Gods of worlds, subjects of one
By Jacob Mills
The espresso pot rumbles, a rich coffee aroma enters my nostrils, and dopamine courses through my brain. It’s a sunny morning and I take a vitamin D primed position to sip my elixir while listening to Conner Habib on the Duncan Trussell Family Hour. My attention is under-caffeinated and vague, but when the discussion says that we are moving beyond the material world, not because we are becoming conscious consumers, but because matter doesn’t exist – they have my full attention.
Conner instructs Duncan into a thought experiment, to close his eyes and explain his experience. I do this too. Stripping away the objects as I know them – my butt, my elbows, my scanty y-fronts. My experience is now just temperature, pressure, sound, and darkness. The biggest trip is focussing on the pressure. I’m not sitting in my chair anymore, there is just pressure around my body and I’m in a dark void.
This got me thinking about the nature of our consciousness.
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We are a simple animal evolved for a specific niche on Earth. We are still, as far as evolution has taken our senses and emotions, social hunters and gatherers. We don’t perceive ultra-violet light, hear sub-sonic sound, see the beat of a hummingbird’s wings, nor catch the vine moving before it covers the trellis because we don’t need to. The ranges of light, sound, distance and speed that we evolved to perceive is just what’s needed to create the sharpest image in our brains that we need to get by as wild animals in each passing moment. By the way, the prefixes ultra- and sub- are just references to our human centric classifications of the phenomena. There is no such thing as sub-sonic without relativity to the subject – sub-sonic to a human is just sonic to a dog.
Therefore, if we’ve just evolved our senses to be just good enough to get by in the wild, and not to be omniscient, then we perceive only a fraction of everything. Our little brains cannot project into consciousness all the information that is constantly coming to us from the massive objective reality around us. So, our brain distils that information down to what is necessary. But this doesn’t mean that all humans have the same perception simply because we’re the same species.
What our brains distil depends on our genetic and epigenetic function. Our abilities for hearing and sight are biologically diverse, our timing, angle, and distance to the event differ to someone else’s, and our emotional priming from different lived experiences and cultures train our brains to different conclusions of the same thing. You witnessed a murder, does that mean it wasn’t self-defence? The ‘drunk’ on the street may have a degenerative neurological disease that causes drunk-like symptoms, ataxia. The distance you feel from your partner might have nothing to do with you and everything to do with the complexity of their own life. We have a lot of information about ourselves yet hardly any about others, and our perceptions are so vivid to us that they seem geologic, sure as a mountain.
Our perception is incomplete by definition of our biological inability to perceive objective reality within the moment. Maybe this is just a function for our brains to create attention considering our brains receive everything that we have receptors for but filters that mass of information to focus us on the necessary. Although, such a function simultaneously creates the opportunity for distraction. When I hear that sliding sound of a snake on the floor, I don’t notice that my partner just farted – filtered and unnecessary in this moment (joy is always trumped by danger). But when those damn sticky flies won’t get out of my eyes, I’m distracted from becoming aware that the father emu is charging me.
But by having consciousness of this subjective, incomplete perception we have the ability to move between the worlds behind the world. We can switch our senses on and off through attention with meditation, or just by closing our eyes. We can sit in a chair, close our eyes, and trip through a world where there is only darkness and pressure if we just focus on that sensory experience. If we deliberately forget, momentarily, that we are sitting in a chair then we can experience another world.
Does our mind literally leave our body during astral projection, an out of body experience? Or is our mind simply untethered from the restraints of the physical world, into the world behind the world? I think the latter, except that the mind is ultimately still tethered to the body, inseparable, the same entity. Because, as Douglas Rushkoff asked, "what happens to the mind if someone kills the body during astral projection, does it just float around?" I don't think so, I think it dies too. I don’t think we can separate the body from the mind – as above, so below. To me, astral projection sounds like an ability to access a specific part of the REM dreamscape.
Dream psychologist Rubin Naiman argues that we live in a wake-centric world, and that if we gave attention to the REM dreamscape as though it is actual experience then we would expand our consciousness, be more creative, and be healthier overall.
The common thought is that we use thought experiments, meditation, astral projection, and REM dreaming to untether our minds from our bodies and allow them to play in the worlds behind the world – to leave our bodies behind on the physical Earth and move through portals. However, I don’t believe that we leave our bodies. I believe that we are nested within the objective reality and that we create a nest of worlds within us as we free ourselves of the sensors of the objective, a gift of our incomplete perception. And if we weren’t nested within an objective reality of matter and different states of energy with an incomplete perception, then our inner worlds wouldn’t exist. We are the Gods of many worlds, but the subjects of one. I believe our true astral projection is how we use what we learn from those worlds within us to more consciously project out of our worlds and into the worlds of others. Our bodies are capsules that we ride in, to go further into these worlds, not something we leave. The capsule is flown or driven by the down- or up-regulation of its senses to create bearings away from the objective world. Psychedelic compounds interact with our bodies to create experiences of the mind.
Our brains produce DMT during REM dreams. Maybe this is why an external dose of DMT is so powerful, allowing us to REM dream while we’re awake. What could be more vivid and more omnipotent than REM dreaming while awake? Why do we take a DMT vision more seriously than a weeknight REM dream? Why are they so profound? Maybe because our bodies are awake and alert for the experience. The capsule is activated. The body is with the mind.
However we choose to manipulate our incomplete perception there will always be the fact that we sit within an objective reality made of matter and states of energy. We are matter, body and mind forever tethered together by energy. The chair is matter, though in a different state to our bodies and that creates pressure when our walls of valence shells get too close. Pressure is an interaction of different states of energy. Without the chair, or without matter, I feel no pressure. But I do feel pressure, and my ability to focus on the pressure against me, while forgetting that I’m sitting in a chair and tasting my saliva, makes me a God of worlds.