Waking Up or: Y’all Motherfuckers Need Acid Part 3

Dreams, despite what you may have been led to believe, are not a higher form of consciousness. Dreams are weird and mysterious, yes, but your mind in a dream is more disengaged than engaged. A dreaming mind is, after all, resting.

Nevertheless, dreams are useful as familiar altered states that we can use to contrast with a psychedelic trip. These two conscious states, the dream and the trip, exist on a spectrum with your ordinary waking consciousness (presumably you now as you read this) positioned between them. From our ordinary vantage, dreams and trips sit opposite each other and apart from us, the distance from our waking state and our dreams equaling the distance between our waking state and our trips. These respective states position along a line, which is the path running from lower consciousness to higher consciousness.

So we don’t approach trips like dreams. Or if we do, we are in for a rude awakening. Trips are awakenings. They push us out of our tranquil, sleeping states. We can no more ignore our mind when we trip than we can fall back asleep with a spotlight pointed straight into our open eyes.

Light, the alarm clock

Our minds in a trip are totally flooded with light and sound, but especially light. Light takes on a personal quality. It achieves character, sometimes with forms of light actually interacting with us. This has been true in my experiences as well as everyone I’ve spoken to who has tripped. It’s true independently across the board for psychedelic users, no matter where or when they are.

So? Who cares? Psychedelics are drugs. They dilate pupils. Everything is brighter when you’re tripping, so of course light is more significant. And of course they would make you think that you’re having a spiritual experience, because newsflash — they’re drugs!

That’s true, but the fixation with light is actually a part of a larger pattern of activity that takes place all over the mind after consuming a psychedelic. See, light does more than just become more vibrant or pretty (although it does do that). Light becomes recognized as the division between our internal world and the external world. It embodies our perception. Why?

Humans can’t relate to light. Our bodies don’t make it or harness it. Its most basic physical properties confuse us. Light doesn’t even experience time (what?!), yet we mark every day by it. I think psychedelic experiences tend to involve forms of light because nothing affects our daily lives more than light. Our days figuratively and literally revolve around light and its illumination of our perception.

But gravity is a familiar natural force, too, and one that we also perceive. Why don’t trippers have conversations with gravity? Why doesn’t gravity appear to us in a form? Well, you have no reason to identify with gravity. Gravity isn’t capricious. Light can be. Light disappears and reappears at intervals that are regular, but it also appears/disappears at irregular intervals. No one controls the clouds! In the long history of our planet, light comes and goes in whims and at great cost to the living beings alive at the time. Who were those beings? Our ancestors.

We are sensitive to light by nature. We relate to light because our existence requires it. And if we relate to anything strongly enough, it becomes identity.

Ego, a pond fish in the ocean

The more a psychedelic mind fixates on light (or any external stimulus! I use light because it’s the most common and obvious) and relates to it, the more it stops relating to the mind’s corporeal form, our bodies. This is the first step towards “ego death”, which, although I hate the term, is an actual thing that does occur when you trip enough.

In short, ego death is what happens when our sense of identity is assimilated. In a dream, we simply exist. When we wake, we recognize the difference between waking and dreaming and see ourselves as beings who do both. Our dream ego dies, incorporated into our waking ego.

This is not unique to psychedelics. When we relate to anything, we risk dethroning the ruling conception of ourselves. Relationship makes us vulnerable, since it overrides our state. It’s potentially dangerous but not necessarily bad. In society, a bigger and grander identity can make us war with each other, but it can also imbue us with a sense of responsibility and compassion for each other. It works the same in our own minds — two seemingly separate ideas can and will unite into a larger understanding and supplant their individual goals.

Consciousness is unity. Full stop. That is what is and that is what it does, no matter the scale. That is a neuron’s entire job description: to join together with others and creates larger understanding. That’s it. When we enter into a higher form of consciousness, the compartmentalized parts of our minds lock arms together. The parts of you that identify as a man or woman or whatever, join together and become dwarfed by a larger identity that supersedes it all: existence itself. We exist together, bathed in light.