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little elves goblins Pixies completely new forms of experience are these just hallucinations was there some reality in them is what is real is that fundamentally physical there's a lot of philosophers here today who believe that's good um or is it mental is that and it so that would be candy cant for example I mentioned Shelby now and so on um or is it both physical and

mental or do they have the same fundamentality that is mind matter dualism um or is it uh something Beyond both something underlying both and they they sort of emerge from that neutral substance neutral monism um or there's another type of um Duality as well from Plato which is that you know there's a special physical world but there's also a Transcendent world of ideals forms in metaphysics

as well as that there are questions about causation about form space and time the Eternal qualities properties relations modalities like necessity probability potentiality and so on and when I mean I've taught metaphysics at Exeter and that's kind of very hard-nosed logical stuff which doesn't really pertain immediately to psychedelics but we've tried to in Exeter create a matrix of metaphysical points of view and there's sort of

one draft of it it's not exhaustive sometimes so we had to do this cross-sectioning because for example with a paper that I mentioned um where psychedelics shift run from physicalism to pan psychism the problem with that sometimes is that pan psychism is sometimes defined as physicalism right from for example Galen strawson and sometimes you can get dualists pan psychisms and so on and so forth so

we've tried to create a matrix which is a bit more comprehensive than what has been used hither too even though it's not perfect it's very hard actually to differentiate these isms the question we'll consider today is how does one understand psychedelic experiences under each of these ontological options do psychedelic experiences lean towards any specific ontology how do metaphysics inform psychedelics and how do psychedelics inform metaphysics

if they do but what are psychedelic experiences first thing to note is that there's an overlap here rather than an identity so um psychedelic experiences can be um metaphysical I'll explain that in a moment what I mean by that um and they can be mystical and mysticism is not exactly the same as metaphysics and psychedelic experiences can be neither metaphysical or nor mystical so for example

if you take psychedelics and you see uh kaleidoscopic colors that wouldn't really be uh thought of as metaphysical or mystical metaphysics you know if you did this if you're in my metaphysics class you wouldn't think anything's related to mysticism or psychedelics more about logic really and with mysticism you might get like uh let's say the study of um Theresa of Avila right it's theological Traditions which

don't really fit that well into either of the others so we should differentiate these three fields for a start so I'm not saying that all psychedelic experiences are metaphysical absolutely not but psychedelic there's a vast array of psychedelic experiences and I'll go through some of them in a moment this book uh coming out in a few weeks edited by me and Christine housekiller by Blue Bloomsbury

is has 15 essays and we talk about the wide typology of these States from a number of different views but let's give you a few examples this from bordelaire whom I mentioned so synesthesia can be incurred through psychedelics so quote ideas are distorted perceptions are confused sounds are clothed in colors and colors of music musical notes become numbers you feel yourself Vanishing Into Thin Air and

you attribute to your pipe the strange ability to smoke you for example jaegon Kim who's a great fluster of mine he died a year or two ago um not related to psychedelics experiences other than through me but he he do you write this book called physicalism or something near enough and um you really pulls out the problems of that particular ontology which is the default ontology

for clinical trials today one interesting question what point he makes is this that why are just these qualia I don't like the words but you know colors redness blueness tastes of Marmite or whatever and why do we have just these quality and not other possible ones that remains a mystery in other words why is um certain Electric Man magnetic frequencies um that are possibly processed in

the occipital lobe why do they appear as red why not as a sound or as something else or as a taste why do we have just these colors why not more um there's no real reason why we have the phenomenology we do except to differentiate things but that could be differentiated in different ways now I mentioned this here because it's quite interesting that a lot of

psychedelic experiences seem to induce novel qualia like completely new forms of experience that for which there are no Concepts no terms no classifications and that's why partly I believe um as we shall see William James said one of the four criteria for mysticism was ineffability which means you cannot put it into words because we've never we just haven't got haven't experienced these things as a community

to make words for them they're not always Pleasant I'm not going to say psychedelics are always great for you they can be highly disturbing here's an example this from Richard Ward is a great book from 1957 on LSD phenomenology called a drug taker's notes anyway in that for example he wrote this it is impossible to convey the horror of thus being threatened with sheer nothingness the

Fear of Infinity I wish that I had the courage to try to find out where one is if one is nowhere but metaphysical horror is kind of like a pushed form of the sublime if you've studied that in Aesthetics you know it just reminds me of another report I read once where so I think it was LSD as well someone said they found themselves in this

suddenly in in this uh space it was hardly space and this nothingness and that and they they thought they'd never come out and then they heard a voice at least but it said not only will you be here forever you never even existed in the first place this was believed so even though psychedelics for the most part are not physiologically damaging they can be psychologically very

distressful actually certain ones such as 5mio DMT which I will talk about and at the end but they are super powerful and they involve a lot of integration to fully accept so I although I'm talking about for psychedelics I am not promoting their use without proper consideration apparent Life review there's LST this is from a lover sax a book hallucinations then my whole life flash in

my mind from birth to the present with every detail that ever happened every feeling of thought Visual and emotional was there in an instant um interesting Thomas Quincy whom I mentioned with opium also said that with high dose of opium he could go back in time and relive parts of his life for example when he was a child in Exquisite detail which led him to claim

that he therefore believes that memories are never lost everything is retained just access to them is lust and a lot of clinical therapy on psychedelics is related to um going back to your past with a psychotherapist and reliving these traumatic moments to overcome them this can go horribly wrong though and I can talk about that privately later another one the classic is from Rick Strassman who

wrote DMT The Spirit Molecule it's very influential also made into a film as I accepted my death into solution into God's love the insectoids began to feed on my heart devouring the feelings of love and surrender they feasted as they made love to me it was extremely alien but not necessarily unpleasant there you go they look like Jokers they were almost performing for me girls on

that big noses however I had the feeling they could turn on me a little lesson completely friendly so intra this is a big mystery for me is one thing I just can't work out right he's a lilliputians little people there are so many reports and they predate Terence McKenna um of uh seeing Little People little elves goblins Pixies little people who are a bit a little

bit dangerous right very common why I have no clue it does really odd um uh David that apparently has got a new theory on it he was asked a few weeks ago and he says he's gonna come out with he didn't dare to tell anyone yet it's so amazing apparently he's worked on that but um I I look forward to that the question is the the

really important question is David Luke also is a specialist in this um who's from Greenwich University but the interesting question is are these just hallucinations was there some reality in them and what level of reality so could there be for example representations of your psyche or um could they be real you know could they have their own point of view I don't know I'm not going

to talk about that because I don't know the answer to it so I'm going to talk about this I don't really have the answer to this either but um another type of excited experience is the modest you could say roughly speaking the modest experience this is the Alan Watts on it for example um the individual discovers himself to be one continuous process with god with the

universe to those who have known it it is as real and overwhelming as Falling in Love from the joyous cosmology I think so um the modest experience in other words mind a matter are one and also nature and God are one this obviously relates to Spinoza if you know anything about him in a minute to continue watching this video click the link in the top left

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