Psychedelic Trips Defy Words / On Being Aware
“To understand music, you must listen to it. But so long as you are thinking, ‘I am listening to this music,’ you are not listening. To understand joy or fear, you must be wholly and undividedly aware of it. So long as you are calling it names and saying, ‘I am happy,’ or ‘I am afraid,’ you are not being aware of it. Fear, pain, sorrow, and boredom must remain problems if we do not understand them, but understanding requires a single and undivided mind. This, surely, is the meaning of that strange saying, ‘If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.’”
I came across this article from Stav Dimitropoulos in Popular Mechanics while scrolling Tricycle Day’s newsletter this week. The piece is some delicious brain food; it explores the ineffable state psychedelics can bring about and really gets you thinking about how language may limit our attempts to describe or even experience those moments.
The concept reminded me instantly of the quote above from the chapter “On Being Aware” in Alan Watts’s The Wisdom of Insecurity — a book I love so much that the margins are full of notes and the cover has been taped on multiple times.
Don’t you love when two distinct little atoms of your life suddenly bump into one another?!
Watts is talking about how naming or describing an experience separates you from it — how language creates distance between us and the present moment. If you are thinking or narrating, you aren’t aware. You can’t think you’re experiencing joy or analyze your way through fear. You have to be them. In a way, this article is saying the same thing — when you’re deep in a psychedelic state, words fall away not because you’re confused, but because you’re experiencing something beyond the scope of language, and trying to name it immediately brings you out of it.
Communication can sometimes be a limitation, and that’s something we need to keep in mind in this space. It’s easy to get caught up in the need to explain, label, or over-communicate. But there are moments when the experience itself is more powerful than any words we could ever use — both under the influence of psychedelics and not.
Something I plan to consider further, and would love to discuss, is how leaders and organizations in the psychedelic movement might lean into this implication when building community and doing business psychedelically, as anthropologist and educator Jaz Cadoch puts it. (Can’t recommend her Cocoon course on “The Inner Work of a Psychedelic Career” enough!)
