Brouwer and Carhart-Harris (2021) define a new psychological construct.
Our broad definition of a pivotal mental state (PiMS) is that they are transient, intense hyper-plastic mind and brain states, with exceptional potential for mediating psychological transformation. We sharpen this definition by suggesting three key identifying criteria: (a) elevated cortical plasticity, (b) an enhanced rate of associative learning and (c) a unique capacity to mediate psychological transformation.
Scientists have studied “transformative” or “quantum” experiences before; what’s new here is (1) a unifying framework for understanding things as diverse as spiritual breakthroughs, psychedelic experiences, and psychotic breakdowns, (2) a common neurological pathway that supports the underlying similarity of these events, and (3) and a set of triggering conditions for inducing a pivotal mental state.
Focusing on psychological transformation as a process is a simple but important aspect of our approach that enables us to offer a potential explanation for how transformative experiences can manifest into extremely divergent outcomes, such as positively life-changing spiritual breakthrough or a descent into a potentially life-long psychotic illness. More concretely, we propose that however divergent the nature of the transformations themselves, many can be traced to somewhat consistent triggering conditions, with chronic stress being a primer and acute stress a trigger…We cite a breadth of evidences linking stress via a variety of inducers, with an upregulated serotonin 2A receptor system (e.g. upregulated availability of and/or binding to the receptor) and acute stress with 5-HT release, which we argue can activate this primed system to induce a pivotal mental state.
“Stress” in this context can mean virtually any kind of physiological or psycho-social stress: abuse, social isolation, fasting, hypoxia, sleep deprivation, pain, and also psychedelics—they all feed into the same serotonin pathway.
Thus, identifying the 5-HT2AR as a key trigger site for inducing PiMSs, we propose that psychedelics hijack the same neurochemical mechanisms that are engaged during, and likely exist for, situations where a hyper-plastic state and associated psychological change is felt as needed. Developing an understanding of endogenously occurring PiMSs can thus shed light on the evolutionary function of brain 5-HT2AR, as well as the action of psychedelics themselves. We propose that the mechanisms underlying PiMSs have evolved to aid rapid and deep learning in situations of perceived or actual existential threat or crisis for the ultimate purpose of catalyzing psychological change when (perceived) circumstances demand this.
Many of the aforementioned stressors are purposefully induced in spiritual contexts, leading the authors to ask, “Is it possible that humans have intuited how to hijack or ‘hack’ their own physiology for the purpose of self-development?” and to answer:
Asceticism, or the withdrawal from sensory stimulation and dedication to a simple but disciplined lifestyle, has an ancient history of association with altered states of consciousness (Hof and Rosales, 2011; Kotler and Wheal, 2017; Wimbush and Valantasis, 2002). Our perspective is that self-manipulated and intended ‘stress’ leading to increased 5-HT2AR signaling and associated PiMSs is a relevant candidate mechanism here.
So that’s one story. But something is missing here—what about the actual ‘experience’ of the transformative experience?
It has long been noted that certain spiritual and early and acute psychotic experiences exhibit similar features such as anomalous self-experience, magical thinking and perceptual aberrations. All three phenomena are reliably induced by 5-HT2AR agonist psychedelics, thus implying their relationship to a more fundamental state—the 5-HT2ARR-mediated PiMS. (citations redacted)
Consider the experience of Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983), the acclaimed architect, writer, inventor, philosopher, and futurist. Note the typical PiMS pattern of an extended period of chronic stress followed by an acute stressor.
Fuller recalled 1927 as a pivotal year of his life. His daughter Alexandra had died in 1922 of complications from polio and spinal meningitis just before her fourth birthday. Barry Katz, a Stanford University scholar who wrote about Fuller, found signs that around this time in his life Fuller had developed depression and anxiety. Fuller dwelled on his daughter's death, suspecting that it was connected with the Fullers' damp and drafty living conditions.
In 1927, at age 32, Fuller lost his job as president of Stockade. The Fuller family had no savings, and the birth of their daughter Allegra in 1927 added to the financial challenges. Fuller drank heavily and reflected upon the solution to his family’s struggles on long walks around Chicago. During the autumn of 1927, Fuller contemplated suicide by drowning in Lake Michigan, so that his family could benefit from a life insurance payment.
Fuller said that he had experienced a profound incident which would provide direction and purpose for his life. He felt as though he was suspended several feet above the ground enclosed in a white sphere of light. A voice spoke directly to Fuller, and declared:
From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to the Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others.
Fuller stated that this experience led to a profound re-examination of his life. He ultimately chose to embark on “an experiment, to find what a single individual could contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity”.
What are we to make of this story? If you are a reductive materialist, then it’s fairly simple—Fuller’s decision not to kill himself in that moment was caused by a molecule in his brain bouncing this way and not that; the sense of being enclosed in a white sphere of light was merely a perceptual aberration, an epiphenomenon with no causal efficacy. But if you hold that Matter arises from Mind, or that they both arise from some Secret Third Thing (i.e. dual-aspect monism), then the experience matters—Fuller’s life was changed in the way that it was because of what was said to him. The aberration was not perceptual but actual—i.e., an act of ‘divine’ intervention.
The cognitive scientific computer metaphors appear much too abstract and “dry” in comparison. They also happen to be unbelievably boring, a fact that, all humor aside, carries real philosophical weight for me. In other words, I find the cognitive scientific models incredibly useful and even convincing as explanatory models for the commonplace (boring) functioning of the brain and the social construction and stabilization of the ego, that is, of the normal sense of self and identity, including and especially religious identity. But I find these models virtually useless when it comes to admitting, much less understanding and explaining, the wilder data of comparative mystical literature with which I am the most familiar. They just don’t work.
The boring materialist model is plain enough (aside from the fact that we have not the slightest idea how mind might arise from matter); in order get a better handle on how a mind-first metaphysics might explain Fuller’s experience let us consider what is known as the transmission or filter theory of consciousness.
But scientific rationalism is not at all the same thing as scientific materialism, and there are very good, perfectly rational reasons to advance a non-materialist science that posits Mind as distinct from the brain, that understands the brain as a kind of supersensitive receptor or reducing valve that the Mind uses to interact with the material world. (Jeffrey Kripal)
Imagine the ‘Mind’ as a cosmic field of consciousness in which the material universe unfolds as a kind of reverie. All localized consciousnesses within this dream-verse (lower case-m ‘minds’) are (somehow) produced by the flowing of this cosmic consciousness into the valve/receptor that we call a brain. The acute stress that initiates a pivotal mental state causes damage to the brain-valve and alters the normal flow of (cosmic) consciousness. The precise manner in which this altered flow manifests is dependent upon the nature of the damage and the structure of the valve (i.e. mediated by the culture and psychology of the individual; thus in Fuller’s case the surge of Mind manifested as a floating white sphere of light that ‘spoke’ English and not Hindi). Here, then, it is the experience itself which precedes and initiates the change in the brain-valve’s physical structure, and not the other way around.
For the materialist proceeds like the reader of a manuscript who, instead of reading and understanding the thought of the author, occupies himself with the letters and syllables. He believes that the letters wrote themselves and combined themselves into syllables, being moved by mutual attraction, which, in its turn, is the effect of the chemical or molecular qualities of the ink as “matter” common to all the letters, and of which the letters and syllables are epiphenomena.
The experience of neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor speaks even more directly to the filter model. On the morning of December 10, 1996 suffered a stroke that shut down the left hemisphere of her brain. What she felt, however, was not a diminution of consciousness but a radical expansion, “a soaring into an all-knowingness”, “a void of higher cognition, as if my conscious mind was suspended somewhere between my normal reality and some esoteric space”. The human being appeared to her as “a portal through which the energy of who I am is beamed into a three-dimensional external space”.
I shuddered at the awareness that I was no longer a normal human being. How on earth would I exist as a member of the human race with this heightened perception that we are each a part of it all, and that the life force energy within each of us contains the power of the universe? How could I fit in with our society when I walk the earth with no fear?
The mystical experiences of Fuller and Taylor and the countless others like them all point to a simple truth: I am a body, an identity, an ego, and something more, something infinite and eternal.
Matter and Spirit. The Human is Two.
Each person is simultaneously a conscious, constructed self or socialized ego and a much larger conscious field that normally manifests itself only in non-ordinary states of consciousness and energy, which the religious traditions have historically objectified, mythologized, and projected outward into the sky as divine, as “God” and so on, or introjected inwards into the human being as nirvana, brahman, and so on.
The Samkhya school of Hindu philosophy, tracing its origins to “ascetic milieus” of the 8th century BC (i.e. cultures in which the self-inducement of pivotal mental states were common), offers perhaps the oldest and clearest expression of this dualism.
[Samkhya] views reality as composed of two independent principles, Puruṣa and Prakṛti. Puruṣa is the witness-consciousness. It is absolute, independent, free, beyond perception, above any experience by mind or senses, and impossible to describe in words.
Splendid and without a bodily form is this Puruṣa, without and within, unborn, without life and breath and without mind, higher than the supreme element.
It is the soul of all beings. (Mundaka Upanishad)
Prakriti is matter or nature. It is inactive, unconscious, and is a balance of the three guṇas (qualities or innate tendencies), namely sattva (goodness), rajas (passion, activity), and tamas (destruction, chaos). When Prakṛti comes into contact with Puruṣa this balance is disturbed, and Prakriti becomes manifest, evolving twenty-three tattvas, namely intellect (buddhi, mahat), ego (ahamkara), mind (manas); the five sensory capacities known as ears, skin, eyes, tongue and nose; the five action capacities known as hasta, pada, bak, anus, and upastha; and the five “subtle elements” or “modes of sensory content” (tanmatras), from which the five “gross elements” or “forms of perceptual objects” (earth, water, fire, air and space) emerge, in turn giving rise to the manifestation of sensory experience and cognition.
Jiva (‘a living being’) is the state in which Puruṣa is bonded to Prakriti. Human experience is an interplay of the two, Puruṣa being conscious of the various combinations of cognitive activities. The end of the bondage of Puruṣa to Prakriti is called Moksha (Liberation) or Kaivalya (Isolation).
So, the filter model: Matter binding and conditioning Spirit.
One further example, lest we think that one can only come to know their Twoness through trauma or asceticism. Jeffrey Kripal (The Serpent’s Gift) writes of a South Korean man who wrote to him about his awakening:
When he was sixteen, in 1984, to be exact, he spontaneously entered a state of cosmic consciousness while sitting in the back row of a high school classroom.1 He was looking out the window, mesmerized by some shimmering sunlight reflecting off the side of a bright white building.2 Caught by the sight, he found this beauty and joy strangely expanding and growing inside him. And then…
…suddenly, something weird happened to my body. I felt like thousands of hot small worms came into existence inside of me. At first, they appeared near my foot and crawled up my body, making my pleasure bigger and bigger. As if the dead body of an animal was full of tens of thousands of small maggots without leaving any space, my body was being fully occupied by all these hot and small creeping things. They made me feel that my body was boiling like hot water. In that way, my body was getting hotter and more aroused by the upward creeping of innumerable “energy” worms, and my whole body and mind were filled with even greater pleasure! And when those creeping and crawling things inside reached my whole body, It happened! Or more exactly, I exploded into It.
He now entered a complete “blank” of consciousness and then emerged on the other side, as it were, into a fuller realization of It. “I” as an ego expired, and the cosmic “I” now became “infinite and eternal” as space and time became utterly meaningless. He writes explicitly and quite literally of “gnosis” here, as he desperately tries (through the convention of the bold letter) to distinguish his little ego or I from the immense divine I with which he was now identified:
I am not created and cannot die or expire. I completely know that I am absolute. Thus I have no need at all, and in that sense I am totally satisfying. I am everything and at the same time, very paradoxically, nothing. I am ‘No Thing’ at all. I am just I am. At the same time, I am a living energy in great bliss. I am so full, so full of living energy, but, paradoxically, I am also empty. I am moving, but not moved as a whole.
It is crucial to point out that this young man did not ask for such an experience, and that he had neither a cultural frame nor a religious language to understand or explain It, even to himself. He was particularly troubled by the moral implications of the state—even though such a cosmic consciousness was fantastically pleasurable, it was also completely beyond all moral considerations. He experienced It as dwelling at the deepest core of his own subjectivity. It was "him”. And yet It was also obviously “cool” to all of “his” personal concerns and worries. It simply did not care.
For the next fourteen years, he struggled to make some sense of the universe and his life in the brilliant memory of these states, but to no avail. Then, in 1998, he discovered a copy of William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience and read its account of something called “mysticism”. He recognized immediately that this is what he had been through, that he was hardly crazy, and that William James was articulating his own deepest truths. He recognized, in other words, that William James knew. It now burst out of him again, and he experienced a conversion of sorts. He remained troubled, however, by how to reconcile this state of cosmic consciousness with the mundane needs of the ego or social self. He now writes often of the “trauma” of these initiatory states. He also writes of how the experience of It was hardly his, that he does not own or possess It in any way; that, rather, It possessed and still possesses him and now wants to speak through his own life.3
Further Reading:
“The Most Dangerous Idea” (on the paranormal and parapsychological phenomenon that often accompany traumatic experience, also featuring Jeffrey Kripal’s work)
Compare R.M. Bucke’s spontaneous awakening into cosmic consciousness.
Note the similarity to Jakob Böhme’s mystical experience, one of the most intellectually consequential visions in the history of Western thought (“Böhme had a profound influence on later philosophical movements such as German idealism and German Romanticism. Hegel described Böhme as “the first German philosopher”.)
Böhme had a number of mystical experiences throughout his youth, culminating in a vision in 1600 as one day he focused his attention onto the exquisite beauty of a beam of sunlight reflected in a pewter dish. He believed this vision revealed to him the spiritual structure of the world, as well as the relationship between God and man, and good and evil. At the time he chose not to speak of this experience openly, preferring instead to continue his work and raise a family.
Compare Fuller: “You do not belong to you. You belong to the Universe.”
I agree, the starting point of all kinds of spiritual wondering or wandering has to be distinguishing ordinary experience from transformative experience, automatic conditioned fearful responses from spontaneous creativity, matter from spirit.
But many spiritual traditions go beyond that distinction, and insist that a deeper unity underlies both. That Prakṛti is the self-effulgence or vibration of Puruṣa, or however you want to put it. Zen also insists that there is no nirvana outside of samsara — the same affirmation in different words.
Should we understand your post as a rejection of spiritual non-duality, and affirming an ultimate duality, in the vein of Manichaeism? Or are you just putting the focus on the initial, necessary stage of pointing out the difference?
None of this is wrong but the moral impasse points to a greater truth, which is that the Mind created matter to create minds and that - the synchronization of minds being precisely what 'morality', in its broadest sense, is - identifying with the Mind outside of synchronizing minds is fruitless and will ultimately just end up desynchronizing you from any community and into solipsism.
Still, the Mind is very real and wants us to know It. It simply wants us to know each other too and that's only possible through embodiment. There must then be a truth that's only accessible through being embodied that nonetheless points to the Mind.
I'd argue that this truth is Christ. Though I dare wouldn't say 'Christianity'.
For what is Christ? Christ is the Word, which must mean he is the self-same synchronistic principle that, as surely as it lifted us above the animals through eons of hard-won agreement on the meaning of grunts, organized matter into life through the code of DNA and, before that, bound unbound particles into the nucleic structure of atoms. Christ is simply that which unifies the many into a one that only exists as and by the agreement of the many.
The crucifixion here is then what happens as any 'one' empties itself into serving the many through serving a higher one. The resurrection then being to experience oneself as that higher one - our cells, for instance, are us and live as us no matter whether any arbitrary individual cell dies, just as atoms 'live' as the objects they make up until the complete destruction of the object, and even then the ultimate object atoms make up is the universe.
Eternal life on this picture is what happens when one has so thoroughly subjugated one's individuality to the synchronistic principle that one literally is the Mind as all- minds-relating-to-each-other, as accomplished by relating to Christ as he who gave himself for all others and whose experience of the world, as the experience of perfect goodness encountering a therefore necessarily unjust evil, exhausts all possible experience.
And the Second Coming of Christ is when all minds realize these truths concretely in the world and collectively give birth to the Mind that can only ever be imagined to have birthed them.
God - as the Mind, as the outside cause of existence - does not exist except as the fiction which makes us real, just as we are the fiction that makes God real, to end with the Ouroboros as you did.