The elephant in the laboratory

A personal account of a brain-breaking mystical experience

The list of great scientists who appear to have entirely flipped-the-table on their belief systems after a single bizarre experience seems to be rapidly increasing. From great inventors like Federico Faggin, to decorated consciousness researchers like Christof Koch, the scientific mainstream seems to be on the brink of a watershed moment in metaphysics. Mystical experiences, psychedelics, meditation, and quantum mechanics, seem to be finally breaking the atomistic dams hammered into our zeitgeist by all-too-clever ancestors.

Well, here’s another such story, but it doesn’t end in the same place. Because while the mystical experience is truly and unfathomably persuasive, it is a way-station on a much longer, much more liberating, toroidal, journey with an extended crescendo right back into the dirt.

To prove this, here I’ll share the fullest account possible of my personal encounter with the elephant in the laboratory - that immense experience breaking the brains of our hardest rationalists since the dawn of the misnamed “enlightenment”. And then I will show you where it falls apart, why it confuses us, and why we shouldn’t get stuck on it.

You ready?

You see, every good adventure begins with a surprise. Surprises provide organisms like us with data that we can’t easily explain. Sometimes surprises are small, like an unexpected remark from a friend, or a meandering shadow in the night. But occasionally, surprises are truly formidable and worldview shattering.

Big surprises call us towards a new adventure. They poke holes in our boxes and our beliefs. They also stimulate scientific progress and shift inner and outer paradigms. They reveal to us what we’ve been missing out on—they draw us out towards the light and break us out of stuckness. Big anomalies initiate a profound dissonance that leads us in search of answers.

It’s like an alien visitor walks into our house and no one knows what to do with the alien. We just can’t integrate them with our norms, beliefs, and ways of communicating. They speak a different language and flail about in bizarre ways that we can’t relate to. So we must go off in search of an explanation, seeking out information that can make sense of the alien. We start foraging for new information, picking epistemic berries to feed our famished beliefs.

Perhaps the biggest anomaly of all, bigger than even actual aliens, bigger than even superpowers, and bigger than flying donkeys, is the mystical experience. It is truly the elephant in the laboratory for all of science. If you’ve really gone there, you’ll agree. If you don’t agree, you haven’t gone there. The experience is too persuasive. It makes all talk of “just neurons firing bro” sound like a toddler’s effort to explain away quantum entanglement.

As far as insights and revelations go, it’s the perfect peak. The top of the ladder. The crème de la crème. No subjective experience compares, nor can it compare. But right there in that very word “experience” lies the problem.

Because who has ever kept an experience?

Imagine: Four guys, sitting on a dirty couch in a backyard on a sweaty spring evening in Brisbane, Australia. Most houses here, known as “Queenslanders”, are made of thin wood for breathability in hot summers. They’re open and spacious with high ceilings fitted with fans that are always disconcertingly wobbly and dangle about sideways.

This particular house, though, was a bit shorter, somewhere between an ordinary single level brick house and a Queenslander. It was a kind of communal party place, always in partial disrepair, with stacked up wooden crates for bonfires. Beer bottles lined the window sills and grass failed to grow.

All the furniture was either second hand or stolen from the “tafe” (college) across the road. Queenslanders, including this one, often have big backyards. It was shaded by broad beautiful trees, which made for a preferable bathroom to the one inside. It was a filthy place but it was a place where we were free. There were no rules.

The friends I was with had recently tried LSD and seemed moved by the experience but unwilling to tell me why. They simply reiterated: “man, you just have to try it”. I was nervous. But curious. Thirty minutes after I put the piece of cardboard under my tongue I start to feel my body in a new way.

I start to see things a little brighter and I start to observe things in a way that made the world seem unusually fresh and clear. It was not what I expected at all. I felt totally sane, clear, present, and aware. Nothing like being drunk or wired on caffeine, or even “tripping out” or hallucinating. Just this powerful, peaceful, clear, luminous knowingness was shining out from everywhere and nowhere and in all directions.

As minutes passed I felt as if my awareness was increasing. I felt more sensitive and open, as if I was taking in more of the moment than I normally did, as if I had taken off some dirty old sunglasses and my peripheries were coming alive. It was as if a grey cloud that permeated everything had finally cleared from the air. It was as if I was ‘gaining’ consciousness, whatever that substance is, which we all intuitively feel we have.

The capacity to experience—if that is what consciousness is—seemed to be expanding and able to hold together more of what is, becoming richer and more refined.

I started to see the patterns of all the nature around me. I saw how they connected to each other, how I was connected to it and how we formed this strange web. The leaves of the trees were no longer separate things, but intricate patterns with vivid, oscillating, backgrounds and foregrounds. It wasn’t some unconscious ‘melting’ into my environment. No, it was something more refined, higher, and more inclusive.

And my friends were also a part of this web of patterns that was emerging. An underlying structure was revealing itself. A palpable pattern that made up the elements of this moment, which were fractal-like and therefore not separate even though the separateness was readily observable. There was no preferential attention to any objects because the spaces between became just as interesting, so the field of experience became a unity instead of a place primarily inhabited by objects and people.

I was also part of this unity.

For the first time I saw the vulnerability inside of my masculine friends. I witnessed their softness and I saw their wisdom. Something that was easy to overlook, at that age. My heart was opening to information that was obviously always there but had gone unnoticed. The interconnectedness that was emerging was harmonious, dense, and moved in tide. I saw simultaneously inward and outward our deeper selves, I felt them directly, and I recognised that we were spontaneous creations of the moment. For the first time I loved my friends just for being them, just as they are; just individual leaves sprouting from the tree of life.

What is this strange molecule? I thought. Why does it seem to be revealing what I had been glossing over all these years? As I wondered about these questions, I exhaled and laid back on the couch and turned my gaze upward somewhere between the trees and the night sky where my awareness had nowhere specific to land. Yet, my inner gaze somehow journeyed on through the gaps into the vast universe above, which simultaneously appeared to be a journey deeper into myself. My consciousness seemed to be capable of travel!

But I was not traveling somewhere outside of myself, just deeper into what is. This awareness rose higher and higher and higher. I’m not sure if higher is the right word, perhaps expansion or integration is better, or more transcendent—these all seem a decent fit for the growing inclusiveness of things: Once fragmented now reunited. I was diving deeper into the essential nature of the moment, which just kept blossoming into more and more wondrous levels of order that included more and more of life.

And the higher my awareness went the more it felt like I was undergoing evolution itself. Rapidly but naturally and effortlessly. Each level was characterized by greater harmony, greater awareness, vaster unconditional love, deeper knowledge, more bliss, clarity and connectedness. Not “new” connectedness, but a recognition of the connectedness that was always there. This all took great intelligence, some sort of higher-order form of intellect. It wasn’t the foolish, regressive, sort of union that Freud dismissed as the oceanic experience. No, it was informative. It included my old intelligence, yet raised beyond it to higher intelligence.

It was something I was tuning into. It—“I”—was always already there. It was a great journey of remembrance. And it just kept going: Expanding, rising, and reaching beyond. These higher realms that emerged were made up of infinite eyes and strange mythical figures that were bistable, separate and yet connected, always both and. Each level of awareness appeared to bring forth greater recognition of the nature of life and reality.

Hegel said, “God does not remain petrified and dead; the very stones cry out and raise themselves to Spirit”. I was like a human stone raising up into the realms of Gods. And as I moved further up these levels what emerged were the symbols of all the great traditions, downloaded direct to my core: Meaning and all. Everything was vibrating with significance, understanding, and consciousness—vast and peaceful beyond all human comprehension. Factual, logical, pure, loving, and true.

The rising continued until it reached its natural pinnacle, at the source of it all, the interpenetrating top of a pyramid or a great cosmic cone. There was the God-head, the absolute light of existence—omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. The essence of the toroid. The creative light-reality beyond heaven itself. Formless but objective. Undoubtedly the inspiration of all the great religions. Infinity passed as I merged with this inconceivable light-love-wisdom.

Time, space, truth, consciousness, and the elements merged in blissful singularity.

Then, out of nowhere, the “I” retracted back to Earth and in a split second I was in the dirty backyard once again, reveling in awe and wonder as a meteor shower of insights rained down upon my brain now sitting sparkly and light in an open skull with no barriers to entry. Like an exposed receiver, my information-being was wide open, data effortlessly recombined and restructured until my whole mind was effectively transformed.

The anomalous experience induced a frenzy of model updating. All the new bits of data gossiping with old beliefs and traditions trying to find their new order, trying to ground themselves in the gravel backyard and the frayed couch amongst beer bottles and bull ants.

And as my being reassembled itself now filled with new understandings, full of new meaning, full of a new different direction for life—I felt energized, happy, confident, intuitive and free, to an extent that I could not possibly have dreamed. Not in a trillion years. I had returned to my natural state but it was as if all the cobwebs of my mind had been cleaned away. The metaphysical nature of reality appeared revealed.

I was a new man. I really mean that. That weird little molecule that Albert Hoffman stumbled upon in 1943 that nearly made him crash his bicycle shoved my simple mind into the abyss of truth-light-consciousness. Everything changed after that. My friends couldn’t believe the transformation they witnessed in the coming months and years. The idea that I would start going on meditation retreats and get a PhD was simply outrageous.

I would go on to read books on Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, and other ancient traditions and I would have a strong intuitive resonance with them. I could see that “this is what I know”. My Christian upbringing that I harshly rejected was completely revised. I sympathized with the Bible. I suddenly saw how misunderstood Jesus was. I saw how silly the atheists were.

And the more I thought I knew… the more my ego grew and grew.

the most high angel
is reduced to dust by pride
spiritual heights
are defined by our absence

Spiritual Materialism

I wanted to share this story with you for a few reasons. One reason is simply to not ignore this part of human experience. It would be a travesty to leave out this most unspeakably beautiful thing as we aim to understand ourselves. A world that ignores this part of life is like a horror movie. Only a society that is truly unconscionable and lost has stopped falling in love with this mystery. We ought to be reminded of this everywhere, in our art, in our science, and in our natural spaces.

But, it doesn’t come without risks.

Another reason to share this story is to provide a general warning against the spiritual materialism that can arise as a consequence of such a mystical experience or ‘formidable surprise’. How could my childish mind deal with such an extraordinarily unusual event? It naturally became the epicentre of my world, the new gravitational nexus, the organizing force of a new ego.

The experience was absolutely earth-shattering and authentic. It was the only experience I really believed to be true, everything else seemed like plastic in comparison. But now I was back to being little old me, albeit with this deep imprint that carried forth like a memory more real than what I was now seeing with my own eyes: Like a blanket-truth that lay beyond what my senses revealed to me in this moment. So I took it on as the foundation for a new personality, a new ego, a new purpose, and henceforth a new matrix.

And so the spiritual drama begins!

Welcome to the theatrical, exhilarating, and manic-delusional phase of spiritual materialism. The void of light that can swallow seekers for years and years and years. Symptoms include: Unsuccessful efforts to recreate old highs, struggles to confirm one’s spiritual specialness, a total rejection of ordinary human life and an insatiable mostly unconscious sense of superiority because: “no one knows, but I know”.

It is said that we should be suspicious of unearned wisdom. Perhaps that is a good warning for insights that we do not yet know how to hold.

There may also arise an obsession with a particular version of spirituality, a particular metaphysics, a particular tradition or teacher; a blind and ignorant devotion. A stuckness that masquerades as freedom. “You just have to experience it!” becomes a kind of bigotry because what “it” is becomes your particular abstract notion of it.

As the old is thrown out for the new, conspiracy theories and alternative everything seems to be the new ‘truth’ to replace the explanatory gap formed by the alien visitor in our consciousness—the grand prediction error. And each novel perspective can only reveal that everyone else who still remains trapped in the matrix is a damned sheep.

The new spiritual “I”, in hindsight is the most hilarious of all the hoaxes. Cunning and elusive, hiding under the veil of connectedness and purity, carefully covering up the feeling of superiority. Identified with experience—nay, experiential figments from the past. Identified with a version of the concept of the “present moment” or “ultimate truth”. Prideful and insincere; subtle but palpable arrogance.

Because you see: there is insecurity in every belief system. No matter how seemingly perfect our spiritual or scientific worldview. No matter how immense our experiences. No matter how many people we convince!

There is insecurity in every belief system.

In other words, I may have stopped getting into as much trouble and started reading spiritual books, but I was still very much a jackass.

like a foolish man who built his house on sand 
the rain came down
the streams rose
and the winds blew and beat against that house
and it fell with a great crash

- Matthew 7:26-27

Imperfection is built into the nature of all models and all beliefs, even those based on tremendous spiritual experience. But at the heart of real meditation is the invitation to approach the present moment in an open and objective way. We let the prediction errors from within our body and from this present moment hit us with their full weight. We allow life to change us. We turn ourselves towards this moment with the attitude: I am willing to change in light of your truth to become a clear reflection. I am willing to give up my self-serving habitual expectations in favour of fidelity.

We do this until we become the flowing river itself. We become heaven and hell, and free from heaven and hell. We become totally ordinary, but free.

We’re not polishing a mirror to become perfect or entirely virtuous, we are simply meeting that which is, observing its nature, and in so doing, learning to let go of our stuckness. We sacrifice ourselves (our present model) for what is. We crucify our delusions by not engaging in self-fulfilling prophecies. We stop the incessant generation of confusion by literally sitting and stopping. We allow the moment to be our teacher—the fruits of which, by definition, cannot be predicted.

The poet, David Whyte, put it like this:

heartbreak may be the very essence of being human
of being on the journey from here to there
and of coming to care deeply for what we find along the way

This is not just colourful language, it is really what’s happening when we meditate. Or when we listen, really listen, to the people in our lives. We are choosing to learn through exposure. And it is this exposure therapy that breaks our hearts—reveals the gaps—but also transforms us and sets us forth in search of something real. It is not a problem we can ever solve, but it is a process that we can learn to accept and love once we understand that it is inescapable and essential to being truly alive.

A person who is dense and highly confident in their views, just as I still too often am, is something quite irritating, but also perfectly understandable. If we have a niche that we can inhabit without encountering too many surprises, it is, in a superficial way, working for us. We have constructed ourselves into an adaptive model in a narrow context.

All we must then do is repeat the cycle of confirmation: Avoid anything that might surprise our understanding and seek out evidence in favour of what we know. In such a loopy state, awakening doesn’t seem worth it. Hubris prevails. But when we encounter a formidable surprise, we have little choice but to set forth. That is why our suffering can be our greatest blessing because it reveals what was always already true, which is that we do not know.

The value of awakening is that it makes encountering surprises much easier. It is something that empties out some fundamental grasping at the heart of our models and perceptions; some overestimation of the precision and permanence of beliefs in general.

Awakening makes us self-aware of the samsāric loops of self-confirmation. Letting go of grasping to our models makes the daily encounter with our crucifixion not only bearable but beautiful. It permits us to step more and more into the fire of life because we know that there is no other choice and we know that fundamentally there is no one who can be burned.

Awakening makes you clear regarding your own nature and therefore you are indestructible because you are no-thing at all! And therefore you are willing to live your damn life.

We come to recognise that it is all God’s extraordinary guesswork. It is always shifting according to the moment. Always truly alive. And though we can’t control it, the light of the mind and its inferences shine forth as a spontaneous display—a movie worth watching, full of actors worth caring for.

stepping beyond all desire
we encounter the ineffable
and it strikes the heart of all things
free to be what they are
peace blossoms
naturally