š¤æAIP 120 Swimming Through the Great Mystery of Consciousness
This exploration is meant to be read while listening to this song in loop. If the link doesnāt work, search up āGustave Expedition 33 songā on YouTube and activate repeat indefinitely in settings.
A few days ago at 7:50 p.m., I was sitting on my favorite bench at Beebe Lake, waiting for the sunset to begin. The geese had stopped squawking as if they too were waiting in anticipation for the coming spectacle. The water slowly splashed against the rocks below, tickling them with white foam. It was one of those philosophical days where my mind drifted to who we are, what weāre doing, and why weāre here.
Sitting there, I found myself reminiscing on the peak of my first psychedelic mushrooms experience. One moment I sat on a hotel couch, solidly present in my understanding of myself as, well, myself, Aidan. The next, I was engulfed into the cushions like a marshmallow dropped in hot chocolate. I floated in an endless black voidānot Aidanāthe awareness bearing awareness to consciousness itself.
In that moment I was completely, utterly, present, a presence so strong, so vast, so all encompassing black, it stopped time itself. My consciousness opened upward, no longer constrained by the chains of Ego. And the cosmos was singing, seeing, inging its heartbeat in every way imaginable. It was like⦠It was like a red giant collapsing under its own weight, sharing its elemental pollen across the fabric of the universe. Like a maple tree in autumn, fluttering its leaf flags upward to salute the sun. Like the shared humming of humanity struggling, loving, hating, persisting.
Even now, a year later, I still donāt have the words. Iām still figuring out what any of it means. I probably always will be. But writing it down helps. I just remember I was crying. I was crying before a cosmos Iād passed thousands of times without notice, and realizing for the first time it was art.
Iām often reminded of that experience, and a quote from H.P. Lovecraft: āthe most merciful thing in the world, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.ā I can understand where this idea comes from. This mysterious, ephemeral, ineffable thing we call consciousness can be horrifying.
It helps me to think of it as a great array of dials. Every dial of consciousness is responsible for a different aspect of being. Thereās a dial for color saturation, a dial for depth perception, a dial for oneās tendency to go off on long philosophical rambles. Ahem.
In our everyday, ānormalā state of consciousness, most peopleās dials are in a state where they can complete the tasks they need to be functioning members of society. But through intense philosophical inquiry, mindfulness, or drugs, one can alter their dials of consciousness. In that psychedelic experience, almost every dial of consciousness had been turned to its breaking point. It took my Ego off like a coat.
As Lovecraft said, it should have been absolutely, mindboggingly, soul-shattering. But it wasnāt; it was the most beautiful thing Iāve ever experienced.
The sunset was starting now. It was one of those sunsets that made the sky look edibleālike someone smeared raspberry jam, apricot glaze, and whipped cream across a giant brioche bun. A few ducks waddled with their ducklings on the grass below. Small whisks of wind tickled my cheek.
I thought about consciousness. I thought about my own consciousness as it usually was, without psychedelics, about why it exists and how one swims through it.
As I watched the sky melt, my consciousness loosened drifting into what I call "discolight" (I like fun names), that fluid mode where thoughts, memories, and feelings swirl without bounds. I began thinking about those I love most, how much I missed them, and how I could show my love. My consciousness shifted towards starlight, a consciousness oriented towards values high clouds. As I made it back to my apartment and journaled this down in my computer, my consciousness tightened to a flashlight, focused on a defined, discrete task.
Finished with journaling, I walked into my bedroom and laid down, staring at the ceiling. If I stared hard enough, I could just make out white splotches, where a little extra paint had coalesced to make hills of snow on the ceiling. All this thinking about consciousness was reminding me of an analogy from The Untethered Soul.
Imagine you built a beautiful house in a tranquil country pasture. This house was perfectly you. You painted it the colors you wanted and furnished it with all the symbols of your being. You liked the house a lot, so you started spending more and more time inside. You read, wrote, cooked, and more in that house.
You spent less and less time outside, where the world was uncertain, unclear, dangerous. Soon all of your time was in the house, and you blocked the windows because you disliked how you couldnāt control the light outside. You constructed your own means of creating self-made light, with a generator that could keep the house lit as long and as bright as you wanted anytime.
You spent days, months, years, you donāt know how long in that house. You read books describing this strange form of light beholden to the cycle of the day and night outside. It baffled youāa light which wasnāt self-generated, which wasnāt controllable. A good thing you had your comfortable house to protect you from such absurdities right?
We all build our own houses from values, thoughts, feelings, beliefs, experiences, relationships. They put bounds on our consciousness because weāre scared of letting things in which could infiltrate, from letting our mind correlate all its contents. It's good that we have a house because otherwise we would be exposed to the infinite array of things we could give relevance to. We would have no frames for funneling attention, or habits for simplifying life.
But sometimes, our houses can trap us. They keep us confined in worldviews of our own making, obvious from the need or not wanting to change.
On psychedelics my entire house vanished in one fell swoop, leaving me naked, exposed, and yet more able to be touched by cosmosās soft caress than ever before. When I was a kid I built my house from the safe walls of video games. As a Freshman I built them from focused flow. And now, I build them from the very pursuit of breaking them down.
Thatās right, once I noticed I was living in a prison of my own making, my goal became destroying my house to witness all the outside world had to offer. But even this can be another form of protection.
As I broke down my house, first the need to protect myself with video games, then the need to be super fit looking, then the frame of focus ruling my life, what I didn't realize is I was just replacing it with a different structure. One built on an incessant need to grow, to become the best person I can so I can help others. Growth without constraints is the most invisible form of confinement.
We all need our houses to some degree. They put bounds on the infinite possibilities of consciousness. Itās the balancing, the Yin-Yang, between staying in our houses, and exiting their walls that is the art of life.
I got up from the bed and put on my shoes to walk outside. Apparently no matter how much I change, Iām incapable of spending more than two hours without walking. My consciousness shifted toward discolight, flowing between some of the people most important to me.
It was 8:07 p.m. in Ithaca. One of my friends was definitely up since it was 5:07 p.m. in San Francisco. She was probably doing something for one of her internships while her friend was off at work. I wonder if she had eaten anything today. Probably not. What was she thinking about?
For another friend, it was 6:07 p.m. in Canada He was likely watching some Valorant or doing work for Morgen. Maybe he was listening to an After Socrates episode.
For my brother, it was 2:07 a.m. in The Netherlands. He was, hopefully, asleep or rampantly studying Mandarin flashcards. Language learning sure is a rabbit hole.
As I walked back to Beebe Lake I wondered again how fascinatingly relational consciousness was. Here I was walking around Beebe Lake, extending my consciousness toward beings which were all hundreds of thousands of miles away.
I laughed out loud. I laughed at the very notion there was a solid self we could hold to. Without even one of these people I would be a profoundly different person. I wasnāt separate from them. They werenāt separate from me. We existed by each other. We exist through relation with everything, neither subjective or objective, transjective.
Perhaps this was why my first psychedelic experience hadnāt terrified me. Perhaps the opposite of terror, is simply wonder.
I found my way back to the old bench. Stars specked the night sky. The crickets were singing their moonlight chorus. I popped in my earbuds and put on Gustave from Expedition 33āthe same song youāre listening to now. I let myself get carried by the melody, the flowing, ebbing, and melancholic happiness which undertones the entire song. Since I first heard it, it reminded me of staying wonder filled while swimming through the great mystery of consciousness.
I didnāt know how the coming months would change my house. But grounded in my awareness, I knew one thing for certain: what a wonder it is to be conscious.