This type of thing is relatively common in psychedelic trips, I believe. I've read for example about someone making love to his girlfriend while high, and it felt like he was making love to the essence of womanhood. My guess is that psychedelics brings to the surface abstractions that we normally take for granted.
I accidentally took way too many mushrooms (or perhaps just enough) with a girlfriend at 18 @ Phish’s 99/00 festival. Indeed she became every woman who has ever lived. I saw in her faces of my mother, female friends, etc.
We didn’t speak of it during the trip, but years later when we spoke of the experience, she shared that I became every man she ever knew.
I’ve since had glimpses of that, during soul gazing for example, sober.
That’s correct, but each substance itself also has a similar, corresponding description or form. The "essence of womanhood" is often associated with the correct dosage of Salvia, for example, with people actually hearing the voice of a woman (or goddess as it is often described). Mushrooms are often associated with the form of the teacher, while LSD seems to have a highly technological or computing form associated with it. Some people will disagree, with McKenna associating mushrooms with aliens and science fiction, but that might have more to do with his heroic dosages.
The interesting question in my mind is how much of that has a neurochemical basis (e.g. psilocybin especially activates brain pathways associated with learning) vs being down to priming (e.g. hearing somewhere that mushrooms will show/teach me something).
There is no evidence for any neurochemical basis, as my follow up post later in the thread explains. It’s purely in the realm of psychedelic lore, anecdotal observation, and weak psychological surveys on testing participants. In other words, it is fringe science. There is simply no way to test for it nor to prove these stories are anything other than stories. The point is that these are examples of the Platonic forms and archetypes found not just in the experiences themselves, but also in the types of substances that are used. You may want to check out Shanon’s book "Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayahuasca Experience" which goes to great lengths to document these archetypes. In this instance, Shanon is arguing that ayahuasca has the form of the "jungle", and the user will see snakes, jaguars, vines, etc. as part of this experience. He and others argue that this is embedded into the drug as a form of information, but there’s no way to substantiate this or any other claim using the scientific method. Narby made similar claims, and was widely ridiculed for them. Previously, and many decades before, Leary, Watts, and many others argued that the roots of religious forms and symbols could be found within the drug itself. Watts gives an exceptionally illustrative description of how Hinduism, the world’s oldest religion, seemed to be encoded in the experience.
This all came together as something called the entheogenic hypothesis. It is often used to explain the connection between the evolution of religion and the purported sacraments that may have been used in formal rites. The Eleusinian Mysteries is often referenced as an example. Campbell’s formulation of the "Hero’s journey" is very often seen as a general archetype for the user of these substances in its synthesis of comparative literature (which features these forms as archetypes) and mythology which also translates to religion itself. In Campbell’s formulation, the "boon" that is brought back from the hero, is overlayed and represented in the entheogenic hypothesis as the very informational content that the psychonaut is able to retrieve from the experiences. McKenna often interpreted this as the "logos" but in a more secular context. Lilly and others heard distinct voices giving them instructions. Shanon and others revisited the Abrahamic stories and posited that these voices giving people instructions were equivalent to what ancient people imagined as the voice of god. Still others, like Julian Jaynes, interpreted this idea in a secular way, seeing it more as a story that explains our transition from partial to full consciousness. More recently, the writers of Westworld took a lot of these ideas and applied them to AI, in an attempt to explain how consciousness could eventually emerge again as AGI.
> He and others argue that this is embedded into the drug as a form of information, but there’s no way to substantiate this or any other claim using the scientific method.
Is there really no way? I can imagine for example conducting a double-blind trial with various psychedelics and controls, and recording the subjects' verbalised experiences during and after the trip. This would give some strong clues as to which aspects of the experience are inherent/neurochemical, and which are culutrally primed.
You can go even further and test it with people that have never heard of psychedelic drugs, let alone been culturally primed. It would take a lot of funding of course, but in principle it's possible.
I totally accept that we know very little about the brain to have a good mechanistic understanding of subjective experience. But I think we're making great progress! A few years ago I went to a lecture by David Nutt, who researches the potential for psilocybin and ketamine therapies to treat depression. What struck me was that it is already possible to measure and talk scientifically about the mechanistic effects of psychedelic drugs on the brain, and how those measured effects correlate to lived experience.
