When I regained consciousness, I was completely naked in a hot spring grasping onto the crucifixion of Jesus. At this point, I was convinced that I was dead. I think what gives life its “lifeness” is the continuity; Experience A, usually leads to experience B and so on, but this time it felt like I was thrown right into B without the A. Panic simmered as I tried to figure out what was happening. I opened and closed my hands to see if these things I am seeing are really my hands and drew the conclusion as I uttered, “damn, I really am dead huh.” The thoughts of my family and my friends entered my mind and I felt sorry for the sorrow and suffering I will bring to them, as they hear the news that I died on 500ug of LSD at some random temple in Thailand. I tried to track down the memory as to how I ended up here. I knew that I took a heroic dose of LSD with the company of a tripsitter. But really, how did I end up here?
"...and that’s why we don’t have free will!"
proclaimed Brian.
"That’s some bullshit, Brian. If I don’t have free will, was I determined to do this?"
As I made movements that resembled a stroke patient, Brian replied,
"Yes, and it seems like it was determined for you to look really dumb right now."
In my junior and senior years of high school, I found myself getting into philosophical conversations with a friend. The topic consisted of Free will, god, robots, and so on. It was one of those conversations where I often lost sense of time and by the end of the conversation, my brain was fried. I started asking bigger questions and finding myself stumbling and yet marveling at THIS. By THIS, I mean the experience of being Mahiro; “Why and how am I seeing the world the way I am seeing the world?” “What is the point of all of this?”
At this point in my life, I was an atheist and had no tolerance for voodoo. I frowned at the word god and said things like, “I don’t believe in god, because it can’t be scientifically proven.” I thought science was the ultimate shovel to unearth the Truth. If science was a company, I would have been the best spokesperson, and if science was a person, I would have been the biggest simp. And when it came to deciding what major to pursue I naturally decided on Behavioral Neuroscience.
The prospect of figuring out the Truth about how thoughts, emotions, and everything else are manifested made me excited to learn about the brain. After all, if I learn everything about the brain and the nerves, I should be able to know how consciousness works, right?
Completing my first year at Northeastern, I started to notice a prominent pattern in the neuroscience community. Professors and students alike never fail to utter sentences similar to, “We don’t know at all how the brain works.” after every two sentences. And when it comes to the topic of consciousness? Forget it. Countless eyes rolled when I tried to find ways to squeeze in questions of consciousness in my first-year intro to biopsych class.
Even some things that we “know” and were taught in my classes turn out to be misinformation. For example, one of the first things we learn in a typical neuroscience class is the function of the motor cortex. Turns out, the idea of the motor cortex sending signals for the body to move has been put in jeopardy over 20 years ago with the finding of mirror neurons. With all the shortcomings of neuroscience taught in school, I figured I will use college as a base knowledge so I can learn more elaborate neuroscience outside of the class by listening to podcasts or reading books.
This was when I stumbled across the book How to Change Your Mind by Michel Pollen. The subtitle of this book is “What the new science of psychedelics teaches us about consciousness, dying, addiction, depression, and transcendence.” The author maintained a scientific approach as he explored the possibility and mind-bending experience of using psychedelics. Despite this, he dared to step into the spiritual aspect of life, which had me intrigued.
You go deep enough or far out enough in consciousness and you will bump into the sacred. It’s not something we generate; it’s something out there waiting to be discovered. And this reliably happens to nonbelievers as well as believers. Second, that, whether occasioned by drugs or other means, these experiences of mystical consciousness are in all likelihood the primal basis of religion.
His claim that even if you don’t believe in god, if you eat this mushroom, you will undergo spiritual experience made me curious as to what it will do to me. Exploring consciousness through drug use was more bewildering and fun rather than just listening to a lecture. After all, Northeastern encourages students to pursue “experiential learning.”
Through time, I began to entertain dualist concepts, where mind and body are in two different matters. This philosophy was popular for most of human history but has been put aside by newer thoughts, materialism. A materialist generally believes that physical activity in the body creates consciousness. In my high school days, I would without a question identify myself as a materialist. However, as I contemplated on my Psilocybin cubensis administration on healthy volunteer research with a population size of one (some might call it tripping on shroom), I recognized my assumption that consciousness simply arising from neurons firing is not a guarantee.
With my mind wandering, I walked into a lecture at the NEURON club at Northeastern. I can’t remember what the lecture was on, but I do remember being very intrigued. It zoomed into the synaptic level of how some emotion is made in our brain. As I scanned through the slide a little cloud of questions formed from the sky of fascination. I asked the professor, “Is neuroscience based on a materialistic assumption?” Professor, after being stunned by such a curve ball of a question (or by a lag from Zoom, but the reality is what you make it, right?) said, “Yes, we need to quantify an abstract concept so that scientific methods can be applied.”
Someone saw Nasrudin searching for something on the ground.
“What have you lost, Mulla?” he asked
“My key.” said the Mulla.
So they both went down on their knees and looked for it. After a time the other man asked:
“Where exactly did you drop it?”
“In my own house.”
“Then why are you looking here?”
“There is more light here than inside my own house.”
This parable highlights the “Streetlight effect.”, a tendency for people to seek truth where the process of seeking is easy, rather than where truth is. I am not saying that neuroscience is easy, but it is observable. It is more favorable for a scientist to focus on some things with physical matter, ex) action potentials, neurotransmitters, brains, etc, than to study things with possibly no matter such as biofield, spirit, mind, etc. I didn’t think that neuroscience was useless either. I simply realized if I wanted to figure out what consciousness is, I must expand the scope of my consciousness. These changes in my mind brought me further away from the community I desperately wanted to be part of. I was taking a different approach to learn than most BNS majors planning to go to medical school. I was more appealed by what was not under the streetlight, willing to search for the Truth in the dark.
In parallel to getting deeper into my BNS undergraduate degree and starting to take harder classes, I read a lot of books taking alternative approaches to consciousness. Some books caused a lot of friction in my mind as they explored concepts I was not comfortable with. By the time I read the book Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda, I would consider myself spiritual, but not religious. Yogananda, who is a Yogi(practitioner of Karma Yoga), wrote his life story that can be hard for the western mind to comprehend. This is the review I left on July 4th, 2022,
This book consists of so many stories that are incredible and hard to explain with modern science. But I have a hunch that there has got to be something behind these stories. (ex: telepathy, astral traveling) The book is a must-read for anyone that considers themselves as spiritual, but not religious as the book tells stories that make you think twice before dismissing a god.
What shocked me the most about this book is the usage of the word “god”, which I previously had to hold in my knee-jerk reaction to throw up upon hearing the word. He writes, “god is simple. Everything else is complex. Do not seek absolute values in the relative world of nature.” and “You do not have to struggle to reach god, but you do have to struggle to tear away the self-created veil that hides him from you” Upon finishing the book, I pondered; If god is so prominent and vital part of life, why hasn’t science proved or disproved god yet? How can I as a BNS student integrate and make sense of these two different approaches to consciousness? I was stumped. I even contemplated dropping out of school to learn the alternative way of approaching these questions. But in the end, I decided to take a gap semester to go on a backpacking trip in Southeast Asia, where Buddhism is prominent.
When I got to Thailand after traveling in Malaysia, I decided I wanted to go on a meditation retreat. I found a 10-day silent meditation retreat in the South part of Thailand. It was teaching a Theravada Buddhism meditation method called “Anapanasati '' or mindfulness with breathing. Each day started at 4:00A.M and ended at 9:00 PM, and in between those times, we meditated, listened to dharma talk, or ate two meals. We were to keep complete silence throughout the retreat and were to hand in any distractions such as phone, books, or anything that can be used to escape the here and the now.
I had been meditating for about a year up to this point, but with inconsistency and lack of structure. Meditating for more than eight hours a day while maintaining silence was also a completely different experience than meditating for 20 minutes in my bedroom. The basic concept being taught was that the body controls feeling and the feeling controls thought. So to control your thoughts, you must be able to control your body. And to control your body, you must control your breath. This sounds easy enough on paper, learn to breathe properly, and voila, enlightenment. But this could not be further from the reality I faced, as what I learned in these 10 days was not how to control my thoughts, but rather realizing how uncontrollable my thoughts were.
In the retreat, we alternated between sitting meditation and walking meditation as sitting crosslegged for hours can be demanding for the body. During the walking meditation, we were instructed to isolate each movement of the stride, for example, lift a foot, move a foot, drop a foot, lift a foot, and so on, and keep repeating these words in the head. We were to keep walking for about 30 feet and turn back and forth. I did this for over 20 hours in the retreat and in spite of my determination to only think about walking while walking, I could not walk a single leg(30 feet) without my mind wandering elsewhere. This was frustrating, to say the least, and at the end of the retreat, I asked an experienced meditator about what had happened. He told me that the mind will wander regardless of how concentrated I am, but to be concentrated means to be able to catch the mind starting to wonder before it has enough time to have thoughts. Now, this sounds hella meta, but this resonated with me as I was assured that it was the nature of the human mind to wonder and was not due to my lack of effort. I left the retreat feeling all zen and convinced that by continuing to practice Anapanasati, I can gain a better understanding of consciousness. (And hitchhiked to go to the airport but the language barrier took me to some random alley and missed the flight)
The journey eventually took me to a town called Pai in the north of Thailand. Here, I was invited to a Kirtan, a Hindu devotional chanting toward deities, in a temple made by a couple over a decade. The temple had several buildings and 16 hot springs in total, which were decorated with crystals, every gods you can think of in all traditions, and a bunch of photos of Carl Jung. In the library, there were several shelves dedicated to just psychedelic books, astrology books, or once again Carl Jung books.
I became friends with the founder of the temple, Hindu Dave, and he allowed me to borrow books from his library. I read two books here, both about psychedelics: Food of God by Terrance Mckenna and a Way of a Psychonaut by Stan Grof, M.D. Stan Grof is a Czech-born psychiatrist, who is one of the principal developers of transpersonal psychology and research into the use of non-ordinary states of consciousness for purposes of psychological healing, deep self-exploration, and obtaining growth and insights into the human psyche. Psychonaut, according to Grof is, “systemic pursuit and use of holotropic states of consciousness for healing, self-exploration, spiritual, philosophical, SCIENTIFIC QUEST, ritual activity, and artistic inspiration.”
I was on a scientific quest after all. Grof, who has treated patients for more than 50 years inducing holotropic states, through psychedelic or breathwork, is certain that materialistic views on consciousness are false and consciousness is not the product of the brain alone. He thinks, “Psychedelics, used responsibly and with proper caution, would be for psychiatry what the microscope is for biology and medicine or the telescope is for astronomy.” And so, I decided, it would be a perfect time for me to do psychedelics, used responsibly and with proper caution, for the scientific quest. This means finding the proper setting, which means a good location and someone to look after you. Luckily Dave allowed me to use one of his guest houses in his temple and my friend Juan, who has experience guiding a trip, agreed to tripsit me. In Grof’s book, he also mentioned the power of a “heroic dose”, and its spiritual benefits, so talking to Juan and Hindu Dave, we settled on taking 500µg of LSD. (LSD overdose is quite unheard of)
Biking from my house to the temple on the day of the big trip, I wanted to be clear about my intentions. Hindu Dave greeted Juan and I and guided us into the guest room. Dave made sure to set up an environment that would induce a good trip and told me that I can go into the hot spring whenever. Juan insisted on adding lemon to my LSD so he went back to his house to grab some. As I sat there in a meditative state waiting for my friend and his lemon, I found the book Tao Te Ching by Laozi on the bookshelf. Impressively, this was the book I had been looking to find a hard copy of during my travels. I read this book a year prior but did not understand anything, but I felt like I was starting to understand what Laozi was trying to say.
He writes,
The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
This went right over my head at first glance as I was confused as to why he would write a whole book about a concept that can’t be described in words using words. But now I see the significance of this. Words are merely the abstraction of the world and to truly understand the universe, I had the hunch that it must be done in some other way. Words are also incapable of describing the “now” and if there is only the“now” as a Buddhist might suggest, words carry no meaning. So to truly experience the full spectrum of the holotropic state, I had to let go of words along with the mental structure I constructed with words, also known as ego. Simply put, during the next five hours or so, I will no longer be Mahiro. Mahiro will be dead!
“Are you ready?”
Juan entered the room with a flute in one hand and a lemon in another.
About 30 minutes into the journey, my body started to vigorously shake. The shake was autonomic and felt a strong surge of energy. As I was still fairly conscious at this time, I asked Juan what was happening. He said,
“It’s prana or chi. It’s easier to cultivate it when you are on psychedelics, but you can feel it at any time if you practice.”
“Noted”
I made a mental note to practice Tai Chi or something once I go back to the sober world. From this point on, every second brought an exponential level of absurdity. I was in a room with people and animals with no limitation of time, pondering on this same question. This question cannot be logically solved as it doesn’t exist in the realm of logic and words. I then realized every endeavor was “all the same” and god is a good intentional trickster. I became friends with Socrates. And eventually, a segment of time started to collapse into smaller and smaller segments until time eventually became null. AHHHHHHHH
… … …
When I regained consciousness, I was completely naked in a hot spring grasping onto the crucifixion of Jesus. At this point, I was convinced that I was dead. After contemplating how I ended up here, I went into the house and saw myself in the mirror. After seeing this human on the other side of the mirror, I asked Juan if everything was okay, like seven times. He reassured me each time that everything was okay and I was still alive. There was so much to unpack. I felt ungrounded for the next two days trying to make sense of what I just experienced. A psychedelic trip is like a dream in the sense that as soon as you wake up, all the details escape your mind unless you make a conscious effort to remember them. I spent a lot of time just sitting by the river recalling my experience. I did not know how I would integrate this experience into my worldview. I was also struggling to justify going back to school if I thought that words and logic can’t explain the ultimate question. I felt like continuing backpacking will show me more answers.
On the third day after the trip, I sat by my usual spot by the river to meditate. I felt more grounded than in the past two days. I remembered more details from the trip and was bewildered by such a baffling nature of life. How do a couple of drops of chemicals induce such episodes? Even if the brain is not the only thing that concocts consciousness, it is a vital organ in the process. And even if science cannot explain the ultimate questions, it certainly gives answers to questions surrounding it. I became at peace with the phases of life I am going through and by returning to school, I may be able to add more to my toolbox. I might even be able to bring in some outsider perspectives to neuroscience, I know that diversity in thought is a key ingredient for solving complex problems.
Everything around me was glittering as I slowly lifted my eyes open. The peaceful yet unforgiving motion of the river induces delightful emotion. A fluffy cloud cut through the vast vibrant sky filled with blue. A big rooster fluttering its wing to impress a hen, perhaps to leave an offspring. A smile organically formed across my face knowing that I get to take in all the beautiful stimulation with my consciousness. I felt like I was given a second chance in life after my death a couple of days prior. I guess it's not so bad to be convinced of your death.
And so, if life gives you a lemon, you add LSD.