We think that we experience reality, and on occasion, some have the impression that through special circumstances they are able to catch sight of a deeper insight, they feel they have got a sense of the ultimate nature of the world. In the past, this was most apparent in religious experiences. But, in contemporary times, it is most commonly found in psychedelic experiences. James Cooke here argues that these mystical experiences can reveal how consciousness itself is a window onto reality and that consciousness and reality exist in one and the same world.

In contemporary neuroscience, it is common to envision the brain as being fundamentally isolated from the outside world. Your brain sits in the darkness of the skull like a prisoner, one who only receives clues as to what is occurring in the wider world, clues provided by the senses. It is the job of the brain to conjure a vision of what could be occurring in the world beyond the bony confines of the cranium. This capacity to imagine the world and oneself within it is what we call consciousness.

Another perspective comes from contemplatives with expertise in exploring consciousness directly. During these explorations, it is common for such spiritual practitioners to experience radical changes in consciousness. These non-ordinary “mystical” states reveal insights regarding the nature of the mind. What’s more, many claim to also glean insights into the nature of reality itself.

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Rather than directly providing information about reality, “mystical” experiences of union with the rest of reality may instead dispel delusional beliefs about the way the world is

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Obviously we are made of the same stuff as the rest of reality, there is nothing special about the individual atoms that make you up. We gain knowledge not through individual physical particles of this kind, however, but through the mind. Immanuel Kant distinguished between what he called the “noumenal”, the world as it exists in itself, and the “phenomenal” world, the mental world of experience. How can experiences arising in the mind possibly provide information about the nature of the world in itself, beyond the mind?

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Rather than directly providing information about reality, “mystical” experiences of union with the rest of reality may instead dispel delusional beliefs about the way the world is. This reflects the tradition of negative theology, in which it is understood that the ground of being can only be approached through negation. What beliefs must we negate in order to come closer to reality as it is in itself?

Many spiritual practitioners come to the insight that one’s presumed separation from the rest of existence is just an idea, not a material reality. Science confirms this, with its view of living things as open systems that continually exchange material with the rest of the physical world. This insight can also generalise beyond oneself to every “thing” that we perceive. This too fits with what we know about the nature of categorical perception - the mind divides up the physical world in our experience, but the world itself is not actually divided along these perceived lines. The weed in your garden is not actually a weed in itself, different to the other plants; you merely perceive it as a weed. Boundaries between weeds and non-weeds do not exist outside of the mind. Negating our sense of personal separation from the world and our perception of independently existing objects can give the experience of insight into the holistic and interdependent nature of existence in general.

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What's more, physicists such as Carlo Rovelli are now arguing that this perspective is a useful way to interpret the findings of quantum mechanics

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Let us consider for a moment that this insight might be valid. If we entertain the idea that reality is not made of separate things, then what is it made of? We can think of existence as being woven together from relations, rather than objects, pure interactions of the whole of existence with itself. We see this perspective arising in many philosophical traditions, from the concepts of interdependence and emptiness in Buddhism to Harcalitus’s writings on the codependent arising of opposites. What's more, physicists such as Carlo Rovelli are now arguing that this perspective is a useful way to interpret the findings of quantum mechanics, seeming to validate these insights into reality that arise from the examination of direct experience.

To bring things full circle, this relational worldview may help to account for how insight into reality might be possible through the mystical experiences of contemplatives. In this picture of existence the brain no longer appears as a distinct and separate object that is disconnected from the world outside the organism. Rather, the whole organism is seen as a relational process that takes part in a fundamentally interconnected existence. If experience is a complex form of relationality between organism and environment and matter consists of an interdependent web of relations, then there is no fundamental difference between matter and mind. As a result, insight into the nature of mind may generalise to the rest of reality.

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According to this view, the brain builds a simulation of the world that is used to predict or anticipate the sensory information the brain will receive

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The relational nature of experience can be discovered by interrogating our own subjective states. In doing this, we find that no experience stands alone, apart from all other experiences. The sensation of hot is meaningless without the possibility of the sensation of cold, the feeling of moving forwards implies the possibility of the feeling of moving backwards - these experiences depend on each other. Can we detect the relationality of the physical world in the same manner?

A contemporary version of Kant’s perspective is articulated in the predictive processing view of the mind. According to this view, the brain builds a simulation of the world that is used to predict or anticipate the sensory information the brain will receive. The simulation of the world is subsequently fine-tined by any mistakes that occur in this prediction process. As a result, experience is seen as a “controlled hallucination”, an internally generated fantasy that becomes honed to capture certain useful patterns in the wider world.

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From this perspective, the mind appears to function as a process of inference. Our controlled hallucination of the world consists of what we infer to exist, based on previously accumulated information combined with new evidence from the senses. We infer that we are inference-making things - or rather we infer that we infer this. If this is correct, then our ideas about reality are forever trapped in the domain of inference, rather than reflecting an ability to directly know the world. In struggling toward such visions of the way the world is, we are confined to the dimension of inference, the space of the mind, Kant’s phenomenal world. We never come to know the relational nature of wider reality directly, we infer it from an examination of experience.

How accurate are these inferences of the relational nature of reality? Their correspondence with the findings of experiments in fundamental physics mentioned above can be seen as providing some level of validation. If it is true that we are a relational process that is capable of making inferences, then our inference that this is what is going on may be fundamentally correct. As a result, we are in some sense directly connected with the way the world is, as the inference is accurate, but in another way we are disconnected, in that such insight is always mediated through the process of inference.

Our situation is like that of the Ouroboros, the mediaeval symbol depicting a snake eating its own tail. The head of the snake can never consume the whole of the body, we will fail. In the same way, if we aim to satisfactorily encompass reality through our heady inferences, we will fail, we cannot consume the very ground out of which our inferences arise.

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If we relax the need to know, we discover that we need not identify with the head of the snake alone - we are the whole thing.

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 Image source Wikimedia Commons

This is not the manner by which the mystic approaches reality, however. Rather, this insight arises through a process of un-knowing. If we relax the need to know, we discover that we need not identify with the head of the snake alone - we are the whole thing. The anxiety about our contact with reality only arose due to an invented partition between head and body, between knower and world. In dropping this paradigm, the problem evaporates. Of course we are in contact with reality, because all there is is reality. A holistic harmony becomes apparent, but only when we let ourselves be content with a recognition of reality that arises through unknowing, rather than through our confining inferences.

So can we know reality directly through non-ordinary states of consciousness, such as the mystical experience? Yes and no. Yes, in that we can negate our delusional beliefs about the way it is, our ideas about solid, separate objects, thereby allowing us to move closer to truth by dispelling delusion. No, in that our understanding is confined to the realm of inference by our very nature as inference making things (or so we infer). By relaxing this process, however, we can find ourselves grounded in reality, as fully part of it, without the neurotic need to encompass it in thought. Through this path, any sense of disconnection from wider reality evaporates, leaving the impression that we are always in direct connection with reality. After all, all there is is reality, so how could it be any other way?

James Cooke's upcoming book 'The Dawn of the Mind: How Matter Became Conscious and Alive' will be released on December 3rd.