Living the Ineffable: Mystical Experience and Mushrooms

What good is the principle of context when there is no context?

You can listen to the audio version of this essay here.

I’ve not personally had many experiences with altered states of consciousness. When I was a teenager I had my wisdom teeth taken out and I considered using laughing gas, but I ended up choosing not to do it. Close to altered consciousness, but not really. I do remember hearing the Trapt song “Headstrong” for the first time back in high school, and that was a pretty mind-bending experience, but it’s not really the same as having your perception of the world changed in some way. Boring, I know.

Maybe something closer to altered consciousness is my many years of sleep paralysis. You might have heard of it before, and maybe you’ve experienced it too. Sleep paralysis is where your mind or consciousness wakes up before your ability to control your body comes back online after sleep, and so you’re awake but you can’t move your body at all. I was in college the first time this happened to me. I had fallen asleep on the couch the night before and the next morning I became aware of myself but couldn’t move and couldn’t open my eyes. I was terrified and panicking but of course my body wasn’t moving, all the panic was in my head. At some point I started to be able to move a finger, and then my hand, and then my arm and with my shoulder moving I could jerk myself completely awake and regain control over my body. I was still pretty scared after it was over.

Later I found out more about what was happening, and that did make it better, but I still didn’t like it. It would come sporadically every few weeks or every month or so for many years. It’s gone now and hasn’t happened for a long time, I think because most of the anxiety I developed in college has now faded away. But since then I’ve learned that I was unusually aware of reality during my episodes of sleep paralysis. Other people report visual and auditory hallucinations as part of theirs, and sometimes the immobility gets folded into their dreams. Somehow I stay pretty with it despite not being able to move and so while my conscious experience is definitely different when this happens, it’s not that different, and as it used to happen more I became pretty familiar with it.

I’ve been thinking about this in prep for today’s essay, because while my state of consciousness is altered a bit during sleep paralysis, it’s also possible for someone’s consciousness to be altered lots, lots more. I’m talking about when they’re hearing voices or experiencing themselves as being somewhere completely different from where their body is, or even as being something completely different from what their body is. People may lose touch of the world around them and may lose the feeling of having a self separate from everything else that exists.

Today I want to consider experiences like these. There’s way too much to handle in a single piece, though, so the only goal here is to consider them in the context of the principle of context. Things we won’t cover include the history of these experiences, the specific physical causes, the different kinds of these experiences, and many other things. What we talk about today is aiming at addressing only a single issue: what happens when we have spiritual-looking experiences that seem to lack all context entirely? What happens when we can’t use our previous knowledge and experience to understand them? In other words, what happens to revelation when the principle of context doesn’t seem to apply?

We’ll do what we can to give some answers to these questions. A fuller take on the issues will have to wait for another time, but what we say here will help us continue to think about how important context is in moving our lives forward. Let’s do it.

The many faces of altered consciousness

Above I used my own experience of sleep paralysis as an example of an altered state of consciousness. Like I said, this isn’t the greatest example because, for me at least, my consciousness during those episodes isn’t really that different from how it normally is. My experience is very different, since I can’t move my body, but a lot of other things are the same.

From there we could move more in the direction of states involving greater alterations to consciousness. My clinical anxiety from college again gives us some more examples. A panic attack is one of them.