These might be my notes on Aidan Lyon’s book “Psychedelic Experience: Revealing the Mind”

An excellent and rigorous book on how mind-revealing experiences relate to psychedelics, meditation, and many more things! Truly a page-turner (at the gates of dawn).

Psychedelic experience

  • ‘Psychedelic’ in this book is meant in its etymological sense: “mind-revealing” (≠ psyche-cryptic), i.e. revealing in our awareness hidden parts of our mind, broadly construed (thoughts, sensations, emotions, etc.)
  • Inference vs experience (analytic vs psychedelic philosophy) (theory vs practice)
    • Learning through inference vs through experience:
      • Learning about our mind through inference is like trying to understand a stranger’s mind: we observe its patterns and behaviour and try to induce its inner workings
    • Reasoning abstractly vs feeling the generalized emotions. In an ethical case involving the suffering of distant people, we could abstract away our emotional biases (replace e.g. England, Russia, Germany with A, B, C); or feel the generalized emotions. (× “blood of people conveniently far away”, At the Existentialist Café)
  • You can train any mental capacity you wish. Feeling generalized emotions (metta, compassion practices), heartfulness/open-heartedness (heart-centered breathing exercises), attention control (focussed-attention meditation), non-reactivity and creativity (open-monitoring meditation), playfulness, energy levels… You can deliberately cultivate any aspect of your personality and mind and it will grow over time.
  • Dimensions define a space and let you compare points.
  • Four dimensions to a psychedelic experience:
    • scope (localized or global?)
    • clarity
      • detail (≠ omission) (defined or diffused?)
      • veracity (≠ commission) (real or distorted?)
    • novelty (top-of-mind or deeply hidden?)
    • duration (short or enduring?)
  • An experience can be more or less mind-revealing than another based on any of these four dimensions. An experience can be maximally psychedelic in four different ways – max-scope, max-clarity, max-novelty, max-duration.
  • Higher dosage doesn’t mean more psychedelic. The trip can have e.g. more scope & novelty but less clarity & duration.
  • The peak of the trip might not be the most psychedelic. Your experience can shift along the four dimensions throughout the trip; the peak of the trip might be highly novel but very unclear.
  • The most psychedelic moment might come after the trip.
  • Psychedelic experiences can reveal while simultaneously distorting; can be psychedelic in some aspects and psyche-cryptic in others.

Attention

  • “The attentional system involves allocating attentional resources so as to bring things in and out of our awareness.” “The parts that receive extra attentional resources either are more likely to appear; or appear more vividly.”
    • Attention as a zoom-lens spotlight: you can direct it and increase its scope, at the cost of definition. (Eriksen and Yeh 1985)
    • Attention a spotlight with adjustable gradient: continuous transition between focus and periphery, more or less abrupt based on task (e.g. relaxed attention, focussed attention) (Gradient model)
  • Two main components to the attentional system: attentional resources and the ability to direct them.
    • Confusion around the term “attention”, sometimes referring to the resources (“focussed attention”, “divided attention”), sometimes to the control over the resources (“good attention”)
  • Attentional resources are limited, and we don’t use them as efficiently as we could.
  • Attention is a limited resource that enhances cognitive processing
    • Attentional resources are limited: if it is more concentrated in one region, it must be less concentrated elsewhere.
    • Attention enhances cognitive processing:
      • Our attentional system up-selects some of the available information for enhanced processing; down-selects some of it for reduced processing.
        • Attention both amplifies and inhibits: Attention can make things bigger (e.g. wonder, heartfulness, connection), other things smaller (e.g. self-doubt)
        • Deliberate amplifying. Hence the power of metta: by deliberately bringing loving kindness to our awareness, we amplify it. What do you decide to amplify? You can choose (to an extent) what you wish to bring to your awareness at any given moment. You have agency over your attention.
      • Salience maps is how the attention system decides what to pay more attention to, and what to pay less attention to.
        • Salience maps let the brain know ahead of time what to focus on by default based on likelihood of being deserving of attention.
        • Deliberately switch salience maps: decide on what stimuli to pay more attention to, what to pay less attention to (× MindApps)
          • e.g. more attention to drive, energy, clarity; less attention to laziness, fatigue, distractions, procrastination.
          • Different salience maps for different contexts (× Your Symphony of Selves)
  • Meditation is a training of attention.
  • Psychedelics increase attentional resources; meditation allocates them more efficiently. Meditation help better manage the attentional resources freed up by psychedelics. Both focussed-attention (maintaining focus) and open-monitoring (non-reactivity – not getting sucked in) help. Meditating during a psychedelic trip lets you more efficiently/effectively allocate the surplus of attentional resources.
    • Psychedelics concentrate, meditation directs.
    • Psychedelic trips randomize the objects of attention – the salience map gets upended.
    • In psychedelic trips, the attentional surplus can be yanked around chaotically and reactively (“bad trips”) or settle in a blissful, non-reactive way (“mystical experiences”).
    • Meditation and psychedelics can work synergistically, e.g. with meditation increasing the clarity and duration of the insights.
  • ADHD is a surplus of attentional resources – making them more difficult to control. Surplus of resources, resulting deficit of control. It can however be harnessed productively. (Hallowell and Ratey 2021)
  • Attention to a resource develops it. Direct your attention to a sense/medium to increase your aptitude at it. “The brain has latent resources that can be consciously activated by focusing attention on them.” (× Presence is a gift; healing people by providing them with attention; WishWellVillage)
    • Deity meditation helping with spatial tasks: “They found that 20 minutes of deity meditation — which is a form of focused-attention meditation that directs attention to an internally generated image of a deity — increased performance in image-maintenance and spatial tasks for experienced meditators.”
    • E.g. imagining music to develop auditory skills; practicing away from the instrument; visualizations (Psycho-Cybernetics); exercising one’s sense of atmosphere or feeling to better embody it (× Chekhov) (sixth sense).
    • Visualizations activities and exercises can also serve as a practice of focussed-attention meditation. (× Psycho-Cybernetics)

Meditation

  • “A rough characterization of meditation: “the practice of sitting still, allowing the mind to settle down, and maintaining a stable state of clarity and non-reactivity.”
  • Two kinds of meditation: focussed-attention meditation, and open-monitoring meditation
    • Focussed-attention: direction one’s attention to a specific object, e.g. one’s breath
    • Open-monitoring: noticing thoughts come and go, not reacting to them
  • Comparable to ​​​​​​​​concentration (samadhi) and mindfulness (sati)
  • Two successes in meditation: noticing your thoughts have wandered, and bringing your focus back to your object of attention. “Catching the fish and bringing it back into the bowl.”
    • “The equivalent of exercising a mental muscle.” “You DO become better at it with practice.” “Like physical training.”
  • Non-reactivity helps maximize allocation of attentional resources to the task at hand – a reaction directs your attention to what you are reacting to, away from the current task. “By looking, you are able to see more than if you are looking and reacting (judging)”
    • “Reacting to” is a waste of attention; is attention allocated inefficiently.
  • Meditation provides better access to the subconscious. By directing our attention on parts of our mind that typically don’t receive it, they become more likely to surface to awareness. Meditation brings more of unconscious thoughts to awareness — more frequent good ideas.
    • unconscious - subconsciously affecting behaviour - in awareness
      • Some thoughts, ideas might not be in awareness, yet still affect behaviour. For example, a trigger might cause a certain behaviour without one realizing it. “A traumatic memory may be amplified enough to create feelings of anxiety, but not enough for the memory to enter awareness.”
  • Focussing on something subtle until it comes to awareness: Attention set on a nebulous area progressively clarifies it.
  • Meditation precipitates high-clarity, low-novelty spontaneous psychedelic experiences.
  • “8 weeks of meditative training (30-45 min of daily practice)”

Mindfulness

  • Mindfulness is not losing your keys in the first place; a psychedelic experiencing is suddenly finding your keys after you lost them.
  • Different definitions to the nebular concept of mindfulness:
    • Being in control of your mind. “Not losing your keys in the first place” Clarity of thought; “lucid awareness of the mind’s objects”. Ease of concentration; “the ability to call anything in the mind into awareness and to hold it there indefinitely with perfect clarity”. (Meta-)awareness of one’s thoughts.
      • Paying non-judgmental attention to the present moment (open monitoring) – state mindfulness. (Regarding non-judgment, also see Come As You Are)
        • Presence is attention directed to the present moment. Presence is simply directing your sharp attention to the present moment.
      • …or the awareness that comes from that. – trait mindfulness.
    • Living spiritually. The ability to remember and hold in mind various important ideas, including the importance of paying attention to things in a particular way. Etymologically, “sati” (mindfulness) means “memory” (remembering Truth, impermanence, the present moment, etc. – “what is otherwise only too easily forgotten”). “Remember God”.
  • State mindfulness vs trait mindfulness: how mindful you are in this present moment vs how mindful is your disposition (trainable).
    • State mindfulness vs trait mindfulness: by regularly practicing the former, one cultivates the latter.
  • Open-monitoring and focussed-attention meditation work synergistically towards trait mindfulness. Mindfulness is paying (1) non-judgmental attention to (2) the present-moment. Focussed-attention helps with directing and maintaining attention (2); open-monitoring helps with non-reactivity (1).
  • Characterizations of mindfulness: “Mindfulness correlated with higher levels of grit (tenacity)” “More mindful individuals were more likely to align their behaviour with their intentions”
  • Meditation/mindfulness helps us break free from patterns. (× Psychedelic “Reset”) (non-reactivity) By creating space between the steps (slowing down the automatic chain if action) and noticing them more clearly, we can deliberately interrupt the chain. (× karma; disentangling actions from reactions)
  • Orthopraxy over orthodoxy: “Various schools of Buddhism emphasize the importance of orthopraxy (correct practice) over orthodoxy (correct belief), resulting in a form of spiritual pragmatism (Braak 2001, p. xiii)”
    • (Also: not getting bogged down by theory, models, beliefs)

Psychedelics

  • “Unspecific amplifiers (of the mind)”
    • ”[Psychedelics] function as unspecific amplifiers that increase the cathexis (energetic charge) associated with the deep unconscious contents of the psyche and make them available for conscious processing.” (Grof 2009)
      • Psychedelics bring more of the subconscious to awareness.
      • Psychedelics help in psychotherapy by bringing more of the subconscious to awareness.
    • By amplifying everything, you are forced to deal with stuff (T.)
    • (× Over-indulgence precipitating the next stage (Future Buddha), The Hero With a Thousand Faces)
  • How you name it is how you think of it: psychedelics vs hallucinogens vs entheogens vs psychotomometic drugs (e.g. “partner”, “lover”, “boyfriend”)
  • Psychedelic “reset”: the idea that psychedelic trips temporarily interrupt habitual mental dynamics that can keep the mind trapped in suboptimal states.
  • Psychedelic trips approximate an increase in mindfulness.
  • Integration helps make (short) psychedelic experiences more durable.
  • Beliefs have varying strengths.
  • False insights: “Insights arising from psychedelic methods can be false even though they may come attached wih strong feelings of certainty” Verify the veracity or coherence of an insight during a psychedelic trip with the rest of your epistemological system.

Phenomenal transparency

  • Phenomenal transparency vs phenomenal opacity: how much immediately, unmediatedly you are in the world; vs observing yourself
    • Examples
      • Seeing through the actors vs noticing the laugh track Watching a film absorbed with phenomenal transparency (being absorbed in it) vs phenomenal opacity (e.g. noticing the laugh track). Either seeing through the actors, or noticing them as opaque layer, distracting from the experience.
      • Experiencing the environment “through the bike”. Riding a bike: experiencing the environment (bumps, textures) “through” the bike, though without noticing the bike itself (phenomenal transparency) — vs consciously pedalling (phenomenal opacity).
      • “Playing through” an instrument vs “playing on” an instrument — the musical instrument either as unnoticeable or noticeable medium (e.g. also computer keyboard). A mastered instrument becomes an extension of yourself, lets you express yourself in ways you cannot on your own.
      • Socially: being self-conscious or uninhibited (see Sartre, The Look; also Trying Not to Try: spontaneity is hard to fake)
      • “Flow states”
    • Phenomenal transparency liberates attention, to be used elsewhere. By way of illustration, when the instrument is mastered and made transparent and can be played automatically, the attention is liberated and can go elsewhere (e.g. to the creative contents of the performance).
    • Phenomenal transparency is typically associated with greater well-being.
      • Phenomenal transparency promotes connection; opacity promotes disconnect.
        • “increases in opacity can be characterized as a kind of “stepping back” from experiences and taking on a more analytics or “distant observer” relation to it. […] In contrast, increases in transparency involve a “plunging” into experience, taking on a more involved, engaged relation to it. Increases in transparency tend to involve increases in meaningfulness and connection, and a kind of union with the objects of experience — the sort of unity with experience that arises in flow states. In extreme cases, this culminates in a mystical experience whereby one is no longer in a relational stance with respect to anything and is instead simply being — in a state of knowing-by-identity
        • “Increases in opacity tend to involve the opposite kind of change — meaning tends to be stripped out of experience, and one becomes more disconnected from its elements.”
          • (Passing thought: could too much open-monitoring meditation lead to de-realization by increasing phenomenal opacity (of thoughts) ?)
            • (Personal relevance: towards the end of my most “spiritual” period, I certainly felt a craving for spontaneity and being more “in” the world — paradoxically.)
      • Phenomenal transparency precludes self-criticism. You cannot criticize something that’s not there.
        • “Represented opaquely, the self is experienced as an object that can be, for example, criticized by the mind. When experienced with transparency, the opaque self-representation is forgotten, and the self takes on an invisible quality to it that allows one’s attentional resources to flow more freely and completely through that representation, thereby manifesting one’s authentic self.”
        • “The removal of this illusion removes the unnecessary internal conflicts and divisions that hold us back from complete well-being.”
        • “*Loss of Ego: Self-Forgetfulness. Loss of Self-Consciousness. |…] (You tend to lose the shyness and bashfulness of the adolescent, the painful awareness of being looked at, etc.) |…] This kind of self-forgetfulness is one of the paths to finding on’s true identity, one’s real self, one’s authentic nature, one’s deepest nature. It is almost always felt as pleasant and desirable.” (Maslow)
      • Phenomenal transparency precludes dissociation from self — there is nothing to dissociate from.
    • Phenomenal transparency is the key to compassion, e.g. feeling generalized emotions (of distant crowds). It can be practiced. A lack of empathy is a problem of phenomenal opacity.
      • Mind-revealing can be world-revealing. If one assumes phenomenal opacity, being oblivious to the suffering of certain people is being oblivious to one’s own suffering (by feeling more of the world through our self, we know more of the world).
      • Mind-revealing can mean soul-revealing (revealing parts of our innermost self).
    • Psychedelics typically increase phenomenal transparency.
      • — though they can increase phenomenal opacity as well; e.g. noticing your behaviour. (cf mindfulness/open-monitoring/non-reactivity)
      • Mystical experiences happen by going to the extreme of phenomenal transparency; not of phenomenal opacity. (!)

Psychedelics vs Meditation/Mindfulness

  • Meditation (mindfulness) shifts the origin, while psychedelics temporarily bring you deeper in psychedelic space, temporarily shift your coordinates.
    • Mindfulness is a movable launchpad for psychedelic experience.
    • The corollary: having a more mindful baseline brings you deeper in psychedelic space during trips, all other things being equal.
    • Psychedelics let you have one glimpse. Meditation lets you have that glimpse repeatedly (with practice, having shifted your origin). (see also: insights from meditation tend to have longer duration than insights from trips.)
  • Different main dimensions in the psychedelic space:
    • Psychedelics: high scope & novelty, low clarity & duration
    • Meditation: low scope & novelty, high clarity & duration
  • Turning up the music vs turning down the noise
    • Psychedelics turn up everything. Meditation turn down the noise. Both result in “hearing the music better” (thinking more clearly).
    • When meditation and psychedelics are used conjointly, effects compound.
  • Psychedelic retreats (with meditation) vs Meditation retreats (aided by psychedelics): two different focusses.
  • “Psychedelics can provide new and valuable “raw material” to work with during meditation”
  • Two ways to increase the mindfulness of a psychedelic trip: 1) by being mindful; 2) by having a trip-sitter, an external “mindful mind”

Memories

  • “Not forgotten, just inaccessible” “Always available, just inaccessible (dormant)” — just like wisdom (× Meno, anamnesis)
  • Many dormant memories. “Many of our memories are lying dormant, never active enough to reach awareness spontaneously, never deliberately retrieved, and never activated by environmental cues”
  • Ways a memory can appear:
    • environmental cues (trigger)
    • deliberate recall (sheer will)
    • spontaneously, e.g. IAMs
  • Many memories are difficult to retrieve for lack of environmental cues.
  • Diffuse attention (open-monitoring meditation) increases the frequency of IAMs (involuntary autobiographical memories — memories about one’s own life that appear in awareness spontaneously without attempt to recall them)
  • Memories have to cross a certain relevance threshold before appearing in our awareness — otherwise we would be constantly bombarded with IAMs during normal experience.
  • Psychedelics, by freeing up additional attentional resources, allow for more memories to reach awareness.
  • Remembering can be psychedelic — at two levels: revealing the memory, or what it stands for.
  • The four dimensions of psychedelic space can apply to memories: novelty, clarity, scope, duration The (mind-revealing) experience of memory can be mapped onto the psychedelic space.
  • “Prospective memory” (intentionality): what one wants to remember during future tasks
  • Songs (and ideas) are like memories, have their own activation pathways (environmental cues).

Hallucinations

  • Hallucinations are the solutions to perceptual problems/input that normally don’t make it to the top. “The brain brainstorms perceptual solutions for reality. Hallucinations are solutions that typically shouldn’t be the top one.” “Hallucinations are like creative ideas in that they pop into your experience as apparent solutions to perceptual problems”
  • “Perception is controlled hallucination” (hallucination is uncontrolled perception) “Under normal circumstances, the mind can quickly find a very good guess, and that is what you consciously perceive as perception. However, there are still all the bad guesses that never make it to awareness. the thought, then, is that these bad guesses may be the hidden hallucinations that psychedelics can reveal.”
    • Psychedelics reveal the alternative solutions. (!)
  • Hallucinations are not created, just censored. “Hallucinations are not “created by the mind on its own”; they are just “another solution to what is being perceived”.
  • Hallucinations can be informal thoughts mapped to experiential reality — a vehicle for consciousness’s contents. (e.g. dreams — cf The Hero With a Thousand Faces: “the mind thinks in symbols”)
  • Brainstorming is hallucinating solutions. “Many of our creative ideas are a bit like “solution hallucinations.””

Creativity

  • Creativity is transformation. “A creative process is just a process that transforms old ideas into new ones.”
  • Creativity is outside our control, but we can create a good environment for it. “The creative process operates largely outside of our awareness.” “This is how insight is supposed to work. your brain is processing the problem, but you don’t have any sense of how it’ going because this processing occurs outside of your awareness. At some point, the solution pops into your awareness. You are surprised any may experience an emotional rush.” “The processing that leads to insight happens largely outside of awareness.”
    • Open monitoring and focussed attention work synergistically for brainstorming : open-monitoring lets you clear the mind and listen (diverge); focussed-attention lets you surface and “zoom in” on a subtle idea (converge). (× Design of Everyday Things: double-diamond model, The Toyota Way, Improvise!) “A diffused state of attention corresponds to you surveying a larger, and deeper, region of the water. Now, once you see a potentially good fish, in order to catch it, it helps to flexibly switch from a diffused state of attention to a focused one.”
  • Ideas don’t pop into our mind. They surface to our awareness. “Ideas don’t pop into our mind. They pop into our awareness after having been generated by unconscious processes.”
  • Open-monitoring meditation is generally more conductive to creative insights than focussed-attention meditation. Open-monitoring meditation greatly increases creative insights.
  • “Creativity heuristics” (creative strategies): recipes for creative problem-solving (cf oblique strategies) (× Improvise)
  • Ideas are like fish; the deeper you go the more beautiful the ideas (David Lynch).

Well-being

  • Psychological suffering is caused by hidden elements. “Psychological suffering is caused by hidden mental elements that drive behaviour and decision-making in undesirable ways”
    • By revealing these hidden elements, psychedelics can help resolve psychological suffering.
  • Feel your fears and go through them. Scarier in anticipation. “Then comes the next layer, and then the next, in this same process of getting a person to face something which he is terribly afraid of, and then find in, when he does face it, that there was nothing to be afraid of in the first place. He has been afraid of it because he has been looking at it through the eyes of the child that he used to be. This is childish misinterpretation. What the child was afraid of and therefore repressed, was pushed beyond the reach of common-sense learning and experience and growing up, and it has to stay there until it’s dragged out by some special process.” (× The Hero With a Thousand Faces (fear), Improvise, Come As You Are)
  • Our analytical mind misses a great deal of reality. Reality isn’t all rational. “Our conscious intellect is too exclusively analytic, rational, numerical, atomistic, conceptual and so it misses a great deal of reality, especially within ourselves.” (Maslow)
  • Psychedelics make more open-minded. “Psychedelics tend to promote increases in the core personality trait of openness to experience.”
  • Self-intimacy (groundedness; staying in touch with one’s own (sacred) self; awareness of breath) “Unless we turn the light within to illuminate the self, how can we hold close the jewel when we are lost in the outlying countryside?” (Eihei Dogen 1200)

Mystical experiences

  • Returning to one’s real self, the non-ego; not the “false self”. “Buddhist philosophy tells us that man must return to his own real self, namely to non-ego. He must awaken to the fact that the self he normally considers to be his self or ego is a false self, full of ignorance and subject to suffering. He must get rid of this false self and see his real self. This real self is the Buddha-nature within every man.”
    • Awakening as remembering.
      • “As here we find in trances, men / Forget the dream that happens then, / Until they fall in trance again” “a condition that ‘cannot be formally remembered, but remains informal, forgotten until we return to it’”
      • “They forgot the sacred objects they had seen before” (× Meno, anamnesis)
  • The ineffability of mystical experiences is twofold:
    • Cannot be described. Speaking about the experience distorts it, as words cannot adequately describe them.
      • Mystical experiences are only vague when you trying to put words to them. “Mystical experiences are not nebulous, vague or maudlin — they only become so when we debase them by verbalisation.”
      • Language traps the mind “Language traps the mind in a discursive form of thought and thereby prevents the mind from attaining the non-discursive insight of mystical experience”
    • Shouldn’t be described. Communicating them might prejudice others and hinder their awakening, as everyone’s path is different (individuality of experience; “over-interpreting”). (× the Buddha’s”unanswered questions)
  • Language is distorted twice: at the emitter’s and at the receiver’s: the problem of language (speaker distortion), and the problem of communication (listener distortion)
  • Letting go (of a model, paradigm), but not rejecting it. (non-judgment (Come As You Are) applied to paradigms (e.g. of one’s past; non-duality) (!)
    • “We avoid making one mistake, but we should also make sure we avoid making the opposite mistake.”
  • Individuals know best how to heal themselves. The humility of psychotherapists: a recognition that the individual is often in a better position than the therapist to sort themselves out. This is the same humility that lies behind the ineffability of mystical experience (mystical guides).
    • Getting out of the way, rather than leading the way. Facilitate and avoid interference.
    • (× Come As You Are: the body knows how to heal)
  • Find mentors that can explain things to you – whose way of explaining things you grok.
  • Beginner’s mind: unlearn what you know, start by not knowing. “We suffer not only from our ignorance, but also from our ignorance of our ignorance”. We cannot learn what we think we already know. (× Socratic aporia)
    • “Allowing oneself to be uncertain — to sit in an extended state of profound doubt and wonder.”
  • As you progress in mindfulness, the focus shifts from gaining it to keeping it.
  • Enlightenment is the realization of one’s true self-nature.
  • “…because it is not an image that he is grasping but the truth” (× Symposium)
  • Alternative & higher states of consciousness: “We may go through life without suspecting their existence.” (sleepwalking). “How long can you keep on living until you realize you’re not living?”
    • Most of us spend most of our lives only in a single state of consciousness. “Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.” (William James, Varieties of Religious Experiences)
      • States of consciousness are parallel, not created. (“shifting”) “Separated by a film” ; “revealed” (not created or transformed — it was already there all along.)
  • One-sentence paper summary: “Wenk-Sormat 2005 found that 20 minutes of focused-attention meditation reduced habitual responding as measured by performance on the Stroop task and an atypical-word-production task.”
  • A definition should be: simple, precise, faithful to the original concept, and theoretically fruitful (criteria for an explication, Carnap 1951)