Mystical Immediacy to Metaphysical Mediation

From encountering the divine to the arduous labour it implies...

On May 21st 2023, I discussed with Dr. Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes his latest academic paper, On the need for metaphysics in psychedelic therapy and research.

On Saturday June 24th/June 25th Philosophy Portal will be hosting an online conference “Logic for the Global Brain.” Dr. Peter Rollins and Dr. Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes will be co-headlining. To register for the conference, visit Philosophy Portal and sign up to the time slots you can attend live!

---

I still remember the night I stumbled across a banned TED talk by Graham Hancock titled “The War on Consciousness” back in 2013. I happened to be in-between a type of tragic disillusionment regarding the basic (metaphysical) structure of academia. My entire identity was open, in the search for a new path. Practically speaking, I had just decided I would not be pursuing a doctorate at the University of Toronto after the completion of my Masters degree in evolutionary anthropology. This was mostly because of the hyper-specialisation, and consequent inability to freely determine my own research trajectory.¹ If I had followed that path, I guess today I would be building some very narrowly focused research project on primate behaviour and ecology. Instead, I took a year off, started a popular science blog/vlog² and continued my independent research projects (all the while searching for the next step into the unknown).

I shall return to this thread, but for now, let’s focus on Hancock’s banned TED talk. While I wasn’t, and am still not, too interested or even intrigued, about Hancock’s specific metaphysics as it relates to archaeology/anthropology, his talk about the power of ayahuasca was enough to pique my interest in psychedelics. It opened a door or, why not, a rabbit hole qua Alice in Wonderland, that totally exploded the coordinates of my own personal metaphysics (even, retroactively, making me realise that my picture of the world was an unreflective metaphysics). What I specifically found down this rabbit hole was a world that I would now call psychedelic-informed-philosophy. Here think of figures whose old lectures and discourses have become popular on YouTube, like Terence McKenna³ and Alan Watts.⁴ I would spend hours listening to the chaotic and complex narratives of these figures, as they talked about dimensions of reality, and spiritual pathways, that I had been previously unaware.

What these figures were introducing me to, was what I would now call mysticism. I started to explore the world of the mystics, and read voraciously everything I could get my hands on. By the middle of 2013, I had a library filled with books by figures like William Blake, William Wordsworth, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Norman O. Brown, Northrop Frye, Timothy Leary, and so on. All of these figures seemed to point me towards the importance of divine immediacy of the transcendental experience which ruptures the coordinates of ordinary consciousness. Consider my personal favourite reflection (or at least the reflection that had the deepest impact on me at the time); Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Transcendental Eyeball” experience in the opening of Nature:⁵

“Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite spaces, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”

Beautiful! Perfect!

However, while pursuing this research trajectory, I was hesitant to dip my own toes (so to speak) in the mystical in-itself. That is, I was hesitant to actually explore the dimensions we could call “psychedelic.” I was afraid to challenge my own notion of consciousness, my own self-concept or ego (to shatter its coordinates). But I was clearly fascinated, pulled by an attractor. Maybe this is something that psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan might call “what is in me more than me.”⁶

All the while, I had still been focused on finding some next bridge to continue my academic work. I had been primally driven by (1) the evolutionary history of great apes and human beings (the emergence of language, technology, self-consciousness), and (2) the consequences of these differences (i.e. the future of language, technology and self-consciousness). I had a tendency to “big picture” thinking about the origins of the universe, life and mind, as well as the way in which this “big picture” could inform the future development of human civilisation (a topic which my aforementioned pop science blog/vlog at the time was trying to engage). While taking a year off from my conventional academic path, I started writing my own research papers on the topic, and looking for any academic outlets that may be interested in this search. In searching, I found the work of Dr. Francis Heylighen and the Center Leo Apostel (CLEA) at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB).⁷ I reached out with my research ideas and proposal, and it just so happened to be perfect timing. The CLEA research group had just received funding for exploring the concept of the Global Brain, and was looking for someone with a training in evolutionary anthropology to work at the doctoral level on a project oriented towards the idea.⁸

Before I knew it, I was off to Brussels to start a new life and a new project.⁹ But not before coming into contact with Dr. Marc Blainey, a doctoral student at the University of Toronto who was finishing a thesis, and now book, titled Christ Returns from the Jungle.¹⁰ He had been studying, as an anthropologist, a community in the Netherlands experimenting with ayahuasca, called the Santo Daime. The Santo Daime were a religious group, inspired by not only Christianity, but also indigenous and African spiritual traditions, and who practiced sacred ritual use of the entheogen. From his suggestion, one of the first things I did when arriving in Brussels to start my doctorate, was get in contact with the Santo Daime for a ritual initiation. I felt that I had found a home or a space where I could safely explore what had fascinated me so deeply over the past year.¹¹

Safe to say that I had my own “Transcendent Eyeball” experiences.¹² Now, this is where the work of Dr. Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes, I think, is so important. For it is one thing to read about the “Transcendent Eyeball'“ experience (so to speak), with ideas of being “lifted into infinite space” and having “all mean egotism vanish” and “being nothing” and “seeing all” and having “currents of Universal Being circulate through me” and being “part or particle of God.”

But it is quite another thing to experience it and then live with yourself after the fact.

While my original ritualistic experience with psychedelics was in a religious context, and that was great, without religious identification, one is not held after-the-fact, by such an organisation. Consequently, I was left blown out in the void, and in being blown-out in the void, my mediation became philosophical (hold onto this idea, as it will be central to this article). In Dr. Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes work, he is emphasising the importance of mediation of psychedelics in the context of, not religion, but psychotherapy (where one can work through free association and transference, with the experience of the mystical). Now with psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy on the rise, there is currently a method being used, that includes three phases:

1. Pre-psychedelic therapy (which recognises sexual difference)

2. Psychedelic therapy itself (administration of ketamine, psilocybin, DMT, etc.)

3. Integrative phase (which is currently ambiguous and undefined)

What Dr. Sjöstedt-Hughes research is emphasising, is this third aspect, the “integrative phase,” which is currently ambiguous and without any defined standards. I quite agree. Since experiencing psychedelics, I have explored the space, and even started working in the space myself at various levels and capacities. There seems to be no clear methods for dealing with “integration” (we are in the “Wild Wild West” days, so to speak). I would even question whether the word “integration” is the right way to think about it. Now what Dr. Sjöstedt-Hughes emphasises in his latest paper, is that it is precisely at this level that we need to think about the relationship between psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy and philosophy, and more specifically, training in metaphysics.

Why?

The idea is simple: while one experiences a transcendental mystical immediacy in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, one often does not have the cognitive tools to deal with the after-effects. Moreover, in the field of psychotherapy itself, there is often no training in philosophical metaphysics that would help give conceptual body to the experience (i.e. free association and transference is not the same as training in metaphysics). What is worse, in the field of philosophy itself, there has been a tendency to either dry secular analytic philosophy or post-modern continental philosophy, which, far from helping “integrate” psychedelic experiences, may even obfuscate the importance and centrality of the mystical as idealist non-sense to be replaced with positivist logic and/or logically deconstructed.

Consequently, Dr. Sjöstedt-Hughes points towards the importance of finding some bridge of mediation between psychedelics and psychotherapy on the one hand, and the revival of philosophical metaphysics proper on the other hand. Philosophical metaphysics is a field that can be understood, distinct from mysticism, as the logical mediation of the mystical. It involves thinking through all of those great big conceptual systems of thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Spinoza, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Whitehead, Bergson, Deleuze, and so forth. It is in the mediation of these conceptual systems where one can find a safety net for self-reflection that allows one to sense-make the overwhelming power of the mystical immediacy and convert it into a drive for in one’s own life.

Perhaps even more importantly, this conceptual mediation of the mystical, opens a real multiplicity of discourses (orienting the singular negativity of the mystical immediacy) that are far more complex and nuanced than our contemporary metaphysical binary, that often involves picking between secular naturalism and supernatural dualism (here recall the way I was originally pulled into the attractor spaces of thinkers like McKenna and Watts). Metaphysics opens us to thinking about the dialectics of nature and supernature, the unity of material and ideal, and the foundational concepts that allow us to think at all, like: substance, cause, form, telos, identity, difference, and so forth and so on.

Without this conceptual mediation of the mystical immediacy, we thus risk one of two things:

1. Critique/deconstruction of the mystical as irrelevant/peripheral for a type of dry logical positivism and scientific naturalism which makes no room for the real of subjectivity

2. Regressive fundamentalist identification in a traditional dualistic metaphysics, whether Christian, Islamic, or some other religious denominational identity, which ultimately obfuscates the truth of individuation¹³

Opening the connection between psychedelics and psychotherapy on the one hand, and philosophical metaphysics on the other hand, has the potential to resolve this problem.¹⁴

I, for one, was very lucky. Not only did I experience my mystical state in the safe space of a religious community that knew how to handle the experience (and also, importantly, did not force or even seem to care about, denominational identification). But I also found myself in an open academic department (with, importantly, guaranteed funding), that allowed me to engage conceptual mediation on the level of metaphysics (although admittedly not without resistance). It is not that this process just unfolded very smoothly without any bumps, bruises or scars.¹⁵ But I did have the space within my doctorate to start exploring metaphysics, and explore metaphysics is exactly what I started doing, very naturally and spontaneously.

For me, this involved following the tradition that ultimately finds its home in what is called German Idealism, with figures like Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel.¹⁶ I started working on trying to understand the German Idealists and their connection to founding the modern world, and influencing foundational thinkers, like Kierkegaard, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger, and so forth and so on. I also stated to work on the connection between the German Idealists and the field psychoanalysis, specifically the works of Freud and Lacan.¹⁷ All of this was made possible, or opened up, by the work of the contemporary Slovenian school, specifically the works of Slavoj Žižek, Alenka Zupančič and Mladen Dolar.¹⁸

In the conceptual mediation of all these thinkers, I was able to find my place, and continue my process of self-differentiation, inclusive of the “mystical jewel” that had blown me to pieces (as a part or particle of God, to re-quote Emerson). Without the chance to conceptually mediate this experience with philosophy, what would have been the consequence? I genuinely have no clue. But I can say that philosophy, and specifically the foundational metaphysical systems, helped me tremendously. So when Dr. Sjöstedt-Hughes points towards the possibilities of the link between psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy and metaphysics as crucial for (what is currently called) the “integration” phase, I say, emphatically (in the spirit of Nietzsche’s Yea-Saying): YES! Let’s think this! Let’s fund this! And let’s set up the meritocratic structures that allow us to link these three “critical Ps”: psychedelics, psychotherapy and philosophy:

1. Psychedelics for the mystical jewel

2. Psychotherapy for the transference

3. Philosophy for the conceptual mediation¹⁹

However, I would make a proposal, inspired by, in my view, the metaphysician of the modern age, G.W.F. Hegel. For Hegel, metaphysics was in major trouble in the modern world, and specifically in the scientific age. That is why he dedicated the majority of his intellectual life to making a case for metaphysics in the modern scientific age. He called this project the Science of Logic. To state it very simply, for Hegel, metaphysics is logic and logic is metaphysics.²⁰ Thus, far from being content with an immediate mystical identification, Hegel was emphasising that we take more seriously the idea of conceptual mediation. Without a robust and scientific approach to conceptual mediation itself, on the level of self-differentiation, we will inevitably encounter problems of both belonging and meaning.²¹

I want to emphasise that, although I have (or rather have developed) a particular metaphysical orientation, my particular metaphysical orientation is not “correct.” In Dr. Sjöstedt-Hughes work he has started to think through what he has called a “Metaphysics Matrix” that can help people find their position within the lineage of metaphysical systems that include categories related to Theism, Pantheism, Physicalism, Idealism, Dualism, Monism and so forth. Moreover, this “Metaphysical Matrix” is not exhaustive or “totally integrative.” It is very practical and may even (I don’t think he will mind me saying) reflect his own particular engagement with metaphysics (which does not de-legitimise it, anymore that I would de-legitimise myself by saying that my metaphysical system is not “the correct one”).

Truth be told, when we are entering metaphysics (or pure logic, which may be the same thing), and specifically its conceptual mediation, we are in a different territory, and confronting different problems, then say, when we immediately identify with the mystical (as many in contemporary psychedelic-oriented spiritual circles do). The problem with simple mystical identification with the immediacy of being “part/particle of God,” is that we end up obfuscating the real of very important dimensions of human society and culture, that precisely require individuals qua singularities, who have encountered the jewel that is the mystical.²²

Thus, what is ultimately at stake, in my view, is a type of logic of the “negation of negation.” What we find in the mystical is a negation of the world (as fallen, as temporal, as finite, as X, Y, Z negative thing), and what is at stake in conceptual mediation is the negation of this negation in the affirmation qua return to this world (like I am writing, i.e. conceptually mediating, to you right now). Yes, the world is fallen, temporal, finite, and so forth, but it is precisely in the conceptual mediation of this fallenness, temporality and finitude, that we just may find a new space for the mystical jewel, the “true infinity,” that we can all (potentially) suprasense.²³ But this requires that we take seriously dimensions that the psychedelic community often does not: which is precisely the sexual, the political, and the economic dimensions of our society and culture which involves the mediation of true infinities. What is more, we need to become the singularities of the moment that revive and bring to life society and culture for this universal moment.

That is what is at stake, I believe, in Dr. Sjöstedt-Hughes work.

---

With that being said, Dr. Sjöstedt-Hughes will be one of the keynote speakers for an upcoming conference hosted by Philosophy Portal titled “Logic for the Global Brain.” He will be speaking on this topic, that is: “Mysticism to Metaphysics.” He will also be joined by many other speakers, including David McKerracher, Alex Ebert, Bruce Alderman, Peter Rollins, Peter Limberg, Thomas Winn, Daniel L. Garner, Layman Pascal, and Thomas Hamelryck, and many others.

REMINDER: To register for the conference, which will be held on the weekend of June 24th and June 25th, visit Philosophy Portal.

REMINDER: On May 21st 2023, I discussed with Dr. Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes his latest academic paper, On the need for metaphysics in psychedelic therapy and research.

1. In retrospect, very Hegelian.

2. The Advanced Apes was my first solo/independent creative project. It started as a blog and podcast, and eventually become a PBS Digital Studios funded animated series, which is still available as a playlist on my channel. (Animations/illustrations are the work of my good friend, Alicia Herbert).

3. One of the most complete Terence McKenna videos: True Hallucinations.

4. The Official home of Alan Watts videos: Alan Watts Org.

5. Emerson, R.W. 1888. Nature in The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Routledge and Sons. p. 548.

6. While the Freudo-Lacanian tradition in psychoanalysis does not deify “ego-death” in the same way that conventional mystics do, there is still a space and a necessity for moving through ego-dissolution, that allows one to accommodate a more complex notion of the psyche (i.e. interrelations between id-ego-superego, to use Freud’s categories; which may roughly correlate to the real (id), imaginary (ego) and symbolic (superego) for Lacan, although this may be more complex, since all three registers are always interrelated, like a “borromean knot”).

7. Specifically, this paper: Accelerating socio-technological evolution.

8. For a historical paper, see: Conceptions of a Global Brain, and a technical paper, see: Foundations for a Mathematical Model of the Global Brain.

9. My first paper with the research group can be found here: Human Metasystem Transition Theory. This paper was first presented at CLEA, and be found here: The Pathway to the Global Brain.

10. Blainey, M.G. 2021. Christ Returns from the Jungle: Ayahuasca Religion as Mystical Healing. State University of New York Press. (we discussed his book on my channel: Christ Returns… From the Jungle)

11. You can find descriptions of my first experiences here: The Real of Ayahuasca Visions.

12. Over the years, I have practiced with ayahuasca, peyote, psilocybin, DMT, 5-MeO-DMT.

13. For a deeper understanding of the relationship between religious identity and the truth of individuation, one should study closely the relation between Religion and Absolute Knowing in the Phenomenology of Spirit.

14. My most recent book, Systems and Subjects, also helps us think beyond this binary for a systems-science-informed-by-metaphysics, see: Systems and Subjects.

15. God only knows the mess of the whole process!

16. For my video series on the Phenomenology of Spirit, see: PoS. For the formal Philosophy Portal course, see: PoS Course.

17. I started a “Return to Freud” series which can be found here: Return to Freud; as well as a course focused on the Freudian Unconscious and its connections to both Lacan and Žižek, which can be found here: The Freudian Unconscious.

18. I started a series focused on Žižek’s masterwork Less Than Nothing, here: LTN, as well as a series focused on Zupancic’s theoretical bomb What Is Sex?, here: WIS?; and a course: WIS? the course.

19. Could we hear propose a link to Lacan’s categories of the Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic? Would not the mystical jewel be the “Real” (the negative dimension which explodes the coordinates of the ego), the psychotherapeutic be the “Imaginary” (the games of transference which reflect the ego’s modes of identification), and the philosophical be the “Symbolic” (the conceptual mediation of logic itself)?

20. I have developed an entire course dedicated to the conceptual mediation of Hegel’s Science of Logic, here: Science of Logic Course. Perfect for “integrating” (or better: mediating) your psychedelic experience.

21. See: Belonging Again: A Reflection on O.G. Rose latest book.

22. What I liked to call the “baby in the bathwater” (of traditional fundamentalisms).

23. What Hegel would refer to as “Concept qua Concept.”