Whatever has a form is only limitations imagined in my consciousness. The World is but a show, a make-belief. The World I perceive is entirely private, a dream. Desire and fear come from seeing the World as separate from my-Self. While I see the dream as real, I’ll suffer being its slave. While I see the dream as real, I’ll suffer being its slave. Nothing in the dream is done by me. I AM THAT, Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Introduction

From the Amazonian Shamans to the Zen masters of Japan, from the medieval ascetics to the monks of Tibet, “All is one” re-emerges, again and again, from the mouths of the mystics.

Even now, people wander into the world of psychedelics and return with the firm conviction that everything is one, harmonious thing. You ask them what they mean, but they can’t explain it any further. They can only repeat it in different ways: “We are all the same”, “everything is connected”.

Throughout the article, these three terms will be used interchangeably to describe the same experience: mystical, psychedelic, and unitive. They each refer to the same epiphany – our perception of distinctions is an illusion.

Today, this is widely known as nonduality.

I will outline an argument for nonduality that can be summarized by four points.

Our brains experience reality through a filter, not as it truly is. The filter is our sense of self, the ego. The ego grounds both language and reason, so these too are part of the filter. Mystical awareness removes the filter, and reveals the contradictory, non-dual truth: All is One.

Disappearing into the All

The Awakening of Jane Goodall

Jane Goodall tells the story of a life-changing experience that occurred in the Gombe Forest of Tanzania in her book Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey. She was suddenly overcome by a brief moment of mystical consciousness. She describes the beautiful experience, which importantly wasn’t induced by any external chemicals:

Lost in awe at the beauty around me, I must have slipped into a state of heightened awareness. It is hard – impossible really – to put into words the moment of truth that suddenly came upon me then. Even the mystics are unable to describe their brief flashes of spiritual ecstasy. It seemed to me, as I struggled afterward to recall the experience, the self was utterly absent: I and the chimpanzees, the earth and trees and air, seemed to merge, to become one with the spirit power of life itself. The air was filled with a feathered symphony, the evensong of birds. I heard new frequencies in their music and also in singing insects’ voices – notes so high and sweet I was amazed. Never had I been so intensely aware of the shape, the color of the individual leaves, the varied patterns of the veins that made each one unique….

That afternoon, it had been as though an unseen hand had drawn back a curtain and, for the briefest moment, I had seen through such a window. In a flash of “outsight” I had known timelessness and quiet ecstasy, sensed a truth of which mainstream science is merely a small fraction. And I knew that the revelation would be with me for the rest of my life, imperfectly remembered yet always within. A source of strength on which I could draw when life seemed harsh or cruel or desperate.”

One of the most powerful arguments for the brain-as-filter hypothesis is the mind-blowing effects of experiences like Jane’s, when the field of perception expands so rapidly that it ruptures consensus reality to unveil a new layer of awareness.

From here, all things appear not just equally meaningful, but equally supremely meaningful. A leaf fluttering in the wind is as significant as the birth of a child.

It’s known as satori to the Zen masters, bodhi in Buddhism, samadhi in yogic traditions, wajd in Islam, religious ecstasy in Christianity, awakening in the modern West. There are many paths to get there, but the destination is the same.

There are many other stories of sudden mystical experience.

Alan Watts, famous writer and Zen monk (now building a formidable youtube vortex from beyond the grave), described “awakening” as a visceral realization that the struggle for power which is built into our experience of the world creates the illusion that we are inherently different from each other.

He uses the symbol of the yin and yang to illustrate the point. The white and black fish might think they are locked in an eternal struggle with each other. But from our perspective, looking at the whole symbol at once, we see they are part of the same thing, moving in harmony – dancing, not fighting.

“The principle of Yin Yang is that all things exist as inseparable and contradictory opposites, for example, female-male, dark-light and old-young…The two opposites of Yin and Yang attract and complement each other and, as their symbol illustrates, each side has at its core an element of the other (represented by the small dots). Neither pole is superior to the other and, as an increase in one brings a corresponding decrease in the other, a correct balance between the two poles must be reached in order to achieve harmony.” – Ancient History Encyclopedia , Image Credit

William James Trips into Zen

Speaking about his cosmic revelations while under the influence of nitrous oxide (laughing gas), the philosopher William James described having a moment of “outsight” similar to Goodall’s, or a moment of seeing the yin-yang all at once, in an article titled The Subjective Effects of Nitrous Oxide.

The centre and periphery of things seem to come together. The ego and its objects, the meum and tuum, are one. Now this, only a thousand fold enhanced, was the effect upon me of the gas: and its first result was to make peal through me with unutterable power the conviction that Hegelism was true after all, and that the deepest convictions of my intellect hitherto were wrong…and (this) served to illustrate the same truth; and that truth was that every opposition, among whatsoever things, vanishes in a higher unity in which it is based; that all contradictions, so-called, are of a common kind; that unbroken continuity is of the essence of being; and that we are literally in the midst of an infinite, to perceive the existence of which is the utmost we can attain.

James would later go on to write his landmark “The Varieties of Religious Experience”, a work of philosophy and psychology that carved out a legitimate place for the mystical state in an increasingly scientific world.

But, reading between the lines, you can almost spot the subtle attempt to retroactively grapple with his own mystical experience on nitrous oxide, as if it were the genesis of his life’s work.

Like countless thinkers before him, the sheer power of the mystical experience left a permanent mark on his heart.

James describes an inherent part of the mystical experience; the evaporation of the boundaries of the ego. For James, Goodall, and Watts the distinction between oneself and the surrounding world becomes as meaningless as the distinction between “me” and “I”, yet they all took different paths to the same destination – where the distinction that lies at the heart of all distinctions is shattered.

Now, the fact that this experience can be triggered by altering neurochemistry, and not only after a lifetime mastering meditation and prayer, reveals exactly how the brain is a filter.

The Default Mode Network and the Ego-Filter

Robin Carhartt-Harris

Through his groundbreaking research on the effects of varying quantities of the “magic” ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms, psilocybin, Robin Carhartt-Harris of the Psychedelic Research Institute has shown that the part of the brain known as the Default Mode Network (DMN) is consistently turned-down during experiences with psychedelic chemicals.

This network is tied to personal reflection, rumination, remembering the past and planning for the future. Hence, it is widely considered to be the physical location of the ego.

The DMN is highly active in ordinary states of awareness. It increases in activity specifically when one focuses on oneself. It also functions like a capital city, a central hub where information from all parts of the brain talk to each other. It’s from the action of the DMN, and therefore the ego, that we get a useful picture of what is happening around us.

Of course, this research was shocking because many expected to see a general increase in brain activity from psychedelics. For such profoundly altered awareness to correlate with decreased activity in this area of the brain gives the impression that the DMN is intimately part of the lens through which we generally experience the world.

Because it is. We see the world through an egoic lens.

“…surprisingly, only decreases in cerebral blood flow and BOLD signal were seen, and these were maximal in hub regions, such as the thalamus and anterior and posterior cingulate cortex (ACC and PCC)…These results strongly imply that the subjective effects of psychedelic drugs are caused by decreased activity and connectivity in the brain’s key connector hubs, enabling a state of unconstrained cognition.” (emphasis my own) – Abstract from Carhartt-Harris’ research article.

Black Elk

A captivating rabbit-hole is only a few google searches away, where you can find countless descriptions of “ego-death” or “ego-dissolution” that mirror what happens when the DMN is quieted. Like James’, Most are triggered by psychedelics. But like the following, many are not.

Black Elk was a Native American medicine man, and when we was only nine years old he fell gravely ill. During this illness, he reportedly fell into a mystical trance and had this vision:

“I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy…but anywhere is the center of the world.”

Black Elk further said that, “The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells Wakan-Taka (the Great Spirit), and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us”

Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux – John G. Neihardt

It is important to note that this mystical experience corresponded with an intense physiological change, the boy’s illness. Though we would have no way of knowing, we can reasonably suspect that somehow the activity of his DMN decreased in this mystical state.

Black Elk echoes the age-old suspicion that we don’t see reality as it is, we merely see an illusion – the illusion of separation.

Donald Hoffman

The philosopher Donald Hoffman has re-enforced this suspicion, and has written a powerful defense of the brain-as-filter hypothesis in his book The Case Against Reality.

“Our perceptions,” writes Hoffman, of “objects were not shaped to reveal objective reality, but to disclose the one thing that matters in evolution: fitness payoffs. Physical objects are satisfying displays of crucial information about payoffs that govern our survival and reproduction. They are data structures that we create and destroy.”

In short, evolution has not equipped us to see objective reality. Hoffman’s research has shown that seeing more of reality than what is necessary for survival is almost always a disadvantage for an organism.

Just as we have evolved to see a specific range of colors out of the much larger scale of possible detectable photons – so too have we evolved to reduce reality to a system which always contrasts a distinct “this” as opposed to “that” out of the much larger possible scale of what might constitute modes of existence.

Ordinary awareness has evolved to reveal what is useful, not what is true. And what is more useful than the distinction between “me” and “everything else”?

Language is the tool of the Ego

He who speaks does not know, he who knows does not speak.

Tao Te Ching

One of the most jarring effects of the mystical experience is how language utterly fails to express it. People often return to ordinary awareness baffled and clumsily grasping for the right words to express an epiphany they had in the altered state, but they rarely can.

It’s not that the person simply does not know the right words, it’s that words are inherently bad tools for conveying the experience. Like the ego, language relies on things being actually different from each other.

Words aren’t useful if they all mean the same thing, and an ego isn’t useful if it identifies with everything that exists. Neither are adapted to a mystical level of awareness because they are tools built for the only world we know, one in which survival and reproduction are everything.

Night and day, man and woman, right and wrong, up and down, me and you…this is the world we experience. We only ever know what something is because we can contrast it to something else. And even if we can’t imagine what the exact opposite of something might be, like a dog, we at least implicitly understand what it means to lack that thing, i.e., I at least know what is not a dog.

But to Goodall, James, Black Elk and countless others who experienced mystical awareness, distinctions disappear and everything appears as one whole object. Nothing is lacking anything.

It’s for this reason that words, which necessarily imply distinction, cannot come close to conveying the experience.

The Greeks had a word for this experience: muein. It’s the linguistic ancestor of words like “mystic” and “mystery”. It means “to close one’s eyes or lips” and also “to initiate”. It has the weight of something beyond description – a word for the un-wordable.

In the Varieties of Religious Experience, James defines a particular aspect of the mystical state: the noetic quality. This refers to the deeply-felt sense of absolute certainty- a knowledge of something clear as day and more real and true than anything else one has experienced. It gives the impression that you have discovered the hidden punchline to a timeless joke, or the key the cosmic game:

“…mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge. They are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of significance and importance, all inarticulate though they remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority or after-time.”

The unitive experience is so powerful, it has the power to turn a staunch atheist into at least an agnostic, as psychedelic studies have repeatedly shown. Mystical experience shakes us to our core, and often flips our lives upside down for a meaningful amount of time.

The true language of mystical experience isn’t in words at all, it’s in the widened eyes of the one who caught a glimpse beyond the veil. You can hear it in his ecstatic laughter and read it in his joyful tears. His nonsensical babbling is the best description.

The language of the heart, not the mind, communicates what he encountered in the unitive state.

The Tao that can be spoken is not the Tao.

Part 2