What follows is an unpolished meditation; speculative, incomplete, but fiercely interesting, and not to be taken as advocacy for psychedelics of any kind. My hope is simply that these ideas provoke some thought.
In The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley describes swallowing a small pill of mescaline (a psychedelic) and, soon after, watching his sense of self dissolve like salt in water. The ordinary geometry of perception; the categories of “me” and “the world,” “object” and “subject”, fell away. What remained was an overwhelming, incandescent immediacy: the is-ness of things. He reported that light itself seemed alive, charged with intelligence. “Each flower,” he wrote, “was a miracle of luminous existence.” The distinctions between beauty and banality evaporated; everything simply was, and its being was enough. Time lost its linear grip; moments no longer slid forward but hovered, expanded, became vast. The world ceased to be a collection of objects for him and instead appeared as a single, shimmering field of consciousness, alive with meaning and presence. Huxley described this experience, not as a hallucination or fabrication of reality, but as an unveiling. It was as though the mind had stopped editing reality and, for a few precious hours, let the whole flood in.
When Huxley returned to his ordinary state, he deduced something unsettling but logical. If a chemical had dissolved the walls of his mind, then those walls must already exist, and if it took a small dose of a compound to expand his consciousness in the way it did, then something in ordinary life must be restricting it. The brain, he concluded, was this wall. The brain functions not as a generator of consciousness, but as a reducing valve. Its job is to filter the vast field of possible experience down to a manageable trickle, allowing us to survive rather than to transcend. In other words, the brain protects us from the overwhelming fullness of what is. Without those limits, we might be blinded by the radiance of reality itself. To hunt, to plan, to build, to communicate; we need focus, not infinity. The price of coherence is exclusion. The wide field of consciousness is reduced by our neurology to a narrow aperture through which we can handle tools, build societies, and remember to eat. Every sensory filter, every neural inhibition, every linguistic category we inherit from our culture, all of it constructs the small room we call the self.
And yet, moments seem to arise when the walls of that room flicker or thin. Perhaps through art, meditation, love, or psychedelics, we sometimes sense the vastness beyond. These moments do not expand consciousness so much as they reveal how limited our usual mode of being really is. They show us that our everyday mind is a kind of nap; a strategic amnesia designed for survival. The extraordinary, then, is not elsewhere; it is here, perpetually present, simply filtered out.
In the Quran, there is a striking verse where God narrates how he “fashioned him [Adam] and breathed into him of My [God’s] spirit” وَنَفَخْتُ فِيهِ مِن رُّوحِى (15:29). It’s a bold image. God, after shaping Adam from clay, transfers something of Himself into this new creature. Ruh is the word used here; typically translated as spirit/soul/essence of God. But consider for a moment that Ruh is actually consciousness. That God is the totality of all consciousness, that he is in fact consciousness itself, and that he installed a portion of it into the blood, flesh and bones of our collective ancestor. In other words, what makes us sentient, self-aware beings is not our biology, but the portion of consciousness (God’s essence) that temporarily inhabits it. Our ordinary awareness is not separate from the divine but partitioned from it.
This interpretation aligns interestingly with Aldous Huxley’s account of his Mescaline experience. Huxley described a sense of union with all things, an awareness so vast and immediate that his individual identity became irrelevant. It was not quite an escape from reality but an unmediated confrontation with it. His interpretation was that the brain, on its own, functions as a “reducing valve,” constraining the flood of consciousness to a trickle fit for survival. But what if what Huxley felt was a momentary unification with the unbound source of consciousness? What if his psychedelic experience, like the deep transcendent states achieved by monks, mystics/gnostics, or Sufi dervishes, temporarily lifted a material restriction? Perhaps through silence, repetition, or chemical interruption, the mind’s habitual boundaries loosen, and consciousness momentarily returns to something closer to its source; a state of unity that mystics have long described as reunion with the Divine.
A related read:
Answer to Something Bigger Than Yourself
It is an irony of our age that, even as the self has been enthroned, the self has also become unbearable. We are told to “find ourselves,” “express ourselves,” “be true to ourselves”, as though the self were a small god to be worshipped and served. Yet the more attention we lavish on this internal idol, the more brittle and joyless we become. The great …
'Unpolished' you said?! Nary a clearer piece have I read. Truly the weight of centering the self to the exclusion of whatever it is we mean by 'God' must be the 'chains' stiffening our necks from liberatory perception of and receptivity to the hidden order of Reality. The soul is ever free. The self never.
Thoughtful and Mind Expanding..It's quite a piece of article!