Psychedelics aren’t required for self-investigation. But what they reveal makes it impossible to ignore.
We don’t need lightning to start fire. Friction, flint, or the sun will do. But it’s hard to imagine our ancestors arriving at fire on purpose, by careful experiment, before they’d ever seen it happen. Lightning made that unnecessary. It struck a tree and the proof was instant. An unmistakable demonstration that this thing – combustion, heat, light from matter – is real and available in the world, whether or not we understand it.
Psychedelics are similar.
For many people, a psychedelic experience is the strike – a dramatic event that makes something obvious which was, a moment before, invisible: the reality we take for granted is constructed and malleable, by a mind we don’t normally see beyond.
But fleeting glimpses are not the discipline.
Just as lightning doesn’t teach us how to work with fire, a psychedelic experience doesn’t teach us how to explore awareness in everyday life.
Self-investigation is the tending. The slow, ongoing, un-dramatic work of learning to see the constructed nature of our own mind without needing a lightning bolt. It doesn’t require the strike. Some people arrive at the same recognition through meditation, through suffering, through philosophy, through nothing more exotic than sustained attention turned toward itself. Regardless of what instigated it, for those who have explored themselves, self-investigation becomes a way of life.
Using psychedelics, while interesting, is not the emphasis here.
Rather, it’s what the research shows us.
“When we become aware of the fact that we are constructing our experience, then the relationship with [that experience] can start to change.”
Shamil Chandaria
What Psychedelic Research Shows
The following is a 14-minute cut from a new documentary.
Major Highlights
(0:00) How perception works
- Reality is a brain construction or controlled hallucination
- A blend of “top-down” predictions and “bottom-up” sensory data
(4:40) Psychedelics de-weight or turn-down the “top-down” side
- Psychedelics decrease the weight of “priors” (past memories, assumptions, beliefs, feelings, preconceptions)
- Example: a depressed person might normally feel “I’m useless and everything always goes wrong”
- On psychedelics, the world might “feel like an amazing place” again
(6:26) Psychedelics affect a range of illness: depression, anxiety, addiction, OCD
- Adversity in life causes us to cling more tightly to what we know
- Trauma increases weighting of “priors” to establish a feeling of control
- Psychedelics decrease weighting of priors (plasticity)
- Plasticity is vulnerable – hence why context (set & setting) is so important
- Like a snow globe covering ruts in the snow, allowing new mental paths to be established
(8:15) Happiness
- Pathology stems from “sub-optimal” top-down priors
- Happiness is about routinely confronting the unknown voluntarily – locating and challenging those priors
(9:11) The limits of psychedelics
- Psychedelics create plasticity – but only temporarily
- In the long run, we might ask: “Who or what is having this experience?”
- The key is exploring awareness in everyday life
- Disrupting ceaseless identification with thought
- Meditation helps discover this – to recognize thoughts/sensations as mere appearances
- We can become aware of how our reality is constructed – and seeing beyond it
The full documentary is here.
Demystifying Jargon
I’ve been exploring psychedelic research for 7 years, and the predictive processing hypothesis for 4 years. The concepts in this documentary were already familiar.
In short: Our brains constantly predict what we’ll experience. Psychedelics loosen those predictions so we see things fresh. Meditation and self-investigation help us do the same thing more sustainably.
For those who are newer to this – how well does the video explain this stuff?
Specifically:
- How perception works – top-down vs bottom-up
- How psychedelics de-weight the “top-down” side
- How psychedelics create immediate fleeting plasticity, whereas meditation and self-investigation support long-term flexibility and change
Whether it makes sense, or you feel confused and want clarification, please comment on our discussion forum or reach out directly.
Self-Investigation Guide
Learn more about the slow, ongoing, un-dramatic work of learning to see the constructed nature of our own mind.