← Philosophy For Our Times
Philosophy For Our Times
Consciousness and psychedelics: In conversation with Rupert Sheldrake
00:31:33
Loading summary
Transcript29 lines
- [00:00]
A
Vrbo's last minute deals make chasing fresh mountain powder incredibly easy. With thousands of homes close to the slopes, you can get epic pow freshies, first tracks and more. Find last minute deals with the Last minute filter on the app. Book a private vacation rental now@vrbo.com.
- [00:18]
B
There are many types of mystical experiences, many times psychedelic experience. There is an overlap though at one point, and it seems that many people who have had such experiences. For them this is a life changing moment.
- [00:29]
C
There's a collective memory, there's a memory in nature, there's a resonance from similar systems in the past to the present.
- [00:36]
A
Hello and welcome to Philosophy for Our Times, bringing you the world's leading thinkers on today's biggest ideas. It's just Ali here today to present consciousness and psychedelics in conversation with Rupert Sheldrake. Rupert is a renowned biologist whose research into morphic resonance and nature's memory has won him both a lot of praise and enemies. He's being interviewed by Peter Sjostedt Hughes, a lecturer in philosophy who has also studied the link between philosophy and psychedelics. Their conversation explores what the nature of consciousness is from a philosophical perspective, and not only a western one, incorporating the wisdom that psychedelics can give us. So, without further ado, I will pass it over to Peter.
- [01:36]
B
Well, thank you everyone. It's a pleasure to be here and an honor to be with Rupert, whom I've read for over 20 years. It's very strange to be on stage with him now. I'm a research fellow and associate lecturer at Exeter University where I'm doing research on philosophy and psychedelics and Rupert of course has a background in philosophy and researching psychedelics. And of course Rupert is a. Well, and needs no introductions, well known biologist on the controversial side, let's say. So Rupert and I have been in correspondence for a week or so in to prepare for this event and we exchanged a few texts and one of the texts I received from Rupert is his recent article is the sun conscious? And I'm very interested in this because I did my PhD on panpsychism, the view that minds are ubiquitous throughout nature. And so I was going to start by asking you if you might explain that article a little bit, why it seems preposterous to some people to think that the sun might be conscious and how that sort of philosophy might relate to psychedelic experience.
- [02:51]
C
Well, in traditional cultures it's taken for granted that the sun is conscious. It's a God or a goddess in Japan it's a goddess in Germanic, in Latin cultures it's a God. In India, it's, it's Surya. So it's taken for granted that the sun, the stars and the heavenly bodies are conscious beings. That's why we call the planets by the names of gods and goddesses. And in the Middle ages, philosophers like St. Thomas Aquinas thought of the planets and the stars as conscious beings with angelic intelligences. And Plato called the planets the visible gods. So the idea that the heavens are animate, that they're alive and conscious, is a very old idea and I would say pretty well universal. What makes our own culture so eccentric is that in the 17th century, at the beginning of the scientific revolution, the whole of the heavens and the earth were declared unconscious, inanimate, devoid of life. Everything was mechanical and machine like. And so in that context, asking if the sun's conscious seems absurd for a materialist. It's just a stupid question. It's something that, you know, primitive people might think, ignorant people might think, children might think because they draw the sun with a smiley face. So they may think it's conscious, but grown up, mature, sensible, educated people ought not even to consider that question, dismiss it with the contempt it deserves. And that's the way it's been treated for several centuries. Well, I think in my own case, I'm predisposed towards panpsychism. In 1990, I wrote a book called the Rebirth of Nature, about the reanimation of the world. I lived for seven years in India, where the Gayatri Mantra is one of the most fundamental prayers in Hinduism, asking for the blessings of the sun to illuminate our meditation. So what I was doing in this article in the Journal of Consciousness Studies is trying to put this idea of the sun being conscious in the context of Western science and philosophy. And the move towards panpsychism in philosophy has been a big help. Galen Strawson helped to open the floodgates. And you're part of this movement too, as a panpsychist philosopher. And what panpsychism does is liberates our imagination because it says that consciousness doesn't have to be located only in brains. Whereas the normal view, the neuroscience view, is that consciousness is generated by brains and therefore it's only in beings with brains like us. The bigger the brain, the more the consciousness. Whereas panpsychism, which considers whether even electrons and atoms could be conscious, opens the possibility of saying, well, is the sun conscious? Are the stars conscious? I think they probably are. And they meet many of the criteria for consciousness that one could think of. They have agency, they seem to be self organizing. They have complex electromagnetic patterns which could be the interface between the their mind and their thoughts. So anyway, what I want to do is explore this possibility in the context of panpsychism. And not only have you read my paper on the conscious sun, but I've read your paper on the philosopher Spinoza, his pantheistic views and slightly, curiously and uniquely in relation to psychedelic experience with 5 methoxy dimethyltryptamine. So perhaps I could ask you to say a little bit about that.
- [06:57]
B
Yes, well, I don't know who's the, who's the weirder here? So when you put it that way. So I, yeah, so I've done my PhD on panpsychism then with Galen Strawson who was just speaking as the examiner and. But I always did it below the human level. Human level and below going up to the stars is known as Cosmopsychism is a sort of polite term for pantheism, really. It's analytic philosophy at least. Okay, first of all, what is 5ameo DMT? 5ameo DMT is one of the most potent psychedelics known to mankind. It I, for research reasons I had to take some and, and the reason, the reason was that Spinozism is. Let me explain Spinozism. Before 5 Meadmt Spinozism then was the original pantheism. Pantheism was coined by Joseph Raphson, British mathematician, after Spinoza's theory. Pantheism means that all is God, nature is God. And so Spinoza's thought in a nutshell is contra Descartes, who split the world into mind and matter, extension and thought. Spinoza said that extension and thought, matter and mind respectively were actually attributes of one substance, which he calls God or nature. In other words, what he does is he argues that as God is the perfect being, God also has extension. God also has space. So God is all of mind, but also all of space. And he argues that in a very rational, he calls it a geometric method. And this substance, this nature, this God has what he calls an infinite intellect. In other words, some kind of overmind, huge cosmic mind. His views were suppressed, he was excommunicated by the Jewish community. His books were banned by the Christian community for many reasons. People said he was an atheist. If you're saying that God is nature, then you're basically saying that God doesn't exist. And he said in his book, you know, God does not love you. So it wasn't the most Christian charitable God. But anyway, it interested me. There's a parsimony to the Philosophy. Now, in relation to psychedelics in the mystical literature, there's a lot, as you know, on so called uniomystica or unitive events where you believe at the least that you are becoming part of the cosmos. This very much sounds like prima facie, at least Spinoza's infinite intellect. So I thought, but what is this experience? Doing the research, I realized then that 5 Meo DMT was supposed to be the most unitive of all psychedelics. So I thought perhaps it would give me an experiential insight into this theoretic framework that Spinoza had. And in my essay I argue how you can compare the two phenomenologically with 5 emo DMT and metaphysically with Spinozism. And that's my general interest, how theories of consciousness that go beyond the brain, how that has repercussions on psychedelic experience. Because normally we think of psychedelic experience as hallucinatory. They're called hallucinogens. I mean they can be called hallucinogens. But of course if we expand our theory of the mind and reality, then perhaps there's some veridicality, some truth to the experience we have. Or what say you?
- [10:54]
C
Well, I'm not quite sure where to begin. The psychedelics or Spinoza. Let's start with Spinoza. I was very interested in your article because I always find Spinoza's philosophy confusing and I find that this calling it God or nature sort of rather squelches the argument right from the beginning because you haven't got the option of looking at whether God and nature are distinguishable because he defines them as the same. But then his view of God having this there's a timeless or eternal quality as well as the natural world. So actually he's saying God isn't just nature, which is all about change and process, there's another aspect to it. And he's also saying that within nature there's a principle of striving, or every living thing has conatus. This striving, which is goal directed behavior, at the very minimum about preserving itself. Well, you see, my own general overview is that the ultimate reality is not a monism, it's a trinitarian. I mean, I'm against Cartesian dualism, not because I think two is too many, but I think it's too few. I think we need three, not two, as general principles. And there is a lot more in common between theological systems in different religions than there is that divides them. This wonderful book, you may know it, by David Bentley Hart, called the Experience of God Being Consciousness Bliss where he shows that in the Hindu system you have sat, chit and nanda as a description of ultimate consciousness. Sat is the ground of all consciousness and being. Chit is the contents of consciousness, that which is known. What Indians call nama rupa, names and forms. And ananda is bliss or joy, because ultimate consciousness is blissful or joyful. But it's also to do with change and movement which they call shakti. The energetic principle in nature is feminine and called shakti. Well, the Christian Holy Trinity seems to me very similar. The God the Father is the ground of conscious being. I am. That I am is God's first announcement of his nature conscious being in the present. The Logos, the second person of the Trinity is names and forms. It's that which is known. God the Father is the knower. The Logos is that which is known. And that seemed to me like nature in Spinoza's system. Whereas the God beyond the transcendent part was like. And then the Holy Spirit is the dynamical moving principle, energy, breath, flow, wind, change. And that role is taken up by conatus. So I thought, I think when I read your article, I thought of Spinoza as being crypto trinitarian. And then I thought, well, what about this actual experience of unity of Consciousness by 5 Mythoxy DMT giving you this sense of Espinosian unity? Well, I've never said this in public before, but in a foreign land I did actually, for research purposes, explore, explore this question myself.
- [14:26]
B
I was also in a foreign land, I should point out.
- [14:33]
C
So. And Curiously enough, this imageless 5 Mythoxy DMT experience, very different from more visual psychedelics, as you rightly pointed out for me, was a trinitarian experience. It was my closest experience to being part of the Holy Trinity. It wasn't a knockdown argument in favor of Spinozism, or I thought it was perhaps possibly an argument in favor of the crypto trinitarian entity interpretation.
- [15:06]
B
Well, okay, interesting. I mean, this is the first time I've ever. The first interpretation I've heard of such kind. But that brings us onto this interesting discussion that was had in the 1960s and it's beginning to pick up again between contextualism and perennialism. And the argument very basically is there are certain thinkers, perennialists, the epitome of that's probably Aldous Huxley, perhaps William James as well, who argue that amongst all religions and or all mystics, amongst all religions and also amongst psychedelic experiences, there is one ultimate experience which transcends all culture and is the same. It's just the interpretation which differs. So I interpret it as Spinozism, you as Trinitarianism, someone else in another way, perhaps. But ultimately the experience is the same. That's compared, contrasted to contextualism, which is the argument that your culture and your life fully determine the experience. So, for example, in the west, we are prone to see Jesus and the burning bush or whatever, whereas in the Americas you're more prone to see jaguars and snakes and whatever. Right, so what's your take on this? And there are midpoints as well. Do you think psychedelic experiences are determined by one's culture, or do you think there's something beyond that that they point towards?
- [16:36]
C
Well, I think some aspects of them take us way beyond our own culture. I mean, when I first took LSD around 1971, I'd been educated in a completely mechanistic way. I was at the time. I'd been converted to atheism by my science teachers. I was in Cambridge. I was a don at Cambridge when I took it. And I was. You know, I'd been to physiology lectures, I knew about neurotransmitters in the brain and so on. And I took lsd. And this was so off the map of anything I'd been taught or told about, except for reading Aldous Huxley, that I didn't interpret it exactly in the context of the culture I knew because it was not on that map. It's more on that map now. But the. But there's. There's an aspect of. Which takes us beyond the realms of cultural names and forms and so on.
- [17:32]
B
And what do you think that experience. So that tends towards a perennialist viewpoint. What do you think? I mean, how would you distinguish between hallucinations? Because obviously some forms of psychedelic experience, more visual ones are hallucinatory and others are not. How do you think one could go about determining whether one's hallucinating or actually gaining access to some metaphysical realm beyond what's offered through materialism?
- [18:02]
C
Well, let me come back to the contextualism thing, because I actually have a take on that. It slightly depends on my own theory of morphic resonance. And so I can't spend half an hour explaining it. But very briefly, it's the idea there's a collective memory, there's a memory in nature, there's a resonance from similar systems in the past to the present. So if a lot of people in the Amazon take ayahuasca, in shamanic cultures, where it's all about jaguars and with particular mythologies, serpents, jaguars and so on, then if Westerners come along and take ayahuasca, the same kinds of changes are going to happen in their brain which may put them in resonance with those who've taken it before. And so there may be a culturally shaped collective memory of the ayahuasca experience which affects people who don't come from that culture at all. And when Claudio Naranjo, a psychotherapist, gave ayahuasca to middle class people in Chile and Santiago who'd never heard of Amazonian jaguar cults, they had visions of jaguars and things. So I don't think it's because there's molecules in the brain that respond to dimethyltryptamine and create jaguar images inside the head. I think it's because they were picking up on a kind of collective memory through morphic resonance of the culturally impregnated experience.
- [19:27]
B
Okay, so you have take on both sides. I mean, one aspect of the psychedelic experience which I find really mysterious and I, I've got, I mean, there are different arguments made for it, but I don't think any are compelling, is the, the common vision of Lilliputians, little people, elves, goblins, fairies and whatever. And we see that in the west, you know, from over before Terence McKenna and that lot in the beginning of the 20th century. We also see it interestingly in the Amerindian cosmologies, which are, which use psychedelics on a regular basis, which is part and parcel of their cosmology. Now, I'm not going to ask you for an interpretation of that, but that seems a common view which is hard to ascribe any veridicality to any truth to. Well, what do you think?
- [20:23]
C
Well, it depends whether we think there is sort of autonomous entities in a kind of psychic space or imaginal realm. Now, I got interested in this, I'm an empiricist at heart, and I got interested in this question in relation to dreams, because psychedelic experiences, a few people have had them, most people haven't. But everyone's had dreams. And in our dreams we enter a realm where all sorts of improbable things happen. Dreams are hallucinatory and they're not really happening, and we're asleep in bed. So I think of psychedelic experiences as sort of exaggerating the dream state and we enter it from the waking state, but in dreams we encounter all sorts of people. You know, I meet people in my dreams, I talk to them. And so then the question is, what happens if lots of people have a cultural image? Does that get into their dreams? So I thought, well, what about Ganesh in India. Ganesh, the elephant headed God, couldn't possibly have existed in the normal sense of the word unless there were elephant head transplants and stuff. It was very implausible. So Ganesh is a cultural image. He's on calendars, he's in statues and temples and in people's houses. We have a Ganesh in our own home in Hampstead. So he removes obstacles. He's very. Almost all Indians, or certainly Hindus, see Ganesh images all their lives. So then I asked the question, does Ganesh appear in dreams? So I went online and I found that there were actually, in India, in English, Ganesh dream discussion groups, all these Indians discussing their Ganesh dreams. Ganesh appears in dreams and he has particular qualities and he's obviously more than a personal hallucination because he's a collective phenomenon, he's part of the collective imagination. And if he appears in dreams, he's meant to be a channel of the energy of the God Shiva. Maybe in dreams he really does have that role. Maybe he's a kind of manifestation of a deeper principle that works through this image in people's dreams. Then it wouldn't just be a kind of fancy hallucination in particular person's mind.
- [22:51]
B
Some kind of Jungian archetype. Then that's manifesting through psychedelics. Let me move the discussion on from religion and metaphysics to the modern day. So we're currently going through the so called psychedelic renaissance. So called. Why do you think psychedelics are becoming popular now in many fields once more, what do you ascribe to this renaissance?
- [23:19]
C
I think because they're opening up people's minds to this much larger realm of the mind for exactly the same reasons that I find them so liberating. And I think for many people they're a kind of rite of passage out of a shrunken materialist worldview into a wider view of consciousness.
- [23:40]
B
So what do you make of current attempts to medicalize them, to turn them into medicines which can be patented and so on? Do you see this as in harmony with that metaphysical outlook or somehow in competition?
- [23:55]
C
Well, I mean, people may try to turn them into medicines that are medicalized and patented, but the actual psychedelics aren't going to go away. I mean, magic mushrooms are going to go on growing in pastures in Wales and elsewhere, and people are still going to be able to pick them and take them for free. So I don't think, I mean, that's a possible. It's happening, but it's part of the modern world. But I think that what's interesting about it is that the curative effect of psychedelics for people with chronic depression and also for various addictions, the curative effect is not just the molecule affecting molecules in brains, it's the experience itself of this greater connection and unity which is curative. It gives people a greater sense of meaning, connection and that their mind's part of something greater and that has a curative effect.
- [24:51]
B
Well, that's the interesting thing about the, the medical aspect of the psychedelic renaissance, but that something that my colleague Professor Christine Haskella writes about, that it seems that medicine at the moment is instilling madness to cure madness, as it were, and that these experiences that can be had on psychedelics do not fit into the sort of scientific materialist framework at all. But nonetheless they can be utilized against depression, PTSD and so on and so forth. Of course they're currently looking at ways in which to use these chemicals without inducing the experience for the same effects. But it's, you know, I think as you say that you know, the, it is the phenomenology itself that is curative.
- [25:39]
C
Well, if they do the research, they'd actually find out, won't they? And I suspect like you, I predict that they'd find that without the experience it would have very little effect.
- [25:48]
B
I should think so, because I think for most, most, I mean, you know, through the ages there have been mystics who have had these somewhat similar experiences. Now there's a debate whether, you know, mystics. The experience of mystics in Christianity for example, is akin to certain experiences on psychedelics. I think my own view is that there are many types of mystical experiences, many times psychedelic experience. There is an overlap though at one point and it seems that many people who have had such experiences for, for them this is a life changing moment. So it would be very interesting if chemical alone without the visualization or without the experience could induce such an effect. Another interesting thing I think from the perspective of the philosophy mind is if the experience itself had an effect upon your health and mental well being and so on, that's an example of mental causation. Of course you know that the experience has the effect. Now, although most people, I would imagine, believe in mental causation, in other words, you know, if I have a desire, it will move me to the pub or something like this for a beer. Of course it cannot be explained. Mental causation is very problematic for our general understandings of the mind and its relationship to the brain.
- [27:03]
C
Well, from a materialist point of view it's very problematic. But I think that actually within medicine, the placebo effect is also an example of. You don't need to go as far as psychedelics. I mean, the placebo effect is mental causation. People's beliefs and expectations affect how a drug or a cure works. And often a blank pill will do as well as an actual antidepressant or something. That's surely very strong evidence for mental causation that's actually arisen within the context of mechanistic medical research.
- [27:38]
B
Yes. Right. I've got some questions here. Further questions. What new cultural possibilities do you think are on the horizon with this intake of psychedelics? I mean, how do you see the, you know, the 20 years to 20 years in the future? How do you think the current psychedelic renaissance might affect it?
- [28:01]
C
Well, it could be chaotic, of course, but I think it could be this therapeutic model that's developing. People running psychedelic retreats, like the British Psychedelic Society. You can go and do a legal mushroom trip in a weekend in a nice country place in Holland. They'll be doing this in Oregon soon. In the United States, people go to Peru for ayahuasca experiences. This is one model that's actually already with us and I think is quite a good model. It means people take them with guidance and with someone who can help them interpret and integrate that experience. I myself think the most interesting development here is psychedelic religions where the psychedelic experience is integrated with a mythic and religious framework. So it's not just an individual trip, but integrated into a sort of wider community. And I'm thinking, for example, of the Santo Daime Church in Brazil, where you have the psychedelic experience of ayahuasca as a kind of communion, as part of their religion.
- [29:08]
B
Well, it seems that the latest science shows that psychedelics are not as dangerous as was propagated in the sort of mid to late 20th century. And if people accept that, of course, then I should see that such retreats will become popular. My own view is that I think there are two reasons, two main reasons for the psychedelic renaissance. I think, first of all, it is medicalization and the money. To be cynical, it is the money in that. I mean, you know, the market for depression is in the billions, and of course, SSRIs are not patentable anymore. So with psychedelics as cures for depression, say, there is a lot of investment in it. And now there are more conferences on psychedelic investment than on psychedelic experience, it seems. However, I think there's another. Another interesting aspect which you alluded to as well, which is Schopenhauer, who was an atheist. He said there's a metaphysical need in all of us. It doesn't have to be any established religion, but there's some desire in our psyche to somehow go beyond the material conditions we perceive. And I think psychedelics allow for that at least. You know, whether or not they are veridical is irrelevant to the fact that they make people at least believe it. And that gives, I think that gives an extra dimension, extra richness to life. You know, I see it as, you know, someone said they don't need psychedelics to me because they've got a good life. I mean, I see that as saying you don't need music, you know, you've got a good life. So what, what good is music? I mean, you know, it's the same with psychedelics. They, they're enrichers and I think they open my your mind to other realities. But there's so much more. The after party for this session is going to be really interesting, so do join us for that. Right, okay. But anyway, thank you Rupert and thank you very much.
- [30:53]
C
Detail.
- [30:57]
A
Thank you for listening to Philosophy for our times. I hope you enjoyed that episode. I think it's always good to open our minds and ears to perspectives that are maybe more unexpected and with which we might not have experience. I definitely find it convincing that there is some level of consciousness that is beyond the accepted so called western understanding. Anyways, what do you think? If you have any thoughts you'd like to share, please do email us. The address is in the show notes. And tune in to more talks, articles, videos, podcasts, etc. Like this one on IAI TV. That's it for now and we'll see you next week. Bye.