How doing LSD in India melted my brain, for the better.

Atheists in India feel very much alone, I discovered this shortly after immigrating. 81% of all Indians are Religious; within my first week my Facebook turned into the Great Wall of Indian God posts, another personal blow to my integration into Indian society.

I’ve always had a Richard Dawkins in me waiting to methodically dismantle anyone’s spiritual or religious points of view. Add the pollution, chaos and poverty of India: needless to say I was not convinced.

But things changed, and before you ask: no I haven’t become religious or spiritual. I just no longer feel threatened by other perspectives or points of view. I relaxed, as I hope you will during the length of this story.

Namaste. Welcome to Goa.

We had enough LSD and Cocaine to last us the night, and more. As a now close friend said in an all too familiar thick Indian accent “Acid is the death of the ego, and the birth of the soul. Cocaine is the death of the soul and the birth of the ego”.

So, I dropped half, and snorted a few lines. The effect was dual, and within a few minutes we got talking, cracking jokes, and laughing. The LSD and Cocaine mix felt nice, so with little thought I grabbed the second half from my shirt pocket and placed it on the tip of my tongue.

“Acid is the death of the ego, and the birth of the soul. Cocaine is the death of the soul and the birth of the ego.”

By the time it reached full potency I started drifting in and out of reality. I laid back and as I melted into the ground to the sound of ‘la fee verte’ by Kasabian, my field of vision filled with vividly animated fractals. My friends yanked me back to reality and suggested I snort some more lines. So I did.

The focussed effect of the cocaine mixed with the integrative effects of the acid meant my mind wandered to places I didn’t know existed, yet I could control my trip fully; I was my own Shaman.

As the conversation really picked up something became glaringly apparent: my friends had faith, and I didn’t. This intrigued me. I was primed. So I peered deeply into their eyes, and listened to their passionate rhetoric. Slowly the mystery of what set me and my brothers apart shone brightly.

Faith is the ability to believe in things for which we have no evidence, and which we do not understand. I’d never chosen to believe in something I did not understand. This was new to me.

To me faith had always rhymed with the dark ages; yet I felt I had the opportunity to explore terra incognita. I didn’t approach it as a believe or not believe conundrum; instead I approached it as intellectual yoga: stretching the mind into a position it was unwilling to fold itself to.

After all I’d travelled to India, to immerse myself into its culture; it seemed fitting with the purpose of my trip. So I relaxed, and let the evening take me wherever it would.

Faith: a free, mind-expansion seminar.

What do you see?

If you answered “a black and white image”, then you are right, sane, and fit of mind. But you are only responding to a thin slice of the stimulus before you.

Currently there are a thousand things in your field of vision, but you guided your mind to ignore the infinitely vast array of input, and you answered “a black and white image”. Why?

This ability to control sensory input is obviously much needed in life, but sometimes it can go overboard, and when it does, the effects can be quite debilitating.

The part of my mind that went quiet that night was my instinctual, incessant and compulsive need to conceptualise and compartmentalise everything.

What changed was my need to dichotomise and arrange reality; rationality versus irrationality, spirituality versus non-spirituality, theism versus atheism; the boundaries became more blurry.

Who cares.

Are we seeing a black and white image? Or are photons being emitted by a series of diodes, filtered by crystals to contain different amounts of red, green and blue?

RGB pixels on the average LCD screen.

I don’t know about you, but I find the human visual system fascinating. Light gets inverted as it enters; we all know this. But what few people know is that the wiring of the retina–the mesh of nerves and blood supply–is in front of the receptor cells, not behind them.

This can lead to loads of fun, once you discover the visual artefacts this causes, you’re in for hours of entertainment. But anyway, back to our black and white image. What are we really seeing? Let’s try again, this time I’ll take a picture with my smatphone:

Peek-a-boo!

This perspective is quite different. Peek-a-boo! I wonder how many different images we could generate, of something that should be conceptually black, white, and static?

Acid has helped me see the continuously changing nature of the world, its dynamic nature. It shattered the static mental image I was projecting onto the world.

God? No god? Mu?

This leads us nicely to ‘mu’, which may be a new concept to you. Mu is complete negation. It goes beyond ‘yes’ and ‘no’. It invites us to re-ask the question.

So when asking what the image represents, I would want to invalidate the question itself, yet keep on contemplating what’s in front of me.

From wikipedia:

“The Japanese and Korean term mu or Chinese wú meaning “not have; without” is a key word in Buddhism, especially the Chan and Zen traditions. […]

Nonexistence; nonbeing; not having; a lack of, without. A negative. Caused to be nonexistent. Impossible; lacking reason or cause. Pure human awareness, prior to experience or knowledge. […]

The character wu 無 originally meant dance and was later used as a graphic loan for wu ‘not’.”

So essentially ‘mu’ invalidates the question. The classic example being: “have you stopped beating your wife?”, which can neither be answered with a yes or a no.

Likewise, I’m suggesting the question ‘what does the image contain’ is already too loaded. It’s a trick question. I’m also suggesting some of the greater questions, such as the existence of god is too loaded, and needs to be unasked.

As for ‘mu’ it gets better:

“The earliest graphs for 無 pictured a person with outstretched arms and represented the word wu “dance; dancer”. After wu 無 “dance” was borrowed as a loan for wu “not; without”, the original meaning was elucidated with the 舛 “opposite feet” at the bottom of wu 舞 “dance”.”

So the word used in Zen Buddhism for “Pure human awareness, prior to experience or knowledge” was borrowed from the word dancer. I’ll let you think about it for a minute. If you suddenly feel like dancing, in every sense then you probably needn’t read on.

Rise above choice.

My two and a half years in India were a mixed blessing. I must admit, there were parts I hated: the cast system was definitely at the top of my list. Open defecation came close second.

But learning to let go of my compulsive labelling of things as either being ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘right or ‘wrong’, and seeing the shades of grey in everything made me a more relaxed human being.

I’m so glad for the experience I had, because I had no right to question people’s faith. This ability to believe in things that are not seen or understood is what gives billions of people around the world a reason to get up in the morning. No one has the right to take that away from someone.

Do not mistake posturing for education.

These viewpoints are their own mirror; whatever one says of the other: they are just commenting about their own reflexion.

This is the difference between objectivity, and subjectivity; it matters more than it may at first seem. I’m not even comparing scientific conviction with religion. Far from it; these two things are incomparable.

I’m just saying they are human conceptual constructs; and that the act of conceptually disconnecting our minds from the world once in a while, to experience it the way it really is, can wind up treating these things as being the same: ways of conceptualising the world, that are in opposition.

The validity or invalidity of either needn’t be put into question. There are millions of belief systems in the world, and millions of ways of investigating the world, whether spiritual, philosophical, scientific, or otherwise, and if we are to truly be a pupil of the world, then we need to rise above choice, and simply see, sense, learn and analyse with no preconceptions, posturing, or opinions.

Who are you anyway?

I find it a much needed break to pull away from these ideas once in a while to contemplate more immediate questions about the nature of the being.

The small bit of you that is really you is in constant flux, and is completely new on average 7 times within your lifetime.

It’s like our bodies are nothing more than a swarm of cells and bacteria, that agreed to come together in time and space, to form the fleeting form we call “me”.

What about your name you hold so dear. Say your name, slowly, to hear yourself say it. That was a whim of your parents, it isn’t you either. What about the language that you speak? Or the intonation you use when you speak it? That was also given, so essentially not you.

Or maybe you have invented a language of your own? Maybe you have invented a single word of your own? Have you?

What about the thoughts you generate all day? If you weren’t capable of inventing a single word, what makes you think you were able to generate a single original thought, versus being a vector for a narrow selection of ideas that were given to you by your society, or circumstance?

Your thoughts, and beliefs and vastly culture-based: if you’d been born in Saudi Arabia, I very much doubt you’d have the same belief system as if you were born in the UK or Sweden.

Our bodies are in constant flux; the world is continuously changing; our language is continuously evolving, despite much protest from many. Why should our thoughts, that were mostly given rather than generated, remain static in a constantly shape-shifting world?

The importance of objectivity and non-posturing.

For the music to be heard, all notes need to be played.

For people to learn, they first need to feel that their viewpoint has been validated, and is not in jeopardy.

It is through this process of education that a child who was born in Saudi Arabia, and who believes in a deity, may rise to an education level where he is capable of applying critical thinking to his own beliefs, and reflect on their rationality, or irrationality.

But it is also through a process of education that those who commit themselves to atheist posturing can rise above antagonising, and deal with both camps without casting a judgement.

Two parts of the same whole.

If there is a god, then he created the scientists (and yes, Richard Dawkings, everyone on /r/atheism and 4chan too).

Likewise, if matter and energy suddenly whooshed into existence from a pin-point in space, and expanded into the universe the way it is today, then this process created every religion, all their believers (and yes, sadly, televangelists too).

There is no dichotomy. The only dichotomy that exists is in the mind. We are all a part of the same event; and are thereby all in the same boat; it’s time we started learning how to deal with this more gracefully.

You know what really grinds my gears?

Be quick to learn and slow to judge

What really grinds my gears is that we have become ultra opinionated as a society. We feel we are entitled to an opinion, and that our opinion matters. Why do we need to jump onto these man-made concepts, and deal with them as if they were all that there is to reality?

What stops us, from time to time, to simply poke our heads out of our dens, close our eyes and feel the wind blow on our faces? Just once in a little while.

The issue with having über strong opinions, formed overly fast, is that opinions are as easy to form about simple matters as they are hard to form about complex ones.

In other words: everyone has an opinion about Justin Bieber, but no one has an opinion about the analytic expression for the two-loop hexagon Wilson loop consisting of 17 pages of Goncharov polylogarithms (personally they infuriate me–damn Winson loops, stealing our jobs!).

The more opinions you hold the more likely you spend too much time thinking about trivial matters.

Think about it. You have formed an opinion about something. So why dwell? Why bash others on the head with it if they disagree? With fists so tightly clenched onto your unwavering opinions, won’t you, 10 years from now, keep on mulling over the same things over and over, like a madman stuck on a carousel and missing out on the rest of the carnival?

Today’s illuminating thought is tomorrow’s stale prison: as we generate thought, so we need to discard it. Thoughts should flow in and out of our minds like a river, so we can experience them all before our counted time on this earth reaches its end. Thoughts should not be left to turn stale, and thoughts are too malleable and fun to play with to be held on to.

Democritus.

“Nothing exists but atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.”

- Democritus, 400bc

Lessons learned

The mind is a double-edged sword, that can be used to think, which takes the mind to a better place, and that can be used to form opinions and judge, which will narrow its field of vision and bog it down.

It is by muting this opinionated, compulsively labelling part of our minds that we can begin to experience the beauty and richness of the world in full.

Beauty everywhere

Life is a crazy experience that is full of good, bad and ugly. The more you shut down that judgemental, compartmentalising part of your mind, then the more the experience will imbibe you, sweep you off your feet and make you love, dance, laugh and cry.

Forget about who you are, where you come from, your identity, your beliefs, your religion, let yourself be a blank slate. For once: let the world paint you.

Be quick to learn, and slow to judge.

Accept yourself for who you are at any given time. And remember that the world will look back at you for its own reflexion, and when it does: reflect only the best parts of the world, and the world will show you the best parts in you.