Without fail, life implies death; repress our mortality though we may, the path of life invariably concludes in death. But this essay explores the reverse sentiment: that death, in fact, implies life, and that only if we die will we truly live. As Goethe affirmed: “Until you know this deep secret, ‘die and become,’ you will be a stranger on this dark Earth.” The idea is that consciousness settles into closed systems of attention, into echo chambers of awareness that sustain what the philosopher Thomas Metzinger calls our “self-models”—that is, our notions of who and what we are as underscored by subpersonal bundles of cognitive processes. Where biological death implies death of the body, the philosophical death in mind here implies death of the self-model, the sense of who, what, and how we feel ourselves to be.
In this essay I argue that the essence of philosophy is to practice and provoke the death of our self-models by puncturing their enclosures around consciousness, thereby opening attention to broader, more novel terrains of awareness. Further, and beyond personal flights of transcendence, the latter half of the essay takes a cultural view to examine how this practice might offer a response to society’s most pressing afflictions, including environmental degradation, advanced capitalism, and oppressive tribalism. What follows in the wake of philosophical practice, then, is rebirth. We cultivate new self-models, we “become,” in Goethe’s sense of the term, by encountering and subsequently enclosing in our selves new landscapes of consciousness. The philosopher’s practice is thus one of undermining closed systems of consciousness, fostering ongoing rebirth into wider modes of sentience.
To illustrate the process of philosophical death and rebirth, I compare the author and nature journalist Michael Pollan’s accounts of psychedelic experience with Metzinger’s self-model theory of subjectivity. Doing so offers an example of how the process of personal metamorphosis is one way we can cultivate philosophy’s perennial goals of autonomy and self-knowledge. Moreover, this comparison draws into view Pollan’s and Metzinger’s mutual stance that this practice of philosophy offers a potent remedy for the large-scale threats facing society. Whether environmental, economic, or social, the pair suspect a primary cause: Our unexamined self-models encapsulate only shallow regions of cognition, and as long as they remain unexamined they will drive behavior in undesirable directions. In other words, on this account, we possess, by and large, only superficial relationships with our own minds. Culturing consciousness, as traced through Pollan’s experience and Metzinger’s theory of mind, offers a corrective response.
Metzinger and the Self-Model
In the space between birth and the emergence of the self-model, society and biology are hard at work, directly and indirectly, molding our neural pathways into particular configurations of perception. Genetics and a long history of evolution also contribute to these inborn tendencies, so that our layers of unconscious habit exist before we do; my body existed as an organism before my sense of “I” did as a self. When the self-model crystallizes, which developmental psychologists believe occurs around two years old, we drop into this prefabricated self like water poured into a glass, adopting its shape.
On the expanse of consciousness that persists beyond our habitual modes of perception, and on our capacity to recreate our self-models, Metzinger writes:
Because of its many dimensions, the number of possible conscious states for a human being is incredibly large. We are only rarely aware of this fact, and we haven’t really started to systematically test how we might deliberately alter our state-space so as to enhance our autonomy and increase experiential forms of self-knowledge, ideally backed by the rigor of modern-day neuroscience. (para. 46)
Initially, these boundary walls that direct perception, true to the glass metaphor, remain transparent, and thus unalterable. However, by cultivating sustained attentional awareness, consciousness can invert back upon itself, and, like an infant recognizing itself in the mirror for the first time, perception reorganizes itself to take into account its newfound container. This is a first step towards asking, as Metzinger does, “how we might deliberately alter our state-space.” The space cannot be altered before the habits sustaining it are made pliable, and the practice of continually catching these habits in view unsteadies them. If the moment occurs where the self-model’s echo chamber is punctured, its containing habits collapse and awareness constellates into new arrangements of perception. The self-model must then reorganize to make sense of the new terrain. The practice of philosophy, from my perspective, is a continual unboxing of awareness in this manner.
This article first appeared in issue 1 of The Side View Journal. Purchase your own copy here.
In Albert Camus’s philosophy of the absurd—the inability of a self, a sliver of consciousness, to grasp the meaning of the whole—he describes the moment of echo-chamber puncture as a “stage-set collapse” that inaugurates philosophical practice by igniting “the impulse to consciousness”:
At any street corner the feeling of absurdity can strike any man [or woman] in the face. . . . It happens that the stage-sets collapse . . . one day the “why” arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement . . . it inaugurates the impulse to consciousness. It awakens consciousness and provokes what follows. (The Myth of Sisyphus, 10)
For Camus, the central question that followed—whether or not life is worth living—is designed to undermine the unexamined life, to call into view as many unconscious behaviors as possible. It unearths the decision to live, rather than not, as a previously hidden imperative. Rarely do we choose to live; instead, living is often an unexamined way of being in the world, an artifact of the self-models we slip into. As Camus writes, “Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined” (6). In tune with the philosophical practice of widening our enclosures of consciousness I’m tracing here, this practice of undermining ourselves, and collapsing our stage-sets to unearth unexamined behaviors, is a long, disciplined one. But the fruits of this practice, to bring us back to Metzinger, are again those perennial objects of philosophy: autonomy and self-knowledge.
Pollan and the Sonoran Desert Toad
Contrasting the long, disciplined practice of examining our self-models, Pollan describes the short-burst, psychedelic method for examining consciousness in his book How to Change Your Mind. After deeply inhaling 5-MeO-DMT, acquired from the smoked venom of the Sonoran desert toad, he scraped the bottom of his self-model, and punctured through to a previously unknown terrain of his consciousness. On Pollan’s account, the familiar markers that orient us as subjective agents in the world — namely, time, space, and self — dissolved. Without them, existence as Pollan knew it melted into an unrecognizable, unspeakable void. Nothing remained but vague, diffused awareness.
As the effects faded and the familiar markers of everyday experience slowly reconstituted themselves—after his reconstruction of something from nothing—an emergent gratitude and reverence overtook him:
Next came an overwhelming wave of gratitude. For what? . . . I felt for the first time gratitude for the very fact of being, that there is anything whatsoever . . . I had just come from a place where being was no more and now vowed never to forget what a gift (and mystery) it is, that there is something rather than nothing. (280)
After traversing these psychedelic state-spaces, Pollan had found an answer to Camus’s question. Having experienced both sides of existence, Pollan found being — as opposed to “being no more” — its own justification. The raw mystery of our inscrutable place in the cosmos, the experience of being something after having been nothing, with its associated sensations of gratitude and wonder, was raison d’être enough. It wasn’t any particular altered state of consciousness that offered to Pollan increased autonomy or self-knowledge, but rather the contrast generated by experiencing multiple states of being, and the fluidity of moving between them.
As with most psychedelic experiences, for Pollan the sensations kindled by the toad venom were quickly overpowered by the return of ordinary consciousness. All too familiar layers of neuroses, insecurities, and anxieties again coated that raw skin of sentience, which for a moment was resplendent with wonder and gratitude. Pollan returned to his former enclosure of consciousness. In this sense, psychedelic trips are just that—trips, from which we inevitably return. But the movement between psychedelic and habitual states can also catalyze movements toward contemplative practice, toward those exercises designed to poke holes in the accumulated layers between our unexamined selves and the potent, wider terrains of consciousness they occlude. Put differently, contemplative practices, like the practice of philosophy I’m describing here, render the conscious mind, the self-model, more porous to that which it habitually filters out. It is the “I” coming to see itself in the mirror.
What Pollan saw that struck him was not his reflection, nor his ego or self-model, but the terra incognita beyond them. Pollan saw into what Metzinger calls the “enormous depth of our phenomenological state-space.” For Pollan, spiritual progress lies in interacting with these depths:
If nothing else, these journeys have shown me how that psychic construct [the ego]— at once so familiar and on reflection so strange — stands between us and some striking new dimensions of experience, whether of the world outside us or of the mind within. The journeys have shown me what the Buddhists try to tell us but I have never really understood: that there is much more to consciousness than the ego, as we would see if it would just shut up. And that its dissolution (or transcendence) is nothing to fear; in fact, it is a prerequisite for making any spiritual progress. (288)
In this work towards spiritual progress, attention is the tool. As with the South American Passiflora Mixta flower, whose nectar can only be harvested by a certain species of sword-billed hummingbird, the nectar of deep consciousness awaits sustained, incisive attention. It requires a long, sharp tool to penetrate the echo chambers of consciousness. Directed skillfully, it can unsettle hardened mental patterns that constrict us into particular ways of being in the world.
Culturing Consciousness
This attentive inversion of consciousness folding back onto itself—used to examine our selves, our lives, and our drives down to their innermost elements , whether understood as philosophic, contemplative, or spiritual practice — is the beginning of an examined life. The practice forges what Ralph Waldo Emerson, the father of transcendentalism and the American culture of consciousness it heralded, calls an “original relation to the universe.” It’s the death without which we’re never born. Goethe’s secret merits repeating, in which lay the seed to all philosophy: “Until you know this deep secret, ‘die and become,’ you will be a stranger on this dark Earth.”
The speed and efficiency with which psychedelics unpack awareness from its habits suit them to our modern technological culture, but generally, the ease of the method employed and the subsequent perspectival shift in consciousness are inversely related. In other words, the easier the method of altering consciousness, the more fleeting the effect. Stability seems correlated with diligence. To transform from vaguely dissatisfied strangers “on this dark Earth” into intimate interlocutors with our brief time here, we cannot just pop a pill on the weekends; we must do the work.
This practice does not occur in a vacuum; the long-term work of culturing consciousness thus requires a sustained effort of the individual that both evokes and acts upon the collective. What’s at stake, suggest both Metzinger and Pollan, is not just the consciousness of the individual, but the fate of society. Pollan states, “The two biggest challenges we face as a culture are the environmental crisis, and tribalism . . . both of which are functions of ego-consciousness.”
Metzinger echoes Pollan, adding that our collective degree of mental autonomy, that which we cultivate through a diligent exploration of phenomenal state-spaces, is pivotal to how we progress through these challenges. Metzinger writes, “In the end, and in the face of serious existential risks posed by environmental degradation and advanced capitalism, we must understand that citizens’ collective level of mental autonomy will be the decisive factor” (para. 45).
Metzinger also takes his caution a step further. While Pollan waits for research to catch up and make the psychedelic plurality of conscious states politically relevant, Metzinger calls for immediate governmental action on behalf of its citizens’ mental autonomy:
What is clear by now is that our societies lack systematic and institutionalized ways of enhancing citizens’ mental autonomy. This is a neglected duty of care on the part of governments. There can be no politically mature citizens without a sufficient degree of mental autonomy, but society as a whole does not act to protect or increase it. . . . As a working concept, mental autonomy is an excellent new candidate for a basic value that could guide us in education, policymaking, and ethics. (para. 48)
Ritualizing Autonomy
There exists a long history of cultural, even political, support in pursuit of mental autonomy. The ancient Greek Eleusinian mysteries, of which Plato and Pythagoras were noted participants, sanctified otherwise illegal substances once a year to, as Pollan puts it, “contain and harness the Dionysian energies of psychedelics” (404) to foster this transcendence of habitual consciousness. Aboriginal Australians underwent the walkabout ritual, where adolescents aged 10–16 spent up to six months in the desert, alone, fostering experiences beyond the cultural pale. In North American shamanic traditions, youths are left alone in small igloos with just enough food and water to survive for thirty days. Cultural historian Richard Tarnas, in his essay “Is the Modern Psyche Undergoing a Rite of Passage,” quotes one participant’s experience in the igloo: “I died a number of times during those thirty days, but I learned and found what can be found and learned only in the silence, away from the multitude, in the depths” (17).
These rites of passage evoke an archetypal death and rebirth, a transition from immaturity to maturity. They engender the very experiences that undermine unconsciousness and habit. They break open culturally conditioned thought patterns and acquaint participants with the unseen depths of their phenomenal state-space. These forays into the penumbrae of perception cultivate the mental autonomy Metzinger believes creates “politically mature citizens.” But where are our rituals? How might we reclaim the forces culturing consciousness? How might we create spaces for the exploration of the “enormous depth of our phenomenological state-space,” where we, as Metzinger writes, “systematically test how we might deliberately alter our state-space so as to enhance our autonomy and increase experiential forms of self-knowledge”?
Perhaps the best example of modern ritual space for exploring consciousness is Burning Man, an annual gathering of over 70,000 “burners” who are “united in the pursuit of a more creative and connected existence in the world.” Burning Man is an expression of a collective thirst for new rituals, even for a new culture that re-places consciousness at its center, but Burning Man is not the answer so much as a better articulation of the issue. Its psychedelic lifeblood remains illegal, and the costs associated with attendance (despite the event’s principle of gifting, which entirely replaces currency) filters for attendees of a particular socioeconomic strata. Liberation, as with most else, is available on today’s market for those who can afford it in currencies of both money and time. The dominant forces culturing consciousness, at present, remain market-driven; they engineer our self-models to serve the economic and political needs of a burgeoning attention-based economy. Without sufficient mental autonomy, we risk being cultured into better consumers, not better humans.
How, then, might we adopt such practices and rituals in ways suited to our culture? It remains to be seen. At present, writes Metzinger, we’re stuck: “The current lack of a genuine consciousness culture is a social expression of the fact that the philosophical project of enlightenment has become stuck” (The Ego Tunnel, 238). If our culture reflects to some degree the nature of its individuals, ours now reflects an aggregation of unexamined self-models, with behaviors that, as mentioned at the outset, are among the primary sources of environmental degradation, oppression, and advanced capitalism. To begin, we could follow the lead of William James, who argued over 100 years ago that we should make meditation a central part of our educational system. Quoting James: “The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention over and over again is the very root of judgment, character, and will . . . And education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence” (The Principles of Psychology, 213).
Pollan recognizes the same need for developing new practices and spaces for examining consciousness. Where Metzinger wrote of the depths of phenomenological state-space, Pollan writes of what he calls “neural diversity”:
If everyday waking consciousness is but one of several possible ways to construct a world, then perhaps there is value in cultivating a great amount of what I’ve come to think of as neural diversity. . . . This strikes me as one of the great gifts of the experience [of psychedelics] afford: the expansion of one’s repertoire of conscious states. (17)
James, who in The Varieties of Religious Experience leaves one blueprint for this interior work in the North American context, offers apt closing remarks for this essay (and isn’t it a fitting affirmation that Metzinger was right to call our philosophy “stuck” that a sentiment from 1902 remains a vision for the future?):
Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question. (325)
Culturally, we appear as Goethe cautioned: strangers to ourselves, to each other, and to our environment. The fields of application and adaptation for different forms of consciousness suggested by James lie before us. Our individual experiences of life, together with our education, our economic systems, and the environment, all stand to benefit from our regarding neural diversity and the deliberate alteration of our self-models with urgency. We must ask questions of consciousness, and not be lulled into complacency by the closed, stultifying systems of attention it settles into. This essay suggested that philosophy, in both individual and communal contexts, is a practice of opening and cultivating these closed systems of awareness through an intimacy with the varieties of possible conscious experience. This practice may propel us towards those visceral sensations momentarily grasped by Pollan, which proved strong enough to put Camus’s question of suicide to rest: the wonder and gratitude that life itself cultures is enough.