Don’t Take ‘Shrooms, Read Oedipus Rex Instead
The first time I took LSD, it was still legal. I was in the White Mountains, and it came on as I climbed a trail to the top. While the friend that gave me the hit had promised “paisley dragons and the whole megillah,” they did not appear for me.
When I reached the top, I found I was equally entranced looking at the panorama or just staring at the ground in front of me. And both were alive and breathing. I mean they were literally inhaling and exhaling!
And then I realized that they weren’t breathing, I was. The separation between my self and the external world had dissolved. There were no dragons or accompanying chorus of angels singing hosannahs, but the realization affected me enough to still remember it fifty years later.
In his Varieties of Religious Experience, William James wrote that mystical experiences are always transitory and noetic—there’s a brief flash that we learn from. I learned that the external world I experienced was a function of my perception of it. There is no objective reality that I can know ,just my subjective view of it.
I’m not surprised that mushrooms are now being heralded as a life-changing therapeutic intervention and micro-dosing is now au courant in Silicon Valley. The dissolving of the barrier between self and other leads to the profound insight that we are creators rather than recorders and so are both responsible for, and in control of, our reality. Change the mind, change the world.
Using psychedelic substances is a bit dicey—one cannot be sure of their purity, there can potentially be a rebound effect, and the trip consumes the better part of a day, but they’re not the only path to enlightenment. From Plato to Zen, there’s a host of chemical-free ways.
Neuroscience teaches us that the brain is a prediction machine. As long as we get what we expect, there is no need for conscious attention. But when we encounter the unexpected, it stops us in our tracks. If the unexpected defeats our logic, the world our reason constructs (one where the subject and object are separate,) falls apart. That’s the purpose of the Zen koan, “what is the sound of one hand clapping?”
What could be more unexpected than finding out that you’ve just murdered your father and married your mother? That’s what turns Oedipus’s world inside out. Aristotle called it peripeteia, a reversal of fortune that he learns from.
The science also teaches us that we make sense out of our experience through stories. It’s just the way the mind works. When we watch or read Oedipus Rex, we identify with Oedipus, become him through a process called neural coupling, and experience the peripeteia as our own. We achieve enlightenment without the potential side effects of psilocybin.
And we view the world through his perception of it, or Hamlet’s or John Snow’s, further reinforcing the relativity of our own perception. Literature is the pharmacy of the mind. Fiction, it turns out, dramatically increase our ability to empathize.
Just one more thing. There are times we’d like to change another’s mind so that they behave the way we want them to, whether it’s a customer we want to buy more, a business we want to transform, or a teenage child we wish to be less annoying. All we need to do is construct the right kind of story. Don Draper and his ilk knew it and so did great leaders throughout history.
Change the story, change the mind, change the world.