Alan Watts: The 4 characteristics of the psychedelic mystical experience

[WaveInTheOcean]

Alan Watts: The four dominant characteristics of a mystical psychedelic experience. Taken from his book: The Joyous Cosmology.

Quote

1. The first characteristic is a slowing down of time, a concentration in the present. One's normally compulsive concern for the future decreases, and one becomes aware of the enormous importance and interest of what is happening at the moment. Other people, going about their business on the streets, seem to be slightly crazy, failing to realize that the whole point of life is to be fully aware of it as it happens. One therefore relaxes, almost luxuriously, into studying the colors in a glass of water, or in listening to the now highly articulate vibration of every note played on a piano or sung by a voice.
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The truth is that people who live for the future are, as way of the insane, "not quite all there" -- or here. By over-eagerness they are perpetually missing the point. Foresight is bought at the price of anxiety, and when overused it destroys all its own advantages.

2. The second characteristic I will call awareness of polarity. This is the vivid realization that states, things and events that we ordinarily call opposite are interdependent, like back and front or the poles of a magnet. By polar awareness one sees that things which are explicitly different are implicitly one: self and other, subject and object, left and right, male and female -- and then, a little more surprisingly: solid and space, figure and background, pulse and interval, saints and sinners, police and criminals. Each is definable only in terms of the other, and they go together transactionally, like buying and selling, for there is no sale without a purposes, and no purchase without a sale.
As this awareness becomes increasingly intense, you feel that you yourself are polarized with the external universe in such a way that you imply each other. Your push is its pull, and its push is your pull -- as when you move the steering wheel of a car. Are you pushing it or pulling it?

At first, this is a very odd sensation, not unlike hearing your own voice played back to you on an electronic system immediately after you have spoken. You become confused, and wait for it to go on! Similarly, you feel that you are something being done by the universe, yet that the universe is equally something being done by you -- which is true, at least in the neurological sense that the peculiar structure of our brains translates the sun into light and air vibrations into sound.
Our normal sensation of relationship to the outside world is that 'sometimes I push', and 'sometimes it pushes me'. But if the two are actually one, where does action begin and responsibility rest? if 'the universe is doing me', how can I be sure that, two seconds hence, I will still remember the English language? If 'I am doing it', how can I be sure that, two seconds hence, my brain will know how to turn the sun into light?
From such unfamiliar sensations as these the psychedelic experience can generate confusion, paranoia, and terror -- even through the individual is feeling his relationship to the world exactly as it would be described by a biologist or quantum physicist, for he is feeling himself as the unified field of organism and environment.

3. The third characteristic, arising from the second, is awareness of relativity. I see that I am a link in an infinite hierarchy of processes and beings, ranging from molecules through bacteria and insects to human beings, and, maybe, to angels and gods -- a hierarchy in which every level is in effect the same situation. For example, the poor man worries about money while the rich man worries about his health: the worry is the same, but the difference is in its substance or dimensions.
I realize that fruit flies must think of themselves as people, because, like ourselves, they find themselves in the middle of their own world -- with immeasurably greater things above and smaller things below. To us, they all look alike and seem to have no personality -- as do the Chinese when we have not lived among them. Yet fruit flies must see just as many subtle distinctions among themselves as we among ourselves.

From this it is but a short step to the realization that all forms of life and being are simply variations on a single theme: we are all in fact one being doing the same thing in as many different ways as possible. As the French proverb goes, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, -- "the more it varies, the more it is one."
I see, further, that feeling threatened by the inevitability of death is really the same experience as feeling alive, and that as all beings are feeling this everywhere, they are all just as much "I" as myself. Yet the "I" feeling, to be felt at all, must always be a sensation relative to the "other" -- to something beyond its control and experience. To be at all, it must begin and end. But the intellectual jump which mystical and psychedelic experiences make here is in enabling you to see that all these myriad I-centers are yourself -- not, indeed, your personal and superficial conscious ego, but what Hindus call the paramatman, the Self of all selves. As the retina enables us to see countless pulses of energy as a single light, so the mystical experience shows us innumerable individuals as a single Self.

4. The fourth characteristic is awareness of eternal energy, often in the form of intense white light, which seems to be both the current in your nerves and that mysterious E which equals mc² . This may sound like megalomania or delusion of grandeur -- but one sees quite clearly that all existence is a single energy, and that this energy is one's own being. Of course there is death as well as life, because energy is a pulsation, and just as waves must have both crests and troughs, the experience of existing must go on and off. Basically, therefore, there is simply nothing to worry about, because you yourself are the eternal energy of the universe playing hide-and-seek (off-and-on) with itself. At root, you are the Godhead, for God is all that there is.
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A classical case of this experience, from the West, is in the British poet Alfred Tennyson's Memoirs:

"A kind of waking trance I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has generally come upon me thro' repeating my own name two or three times to myself silently, till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction but the only true life."

 

 

Edited October 26, 2018 by WaveInTheOcean

[outlandish]

Thanks for typing that all up and sharing it. Alan Watts was a wise one indeed.

[PsiloPutty]

He wrote exactly like he talked. A fascinating human being. One of my favorite modern philosophers.