying
the art, skill, dexterity, and cunning of the supreme Self in the
exercise of its playful, magical, and creative power. The power
of an actor so superb that he is taken in by his own performance.
The Godhead amazing itself, getting lost in a maze.
Classical illustrations of maya include the
apparently continuous circle of fire made by a whirling torch,
and of the continuity of time and moving events by the whirring
succession of Asana, or atomic instants. Physicists use similar
metaphors in trying to explain how vibrating wavicles produce the
illusion of solid material. The impenetrability of granite, they
say, is something like the apparently solid disk made by the
blades of an electric fan: it is an intensely rapid motion of the
same minute orbits of light that constitute our fingers. Physics
and optics have also much to say about the fact that all reality,
all existence is a matter of relationship and transaction.
Consider the formula
a
b = Rainbow
c
where a is the sun, b is moisture in
the atmosphere, and c is an observer, all three being at
the same time in a certain angular relationship. Deduct any one
term, a, b or c, or arrange them in positions
outside the correct angular relationship, and the phenomenon
"rainbow" will not exist. In other words, the actual
existence of rainbows depends as much upon creatures with eyes as
it depends upon the sun and moisture in the atmosphere. Common
sense accepts this in respect to diaphanous things like rainbows
which back off into the distance when we try to reach them. But
it has great difficulty in accepting the fact that chunky things
like apartment buildings and basic things like time and space
exist in just the same way—only in relation to certain
structures known as organisms with nervous systems.
Our difficulty in accepting for ourselves so
important a part in the actual creation or manifestation of the
world comes, of course, from this thorough habituation to the
feeling that we are strangers in the universe—that human
consciousness is a fluke of nature, that the world is an external
object which we confront, that its immense size reduces us to
pitiful unimportance, or that geological and astronomical
structures are somehow more real (hard and solid?) than
organisms. But these are actually mythological images of the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—ideas which, for a
while, seemed extremely plausible, mostly for the reason that
they appeared to be hard-boiled, down to earth and tough-minded,
a currently fashionable posture for the scientist. Despite the
lag between advanced scientific ideas and the common sense of
even the educated public, the mythology of man as a hapless fluke
trapped in a mindless mechanism is breaking down. The end of this
century may find us, at last, thoroughly at home in our own
world, swimming in the ocean of relativity as joyously as
dolphins in the water.