I wanted to write something on psychedelics for a long time. Anyone who has done psychedelics though, knows how hard it is to write about psychedelic experiences, how hard it is to give words to a world which loses its linguistic coherency. Perhaps, for me, the coolest aspect of taking psychedelics is the loss of language, its breakdown. With a good dose of your choice of psychedelics, there comes a time when grammar and usual syntax disintegrates, and one is left with flashes of a single word or two. Since I am a really "wordy" guy, one who likes to describe events and instances in words, the loss of language is often liberating. By this, I don't mean I am released from the chains of language. I love language. I mean something more along the lines of, "I am liberated from sentences." The arrival of those flashing words is very poetic, like the arrival of the single, perfect word to complete a line of poetry.

If you are reading this, you're more likely a person who believes psychedelic experiences reveal something significant about being. You probably don't think psychedelic experiences are merely an intoxicated, jumbled up form of perception. I mean no doubt they are that, too, but also, more than merely that.

One way of thinking about psychedelic experiences is to see them as a "breakdown" of perception. Here, I don't mean anything negative by breakdown. I simply point towards how under the influence of psychedelics our mundane perception is altered: things lose their stability and begin to sway, their details are in movement and emphasized as we keep gazing at them, and ordinary use of language, after a while, becomes an impossibility. But breakdown is also a more appropriate word than "altered" since we witness the dissolving of ourselves and the things around us. They expand and shrink with our gaze, rooms widen and shut on us, space and time do queer movements.

What does this show us? What is the insight of this? For most psychedelic-lovers, what I will go onto describe are well-known, lived insights, but insights which are very difficult to express. Usually after a psychedelic journey with friends, we don't try to express these insights in words since we all believe in the similarity of our trips. Rather, we describe what we have seen, felt, enjoyed, or what put us in a bad "headspace." The insights stay silent.

One way to approach this difficult topic is to first think of our mundane, everyday relation to the world and things in it. Since psychedelic trips are nothing but mundane, the contrast might allow us to bring something into the light.

When we are going on with our lives, doing tasks, talking to others, buying groceries, we assume that things are as they are on their own. Yes, we might have perceptual illusions, but that's just a "misfiring" of our perception. We believe that this apple is there, red and glossy, on its own accord. We believe that perception is seeing the world as it is. Things are already well-defined objects with which we interact. This is what I call "naive realism." This is not a bad thing. Rather, it is our "natural" attitude towards the world. If this was not our ordinary attitude, believe me, we wouldn't be able to do anything. I mean, think about yourself on LSD, can you really peel an apple, slice it, and eat it at the height of a trip? Our natural attitude, our naive belief in realism, allows us to share a stable world with others, where we don't doubt, question, and feel mesmerized by everything. We know the apple will be there in the same shape, with same details for others as it is for us. Perception, for the most part, has an inherent faith in itself and in what it perceives.

What we realize in psychedelic trips is that naive realism only goes so far. Things are not simply there on their own accord and doing. Perception is not a mere reflection of what is out there as it is. Perception is the primordial coupling of us and the world. We play a part in perceiving, in how things appear. The meaning of things and situations is shaped by our attitudes, bodies, and histories. If we think of naive realism as to see the world made up of well-defined, clear objects, then psychedelic trips allow us to see beyond this naiveté. It shows us the malleability of ourselves, the world, and the things in it. I think this is often the unspoken insight of psychedelic experiences. As one of my friends would put, "I take psychedelics every six months to 'reset.'"

What is reset is a narrative of life which has become a little too rigid. The experience opens it up by immersing one in the plasticity of being. To see the world in malleable motions, to witness the dissolution of one's everyday self, and the re-gathering of this self as the effects fade out, fills one with renewed joy, vigour, and possibilities. It clears us from well-defined notions about ourselves. As we dive into the plasticity of the world, we understand how the narrative of our existence is also plastic and reshapable. The "drug" can't give you an answer but it can help you clear an opening for the answers to be seen. This might be why psychedelics are helpful for people who are dealing with alcoholism. It allows an alcoholic to see their addiction not as a god-given, unchangeable habit, but a pliable aspect of their existence.

Yet, overdoing a psychedelic drug, taking it too often, can be troublesome due to the same effect. A world that has become too plastic is one difficult to move through. The world and us need stability as well. When so much is in motion, we feel overwhelmed. Things we touch suck us in, situations slip out of our hands like sand, and we feel cornered with nowhere to rest and be still. This is the cliche spectrum of medicine-poison. The plasticity can be threatening.

Of course, what I have said so far raises a worry, at least for me. It makes the world too much "in our heads." It winks at a sort of idealism or subjectivism, that we are the masters of our world, that we can change anything if we simply believe in it, or see it from a different perspective. This is not what I am getting at. The world is out there, but out there is only out there from a particular perspective. Psychedelic experiences help us understand how this perspective, one we often forget in natural attitude, in naive realism, plays a big role in the appearance of the world. The world and the perspective which opens to it are not two separate sides which later merge. They grow out of one another. As our bodies develop their motor functions in infancy, as we touch things, move them around, and put them into use, we see things with more clarity and definition. Things become things for us, as our perception grows and develops through our engagement with them. We understand how to engage with things as a result of habituation. And just like a little child becomes habituated in using a tool or performing an act, historically, societies do the same. The habituation covers up how this is a historical and contingent process, that things need not be the way they are presently. Psychedelic experiences present us with the malleability and contingency of this historical and social context, and how we can participate in shifting this context. Even though we are not masters of this context, we learn how we participate in upholding it, and hence how we can also change it.

When the effects wear off, naive realism returns. After a day or two, we return to engaging with things as if they are there merely on their own. The context settles once again as we go to work, attend classes, or visit our parents. The contingency is not so readily present anymore. But, a good trip, besides the laughter and the fun, is to also incorporate these silent insights into our lives. To understand our part in being as agents, revealers, artists, and participants. To understand how we are fundamentally responsible for the gathering of the world. To appreciate the contingency of our historical context and place.

D - 28/6/2022