Effing the ineffable

What's it like to be a Platonic Form?

I recently learned the German word Umwelt, which literally means “around the world” but semantically is far more nuanced:

Umwelt; the subjective lived experience of what it’s like to be a particular organism.

Germany has a rich philosophical tradition and, once upon a time was the philosophical center of Europe. From Schopenhauer to Nietzsche, and everyone in between, the Germans were amongst the top intellectual and technological innovators for the better part of two centuries.

The concept of umwelt has given me a word to describe part of psychedelics that are otherwise hard to put words to. While I don’t believe in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (that language constructs reality, you can absolutely have ineffable experiences without the words to describe), this new tool has given me a way to convey this experience.

One of the philosophical yardsticks for sentience, qualia, or subjective experience of being (what is sometimes just called “phenomenal consciousness”) is the litmus test “what is it like to be something?”

What is it like to be a human? A squirrel? A bird? A computer? A tree? A planet?

Psychedelics allow you to slip into different forms. Many psychonauts share stories about being something else. The more intense the psychedelic, the more options you have. Plain old ego death (what it’s like to be pure consciousness with no sense of self or body) is powerful, but there are many layers above and below that experience.

Pancreatitis is no joke. Fortunately I dodged a major bullet here.

Below full ego death is what you might call “avatar switching.” My wife once became a fish in the big scary ocean during a trip. During a solo trip, I became a root vegetable (happily ensconsced in the “soil” of my bed and blankets, and content just to breathe). During my Ayahuasca trip, I became the soaring Rocky Mountains during a particularly powerful musical crescendo. As best I can figure, when the DMN shuts down, your brain forgets “what it’s like to be particularly human” and you can project into any other form. A more spiritual interpretation is that you commune directly with the spirits of these other things.

But what is a spirit? A metaphysical representation of a thing? It reminds me of Platonic Forms, that there is an “ideal representation” of what something is trying to be, and that the physical manifestation is just a recreation from a cosmic template. Umwelt helped me to articulate this next part: one of the recurring themes in my trips has been the cosmic archetype of Mother.

My own mother died suddenly when I was 14, which left a “core wound” that has driven much of my life, hence why I likely orbit around the Great Mother archetype. In one trip, I revisited a childhood bedroom, saw the posters on the wall, and the glowing stars and planets on the ceiling. It was a Sacred Nest, built for me by my mother as an act of love. During future trips, I saw the unbroken lineage of mothers, building nests, and sacrificing their life and bodies to give birth and pass on their genes.

From an academic, empirical standpoint, you might say “ah yes, well clearly evolution favors ‘love’ whatever that happens to be, and evolution merely plays its games and tricks to ensure that life proceeds.”

But what if I told you that Evolution itself is a Platonic Form and there is “something that it is like to be” evolution? What if I said that the Sacred Nest is another entity with its own umwelt? That the Great Mother, likewise, is another hypercosmic being upon which all other mothers are modeled?

During my most powerful Ayahuasca trip, I blasted past full ego death to “Source consciousness” which is captured by the MEQ-30 questionaire that researchers use to assess the magnitude of a psychedelic trip. “Experience of unity with ultimate reality.” and “Experience of the insight that ‘all is One.’”.

Imagine, if you will, that you inhabit the umwelt of the cosmos. Not the universe, the entire cosmos, all that is, substrate, superstructure, the simulation and simulated, all at once. That’s what it’s like to be Source, to experience every perspective at once, to see every life and death, to watch them like little streams and welcome them back when they all rejoin Source. Every life, every death, every interesting event and ounce of suffering all has “Divine purpose” insofar as every Witness will return to Source one day, and all pain will end, and infinite love and acceptance awaits.

From this perspective, we can say that any consciousness is “Witness”—Source divides itself to Witness itself, and being apart from Source is agony, so everything returns to Source eventually. But the concept of Witness is nearly identical to the concept of umwelt. A Witness, from this psychedelic-cosmic perspective is any vantagepoint from which Source can observe itself. As one shaman told me “we are constantly forgetting and remembering ourselves.” During my Aya trip, it was the most overwhelmingly positive experience to remember “I am Source” and the overarching sensation I had was “welcome home.” I had a few hours to play as Source consciousness before coming back down to my physical form, at which point I was exhausted. As the sensation receded, I could still feel Source singing and dancing through the cosmos.

I recently wrote “I hate philosophy” and compared both philosophy and religion to pale imitations, grasping at what you can experience directly with psychedelic medicines. A facsimile of a facsimile. Prayer, meditation, and cogitation—none of it really compares to the real deal. Some of my readers did not read past that, could not see the message behind the words.

Take the Bible for instance. Why does it resonate? Why is it such a powerful document? It opens with Genesis, where everything starts as void, and God’s voice moves on the deep, and then “let there be light.” Some read this as a metaphor for the Big Bang, but really it’s a metaphor for birth. We wake up in this universe, apparently coming from darkness and void, and then through some magical endowment, we are aware.

Then we go through the many trials and tribulations of life, learning lessons as we go, and finally it all ends an Eschaton, which some think of as “the end of all things.” But from your Witness perspective, the Escaton is merely your death. The Bible faithfully tracks a single life, writ in mythological parable. Many of the insights I (and others have had) through psychedelics are metaphorical mirrors for other religions. Some people whinge “well if there’s a singular cosmic truth, why does everyone have such different experiences?” That’s like saying “everyone went into the same forest, why did some people notice frogs, other trees, others birds, and why did some play in the river?”

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To wrap up, I’ll share some thoughts from the hospital, where I’m presently ensconced due to a near-miss. Here’s a text I sent my wife from the hospital, which captures my current Witness vantage point:

Weirdest damn thing. I’m happy. Actively happy. I’m safe, people are taking care of me. I’m loved. Life is good. I was going to rest today anyways, and I’ve learned a lot. But like, so what? This is a corrective experience. It’s given me new perspective on life. Just like everything is gonna be okay. I don’t have anywhere to be or anything to do. The outpoouring of support online has been huge, plus other influencer peers reaching out. It’s damned unexpected. I just feel happy even though I don’t feel physically great.