Most people probably aren’t sitting around all day analysing their metaphysical beliefs, and I imagine these conceptual ideas are largely unexamined when we have such busy lives which require us to act, rather than think about how we’re actually engaging with the world. Psychedelics might, however, have the potential to take notice and radically shift our beliefs, but is this enough? When speaking to Sjöstedt-Hughes, he mentioned that we need to combine these shifts with an understanding of philosophy in order to understand how to properly engage with the world via a new metaphysical worldview.
If we’re looking at things from a Western perspective, are most people coming into the psychedelic experience as implicit physicalists? The logical positivist AJ Ayer thought that metaphysics was essentially nonsense because these worldviews can’t be empirically verified or understood as a statement, which is true by virtue of its logical form, and that philosophy was “a superstition from which we are freed by the abandonment of metaphysics” – but do we need to necessarily verify something for it to have an impact?
Psychedelic experiences have the potential to induce “ontological shock”, relating to the way in which people understand the nature of existence and what it means to be. Ontology and metaphysics can often be used interchangeably, but ontology is concerned more with the idea of what is, rather than what could be possible in a metaphysical sense. So if we’re going about our existence just thinking we’re consciousness inside of a physical body, but then have an experience where there is a felt sense of ideas such as consciousness not being confined to the brain, or that our whole reality has some kind of interconnectedness that we previously ignored, or maybe that everything around us is truly alive, then this experience has serious potential to radically shift our metaphysical beliefs. It can change how we engage with our reality, which may cause a high degree of shock, given how rooted a lot of us are in our general consensus reality.
I have personally experienced a sense of “aliveness” when having psychedelic experiences out in nature, where it feels like, for the first time, you’re really seeing, hearing, and smelling all the different aspects of the natural world. I had the benefit of consuming psychedelics for the first time around the woodlands of Canterbury, and I was always overjoyed at how much awe I had for the nature around me. I learnt to identify trees, plants, and mushrooms, all through the focused lens of being thoroughly engaged with the world around me. This animistic worldview of everything being alive and conscious has personally been amplified for me when consuming psychedelics in this way, and the more I continue to connect with this worldview, the more sense the world seems to make to me.
But is this a random occurrence from consuming a psychedelic substance, or are these beliefs altered in a specific direction? In my conversation with Sjöstedt-Hughes, he suggested that this shift in our metaphysical beliefs isn’t random, and we can create philosophical frameworks to understand these shifts and how we engage with our reality. But is there a specific metaphysical shift that we should be paying more attention to?
The contemporary philosopher Chris Letheby thinks so. His view is that unless you’re engaging with a naturalistic metaphysical worldview, the ideas of shifting your metaphysical beliefs through psychedelic experiences might simply be a comforting delusion:
I realised that typically people fall into one of two camps. There are the people who think psychedelics give you genuine spiritual experiences; these people tend to call the drugs “entheogens”, and to reject philosophical naturalism or materialism. And then there’s the camp of naturalists or materialists who see psychedelics as hallucinogens that distort perception and cognition and don’t give you any real knowledge. They often think of the drugs as “hallucinogens” or “psychotomimetics” – as anti-epistemic by definition. So the middle ground – that materialism or naturalism is true, but psychedelics still have epistemic and spiritual value – seemed to me to be a really underrepresented and plausible position.
So, do we need psychedelics to radically shift our metaphysical beliefs in order to have some benefit from these experiences? Or can they be useful for engaging more with the natural world that is right in front of us, rather than creating potentially delusional beliefs about reality?
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My feeling is that this word “spiritual” is indeed the “no-thing” or “eternal now” and the physical-mental world we live in is the extrusion or resolution of this “non-substance” called mind-stuff or neutral monism, perhaps seen as a superposition of mind and matter, into reality by the process of self-observation (the I am). There must be a structure to this dimension because it has physical and mental aspects when it is made “real”. The psychonauts, mystics or divines have a minimal access to this numinous dimension, but it is the source of all experiential aspects of life and is the experiential basis of what unites us as well as divides us. This is where philosophy unites reality with religion, the real with the numinous.