We stand today on the cusp of a new era of scientific and spiritual symbiosis, for we now have the technology to summon direct spiritual experiences almost at will. I am speaking of the psychedelic chemical agents whose capacity to readily generate human experiences describable as 'spiritual' has been widely acknowledged ^#1. Direct spiritual experiences are rare under normal circumstances, yet a sense of being at one with the universe, even identifying oneself with a cosmic consciousness, is a common report from psychedelic explorers.

Why are such salutary experiences always temporary? Why are they so far removed from our usual state of mind? Are they only drug-induced illusions or do they have genuine epistemic value? The experience can feel so real that many question their normal perception afterward.

In this chapter I look at what connectivity and architectivity can bring to an understanding of the psychedelic experience. I deal predominantly with the type of experience encountered under LSD, mescaline and psilocybin even though the term 'psychedelic' is often used to include DMT and MDMA among others.

If you have no interest in psychedelics please skip this chapter.

Psychedelic experiences are not to be taken lightly. An atheist at the time of my first exposure, I was initially overwhelmed by the visual extravaganza ("Fire the art director!" was my initial reaction) but eventually emerged some hours later announcing wide-eyed that I had "met God". Not some wise old man on a cloud but a greater-than-human consciousness pervading the cosmos. (It must be mentioned that I was not aware that the substance I had ingested was LSD, and my companions were all equally godless, so there was no expectation of a spiritual experience.)

I didn't have to die to do it. I didn't have to meditate for a lifetime either. I put a tablet the size of a pinhead on my tongue and that was it. And I can do it again - have done it many times - though not always with the same degree of exaltation.

The major takeaway from these experiences is that heaven is right here, we don't have to go elsewhere to find it. We're in it, only we can't see it. And it's not only the rendezvous with the divine that is so striking, but the realization of how fabulously expansive and gorgeous our world is - and how scant is our appreciation of it. There appears to be a hedge, let's call it, normally preventing us from seeing this heavenly garden, and worse still, having thorns that can make life in the garden fiendishly difficult.

A question faces returning psychonauts: How can we penetrate the hedge more readily? And can anything be done to disarm the thorns?

Though most religions offer pathways to overcome adversity, only the mystics acknowledge the garden we are in but cannot see, so their advice appears the most plausible and it is virtually unanimous: the thorn hedge can be overcome by changing one's own mind.

Changing one's own mind? Hey, psychedelics do that magnificently! Let's do more! But a tolerance develops and returns diminish. And we always come back to normal. With excessive use our relationships suffer and our money dries up. Psychedelics may allow us to see the garden but the hedge always re-establishes on our return.

So we follow the mystics. Search out a guru. Meditate. Find Jesus. Fast. Go vegetarian. Practise yoga. But without psychedelics one has to strive for a lifetime or die to get there. And then only maybe. In the meantime the thorns remain.

We get serious. Study philosophy, physics, neurology and anthropology. Systematically explore the psychedelic phenomenon. But intellectual effort alone cannot reproduce the experience and drugs are not permitted in the halls of academia.

As I see it, the psychedelic enterprise is up against the architective dominion. The thorn hedge, I argue, is the architective dominion of our planet, which at our scale is an intrinsic part of the garden. Changing one's own mind may allow one to perceive the garden more readily but it cannot remove the thorns.

A Model for the Psychedelic Experience

From a neurological perspective psychedelic drugs are known to interact with the serotonin receptors on our brains' neurons. Translating this neurological activity into a subjective spiritual experience is just as impenetrable as the "hard problem" of consciousness itself. But I suggest we can gain some insight into the psychedelic experience if we understand it to enhance our capacities for pattern recognition.

To this end, suppose our brains host a cyclic process that mediates our perceptions. (Our brains host many cyclic processes, such as neural oscillations, and thalamocortical oscillations in particular are understood to assimilate our perceptions.) The frequency of such a cyclic process would set an upper (but not lower) limit to the changes we can resolve. For example, if this frequency was 100 cycles per second I could clearly perceive things changing at 25 changes per second (or less) but I would not be able to distinguish all the detail in 150 changes per second (or more). The rates of change I could clearly perceive would be increased, and the range of changes I could distinguish would be widened, if I increased this frequency to say 200 cycles per second. I call this frequency my perceptibility limit.

An increase in one's perceptibility limit implies more than a widening of one's sensitivity to change, for there may be patterns in the changes and widening one's sensitivity also means being better able to distinguish patterns in the changes. It means being able to see more patterns, and then being able to see patterns in the patterns. In other words, a widening of one's sensitivity to change can be accompanied by an increased appreciation of the order (as I have used this term) of both architective and connective patterning and serial meaning.

It is not only one's sentience that is enhanced by an increase in one's perceptive capabilities, but one's sentience of one's sentience - one's consciousness. Conscious capacities such as attention, reflection, introspection, association, abstraction and imagination are also extended. In particular, one's capacity for abstraction - for consciously recognizing higher orders of pattern - is greatly extended.

In their capacity for neuromodulation, I see psychedelic drugs increasing one's perceptibility limit, widening one’s sensitivity to change and enhancing one's capacity for pattern recognition.

An increase in one's perceptibility limit would allow one to perform conceptual architective manipulations at a higher rate. Language and mathematics could systematize more readily. Architective ideas could process more quickly, conceptions of control and organization could be realized more clearly, and strategies for contest could be thought out more comprehensively.

An increase in one's perceptibility limit would also increase one's awareness of connective patterning and constellation. It would increase one's sensitivity to connective subtlety and order and allow one to be aware of and employ ever slighter amplitudes of interaction.

Changing one's perceptibility limit might also change one's subjective experience of the passing of time.

Psychedelic drugs significantly widen the scale at which we participate in the world. Details can be perceived more clearly: I might see poetry where I saw none before, or I might moderate an experience of bodily pain by resolving previously unresolved frequencies, allowing me to negotiate the sensation without stubbing my toes on its unseen corners. An increased sensitivity to connective subtlety might allow me to sublimate constraints and touch areas vibrationally that would normally be out of reach.

I am not suggesting that the sensitivity of my sense organs themselves are altered, only that the brain processing of the sense signals is altered. The architective nature of our sense organs would continue to constrain the frequencies they are sensitive to.

I see too that one's perceptibility limit is not fixed. Many factors might affect it, such as one's state of mind, genetic predisposition, training, diet, comfort and mood. I believe that my practice of meditation has developed a capacity to voluntarily flex my perceptibility limit to some degree, while psychedelic drugs forcibly induce perceptibility limit changes. In the case of meditation or a minor psychedelic like cannabis the experience is quite manageable, while a major psychedelic like LSD extends my perceptibility limit so far beyond normal as to make the experience quite challenging.

Increasing one's perceptibility limit also widens the scope of one's imagination. Normally our imaginations utilize and extend our past experiences or perceptions (say through reading, discussion, art or theatre). But as our appreciation of patterning expands, we are able to incorporate novel patterns into our imaginations, possibly extrapolating them beyond the sensitivities of our organs and beyond our personal histories. The stuff of our normal imaginations, based on experiences at a lower perceptibility limit, is not nearly as rich.

By widening our appreciation of pattern and its ordering, fields of meaning become available to us that are normally imperceptible, offering new landscapes to navigate in which novel games may be played. Having greater depth of meaning, we may find these games and landscapes more interesting than our normal ones, and choose to play them instead.

Connective visages may constellate in the hyper-patterning of psychedelic experience, while the deeper architective narratives of our lives may become clear, and all these may play in their deeper fields of meaning. This, I believe, is the essence of "getting high", when we are not only able to discern higher orders of pattern and meaning but can navigate them on their terms.

Under a major psychedelic we may become aware of exceptionally high order narratives in our lives, perhaps even the processional narratives of our entire species or planet. Exceptionally high order connective fields of meaning may also become available to us, and should our appreciation of connectivity extend to the cosmic connective system, that system's deep orders of meaning may become discernible to, and navigable by us.

Amazingly, our minds appear to be perfectly capable of negotiating such exotic topographies.

While both modes of consciousness may be enhanced, proportionately it is our connective consciousness that is the major beneficiary of the psychedelic since it is usually so under-represented in our normal state. In addition, since a connective sentience is dispersed rather than focused, the slightest widening of one's connective capability spawns a disproportionate expansion of one's connective awareness. Subjectively, both modes of sentience become more interesting, but one's connective sentience becomes much more interesting, even to the point of overcoming the architective domination of one's attention. Environments that offer exceptionally deep orders of connective patterning like nature can become totally absorbing. LSD is so powerful a psychedelic and our connective capacity so enhanced that one's appreciation of connective subtlety, constellation and order may bloom exponentially while one's architective capacities, though enhanced, remain comparatively stilted. Indeed, for first-time users, the comparative explosion of connective awareness is often misread as a total banishment of architectivity, leading to a misplaced belief that getting high offers a salvation from all one's woes.

Under a major psychedelic the flood of new information renders one's usual mental controls ineffective. The overwhelming proportion of that new information is connective so our experientially acquired and predominantly architective knowledge base is now relevant only to a small portion of our experience. Our normal understanding of how the world works and what we can do to manage it becomes almost irrelevant. The experience can be terrifying until one adapts to the abandonment of control, certainty and reliance on past epistemic reference. One's connective experience is not based on control and certainty and does not reference a fixed knowledge base so the increase in connective information is easier to accommodate. This I feel is a major benefit of the psychedelic experience, where in a state approaching pure connectivity our normal preconceptions become redundant, leaving one to swim, or perhaps drift, on the currents of one's immediate perceptions without pre-judgement.

At its peak, the psychedelic experience is notoriously difficult to describe or pin down. Images and sensations flow at speed through too many variations for one to be able to utter a word of description. No specific knowledge can be extracted at the time so any intellectual understanding of the experience can only be distilled after the event.

You may remember when earlier describing a purely connective window of scale I remarked how alien we would find such a window with its absence of architectivity. The comparative explosion of our connective awareness under a strong psychedelic approaches that sense of other-worldliness - of being spiritual - even though we remain situated in material reality.

Increasing one's perceptibility limit may significantly increase awareness of one's internal constitution. Physically one might become more aware of the flows in one's body such as pulse and breath, mentally one might become more aware of one's architective habits constraining a more profound connective expansion and be able to release them.

Even with only a modest increase in one's perceptibility limit, the comparative connective advantage permits a noticeable diminution of the architective dominion of one's consciousness. Psychedelic drugs can be a powerful tool for overcoming the architective dominion, at least temporarily.

Changing one's perceptibility limit might change one's mood or change one's subjective flavouring of the external world. Since our perceptibility limits are not fixed, different classes of drugs, different doses of the same drug and similar doses at different times can have quite different subjective effects.

Even in our normal states of mind we would each likely have different perceptibility limits, and so have different subjective experiences of the world while sharing a common objective reality. I suspect that one person would find another more empathic when their perceptibility limits match. Perhaps the feat of great art is to bring the perceptibility limits of an audience up to that of the artist.

The Psychedelic Journey

The concepts of connectivity and architectivity can provide a framework for understanding the psychedelic journey and even offer signposts for its navigation. But before elaborating on these I must make a caveat: As mentioned, any thoughtful description of a psychedelic journey cannot be made during the journey itself since at the time one's perceptions are too volatile to capture. The material of this discussion has been collated in my normal state of mind and not from within a psychedelic state. Consider too that writing is an architective process for which accurately describing a purely connective experience is quite impossible.

That said, I have looked back at these ideas from subsequent psychedelic highs and have never found them misleading, only to be very distant from the experience itself (like standing at the top of a mountain and looking at the track leading to the mountain in the valley below).

A psychedelic journey often includes an experience of universal connectedness, which is so different to our normal experience as isolated individuals. The extension of one's connective sensibilities under a strong psychedelic may be so "far out" as to allow a conscious awareness of oneself as an integral part of the universe, or in the parlance of this discussion, the integration of one's self in the cosmic connective system. I distinguish two aspects to this experience: An awareness of one's participation in the cosmic connective system, which I call cosmic integration, and a sharing in the consciousness of that system's holism - the consciousness of the Cosmic Deity - which I call cosmic selfhood.

Synaesthesia offers a good analogy for the experience of cosmic integration. In synaesthesia two or more of one's senses coalesce into a single sense - the boundary between the senses disappears. One may see a sound as well as hear it, for example, or vice versa. The experience of cosmic integration can be envisaged as the coalescence of all one's senses, followed by the disappearance of the differentiation between one's senses and what they are sensing, until everything - oneself and everything one senses - has merged into a hyper-sensation of communion in which the connectedness of the cosmic system becomes an all-encompassing sensation.

The accepted wisdom is that to achieve this sensation the psychedelic explorer will have been able to "lose their ego" so as not to impose any preconception or restriction on the sensation. In the parlance of this book, the psychedelic explorer will have been able to relinquish their architective consciousness, or rather maintain their consciousness to the connective mode for long enough to recognize the sensation. This is not easy to do and for many explorers this feat may take up the bulk if not all of their initial psychedelic sessions.

Relinquishing one's architective consciousness - one's ego - can be a terrifying experience, for one's capacity for control and referential certainty is significantly diminished. Meanwhile the world (and one's mind) is behaving in the most astonishing way, and if one is not primed for the experience one's natural instinct is to try to control it. One's architective consciousness fights to stay in control.

The concepts of connectivity and architectivity help us understand that letting go of one's architective consciousness is not a matter of handing control of oneself to someone or something else - it's a matter of relinquishing the concept of control altogether.

Relinquishing architective consciousness does not mean relinquishing one's architective sentience, only that sentience's insistent grip on one's consciousness. Even when we have overcome our habitual architective consciousness, our architective context persists since our bodies continue their architective functions, and while the majority of these can be dealt with subconsciously by our architective sentience, management of some functions must be done consciously (like going to the toilet). Connective consciousness is not self perpetuating so an architective consciousness can be invoked anytime the necessity arises. The difficulty is in getting back to connective consciousness since one's architective consciousness demands to reinstate itself. Though the task of achieving a continuing connective consciousness is facilitated by the psychedelic, a lifetime of automatically invoking architective consciousness is not easily overcome, and to this end intrepid psychedelic explorers embark on extensive psychological and spiritual training.

It is not only one's architective consciousness that strives to prevent one relinquishing it. Our Planetary Deity also fights to prevent it since one's consciousness is then beyond its organization. Even when one is able to avoid the domination of one's own architective consciousness our Planetary Deity will do all in its power to defend its domain: If it can organize an urgent external intrusion it will; if it can provoke a habitual ego response it will; if it can distract one with images of fear and loathing it will; if it can engender a state of paranoia it will. It is only when we can negotiate even these tactical distractions by our Planetary Deity that we are able to enter the universal union.

We can reduce the likelihood of external intrusions disturbing a psychedelic session by providing a suitable setting for the session, one that is sheltered from extraneous architective distractions and where all foreseen architective needs have been catered for.

Integrating with the cosmic connective system is a stupendously satisfying experience but it is not the end of the journey. Awareness of, and participation in, that system's consciousness - its holism - awaits. The cosmic system includes a vast array of strong connective forces that can obscure the subtle effects of its holism. As one wanders about the garden of integration savouring its perfumes and splendours, one 'hears' snippets of a song so deeply hidden it is discerned only fleetingly. With patience, the stronger interactive winds of the cosmic system may subside sufficiently to let that song shine through - the song of the Cosmic Deity. Should one be graced with its discernment, one's consciousness spontaneously constellates with that of the Cosmic Deity and one assumes one's Cosmic Self.

One's normal, mundane, separate consciousness might be called one's Planetary Self.

(The term 'psychedelic' means "revealing the psyche". This sometimes becomes evident at the end of a session when one realizes how one's expectations and determination to stay in control have shaped one's experience of the psychedelic, thus exposing one's mundane psyche or Planetary Self for self-reflection - but it may also be describing the revelation of one's Cosmic Self.)

Some Notes for Travelers

Psychedelics loosen the grip of one's architective sentience on one's consciousness. As an architective consciousness habituated to perpetuating itself, one may experience the increasing suspension of that consciousness under a psychedelic to be that one is dying, and that one must do something - anything, and immediately - to reinstate that consciousness. But it is only one's architective consciousness - one's ego - that is dying. One's architective sentience is not dying, only its persistent grip on one's consciousness.

If one has the fortitude, one should not fear this death. Physical deaths from ingesting psychedelics are rare ^#7. Almost all reported cases have arisen through an ancillary (and unsupervised) act like running into traffic or threatening a policeman. As chemical agents the only significant effects of psychedelics are on one's mind. One's breathing and heartbeat are not reliant on one's ego to keep going. And though it may not seem that way at the time, one's architective consciousness can be restored whenever it is needed since connective consciousness is not self perpetuating.

If the psychedelic experience offers you an opportunity to die, accept it - as long as it requires no architective act on your part or on the part of anyone or anything else (which means no bodily harm is involved).

Any architective act at this stage is just another tactical manoeuvre by one's ego or our Planetary Deity to have one's consciousness revert to the architective mode. Beware too of thinking you need to prove your connective purity, say by an act of architective self-harm, for proof is an architective concept, and just one more distraction from the connective enormity one is facing.

These opportunities for relinquishing one's architective consciousness are a major benefit of psychedelics. Opportunities for cosmic integration are not easily come by in our everyday lives and are not to be missed.

In avoiding or confronting architective distractions, one must take care not to compound them by playing their game, fighting back or attacking someone else. Doing so brings one's consciousness back into the architective mode. Distractions can often be circumvented by changing one's immediate environment, say by going for a walk or changing the music.

Distraction also raises the issue of advising trippers to be totally accepting of whatever they are experiencing. I see such advice to be valid only in a connective sense. Architective influences, whether internal or external, that are distracting from connective consciousness should be avoided or managed. Certainly in the connective sense being totally accepting of whatever one is experiencing is necessary, for finding cosmic integration and the song of the Cosmic Deity requires that one allow one's connective reality to go wherever it wants to go.

Much of the imagery encountered in a psychedelic session is fast moving and kaleidoscopic. This is consistent with the dynamics of connectives where visages fluidly move in and out of constellations. Should the imagery or situation get stuck in a rut or become inescapably constraining one must suspect an architective presence, for purely connective processes will always move on. If the same distraction keeps recurring in spite of one's evading actions it needs to be managed.

One should beware of overdoing the spiritual training and expectation. The idea that rigorous spiritual training is the only condition on which spiritual achievement or success in psychedelic exploration depends is not only misleading but harmful, for it can lead to an obsession with cleansing one's body and one's psyche - which is just another architective distraction. That said, spiritual exercises can train one's architective consciousness to relax its total occupancy of one's consciousness and so make the relinquishment of architective consciousness less intimidating.

It is well to recall that a disregard of architective serial meaning involves a disregard for any precise or enduring meaning in symbols, especially as found in language. Purely connective serial meaning is not conveyed through specificity in words, symbols, rationality or logic. We feel it rather than think it. And here, where I argue that spirituality arises in the material world, I say that we experience cosmic integration as a wordless, somatic sensation. Knowing this, during a psychedelic session or when meditating, it pays to follow one's bodily sensations rather than one's thoughts or ideas.

An experience of cosmic integration does not mean that we can actually see the forces at play in the cosmic connective system or that we can understand its composition, but that we become aware of the concert of the system in its subtlety and grandeur. We see the dance of all objects responding to each other, and the intimacy with which we dance with them.

One should not confuse an aesthetic enjoyment of the beauty and wonder of the world, especially as enhanced under psychedelics, with an experience of cosmic integration. For cosmic integration is a somatic whole of body and mind sensation rather than a detached aesthetic appreciation of beauty.

Sex and Psychedelics

Having arrived at a recognition of one's Cosmic Self, what does one do with any time remaining in that blessed but soon-to-end psychedelic nirvana? Is there anything a cosmically constellated human can bring to a Deity enrapt in connective profundity?

Yes there is: One's architective embodiment. One's body as a functional organism now participating in the cosmic connective system and in harmony with the Cosmic song. The Cosmic Deity does not have an architective body of its own. As I see it, one's most profound connective bodily expression is a heartfelt, orgasmic sexual encounter with a lover, and when cosmically enjoined, serenading the cosmos with your love-song.

The psychedelic mind can however be so riotous that a cosmic erection is difficult to maintain, while the delicate threads of a whole-bodied communion are easily lost. But consider that the Cosmic Deity does not seek absolute perfection. It seeks the most profound connective constellation available. There is no one target among the infinite possibilities for connective profundity. The Cosmic Deity accepts lovingly whatever is given with the whole of one's being. Though orgasm may be beyond one's reach, the love-play can go on interminably - perhaps even for the rest of one's life.....

Sharing an experience of cosmic integration can open relationships. The following is a quote from an online forum:

"My now husband (32M) and I (24F) have been doing psychedelics together since our second date. ...... I am a huge advocate for regular psychedelic use with a partner. I think it has allowed both sober and trip wise to remain with our walls down. I was recently asked at a party about whether or not I'd recommend sex on LSD, and I said 1000 times yes. Sometimes the sex involves 0 penetration, but it's so emotional. ...... Has anyone else had nothing but positives when tripping with their partner? We have differing work schedules and other obligations, we use this as a reset and time that is solely devoted to each other, where we just kind of worship and dote on each other extra. We have always had an amazing connection and understanding when we are in our day to day. This is nothing but a positive post. But I wanted to know if any of you share a similar experience? We have been able to work through things so quickly because of the vulnerability that tripping has created both inside and outside of psych trips."

We are not always so fortunate as to have a lover join us in a psychedelic communion. A whole-bodied enjoyment of music - alone or shared - can also offer a wealth of connective profundity that is capaciously appreciated, as is a whole-bodied communion with nature, and of course, a communion (not socialization) with other people. Sharing an experience of cosmic integration can create a bond among participants that persists through their return to normality.

"It's All in the Mind"

A strong impression of the psychedelic experience is that of the power of mind, in the sense of one's mind having the power to shape reality without physical intervention of any kind.

Such a sense is valid when one's consciousness has constellated to the Cosmic Deity, for that mind has the ability to apprehend reality without interaction. However, it is only the connective aspects of reality that can be affected through apprehension and then only their subtler modulations. Stronger manipulations, whether connective or architective, require direct interaction or control, whether by one's own material actions or those of someone or something else.

In the exaltation of holistic apprehension it is easy to believe that "its all in the mind", that reality ultimately springs from mind or that mind is a precursor to material reality. But it's only the connective components of reality, and only their finer modulations, that are "all in the mind". From one's viewpoint as a purely connective consciousness, the concreteness of architectivity, whose serial meanings we are no longer comprehending, can indeed appear illusory.

In everyday terms, believing that one's entire reality is a product of one's own mind can engender a sense of guilt, for one then becomes personally responsible for all one's misfortunes and those of others. Understanding that one cannot assume such a universal mantle of responsibility for the architective components of reality leaves one innocent of much of the architective component of our suffering. The Cosmic Deity too is not responsible for, nor can it even comprehend, the architective pressures of our existence, and when we are constellated with it, neither can we. Nor can one assume such a universal mantle of responsibility for the stronger connective components of reality, for it is only their subtler modulations that are apprehended by the Cosmic Deity, or by ourselves when we are constellated with it.

Any apprehensive shaping of reality on one's own part when in the psychedelic state is only possible when one's personal intent has constellated with that of the Cosmic Deity. One need have no fear that any flaw in one's personal intent is causing misfortune through the apprehension, for there is no way that one can coerce the Deity to one's own intent; rather it is one's personal intent which constellates with that of the Deity.

That is not to say that misfortune cannot happen in a state of apprehensive possibility, only that it would arise through architective manipulations or the stronger connective interactions of the cosmic connective system. Of course, being integrated with the cosmic connective system one bears an imputation to any suffering associated with its stronger connective interactions. (Once, while in a psychedelic state of cosmic integration, I switched on the TV news which happened to be showing a hurricane tearing through the southern US states, causing enormous damage and hurt. The hurricane's name was Michael. How do you think I felt?)

None of our suffering - or anyone else's suffering - arises from any one person's inability to mind-generate a perfect world, whether under the influence of a psychedelic or not.

There is another aspect to one's mind having the power to shape reality without direct intervention, namely in the power of a conscious mind to choose between architective and connective consciousness when these would result in contradictory outcomes. Such dilemmas are rare in one's normal state of mind, but during a psychedelic journey they become frequent hurdles on the accelerated path to cosmic integration. In the psychedelic case it becomes necessary to keep choosing connectivity if one is to achieve the connective purity required for cosmic integration, no matter how inconvenient or frightening it may be, and the psychedelic session should ideally be arranged to provide a safe space that allows one to make such challenging decisions more easily. In a normal state of mind where architectivity is so dominant, or in an unprotected psychedelic space, these challenges may be too difficult to overcome and insistently choosing connectivity can have serious architective consequences.

The Epistemic Challenge of Psychedelics

In the introduction to this chapter I mentioned that the psychedelic perception of the world can be so convincing as to make one question one's normal perception of reality. Yet the veracity of the subjective experience remains under question in the light of it being unprovable after the event. The world we come down to continues its same old epistemic themes as before, seemingly oblivious of the earth-shattering revelations one has just encountered. So is there any epistemic value to the psychedelic landscape or is it only a "comforting hallucination"?

Earlier in this chapter I indicated that the hyper-patternings experienced under a psychedelic can attain their own contextual meanings, and that the essence of getting high was not only being able to discern these high order meanings but being able to deal with them on their own terms.

That a successful navigation of such a novel landscape on its terms is at all possible must surely indicate the veridicality of that landscape, and that at least when within that landscape, it has epistemic value. This might even suggest that a manifold of epistemic systems are possible, and that the one we normally appear stuck in is only one of many. Perhaps the most challenging and rewarding aspect of a major psychedelic is having to pass through, and accept, many epistemic systems when we are accustomed to believing there is only one.

In closed-eye psychedelic sessions, such as is common in a therapeutic setting with eye coverings, the psychonaut lies back and experiences the psychedelic purely inwardly. In this case we could question the epistemic value of one's psychedelic experience because of the absence of any external validation. But when the session takes place in an open-eye waking state and one is able to successfully negotiate reality physically and socially in the psychedelic context there can be no question as to the reality of the landscape one is perceiving and the validity of one's choices when negotiating it.

While the stimulation of my senses under LSD has been extremely pleasurable and the accompanying experiences of cosmic integration spiritually satisfying, it was only the fact of having successfully negotiated physical reality in the psychedelic context that ultimately convinced me of the epistemic validity of the psychedelic experience.

Psychedelics on the Horizon

At the time of writing, it has become fashionable to promote ritualized psychedelic ceremonies as a more acceptable means of psychedelic activity, often legal, removed from the image of "party drugs", the pleasures of getting high or the unnaturalness of synthesized drugs. I am thinking for example, of the traditional ayahuasca ceremonies of South America and peyote ceremonies of North America. While this promotion may seem a reasonable step on the thorny path to legalization, we should be aware that it effectively encloses what should be an unbounded connective exploration within an architective shell of ceremony and expectation.

The same can be said of restricting a future legal use of psychedelics to licensed therapists. While this may make the legalization of psychedelics more palatable to its sceptics, and even make the contemplation of a psychedelic experience less daunting to a novice, it can result in experiences that are architectively framed to particular methodologies or commercial, religious or institutional brands.

Natural vs Synthetic

We have a history of assuming a primordial innocence to nature. Many cultural movements have sought salvation or nobility in a return to nature. The psychedelic experience also promotes a turning to natural innocence, for the experience of universal connectedness often reveals the commonality of all beings and a compassion for one's fellows. It also reveals the particular openness of animals and young children (and adults "young at heart") to the abundant connectivity in nature.

For some, turning to nature involves a rejection of anything synthetic or man-made. It's as if our humanity is regarded as the source of all evil, an idea probably rooted in the "original sin" of Adam and Eve (and particularly Eve, who continues to pay a heavy price). Technology may be shunned, organic food promoted and simpler, more primitive belief systems embraced. But we should keep in mind that all technologies are architective, and it is a rebalancing of our connective deficiency that is required to improve our sense of connectedness rather than the replacement of one technology with another.

We also cannot deny that technological innovation has been our salvation from much physical suffering. Technology can be humanly beneficial even though it has in many ways contributed to that suffering.

Spiritually speaking too, unbridled expressions of nature are not always spiritually correct, for they can involve raw connective and architective forces that are much stronger than the apprehension of the Cosmic Deity, which, I believe, is the spiritual ambition many of us aspire to.

It could even be argued that any intentional connective behaviour on our part is not natural, since it is naturally opposed by the architective dominion.

There is a tendency to regard naturally occurring psychedelics such as mushrooms and ayahuasca to be preferable to their synthetic counterparts. Yet they contain additional, often unspecified components, while a purified synthetic version of the active ingredients (in this case psilocybin and DMT) are known and well-calculated risks. Besides, ayahuasca without DMT is psychedelically worthless, as are mushrooms without psilocybin. The magic is in the molecule, not the mushroom ^#8.

We need to beware of loading words such as 'nature' or 'natural' with a necessary spiritual correctness or absolute wholesomeness. Events may arise without human intrusion which are neither spiritually correct nor humanly wholesome. There are times when it is spiritually appropriate or in our human interest to prevent a 'natural' outcome, or even create a synthetic one.

That said, we always need to be considerate of the extreme mildness of the Cosmic Deity's apprehensive effects when imposing our own intentions on nature, for impositions on our part that do not harmonize with the Deity's apprehension are also spiritually counterproductive.

The Physical Basis of Cosmic Integration

I would like to digress momentarily and return to the theme of this book - physical spirituality - to stress the physical nature of cosmic integration. We experience cosmic integration through the connectedness of the cosmic connective system - a material system - through its physical gravitational interactions, through its electrical and magnetic interactions, through the physical motions of their derivatives (atoms, molecules, organisms, neurons, winds, aeroplanes and stars), through the empathic flows among humans and animals, and through the waves of change running through all of them.

Though different, these physical interactions interconnect with each other, directly or indirectly, so that a change in one induces a change in another; and they extend their connections to whatever responds to them - to the trees waving in the wind, birds riding on the air, their screams and their calls, waves crashing on the beach, our breath catching physical perfumes, our brains resonating to excitations all around us in this grand material connective system.

Look at a landscape this way: One tree waving in the wind is of course different to another tree but they are waving to the same wind, different gusts perhaps, but gusts that are mutually interacting. The trees may be different but their movement is orchestrated by the wind. And the wind never stops - it may calm down, even be imperceptible, but it is never absolutely zero. Now are you seeing separate trees and noting their differences, or are you seeing their concert in the wind? Are you looking at shapes or are you looking at movement? We experience cosmic integration materially, not by examining what each thing is but by appreciating their concert.

The Enigma of DMT

The formal studies ascribing cosmic integration as the primary affect of psychedelics have been conducted using psilocybin. Anecdotal descriptions of the other classic psychedelics, LSD and mescaline, point to the same thing. Studies based on DMT however report "alternative realities" and "other worlds" as their primary affect, in which connection with this world is lost, while under psilocybin, LSD and mescaline connection with this world is enhanced rather than lost.

"One's sense of self is maintained, there is an external free-standing independent-of-the-observer spiritual world. One relates to the content of the experience, rather than being dissolved into it." - Dr Rick Strassman, describing the DMT experience ^#9.

My own experience of DMT is limited. For the following outline I have drawn on the article "A Thematic and Content Analysis of DMT Experiences From a Naturalistic Field Study." by Michael P, Luke D and Robinson O (2021) Front. Psychol. 12:720717. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.720717.

The most remarkable characteristic of the DMT other-worlds is their population by 'entities', life-forms described variously as elves, insects, animals, aliens or octopoids; sometimes as clowns or cartoons. The entities have visible individual bodies that are external to the experiencer and the experiencer is able to converse with them. They are often gendered, have faces, eyes, limbs, perhaps even noses, though sometimes they take on purely geometric shapes. Their communication is always non-verbal, using gestures, dance or telepathy.

The entities show varying dispositions. They may be described as intelligent (if not hyper-intelligent), benevolent, friendly, menacing or disinterested; helping or nurturing, manipulating or controlling. They play and have fun, amongst themselves or with the experiencer, and often want to communicate important information to the experiencer. To this end they come across as teachers, guides and healers - working on the experiencer's physical or psychic body, eliminating toxins and doing "brain surgery". Sometimes they provide the experiencer with insights into the nature of the universe, often portraying it as a vast playground for everyone's pleasure.

These other-worlds offer alien landscapes, architectures and objects of great beauty. The entities often play with a 'toy', a multi-dimensional cube that is continuously shifting shape and color, to which they attempt to draw the experiencer's attention. Each entity may have its own toy, with which they compete for the experiencer's attention. Molecular and atomic themes are often used to describe the toy, and DNA is mentioned regularly.

The prominence of architectivity in this outline is striking.

Experiencers interact with separate individual entities rather than merge with, and become indistinguishable from, the rest of the world. The entities and objects of these other worlds have figurate features such as bodies and faces and interact using their shapes, which means that the spatial scale at which they operate is within the figurate window.

The fact that they are so often gendered means that the aggregational path of their embodiment must have been eukaryotic, for it is only within the eukaryotes that gender is found.

The movement and environment of the entities is often described as mechanical - "machine elves", "wheels and cogs spinning in multiple layers", "the workings of something", "track ways where these things were moving along" "this whole thing was like the innards of a machine", etc..

The fact that they have shapes and move indicate that they operate in space and time - they do not transcend it.

The prominence of architectivity in the DMT experience draws a comparison with dreaming - in a later chapter I note the dominant role of architectivity in our dreams.

There are other parallels with dreaming. DMT affects the power spectrum and signal diversity of EEG recorded brain activity in a manner similar to dreaming ^#10. The DMT experiencer usually passes out during a session while under a classic psychedelic the experiencer is able to perform everyday tasks if required (though probably not very efficiently).

Like DMT, dreams offer us an alternative reality, except that the dreaming reality is populated with everyday items while the DMT landscape is distinctly alien. Could the DMT experience and the dream state be related?

The balance that connectivity brings to our waking state serves as a "reality check" that moderates the architective excesses of our dream state. If DMT experiences are a dream-like state, then they, and our dreams, are not "alternative realities", but states where the significant reality check of connectivity is minimized. Contrarily, we might say that at the peak of a classic psychedelic the reality check of architectivity is minimized. However, the reality check of architectivity is only necessary within the architective window of scale, while the reality check of connectivity is required at all scales.

While the contexts of our dreams are largely drawn from our waking lives, the DMT context has no relation to our waking lives at all. No-one could even imagine a DMT-like context from within a waking or sleep state (who had not experienced one before). This implies that the DMT context is not generated by our own brains but constitutes a reality entirely independent of our personal history and experience. And that context is coherent, multifarious and accessible. But where is it? Where are these realities? In other dimensions? Parallel universes? Other planets?

The figurate nature of the DMT experience gives us a clue - they must reside within the figurate window of scale. So I suggest that DMT offers us access to different spatial scales of our own bodies, that the "other worlds" of DMT are within our bodies at scales such as the cellular or molecular. The likelihood of eukaryotic origin and the regular mention of DNA and other molecular structures supports this view. In earlier chapters I described how different fields of meaning arise at different aggregational levels in an architecture, and mentioned that sentience is present at some of our own lower biological levels. I also indicated that for all we know, there might be consciousness at these levels. Could these be the DMT entities?

If so, their work on us - their elimination of toxins and brain surgery - makes sense. They might be attempting to modify our behaviour - as their controllers and organizers - to be more beneficial to their own health and comfort (much as we would like our spirits to be kinder to us).

Many of the motions in the DMT experience involve a splintering, a breaking up into pieces which in turn break up into pieces which break further, and so on; while the motions associated with the classic psychedelics involve a coherence and harmonization of normally disconnected objects. That coherence and harmonization of the connective experience extends outward into the cosmos, while the splintering of the DMT experience could well probe inward into our lower biological levels.

My own experience of DMT is too limited to say that they do not engender an experience of cosmic integration. Indeed many others' descriptions of the experience are of a space-like environment and involve ego death. Some DMT entities may be so connectively proficient as to allow connective spirituality to be available to consciousnesses at these scales.

I am far more inclined to regard DMT experiences giving us access to ourselves at a smaller scale rather than as a dream state, because there is so much agreement on their general characteristics while our dreams vary so widely from person to person.

The Limits of Psychedelic Expectation

I see many proponents of psychedelics creating exaggerated expectations of what psychedelics can deliver in terms of mental and physical health, improvement of one's social relationships and material well-being. We need to be more circumspect in our expectations:

The achievement of cosmic integration does not necessarily follow from the ingestion of a psychedelic. Recent studies ^#11 have shown that it is this achievement of cosmic integration that delivers the greatest benefit from psychedelics and such heights are not always achieved. Even when issues such as set and setting have been adequately addressed, factors beyond anyone's control, such as the strong interactive forces of the cosmic connective system and the dispositions of our Deities, can profoundly affect the success of a psychedelic session.

The experience of cosmic integration itself is necessarily temporary. Such understanding permits a reconciliation with its everyday absence and avoids any obsession with repeating psychedelic sessions with the ambition of making one's cosmic presence permanent.

The benefits of cosmic integration are primarily connective. Expectations of material wealth or improved social status are well beyond the scope of connectivity, while even in terms of one's personal health, benefits might only come from a more harmonious connective tuning to oneself and one's environment or a deeper understanding of the architective narratives of one's life. Talk of "medicine" and "healing" should be understood to be primarily connective. Similarly, improvements regarding one's social status will only be found in one's abilities for connective harmony - resolutions of architective political or business issues will be incidental, if at all. Such understanding also avoids any obsession with repeating psychedelic sessions in the hope of eliminating one's architective problems.

The enhancement of our connective sensibilities afforded by psychedelics and meditation can however help us cope with physical pain. You may remember my suggesting that bodily pain is a vibratory phenomenon in our brains even though it may be sourced in an architective malfunction. Our psychedelically enhanced connective sensibility may not be able to mend the architective malfunction but it could be harnessed to discern and then offset the corresponding brain vibration. Mitigating the pain may allow a deeper connective penetration as well as relieving the bodily discomfort. Indeed, there are many reports of, and I myself have experienced, the disappearance of annoying physical symptoms while a psychedelic session is in progress (only to have them reappear when the session ends).

The Cosmic Intent

It is not only the suitability of one's immediate environmental setting that contributes to a fruitful psychedelic excursion. The cosmic weather - the strong interactive forces of the cosmic connective system - can be turbulent, in which case the enhanced appreciation of connectivity permitted by a psychedelic can be unpalatable from a human point of view. A calmer cosmic setting contributes to our comfort on a psychedelic journey.

Constellations also become a lot less likely when the cosmic weather is stormy, so our psychedelic excursions may also be less meaningful at these times. I think that a person's first impressions of psychedelics depend on how rich in constellation their introductory sessions have been. First encounters in a stormy cosmic setting may well leave an unfavourable impression (as will a first encounter in an unsuitable environmental setting).

Consider too that a conscious Deity has an intent of its own, so one's attempts at cosmic integration may not always be welcome from the Cosmic Deity's point of view. For example, it might happen that when the cosmic weather is stormy the Cosmic Deity might rather not have another fumbling tripper add to the general melee. Or there might be other matters it would prefer one attend to. Our human spiritual desire is of course to join the cosmic union but the priority of the Cosmic Deity is for a profundity of cosmic harmony rather than an abundance of human participants. Joining the cosmic union when appropriate would enhance the cosmic harmony but we should abstain when the Cosmic Deity would rather us be quiet.

Regardless of whether a psychedelic experience contributes to the profundity of cosmic harmony, it remains valuable from a human standpoint, for the enhanced appreciation of connectivity it offers allows us to weight our serial meaning to the connective mode (if only for the duration of the session) and so direct our personal reality according to connective serial meaning rather than always deferring to the architective default.

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