I have, for most of my adult life, considered that it would be good for everyone to have the opportunity to use legal psychedelic drugs at some point in their lives — all the obvious caveats aside. Like falling in love, or having children, or swimming, or looking a wild animal in the eyes at close range, such an experience can be a significant part of what we rightly take to be the fullness of a life. It has moreover seemed to me that there is nothing intrinsically shameful about psychedelics. And yet, clearly, psychedelic drug use is often surrounded with shame.
One reason for this is that the dimensions of ourselves that are churned up while under the influence of psychedelics are ones that we often have difficulty squaring with the persons endowed with moral agency that we ordinarily take ourselves to be. It is normal to recoil from some of what we find within ourselves, to seek to disavow it once the trip is over. But the fact that we are able to find hidden dimensions of ourselves that seem to have a life of their own, whether we like what we find or not, while under the influence of certain substances, is itself of interest, or should be, to anyone who wants to understand what it is to live in this world, with a human mind and a sense of wonder.
It raises the question: how is it that we perceive reality the way we do? And what does it say about our perception of reality that it can be so fundamentally altered through an intentional alteration of our internal chemistry? Do psychedelics warp our perception of reality, drawing us further than in our ordinary lucid state from the actual way things are? Or do they rather reveal something to us about the way things are that we ordinarily cannot perceive? It seems that to answer in favour of the view that psychedelics push us further from apprehension of the world as it is presupposes that our mind is, in its default state, naturally and adequately constituted so as to know reality itself. But philosophy has spent the last few millennia coming up with some pretty good reasons why we should be sceptical of the idea that the mind is so constituted.
Something therefore seems a bit off, a bit fishy, when philosophers, along with the surrounding culture, shy away from psychedelics, whether taking them or studying their effects, on the grounds that they distance you from reality. Philosophy is born of the realisation that we already are, or seem to be, at some distance from reality even in our default mode of consciousness. Why not, then, explore all the modes of consciousness available to us, considering what each of them might have to tell us about the relationship between mind and world? That is exactly what I did while researching my new book, On Drugs: Psychedelics, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality.
Not so long ago, I was in a city in the Netherlands for three nights. I had been invited to give a public lecture, and I decided to stay on over the weekend to conduct some research for my book. In that time, I took psychedelics twice.
The evening of the second psilocybin trip, having taken more than before, and far more than is recommended, would turn out to be one of the most intense and transformative experiences of my life. Though I bump up against the limits of language when I try to convey what it was like.
“Something therefore seems a bit off, a bit fishy, when philosophers shy away from psychedelics”
My hotel room had a cheap-looking poster of Marilyn Monroe framed on the wall. One of the first signs that the psilocybin was taking effect arrived when I was walking towards the bathroom, and I saw her there and paused in front of her image and stared at her in absolute wonder. “Do I know Marilyn Monroe?” I asked myself. I never met her, but she has been with me my whole life, just as she has probably been with everyone reading this piece. She is at least as familiar to me as, say, any of my first cousins. And yet, I reflect, I have never so much as greeted her. How strange! So, there in that hotel room, I greeted Marilyn Monroe, and it was heartfelt, and I was certain that whatever just transpired counted as a meaningful interpersonal exchange.
But this was just the beginning, as the particular quality of that encounter with Marilyn would be felt 10 times more strongly when I returned to the bed and pulled up old clips on YouTube of Cass Elliott, more commonly known as Mama Cass. For some inscrutable reason, earlier in that day I had had an earworm from The Mamas and the Papas’ 1967 song “Creeque Alley” going through my head, in particular the line that runs: “And no one’s gettin’ fat except Mama Cass.” This had come to me in my completely unaltered mental state, a reminder that the mind and memory are a marvel, too, without psychedelics. I don’t know what it was doing there. I’m not particularly a fan of Sixties folkpop. But there it was, in my head, and so I pulled it up on the computer, and I ended up spending the next few hours watching clips of Mama Cass on the talk show circuit, all the while feeling not only that I knew her, and had always known her, but that I had always loved her.
To say it like this sounds ridiculous, but the feeling was entirely sincere. Something about Mama Cass seemed to tell the whole story of my own existence. I suddenly recalled a black-and-white picture of my parents, from the summer of 1972. My mother is pregnant with me, and she is unusually heavy. Then I recalled a distant memory from early childhood when that photo was being shown around to guests at our home. I knew I was in it, though still unborn, and I knew I was the reason why my mother had gained so much weight. Then I recalled that someone, I don’t know who, said, when looking at the photo, that my mother looked like Mama Cass. Resemblance, now, seemed to collapse into identity, or rather the distinction between them no longer mattered. Mama Cass suddenly appeared to me as “Mama” in the fullest sense: the fount of my being and the origin of my world.
I am not going to attempt to defend this conviction, which felt so strong at the time. That it is indefensible, that it is ridiculous, is precisely what I am attempting to convey. Why did such thoughts come to me so intensely and unbidden? The mind, it seemed to me as I reviewed the experience on the following day, is just so much more wondrous, so much stranger, than my professional colleagues ordinarily take it to be! We philosophers are typically concerned to understand how a human mind can entertain such propositions as “There is a pain in my foot” or how it can perceive a red dot on a screen. These are fascinating problems, too, but surely we might also gain from considering how the mind can become convinced that a long-dead pop star has become identical with one’s own mother or with something like “cosmic motherhood”.
I think at least a part of the reason we tend to stick with the pain in the foot or the dot on the screen is that, in order to talk about the stranger divagations of the mind, we generally have to acknowledge that we have experienced them, and that is an acknowledgment that typically entails a measure of shame. Part of my motivation in writing what I have written here is to push beyond that shame, to write about conscious experience in a way that truly faces up to the weirdness of the world.
Was my encounter with Mama Cass so ridiculous in the end? Was I completely out of line in my conviction that I loved her? In the Symposium Plato has Socrates describe the ideal ascension of this emotion, from its lowest to its highest expressions. Early in life, we experience love mixed with sexual desire for the beauty of a particular other person’s body, and then we move from there to love of all beautiful bodies. But if we progress as we might hope to do, towards wisdom, then as we age we will also gradually come to love all beautiful minds, and in turn all beautiful institutions and endeavours, then all beautiful knowledge, and in the end, as wise old philosophers, our love will be focused upon nothing but Love itself.
The truth is that most of us vacillate throughout our lives between the various positions on this imagined hierarchy. But whether we think of the ascension as a one-way journey or not, the key philosophical idea in it is that there is a real entity, Love, that exists independently of any of its instances as we know them from experience. This is what we generally refer to as a “universal”, and the question whether such a thing exists or not — not just loveable creatures and things, but Love itself; not just instances of justice, but Justice itself, and so on — will divide the schools of the philosophers, with their running “footnotes to Plato”, as Alfred North Whitehead described the history of Western philosophy, for millennia to come.
I am certainly not going to make any progress towards solving the problem of universals in my book, nor even stake out a position on either of the familiar sides of the debate. But I will remark, first, that psychedelic experience can itself deliver a strong argument in favour of the realist camp in the debate. Under the influence of psilocybin, I seemed not to love Mama Cass, for example, in her particularity, but rather to love her because this love is a point of entry, so to speak, to the experience of Love itself. When I listen to music while on psilocybin, I love the particular song, but I also feel, much more strongly, that the song is my point of entry to Music, with a capital “M”, to the thing itself that exists eternally behind and before all the songs that have ever been sung.
We all have this feeling from time to time, to some extent. It’s the feeling, in fact, that music and poetry excel above all at conjuring in us: the feeling that there is another dimension that these works of art are coming from. Ordinarily, in a sober and lucid mind, this feeling mostly gets expressed in the form of longing. Songs we love have a particular power to make us feel as though there is a world that we know, somehow, but from which we are cut off. Songs seem to emanate from that world but generally do not seem fully to open that world up to us. Yet under the influence of psilocybin, one of my most vivid thoughts goes something like this: “So that other world is real after all, and it is now open to me! I wasn’t only imagining it!”
Do I still think that other world is real, now, when my brain chemistry is back to its default setting? The answer is complicated, but I believe philosophy can help us face up to the challenge somewhat.
The trouble is that Western philosophy has long valorised the sober, lucid mind above the drugged, drunk, or dreaming one. For at least the past two millennia, Western philosophy has defined itself in contrast to other related endeavours, such as mysticism, theology, poetry, and myth, even as nonspecialists often run these endeavours together. The key difference between philosophy and mysticism in particular, and indeed a key point of pride among the philosophers, is that unlike the mystics — who often rely on techniques to bring themselves into altered states of consciousness, which might include drugs, but also include meditative practices, or attention to one’s own dreams, or the hallucinations induced by descending into the dark depths of a cave — we philosophers are expected to rely entirely on the cognitive faculties available to us in our lucid, waking, and sober state. Our aim is to produce natural-language propositions that can be shared with other philosophers, discussed, argued about, and nitpicked.
Philosophy is almost always held to be concerned, by definition, with meanings and arguments, not with what lies beyond these. But there has also always been a dissenting camp, which says that philosophy should occupy itself with whatever human beings experience, whether easily rendered into propositional form or not. It may be that it is ultimately for the good of philosophy if some of its practitioners willingly run the risk of being seen as having gone off the deep end.
***
This is an excerpt from On Drugs: Psychedelics, Philosophy, and the Nature of Reality. Copyright (c) 2025 by Justin Smith-Ruiu. Used with permission of the publisher, Liveright Publishing Corporation, division of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
