Buddhist-Psychonautical Propaganda
Everything that follows is about one’s own perception, and can be experientially appreciated. The status of perception-independent reality is not something I will address here. There are others more qualified to squabble about that.
Some etymology to begin with:
enlightenment/awakening:
Within a Buddhist context these are both translations of bodhi, an abstract noun derived from the verbal root budh-, literally to wake up.
psychedelic:
A composite neologism derived from Greek, which literally translated means ‘mind-manifesting’.
...and suggestive scripture:
The Essential Jewel of Holy Practice, by Patrul Rinpoche:
Cut off the mind’s obsession with appearance.
Let the whole structure of deluded appearance crumble away.
The nonduality of mind and appearance is an infinite expanse.
Realizing that single essence, chant the six-beat mantra.
I’m going to try to get my points across by way of using this verse of Rinpoche’s poetry as scaffolding. Bear with me.
Cut off the mind’s obsession with appearance.
You fall asleep, and in the theatre of the night dreams appear. You do not know you are dreaming, and are fully immersed in the dream’s contents and narrative. Disaster occurs. You are devastated, inconsolable, alone in a frightening world. The fact of this being projected and constituted by your own mind is cognitively and perceptually inaccessible, not an introspectively available fact to be noticed. Or is it? How, if in retrospect all this is but a projection of your own mind, could you be so deceived? And more, if all is but a projection of your mind, why does all seem in the dream to be perceived by ‘you’, as if you were something separated out from the dreamscape?
As sentient beings we find ourselves at each instant within ordinary (and most extraordinary) states of consciousness situated, most often centered, in a richly structured and dynamic three-dimensional space. This room, the moving foliage seen through the window, the sound of a heating fan, all appear as objects in this perceptual space, and are mapped within it with reference to an apparent center of space, the point-of-view, me! This basic situation of a point-of-view, I, and various objects which appear to it constitutes the ordinary basis of all activity in this space.
If the objects appear pleasant, there is attentional and affective pull and the activities which arise from that. I want this! Bring it closer! Give me more! I wonder if I can get more of this in the future. What if it goes away? Woe is me!
If the objects appear unpleasant, there is attentional and affective push and the activities which arise from that. I don’t want this. Get it away from me! None of that, thank you. I wonder how long I’ll have to put up with this. What if it never leaves? Woe is me!
If the objects appear neutral, boredom ensues, and attention and affect search out something to be attracted or averse to.
In short, the mind, or rather the portion of the mind manifesting as this point-of-view, thoughts, and feelings, is obsessed with appearances. Thus come all our trials and tribulations: the seemingly interminable recursive cycling of experience between the deluded poles of attraction and aversion. Samsara, in another word.
Let the whole structure of deluded appearance crumble away.
It is very difficult, and unlikely, to let go completely, directly. After all, we’ve spent all our lives doing the opposite and thinking we’ve been rewarded for it. So, rather than release the forces of attraction and aversion directly, why not destruct that which is grasped, so that the grasping lets go for lack of support? There are various ways that appearance may crumble away. Here I offer two.
You can focus your attention so acutely and exclusively that the perceived world outside of the attended object drops off. The usual perceptions of subject, space, and time cease. The mind is so absorbed with singleness that everything else disappears for lack of resources. The mind can let go of producing even this, pull its own plug and reboot, so to speak. This is quite radical. Appearances require upkeep. That centred, richly structured and dynamic three-dimensional space, in fact all and any experience whatsoever, is a doing of the mind.
What’s described above is the experience of an advanced meditator. This radical recognition of all appearance as produced, as not other than mental fabrication, is perhaps likely to remain inaccessible to most via that method. Enter psychedelics. These compounds have the potential to so completely dissolve and restructure appearances to the extent that their very mutability should allow informed inference, if not direct recognition, of their fabricated, mind-manifesting nature. This inference or recognition can be quite the motivation to inquire further through more traditional means which can actually durably alter one’s experience of self and world. Very many of the most revered western-born teachers of Buddhist meditation today had their start with these substances. It’s not an accident.
Now, plenty, perhaps the majority, of people just get hung up on these new and differently configured mind-manifestations, and miss their nature entirely. As in normal waking consciousness, there is a fixation on content rather than recognition of the context in which/as which it appears. Aspiring psychonauts are liable to become even more deluded than they already were. So it goes. Hopefully they can be warned off such misapprehensions.
The nonduality of mind and appearance is an infinite expanse.
Where do these radical alterations to ordinary phenomenology leave us? Awakened, hopefully! But awakened to and from what? With all the foregoing informing this exercise, I invite you to look straight ahead with an even, unfocused gaze, as though staring through what’s before you, and non-discursively investigate this: are the sights you see appearing in the eye? Are the sounds you hear appearing in the ear?
Your eyes do not see. Your ears do not hear. The point-of-view does not perceive and never has. Appearances and mind are nondual, and all illusion-like arising is naturally complete in this recognition. This is always already so. I defer to the Most Ven. Kaṭukurunde Ñāṇananda Maha Thera on how the charade of its seeming otherwise is maintained:
In the process of 'grasping' there is involved a kind of 'projection' of desires (cf.‘nati’ — inclination, bent) whereby the split in experience widens into a definite gap between a subject and an object. ‘Becoming’ or ‘existence’ is the make-believe attempt to bridge this gap which, however, forever remains unabridged, for the material on which it relies is perpetually crumpling up underneath. Yet it somehow props up the conceit of an ego—the conceit ‘I am’ (asmima‘na). From the point of view of the ego, the things clung to (updda‘na) appear as assets (upadhi) and one takes pride in the very things one depends on. Thus liabilities are looked upon as positive assets and an abject slavery becomes a petty mastery. The topsy—turvydom is complete and the double-bind becomes a fait accompli. The ego now finds itself ‘born’ into a world of likes and dislikes, subject to decay-and-death, sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief and despair.
This grasping can be seen through directly, for there is no gap, and that recognition renders any grasping like writing on water. Mind-itself can be intimated and recognized because it is never more than here, than this, you just don’t see it for being blinded by seeming to see. It is in this context that sudden awakenings as gestalt-shifts in perception come to make sense. Thomas Metzinger:
For example, following a global Gestalt switch in which MPE [what is recognized in awakening] has turned from an unrecognized background into the dominant and spontaneously present foreground of all experience, an explicit experience of Wakefulness could appear as the medium or the centre- and timeless epistemic space in which rich, variable, and complex phenomenal contents unfold over time.
Jay Garfield and Emily McRae explain part of Patrul Rinpoche’s pointings at the moon:
...liberation is not the result of a process that begins with bondage and that is achieved through transformation, but rather that liberation is the original nature of all phenomena, a nature always present but occluded in samsara. It is to be realized, not to be achieved. Mind itself is already pure awareness; the manifestation of mind as distinct from its object is illusory. The objects of the six sense faculties (the five external faculties and the introspective faculty) are themselves already the bases of liberation if experienced as they are, free from attachment and aversion and free from dualistic appearance.
Realizing that single essence, chant the six-beat mantra.
The upshot of all this is that our minds are free by nature, we have only to realize it. When realized, simultaneously, natural prosocial urges come to predominate and the bases of attraction and aversion which undergird harmful behavior are eroded. McRae and Garfield once more:
...Patrul Rinpoche connects self-grasping – the view that one is an independent ego – to vice and suffering, and liberation to the cultivation of care. When we take ourselves to be independent egos, we draw the essential distinction between self and other, and we each place ourselves at the center of our own universe and regard others as existing merely as our objects. That is not only irrational but also leads to the attraction and aversion that generate suffering. An attitude of care allows us to eradicate that self-grasping and to liberate ourselves and others from suffering.
Coda:
If you want to pursue these matters yourself, there’s a dizzying array of options. Though conceptually and in practice I’m rooted in traditional Buddhism(s), I would recommend Shinzen Young’s Unified Mindfulness system as an intro and accompaniment to any contemplative practice. Start here if you wish:
https://unifiedmindfulness.com/
For current academic reading on the subject, I suggest you take a look at these philosophical papers by Thomas Metzinger and Raphael Milliere, respectively:
https://www.philosophie.fb05.uni-mainz.de/files/2020/03/Metzinger_MPE1_PMS_2020.pdf
https://www.raphaelmilliere.com/publication/milliere2020varieties/
I poached Patrul Rinpoche’s verse and Garfield and McRae’s excellent commentary from their translation, which is available here: https://www.amazon.com/Essential-Jewel-Holy-Practice/dp/161429447X
I quoted the Most Ven. From his illustrious The Magic of the Mind, freely available here: https://seeingthroughthenet.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/the_magic_of_the_mind.pdf
