Why Trip?
A human being is a part of a whole, called by us “universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest… a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
-Albert Einstein
Ask most people if they’ve ever tripped, and they’ll say no. Shrooms, acid, mescaline – no, I’d never do that. I’d never trip. But tripping – hallucinating – is unavoidable. And not only is it unavoidable, it’s a daily occurrence; hallucinations are simply immaterial thoughts strong enough to seem material. Closed-eye-visuals (CEV’s), daydreams, and dreams are all forms of hallucination, and in a sense one could even go so far as to say that all thought manifesting itself in a sensory (audiological, visual, olfactory, etc.) manner is a mild hallucination. An example is thinking of a song – you can “hear” the melody in your head, even though it’s not physically playing. That’s hallucination – perceiving things that are not “there.”
And yet people are afraid to trip. Why? Though we hallucinate daily, our waking hallucinations stay “in the back of our head” – our outer sensory perception, though often dimmed, remains largely unaltered. And dreams, hallucinations which completely alter and replace our senses, are not a part of our “daily life.” It’s not something we experience in waking. When we wake we see things as they are, and when we sleep we experience hallucinations, but they’re cut off from the rest of the world – there’s the period of unconsciousness before and after they occur. And so we separate them from our reality, and live with a dualistic mindset, with the idea that hallucinations are somehow separate from “real life.”
When you trip, the barrier dissolves. Hallucinations are no longer confined to sleep, they become a part of your waking perception. It’s often observed that hallucinogenic experiences – strong cannabis highs, psilocybin or LSD trips, etc, seem to resemble dreams – the difference being that you’re not dreaming. The waking world is transforming before your eyes. And when the trip ends, you’re not “coming back to reality,” you’re in the exact same reality you were in while you were tripping – it just looks more like it did before. When the mind sees that the only true sense of “reality,” that is, one’s sensory perception of the world, is subject to change based on conditions within the mind, reality ceases to be the certain, dependable reality that we knew – in fact, by all standard definitions, reality ceases to be “real.” The realization that “reality” is actually dependent upon our minds is an idea so hard to truly grasp that the mind tends to ignore or repress it following the experience, because to live with this truth in mind would hinder people’s “real-world” performance.
So we don’t trip – we leave the walls up. Whether out of fear or self-preservation, we tend not to admit and recognize that the world and self are one, that all material is immaterial, and that all sensation is merely perception.
Descartes touched upon this reality in his signature idea, that “I think, therefore I am” is the only inarguable truth. This mindset is a prelude to solipsism. “I think, therefore it is” is a much more encompassing mindset. Where Descartes erred was in assuming that the “I” was any different from the “it.” I, we, you, he, she and it are all part of the same fabric of reality – and are all as immaterial.
I think we should trip.
Mozez – Feel Free || 2005/So Still
Truly all perception is a construct and is filtered and we experience the world only through the distorting lens of our senses. Nobody see’s the real world in it’s raw form. This is analogous to trying to read a book reflected in a foggy funhouse mirror. You will be subject to inaccuracies. There is a whole branch of psychology dedicated to this called phenomenology which posits that the world does not exist independent of perception, and so that’s all that matters.
I bumped into this post by searching on Sartre’s experiments with Mescaline.
Good wording for a subject that is hard to breach with hard-headed materialists.
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Well said. Too bad default cultural programming works so well. Farming people, independent thought would mess that up big time.