Buddhist Enlightenment in a Pill - Also “realist” enlightenment
Actually Written SEPTEMBER 22, 2007
Buddhist enlightenment (among other things) in a pill.
For those who can’t manage to meditate long enough to achieve enlightenment, there may be a chemical shortcut known as mescaline.
Also:
For those philosophers who behold things that exist, yet who simply cannot identify the bare fact of existence, there may be a chemically induced state making it easier to achieve that identification, again, known as mescaline.
Yes, here’s what I’m suggesting:
Mescaline trip = Buddhist enlightenment = increased awareness of the bare fact of existence = temporary schizophrenia.
Well, no. I don’t mean that a mescaline trip is really equivalent to these other things. I just mean that mescaline trip may greatly promote or resemble these other things.
Let me digress a bit into a personal reflection.
First, I have the capacity to focus on the bare fact of existence.
Second, I think this is a very rare capacity.
You may find these claims rather absurd. Doesn’t everyone see existence when they simply look around them? No. They don’t. Most people can see particular things that exist, but they simply cannot focus their attention on the bare, abstract fact of existence, un-associated with any particular instance of existence. They look around them and report that they can see things that exist, but cannot see anything that one would simply call “existence”. (This is similar, in character, to their reports that they can see particular shades of blue, but cannot see anything that one would call “the bare fact of blue-ness.”)
Thirdly, I suspect I am to some degree schizophrenic.
Fourthly, perhaps there is some causal connection between my mild schizophrenia and my capacity to focus on the bare fact of existence.
Fifthly:
I have wanted to show people this bare fact of existence. This has especially been so while arguing metaphysics with a fellow of philosophy. As recently as last month I was again surprised to encounter yet another philosophy scholar who claimed to see things that exist, but not to see the bare fact of existence. This fellow was totally unmoved by arguments such as “the existence of the things you see means you can see that which exists, that you see instances of the bare fact of existence, that all you need do is abstract on these instances and you will realize that this is so” and so on.
How long I have fantasized about having the means to get such fellows to realize that they are in all instances seeing the bare fact of existence.
In several of these frustrating encounters, I’ve been tempted to prescribe Buddhism, as a polite way of telling them to “just shut up and look at the such-ness of things for a long, long time – and then maybe you’ll get it.”
Then a few days ago I heard the audio-book The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley, a sophisticated report on the author’s mescaline trip. Now instead of a polite prescription of Buddhism, I’d fantasize about politely prescribing a mescaline trip to those who still can’t focus on the bare fact of existence. Mescaline will make you shut up and look at the existence of things, without being distracted by whatever other qualities things happen to have. Mescaline will go out into the world of mundane objects, select one or two upon which your gaze will fall, and then dig deep into those chosen objects, rooting through all their characteristics and qualities, to lay hold on the very fact of those objects’ existence, and then rip that fact out of them as like their still beating hearts, and present these existential hearts to you in all their horrifying glory.
If you want someone to notice something, but you can’t describe it or locate it, you can contrast it against change – you can wiggle it (or wiggle all that is not it.) I suspect mescaline “wiggles” all that is not the bare fact of a thing’s existence, making that bare existence conspicuous by how it holds still against all the other qualities of a thing. While spatial distortions are a part of this wiggling, they are only a minor part. Apparently, the wiggling is more about the importance our minds place on the various characteristics of things. The mescalinated mind simply loses interest in characteristics previously regarded as important. But, apparently, the very existence of things becomes important to the point of obsession.
So anyway, now I’m curious about mescaline. I may want to try some myself, just to see whether it would be worth prescribing to those who can’t grasp the bare fact of existence. Then I suppose I’d like to see whether such a prescription would help convert a philosophical anti-realist to a realist who believes in the perceptual validation of existence.
He he ha ha! Be gone, you analytic/synthetic dichotomy! The real object of consciousness and knowledge is the bare existence of things, not the characteristics that distract us toward such wild goose-chases of categorization into “necessary” versus “contingent”, primary versus secondary, or analytic versus synthetic.
Please excuse me. That was a private kind of jab at the folks who, as a consequence of their inability to perceive the bare fact of existence, split knowledge about objects into realms of “necessary logical intuition” about objects, and “contingent perceptual data” about objects – wherein the bare fact of existence doesn’t fit in either realm. This split is called the “analytic/synthetic dichotomy,” and has the absurd consequence of separating what we observe from what must logically be true. [Remind you of what I wrote in “Against Metaphysical Continua”?]
Yaw. So anyway…
Womp, yoink, boing!
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