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Sciencing the Mystical: The trickery of the psychedelic trip report

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Tehseen Noorani at University of Auckland
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Abstract

Science has caught wind of mysticism once again. Operationalising metrics from the writings of perennial philosophers, psychopharmacologists are using psychedelics in a laboratory context to reliably induce ‘mystical experiences’. These experiences are scored along such dimensions as unity, noesis, transcendence of space–time and ineffability. How are we to read this moment? I draw on data from an ethnography of psychedelic science and take cue from Walter Benjamin’s treatment of the threshold in Convolute O of The Arcades Project, to identify apophatic narratives of trickery that contrast with the positive knowledge prominent in the sciencing of the mystical experience. Read as apophatic labour, psychedelic trip reports reveal how the significance of the mystical encounter lies not in its point-like efficacy in transforming the subject, but in precisely the doubts, contradictions and aporias involved in the writing out of their experiences.
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New Writing
The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative
Writing
ISSN: 1479-0726 (Print) 1943-3107 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rmnw20
Sciencing the mystical: the trickery of the
psychedelic trip report
Tehseen Noorani
To cite this article: Tehseen Noorani (2019): Sciencing the mystical: the trickery of the psychedelic
trip report, New Writing, DOI: 10.1080/14790726.2019.1566375
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2019.1566375
© 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa
UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis
Group
Published online: 09 Apr 2019.
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Sciencing the mystical: the trickery of the psychedelic trip
report
Tehseen Noorani
Department of Anthropology, Durham University, Durham, UK
ABSTRACT
Science has caught wind of mysticism once again. Operationalising
metrics from the writings of perennial philosophers,
psychopharmacologists are using psychedelics in a laboratory
context to reliably induce ‘mystical experiences’. These
experiences are scored along such dimensions as unity, noesis,
transcendence of space–time and ineffability. How are we to read
this moment? I draw on data from an ethnography of psychedelic
science and take cue from Walter Benjamin’s treatment of the
threshold in Convolute O of The Arcades Project, to identify
apophatic narratives of trickery that contrast with the positive
knowledge prominent in the sciencing of the mystical experience.
Read as apophatic labour, psychedelic trip reports reveal how the
significance of the mystical encounter lies not in its point-like
efficacy in transforming the subject, but in precisely the doubts,
contradictions and aporias involved in the writing out of their
experiences.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 23 November 2018
Accepted 1 January 2019
KEYWORDS
Psychedelics; mysticism;
narcopoiesis; ineffability;
apophasis; science
Convolute O: prostitution, gambling
Our election cry must be: Reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but through the
analysis of mystical consciousness that is unclear to itself …Then people will see that the
world has long possessed the dream of a thing-and that it only needs to possess the con-
sciousness of this thing in order really to possess it. (Marx, cited in Benjamin 2002, N5a,1)
We have grown very poor in threshold experiences. Falling asleep is perhaps the only such
experience that remains to us. (But together with this, there is also waking up). (Benjamin
2002, O2a,1)
Pharmacological science has renewed its curiosity in the ‘mystical experience’, skilfully
occasioned through administration of psychedelic drugs, purportedly establishing perma-
nent changes in self.
In participants who had mystical experiences during their psilocybin session, Openness
remained significantly higher than baseline more than one year after the session. The
findings suggest a specific role for psilocybin and mystical-type experiences in adult person-
ality change. (MacLean, Johnson, and Griffiths 2011, 1453)
© 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any
medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
CONTACT Tehseen Noorani tehseen.n.noorani@durham.ac.uk
NEW WRITING
https://doi.org/10.1080/14790726.2019.1566375
The idea that a single discrete experience can result in lasting beneficial effects in an individ-
ual’s attitudes or behavior is highly unusual if not unprecedented within the modern biome-
dical paradigm. (Garcia-Romeu, Griffiths, and Johnson 2015, 163)
Once you drink you see, and once you see you cannot unsee. (Narby, cited in Richards 2015, 33)
Piercing phantasmagorias; becoming woke. The 1960s call for the transformation of global
consciousness stirs.
And yet.
The threshold must be carefully distinguished from the boundary. A Schwelle <threshold> is a
zone. Transformation, passage, wave action are in the word schwellen, swell, and etymology
ought not to overlook these senses. (Benjamin 2002, O2a,1)
Threshold experiences: swollen zones; swollen in the zone.
Eight dimensions of the Hood Mysticism Scale:
EGO QUALITY (E): The experience of a loss of sense of self while consciousness is nevertheless maintained
UNIFYING QUALITY (U): The experience of the multiplicity of objects of perception as nevertheless united
INNER SUBJECTIVE QUALITY (Is): The perception of an inner subjectivity to all things
TEMPORAL/SPATIAL QUALITY (T): Both space and time are modified, with the extreme being one of an experience
that is both ‘timeless’and ‘spaceless’
NOETIC QUALITY (N): The experience as a source of valid knowledge
INEFFABILITY (I): The impossibility of expressing the experience in conventional language
POSITIVE AFFECT (P): Typically the experience is of joy or blissful happiness
RELIGIOUS QUALITY (R): The intrinsic sacredness of the experience
(Adapted from Hood 1975,31–32)
Clinical researchers ask participants to write out their experiences in the days following
psychedelic sessions. Elsewhere, online repositories of tens of thousands of psychedelic
‘trip reports’peppered with scientific precision characterise more attempts to speak the
ineffable.
Definition of trip reports (I): ‘Detailed first-hand descriptions of drug experiences’
(Bluelight)
This presence was a feeling, not something I saw or heard. I only felt it, but it felt more real
than any reality I have experienced. And it was a familiar place too. One I had felt before. It
was when I surrendered to this, that I felt like I let go …I was in the void. This void had a
strange and indescribable quality to it in that there was nothing to it but this feeling of uncon-
ditional and undying Love. It felt like my soul was basking in the feeling of this space. I have no
idea how long this lasted. Time and space did not exist there. (Volunteer, cited in Barrett and
Griffiths 2018, 397).
[The First Principle of Apophatic Language:] The Aporia of Transcendence
(a) X transcends all names and referential delimitation.
(b) If the major premise is true, it must also be false or incomplete, because if X is ineffable in
this rigorous sense, it cannot be called X.
(c) This dilemma leads neither to silence nor to a distinction between two kinds of names (deus
in itself, deus in our minds; God in himself, God in creatures; God and ‘God’; or God and god).
2T. NOORANI
(d) The aporia yields an open-ended process by which the original assertion of transcendence
continually turns back critically upon itself.
(Sells 1994, 207)
I believe Mother Ayahuasca wanted me to write this book to help bring her medicine to the world.
(Author and psychotherapist)
I learned photography in order to capture what I saw in my session.
(Trial participant I)
After Salvia blew the hinges offmy reality the study ended. I needed to build new containers to
keep processing what I saw.
(Trial participant II)
I live now in the knowledge that the mystical plane is the real one. It watches this one.
(Psychedelic Society audience member)
Definition of trip reports (II): Documented waves of non-sensuous correspondences
evoking, provoking and metamorphosing the power of drug experiences.
…the point to consider here is whether the anthropologist [studying shamanism] was himself
part of a larger and more complex staging in which exposure of tricks is the name of the game
and that what we are witness to via the text is an imaginative, albeit unintended and seren-
dipitous, rendition of the skilled revelation of the skilled concealment necessary to the mix of
faith and skepticism necessary to magic. (Taussig 2006, 150)
Go again. Consider here whether the psychedelic clinical trial researchers oversee exper-
imental systems that skilfully produce objective, replicable knowledge without the scien-
tists’subjective interference (except a little subjective influencing here and there),
admiring of the skilled separation of subjectivity and objectivity reported by others
(while keen to expose a little subjective influencing here and there).
Futurity tricks: summoning the gratification of imagined successful medicalisation to
curtail critique in the present course of action.
Commodity tricks: trading the pursuit of widely useful knowledge of whole plants for
narrowly patentable knowledge of synthetic extracts.
Continuity tricks: interpolating smooth transitions between measurement points to
reveal how discrete interventions result in unidirectional transformations.
Placebo tricks: reading for figure-ground reversals that seek the magic not in the drug
but in everything-but-the-drug.
Each a skilled revelation relying on the experiment; magical formulae as formulae for
magic.
The dominant image of the mystical experience in psychedelic science is a mountain with
many paths leading to a single, eternal mountaintop. This is the universalist domain of per-
ennialism. But read as apophatic labour, trip reports reveal the power of the mystical
encounter to lie in a series of mis/translations across thresholds –the doubts, contradic-
tions, ambivalences and aporias involved in the writing out of experiences. Psychedelic
science is setting before us new tasks of dream interpretation.
NEW WRITING 3
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Funding
This work was supported by a Durham Junior Research Fellowship COFUNDed between Durham Uni-
versity and the European Union [grant number 609412].
Notes on contributor
Tehseen Noorani is a medical humanities scholar writing at the intersections of psychedelic science and
understandings of psychopathology. From 2013 to 2015 he was a postdoctoral research fellow working
on a psychedelics-assisted clinical trial at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, USA.
ORCID
Tehseen Noorani http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4185-0218
References
Barrett, Frederick S., and Roland R. Griffiths. 2018.“Classic Hallucinogens and Mystical Experiences:
Phenomenology and Neural Correlates.”In Behavioral Neurobiology of Psychedelic Drugs, edited
by Adam L. Halberstadt, Franz X. Vollenweider, and David E. Nichols, 393–430. Berlin: Springer.
Benjamin, Walter. 2002.The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Ailand and Kevin McLaughlin.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bluelight. Accessed June 8, 2018. http://www.bluelight.org/vb/forums/40-Trip-Reports.
Garcia-Romeu, Albert, Roland R. Griffiths, and Matthew W. Johnson. 2015.“Psilocybin-Occasioned
Mystical Experiences in the Treatment of Tobacco Addiction.”Current Drug Abuse Reviews 7:
157–164.
Hood, Ralph W., Jr. 1975.“The Construction and Preliminary Validation of a Measure of Reported
Mystical Experience.”Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 14: 29–41.
MacLean, Katherine A., Matthew W. Johnson, and Roland R. Griffiths. 2011.“Mystical Experiences
Occasioned by the Hallucinogen Psilocybin Lead to Increases in the Personality Domain of
Openness.”Journal of Psychopharmacology 25 (11): 1453–1461.
Richards, William A. 2015.Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Sells, Michael A. 1994.Mystical Languages of Unsaying. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Taussig, Michael. 2006.Walter Benjamin’s Grave. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
4T. NOORANI
... Another benefit of such self-experimentation was that these psychedelic experiments could be documented in detail and then compared with descriptions of psychosis as offered by patients, thereby providing support for the view of psychedelics as models of psychosis. Despite the notorious difficulty of describing either psychosis or psychedelic experiences (Jones & Shattell, 2016;Noorani, 2019), comparative accounts of the two phenomena became popular with psychiatric researchers in the mid-twentieth century 4 . Much of this research was conducted with the aim of illustrating the remarkable similarities between these experiences; as Bowers and Freedman (1966) suggested, "when seen from the point of view of subjective experience, early psychotic experiencing becomes less discontinuous with other altered modes of experiencing," such as those brought on by psychedelics (p. ...
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