II. Psychedelics and the Gift of Subjectivity
Note: this is an updated version of a 2016 article exploring the process of change in psychedelics, and I published it here because I had failed to finish anything else in the 3 week deadline I had set for myself. But also, it’s as good an entry-point into this inquiry as any, focusing on what is perhaps the central task involved in the larger process that is our focus.
“He who looks outside, dreams. He who looks inside, awakens.” –Carl Jung
It is in phrases such as this that Jung’s essential differences with Freud emerge most starkly. For while Freud held the knowledge of and consideration for reality essential to guide one’s life, Jung maintained that when making decisions seeking an inner light was most important, particularly during the latter half of life.
However, Jung struggled throughout his life to reconcile the objective and the subjective. He was a man of powerful dreams and visions, and with a richer inner life than most any before or since. But he was not unaware of the ravages delusions take on the psychotic, and those unable to navigate the world because they have become incapable of differentiating between inner and outer. In other words, he was well aware of what can happen if the focus on one’s inner world is taken to excess.
But the question of how to orient oneself towards idiosyncrasies of perception, whether they be hallucinations (auditory and/or otherwise) or the more common affective impressions that “color” our experiences remains a pressing one. To what degree should these be dismissed out of hand or humored? Are these a kink in the system, or a feature? For example, what have we sensible, modern folk to do with such “barbarisms” as sensory experiences of the dead, autoscopic phenomena, synesthesia, phantom limb syndrome and near death experiences? With dreams and premonitions, synchronicities and intuitions, auras and the like?
The following is an examination of this larger question, starting with Jung and winding our way through religion and the Numinous, psychedelics and the meaning of life.
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Jung commented once that many who are labeled psychotic are trying to “create a system that will enable them to assimilate unknown psychic phenomena and so adapt themselves to their own world.” He applauded the attempt to take one’s own private experience into account and made the point that adaptation is not necessary for external reality alone, but also for one’s own subjectivity. The tragedy was their lack of success, and not the attempt.
He was struggling to bring the normal and the psychotic closer together, and to connect these personal delusions and hallucinations to adaptations (and later to myth and to symbols which have significance beyond the individual). In other words, Jung was attempting to find meaning in the seemingly irrational behavior and communications of the psychotic – no less than what Freud had done for the neurotic.
Freud, however, would respond that no matter how meaningful the delusions, they still represent a break from reality and therefore a regressive turn. Jung in response would point out the example of the adaptive myths of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, who:
…believe (or, as Jung may have put it, ‘live by the myth’ that) the sun is their father. Moreover, they also affirm that by practicing the rites of their religion, they assist the sun to perform his daily journey across the sky. By punctiliously performing these rites, they are thus benefiting the whole world; and, if they were foolish enough to neglect them ‘in ten years the sun would no longer rise’. Then, Jung’s informant went on, ‘it would be night forever’.
Jung’s comment on this is as follows: ‘I then realized on what the “dignity” the tranquil composure of the individual Indian was founded. It springs from being a son of the sun; his life cosmologically meaningful, for he helps the Father and the preserver of all life in his daily rise and descent.’ If a myth can give a life dignity, meaning and purpose, it is serving an important positive function, even if it is not objectively true.
So Jung would not have us locate insanity in delusions but rather in something he never quite names (although he suggests the differentiator is the adaptiveness of the myth)1. That was not his project. His project was to help individuals to either make sense of their madness, or to get in touch with it. People have bewildering subjective experiences, and their “choice” is between honoring them within the paradigms emotionally available to them or questioning the cultural understanding that are written in their blood and bones – which is hardly a choice at all. Socially, it’s a choice between joining a community of people who “believe” and affirm their personal and group identity or of flailing about alone.
Jung once said that his goal was to make his clients more of whatever they are (be they Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, ect…). For those that have such experiences, perhaps the best adaptation is to develop a richer understanding of the traditions in which they were raised – a broader, warmer, more embracing spirituality (or alien conspiracy theory, as the case may be). To integrate their experiences with their cultural traditions – not to throw either out but to see how their personal experiences might fit in with those traditions and adapt the latter accordingly.
The Spiritually Empty Modern Self
But in our age the issue is more the lack of such experiences – a disconnection from ourselves, a rigid, closed-off self – a life lacking the confusing but enriching numinous and religious experiences we’ve been discussing. Jung famously commented that a third of his clients “are not suffering from any clearly definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and aimlessness of their lives,” later calling it “the general neurosis of our age.”
But what is the nature of the numinous experience? Aldous Huxley:
The literature of religious experience abounds in references to the pains and terrors overwhelming those who have come, too suddenly, face to face with some manifestation of the mysterium tremendum. In theological language, this fear is due to the in-compatibility between man’s egotism and the divine purity, between man’s self-aggravated separateness and the infinity of God.
This experience is often not merely joyful but almost painful in the awe-inspiring feeling it inspires in the face of infinity, in contrast to our own mortal finitude and the unbridgeable gap between the two.
This same literature also documents the uniquely transformative effect this experience can spur. Jung himself was one of those, and documented it in his autobiography. During this chaotic period he wrote his “Red Book” which is filled with fantastical imagery and stories of his mystical experiences.
And what is a mystical experience but an intensely personal, subjective one? It is known only to oneself, an affirmation of individuality and the reality of private experience. Such moments can perhaps anchor personal identity and worth, a sense of who one is apart from the world.
But what is to be done for those for whom the religious and the spiritual are closed off? Those for whom religion does not help. Oscar Wilde was one of those…
When I think about religion at all, I feel as if I would like to found an order for those who cannot believe: the Confraternity of the Faithless, one might call it, where on an altar, on which no taper burned, a priest, in whose heart peace had no dwelling, might celebrate with unblessed bread and a chalice empty of wine. Every thing to be true must become a religion. And agnosticism should have its ritual no less than faith. It has sown its martyrs, it should reap its saints, and praise God daily for having hidden Himself from man.
Sometimes accessing these experiences simply requires a shift in focus. When Jung saw new patients who claimed never to dream, he always said, “Don’t worry – you will”. Because what we notice is determined in large part by what we pay attention to – and what we pay attention to, we remember.
But for some, this is not sufficient. A lifetime of suppressing the imagination, of ignoring the mysterious and the unknown, can be too much to overcome. For those, something more powerful is needed. Something like acid.
The Numinous in a Pill
Three dozen people lay on a comfy couch in an architecturally challenged building on Johns Hopkins’ stark medical campus in north Baltimore and took a naturally occurring psychedelic compound called psilocybin — the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms”…
“What I wasn’t prepared for,” he says, “is people would come in two months later and I would say, ‘Well, so what do you think of the experience?’ And they’d say … ‘It was one of the most important experiences in my life.’ ”
In the end, more than 70 percent of the participants self-rated the experience as one of the five most important in their lives. Perhaps even more astoundingly, nearly a third rated it the single most important experience of their lives.
Roland Griffiths, the psychopharmecologist who conducted this study later followed it up with one on medical patients with life-threatening cancer who were suffering from anxiety and depression. One of those patients, retired psychologist Clark Martin, found his interests and life experience constricting and narrowing, and his relationship with his daughter growing more distant following his terminal diagnoses. So he joined the study, got high - which he related didn’t feel like a high – just a new kind of clarity:
As he emerged, he began to marvel at the steady presence of the sitter who had put his arm around his shoulder, and the fact that it was his presence alone — no words, no actions other than that one touch — that had meant everything to him in his panic. He realized that he had been missing that simple fact in his most important relationship, with his daughter.
“I had an insight that my primary role as a father was to maintain a rock-solid attunement with my daughter. … The significance of this for me was that personal relationships do not need to be managed. Therefore, there is no need to present a false self and, in fact, doing so will severely limit the joys available naturally in relationships.”
When he returned to his hotel room, he was shaken. “I was scared to go to sleep because I was fearful that I would drop back into the study stage and there wouldn’t be anybody there.”
In the coming weeks the experience kept working on him. Eventually, he says, he fell into a new way of being. A year after his psilocybin experience he wrote:
“There has been a shift from trying to micro-manage life to trusting intuition and spontaneity. … I’m more focused on values and process and less likely to feel long-range goals are set in stone. I am again involved professionally and socially. Most significantly, life has continued to open up, a move away from the depression and what felt like a downward spiral. Somehow, the psilocybin re-engaged a fullness of function that had been lost.”
He had a new relationship with his daughter: Instead of an arm’s length, role-dominated father-daughter relationship, “we’re two people who share what’s going on in our lives in a very real, spontaneous kind of way.”
Another breakthrough he hadn’t considered possible came in his relationship with his father, who lived in a nursing home in an advanced stage of Alzheimer’s. Before the psilocybin, Martin had visited him out of obligation.
“I wasn’t really present,” he said. Mostly “I was … figuring out in my mind … how long will it be before I leave.”
After his psilocybin experience, he found that “I connected with him at the level that he was functioning. And he just really cranked it up, not that he can maintain a conversation but he attempted it.”
He began to see things through his father’s eyes, and felt his frustration at being so constrained, day after day, by four walls. On impulse, he gathered his father up and went driving for hours in the wide-open ranchland that surrounded the home, something he never would have considered doing before.
Now his father “just lives for those drives. He thrives on it. He’s actually gotten better physically and mentally. And I know it sounds odd, but I’ve never felt closer to him.”
Griffiths writes elsewhere in his book that psychedelics seem sometimes to “simply dissolve problems,” offering a shortcut to the “profound peace, total acceptance. . . [and] transcendent normality [that is] the wished-for endpoint of all therapy.” It “helped [one] to trust in the process of opening up and to see that, even with difficult things, feeling them and integrating them was the path to healing.”
Can these Outcomes be Replicated with the General Population? Notes on Framing Mushrooms
Human beings are fundamentally reflexive. That is, our understandings of ourselves and of our experience fundamentally affects who we are and how we experience the world. And we live in a deeply banal culture, where it is an intense struggle to talk about meaningful things without sounding quaint. So many words have become commodified by culture, contaminated against meaningful usage, and in response our horizons have constricted.
Psychedelics will be eventually legalized in some form; initially most likely a medical one. My concern is that the larger truths about why they are so effective in facilitating transformation will be lost and compromised by the stain of modernity. Because the benefits of the drug depend as much on the context as they do on its psychoactive effects.
In other words, the visions one sees under psychedelics are heavily influenced by one’s existing paradigms. They break beyond that, certainly, at least at present – but will it always? I’m afraid the narrative will be hijacked from one focused on radical subjectivity to one focused on some banal version of “wellness” that both meditation and yoga have fallen victim to.
Religion and perhaps psychoanalysis are the last bastions in the civilized world of mystery, of things greater than we are (God and the unconscious, respectively) – which are perhaps the domains under which psychedelic use can be most effectively framed.
And if you combine God and the unconscious, whom do you encounter? Why, Jung of course – which brings us full circle. But let me take a moment to retrace our steps to see where we are before we move forward again.
Altered Consciousness, Transformation and an Objection from Dr. Jung
As discussed, psychedelics have been found to be (sometimes at least) singularly effective in almost overnight treating and transforming many neuroses. Further, altered consciousness used therapeutically is not new; hypnosis by all evidence was rejected by Freud not because it didn’t work but because he wasn’t good at it.
And it just so happens that altered consciousness was the centerpiece of Jung’s treatment:
It always seemed to me as if the real milestones were certain symbolic events characterized by a strong emotional tone. …the main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neuroses but rather with the approach to the numinous. But the fact is that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experiences you are released from the curse of pathology. Even the very disease takes on a numinous character.
As Jungian Murray Stein notes: “a numinous experience is a ‘hint’… a hint that larger, non-egoic powers exist in the psyche, which need to be considered and ultimately made conscious...”
Finally, Jung noted the similarity between psychedelic experience and the numinous when writing about the experiences recorded in his infamous “Red Book”.
“He later would compare this period of his life — this ‘confrontation with the unconscious,’ as he called it — to a mescaline experiment. He described his visions as coming in an ‘incessant stream.’ He likened them to rocks falling on his head, to thunderstorms, to molten lava. ‘I often had to cling to the table,’ he recalled, ‘so as not to fall apart’….
[And] Jung recorded it all. First taking notes in a series of small, black journals, he then expounded upon and analyzed his fantasies, writing in a regal, prophetic tone in the big red-leather book. The book detailed an unabashedly psychedelic voyage through his own mind, a vaguely Homeric progression of encounters with strange people taking place in a curious, shifting dreamscape. Writing in German, he filled 205 oversize pages with elaborate calligraphy and with richly hued, staggeringly detailed paintings.”
However, despite those statements Jung did not condone the use of psychedelics. In a letter to a woman, one Mrs. Eisner, who compared LSD to “a religious drug” he wrote:
Experiments along the line of mescaline and related drugs are certainly most interesting, since such drugs lay bare a level of the unconscious that is otherwise accessible only under peculiar psychic conditions.
It is a fact that you get certain perceptions and experiences of things appearing either in mystical states or in the analysis of unconscious phenomena, just like the primitives in their orgiastic or intoxicated conditions.
I don’t feel happy about these things, since you merely fall into such experiences without being able to integrate them.
The result is a sort of theosophy, but it is not a moral and mental acquisition. It is the eternally primitive man having experience of his ghost-land, but it is not an achievement of your cultural development.
To have so-called religious visions of this kind has more to do with physiology but nothing with religion. It is only that mental phenomena are observed which one can compare to similar images in ecstatic conditions.
Religion is a way of life and a devotion and submission to certain superior facts—a state of mind which cannot be injected by a syringe or swallowed in the form of a pill.
It is to my mind a helpful method to the barbarous Peyotee, but a regrettable regression for a cultivated individual, a dangerously simple “Ersatz” and substitute for a true religion.
Sincerely yours,
C.G. Jung
[Letter dated 12 August 1957]
Are Psychedelics a Cheap Knock-off of Religious Experience?
While I am sympathetic with Jung’s contention that a mere pill or powder cannot alone provoke change – a number of studies suggest otherwise2. Undertaking trips with a trained therapist whose job it is to help the client integrate the experience (as was done in the above studies) can alleviate much of his concerns. That is the purpose of research – to rid us of our prejudices. And on consideration, it seems reasonable that a sufficiently powerful single experience that forces one to face one’s subjectivity in such clarity and reflect on it afterwards can have a long-lasting effect on individuals. And even though synthesized, is it really worse than never experiencing it at all? Perhaps indeed such an experience will lead individuals to pursue the religion Jung so highly esteemed.
Psychedelics certainly can be used to amuse oneself away for the evening, and laugh off the visions as nothing of import – just as dreams can. But it can also (if we choose and make the necessary preparations) open our eyes to the reality and richness of our inner world, and in such a way that it demands a response – and occasionally a transformative one. This powerful yet humbling experience can bring us in more immediate contact with our unique inner imagery and personal symbolism as well as pointing beyond it to the unknown. The results in many ways mirror the effect of true religion – a standing before the mysteries of the world – including one’s own very existence – in awe and gratitude and humility.
Proof of the relation between religious experience and psychedelics is illustrated by a fascinating study conducted by Walter Pahnke, a minister working under Timothy Leary in the 60’s, on the effects of mushrooms on divinity students at Harvard. It led to scenes such as this one, that is scarcely imaginable in modern America:
Twenty divinity students received a capsule of white powder right before a Good Friday service at Marsh Chapel on the Boston University campus; ten contained psilocybin, ten an active placebo (nicotinic acid). Eight of the ten students receiving psilocybin reported a mystical experience, while only one in the control group experienced a feeling of “sacredness” and a “sense of peace.” (Telling the subjects apart was not difficult, rendering the double-blind a somewhat hollow conceit: those on the placebo sat sedately in their pews while the others lay down or wandered around the chapel, muttering things like “God is everywhere” and “Oh, the glory!”) Pahnke concluded that the experiences of eight who received the psilocybin were “indistinguishable from, if not identical with,” the classic mystical experiences reported in the literature by William James, Walter Stace, and others.
Psychedelic and mystical experiences are “indistinguishable” in their effects3. When these students were interviewed decades later most related it as a singular turning point in their lives which increased their faith and in many cases forever altered the course of their lives.
Research has revealed a U-shaped relationship between religious belief and happiness4; those who are most and least religious are the best off psychologically, while those in the middle are the worst off – which is perhaps one of the mechanisms behind these transformations.
Psychedelic experience can motivate one to embrace whatever it is one believes in a much stronger fashion – in essence achieving much the same ends as Jung’s depth analysis. Being more involved in your religion or belief system could then inspire actual visions or religious/spiritual experiences which Jung reveres so highly.
This relation between strength of religious affiliation and psych well-being illustrates the larger principle that one of the greatest cause of unhappiness is spending your life going half-assed at things. We moderns are always hedging our bets, afraid of losing if we go all in. But by not going all in we often hijack our goals. So we have no great disappointments, but we don’t have any great victories either. This of course is not a new idea, but using psychedelics to push you there perhaps is.
The Subjective and the “Objective” and the Search for Certainty and a Ground of Being
But the question arises why it is exactly that those who are most and least religious are happiest. Investigations into this question show that it’s primarily certainty which brings these benefits. But whereas religion often produces certainty that is dogmatic, inflexible and close-minded, the psychedelic encounter with the unconscious generally brings the benefit of certainty without the side effect of delusionary omnipotence.
For the idea of the unconscious is even more de-centering and more a nudge towards humility than the idea of God – even the Christian one. Christians, no matter how down on themselves and human nature, and no matter how focused on the glories of God or his creation, still generally have an indomitable view of the accuracy and genuineness of their belief in God.
But can one ever truly be certain about the external world? No, of course not, unless one is also insane. But inner experience is one area we are undisputed experts on, and certainty on one’s own inner world and experience brings as much benefit – nay more - than certainty about the external world. Indeed, while dogmatism about the world can often bring conflict and much worse, certainty about one’s internal world is unlikely to lead to either and brings the unique benefit of a sense of knowledge of and peace with oneself and one’s values. A recent New Yorker article paints a picture:
Most people’s recall of their journey is not just vivid but comprehensive, the narratives they reconstruct seamless and fully accessible, even years later. They don’t regard these narratives as “just a dream,” the evanescent products of fantasy or wish fulfillment, but, rather, as genuine and sturdy experiences. This is the “noetic” quality that students of mysticism often describe: the unmistakable sense that whatever has been learned or witnessed has the authority and the durability of objective truth. “You don’t get that on other drugs,” as Roland Griffiths points out; after the fact, we’re fully aware of, and often embarrassed by, the inauthenticity of the drug experience.
This suggests that psychedelics are a way to gain the benefits of religion without its liabilities – in other words, you gain certainty without sacrificing one’s intellectual integrity – an intelligent faith not absent a brain. You can also approach the mysteries and disturbing inevitabilities with an equanimity that does not involve self-deception. That ultimate mystery of course being the end of our own existence.
“‘A high-dose psychedelic experience is death practice,’ Katherine MacLean, the former Hopkins psychologist, said. ‘You’re losing everything you know to be real, letting go of your ego and your body, and that process can feel like dying.’ And yet you don’t die; in fact, some volunteers become convinced by the experience that consciousness may somehow survive the death of their bodies.”
Believing that consciousness may continue after death based on a personal experience is far different than believing it because some authority figure told you so and it feels good to think that way. The relation between private experience and the external world is always tentative, it is always open to different interpretation and questions of how much it reveals about ourselves versus the world – no matter how vivid. As such it is eminently human.
A Final Note
Sometimes in our mania for facts, in our attachment to everyday objects and focus on the external we can easily lose sight of the larger context of our lives. We can lose the forest for the trees, ignoring what is most important and focusing on what is vain and ephemeral.
The question is: how does one escape from this path? How does one get away from allowing what is around us and the pressures from without from dominating our perspective and priorities? Art can do this sometimes, as can education. But sometimes we can become so lost that these lose their power over us. What then?
One answer: we need to take a sustained look inside.
But how does looking inside lead to an awakening? I look within and I sense muscles tighten and relax, I notice thoughts appear and drift here and there, I notice feelings of this or that nature. I don’t feel any more or less awake than when I focus on this sentence I’m writing, or look out the window.
So what the hell is he talking about here?
One answer Jung turned to was the numinous experience.
Jung’s writings suggest he’s referring to the spiritual experiences available when one takes a sustained look within, to contact with the imagery and personal symbols buried there that we repress because they are not rational and as such are not valued by our efficiency-obsessed society.
I have only experienced a shadow of such a world, in dreams, in sleepless, drug-addled states – but I’ve never had the sense any of this was meaningful for navigating my life. Or, if I did, I’d dismiss it as silly and irrational. A certain pride or obstinacy has prevented my taking such things seriously.
But these inner leanings are not the only barriers to inner “awakening”. Any voyage within requires time and patience. There was a reason Jung’s house, intricately designed by him, was a Luddite’s paradise.
And beyond even openness and time, a certain disposition may be required. Jung had it, from an early age – likely to an extent few before or since had.
To get past all of these barriers, a vision or force of some power is required. Religious experience was for Jung an experience of being a part of something larger than himself, it was being cognizant of the larger realities that our daily lives obscure more than they reveal, of the briefness of our lives, our essential unity or inseperateness with the universe and with nature. And by all accounts, it encouraged a return to subjectivity – a reaffirmation of what is most important to us – which often is different from what society says it is and what our daily lives consist of. It’s a form of radical subjectivity, which is perhaps why the establishment fears it so.
The experience of the numinous – achieved either through religion or psychedelics, can push us to finally take ourselves seriously. To own who we are, our values, our temperament, the mysteriously persistent attractions and aversions which mark our nature – to realize that we do not have control of the universe, much less ourselves – that the greatest life is as much submission as it is initiation. To realize that the reality without does not trump the reality within – our visions are no less real because they cannot be experienced directly by others or examined under a microscope; the moon and stars are not more genuine than our peculiar inner experience of love and joy, of hate and anger, or the images that visit us nightly.
Knowledge of the world without can help us navigate it; but it is knowledge of the world within that makes the voyage a worthwhile one. For such knowledge gives direction, while paradoxically it connects us most meaningfully to the world and to those around us. To seek knowledge of the self is to come out of the self, to an encounter with the traditions and figures which shaped it – and ultimately with the larger-than-us and the great unknown.
But this exploration can only happen if we feel the treasure is worth pursuing – that there is something there of value and power. The great wise men of the ages can speak until the world collapses in on itself on the importance of self-knowledge, but for many experience alone will convince them. In such an age of distraction and myopia, psychedelics may be our last and best hope – not as a permanent cure, but rather as a taste of what could be and a temptation to pursue it.
He says that although a myth may not correspond with external reality, its source is always psychologically true - its springs from a felt psychological need that is all too real, and the modern urge to disparage this “myth-making” part of the human is perhaps part of the problem.
For a review see: Johnson, M. W., Hendricks, P. S., Barrett, F. S., & Griffiths, R. R. (2019). Classic psychedelics: An integrative review of epidemiology, therapeutics, mystical experience, and brain network function. Pharmacology & therapeutics, 197, 83-102.
Carhart-Harris, R. L., Roseman, L., Haijen, E., Erritzoe, D., Watts, R., Branchi, I., & Kaelen, M. (2018). Psychedelics and the essential importance of context. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 32(7), 725-731.
Interestingly, psychedelic experience and dreams are indistinguishable from one another physiologically. See Carhart-Harris, R., & Nutt, D. (2014). Was it a vision or a waking dream? Frontiers in psychology, 5.
Further, psychedelics cause a much greater emotional reaction to music, and historically music has often been viewed as the means by which the Gods communicate with man. See Kaelen, M., Barrett, F. S., Roseman, L., Lorenz, R., Family, N., Bolstridge, M., … & Carhart-Harris, R. L. (2015). LSD enhances the emotional response to music. Psychopharmacology, 232(19), 3607-3614
Streib, H., & Klein, C. (2013). Atheists, agnostics, and apostates. APA handbooks in psychology: APA Handbook of psychology, religion and spirituality: Vol 1.
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