Tags
drugs, generations, Ken Wilber, Mark Schmanko, Moses, mystical experience, nondualism, perennialism
As I reflected back on the works of Ken Wilber recently, a thought occurred to me: man, that guy must have done a lot of drugs.
I don’t recall Wilber ever saying anything about drugs in his work one way or the other. Given that he wrote most of his work under the restrictive régime of the late-20th-century US, that shouldn’t be a surprise; caution is valuable. Yet he is an American baby boomer deeply interested in spirituality and mysticism; that is the sort of profile that leads one to expect significant experimentation with psychoactive substances.
But more importantly than his demographic: Wilber’s philosophy is very much the sort of philosophy one would expect from someone who had had profound drug-induced mystical experiences. A theme throughout Wilber’s work is the importance of experience to knowledge, a view that Wilber’s late work comes to call “radical empiricism”. He claims throughout his work that the essentials of premodern wisdom traditions – Platonism, Buddhism, Christianity – are to be found in mystical experiences, and in replicable practices that lead up to those. Some years ago I wrote an article debunking this claim: I don’t think that a reasonable historian can look at the evidence we have of Confucius or Moses or Jesus or Zhiyi (Chih-i) and still say that the essentials of their teachings come from replicable experiences. (We could reasonably say that Moses at the burning bush was having a mystical experience, but it was not in any way replicable.)
But why would one make the claim that the core of the traditions was replicable experience, in the first place? Well, if you had one of the more profound experiences of your life after taking a significant quantity of psilocybin or ayahuasca, that would give you some first grounds for imagining that others would have done the same. That experience is deeply replicable: it is open to all who “try the experiment“, as Wilber puts it, as long as they can get access to the substance in question. If your best access to the insights of premodern traditions had come through drug experimentation, it would make sense to you to say that those traditions’ insights can be accessed through repeatable experiment. (You just have to ignore those, like Candrakīrti and Rāmānuja, who say they can’t.)
And what particular insights would you likely have drawn? Well, you might well have come to think that ultimate reality is ultimately nondual, since – we see from Roland Griffiths’s research – a high dose of psilocybin is likely to give one an experience of a unified, nondual reality that one has merged with. (The same appears true of other substances like 5-MeO-DMT.) And sure enough, when Wilber in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality gives a typology of mystical experiences that he sorts into a hierarchy, the nondual takes its place at the top.
I don’t know Wilber’s personal life beyond his writings, which, again, disclose no drug experiences as far as I know. So I could be totally wrong about this. I’m just looking at the preponderance of the evidence: if there was a baby boomer who decided that the truest essence of the world’s wisdom traditions was a nondualism that one could reach through replicable experiment, it would be weird to find that that boomer hadn’t done a lot of drugs.
I’m not saying any of this to discredit Wilber. If anything, it’s the opposite. I’ve moved away from my early enthusiasm for Wilber’s project because, as my article argued, his project fails at its goal of trying to integrate everything: it is just not the case that every tradition is based on replicable experiences. But replicable experiences may well play some role in various traditions, and psychedelics may well be the most replicable route that we have to mystical experiences – and Wilber’s work may turn out to be genuinely helpful in understanding what’s involved in those.
Maybe having a certain kind of psilocybin experience does provide a correct insight into the nature of reality; that’s an idea I have begun seriously entertaining in recent years. And such a view would work well with the approach Mark Schmanko articulated a decade ago in response to my article. In Schmanko’s approach, we recognize that it is a relatively recent modern view to treat replicable mystical experience as central to an aspect of life that we might call religious or spiritual – and consider that modern view to be progress, an improvement on other views. As I noted to Schmanko at the time, what such an approach doesn’t do is incorporate all traditions into a grand synthesis, the way Wilber claims to be doing. What Confucius and Moses are on about is something very different. But moderns like Wilber who insist on the importance of replicable mystical experience might yet be on to something.
I’m not an expert on Wilber, so I could be totally wrong about this, but here’s a counter-hypothesis that came to mind after I read this post, based on my recent reading of the 19th-century philosopher Shadworth Hodgson: There is an intellectual explanation for Wilber’s emphasis on experience that doesn’t require an emphasis on ingesting mind-altering drugs.
Hodgson’s masterwork was The Metaphysic of Experience (1898). I would call it phenomenology, even though Hodgson didn’t use that word; Hodgson had a great influence on Edmund Husserl and on William James. James used the term “radical empiricism”, and I wonder if Wilber borrowed the term “radical empiricism” from James? Hodgson considered himself to be taking post-Kantian subjective methodology in philosophy to its logical and ultimate conclusion, and I’d say his self-understanding was accurate. This is from Hodgson’s Preface to The Metaphysic of Experience:
“What is reasoning on the basis of experience? It is reasoning from experience in which all a priori assumptions, whatever their origin, transcendental or not, is avoided, and therefore that assumption among others, which makes the distinction between Subject and Object the ultimate distinction in philosophy, and puts it in the place of that between Consciousness and its Object, which, as will be shown, is a distinction perceived as inseparably involved in consciousness itself. All knowing is consciousness; but we do not know a priori, or to begin with, that all objects are consciousness also. Whether they all are so or not is among the things we want to know. Consciousness, therefore, as distinguished from its objects, is the thing to be interrogated.”
And here’s Hodgson in Chapter 1, section “All experience is subjective”:
“Now if we are seriously to make experience the basis of philosophy, and if, in consequence, our method is to be that of subjective analysis, it is evident that we must understand the terms experience and subjectivity in a far stricter, and therefore also in a far ampler, sense than has hitherto been usual. In appealing to experience we must appeal to experience alone, without a priori assumptions of any kind; and in analysing experience we must analyse it as it is actually experienced, and in all the modes which it includes. If experience is in itself a synthetic agency, we must trust to analysis to bring that fact and that agency to light. It cannot be assumed to be so, prior to analysis; for the simple reason, that the idea of agency, the idea of an active power at all, is part of knowledge, and the object of that idea cannot otherwise be known to us than as an object of knowledge, that is, an object of one mode or one department of experience itself. A philosophy founded on experience alone, and solely by means of subjective analysis of it, is very different from anything in the nature of philosophy which the world has yet seen. [Note: I doubt Hodgson was considering non-Western thinking here.] The difference between it and Kant’s so-called Copernicanism, or between it and Hegel’s Thought-Agency, or Schopenhauer’s Will in Nature, is a difference which amounts to a revolution. And when I call philosophy of this kind Metaphysic, I am well aware that the meaning which I give to this latter term is very different from the meaning which is currently assigned to it. Metaphysic means, with me, subjective analysis of experience; its conclusions logically precede, and therefore criticise and govern, the conceptions and ideas which are the most fundamental and vitally regulative ones in all other departments of knowledge. This is so because all knowledge, the positive sciences included, is something subjective, is knowing distinguished from the things known, which belong to Being. This is, saying in other words, that all branches of knowledge which take objects of particular kinds as their ultimate objects of enquiry, or ideas of particular kinds as their ultimate modes of dealing with such objects, are logically subject to that most comprehensive of all modes of knowledge, which has the formation of ideas of all kinds as its object matter, without assuming any objects or any ideas as already known or given to begin with.”
I thought it was worth quoting Hodgson at length because he’s so clear about his position: experience or consciousness is “the basis of philosophy”, and the method of philosophy is “subjective analysis” or “interrogation” of consciousness. For anyone who takes a position like this, experience or consciousness is going to be central to knowledge (not to mention those who assume, unlike Hodgson, that everything is consciousness), whether or not they take a lot of mind-altering drugs.
My own view is that Hodgson well illustrates a huge problem with such a position: contrary to his claim of having no “a priori assumptions of any kind”, he is certainly assuming a concept of consciousness or experience! A decade after Hodgson’s book was published, Roy Wood Sellars, who would go on to develop critical realism, went straight for the jugular of this assumption in his 1907 paper “The nature of experience” (The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 4(1), 14–18):
“The recent discussion of the subject-object relation, particularly that by Professor James in the article ‘Does Consciousness Exist,’ has a metaphysical bearing whose full significance has not, it seems to me, been grasped. Consciousness-in-general of the Kantian tradition made current an abstract and vaguely impersonal treatment of experience which gracefully avoided the more difficult problems of the relation of the individual to other individuals and to the universe. As Riehl points out, the transcendental ego, the subject, is logical, not actual; timeless, not undergoing change. Consequently, by a process analogous to the transference of feeling, experience lost its concreteness and took to itself the grayness of abstraction, nor was this much remedied by the term ‘organic’ so frequently applied. The question asked by the tyro in philosophy, Whose experience? was looked upon as the sign of the uninitiate.” (emphasis added)
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying there is no other possible explanation for Wilber’s approach than that he did a lot of drugs. If I recall correctly, he does indeed get the term “radical empiricism” from James. As I said, I could be totally wrong about the drug influence. It’s just that given his generational/demographic position and the approach he takes to mysticism, it would be a surprise if he hadn’t gotten that approach from drug experiences.
Somewhat beside your point, from a scientific perspective, I would think that replicable drug experiences would only show that a certain chemical affects the brain in a predictable way, producing consistent changes in subjective experiences. For one to conclude that such changes in in subjective experiences give the experiencer insight into ultimate reality would seem to require ignoring scientific (physicalistic) models of how bodies work and instead assuming some kind of idealism or spiritualism. I doubt that taking mind-altering drugs would automatically turn a person into an idealist or spiritualist (no more than my own very beneficial experiences with nitrous oxide made me think that I had “touched the ultimate” in the dentist’s chair); the person would also need to have reasons to be sympathetic to idealist or spiritualist assumptions before or after their drug experiences.
William James’s “radical empiricism” can be traced via Hodgson (and probably others) back to Western idealisms, and James also seemed sympathetic to spiritualism. If Wilber had these same philosophical predilections, then he would indeed seem to hold the requisite kind of idealist or spiritualist assumption for concluding that drug experiences would give him insight into ultimate reality. Such an assumption would be highly questionable to anyone like Sellars who interprets experiences in the light of modern sciences and epistemology: for them, replicable drug experiences can be important in various ways, but not because they reveal the hidden secret of ultimate reality.
It seems to me that what replicable drug experiences can show us is comparable to what any other kind of replicable experiences can show us – no more, but also no less. I don’t give the non-influenced brain state preference in that regard.
From what I’ve seen so far, Griffiths’s experiments indicate that high-dose psilocybin experiences often have a nondual character, involving a unity or merging with the reality around one. I don’t think that necessarily requires that one must have brought nondualist assumptions to the experience; if nobody had told me what maple syrup tasted like and I experienced its taste for the first time, I would be able to tell that it is sweet regardless of my assumptions.
I’ve never taken psilocybin, but my experiences with nitrous oxide were basically that my body disappeared. I have also experienced this in long meditation retreats without any use of drugs, where I associated the experience with Dogen’s term “dropping off body and mind”. I do think there is value to the fact that I could replicate the experience that Dogen described using the meditation method that he recommended. But some of the things that Dogen wrote tell me that the way he interpreted such experiences was very different from the way I interpreted them due to differences in our knowledge. This is different from simply tasting maple syrup and agreeing that it has a sweet taste. Philosophy and science involves more hermeneutics. The truth in perennialism is probably due to human universals (homologous experiences corresponding to homologous biotic processes) whereas the falsity in it is probably due to human diversity.
Just to add my own thoughts here–and I basically agree with Nathan— the following passage from a recent chapter of mine in the Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Meditation (2022) which deals with mystical experiences in meditation and on psychedelics:
“[In Zen meditation] practitioners may also experience rare, time-limited altered states of consciousness that the Zen tradition ‘satori’ or ‘kensho’, and which bear some family resemblance to altered states described by other Buddhist traditions (e.g., ‘attainment of cessation’ in the Theravāda, or ‘primordial consciousness’ in the Vajrayāna). These states may be characterized by varying degrees of atemporality, abatement of discriminative thought, and alterations in the self/other boundary and intentionality. If we divide satori experiences into Stace’s (1961) introvertive and extrovertive subtypes, the introvertive type resembles Metzinger’s (2020) ‘minimal phenomenal experience’ in that it is non-sensory, non-motor, non-cognitive, non-egoic, and atemporal. In the extrovertive type, the sensory experience of a phenomenal world remains, albeit transformed by an intuition of its all-togetherness.
Experiences of satori provide intriguing parallels to Madhyamaka and Yogācāra-influenced Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna metaphysical claims about the empty and nondual nature of reality. These experiences are imbued with meaning for the practitioner in that they appear to validate the effort one has put into meditative practice and to experientially realize the claims of Buddhist texts. This can confirm one’s faith in the Buddhist path and strengthen one’s commitment to self-transformation. In addition, the recognition one receives from one’s religious community for having these experiences can socially validate them.
This is not to suggest that most of the value of such experiences lies in post-experience meaning-making or extrinsic validation. People can feel immediately different in the wake of such experiences – differences that may persist over time – including alterations in one’s sense of self and/or relatedness to the world. As Stace notes, an experience “of only a few moments’ duration” can transform a person’s life: A life previously felt to be “meaningless and worthless” can come to acquire “meaning, value, and direction” (1961, pp. 60–61). These experiences can serve as touchstones informing a person’s attitude toward life. The kinds of differences they make and the degree to which they serve as touchstones, however, depend a great deal on the context in which they are understood and experienced, and how they are incorporated into the matrix of a person’s ongoing beliefs, aims, and projects.
There is a difference, however, between the meaning an experience opens up for us, and whether or not the experience empirically validates some hypothesis about the true state of affairs in the world. As William James concludes, people who report profound mystical experiences “have no right to claim that we ought to accept the deliverance of their peculiar experiences, if we ourselves are outsiders and feel no private call thereto” (1936, p. 415). Arguments against the hypothesis that mystical experiences validate Buddhist metaphysical assumptions include: (a) the diversity of theistic and non-theistic mystical experiences which can be invoked to support a variety of different metaphysical positions (Katz 1978), and (b) the possibility that these experiences only tell us something about the way the brain functions and not about the way the world is.
Meaning and truth value are separate considerations. A man under the influence of psychedelics may perceive the walls ‘breathing’ and come away believing ‘everything is alive’. While this experience may deepen, enrich, and improve his life, surely the walls of his room were not breathing in ordinary terms. His intuition that everything is ‘alive’ may be meaningful and transformative, but seeing walls breathe – something others cannot – does not constitute evidence (according to standards for empirical evidence) for his hypothesis.
While satori experiences cannot prove Buddhist metaphysical assumptions, we cannot rule out the possibility that they can expand our vision of what may be a genuine and essentially ungraspable nonduality. As such, they are, at best, intimations of, pointers to, and partial glimpses of, that nonduality – our own limited perspectives on it at a certain point in time – and not a full, complete comprehension of it from some omniscient vantage point. This follows from our first foundational assumption that we can never know reality simplicter, but only what it is like for us. It also accords with the view expressed by Eihei Dōgen, the 13th-century founder of Japanese Sōto Zen, that “when one side is illumined, the other is dark” (2016, p. 31). ‘Enlightenment experiences’ do not make us ‘enlightened beings’ in some absolute sense. They may be helpful pointers along the way on a never-ending journey, but however vast one’s enlightenment experience, it can always be vaster.”
Thanks, Seth. Overall I would generally agree. As I’ve noted in my past writings on Wilber, I do not buy the thesis that the heart of the wisdom traditions comes down primarily to mystical experience. That said, I do think mystical experience is a significant part of many traditions. I note in particular this sentence: “His intuition that everything is ‘alive’ may be meaningful and transformative, but seeing walls breathe – something others cannot – does not constitute evidence (according to standards for empirical evidence) for his hypothesis.” By itself that is true, but I think we do need to remember what “empirical evidence” is – it is evidence that we learn by perception, by experience. The standards in question typically have to do with replicability – that is, his seeing walls breathe doesn’t count as evidence because it is “something others cannot” see. But if there is a way to reliably make people see such a thing, then perhaps it can count as evidence. I don’t think there’s a way to make people reliably see that walls are alive (as opposed to simply moving), but things may be different when it comes to experiences of nonduality.
Except that while Advaita Vedantists and Mahayana Buddhists see non-duality, Theradava Buddhists and Abrahamic practitioners (with some exceptions such as Meister Eckhart) generally do not. See for example, Steven Katz’s descriptions of Kabalistic mystical experience, and the many other Judeo-Christian experiences (e.g. the Spanish Catholic mystics William James writes about) which involve encounter with God but not union with Him, or Martin Buber’s critique of Buddhism for ignoring the dualism of I-and-Thou.
Well sure, the big thing I’m not arguing is that all “mystical experience” is the same. There’s nothing nondual about St. Teresa getting penetrated by the angel’s dart! That’s a different thing entirely. But Eckhart, it seems, manages to have a nondual experience within the same tradition as Teresa. It’s his experience that I think might be comparable.
Seth, thanks for sharing that excerpt of yours, which I really like. I just read the whole chapter and there is so much that I like in it. For example, this passage:
“One can imagine different soteriologies in which meditation results in ‘seeing’ different sets of ‘facts’ about how ‘reality’ is. For example, a meditating pantheist might observe how all phenomena participate in and are manifestations of the divine. The Japanese for ‘yathābhūañāndassana’ is ‘nyo-jitsu-chiken’ (Buswell and Lopez 2014, p. 1025), or ‘awareness of the truth as it manifests itself’. Zen meditators will more likely ‘see’ that ‘truth’ as suchness (tathātā) and emptiness (śūnyatā). All ‘seeing’ in meditation occurs within soteriological contexts that suggest what we ought to look for and what might aid us in our progress. Those contexts constrain which aspects of experience we are likely to attend to, and what we may ultimately discover.”
The importance of “contexts that suggest what we ought to look for” almost can’t be overemphasized. I’m reminded of how Michael Yapko compared guided mindfulness meditation and hypnotic induction/suggestion and found them to be analogous. My understanding is that the same cognitive mechanisms (that Yapko discussed) underlie placebo and nocebo effects (for example, placebo analgesia and hyperalgesia): deep cognitive expectancies. I would guess that hallucinogens also produce their effects by messing with these mechanisms.
Seth didn’t exactly say this in his chapter, but in Dogen’s philosophy, if I’m not mistaken, there is a sense in which experience almost doesn’t matter since all meditation (zazen) is conceived as an enactment of enlightenment. I’ve always felt that the view that “all zazen is an enactment of enlightenment” is the kind of expectation described in the previous paragraph, the context that suggests how to interpret anything that is experienced.
I took a look at Ken Wilber’s book Sex, Ecology, Spirituality that Amod mentioned in the article, and what strikes me about it is that it is not the work of a philosopher who is trying to avoid “all a priori assumptions” and “appeal to experience alone” as Hodgson aspired to do. Wilber seems to enjoy creating a thick layer cake of assumptions with plenty of decorative frosting. For example:
“Just so, significant aspects of ‘the mystical consciousness’ are anchored in referents (‘the mystical reality’) that, even if always culturally situated, are never merely culturally situated […] Likewise, precisely because ‘the mystical reality’ is there, anchoring a transcendental signifier, this (1) allows learning to occur vis-à-vis the mystical reality, (2) ensures that learning will unfold, like all learning, in a developmental arc, (3) allows the stages of that arc to be identified, (4) allows the traditions themselves to spot when a trainee is making a mistake, (5) allows a rational reconstructive science of the mystical unfolding in abstract terms (deep structures), and (6) frankly acknowledges that Spirit is there prior to humans and their cultural tinkerings, and is not simply a product of men’s and women’s capacity to make symbols: Do we create God? or is that simply backwards?” (p. 649)
I notice that Wilber has a discussion of how his system differs from phenomenology (pp. 771–771) that I think is insightful, so my mention of Hodgson may not have been as relevant as I thought and was more about me talking about what I’ve been reading lately (but you probably already knew that). Nevertheless, Wilber’s use of the words “mystical”, “Spirit”, and “God” to refer to reality that “allows a rational reconstructive science of the mystical unfolding in abstract terms” seems to indicate the kind of idealist metaphysics that could predispose one to seek to experience “the mystical reality” through drugs as we discussed above.
My references above to Sex, Ecology, Spirituality are to the revised edition (Shambhala, 2000), and the last page range I mentioned above should have been 771–776.
Wilber makes clear that he doesn’t self-identify with metaphysical idealism, and he considers himself to have gone beyond it (just like he thinks he has gone beyond everyone), but he’s so sympathetic to idealism and so dismissive of physicalism that I feel perfectly justified in calling him an idealist. For example:
“The Idealist movement was, in the West, the last great attempt to introduce true Ascent and, most important, to integrate it believably with true Descent—the Ego and the Eco both taken up, preserved and negated, honored and released, in all-encompassing Spirit. The true heirs of Plotinus.” (p. 533)
“The great Idealist realization was that both the Ego and the Eco are manifestations of Spirit, and Spirit redeems all IOUs. On the one hand, the Spirit (or highest Self or pure Ego or I-I) of the Kosmos is perfectly autonomous, because it is the pure Self (which is self-positing and self-defining and thus completely free or autonomous); and, on the other, it is perfect wholeness at the same time, because there is nothing outside of it: both Mind and Nature are expressions of its own Being and Becoming. And thus, to the extent that I rise to a intuition and identity with Spirit, then both the free will of Mind and the union with Nature are given to me simultaneously. I-I am everything that is arising, and thus I am autonomous and whole, free and determined, ascended and descended, one and many, wisdom and compassion, eros and agape.” (p. 535)
“The Idealists […] were dismissed as ‘mere metaphysics,’ and gone was a priceless opportunity that the West, no doubt, will have to attempt yet again if it is ever to be hospitable to the future descent of the all-embracing World Soul. In the meantime, the collapse of Idealism left the [clutches pearls] Descenders virtually unchallenged as the molders of modernity.” (p. 537)
Oh no, not the Godless
Deceptacons, I mean, the Decenders! Save us!