Philosophy of psychedelics

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Philosophy of psychedelics is the philosophical investigation of the

altered states of consciousness to philosophical questions is a relatively late phenomenon in the history of philosophy. Traditional cultures who use psychedelic substances such as the Amazonian and Indigenous Mexican peoples hold that ingesting medicinal plants such as Ayahuasca and Peyote allows one to commune with the beings of the spirit world
.

Indian philosophy

The Indian Yogi and scholar Patanjali in his Yoga sutras (4.1) mentions that mystic powers (siddhaya) can arise from certain "herbs" or "healing plants"[1] (osadhi):

janmauṣadhi-mantra-tapaḥ samādhi jāḥ siddhayaḥ||
The mystic powers arise due to birth, herbs,
mantras, the performance of austerity and samadhi.[2]

Later commentators on the Yoga sutras like

asuras, and also state these herbal concoctions can be found in this world. Adi Shankara meanwhile refers to the Vedic drink Soma.[2]

Chogyam Trungpa (1939 – 1987), a modern teacher in the Kagyu
tradition:

amrita... is used in conferring the second abhisheka, the secret abhisheka. This transmission dissolves the student's mind into the mind of the teacher of the lineage. In general, amrita is the principle of intoxicating extreme beliefs, belief in ego, and dissolving the boundary between confusion and sanity so that coemergence can be realized.[6]

19th century

European literature such as

Kant)[7] and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan described the use and phenomenal character of mind-altering substances such as Opium. De Quincey held that Opium
allowed one to access the earliest of memories and that therefore no memories were ever truly forgotten:

The minutest incidents of childhood, or forgotten scenes of later years, were often revived: I could not be said to recollect them; for if I had been told of them when waking, I should not have been able to acknowledge them as parts of my past experience. But placed as they were before me, in dreams like intuitions, and clothed in all their evanescent circumstances and accompanying feelings, I recognized them instantaneously […] I feel assured that there is no such thing as forgetting possible to the mind.[8]

Jacques-Joseph Moreau, who reported his experiments with mental patients and drugs, believed that “the hashish experience was a way to gain insight into mental disease.”[9]

The French Poet

Theophile Gautier.[10] Baudelaire's opinion of the drug was generally negative, believing that it weakened and dampened artistic capacities, the personal Will and even the very identity of the hashish eater. He compared it to suicide and a false happiness, and saw wine as the true intoxicant of the artists.[11]

In the United States,

he likewise writes:

Nitrous oxide and ether, especially nitrous oxide … stimulate the mystical consciousness in an extraordinary degree. … [In] the nitrous oxide trance we have a genuine metaphysical revelation. … [Our] normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.[14]

While it has been speculated that Friedrich Nietzsche had psychedelic experiences brought on by the drugs he used to help with his various illnesses, it is more likely that his drug use was restricted to opium, rather than classic psychedelics. He had, however, speculated on the significance of altered states, particularly with regards to "narcotics potions" taken to attain oneness with one's fellow man and with nature. In The Birth of Tragedy he wrote: "Now that the gospel of universal harmony is sounded, each individual becomes not only reconciled to his fellow but actually at one with him - as though the veil of Maya had been torn apart and there remained only shreds floating before the vision of mystical Oneness" The Birth of Tragedy. [15]

20th century

After using

dharmakaya.[16][page needed] Huxley also quotes the philosopher C. D. Broad
, which held that the brain and nervous system might act as a reducing valve of all the stimuli in the universe:

According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this Particular planet.[16][page needed]

Huxley wrote that it was possible that certain human beings could, through drugs, meditation, etc. circumvent the reducing valve and experience something far beyond everyday consciousness. This experience Huxley saw as the source of all mysticism, a theory termed the perennial philosophy. He also discusses art and the legality of various drugs in the West as well as arguing for the importance for self-transcendence. Huxley's philosophical novel Island also described a utopian society that used a psychedelic substance for spiritual purposes.[citation needed]

In the early 1960s a group that eventually came to be called "Harvard Psychedelic Club" which included Timothy Leary, Huston Smith and Ram Dass administered psychedelics to Harvard students. The group experimented with psychedelics in experiments such as the Harvard Psilocybin Project. Huston Smith's last work, Cleansing the Doors of Perception, describes the Harvard Project in which he participated.[citation needed]

Ram Dass' Be Here Now and Tim Leary's The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead compared the psychedelic experiences to eastern philosophy and mystical states of consciousness. These books further popularized the idea that eastern - particularly Indian philosophical and spiritual insights could be obtained from using psychedelics. One of these experiences described in The Psychedelic Experience is that of ego death or depersonalization.[full citation needed]

The idea that the psychedelic experience could grant access to eastern spiritual insights was also promoted by the popular philosopher Alan Watts in his writings such as The Joyous Cosmology, who also argued that one should not remain dependent on them for spiritual growth: "If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen."[17]

Various psychologists during the 1960s also studied psychedelic substances and worked with psychedelic therapy and later developed various theories about their effects and significance. Stanislav Grof is known for his extensive work in LSD psychotherapy and for developing a theory which stated that the psychedelic experience allowed one to relive birth trauma and to explore the depths of the unconscious mind. Grof observed four levels of the LSD experience, which for him correspond to areas of the human unconscious: (1) abstract and aesthetic experiences (2) psychodynamic experiences (3) perinatal experiences, and (4) transpersonal experiences. Grof defined the last level as "experiences involving an expansion or extension of consciousness beyond the usual ego boundaries and beyond the limitations of time and/or space."[18] The field of transpersonal psychology focuses on this type of experience. Grof included topics such as consciousness, mysticism and metaphysics in his later writings.[citation needed]

The scientist and philosopher

The Center of the Cyclone: An Autobiography of Inner Space and Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer. Other psychologists who studied and wrote on psychedelic use include Walter Pahnke, Ralph Metzner and Claudio Naranjo.[citation needed
]

According to writer James Oroc, the 1990s brought about a second phase in modern psychedelic culture. The philosophical foundation of this new wave of psychedelic thought was based on the works of Alexander Shulgin, Alex Grey and Terence McKenna.[19]

Contemporary

Neuroscientist

Near Death Experiences and psychedelic states caused by outwardly administered DMT. He also describes the psychedelic experiences of the volunteers in his experiments and their encounter with certain strange "beings" after being administered DMT.[citation needed
]

In 2012,

mystical experience—has been very influential among contemporary psychopharmacologists. These scientists, Langlitz writes, have given Huxley's view a materialist "neurobiological reinterpretation" which Langlitz calls "mystic materialism".[21]

The philosopher Thomas Metzinger has discussed the effects of substances such as LSD, dimethyltryptamine, and mescaline in his Being No One (2003) and those of psilocybin in The Ego Tunnel (2009).[22][page needed][23][page needed] Metzinger describes the hallucinatory component of the psychedelic experience as "epistemically vacuous," i.e., not a reliable source of knowledge.[21]

The American author Sam Harris discussed his use of psychedelics in his 2014 book Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, which also attempts to argue for a naturalized spirituality.[citation needed]

The philosopher Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes' book Noumenautics was published by the independent publisher Psychedelic Press in 2015 and discusses psychedelic phenomenology and its metaphysical implications. In 2021 they published his Modes of Sentience covering similar themes.[citation needed]

In his non-academic encyclopedia of psychedelic culture and thought Psychedelia (2012),

Merleau-Ponty, Paul D. MacLean's Triune brain theory, the work of Eugen Fink, and other thinkers.[citation needed
]

In 2021, the philosopher Chris Letheby's book Philosophy of Psychedelics was published by Oxford University Press.[24] Philosophy of Psychedelics is organised as a defence against what Letheby calls the 'Comforting Delusion Objection' to psychedelic therapy. The objection is that psychedelic therapy works by inducing non-naturalistic metaphysical beliefs, and so it is epistemically deficient if one adopts a philosophically naturalistic world-view.[4] Letheby concludes that the Comforting Delusion Objection fails, and that the epistemic status of psychedelic therapy, given philosophical naturalism, is good.[3]

In 2022, Christine Hauskeller and Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes' edited volume, Philosophy and Psychedelics was published by Bloomsbury.[25]

See also

References

  1. ^ Arthur Anthony Macdonell, Arthur Berriedale; Vedic Index of Names and Subjects, Volume 1; Volume 5
  2. ^ a b Bryant, Edwin F.; The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary, chapter IV
  3. ^ a b Gimian, Carolyn Rose; The Essential Chogyam Trungpa, Glossary
  4. ^ a b Stewart, J. M. The Life of Gampopa, The Incomparable Dharma Lord of Tibet, Snow Lion Publications, Ithaca, N. Y., USA, 1995, page 53.
  5. ^ Walter, M. L, Preliminary Results from a study of two Rasayana systems in Indo-Tibetan Esoterism published in Tibetan Studies in Honour of Hugh Richardson (M. Aris, ed.), Aris & Phillips Ltd., Warminster, England 1980, page 319
  6. ^ Trungpa, C.; Sacred Outlook: The Vajrayogini Shrine and Practice (in The Silk Route and the Diamond Path, D. E. Klimburg-Salter, editor ), UCLA Art Council, Los Angeles, 1982, page 236
  7. ^ Stirling, James Hutchison (1867). "De Quincey and Coleridge Upon Kant," Fortnightly Review, Vol. 8, pp. 377–97.
  8. ^ Quincey, Thomas de. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings.London: Penguin Books, 2003, 76
  9. ^ Nahas, Gabriel G. Marihuana—Deceptive Weed. New York: Raven Press, 1973. see: Baudelaire on Drugs : Marijuana Consumption in the Age of Colonialism http://evitanza.bol.ucla.edu/baudelaire.html#_ftn15
  10. ^ Levinthal, C. F. (2012). Drugs, behavior, and modern society. (6th ed.). Boston: Pearson College Div.
  11. ^ Vitanza, Baudelaire on Drugs : Marijuana Consumption in the Age of Colonialism
  12. ^ Ludlow, Fitz Hugh "The Visionary", The Hasheesh Eater 1857
  13. ^ James; The Subjective Effects of Nitrous Oxide (1882), https://erowid.org/chemicals/nitrous/nitrous_article1.shtml
  14. ^ James, William; The Varieties of Religious Experience, ch. XVI
  15. ^ Traherne, Twain; The Psychedelic Nietzsche
  16. ^ .
  17. ^ The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness (the quote is new to the 1965/1970 edition (page 26), and not contained in the original 1962 edition of the book).
  18. ^ PSYPRESSUK CONTRIBUTORS; Realms of the Human Unconscious by Stanislav Grof PUBLISHED JANUARY 19, 2011 · UPDATED FEBRUARY 5, 2015, http://psypressuk.com/2011/01/19/literary-review-realms-of-the-human-unconscious-by-stanislav-grof/
  19. ^ Oroc, James; The Second Psychedelic Revolution, http://realitysandwich.com/216613/the-second-psychedelic-revolution-part-one-the-end-of-acid/
  20. .
  21. ^ a b Langlitz; Nicolas; IS THERE A PLACE FOR PSYCHEDELICS IN PHILOSOPHY? Fieldwork in Neuro- and Perennial Philosophy, http://www.nicolaslanglitz.de/nicolaslanglitz.de/Texts_files/Langlitz%202016%20-%20IS%20THERE%20A%20PLACE%20FOR%20PSYCHEDELICS%20IN%20PHILOSOPHY%3F.pdf
  22. .
  23. .
  24. .
  25. OCLC 1291222794.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) CS1 maint: others (link
    )

Further reading

External links