Perhaps my earliest memory (I must have been two or three) places me on the floor of an aunt’s gloomy sitting room, staring passively at a framed print which hung on one of the walls. An eerie image, it depicted a merry-go-round on which a handful of stiff, almost corpselike figures rode joylessly. Turning my gaze to the blank wall opposite, I saw an afterimage of the print. This really caught my attention. There was no print of a merry-go-round on the wall. But there it was. With unalloyed certainty I concluded that I possessed ‘magic.’ I embraced this secret and guarded it from my parents and friends.
This experience marked my introduction to the separability of mind and world. What I referred to then as my ‘magic’ I would now call consciousness. Enraptured by the possibilities of this strange new substance, I came to design a regime of ‘magical exploration,’ into which I threw myself nightly, in bed, with my eyes shut. Today I would call this fruitful state ‘hypnagogia.’ In my nightly expeditions I came to sense the presence of a chasm bellying out beneath me, a darkness to which my inner eyes, not yet dazzled by the neuroses of adulthood, were still capable of adjusting. This inner depth felt alien, but it felt intimately mine. It was the deep source from which the mundane daily offerings of waking consciousness—the sights and sounds of the day; the bouts of listlessness, joy and anxiety that attended them; and eventually the upswells of sexuality—revealed themselves. And so it came about that my pine bedframe, positioned in a southern region of Tasmania, would bobble above the Mariana Trench, whose horrifying depths churned beneath me in a state of hot and dreamlike reverie.
No sooner had I inducted myself into the secrets of magical exploration than others began inducting me into the rhetoric of adult disenchantment. This began when my parents arranged for me to see a man with bad breath (today I would call him a ‘psychologist’) for an hour every week. After a few sessions, the man with bad breath reported soberly to my parents that I was prone to hallucinations. This term—‘hallucinations’—deflated the reality of my experience in a way that everybody except for me seemed to regard as utterly reassuring.
As my schooling took hold, I learned about philosophical theories of consciousness. Consciousness, I learned, was the weird result of special electrochemical processes around the front of the brain. This is the view of scientific materialism, and it is pretty much the standard philosophical position today. True enough, not every philosopher would call consciousness a ‘result,’ some don’t think it’s all that weird, and some ask whether its neural base might extend as far back as the temporal cortex and other early processors. But the one thing on which they all seem to agree is that ‘ordinary consciousness,’ as it is known, forms the gold standard of consciousness itself. Introspection, we are told, hits rock-bottom at three or four listable items. Any flash of introspective insight that hints otherwise is a statistical outlier of peripheral theoretical importance. The mind-expanding experiences of hypnagogia—to say nothing of hypnopompia, psychedelics, fever, sleep deprivation, anxiety, starvation, excruciating bodily pain, psychosis, light-headedness, meditation, or NDE—have no respectable place within this framing of consciousness research. Instead, they are relegated to the status of mere hallucination. Before I understood what was happening, my notions of my own internal life had been drastically impoverished, and correspondingly little remained of the reverence which they had once occasioned. This change was carried out so gradually and assuredly, and from such an early age, as to be almost unnoticeable.
What drives our culture’s insistence on denying or deflating extraordinary conscious realms? I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this tendency has corresponded to the rise of scientific materialism. Jung scholar Edward Edinger laments:
When we use the word subjective, we usually say or imply only subjective, as though the subjective element were of no consequence. Since the decline of religion, we have had no adequate collective sanction for the introverted, subjective life. All trends are in the opposite direction. The various pressures of Western society all subtly urge the individual to seek life meaning in externals and in objectivity. Whether the goal be the state, the corporate organization, the good material life, or the acquisition of objective scientific knowledge, in each case human meaning is being sought where it does not exist—in externals, in objectivity. The unique, particular, not-to-be-duplicated subjectivity of the individual which is the real source of human meanings and which is not susceptible to an objective, statistical approach is the despised stone rejected by the builders of our contemporary world view.
If Edinger’s despondency is justified, we who accept scientific materialism are especially ill-disposed even to notice that consciousness boasts a deep and complex structure, let alone to accept this as a valuable philosophical datum. And this state of mind acts to preserve the acceptability of scientific materialism, in return, by diminishing its most formidable unexplained mystery. And round we go, trapped in a merry-go-round of our own devising.
Thankfully, one needn’t search far for offramps. Any remotely extraordinary mode of consciousness defies the dominant narrative about the simplicity of consciousness. Hypnagogia, psychedelics, fever, etc., etc.—all attest to the range and complexity of human consciousness. The difficulty is not in encountering such states; they are as common as muck. The difficulty is in attending to them as they are, without comforting ourselves with the assumption that extraordinary modes of consciousness are aberrations from consciousness in a truer form. It is this assumption that condemns us to the merry-go-round.
The social sanctions for hopping off are predictably severe, so that anyone who succeeds in doing so can expect certain standard reprimands to fly from the blurred faces still whizzing around like mad. “There’s nothing out there, you nutcase!” they will cry to you, as you reacquaint your feet with the stability of the cool earth. But what if they’re wrong? Isn’t there a possibility that, in consciousness’s more expansive moments, something truer to its structural reality is momentarily laid bare? If so, then there is a place for the cautious philosophical exploration of extraordinary conscious realms.