Simon Powell - The Psilocybin Solution

In all three propositions, it is most definitely the term information that fits the picture. This chapter attempts to formally elucidate this information-based scenario and to explore further the nature of information and its role in the Universe at large.

At first blush, it might seem somewhat off the point to delve into the nature of information and its role in shaping the Universe. Are we not entering territory far removed from tangible entheogenic plants and fungi? Won’t we be speculating beyond the call of duty? Can we really justify an attempt to understand of what the mystical experience and the Universe at large are made? Are they not two different things, two completely separate domains of inquiry?

In defense of such a bold move, I would remind the reader that the issue at stake in all refined psychedelic debates is that of the nature of perceived reality, in particular, whether the seemingly expanded field of reality unveiled by psilocybin, with its spiritual aura and its mysterious feel of interconnectedness, has any kind of firm foundation. My conviction, like that of Huxley and McKenna, is that entheogens like psilocybin really do allow us to glimpse the “bigger picture” (which falls into place when neuronal conditions are conducive) and that an attempt to understand this “bigger picture” should be pursued as far as possible. Since the psilocybin experience seems to depend on extreme levels of information integration, this strongly suggests, at least in my mind, that a principle of self-organization operates throughout the Universe on all levels, from star formation to DNA formation to the formation of minds, concepts, and perceived truth. In any case, the idea that the Universe consists of a purposeful flow of self-organizing information is precisely what visionary agents like the mushroom seem to confirm. For this reason, I think an attempt to understand reality in terms of information is justified. However, before we go on to examine these issues, a brief detour is in order. This will serve to drive home the point that entheogens have an important role to play in our conceptions of reality.

A genuinely mystical experience in which the presence of the Other is felt cannot fail but change one’s conception of the world and, in particular, the significance one gives to life, particularly conscious human life, on this sensitive planet of ours. It therefore comes as no surprise that psilocybin phenomenology can be a tad religious in nature. Because the entire field of reality (the “bigger picture”) is reconceived and reperceived in the psilocybinetic state, a kind of subjective paradigm shift occurs somewhat akin to paradigm shifts in science. These shifts in theoretical perspective involve thoroughly new conceptual frameworks with which to comprehend the fundamental nature of things. Similarly, traditional religious ideologies attempt to provide an overall scheme with which to understand reality. It is this holistic nature of religious thought that links it with psychedelic thought.

Entheogens, then, are powerful tools with which to forge a new set of conceptions about the reality process, and any competent person out to grasp the meaning of life should consider employing them. More to the point, newly acquired concepts can continue to be employed long after the consumed psychedelic catalysts have been metabolized into inactive by-products. In a sense, it is as if new conceptual insights into Nature, once divined, install themselves permanently within the mind. Entheogenic ecstasy, once tasted, is not forgotten. The difficulty, the overwhelming labor, is in trying to integrate the new view of reality with the old, to merge them so to speak, which is precisely what the rest of this book is about.

Huxley epitomized the paradigm-shifting effect of psychedelics through his interests and concerns during the last decade of his life. As we have seen, Huxley was convinced that psychedelics could grant one access to the sacred side of Nature as encountered by mystics and religious visionaries, an aspect of reality real but hidden to the secular mind. Indeed, he even asked his wife to inject him with LSD shortly before he died, so assured was he that a psychedelic state of mind could prepare him to face the final stage of human life. This is rather dramatic testimony to the fact that psychedelic consciousness connects one to the deepest mysteries that reality confronts us with.

Similarly, in the context of traditional psychedelic shamanism as practiced in South America, the mythological conception of reality held by the whole tribe stems from the effects of entheogenic plants on the psyche of the shamanic voyager. And, as the acid gurus of the 1960s testified, worldviews are very much at stake when it comes to the use of psychedelics. Chemically instigate a change in an individual’s underlying concepts about reality, and culture transforms itself also.

In each of the above cases, reality is the issue at stake, along with the importance of the psychedelic experience in shaping it. Even without a psychedelic experience, Nature demands that we perceive it in some kind of organized way. Since we are woven into the very fabric of the Universe, we cannot ignore its true nature forever. Perhaps, for the most part, we conceive the nature of reality unconsciously, for we all carry around tacit assumptions and tacit beliefs about the world (this book, for example, carries a number of basic assumptions, such as the assumption that a “world out there” really does exist and that its nature really can be understood). Like our consciousness, we take many things for granted and may hardly ever reflect on them (like the stable existence of beneficent energy-emitting suns, for example, or the stable presence of oxygen in the atmosphere). What makes psilocybin so remarkable is its uncanny ability to take one’s precious store of reality concepts and shake them about vigorously so as to reveal just how fragile and shallow-rooted these ingrained beliefs might be. If we imagine normal consciousness to be like a gramophone needle trundling along the groove of Nature’s apparent “surface,” entheogens like psilocybin can jog the needle of consciousness into a rarer, and indeed, more “groovy” surface groove. The true nature of reality then becomes a kind of “unfinished business” that simply must be dealt with. This is the clarion call of the psilocybin mushroom advocate. If we really wish to understand the reality process and the sense and significance of human life within it, entheogens offer us a direct path to the Other, a sentient and intentional agency made of information whose presence and teachings await us.

One cannot stop reality, and this makes its nature formidable regardless of what you believe. The sun warms us or burns us. The cold of winter bites at our flesh, and our homeostatic bodies automatically respond by shivering. The relentless rush of our billion-cell biology propels us toward sex, always it seems, making us grope, cling, moan, and shudder. This same biological march also puts us to sleep every night. We awaken, and again there it is—the reality process. We are inescapably bound up in it like grains of sand caught in an everlasting vortex of wind. More to the point, eventually this perennial condition kills us.

As I remarked in the introduction to this book, whatever you may have read, the ultimate nature of the reality process remains open to question. This may always be the case. Science seems always to reveal more mystery as it delves into the heart of “matter.” What is more, science is conducted first and foremost to gather data. How this data is interpreted is another matter. What is a complex mechanical system to one scientist might be blatant proof of an organizing intelligence to another. And as for the long-sought-after supertheory that will be able to explain the totality of Nature in terms of, say, umpteen dimensional superstrings or in terms of some convoluted mathematical equation that only a few ivory-tower professors can really understand, these are likely to omit an explanation for consciousness and the mysteries of the mind. Indeed, such a final theory, such a final equation scrawled on a blackboard with one fell swoop of chalk, will probably serve only to confuse the average mind rather than enlighten it.