From within the Hall of Mirrors (an ontological turn)

How do our concepts regarding consciousness determine our understanding of consciousness? Do they fence us into the safe and “sane” demarcations of the known and socially accepted? Or do they provide jumping points toward broader, more profound, and even more granular understanding? Do our experiences align with our concepts, and do the contiguities of experiences and concepts intersect and give rise to insight regarding the befuddling nature and dimensionality of consciousness? 

In correspondence with Aldous Huxley, Harry Osmond, in 1958, coined the term psychedelic—a single word composed of two Greek words, psyche for soul and delos for revealer. Psychedelics as a clinical modality has gained mainstream acknowledgment, institutional backing, and research funding and has become a capitalist venture port in the last two decades. In his 2018 New York Times article “My Adventures with the Trip Doctors,” Michael Pollan describes the complexities of such clinical trials and the commodification of indigenous plant medicine technologies into their synthesized laboratory versions. He describes the clinical “elite” spaces of research trials functioning above a concealed network of rogue demi-therapists who practice clandestinely outside the establishment’s purview.

These “underground guides” are intermediaries between the clinical spaces and the traditional local spaces of Central and South America that are rooted in ritual, ceremony, environmental kinship, and an overarching relational ontology. “Trip Doctors” has a triple significance: The institutionally empowered researcher, the rogue therapist who is a hybrid practitioner of the local tradition and the mainstream, and the Indigenous elder healer or spiritual guide. Each has a distinct relationship to the psychoactive agents, which is reflected in the chosen context of its delivery and consciousness outcome.

As coined by Timothy Leary during his Harvard psychedelics experiments, the “set and setting” shape the psychedelic experience. The set and setting of the contemporary clinical research spaces are nondescript sterile containers that function as bedrooms. The participant wears eyeshades and headphones, further isolating oneself from the external world to encourage introspection. The set and setting reflect the autocentrist and cognocentrist Euro-American worldview and knowledge-making and transmitting institutions. Autocentrism is the belief that the self’s experience, the phenomenological flavor, and the flurry of self-narratives fomented are preeminent sources for understanding the psyche. Cognicentrism is perhaps a more extreme commitment to the self’s subjectivity. Cognition, inner fantasy, imagination, and the mind-wandering and coalescing narratives that comprise the fluid story of the self hold the preeminent knowledge-making position. Both autocentrism and cognicentrism highlight the preoccupation with Cartesian dualism.

The extraction of psychoactive substances from their ecological settings is a symptom of our autocentrism or self-centredness. The designating term “psychoactive substances” is a further extraction as it strips plant medicines of their stature and dignity as living entities. According to Indigenous traditions, spirits reside in plant consciousness. Their potencies are catalyzed through ceremonial ingestion rituals. The medicinal agent plant is an integral component of an ecological matrix that ontologically primes the individual with its cosmological implications. Additionally, the environmental container that holds both plants and practitioners is integral to its delivery and yields unique consciousness experiences.

For Pollan, psychedelics induce a disembodied experience, where the ego’s scaffolding of habituated cognitions, feelings, and behavioral responses is dismantled. The mind is unmoored from its ordinary spatiotemporal constraints for the trip's duration and enjoys spaciousness. As the agent is metabolized and gains potency, the self increasingly dissolves into the internally projected psychedelic experience. In other words, the sense of self and our autocentrist predispositions dissolve by decree of blindfold and headphone soundtrack into the cognitive inner realm. The ego is offloaded into the cognitive content. This parallels the faithful consent one’s sleeping consciousness gives to its dream contents and fully immerses itself in them. And in the case of therapy, the mind re-emerges from such psychedelic experiences with a replenished, healthier, and better-adjusted configuration of the self.

Interestingly, the term oceanic feeling state, utilized in mystical experience questionnaires and popularized by the current amalgam of psychedelic culture and research, comes from the Nobel laureate for literature, Roman Rollain, who utilized the concept in his letter correspondence with Freud. The oceanic feeling state evokes the sense of consciousness’s “indissoluble bond” with the external world and the infinite majesty of divinity. Oceanic feeling connotes a transpersonal sense of profundity, where the centralized self merges into its periphery and the infinitely sprawling world or cosmos it now participates in. By highlighting this experience, Rollain challenged Freud’s consciousness and unconsciousness psychic functions into reified psychic partitions. The centralized self and its psychic partitions dissolve into the participatory divine. 

Pollan similarly recounts an oceanic feeling during his “trip.” He curiously describes how a sense of self, a phenomenological feeling tone, exists throughout his psychedelic journey beyond the demarcations of the ego. However, in Pollan’s depiction, the oceanic self, rather than extending, generalizing, interconnecting, and dissolving with an external world, undergoes a wholly internalized experience. Did Pallon’s autocentrism collapse into introspective cognicentrism, the phenomenological stimuli catalyzed by the psychoactive agent?

What experiences of consciousness and subsequent definitions and cultural expressions emerge from ingesting plant medicines within their native ecology and Indigenous contexts? Indigenous ceremonies are profoundly communal events, with ritual elements that guide the participant and cultivate unique and holistic consciousness experiences. Spirit medicine mobilizes an inter-participatory realm of the individual, community, and the surrounding nature.

In Hua Hsa’s New Yorker article “The Secret Lives of Fungi,” we are introduced to the mysterious consciousness modality of the fungi realm. Fungi intelligence is not decentralized. There is no central operating hub or theatre. Instead, mycelium hypha tips are distributed across vast mycorrhizae and communicate across organic networks of plants and fungi. Merlin Sheldrake describes this intelligent communication network as a symbiotically functioning ecological internet. Hsa mentions that the largest known living organism is a fungi constellation exceeding 3.7 miles in diameter. Might this extension of self into the living environment more closely resemble Indigenous concepts of interconnected consciousness and Rolland’s weft-like oceanic feeling state? Do plant and fungi consciousness concepts resonate with the Indigenous experiences of consciousness? These include a somatic knowing, as opposed to Pollan’s disembodied experience. From the Indigenous perspective, embodied consciousness moves beyond the individual personality and participates in the ecological Indra, the net of interdependence where self, plant, animal, environment, and cosmology become intimately and effortlessly linked.

Does the psyche or soul reveal itself in psychedelics?  Or is consciousness a hall of mirrors reflecting our assumptions and predeterminations? Are we merely seeing our epistemic projections? Or are we willing to make an ontological turn? Can we allow ourselves to be impacted by the myriad renditions of consciousness and honor their status? A series of conundrums. Perhaps the diversity of consciousness definitions is truly thus revealing.