>My purpose in using that particular example, though, was simply to illustrate that some of the effects of hallucinogens can be easily explained as cognitive misfirings or increased awareness. I may later “reintegrate” these experiences into my daily life or remember how to focus my attention to these normally ignored features of the environment.<
The reason I asked if you were attempting to rationalize, trivialize or explain away your perception of walls breathing is that walls and other seemingly inanimate objects are indeed “breathing” and “alive”, not in the restricted way our logical, ego dominated minds define breathing and life, but insofar as the matter comprising them is constantly vibrating, moving in and out, flashing on and off, and particulating, or pixelzing, from waves. I believe that the normal ego-dominated mind integrates these phenomena into a seamless picture. But in the relatively ego-less state that entheogens induce, the mind for some reason (and in some way currently unbeknownst to us) becomes conscious of these phenomena. This is not necessarily because the mind actually perceives the waveforms from which matter is particulating from moment to moment, or the particles themselves, but because it somehow perceives manifestations of these phenomena that it doesn’t perceive when the ego’s normal filters are operating.
The difference between the normal view of reality, the logico-scientifiic explanation of the breathing walls that your ego offered with hindsight based on that view, and the original raw perception can be understood, imo, by considering the two views analogous to the so-called “double-slit” experiments that quantum physicists have used to examine the wave-particle properties of light. In these experiments, a beam of light or electrons are passed through a series of openings or filters and detectors in different ways that determine whether the beam manifests itself as a wave or as particles. If the filters are set up to detect individual particles that’s what one detects, but if the filters are set up to detect waves, then one detects waves.
Imo, the ego can be viewed as a series of genetically-and environmentally-derived conceptual filters having neurophysiological underpinnings that evolved to integrate phenomena into the seamless picture we normally have of the world; i.e., matter appears to be solid even though it’s 99 percent space; and events are organized sequentially and causally even though time doesn’t exist at other levels of consciousness. In contrast, when the ego’s filters are weakened or entirely removed, the same phenomena manifest themselves non-sequentially and “holistically” as what Jung called synchronisms. There is, however, a method to the mind’s seeming madness even when such filters are removed, for the resulting world-view is the same one that people have reported from time immemorial during spontaneously induced mystico-religious experiences.
There’s obviously a lot more to this than meets the eye………….
Tags: hallucinogens, jung, perception
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