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Discussion => Newbie discussion => Topic started by: Dutch Pride on August 30, 2013, 04:45 pm
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If something like this is the case, then even hardcore reductionist neuroscientists will find themselves on a potentially paradoxical flight path. As the imperialistic desire of neuroscience to dominate and recode other fields of knowledge and experience grows, scientists must confront, in a robust way, the anomalous edges of human experience, those liminal realms where mystical, paranormal, synchronistic and visionary phenomena hold sway. Even while this encounter will continue to occasion reductive explanations, its exotic visibility will nonetheless cast a brighter, more public light on the phenomena themselves.
Though a powerful hallucinogen, ayahuasca is not illegal in Brazil, where the tea is used by urban professionals
I suspect we will see more and more thinking individuals cross over from third-person descriptions to first-person encounters, especially if the therapeutic and cognitively enhancing character of these experiences holds true over time. In other words, despite and because of our neuroscientific bias, anomalous religious experiences are on track to become ever more recognised dimensions of human experience. They are rightfully taking their place as ‘poetic facts’ — experiential claims that the living of life itself makes on us, and whose very persistence constrains the totalising aspirations of purely meat-based science.
One sign of this development is the fascinating scientific and philosophical discourse surrounding meditation and contemplative practices, some of which was sparked by the Dalai Lama’s sustained conversations with neuroscientists in recent decades. While some intriguing brain-based explanations for traditional Buddhist claims have been offered up, these explanations are ultimately less important than the zone opened up between neuroscience and traditional spiritual philosophy and practice. Meetings, conferences, texts, trials — these are the spaces where poetic facts collide with scientific ones. A similarly robust space of possibility and dialogue might lie ahead for psychedelics.
This is what makes some recent ayahuasca research by neuroscientists working in South America so exciting. Though a powerful hallucinogen, ayahuasca is not illegal in Brazil, where the tea is used by urban professionals as well as by traditional and Mestizo populations, and has been integrated to some degree into national identity. As such, the state has also begun sponsoring a number of ayahuasca studies, the latest of which was published in the November 2011 issue of the journal Human Brain Mapping. A team of researchers in the city of Natal used functional MRI to track how the brains of experienced ayahuasca drinkers behaved during the extraordinary visionary displays occasioned by the brew. By asking participants to imagine internal scenes, and correlating the imaging data with visual tests and psychological measures, the team was able to trace the shifting dance between different brain regions associated with memory, projective imagination, vision, and intentional imagery, and to offer tentative explanations for the intense vividness of the visions.
While such findings can support explanations that banish the spirits from the forest and lock them into our neural circuitry, this sort of research can also be seen, from a different perspective, as mapping the brain’s own potential reconfigurations as a transceiver of information flows — that is, as a reality machine that is as much like a radio set as a computer. While this ‘transmission’ model of consciousness is certainly more speculative, neuroscience is still a long way off from closing the gap between its explanations and the felt flow of consciousness — indeed, according to some philosophers, this gap is simply woven into the nature of things. As such, neuroscience might be seen not as eviscerating traditional accounts so much as weaving them into more multifaceted and open-ended meshworks, where social, cultural, and even cosmic frameworks interlock with neural and biological ones.
In any case, one suspects that this is what the spirits would like. For although traditional numinous accounts might not survive the encounter with neuroscience intact, they are far more likely to be transformed by that encounter than destroyed by it. The sacred, in other words, is not going to go away.
One sign of this is the rise of ayahuasca culture outside of the Amazon, where the brew gets name-dropped by rock stars and has become a must-have in the margins of the yoga boom and the eco-New Age. What is remarkable is that, despite this explosion of interest and the subsequent fraying of indigenous cultural use, the brew remains profoundly linked to religious forms and forces. Whether quaffed in Europe or North America, at the feet of touring Peruvians or white facilitators with varying degrees of ‘shamanic’ costume, or sought at the source in the Amazon’s increasingly commercialised ayahuasca service industry, the brew remains for its Euro-American consumers an overwhelmingly sacred, ritualistic, and transformative occasion. Traditional elements — the drunken cup, the sitting circle, the darkness, the songs, the shared gastrointestinal ordeal — all resonate with first-world desires for personal, social and ecological healing that are, I suspect, more sober and even desperate today than during the more wayward and exploratory years of the psychedelic counterculture, when etho-botanicals such as magic mushrooms and peyote were generally consumed in more informal situations.
The most active alkaloid in ayahuasca is DMT, the tryptamine whose study initiated the current wave of psychedelic research and also occasioned some of the more intriguing juxtapositions of religion and science in the recent literature. In the early 1990s, the American psychiatrist Rick Strassman began doling out hundreds of injections of the powerful, short-acting tryptamine to seasoned volunteers at the University of New Mexico. Strassman’s study was designed to collect psychophysiological data, but his project was inextricably woven into broader religious and spiritual concerns on a number of fronts. Many of the volunteers experienced astounding and often terrifying encounters with alien or divine beings. These quasi-shamanic episodes disturbed Strassman and many of his subjects, and Strassman worried that the scientific mindset and clinical setting of the study (as opposed to more traditional or spiritual contexts) might be a leading factor in lending them a negative edge. These arguably 'religious' concerns contributed to his decision to discontinue the study in 1995.
Another feature of the weave was Strassman’s conclusion that, by maintaining an objective biomedical orientation rather than a more spiritually therapeutic ‘set and setting’, few positive results were accruing from these encounters. A practicing Zen Buddhist at the time, Strassman also confronted strong condemnation of his research from some in his community. Part of this negativity grew out of the community’s own internal dynamics, but it also reflected American Buddhism’s inability, as it established itself as a mainstream religious option, to acknowledge the powerful role that psychedelics have played in the founding (and continued flow) of the Western dharma.
After abandoning the study, Strassman published some of his findings in the usual journals. But he also decided to write a mass-market book called DMT: The Spirit Molecule (2001), which included many of the mind-blowing first-person accounts of his subjects, along with a number of Strassman’s own more imaginative ruminations. For instance, Strassman speculated that DMT, traces of which are found endogenously (within the body’s cells), is produced in the pineal gland upon the onset of death, and thus might explain the phenomenon of near-death experiences. Beyond his curious support for a long-mocked argument of Descartes, who had located the soul in the pineal gland, Strassman also invoked the crown chakra of Hindu Tantra, though he noted that the pineal gland becomes visible after 49 days of fetal development — the same period of time that The Tibetan Book of the Dead claims is required for the outgoing soul-force to reincarnate.
Seeking to get to the bottom of psychedelics, we must navigate between the Scylla and Charybdis of neural reductionism and woo-woo
The religious and spiritual concerns that underlie Strassman’s thinking — he is currently writing a book on prophecy in the Hebrew Bible — no doubt fuelled the worldwide popularity of his book on DMT, which has sold more than 100,000 copies and has been translated into 12 languages. Some of these readers in turn misread Strassman’s speculations as scientific proof, with the result that the notion that DMT is produced in the pineal gland has become a congealed ‘fact’ in psychedelic folklore — a further example of the complicated ways in which sacred desires and phenomenological perspectives are bound up with the always-embedded context of scientific pharmacology.
The ongoing interplay between official psychedelic science and the vibrant mutation of experiential religion in the 21st century presents a challenge for everyone: for researchers, for drug designers, for shamans and neo-shamans, and for funding bodies such as the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies, who must craft a mainstream public face for what is sometimes a deeply peculiar and marginal realm of poetic facts.
In seeking to get to the bottom of psychedelics, we must navigate between the Scylla and Charybdis of neural reductionism and woo-woo; between the sacred and the profane; between spirits and molecules. Perhaps the psychedelic researchers who most successfully navigate this narrow gate today are those studying what help these substances might provide to people suffering the challenges of life-threatening disease. In Switzerland, Peter Gasser is using LSD to treat anxiety related to terminal illness, while in the US Charles Grob and Roland Griffiths have both studied psilocybin as an adjunct to psychotherapy with cancer patients. What is appealing in these studies, which have so far shown promising results, is not just the possibility of bringing some peace and insight to people at a very tough time. They also reflect the unique way that death and dying draws the psychedelic meshwork of religion, science and the self into meaningful focus.
Once again, we have a reverberation with the 1960s, when many people first heard about mind-expanding chemicals through the trip manual The Psychedelic Experience (1963), written by Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner. This book mapped the dynamics of psychedelic rapture onto the visionary descriptions of dying, death and afterlife travel offered up, once again, in The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Whether you interpret the text as a crude misappropriation or as a savvy psycho-spiritual mash-up (I think it’s both), its continued resonance is a reminder that, even if psychedelic experience is nothing more than a neural construction (and what, according to neuroscience, isn’t?), it still invokes the existential and religious questions brought up by the implacable conundrum of our own necessary demise. Indeed, it is perhaps here that we most see their mettle.
Like many of the death-prep meditations practised in Tibetan Buddhism and other initiatory traditions, psychedelics — provided, again, within an appropriate set and setting — can serve as flight simulators hurtling us through the shadow of death, test runs of the inevitable fear and phantasmagoria, as well as avenues towards acceptance and integral insight. Having died, even in hallucination, one can no longer quite live the same way.
And here, at the very least, the warring parties of religion and secular reductionism might be able to hold a truce. After all, materialists and New Agers, sceptics and shamans, are all united in facing the death of ourselves and our loved ones — a process that remains, even for the most committed sceptic, a mystery poised at the knife edge of meaning and the void. And mysterious ordeals sometimes require mysterious protocols. The gambit of psychedelic research is that third-person explanations will not exhaust the meaningfulness of wrestling with first-person experience. Like our loving and like our dying, our trips are ultimately known, if anything is ultimately known at all, from the inside.
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Awesome read!
You should link to this article from the first one at the bottom of your text though. These articles might be on the same page right now, but they will likely get seperated over time, depending on who comments more on which article. ;)