I’ve spent much of the past three days reading Michael Pollan’s 2019 book How to Change Your Mind. I’m not a book critic, so I won’t rehearse its strong and weak aspects. Nor will I try to encapsulate it – rather, here’s what I’m taking from it, even if some of this was not in the book.
Most successfully functioning adults have honed a strong ego that dominates our consciousness and actions. We have things to accomplish, so we seek to use our prior experiences to simplify, categorize, and objectify situations, cause/effect, objects, people, and even our feelings. Our frustrations, tensions, and fear of death stem in part from our understanding that we as individuals are:
· the only way we can understand and be in the world (“I don’t perceive it, so it’s not there.”)
· rational, logical, and efficient
· in control of cause and effect.
What I’ll call pyscho-active substances (“drugs” implies manufacture, but some of the substances are easily ingested from nature) numb the parts of the brain that control ego (the sense of self) and allow more parts of the brain to come to the fore and to interact with one another. What most “trips” have in common:
· the destruction of the sense of individual existence, separate from other things, life forms, and people;
· recognition that existence is very much possible without a “self”;
· much heightened awareness of everything that surrounds us: light, music, memory, objects, people, life forms -- experienced as if for the first time;
· connection among these things – so that light may become music, music becomes life forms, memory becomes objects, life forms become music – and allowing changes in any of these things to affect the awareness and perception of any of the other things.
As a result, many people experience a strong sense that:
· everything is connected;
· one’s self and one’s body are shells that get in the way of recognizing these connections;
· stripped of ego and concerns for one’s body, one becomes comfortable with and even supported by these connections, recognizing that memories are real and existence (but not of the self) continues before “birth” and after “death” of the self.
These experiences/recognitions explain the effects of these treatments: seeing everyday things as if for the first time (rather than relying on a memorized checklist: “trees,” “rain clouds,” “John”); the outpouring of support and empathy (love) that subjects feel during and after the experience; reducing the existential dread of death. The opening of connections among senses and experiences allows some people to break free of recurrent fears or well-honed habits like addiction.
Similar (but usually less strong) responses result from affecting the brain through Buddhist training, meditation, or rhythmic hyperventilation. This gives me the tiniest bit of insight into the practice of meditation.