Displaced dream fairy on validity, reliability, and expression of subjective experience.
Psychedelic Film Practice PhD diary. Pure subjectivity as means of connection. Reclaiming the imposter syndrome. Stop ignoring The High Priestess.
Thank you for being here!
Dismantled brain-machine
I must say that I have been so in love with the idea that Upper- Palaeolithic cave art can be connected to altered states of consciousness, that I completely ignored the limitations of the entoptic phenomena definition proposed by Lewis-Williams and Dowson in their 1988 article in Current Anthropology, a piece that had a significant impact on my research into flicker film and visions induced by stroboscopic light.
As usual, I looked to science for an “explanation”, or rather “validation”. It is strange how the deeply rooted belief in higher value of the so-called rational mind over what one subjectively knows to be true surfaces in every step of the way. A need for balance is reestablished with each realisation.
Someone at the university told us a story of a conference full of highly qualified academics where the speaker started by asking who in the room currently has the imposter syndrome. Apart from one very old professor, everyone did. I believed it straight away, and imagined that I will have to get used to the idea that no matter how “far” I go in life with the things I do, I will always feel out of place. Like I somehow don’t deserve to be there. Then I remembered that I already am in the process of agreeing to be forever at peace with the fact that I feel like a misplaced dream fairy in any social circumstances, but this is for a different reason. I should have asked what field was the conference for, and remarked that it’s a shame that neurodivergence is not yet monitored on all anonymised equality and diversity monitoring forms.
Reading Dr David Luke’s work Rock Art or Rorschach: Is there More to Entoptics than Meets the Eye?, published twenty two years after the Lewis-Williams’ text, I felt suddenly empowered to question things, in accordance with my own subjective experience and intuition. While Luke agrees with the idea that our ancestors sought altered states of consciousness, and that the cave paintings could easily be connected to those experiences, he criticises the validity of the claim that solely the brain itself is responsible for the shapes and forms in entoptic vision. I felt once again inspired by someone promoting the appreciation of first-person experience, similarly to what Varela (1999) and Thompson (2015) did in their neurophenomenological approach. Luke argues that Lewis-Williams and Dowson’s approach clearly lacks the direct knowledge, and runs the risk of imposing their “rational materialist philosophical assumptions on the data without actually experiencing such states”. Theory does not work without practice.
This week I watched some important online talks in the Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy Global Summit. Bessell van der Kolk MD, the author of a best-selling book on trauma The Body Keeps The Score, has been interviewed on the topic of his research on MDMA-supported therapy in treatment of PTSD and life-long trauma. Apart from expressing his own initial mistrust and surprising discoveries in the field, he sounded very passionate about the issue of prioritising the neuroscientific correlates of the effects of substances in order to understand their potential benefits. “We just don’t know”, he said, referring to the present early stages of progress in the field, and highlighted that the research has to focus on understanding of psychological processes involved in healing, rather than just chemical reactions. “After all”, wrote Merlin Sheldrake in Entangled Life, “it is people who have experiences, not brains”.
Psilocybin finds its way to act within the brain by being converted into chemical psilocin which stimulates the receptors normally used by the neurotransmitter serotonin. Through its action on the nervous system, it reduces activity in what is termed the default mode network (DMN), which is mostly active during the brain wandering idly, thinking about the past and the future, while activity in other brain areas, and connectivity between different networks increases. This is all very good to know, and although I am far from understanding depths of neuroscience, I get very excited by this sort of knowledge. I find the biological and chemical processes of the brain fascinating, but these words only have value because of the experiential effects: the phenomenological event and behavioural changes which seem to present not only the potential for a single unforgettable experience, but for a long-lasting change of perspective, increase in understanding, and healing (see Luke, Sheldrake, Pollan, McKenna, Watts, Stamets, etc.).
Can you picture the meaning of “omnidimensional“?
Luke points out that the first-person accounts of altered states such as under psychedelics or in near-death experiences, describe extraordinarily complex visual occurrences that extend beyond the physical reality of vision. The much-ignored subjective accounts, he notes, including his own and Terence McKenna’s, as well as immense online repositories of “trip reports” from outside of clinical settings, repeatedly mention multidimensional or omnidimensional vision, and hyperreal colours, representation of which is hardly accurate in 2D simplified patterns that can be painted on a rock or a piece of paper. Much less should these representations be taken to accurately reflect the “structure of one’s own brain”, as was suggested by Lewis-Williams. “Confusing the map with the territory” seems to be common in the research on altered states, similarly to the confusion of language of which Alan Watts wrote, where the word is forgotten to be a symbol and is taken to “be” the thing that it symbolises. Don’t we tend to forget that art is beyond all a form of expression, and representation is just that: representation.
In the final blow in intellectual dismantling of the notion of the extraordinary visuals being produced directly by the brain, Luke refers to the, admittedly scarce, but reliably promising, research into near-death experiences in blind people: “[H]ow is it then that a person who has never experienced sight, let alone a sense of visual space, can have a veridical visual experience during an ASC in the absence of a normally functioning visual system (both retinal and cortical)?”. The point that he, Sheldrake, and van der Kolk all make is that the brain is not a machine, and understanding of the processes within cannot be based on classifications of pure mechanisms. Or rather, that these insights, while of value, are not the first step to understanding why would humans, since the beginning of their history, actively engage in a pursuit of variety of altered states of consciousness, and how the experiences of these states produce effects beneficial to mental wellbeing. The difficulty is not only in the scientific method’s widely established ignorance of subjective accounts, but, of course, in the fact that “sense that the experience cannot be described adequately in words” is one of the essential items in the Pahnke-Richards Mystical Experience Questionnaire. This is where I understand art to come in. The language of, for me, moving image, sound, photography and poetic writing, extends the boundaries of communication beyond the limits of what verbal logic can describe.
However fascinating I find the scientific hunt for solutions to the hard problem and for the neural correlates to consciousness and selfhood, it is rather freeing to read an academic text advocating the idea that perhaps we shouldn’t consider that everything is generated within the brain, and following Huxley’s phrase of “a reducing valve”, offers support to the metaphor of the brain as a TV or a radio, able to tune in to different frequencies. Dr. Luke encourages to consider “the brain as a receiver of consciousness, rather than the inadequate materialist notion of it as a generator of consciousness”.
Cross-disciplinary search for communion
None of this is very new research, but has a breakthrough vibe for me. In my half nervous digging, sniffing and sorting, half peace-bringing swimming in the cataloguing of literature review for my Psychedelic Film Practice project, I keep tripping over lines of thought that confirm what The High Priestess card indicated while sitting on my bookshelf for the past month - get on with trusting your intuition. While fighting the imposter syndrome in every life situation that involves interaction with anything different than plants, notebooks, books, and pens, I am learning to admit that my fascinations are not only valid to be expressed, but are valid academic interests. It is the connection and immediate understanding I felt while reading Huxley’s descriptions of direct perception of a bouquet of flowers, and seeing a chair as it is, that kept me motivated to look into ways of expressing the subjective experience. The need to express the first-person perspective is inherent in all human creativity and communication. It is not the understanding of objective mechanisms that allows us to feel that we belong, to feel a part of a collective. It is the seeing, reading, and hearing about purely subjective events. This is what makes us feel less alone. Thinking about convergence of science and art, of balance between the scientifically objectively verifiable, and the subjective truth of experience, I can’t help but notice that we seem to be eternally, cross-disciplinarily, searching for ways of communion. Of communication, and collective understanding.
As van der Kolk points out, interactions with other people shape who we are. Whether as an effect of neurodivergent experience in a mostly neurotypical world or any other trauma and displacement, the need for a sense of connection can’t always be easily met by social interaction. I think various altered states allow for an opportunity for genuine expression, integration and reconsolidation of experiences - and it seems evident that altered awareness has always been available to human beings, and utilised as means for transpersonal experience - one that extends beyond the individual self and allows to feel a part of a larger whole. I understand psychedelic (mind-manifesting) as a way of accessing and expressing the subjective, in order to connect to the collective.
I had a dream last night in which I saw this definition of mind-manifestation in a book or a paper by someone I really admire, and it made me feel incredibly excited and connected. Another article I read this week (in waking life), was Cormac McCarthy’s “The Kekulé Problem”, in which he discusses the origins of language, while searching for an answer as to why our unconscious communicates largely without it, for example by showing Kekulé an image of the ouroboros as a solution to discovering the ring-like structure of benzene molecule. However interested I was in the main themes of the text, I most related to McCarthy’s repeated remark when he talked about having shared a certain viewpoint with his colleague. “[T]he same idea had occurred to him. Which pleased me a good deal because David is very smart.”
And so every day I’m unlearning the habitual neglect of the subjective. I think there is an enormous connecting energy stored in the ability to appreciate the uniqueness and importance of subjectivity - not only of one’s own, but of others’, and of the more-than-human world. But what do I know, at the end of the day. Hopefully it won’t be every day that I need three academically accomplished writers to remind me that my own experiences are in fact an important matter.
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Huxley, A. (2004) The Doors of Perception, Heaven and Hell. London: Vintage books.
Kolk van der, B.A. (2015) The body keeps the score: mind, brain and body in the transformation of trauma. London: Penguin Books.
Lewis-Williams, J.D. and Dowson, T.A. (1988) ‘The Signs of All Times: Entoptic Phenomena in Upper Palaeolithic Art’, Current Anthropology, 29(No. 2).
Luke, D. (2010) ‘Rock Art or Rorschach: Is there More to Entoptics than Meets the Eye?’, Time and Mind, 3(1), pp. 9–28. Available at: https://doi.org/10.2752/175169710X12549020810371.
McCarthy, C. (2017) ‘The Kekulé Problem: Where did language come from?’, Nautilus [Preprint], (April 17). Available at: https://nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-236574/.
Pollan, M. (2018) How to change your mind: what the new science of psychedelics teaches us about consciousness, dying, addiction, depression, and transcendence. New York: Penguin Press.
Sheldrake, M. (2021) Entangled life: how fungi make our worlds, change our minds, and shape our futures. London: Vintage.
Watts, A. (1973) This is it, and other essays on Zen and spiritual experience. New York: Vintage Books.