From a Western psychological perspective, the authentic self can be thought of in relation to self-advancement, where authenticity elicits self-advancement, and self-advancement elicits authenticity. This is the idea of being true to oneself, where we find coherence in our identity and values, with a continuous narrative. These are aspects for me personally that resonate a lot with my psychedelic experiences, especially in a creative sense, where my engagement with psychedelic music is part of a wider cultural narrative. It’s hard to put into words the degree to which this connection makes me feel like I can really be myself, where I can be around others in a state of communal joy. There’s a sense of everyone being on a similar vibe, whether it’s listening to music that we love or engaging in creative conversation, exploring nature, or tapping into different practices with others in a group setting.
I’ve been playing music for 30 years, but it’s not always been a straight path. Challenges in my life as a teenager had a significant impact on my joy for playing music, and it often seemed like a bit of a slog. I found music lessons and practising quite draining, and studying A-level music just became a bit of a disaster. Being introduced to psychedelics at university was a life-changing experience regarding my creativity, which has now resulted in me pursuing music in a more focused and professional way, having now released a second studio album with my band. Psychedelics have been key in allowing me to return to this core, where previously I might have been shut off or not had enough belief in the level of my playing ability to engage with this self-advancement.
This is very much in line with thinking about the content of the self, placing the self as an object to base our own existence on. But what if we could understand the self from a different perspective? In his book No Self, No Problem: How Neuropsychology Is Catching Up to Buddhism, Chris Niebauer poses the question:
Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 percent of everything you think, and of everything you do, is for yourself—and there isn’t one.
From an Eastern philosophical perspective, the concept of self doesn’t actually exist, and it’s simply an illusion of the process of our thought patterns. The Western mindset often perceives the self as a stable force, but this might be quite peculiar within the context of other world cultures. If the self isn’t necessarily stable, could we come to think of it more like a process rather than an object? The philosopher Thomas Metzinger has expressed the idea that the robust phenomenology of the self has convinced us that we’re someone, but there is “no metaphysical entity such as the self which could exist independently of the brain”.
Could this understanding of the self as a process be a detachment from egoic identity? What if there was a difference between egoic identity and presence? One individual whom I’ve become a big fan of is the spiritual teacher and self-help author Eckhart Tolle, who has spoken at great length about the idea of presence in our lives, particularly in his book The Power of Now. When we interact with another person and two consciousnesses are going at it, we might be stuck in this stream of thought where all the space is taken up. We might, however, have moments of recognition that all this space has been taken up and effectively lost, and we have the ability to engage with the awareness that exists outside of thought. We can anchor ourselves in different ways, whether that be awareness of our breath, our body, or our surroundings.
Without this awareness, we might succumb more to the ‘pain body’, where we experience past emotional pain in terms of anger, depression, anxiety, or some other kind of negative emotional state. We identify with the pain body; there might be something that we’re not willing to let go of, even though it seems obvious that no one would actively choose to experience these negative emotional states. But is this identification due to being stuck in the thoughts and not engaging enough with presence or awareness? If we become more aware of the pain body, we then have the possibility of breaking this identification and shrinking or dissolving the pain body to have the opportunity to enjoy the present more. Tolle often speaks about the human love for dogs in the sense of the recognition of the ‘non-egoic’ or ‘pre-egoic’ state that they seem to have:
They’re not troubled by low self-esteem or body-image problems. You can look into their eyes and feel temporarily liberated from your worries. They’re guardians of being — some people are kept sane by having a dog nearby. But dogs are pre-thought. It’s not our evolutionary destiny to go back to their level.
Is being able to enjoy the moment more about how we relate to situations rather than who we are? If we can understand that we’re not our thoughts and we can’t control them, we can see where we have the power to change how we relate to what’s happening by tapping into the awareness and presence that exists outside thought. My experiences with psychedelics, in particular, LSD, have allowed me this space and ability to tap into the awareness which exists outside of the thinking mind – this is where I think a substance such as LSD has so much beauty contained within it. I’ve had moments where I feel like I’m existing in pure joy of experience and awareness, whether that be what I’m seeing, hearing, smelling, or tasting. There was one moment in particular where I remember sitting in a field on my university campus, and becoming aware of not having any thoughts (or at least being in the space in between my thoughts), where at that moment I started laughing in the joy of feeling like I’d escaped the ego. The famous jazz trumpeter Miles Davis often spoke of playing the silence in between the notes, as this is where the next note is born, and we might be able to think of this in a similar way to psychedelics and thought.
In this moment, is there a recognition of the healing potential of psychedelics that goes beyond the self and our life story? Perhaps in connecting to that state of pure awareness, there is engagement with something that could be thought of as essential, where this awareness is not defined by our personality, life events or circumstances. Is this something, however, which is only experienced by those of us in the West who already have this personal association with ideas of the self?
My experiences with magic mushrooms, while having been greatly beneficial in working through challenging life events on an individual level, have also consistently presented me with the idea of these mushrooms being here to help us as a collective species. This has often felt quite clear, and it seems to be a recurring pattern of thought or general conclusion when it comes to understanding the lessons gained from psychedelics such as mushrooms. Perhaps the self doesn’t really exist unless it’s in relation to other selves?
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