Philosophy of Use: Psychedelics, Something Solid, and Describing the Indescribable.

I cover psychedelics and psychedelic culture often. However, despite this fact, I (and many other people, for that matter) struggle to accurately describe what a psychedelic experience actually is. The ethereal quality of psychedelic use is part of its beauty and its value but I also feel like its mysterious nature contributes to some of the negative misconceptions that society holds about psychedelics. In this installment of Philosophy of Use, I will cover what makes psychedelics particularly difficult to describe and how I think we can best accomplish the task of describing a trip.

Putting the intangible into words is a problem for more than just psychedelic users. Milton, who is rightly considered one of the greatest authors in the English language, must often use similes and metaphors while describing Heaven and Hell in Paradise Lost. This is because he imagines these places in ethereal terms and that renders them indescribable. He does this intentionally (obviously) for poetic reasons that needn't be discussed here. If you want an example that is closer to home, so to speak; try drawing a picture of a feeling. Can you draw a picture that expresses nihilistic apathy in a way that would be recognizable to another person? I won't say that you can't but I have yet to meet a person who can.

I would venture to say that describing psychedelics is more challenging than conjuring a verbal image of Milton's Heaven and Hell. The concepts that Milton was trying to express already existed in the collective consciousness of his culture. Seventeenth century Britain was, not surprisingly, very religious. People already had a picture of Heaven and Hell in their minds and they were able to lay his indirect descriptions over that frame-work and come to rather consistent consensus on what was being described. With psychedelics, on the other hand, there is no canon that we all subscribe to. There is no agreed upon picture of what the experience is supposed to be. This is because a psychedelic experience is one hundred percent subjective. Most "events" that we experience have some hard fact involved. You and I may read the same book and have very different interpretations of that book but we can not disagree about what is printed in it. You and I may see a person get hit by a car and we may disagree about whether the accident was intentional or not but we cannot deny that a person was hit by a car. However, with psychedelics the subjective reaction to the drug is the "event." There is no "something solid" to for another person to grasp onto when the user tries to describe the experience.

This leaves us with the question that looms over this little essay. That is, how does one describe a psychedelic experience? To my mind, there are two approaches but I favor one over the other. The first is to try to describe every single detail of the trip. You do your best to relate every feeling, thought, and hallucination as vividly as possible. This method works fine in some ways but it also has some problems, in my opinion. It takes a long time, for one. Many users experience extreme time distortion in which hours, quite literally, feel like weeks (Dave Chappelle had funny bit about this aspect of tripping in one of his early televised sets). Now imagine how long it takes for someone to describe every detail of a ten week vacation. It would take nine weeks, at best. It also is difficult to impart the gravity of the experience when one describes things in this way. Other users may understand what you are talking about because they have felt that gravity for themselves but non-users have no basis for comparison. To me, this seems to be prohibitively impractical and ineffective and conveying the "feel" of the experience.

The method that I favor is to take Milton's approach. That is to say, I think it is best to use a more poetic style of description. If I say that tripping is like crossing a living desert and swimming in the ocean in the same moment. A user may understand me a little better than a non-user but even the non-user should gather that I mean tripping is like traveling through a strangely beautiful ( and almost alien) landscape but it also feels as though you are caught in its current and are subject to its whims as it crashes over you in waves. This indirect way of describing a trip gives the non-user the "something solid" that grounds their understanding of what the user is trying to tell them.

As always, this is just my opinion. I am curious to hear what you think about this issue. How do you approach describing psychedelics and other indescribable experiences? Do you ever struggle to describe your trips or if you have never tripped, do you find it hard to follow descriptions of psychedelic experiences?

Peace.

This was another installment of my Philosophy of Use series of posts. If you liked what you read, feel free to check out my page for more similar content.

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