The Psychedelic Savior Part II: Encased by the Darkness of the Skull

If humanity can clean up its doors of perception we will reach a collective spiritual transformation and get much more fun out of life, at least that’s what William Blake claims. And yet, if I take the “the doors of perception” to mean my senses, well actually I see, hear, taste, and so on just fine – so what needs this cleansing Mr. Blake? Blake saw the body as “the portion of the soul perceived by the five senses,” so that my sense perceptions are not separate from my soul, they are part and parcel of it.  In our world we call a spade a spade because spade-like things are what we know, but in Blake’s world a spade is as likely as any other object to be a portal into the infinite. So, what kind of muck and clutter is getting in the way of our spiritual processes?  

 It’s Aldous Huxley again, and his ideas about psychedelics that can shed some light. Huxley presents the idea of the reducing valve, a mechanism that screens out the deluge of sensory (and cosmic) information that is always bearing down on us from Mind at Large, which is a way of saying cosmic consciousness, the infinite, Source, God, or what one of the Desert Fathers called That Yonder.

“To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet…Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he or she has been born – the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to the accumulated records of other people’s experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness in the only awareness and it bedevils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things.”

 We might argue with the idea that this closure came with the advent of language, but surely this “measly trickle” is the same as the tiny bit of light coming through the narrow chinks in Blake’s cavern. If the reducing valve gets overactive and does its job too well, it leads to impoverished emotional and spiritual perceptions, and a dull time for everybody.   

A more sciencey name for what may be the same event, is the default mode network that has recently been popularized in Michael Pollan’s book Changing Your Mind. The default mode is what is happening in the brain when it is just ticking over with nothing special to do – the daydreaming, loosely associating mind that may be chewing over the past or ruminating on the future. At the outset, the default mode did not excite much notice, and it was seen as the baseline from which more interesting brain activities might be measured, the where-you-are before the experiment proper begins.

Gradually researchers got interested in this baseline itself and saw the default mode as an activity in its own right that takes place in certain linked areas throughout the brain that they appropriately called the default mode network. Interesting things took off in 2012 when researcher Robin Cahart Harris put people in brain scanners while they were tripping (poor things) and saw that rather than getting more active during the mental fireworks of the trip, the default mode network actually slowed down dramatically. That goes along with our oft-encountered experience while tripping of ruminating “me” becoming a much more tenuous and porous entity than normal. As the default mode network stops grabbing all the neural pathways, unexpected and original connections are made between disparate areas of the brain that don’t usually get to meet each other – rather like a family reunion where your noisy uncle finally falls asleep in an armchair. As the reducing valve (or default mode) falters in its duty, the doors of perception get a good psychedelic cleansing and the tripping brain takes a peek at the infinite. At least, that’s one metaphor for what happens to us while we are tripping.

Why does muck and clutter accumulate on the doors of perception in the first place? Some of the reason for this is to do with the nature of perception itself. Neuroscientist Anil Seth points out that the central organ of sense perception is not the eyes or ears etc., but the brain which receives and coordinates all these sensory inputs. The brain does not ‘see’ or ‘hear’ anything, it is encased by the darkness of the skull, and from there it takes the electrical impulses that come from the sense organs and it composes a representation of the world, modeled by its expectations of what is out there. What we take to be seeing and hearing is really a game of battleships that the brain is playing with the world, filling in its internal map as more information comes along.

According to Seth, half or more of the neuron pathways involved with perception are actually sending information from the brain outwards to the perceiving organs, while the remainder are bringing electrical impulses from the perceptual organs in. To save time and energy the brain is its own reducing valve, making an educated guess at what it expects to perceive, presenting its prediction as reality, and then adjusting as it goes along – that’s why we do a double take when we see the unexpected. “Normal perception is a fantasy constrained by reality,” says Seth, “We’re all hallucinating all the time; when we all agree on our hallucinations we call it reality.” The brain’s mandate is not to tell truth, it is to make the world navigable at the least possible expenditure of energy – and it needs to conserve energy, because at 2% of our body weight the brain burns up 20% of our calories. The doors of perception are clogged up with preconception.

So, the brain has only a passing interest in what’s really there, and more than that, according to Iain McGilchrist, in The Master and his Emissary, it has little direct interest in our emotional and spiritual wellbeing either. Like the rest of the animal kingdom, we have two hemispheres to our brain, the left and the right, and though they are both intimately involved in all our activities, the left hemisphere specializes in classification and naming while the right hemisphere is more involved with the global picture, relationship, emotion and nuance. The left hemisphere is totally literal, it doesn’t get irony or humour, while the right hemisphere does not do expressive speech; you want your left hemisphere if you are driving a car or totting up your bank account, and your right hemisphere if you are pondering the meaning of life. The left hemisphere is an excellent servant for the right hemisphere, with its capacity to organize and categorize, but a terrible boss. And what has happened is that over the last few centuries in Western culture is that the left hemisphere, with its penchant for counting, quantifying, bureaucratizing, and putting everything in straight lines, has become our boss – to the detriment of everybody. What do I do today if I want a fulfilled life? I check off all the items on my bucket list. There, done!

Perception then, is not at all what we take it to be. Blake, a prophet who railed against the early stages of the left-brain take-over said, “a fool sees not the same tree as a wise man,” meaning that for one person it is “a thing in the way,” for another a source of potential money, and for another a portal into this infinite, and so on. For instance, many years ago, in my twenties, I was walking with my friend Dean on some street in Oakland, California while Dean was tripping. I, as representative of Anil Seth’s collective hallucination called “reality,” was taking care of him. Passing a small tree in flower, Dean stopped and gazed at it in wonder. Now, it was a truly gorgeous tree, but he spent an absolute age standing there, until I was getting restless and slightly embarrassed by the people walking past us. “It’s alive,” he said at long last, with such profound reverence that I knew he was taking in levels of beauty and levels of information that my non-tripping brain could not fathom. “Yes,” I replied from the other side of our divide, and we stood there an age longer. In terms of this particular tree, Dean was the wise man, and I got to play the part of the fool.

And fools we continue to be. One recent morning, as I was going into a park near my house in Brooklyn, I was struck by the beauty of one of the trees on the approach road. This tree did not have its cover of leaves yet, so the jagged shape of its branches against the sky illustrated some kind of law from chaos theory or maybe the Fibonacci sequence, not in general, but as it filtered through that particular being in its particular conditions. I felt that if I could gaze upon the tree with the right degree of concentration, I could do a Dean, and take in living information about the structure of things. But with my reducing valve firmly in place I could only detect a faint and distant echo of that kind of communion. It was more of an “if only” moment than an “aha.” Still, I shouldn’t feel too bad, better people than me have had the same problem. Here’s William Wordsworth, who was around for much of the same time as William Blake:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore; —
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

 In the same long poem, Ode: Intimations of Immortality, he did also have this more cheerful idea:

 Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and its fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Sometimes, despite the reducing valve and the default mode network conspiring with the left brain to make life miserable, we are still able to feel things just as deeply as Wordsworth describes. Our potential for the future, the human bet on life, is that I as an individual, and us as a collective being can reach into our hearts and open our perceptions into something closer to the tripping mindstate, without doing ourselves the least bit of harm. We might harm the economy though, by not needing so many useless knickknacks and toys afterwards. But for ourselves – it would do us a world of good.

Too many years of crossing on the green, pondering over our to-do lists and being told to pay attention in class have gummed up our ability to easily get into that state, and although in childhood it might have been easy to unselfconsciously be transfixed by the sight of a tree, or an ant on the sidewalk, or a passing truck, today such spontaneity is taboo for grownups. There is no written law against it, but there is a strong social law, and you will be seen as weird or crazy if you are caught doing it. If you don’t believe me, take note of how many people you see on a busy street suddenly stopping and sighing with joy at the sight of a beautiful cloud. The truth is that we are discomforted by people who want to experience their perceptions deeply, who like Dean or William Blake, can openly drink in the power and the glory.  

We don’t remember having chosen it this way, but we have self-selected for a limited life. To battle against our personalized depression states, anxiety states, OCD, ADHD, PTSD and so on, we take a pill or talk to a therapist, not in order to re-enliven the world, but to get rid of the pain that comes with being part of a sick system. The project should instead be to re-animate the spiritual corpse of humanity by starting at the beginning – ourselves. With psychedelics we can sometimes reach the mindspace of intense communing that will throw us into ecstasy and remind us about what’s what. When we can reach that special state, the tragedies of life, our terrible moods, the tumult of our feelings – none of these go away, not if we are human – but they become part of the tapestry, not a grey lens covering it all. We can be free.