The Psychedelic Memory of our Divinity
How psychonauts have secretly shaped history
According to Plato, the knowledge of universal truths such as mathematic is the act of remembering what we knew in a previous life, prior to our immortal soul’s incarnation in this one. When I first read that platonic view of anamnesis, of the identification of innate knowledge with a type of memory, I considered it a quaint hang-over from folk religion.
Years later a strange thing happened.
Entheogens and the Memory of Godhood
I vaped cannabis once and got really high, and to my surprise it felt exactly like the far-out thoughts that seemed to flow through me were memories. The sensation of my consciousness being wrenched free from its neuronal confines seemed somehow familiar, even though it hadn’t happened before, and the apparent intellectual overview of reality felt like the recovery of a timeless perspective.
Although I remembered the contents of that elevated state and wrote about them soon afterward, I noticed that something slipped away when I felt jolted back into embodied awareness and “came down from the high.” Even if you can remember what you were dreaming, you lose the euphoric apotheosis, the sense that the “trip” is of ultimate importance. You may remember some details, but when you’re sober it’s impossible to care about them as much as when you’re in the grip of the altered state.
Of course, my uncanny impression that the intoxicated perceptions were truer than my mundane sober ones and that the former were recoveries from a state of profound ignorance was hardly unique. As I explored some literature on psychedelic matters (especially Terence McKenna’s lectures), I learned that this association of memory with entheogenic states of consciousness is typical. (An entheogen is a chemical substance that catalyzes a religious experience.)
Indeed, the association is often clearer in experiences induced by the many stronger drugs such as DMT or LSD, although I haven’t personally tried any of them. In many cases, not just the elation but the contents slip away from memory very soon after the drug’s effects wear off, in which respect the experience is similar to dreaming. A dream can seem both vivid and crucial, but as soon as you wake up you often can’t remember what you were thinking and you also no longer care.
I say this is all strange, because it turns out that Plato and Socrates likely had psychedelic experiences through the Eleusinian Mysteries and kykeon, a psychoactive potion. Plato introduces his theory of innate knowledge as a way of answering the paradox that the notion of searching for knowledge makes no sense, since we either know what we’re looking for and therefore don’t need to search, or we don’t and therefore can never find it.
This paradox is sophistical, since we can know what something is without having the thing. The concept of knowledge may have developed gradually to make sense of the fact that guessing and judging from a standpoint of mastery feel different. Likewise, the concept of cats, for example, might have been acquired from our species’ first encounters with the animal prior to our having any knowledge of them.
In any case, Plato’s theory of anamnesis may have been inspired by a queer feeling that his “higher” state of consciousness at Eleusis was a case of déjà vu, and that mysterious sense of familiarity with altered states that are on the contrary the strangest states any brain can process is shared by most who try an entheogen.
Two Interpretations of Entheogens
There are at least two ways of interpreting this link between Plato’s theory of anamnesis and what it feels like to be in a psychedelic state. The first is that this state points to a transcendent reality. So the contents of your psychedelic trips would feel profound because they are metaphysically so. If you feel omniscient while you’re high, that’s because you really are temporarily godlike.
I think this interpretation can be dismissed. More specifically, I think it has to be by anyone not currently intoxicated, because such a person can’t possibly care enough about the wild speculations you entertain while high, to compensate for being unable to meet the required epistemic burden of establishing the rationality of those wild ideas.
The situation is comparable to what the philosopher David Hume said of miracles: any natural explanation of what seems miraculous will be more rational than a supernatural one, by definition, because the former is necessarily grounded in the bulk of our experience; otherwise, a miracle wouldn’t be a violation of natural law or at least a very rare and strange event — but that’s exactly what a miracle is supposed to be. The factuality of the contents of any psychedelic vision would be miraculous and would fall afoul of Hume’s reasoning.
The second interpretation is that (a) regardless of whether anyone truly becomes divine, immortal, or all-knowing while sufficiently intoxicated, you do feel as much while high and (b) the commonality of that experience across the hundreds of millions of entheogen-users or psychonauts has likely shaped much of our history.
I can personally attest that (a) is true. The clarity of thinking in the altered state and the impression that that thinking is profoundly important can feel exactly like the recovery of hidden, monumental, previously-held knowledge, if only because the implicit trust in the intoxicated vision is similar to the trust in mundane memories.
If Plato’s theory did arise from a psychedelic trip, (b) is also confirmed, since here we would have Plato’s report two and a half thousand years into his enormous influence on Western history. Of course, anamnesis isn’t even the strangest part of Plato’s philosophy. What are stranger are his metaphysical dualism and his proto-Gnostic contempt for the material world, both of which influenced early Christianity thanks to the Hellenistic period, and both of which could likewise have been inspired by Plato’s psychedelic visions.
Has History been shaped by Psychedelic Strangeness?
Asceticism, mind-body dualism, and the belief that events are guided by higher beings could be based on at least the subjective truth of altered states of consciousness. (Graham Hancock’s book Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind makes a similar case but suggests the first, more miraculous scenario, that is, the objective truth of those altered states.)
What’s almost as strange as the altered states is that their effect on history is typically indirect, because the use of entheogens is taboo. Just as you may be inclined to puzzle over the meaning of your half-remembered dreams or psychedelic visions, you have to read the tea leaves of history to see the impact of what some would call “peak” states of consciousness (“peak” being a euphemism for being high).
It’s as though history really were as conspiratorial as the Gnostics declared. Indeed, the hypothesis suggests itself that metaphysical and especially theological speculations generally are traceable to psychedelic explorations of strangeness. Again, my suggestion isn’t that the strangeness points to any deeper reality, but that that issue is irrelevant to the psychonaut, since her experience is guaranteed to feel profoundly real and will build upon those of other neoshamans and therefore linger in the form of dark, esoteric secrets or subcultural misunderstandings.
The very distinction, found in all organized religions, between insider and outsider, between the initiated elite and the clueless heathen could have arisen from the gulf between those who have taken an entheogen and those who haven’t. (Originally, the distinction would have been between the shaman and the spiritual civilian, as it were.) No matter how well anyone describes what a psychedelic trip is like, if you haven’t taken one you’ll lack the emotional context, the elation and the grandeur with which the bizarre information is presented.
In this respect, entheogens are like the philosophical thought experiment of Mary’s room. If Mary learns everything in the world in a black and white room, never before having seen the colour red, she might know the physical nature of redness, but if she were to leave the room and see a red apple, she’d learn something new, namely what it’s like to see red.
The qualitative aspect of a psychedelic trip — even of a minor one on cannabis like mine — can’t be passed along with mere descriptions. I know that for a fact because, as I said, once I came down from the high I no longer cared about the vision as much as I did while I was high. I became more skeptical and distracted, and went back to my mundane routines, whereas while high I thought I was receiving the deepest Truth straight from the heart of Reality.
The Return to Childlike Wonder
To be sure, the experience had a lasting effect on me, which explains why I’m writing this article. But the sense of certainty and what might be described as the saintly faith you have when you’re in the throes of the unconventional mentality is incommensurable with a prosaic state of consciousness. The one feels sacred, the other profane.
Assuming your consciousness doesn’t actually travel outside your body or engage with supernatural dimensions in the altered states, why does it feel otherwise? I suggested that on marijuana, at least, there’s a profound trust in the truth of what should, on the contrary, feel exceedingly strange. This is another way of saying that cannabis seems to shut off your critical faculties, opening you up to a creative flow of imagination. Of course, that’s why artists love the drug.
According to Terence McKenna, the situation is different on the much more potent drug, DMT. If you smoke enough of that drug, you encounter strangeness galore but with all your critical faculties intact, so that you’re free to be astonished by the “hallucinations” and it feels even more certain that your mind is taking a trip far beyond the confines of what we know as the natural world.
Conceivably, this pattern could lend some support to the first, realist interpretation: the stronger the drug, the more complete the mind’s flight from the body. It’s not so simple, though, since strong drugs, too, can affect the mind and personality such as by eliminating even your sense of having an independent self. Evidently, different psychedelic drugs, such as Ketamine, Salvia divinorum, MDMA, LSD, and Mescaline have different effects depending on how they interact with the brain. Some drugs are dissociative, others induce euphoria (they release serotonin), while others are hallucinogenic.
Perhaps the one commonality is the unearthliness of the contents of entheogenic experiences. In effect, the altered state puts the psychonaut in the position of a child. The world is unfamiliar to a child and the child’s brain is still growing, so she experiences the world as enchanted and full of meaning, which invites her to investigate and learn how things actually work.
The more years we pack under our belt, as it were, the more we fall into routines, and that overfamiliarity disenchants the world for us. That’s so even for believers in the supernatural, since adult theists typically believe they know all about the divine beings and plans. Knowledge and memory, habits and expertise build up our self-esteem and steer us away from the unfamiliar.
Obviously, entheogens have the opposite overall effect, regardless of their different impacts on the brain. Entheogens skew our cognitive or perceptual processes, blocking some neural pathways or heightening others; the user is returned to a childlike state of wonder or terror. Perhaps that’s the source of the psychonaut’s impression of familiarity with the weirdness. The weirdness feels vaguely familiar, as if we were remembering events from a previous life, because that’s practically what’s happening: we revert from the adult’s overconfidence to the child’s ignorance and naivety. We go from being a big fish in a little pond to being a small fish in an ocean.
Every adult was once a child, of course, so we all once processed information from a standpoint of being mostly uninformed and open-minded. Tell a child that Santa Claus is real and she’ll believe it, because the child is adapted to learn from, and thus to trust implicitly in, her elders.
When reduced to childlike bewilderment in the face of the strangeness of a psychedelic vision, that same instinct may be triggered in the adult psychonaut, so she’ll be open to the wildest interpretations and will naively trust in them to attempt to make sense of what surpasses her comprehension. When the drug’s effects wear off, the familiar world snaps back into place, with only tantalizing daily hints that an adult is still capable of peak states of astonishment and of fear, which polite society forbids.
