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July 14 - July 22, 2023
It’s literally a reboot of the system—a biological control-alt-delete.
Psychedelics open a window of mental flexibility in which people can let go of the mental models we use to organize reality.”
“Alcoholism can be understood as a spiritual disorder,” Ross told me the first time we met, in the treatment room at NYU. “Over time you lose your connection to everything but this compound. Life loses all meaning. At the end, nothing is more important than that bottle, not even your wife and your kids. Eventually, there is nothing you won’t sacrifice for it.”
the posterior cingulate cortex.
The posterior cingulate cortex is a centrally located node within the default mode network involved in self-referential mental processes. Situated in the middle of the brain, it links the prefrontal cortex—site of our executive function, where we plan and exercise will—with the centers of memory and emotion in the hippocampus. The PCC is believed to be the locus of the experiential or narrative self; it appears to generate the narratives that link what happens to us to our abiding sense of who we are.
relating thoughts and experiences to our sense of who we are.
The one that came to mind first was an image of a pastoral landscape, a gently rolling quilt of field and forest and pond, directly above which hovered some kind of gigantic rectangular frame made of steel. The structure, which was a few stories tall but hollow, resembled a pylon for electrical transmission lines or something a kid might build from an Erector set—a
Anyway, by the odd logic of psychedelic experience, it was clear to me even in the moment that this structure represented my ego, and the landscape above which it loomed was, I presumed, the rest of me.
The scene had given me a kind of overview effect: behold your ego, sturdy, gray, empty, and floating free, like an untethered pylon.
Or maybe it was the specific content of the image, and the mere thought of bidding adieu to my ego, watching it float away like a hot-air balloon, that had the power to silence my default mode network.
“A spiritual experience does not by itself make a spiritual life.” Integration is essential to making sense of the experience, whether in or out of the medical context. Or else it remains just a drug experience.
Consider the case of Paul Summergrad, who has spoken publicly of his own youthful use of psychedelics. In a videotaped interview with Ram Dass that was shown at the 2015 meeting of the American Psychiatric Association,
Institutions
generally like to mediate the individual’s access to authority of whatever kind—whether medical or spiritual—whereas the psychedelic experience offers something akin to direct revelation, making it inherently antinomian.
Yet even a moment’s reflection tells you that attributing the content of the psychedelic experience to “drugs” explains virtually nothing about it. The images and the narratives and the insights don’t come from nowhere, and they certainly don’t
come from a chemical. They come from inside our minds,
(Part of the power of the ego flows from its command of one’s rational faculties.)
