emilie trice

MULTIVERSE (prototype), 2019
Interactive sculpture with video projection, sensor and disco ball, dimensions variable

In How to change your mind, Michael Pollan’s widely publicized 2018 book, the author provides strong evidence and first-hand accounts that connect the ego dissolution caused by psychedelics with overcoming one’s fear of death. Pollan illustrated this through various studies of terminally ill patients, each of whom had a psychedelic experience that assuaged their fears of dying, and which manifested through surprisingly similar hallucinations and a shared sense of oneness with everything in the universe, or rather, in the multiverse. This loss of ego, Pollan argues, “is the key psychological driver of the experience. It is this that gives us the mystical experience…the notion of a mental reboot, the making of new meanings and the experience of awe.”

Andrei Platonov, a Soviet writer and philosopher, once wrote, “We are all comrades only when the trouble is identical for everyone.” Climate change makes the trouble identical, and thus makes us all comrades - we are all inhabitants of this earth, this ecosystem. Becoming fully immersed in the ecosystem, as Pollan writes, necessitates that we “cultivate this mode of consciousness…(which) requires us to transcend our subjectivity...widen its circle so far that it takes in, besides ourselves, other people and, beyond that, all of nature.” He goes on to confess, “Now I understand how a psychedelic could help us to make precisely that move, from the first-person singular to the plural and beyond. Under its influence, a sense of our interconnectedness...is felt, becomes flesh.”

The so-called “Default Mode Network” (DMN), the part of our brain seemingly responsible for our ego-driven selves, first entered the neurological lexicon in 2001. Recent studies have supported the conclusion that alterations to the DMN are empirically correlated to “ego-dissolution.” Psychedelics “reduce the stability and integrity” of the DMN and other brain networks, reducing “the degree of separateness or segregation between them; that is, they induce network disintegration and desegregation.” The effects are “phenomenologically resonant with the notion of ‘aberrant salience’ in schizophrenia research.” Aberrant salience is essentially deriving meaning from patterns that don’t actually exist or which the subject has either invented or hallucinated.

Psychedelics are thus an apparatus that enable the multiversal fracture of our neurological “default mode network.” This apparatus allows for a significant “becoming-with,” as described by philosopher Donna Haraway, through a “diffraction” of the boundaries between object and subject. According to scholar and theorist McKenzie Wark, this is where we find a “meta-utopian fiction,” but it could also be the apparatus through which we learn to “organize between things.” Embodiment becomes immersion, revealing those invisible threads that link us to everything living and nonliving, to the past and the future. If equilibrium (or whatever is closest) is what we are collectively aiming for, in order to restore some balance (or something resembling harmony) to our ecological and socio-economic systems, then psychedelics offer an apparatus to help us see ourselves as we really are, enmeshed in nature and each other, a plurality manifest throughout the multiverse.

As Wark writes,“For perhaps we need a more plural conception of utopian possibility to match the plurality of sensations and the worldviews of the times.”

-Emilie Trice

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