Psychedelics and Interbeing

I am generally cautious about trying to extract philosophical juice from the psychedelic experience. As one who has a tendency towards over-intellectualising, I am grateful for the clear limits that psychedelics impose on the scope and usefulness of the intellect. It is a useful tool for certain tasks, but it is no more going to help you make sense of a psychedelic experience than it is likely to help enjoy the taste of a watermelon on a hot summer's day. Over the last year I have been giving a lot of thought to what might be useful when accompanying others through a psychedelic experience. It seems to me that a fully realised experience involves a complete disconnection from language. The experience will not be contained within the culturally conditioned structures of language. We may return from the experience babbling incoherently about everything being connected, but I always have the sense that whatever we say about the experience inevitably and always separates us from that experience.

However, it does seem to me that there is a feature of the psychedelic experience that is worth pointing to. It is a feature that gets invoked using many names, but I am reluctant to name it for fear of committing the error that the Zen poet Ryokan warned against; of mistaking the moon for the finger pointing at the moon. Something gets named and then the name becomes currency and gets tossed around in conversation while obscuring whatever it was that it was coined to highlight. However, I have found that through my practice of sound therapy, an opportunity occasionally presents itself which provides an experiential instance of this feature that seems to be so basic to the psychedelic experience. There is a technique that I use to create group cohesion through spontaneous vocalisations together with the rest of the group.

It occurred to me on a recent After the Rains community event, while I was giving instructions for this last activity, to suggest that participants neither try to hide their voice behind the collective voice of the group, nor impose their voice over the collective voice, but rather that the goal should be to allow their voice to blend into the collective, both supporting it and supported by it. I was very pleased when someone later commented on how useful that instruction had been. We agreed that that intermediate point, that place that is neither 'you' nor 'other', that place is where the teaching happens. That place is the teacher. Some fairly dramatic words are used to invoke that place. Leary's ego death, Jung's psychic death, Mckenna's boundary dissolution. But what all these terms point to, I would suggest, is an encounter with a feature of experience that is hiding in plain view. It is our ordinary experience of the world when we are not immersed in language, whether thinking or talking. We might wish to hide our voice because we think that our voice is not good enough. We may try to impose our voice over other people's voices, because we think our voice is special. But if we are fully engaged with trying to find that intermediate point where we are part of a larger whole, and if we are attentive to that whole, then the chatter dies down and something new and spontaneous can be born. And that which is born is the teacher and it persists for as long as we remain fully engaged.

I suppose we carry with us this potentiality at all times, irrespective of whether we have taken psychedelics or not, but there is no doubt that psychedelics make it more present. It shows itself in many and various ways, perhaps it is the true constant of the psychedelic experience. You might have the sensation that the walls are breathing and be unable to distinguish between your own breathing and that of the walls. While walking in the forest, you may feel overwhelmed by gratitude for the life and beauty that suffuses everything. You may feel a joyful sense of connectedness to the group you are with, or your loved ones. This, I would suggest, is our natural state when we are not reinforcing our separateness through the endless repetition of the fundamental dualities that are built into the grammar of our thought processes. But that starts to sound like intellectualising.

Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist monk used the term interbeing to point to this phenomenon. He used the term to highlight that we never exist in isolation. "To be means to inter-be", he said. "A flower has to inter-be with everything else; she has to inter-be with the sunshine, the clouds and everything else. She doesn't have a separate existence." It seems to me that the designation interbeing is a useful term for highlighting this feature of the psychedelic experience which is, in fact, implicit in any experience. We exist always and only ever in relationship and psychedelics help us to pay sufficiently close attention to the content of experience to actually notice this. Terms like ego death refer to an exceptional and dramatic event, whereas the term interbeing can gently and repeatedly remind us of the ordinary way in which we relate to the world. Just be sure not to mistake the pointing finger for the moon.